ABSTRACT
The basic premise of gatekeeping scholarship is that messages are created from information about events that has passed through a series of gates and has been changed in the process. Some information ends up on a newspaper’s front page, some in the middle of a newscast or web page, and some never makes it into the news at all. Similarly, an event may appear in some news media but not others. Or information may be given the most prominent placement in one medium but buried inside another. As noted at the outset of this book, the Downing Street memo was the basis for many news reports in Europe but relatively few in the mainstream American media. In this chapter, we explore how information items enter a channel, the characteristics of those items, and the nature of forces in front of and behind the gates.
