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A return to 'Mr. Gates': Photography and objectivity
Newspaper Research Journal, Summer 2000 by Bissell, Kimberly L
Gatekeeping of photography is somewhat subjective and it is a chain of gatekeepers, not just one, that alters photo content.
Since David Manning White's' study of Mr. Gates, the notion of editorial content being monitored by gatekeepers has been addressed empirically for more than 40 years. Researchers from Gaye Tuchman2 to Herbert Gans3 have examined news as social constructions of reality. Other studies have examined the routines of news organizations and organizational constraints on decisionmaking.4 The examination of the news process as a social activity has allowed scholars to assess objectivity, influences on content and decision-making.'
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This paper presents a case study of photographic decision-making at a single newspaper and presents results of a content analysis of this newspaper's photographic content. This project examined decision-making at multiple gates, using the conceptualizations of the forces that facilitate or constrain each news item's passage through those gates. 6
Theory - Photography and objectivity
One of the most important functions of news is its ability to generate images. Visual imagery now tells a story in a way never imagined decades ago. But time and technology have evoked changes in photojournalism, and these changes are often evident in news content. William Gamson and colleagues? suggest that photographs possess a power and a point of view based on the agencies or individuals that construct them. He asserts that photographic images are rarely neutral and suggests it is through the creation of an image that meaning is constructed. Tagg8 says that while a camera can be neutral in theory, once the various gatekeepers handle it, all hope of neutrality is lost. The suggestion, then, is that while photographs imitate the life they are representing, the photograph is also reconstructing the world. Photographs cannot take on the meaning of an entire event because they represent a slice of life; therefore, each photograph represents only a portion of reality. Roland Barthes9 says that through simple changes in lighting or camera angle, meaning can be imposed in photographic messages. Hall" suggests that through each photograph's use of an expressive code, newspapers can inflect a different news angle toward a story.
Photographic gatekeeping
Through conceptualizations of Kurt Lewin," White,"2 Pamela Shoemaker, 13 Shoemaker and Stephen Reese,"4 and Shoemaker, Martin Eichholz, Euyni Kim, and Brenda Wrigley,15 gatekeepers have been examined on a variety of levels at multiple news organizations. In its simplest conceptualization, gatekeeping is the process of winnowing down thousands of potential story ideas to the few that are transmitted by the news media.
Shoemaker and colleagues 16 suggest that through the winnowing down process, positive or negative forces facilitate the flow of items through the various gates. Shoemaker and colleagues further suggest that these forces can be identified on all levels of analysis. Three of the five levels of analysis" individual, routine, and organizational - are addressed in this study.
Individual, routine and organizational influences
Influences on content at the individual level range from the demographic makeup of journalists to journalists' perceptions of readers' expectations. Several studies have provided conclusive evidence that each journalist's decision-making is shaped by influences at the individual level."
In addition to forces that are generated by individual decision-makers,19 some influences on content are evident in the structure of the newsroom itself. Warren Breed" suggests that through the socialization of journalists in the newsroom, journalistic routines and organizational routines are instilled in cub reporters. Furthermore, Shoemaker and colleagues21 found stronger suggestions of routine-level influences rather than individual-level influences playing a larger role in decision-making in their study of individual and routine forces in gatekeeping. Through the work of Eric Abbott and L.T. Brassfield and Shoemaker and colleagues,22 the suggestion is that as journalists adapt to their work environment, they become socialized to the organization's way of thinking. The "this is how we do things around here" mentality can cloud some journalist's judgment, in some cases, influencing journalists to make decisions based on the routines of the organization.
At the organizational level, Gans23 reports that in news decisionmaking, larger organizational goals often outweigh individual journalist and routine-level influences. For example, C. Zoe Smith"' found in her study of the photo department at two Milwaukee newspapers that because of the constraints of the organization - both newspapers owned and operated by the same company - some photographic decisions were reflective of that single ownership. Furthermore, George Bailey and Larry Lichty2l report of the role of the organization during decision-making in their analysis of NBC News coverage of the Vietnam War. In this case, the executive producer made the decision to run a graphic video of the now-famous assassination of a Viet Cong prisoner, even though other reporters, editors, and producers were generally responsible for day-to-day news content. The suggestion, then, is that the forces or influences on content are multiple and may occur at many levels.
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