Deciding what's news: A study of CBS evening news, NBC nightly news, Newsweek, and Time

Medill Visions of the American Press

by Herbert J. Gans

For ten years, Gans spent considerable time in four major television and magazine newsrooms, observing and talking to the journalists who choose most of the news stories that inform America about itself. He was interested in their values, professional standards, and the external pressures that shaped their judgments. This fascinating study of the unwritten rules of American journalism provides rare insight into how our society words and how our perceptions of it are formed.

Genres: Journalism, Nonfiction, Academic, School, Sociology

393 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Herbert Julius Gans was a German-born American sociologist who taught at Columbia University from 1971 to 2007.
One of the most prolific and influential sociologists of his generation, Gans came to America in 1940 as a refugee from Nazi Germany and sometimes described his scholarly work as an immigrant's attempt to understand America. He trained in sociology at the University of Chicago, where he studied with David Riesman and Everett Hughes, among others, and in social planning at the University of Pennsylvania, where his dissertation was supervised by Martin Meyerson.
Herbert J. Gans served as the 79th President of the American Sociological Association.

Reviews

[Inggita · Rating 3 out of 5]

journ majors, you can't escape this, if you haven't been in an editorial meeting - this will give you the basics. sure it's outdated, but the basic mechanism didn't change much - even bloggers do it - they consult the one in the mirror...

[Shawn · Rating 1 out of 5]

A dull, dry dissection of 'journalism.' Don't bother w/this, it's dated to Nixon, Watergate & Vietnam, it doesn't explain anything that isn't already understood by a perceptive person, it speaks of journalists in such an off-putting, scientific manner, and it analyzes the news programs & stations in such a boring, yawn-inducing, uninteresting way! I forced myself to finish (b/c I avoid DNFs as best I can) but really had to skim that last fifty pages. He'll introduce an issue, then list the yin & yang, and then proceed to describe in some drab, manual-like way, the yins & the yangs. He'll write that journalists are subjected to types of pressure, for example, then spend the next seven paragraphs or three pages unnecessarily fleshing out those types. That this book deals primarily w/magazines & newspapers is a chore! Relegating columns to the back of the paper, or using color images, etc. were important concerns. The book goes over anchorpersons, the power of executives & editors, the role of beat reporters, etc. and though it touches on bias & such, it never rings sincere but instead drones on about the world of news organizations. So much words with so little import or substance. The writer, it seems, didn't really have to put much brain effort in this book, but rather had to merely regurgitate his analyses & observations, as objective, detached, & dry as possible. He just described a game, as would one of baseball, and from a baseball player, that ain't much work at all, more like a fun, self-scratching exercise. I wasn't enlightened or informed or exposed to anything that I didn't already know. And today's news differs SO much from this book's time that it was almost comical how he'd portray journalists, or how he'd reference the small stature of TV programs, or how he offered up solutions that had not one ounce of feasibility (he even admits that his solutions aren't realistic). I was itching the whole time to hurry up & finish it so that I could move on to another read. Stultifying reading experience of a book.

[John Biers · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tracked down this book after hearing about it in the course of one of the debates about journalism. It was written during the Cold War, prior to Fox News, the Internet and modern-day cable news. So it’s fairly dated in a lot of ways. But as someone who works in the field, I still found value in some of the discussions, for example on the enduring emphasis of“objectivity” in news and the evolution of this value. I skimmed through a fair bit of it, but there were definitely several parts that are still resonant today.