Silent Witness: News Sources, the local Press and the Disappeared Woman

Karen Ross

Introduction

In a media environment in which most broadcast news items are around eight seconds long, on the grounds that this is the typical attention span of the average adult, it is perhaps unsurprising that journalists have moved away from traditional forms of political reportage towards an interpretive rather than a 'straight' reporting style. News stories have become less about what was actually said in any given parliament by a particular politician, and more about what the journalist thinks such utterances mean. While selection processes have always played a part when decisions need to be made about what should go on the front page or be included in the evening news on TV, the contemporary news media landscape has seen a real shift in both what actually counts as news and whose voice should be heard. Our contemporary fascination with celebrity means that the views of a pop star on a political issue of the day are given equal weight to those of an elected parliamentarian, all of which are then refracted through a journalistic lens which extracts the most 'entertaining' elements and puts them out as the day's news. While this analysis can be regarded as a little cynical, there is nonetheless a real problem with political news discourse in the twenty-first century given that it persistently seeks out sleaze over substance but, at the same time, continues to prefer elite voices over those of the citizen.

At the time of writing (June 2009), Britain is in political meltdown as waves of MPs resign over the 'expenses' scandal, but the voices raised in alarm about the venality of our elected members are those of journalists, not the citizens whose taxes have actually been hijacked to benefit precisely those people who are supposed to be representing 'us'. It is with this issue of news sources that this paper is concerned. I argue that the media operate a clever sleight of hand by using particular sources in particular ways to frame a story, but without appearing to have any influence whatsoever. This clever strategy is regularly employed so that across the mainstream news media at least, there appears to be a shared understanding of what the issues of the day are and how they should be understood and interpreted. The constant use of elite voices at the expense of the less media-savvy but equally valid commentators who constitute the 'public', means that hegemony is preserved, awkward questions go unasked and a particular view and perspective on the world is maintained.

A cursory glance at any newspaper demonstrates that a majority of mainstream news stories, other than editorials, round-ups and opinion pieces, routinely include either a quotation from a source or some paraphrasing of a source's words (Sundar, 2001). The use of sources is thus an extremely important part of the story's construction and orientation as well as, ultimately, the point of view being supported (see Tuchman, 1972). Crucially, in the wider context of news content and news production, questions of gender and 'class' bias have been consistently raised over recent decades, both in terms of the restricted range of story types in which women and citizens appear (Tuchman et al., 1978; European Commission, 1999; WACC, 2005), but also in relation to women's relatively subordinate positions within mainstream newsrooms (Gallagher, 1995; Meehan & Riordan, 2002; De Bruin & Ross, 2004; Mahtani, 2005). This chapter considers the ways in which gender plays out in, for example, the selection of news sources, and the use of female decision-makers, elite commentators or members of the public. The salience of gender, in terms of a journalist's propensity to use women or men as sources in their work, is also considered. I take a case-study approach by sampling three English regional newspapers whose content is interrogated using a gendered frame analysis as the primary explanatory framework. Issues of gender are often ignored in much of the research which analyses media texts, thereby eliding important differences in the ways in which gender is both performed but also marginalized. I begin by discussing the broader landscape of news discourse before moving on to consider the findings of the larger study upon which this paper draws. I then, finally, reach some tentative conclusions.

The national vs the local: The big guns and the small fry

Over recent decades, the news industry has come under considerable scrutiny and has mostly been found wanting in terms of its contribution to the public understanding of, say, politics, or even in terms of providing a balanced news diet to a hungry audience. There is a clear requirement to exercise judgement over content and voice, simply on the grounds of available space, let alone the commercial imperative to increase market share (of viewers, readers or listeners). It is precisely the mechanisms by which those decisions are made that have formed the basis of much media scholarship about the media's role in framing and agenda-setting (Entman, 1989, 2008; Bennett, 1990; Dearing & Rogers, 1996; Iyengar, 2001; McCombs, 2004). The relatively uncontroversial theory which has emerged from studies of news over recent decades suggests that the 'frames' within which stories work contain particular ideological biases which are presented to the news consumer as simple 'truth' (Eldridge, 1995; Philo, 1999; Hardt, 2004). It is precisely this pretence at neutrality which so exercises media commentators, not least because the public tends to believe that the news really is what has happened on any given day, and does not regard it as a constructed package which is entirely partial. For feminist media scholars, the persistent...