ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author wants to outline, quite briefly, what has emerged in recent media studies, for example the Glasgow and the Birmingham research, as a sort of ‘standard position’ on the question of partiality in news presentation. The news media select events for reporting according to a complex set of criteria of newsworthiness; so news is not simply that which happens, but that which can be regarded and presented as newsworthy. These criteria, which are probably more or less unconscious in editorial practice, are referred to by students of the media as ‘news values’; and they are said to perform a ‘gatekeeping’ role, filtering and restricting news input. News values, then, are to be regarded as intersubjective mental categories. In determining the significance of events, the papers and their readers make reference, explicit or more usually implicit, to what are variously called, in cognitive psychology and in semantics, ‘frames’, ‘paradigms’, ‘stereotypes’, ‘schemata’ and ‘general propositions’.
