Journalism and Political Exclusion: Social Conditions of News Production and Reception 9780773590113

Table of contents :
Cover
JOURNALISM AND POLITICAL EXCLUSION
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
Acronyms
Introduction
1 News, News Publics, and Non-Publics
2 Changes and Continuities in the Conditions of News Production
3 The Process of News Reception
4 Social Conditions of Reception: Commercialization, Convergence, and Content
5 Social Conditions of Reception: Class, Gender, and Other Social Divisions
6 Journalism, Information Poverty, and Political Exclusion
Conclusions
APPENDICES
1 Methodological Notes
2 Questionnaire
3 News Diary Format
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Journalism and Political Exclusion

Journalism and Political Exclusion Social Conditions of News Production and Reception

Debra M. Clarke

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014 ISBN 978-0-7735-4281-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-4282-2 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-9011-3 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-9012-0 (ePUB) Legal deposit third quarter 2014 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Clarke, Debra M., 1953–, author   Journalism and political exclusion : social conditions of news production and reception / Debra M. Clarke. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4281-5 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4282-2 (pbk.). – ISBN 978-0-7735-9011-3 (pdf). – ISBN 978-0-7735-9012-0 (epub)   1. Journalism – Social aspects. 2. Mass media – Social aspects. 3. Reporters and reporting. 4. News audiences. I. Title. PN4749.C53 2013   070.4'3

C2013-907831-2 C2013-907832-0

Typeset by Jay Tee Graphics Ltd. in 10.5/13 New Baskerville

In loving memory of my parents, Henrica Cornelia (Didi) and John Edward (Jack) Clarke

Contents

Tables and Figures  ix Acknowledgments xi Acronyms xv

1 2 3 4 5 6

Introduction 3 News, News Publics, and Non-Publics  19 Changes and Continuities in the Conditions of News Production 57 The Process of News Reception  102 Social Conditions of Reception: Commercialization, Convergence, and Content  143 Social Conditions of Reception: Class, Gender, and Other Social Divisions 185 Journalism, Information Poverty, and Political Exclusion  224 Conclusions 261 APPENDICES

1 Methodological Notes  275 2 Questionnaire  282 3 News Diary Format  288 Notes 291 References 305 Index 349

Tables and Figures

Tables 1.1 Significant media usage patterns in Canada  53 2.1 Examples of production constraints and their textual outcomes 96 3.1 The continuing primacy of television journalism  127 3.2 Social characteristics of the samples  138 3.3 Primary news source by social class  140 4.1 Criticisms of television news and other news sources  178 A.1 Interviewees   278

Figures 2.1 Distribution of commercial television revenues by broadcaster, 2012 74 a.1 News diary cover page  288 a.2 Sample news diary page  289

Acknowledgments

While conducted over the course of almost a decade, this project in many ways represents the culmination of more than three decades of research inquiry into the sociology of journalism, a period of inquiry that began with my undergraduate honours thesis regarding media ownership in Canadian society, proceeded through two graduate-level theses regarding news production and news texts, and through a good number of years of research thereafter to examine news production, news texts, news audiences, and other issues related to journalism. As such, it owes a tremendous debt to the early mentorship of Wallace Clement, Peter Golding, and Graham Murdock during my graduate school days, each of whom illuminated the importance of a political economy of communication that could be interdisciplinary and, at the same time, particularly enriched by sociological insights. The overall project is also very much a direct outcome of the generous mentorship, long-term friendship, and continuing support of Gertrude J. Robinson. Much gratitude is also due to James Curran and Gianpietro Mazzoleni for their early support of the proposed manuscript, ­ and to colleagues elsewhere who committed their time to provide very helpful comments about various draft chapters, including Carl Cuneo, Mike Gasher, Josh Greenberg, Yasmin Jiwani, Graham Knight, and Kim Sawchuk. Many thanks are also owed to Kathleen Cross, David Pritchard, and Philip Savage, each of whom contributed very useful source material. I also remain truly thankful for the generous praise of the anonymous readers who reviewed the lengthy original manuscript submitted to mqup in the summer of

xii Acknowledgments

2011. Their insightful comments, suggestions, and critical remarks all contributed very significantly to a more concise final manuscript. At Trent University, thanks are extended to John Wadland, now professor emeritus of Canadian Studies, for his long-standing support, and to Stephen Katz, who, while chair of the Department of Sociology, was able to provide a half-sabbatical during a pivotal period in the research process. Rory Coughlan, Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, and especially Marisa Scigliano-Arvin contributed vital support, including a level of good friendship, good humour, and pragmatic wisdom that helped to render the project manageable. By her own example, Amy Twomey, my doctoral student during much of the writing process, provided fresh reminders of the need to nurture and sustain one’s research passions and to translate these directly into disciplined writing. Undergraduate students in my various Canadian Studies and sociology courses over the years have also inspired those passions. Research funds provided by the Symons Trust Fund for Canadian Studies, the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies Research Committee, and the Ontario Work Study Program are also gratefully acknowledged. Appreciation is also due to Intellect Books in the UK, publisher of the International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, and to Rowman and Littlefield in the US, publisher of Converging Media, Diverging Politics: A Political Economy of News Media in the United States and Canada (Skinner, David, C ­ ompton, James R., and Gasher, Mike, eds., 2005), who each granted permission to reprint some previously published material, including quotations from research interviews, in chapter 1 and chapter 4. Many thanks are also extended to the team of interview transcribers who frequently struggled to translate recorded audio into printed text. Their work was especially difficult because the interviews included discussions that were often concurrent with the sounds of the newscasts and also because the interviews were conducted in household settings that were not always amenable to voice recording. As several transcribers wryly and accurately concluded, “you had to be there.” Consequently, as other reception researchers have found, it ultimately became necessary to self-transcribe much of the interview material. This extraordinarily time-consuming predigital process, carried out over the course of several years during and after the interviews were completed, was nevertheless made considerably easier thanks to the preliminary transcripts produced



Acknowledgments xiii

by the team of transcribers, who included Elizabeth Batten, Varugis George, Marisa Haensel, Kate Johnston, Joan Lepp, Sandra Martin, Shirley Pavy, Dorothy Sharpe, and Janice White. Their efforts are very greatly appreciated. Above all, the research would have been literally impossible without the vital cooperation of the community organizations that were consulted, all of which, together with their members, were assured of anonymity and confidentiality. The greatest debt by far is to all of the members of these organizations who agreed to become research participants, including all those who completed questionnaires, who opened their private homes to frequently lengthy interviews, and/ or who wrote often detailed and thoughtful entries in the news diaries. Their eagerness and enthusiasm about the project far exceeded expectations. Thank you all so very much for your time, your kindness, and your invaluable reflections about the nature of political communication. Finally, the book is dedicated to the loving memory of my parents, Didi and Jack Clarke, who were the first to tolerate my insistent childhood questions about how the world works and why journalism is unable to explain it.

Acronyms

ap aptn bbc bbg bn cab caj cbc cip cjf cjfe cmc CMG cmrc cp cpe crtc

Associated Press Aboriginal Peoples Television Network British Broadcasting Corporation Board of Broadcast Governors Broadcast News Canadian Association of Broadcasters Canadian Association of Journalists Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Canadian Internet Project Canadian Journalism Foundation Canadian Journalists for Free Expression computer-mediated communication Canadian Media Guild Canadian Media Research Consortium Canadian Press Canadian programming expenditures Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission CWA/SCA Communication Workers of America/Syndicat des communications d’Amerique ess European Social Survey fpjq Fédération professionnelle des journalists du Québec gmmp Global Media Monitoring Project gss General Social Survey gumg Glasgow University Media Group ict information and communication technology iptv Internet Protocol Television

xvi Acronyms

isp mcm mcw pwac rao rci tbc tng ubb ugc upi vcr vnr WCM WCW

internet service provider middle-class man middle-class woman Periodical Writers Association of Canada resident adult offspring Radio Canada International Television Bureau of Canada The Newspaper Guild usage-based billing user-generated content United Press International video cassette recorder video news release working-class man working-class woman

Journalism and Political Exclusion

Introduction

After many Western societies began to deregulate their media industries in the 1980s and 1990s, the prominence of public broadcasting organizations was progressively diminished while, at the same time, the fiscal strength of these organizations was – and continues to be – severely undermined. Under neoliberalism, attention was redirected to commercialization and to the appearance of competition, diversity, and plurality, to the extent that it became possible to interpret developments such as the minimally regulated proliferation of radio broadcasting licences and the multiplication of specialty television channels as a new movement in the direction of “media pluralism” (Cushion 2012b). Together with the accelerated expansion of the internet and its increasing availability through a diverse number of digital platforms (such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets), the resultant media environment of the twenty-first century is readily celebrated by many as “a richer and more globally diverse public sphere” (Cushion 2012b: 1; see, for example, McNair 2006). With regard to journalism in particular, Fuller (2010) is led to proclaim a virtual “information explosion” whereby news is seemingly available from a multitude of richly diverse sources as well as more easily and more speedily obtained at any time of day or night and from any conceivable geographic location. The appearance of pluralism derives principally from perceptions premised upon: (1) access to a multiplicity of information sources, access that is seen to include the (ostensibly equal) opportunity to interact with these sources and, indeed, the (again, presumably equal) opportunity to actually participate in newsmaking through the production of user-generated content (ugc); (2) the speed with

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Journalism and Political Exclusion

which information can be obtained via 24/7 all-news channels or live radio news or e-mail, texts, and tweets; and (3) the sheer quantity of information sources available. All three perceptions are widespread within popular discourse as well as within general scholarly discourse, although without any solid foundations in empirical social realities. Unfortunately, these same misperceptions have sustained even grander mythologies which declare that digital media pluralism will transform entire societies, eradicate social inequalities, and facilitate a newly democratic dominance of citizen journalism over the old order of professional journalism. As Curran (2012a, 1) concisely explains, such predictions have been “proved wrong for two reasons. They were extrapolations from the internet’s technological prowess that underestimated the wider influence of society. And they did not anticipate that the world would influence the internet more than the other way around.” In the first place, perceptions of equal access to the multi-­platform digital mediascape are nothing more than illusions – illusions that continue to be contradicted by the realities of persistent digital divides based upon class, gender, and other deeply entrenched and by no means eradicated social inequalities (see, most recently, crtc 2013; Curran 2012b; Middleton 2011; Middleton, Veenhof, and Leith 2010). “Even” in a comparatively developed society situated within the privileged global North, there were close to three million households without internet service in Canada in the year 2012, as reported in the crtc’s most recent Communications Monitoring Report (2013). Significantly, Middleton (2011, 4) clarifies that neither availability nor cost are explanatory factors; rather, “many households that could get a broadband connection choose not to do so,” and almost 40 percent of non-users express no interest in the internet. As she points out, while approximately 60 percent of all adult Canadians go online daily, this also means that about 40 percent do not go online every day. And, in fact, only 42 percent of adult Canadians spend five or more hours online per week (Middleton 2011, 4-5). This datum compares poorly with the current average of 29.8 hours per week spent watching television (crtc 2013). In other words, during each and every week, almost six times as many hours are spent in television use as in internet use. As Middleton (2011, 8) concludes, “usage data suggest that the internet is not yet central to the daily lives of many Canadians.” Furthermore, it remains the case that both television and the internet are principally used for non-

Introduction 5

informational purposes. Canadian usage data support data elsewhere, which indicate that the majority of online time is consumed by e-mail and leisure activities rather than by news consumption or other forms of information-seeking (Middleton 2011; Middleton, Veenhof, and Leith 2010). Second, there is a need to question why speed is highly valued and how this affects the nature of the information that is produced and received. What is the impact of 24/7 “speedy news” upon the quality of the information produced? These questions have been studied by Bromley (2010), Lewis (2010), Rosenberg and Feldman (2008), and others who point out that the expanded availability of the internet through mobile devices has further quickened the pace of news delivery, with direct implications for the content of news. In his discussion, for example, Cushion (2012b, 173) speaks of how the “cnn-ization of news values” has led to greater emphasis upon “breaking news.” Why is that problematic? As Lewis and Cushion (2009) have demonstrated, breaking news stories tend to be based upon fewer sources, and these stories are inclined to favour particular categories of news, such that stories of crime and natural disasters assume priority over political information. Third, regarding the increased quantity of information sources, Curran (2012b), McChesney (2005, 2008), Murdock (2010), and others emphasize that the availability of more information sources must not be confused with the availability of better information sources. On the contrary, more does not necessarily mean better, as many critical analyses of convergence and its implications within contemporary professional journalism have demonstrated. Beyond counting channels and websites, we need to ask the more meaningful substantive questions, such as: Which social groups in a society are able to gain access to which information sources? How are the multiplicity of sources actually used in the context of everyday news consumption routines? Why is it that such a multiplicity of sources can only produce information that is redundant and repetitive rather than richly diverse? How can these increasingly high levels of cross-media content convergence be explained? Why are news users increasingly disenchanted by the limited variety of news available across different channels and different media platforms? Not least important, rather than declare the sheer quantity of sources a triumph, we need to ask about the quality of the information available as well as whether, how, and to what extent this information

6

Journalism and Political Exclusion

contributes to political knowledge of the sort that professional journalism is ideologically mandated to provide to the citizens of ostensibly democratic societies. These are among the questions to be addressed here through a multi-method, integrated analysis of the social conditions of news production and news reception. What has been the impact of contemporary developments in news production on the capacity of professional journalism to generate an active and informed citizenry? At the turn of the millennium, Holtz-Bacha and Norris (2001) surveyed fourteen European countries to examine whether the proliferation of channels had increased levels of political knowledge. While the authors acknowledged issues of causation and reported the results cautiously, viewers of public-­sector news were found to be more knowledgeable about political matters than commercial news viewers. Importantly, the authors also observed a “virtuous circle” whereby those who are more politically aware may be more inclined to view public-­ sector television news, including current affairs documentaries, and thereby increase their level of civic information (138). Further into the new millennium, Prior’s (2007) extensive analysis of US news audiences disclosed that the acceleration of consumer choice in the form of television, cable, and internet news platforms had actually turned more people away from news and documentary programs. The Americans studied by Prior more often chose entertainment genres over news and other information genres online as well as in their broadcast and print media usage. Prior argues essentially that contemporary changes to the US media environment – such as accelerated commercialization and the multiplication of channels – have made it easier to find, and also easier to avoid, sources of news and current affairs. Three years later, at the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Aalberg, van Aelst, and ­Curran (2010) reported about their systematic comparative analysis of political information flows throughout six Western societies during the period between 1987 and 2007. Americans were found to be exceptionally ignorant about politics and international affairs, more so than citizens of the United Kingdom, Belgium, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway. The authors explain it, at least in part, in terms of how poorly Americans are served by their market-driven broadcasting system and the not unrelated fact that Americans are comparatively light consumers of news (Aalberg, van Aelst, and ­Curran 2010, 265-8; see also Aalberg, Blekesaune, and Elvestad 2013).

Introduction 7

These and other empirical results must lead us to question the extent to which the culture of news consumption has changed as a consequence of the increased volume of news available through television and the internet. For example, Aalberg, van Aelst, and Curran (2010, 261) document that the vast majority of the increase in the quantity of television news has occurred outside of prime time and that, therefore, there is no reason to conclude that television news has received greater attention or that the growth in volume has led to increased news consumption, particularly since daytime television does not attract significantly large audiences. As most broadcast news managers know from their industry-generated data, patterns of news consumption remain stubbornly dictated by well-established everyday personal habits and routines, or what the industry refers to as “appointment viewing,” whereby viewers will designate time to watch local and national newscasts consistently at the specified times in the program schedule. As the news reception evidence to be presented here also indicates, viewers remain more inclined to watch news “by appointment” in this manner and much less inclined to randomly surf either television channels or the internet for additional news and information. Likewise, the empirical usage evidence casts enormous doubt upon the extent to which laptops and other mobile televisual platforms have affected established television consumption patterns. For example, Evans (2011, 175–6) concludes her British reception research regarding the transmediality of television drama as follows: I do not wish to argue that television as it has traditionally been understood (a broadcast feed sent from a central institution via an aerial, satellite dish or cable to a television set in a living room) is dead. There were clear indications within the focus groups for this research that this meaning of television is both persistent and desired ... As the participants in this research show, the development of the internet and mobile phone as televisual platforms does not make television redundant. Instead, they are integrated into a complex and shifting media landscape that includes both television and earlier media forms. It is in this sense, among others, that the distinction between “old” and “new” media loses its acuity and its utility. While, historically,

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Journalism and Political Exclusion

there have always been such fears and predictions, the ­introduction of a new medium has never fully supplanted existent or “older” media forms. Despite the fears that surround a decline in American newspaper readership, newspapers remain a primary and vital component of the newsgathering infrastructure underlying all modes of contemporary news production. Radio continues to be the most ubiquitous medium of all. And television, which some argue has acquired a new level of cultural respectability and “status” by virtue of its availability across multiple large and small, private and public digital screens (see, for example, Newman and Levine 2012), is the medium that continues to reign supreme as the primary news source. In October of 2012, this was once again affirmed by a Canadian Journalism Foundation (cjf) release of new survey data headlined “Despite Growth in Digital Media, Canadian News Seekers Still Rely on Traditional Sources for Daily News” (cjf 2012). Hence, while due attention must be paid to the digitalization of news production and news reception, a primary focus of the current analysis must be the medium of television in particular, precisely because of its continued prominence as the central news source. Primary emphasis is also placed upon the structural conditions of television news production and reception, the analysis of which reveals commonalities between those who produce television news and those who receive it. It will be argued that “news producers” – used here in the generic sense to refer to all those who perform the labour required to produce news – and news audiences are both concurrently creative and constrained in their respective production and reception activities. Producers and audiences can both be seen as creative within the limits of the social conditions that circumscribe and necessarily constrain their experiences with professional journalism. Accordingly, there is no concern or intent here to criticize journalists and news producers generally, either as individuals or as a professional group. Rather, this analysis needs to be understood as critical of those social conditions that impose upon the labour of all news producers and, at the same time, restrict the informational experiences of news audiences. News producers, for example, when queried in surveys of their profession, often report being “satisfied” with their choice of profession and yet simultaneously “stressed” by the conditions of their labour. Similar contradictions are experienced by news audiences, who are frequently keenly attuned to the reception implications of these same

Introduction 9

c­ onditions of production and who, as a result, are often inclined to experience parallel levels of stress as well as levels of exclusion that can discourage both the extent of their news consumption and the extent of their political participation. What are the elements of news production that affect news reception in direct and concrete ways? Just as Fenton (2011) captures the essence of neoliberalism when she describes it as the pursuit of the economic at the expense of the social, so too can newsgathering within contemporary neoliberal societies be seen as the pursuit of the extraordinary at the expense of information about the ordinary. Audiences are inclined to crave the latter much more than the former, although, as Bourdieu (2001, 248) observes, “there is nothing more difficult to convey than reality in all its ordinariness.” In the relative absence of such explanations of the ordinary, and in view of a multitude of other constraints that affect the news production process, the analysis here proceeds to examine how news audiences fared in their pursuit of information during the first decade of the twenty-first century, well after neoliberalism was thoroughly entrenched, together with the extensive commercialization and convergence associated with it, and amidst the so-called “information explosion” that ostensibly provides the means to fully satiate the informational needs of all. In conjunction with a critical review of the contemporary social conditions of news production, this analysis also presents original data derived from a longitudinal study of Canadian news audiences in order to concurrently examine the contemporary social conditions of news reception. The decisive contribution of professional journalism to the production and reproduction of ideas about social reality is frequently acknowledged, assumed, and indeed often overstated, although rarely is it investigated empirically. Remarkably, this applies to Canadian news audiences, about which there are few qualitative studies, despite the emergence of American, European, and other international studies that have revealed fascinating findings regarding how audiences interpret television news and other news media. Many of the international studies have finally shattered long-held assumptions about the passivity of news audiences and also critically questioned the merits of long-practised principles of news production. The relative absence of any comparable Canadian studies is all the more remarkable in view of the historically very heavy levels of media usage by the Canadian population at large and,

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Journalism and Political Exclusion

in particular, their continuing and exceptionally heavy dependence upon the medium of television as a primary source of information about developments in the social world. Despite the technological changes that have enabled online journalism and progressively altered it in various ways, television journalism continues to reign supreme as the principal news source of the Canadian population as well as the majority of other Western populations. This book seeks to address the tremendous gap in our knowledge regarding Canadian news audiences and to do so in a manner that encourages a refinement of the approaches and methodologies that have frequently been employed in examinations of news audiences elsewhere. Whereas many scholars confine their research to audiences as their primary object of analysis and proceed to examine the process of reception in isolation, here it is argued that we need to contextualize news reception experiences with reference to the production of offline and online journalism, including the intrinsic limitations of the core practices and principles that underlie news production. The intent is to arrive at a more fully comprehensive understanding of the relationship between news production, news reception, and the ongoing renewal of the consent required to support hegemony. Concretely, it is necessary to consider why television journalism presents events in a particular manner and why it offers a limited set of possible interpretations before one can adequately explain the actual interpretations of viewers. Even in the absence of intermediary textual analysis which might suggest that these interpretations are rooted ultimately in the specificities of the news text itself, it will be argued that a very direct relationship between the social conditions of news production and the social conditions of news reception can be established. The social conditions of news production shape news reception experiences in a multitude of ways. Time constraints, for example, such as those that limit production periods, program lengths, and story lengths, are such a deeply embedded component of professional journalistic practices that both producers and audiences are inclined to see them merely as a given, as a feature of journalism that is so impermeable as to be “commonsensical” and rarely subject to critical discussion, at least not commonly by professional journalists who must learn to live with such constraints in their everyday work lives. Like journalists, audiences are keenly sensitive to the limitations that time constraints impose upon news content. Much



Introduction 11

more critical are the economic constraints of news production, which have widespread effects upon the quantity, form, and content of the stories that are produced. Such constraints become manifest in limited facilities and resources, including human labour power and technological resources. Other vital components of news production infrastructures, such as the division of journalistic labour, can impose serious limitations upon the very ways in which news is defined as well as how and where it is sought. Relatedly, the newsgathering infrastructure is commonly organized in such a way that journalists must confront their structurally unequal access to individuals who might potentially appear in their stories, a constraint that results directly in a quantifiably and otherwise limited demography of news subjects as well as in a limited conceptualization of power and politics. A lengthy list of exemplary production constraints and their textual outcomes appears in table 2.1 and it is discussed at greater length in chapter 2. In light of these limited available interpretations, imposed principally by production constraints, the analysis proceeds to consider how audiences integrate their reception of journalism’s informational output into their perceptions of the social order and how these perceptions in turn nurture, or fail to nurture, the extent of their community activism and their broader engagement with political processes. Through the analysis of a targeted sample of households occupied by community activists in a medium-sized central Canadian city, the reception process is examined further within the context of the variable interactional dynamics operative in different household settings. The social science literature regarding families and households is called upon to provide additional insights into the logistics of how televisual information is mediated in the everyday concrete settings in which it is commonly experienced. In addition to internal household dynamics, a full gamut of other mediational social forces are operative in the relationship between text and reception – forces that intersect with each other to configure a complex diversity of textual interpretations that are not easily generalized or typologized. These important mediators are associated with one’s social location and include, for example, social class, gender, ethnicity, age, politico-ideological posture, and religious affiliation. The analysis is concerned to examine empirically the actual social conditions of news reception, with a special focus upon the significance of class and gender.

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Journalism and Political Exclusion

The publication of Morley’s The “Nationwide” Audience in 1980, a seminal analysis of the responses of British audiences to that bbc news program, heralded a stream of scholarly interest in audiences that has highlighted and often celebrated the critical resistance of television viewers, particularly in response to news. Elements of these celebratory notions can be found in the literature long prior to the 1980s, yet it was at the outset of that decade, and most decisively by the start of the new millennium, that a vision of the “democratizing” potential of both traditional and newer media had firmly supplanted long-held perceptions of television viewers as passive consumers of media output. Audiences had come to the fore of interdisciplinary communication studies as human and social beings who deliberatively utilize television and other media to construct their own meanings and identities and to make sense of their social worlds. Within that process of reception, television journalism continues to figure most prominently as the primary source of information upon which citizens depend. Interest in the critical and resistant capacities of news audiences has led, more recently, to a broader vision of audiences as citizens or publics who, thanks to the presumed liberations of the so-called “information age,” are better equipped to participate actively in political life. Earlier visions of the “enslavement” of citizens have been overcome by visions of their “empowerment” through engaged interaction with television and newer digital media. These contemporary discussions of the relationship between journalism and political engagement extend beyond sociology and political science to other social science disciplines, to various interdisciplinary realms of analysis (such as citizenship studies, communication studies, and cultural studies), and, of course, beyond the academy to the larger “public sphere.” Regrettably, both scholarly and non-scholarly discourses have been undernourished by a relative paucity of empirical research into the actual everyday experiences of audiences with television news and other forms of journalism. Unlike many publications that have contributed to these debates without the benefit of on-the-ground data, this book presents a large set of longitudinal data gathered during the seven-year period between 2001 and 2007 in the multimodal form of news diary, interview, and questionnaire data. These extensive data can be called upon to shed rare light upon a host of questions regarding audiences in Canada and elsewhere – questions



Introduction 13

frequently debated yet rarely subjected to sustained empirical examination. Above all, as we reflect upon actual experiences of information consumption during the first decade of the twenty-first century, we can begin to assess the validity of those grandiose claims which continue to insist that the “information explosion” has transformed entire societies, uprooted structures of social inequality, enabled new forms of political engagement and social activism, and radically altered everyday social interactions. This is among the features of the present analysis that render the project distinctive. First and foremost, it moves beyond conjecture, speculation, and theorization to directly examine the actual conditions of news reception. Second, it moves beyond mediacentrism to examine the social conditions of reception and it thereby provides much-needed sociological insights within a necessarily interdisciplinary framework. Third, it integrates analysis of news production and news reception. Unlike many works focused upon one to the neglect of the other, this book not only examines both but it also demonstrates the relationship between the limitations of professional journalistic practices and the limitations of audience experiences. Fourth, as discussed, the analysis calls upon extensive longitudinal and multi-modal reception research conducted during the seven-year period from 2001 to 2007, including quantitative data as well as a literally unprecedented collection of qualitative material regarding the experiences of news audiences in Canadian society. The material was derived from personally conducted, indepth field interviews as well as questionnaires and news diaries. These data are largely applicable to news audiences in other Western societies. Finally, the parameters of the research time period, which includes follow-up interviews in 2006 and 2007 with 2001 interviewees, enable exceptional comparisons of audience responses as well as reflections upon “enduring stories” such as 9/11 and its political aftermath to date. Thanks to the longitudinal nature of the research, issues of “empowerment” and political engagement can be pursued with a degree of acuity not ordinarily enabled by shortterm reception analyses. It will be argued that, rather than “empower” citizens in the direction of active, informed political engagement, narrative news genres and the production principles underlying them – critical components of what Bourdieu identifies as the “journalistic field” – contribute to a sharply different outcome whereby entire social groups

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Journalism and Political Exclusion

are instead disengaged or utterly excluded from such meaningful political participation in what might otherwise be more genuinely democratic political processes. Such groups include, most notably, working-class and women “news publics” who frequently experience conditions of information poverty, despite the apparent proliferation of information sources in the so-called “information age.” These major sectors of the population, as well as other social groups, are effectively reduced to “non-publics” and are excluded from the socalled “public sphere.” The first chapter establishes the theoretical parameters of the analysis, including a critical reassessment of concepts frequently utilized in the scholarly literature regarding journalism and political communication, such as Gramsci’s concept of “hegemony” and Habermas’s notion of the “public sphere.” A number of the important distinctions between offline and online news production and news reception are introduced. Issues that arise out of the contrasts between private and public broadcasting are also introduced. Canada’s broadcasting system is seen to occupy a curiously ambivalent and richly contradictory position along the spectrum between, on the one hand, the classically laissez-faire American model of broadcasting (which favours private ownership almost exclusively) and, on the other hand, the British broadcasting model (which insists upon public ownership in order to attain “public service” objectives). Divergent conceptualizations of audiences, citizens, and publics are examined and emphasis is placed upon the need to address plural “news publics” as a means to acknowledge the stratification of audiences and their essential diversity. At the same time, it is argued that there is a need to revisit those earlier approaches that were inclined to treat audiences as homogeneous publics. Crucially, there is a need to integrate the analysis of news production and news reception in such a way that everyday journalistic practices are connected with everyday viewer experiences. Among these experiences, the political exclusion experienced by various social groups is one of the most problematic, particularly in view of professional journalism’s mandate to encourage a well-informed, politically engaged citizenry. Finally, in light of these arguments, the methodological parameters of the analysis are set forth. Before the results of the reception analysis can be presented, however, there is first a need to examine the social conditions of news production that precede and powerfully shape the social conditions



Introduction 15

of news reception. The second chapter is therefore concerned to provide a concise review of the international literature regarding the process of news production, including the social characteristics of journalists and news producers generally, with a focus upon changes and continuities in the general social conditions of news production that prevail within Canadian and other Western societies. Based upon previous research into the conditions of news production within Canadian society (e.g., Clarke 1987, 1990, 1991), as well as international research regarding professional journalistic principles and practices, the historical infrastructures of network information production are outlined briefly and the intrinsic constraints of the news production process, as it operates in Canada and elsewhere, are summarized. The implications of these production constraints for the nature of the news text that results are also discussed. A final discussion of their implications for the ways in which the news text is received by viewers introduces the focus of the following chapter. Chapter 3 begins with a more extensive exploration of the epistemological complexities associated with qualitative reception research in order to explicate the mode of analysis utilized to conduct the original reception research presented here. Of necessity, it proceeds to deflate popular misconceptions about the social impacts of new information and communication technologies (icts). The presentation of current international and Canadian data demonstrates that, despite the arrival of newer digital media, television remains paramount as the dominant vehicle of political communication. Furthermore, grand claims regarding the so-called “information age” are assessed against the empirical realities of persistent digital divides rooted in class, gender, and age differences as well as in regional disparities in the global and national use of newer ICTs. The significance of these differences – and differences such as those based upon education, ethnicity, and politico-ideological affiliation – to the process of news reception is also considered here. While it is apparent that multiple social traits figure interactively within the reception process, the analysis is directed at class and gender in particular. Attention is also directed at the household context in which televisual information is most commonly experienced, as the research demonstrates that interactional dynamics between household members play a significant part in the determination of how the information is received, made meaningful, and

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utilized. Finally, the samples of research participants are introduced with a discussion of their social characteristics and news usage patterns, both of which are comparable to those of the Canadian population at large. Chapter 4 focuses upon those critical commonalities found throughout all news publics, regardless of social location, such as the nature and extent of awareness of ownership convergence, dissatisfactions with cross-media content duplication and other convergence outcomes, the commercialization of “public” news and the tabloidization of private- and public-sector news, dissatisfactions with established news formats, news story lengths, and other dimensions of the mode of news production as well as other sources of dissatisfaction shared by the general population. The data include questionnaire responses as well as news diary and interview material regarding these and other fundamental issues which derive from the conditions of news production that remain persistent throughout the news produced by both mainstream legacy media and newer digital media. Among other issues, what remains to be discussed and explained is why these commonly expressed criticisms and dissatisfactions do not necessarily lead to more extensive use of internet information sources or other “alternative” news media. Moreover, even under those uncommon circumstances in which other news sources are persistently pursued, these sources are still largely unable to satisfy informational needs. Disparities between journalistic representations of the social order and the class-based realities of everyday viewer experiences are the initial focus of chapter 5. Social class is examined along a range of different dimensions, including the remarkable degree of homogeneity in the class origins of professional journalists and news producers generally, journalistic assumptions about the class characteristics of news publics, the capacity of journalism to construct the notion of a singular and classless “public,” how social class is visible and invisible within news stories, as well as how, and how importantly, class figures within the reception of news. In the discussion of gender that follows, it is demonstrated again that reception needs to be understood principally in conjunction with production and, to a lesser extent, in conjunction with the nature of the news text that results from what continues to be a highly gendered news production process. The analysis proceeds from a brief review of the literature regarding gender inequalities within professional



Introduction 17

journalism to the presentation of original research regarding gendered patterns of news reception evident among the Canadian samples. Highlights of interviews conducted in their households, results derived from the nvivo analysis of all interview transcripts, observations regarding gender dynamics operative in reception, and pertinent material derived from the news diaries are all reported here. This material is considered alongside the evidence regarding gendered viewership practices in general and those of the Canadian samples in particular. At the conclusion of the focus upon gender in this chapter, it remains to explain women’s lesser engagement with offline and online news sources and the extent to which this phenomenon can help to explain gender differences in levels of political engagement. Finally, other social divides among audiences, such as age and ethnicity, are examined briefly as well as the intersectionality of social traits in the reception process. Overall, the chapter sheds light upon classical and contemporary debates about the relationship between journalism and political participation as well as less empirically informed debates regarding gendered conditions of news production and reception. Some of the most important results of the Canadian research and other research regarding news audiences elsewhere are presented in chapter 6, which first summarizes the most distinctive commonalities and variations between the reception experiences of different class-based, gender-based, and otherwise delimited social groups. The chapter proceeds to highlight those research results that are most consequential to the understanding of how the social conditions of news production contribute to information poverty and the political “disempowerment” or exclusion of various social groups. Such results include, for example, the strongly evident self-­ referential nature of news reception, the importance of the habitual nature of news usage, the commonly perceived insularity of the private households in which news usage routinely occurs, and the similarly common and recurrent disconnections between private viewership and public political engagement. Many of these patterns and tendencies in the social conditions of news reception can be linked directly to the essentially constraining nature of the general conditions of news production that feed these everyday reception experiences. In sum, it becomes strongly evident that news reception experiences are powerfully shaped by the social circumstances and conditions of news production – including the constraints of

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historical ­journalistic practices and principles together with convergence, digitalization, and other contemporary conditions of journalistic labour – to the extent that both textual outcomes and reception outcomes need to be examined and understood in relation to their origins in the mode of news production. A few clarifications regarding the use of recurrent terms will be useful at this juncture. The terms “journalist” and “news producer” are often used interchangeably throughout the discussion. The latter term refers not to any official title or specific position within newsroom hierarchies. Rather, it is used in the generic sense to refer to all those who participate in the labour required to produce news. While “journalism” and “news” are often used interchangeably, it is understood that the two terms should not ordinarily be conflated. Inevitably, this occurred in the case of the news diaries, where research participants reported about their consumption of all journalistic output, not merely news. Moreover, especially in their entirely unstructured interviews, participants freely offered critical comments and information about their experiences with news in particular as well as journalism in general – the latter understood to more broadly encompass the television current affairs program genre, film and television documentaries, online and offline political punditry by journalists, journalistic commentary in the blogosphere, and so forth. More often than not, their critical comments were directed at journalism generally, not strictly at news. Finally, it is also important to underline that, despite occasional opinions that were expressed about the competence of individual journalists (notably, while participants viewed newscasts), the overall inclination of most research participants was to direct their criticisms towards the profession at large and the practices and principles associated with the profession, not towards the individual journalists who work within it. This, of course, concurs with the objectives of the analysis here. Indeed, it will be seen that the structural limitations of journalism, especially television news, are such that these limitations are inclined to engender dissatisfactions and frustrations that are experienced by news producers as well as news users.

1 News, News Publics, and Non-Publics The study of audiences represents a crucial site in which to analyze critically how political and economic power is played out in people’s everyday lives. Sonia Livingstone, “The Influence of Personal Influence on the Study of Audiences”

In her reconsideration of what is to be learned from Katz and ­Lazarsfeld’s classic work – Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications – first published in 1955, Sonia Livingstone (2006) sensibly revives a number of vital points often lost during the subsequent decades of debate regarding “media effects.” Among these vital points is their very early identification of the significance of mediation in communication flows. Katz and Lazarsfeld point, in particular, to interpersonal communication as a source of mediation in the reception of mass communication, although it is frequently forgotten that mediation was a primary focus of their seminal analysis. Not only was it demonstrated that individuals engage with others in their social networks who serve to mediate the impact of media, it was also found that, in the end, media are not nearly as influential as many had feared at the time. Overall, one of the greatest legacies of their work was their profound empirical refutation of hypodermic needle models and all other linear cause-effect models of communication power. Nonetheless, those crudely simplistic linear models of easily duped masses, fully vulnerable to ubiquitous media, remain persistent within academic and public discourse. At the other extreme are similarly persistent models of consumer sovereignty which insist that communication power is usurped by the capacity of individual consumers to select and to reject media output at their whim. As the use of “new media” has increasingly gained momentum within some population sectors, consumer sovereignty claims have extended to the capacity of

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individual consumers to create media output in the form of user-­ generated content (ugc).1 Half a century after the publication of Personal Influence, ­Silverstone (2005) outlined the essential concerns of what he identifies as “the sociology of mediation and communication.” Of necessity, one of the most essential concerns is power – not only or exclusively “communication power” (see Castells 2009) yet also the broader exercise of economic, political, and ideological power across and throughout whole societies. Central to any sociological understanding of that broader macro-level power is a full appreciation of the social inequalities associated with its unequal distribution. It follows that the sociology of mediation and communication needs to first acknowledge and then concern itself directly with the social stratification of the plural publics who experience media within the socially structured contexts of everyday life. In practice, however, there is still remarkably little research attention dedicated to the diverse and unequal circumstances underlying the actual social conditions of media reception. During those infrequent moments in which issues of class inequality, for example, are raised in this literature, researchers sometimes appear to be perplexed by such differences, to the extent that their results are deemed to be curiously “inconclusive.” There may also be exasperation with the sheer complexity of the reception process as it is observed among many categories of social subjects within multiple households and other social settings. Despite these research outcomes, there remains a vital need to identify and to track the operation of mediators such as class, gender, and ethnicity (among others). This is the sense in which mediation and mediated communication are discussed here – that is, in the same sense in which Katz and Lazarsfeld point to the social location of individuals as part of a dynamic social environment that breaks the directness and linearity of media impact.2 Silverstone also underlines the essential point that all mediated communication is political. Media of all varieties must be understood as “fundamentally inscribed into the political process itself” (Silverstone 2005, 6; see also Virilio 1986; Wark 1994). Of course, media extend beyond the formally political realm into the economic and symbolic realms of social life. As Thompson (1995) suggests, media power is power exercised at the conjunction of the economic, the political, and the symbolic. While careful to caution against the dangers of mediacentrism, Silverstone (2005, 30–1) concludes his



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review of the sociology of communication literature with the following observation: “The increasing centrality of media for the exercise of power as well as for the conduct of everyday life ... has drawn the study of mediation to the centre of the sociological agenda ... media have to be explained as social just as they are required to be a part of the explanation of the social.” In a much grander vision, the term “mediation” is increasingly used to refer to the ways in which everything in the social world is mediated or, more contemporarily, “mediatized” (see, for example, McQuail 2006; Ross and Nightingale 2003; Schulz 2004) by the very presence of multiple means of communication. This very broad and rather loose usage of “mediation” and its various current formulations is premised upon assumptions of highly potent media significance that is also assumed to extend throughout every sphere of social life. The excessively grand vision summoned by this usage raises old yet persistently problematic issues of mediacentrism, Media Blame Syndrome, and the often related use of the abstraction “the media,” which is frequently invoked in the singular as if “it” (as opposed to the stylistically correct and substantively more appropriate “they”) constitutes a singular, unitary, and homogeneous social force.3 The sheer grandness of that principally rhetorical vision can readily lead to exaggerated speculations about the actual significance of media: the keywords here are “actual” (as in empirically examined) and “significance” – as opposed to the unsubstantiated perception of a singular autonomous source of “communication power” that pervades so-called “information societies” or “network societies” (see, for example, Castells 2009). In his conclusion cited earlier, Silverstone establishes a crucial clarification when he acknowledges that, at one level, the analysis of mediation needs to unravel the ways in which broad macro-level processes of mediated communication shape societies and the social institutions within them. The arguably much greater challenge is that “at the same time such analysis requires a consideration of how social and cultural activity in turn mediates the mediations: as institutions and technologies as well as the meanings that are delivered by them are appropriated through reception and consumption” ­(Silverstone 2005, 30, emphasis added). Similarly, in her 2008 presidential address to the International Communication Association titled “On the Mediation of Everything,” Livingstone specified her own use of “mediation” and asserted that: “The analysis of mediation,

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therefore, invites what Radway called a ‘radical contextualism’ to encompass ‘the kaleidoscope of daily life’” (Radway 1988, cited in Livingstone 2009, 8). Most profoundly, Livingstone concluded her speech with a strong emphasis upon the need to connect political economy to the experiences, including the communicative experiences, of everyday life.4 Radway (1984, 1991), of course, in Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, classically illustrates the complexities of that everyday kaleidoscope as it pertains to women’s engagement with romance novels. Rather than focus upon differential interpretations of the novels by the women she interviewed and the more general issue of the diversity of readings produced by any given text, her path-breaking work demonstrates the need to examine not only the differential meanings of news texts to their various groups of readers but also, and more significantly, the meaning of news consumption as a social activity and, specifically, as a social event that still occurs principally within a familial context. A feminist appreciation of the familial context is pivotal to Radway’s explanation of the experiences of the women in her sample. While the context of news usage is always crucial, one of the greatest lessons of her seminal research is that it is vital to go beyond the analysis of differential textual interpretations and to separate that analytically from a larger analysis of how the social conditions of reception figure within actual experiences of news, including how news reception is understood and incorporated into the everyday social activities and rituals of audiences. As she reflects upon her original and highly influential 1984 publication in a new introduction to the 1991 edition, Radway (1991, 7) discusses her realization that the meaning of their media use was multiply determined and internally contradictory and that to get at its complexity, it would be helpful to distinguish analytically between the significance of the event of reading and the meaning of the text constructed as its consequence ... What the [original] book gradually became, then, was less an account of the way romances as texts were interpreted than of the way romance reading as a form of behaviour operated as a complex intervention in the ongoing social life of actual social subjects. (emphases in original)



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While it is unquestionably useful to examine specific reception experiences, such as the meanings derived from reading a particular romance novel or watching a particular newscast, it is even more useful to address that related yet analytically distinguishable issue to which Radway points. In the case of the current project regarding journalism, it is the issue of the continuing, ongoing, long-term significance of news reception within the larger life trajectories and overall worldviews of one’s research participants. This is a phenomenon that extends well beyond their specific reading of a specific text on a particular day in which a researcher happens to observe their news reception. It also helps to explain why there is not a particular concern here to observe specific readings of specific news texts in conjunction with conclusions reached in a textual analysis conducted prior to such observations. A persuasive case can be readily made that sociology is especially well equipped to capture the operation of those multiple mediators and kaleidoscopic social contexts that are inevitably activated during everyday media encounters. At the outset of their media sociology textbook, Jackson, Nielsen, and Hsu (2011, 4) offer a succinct statement of how sociology can contribute useful insights to reception analysis: “critical sociology contrasts real audiences and the audiences implied or imagined by media” (emphasis in original). Indeed, within the larger realm of multi-disciplinary communication studies, there are abundant indicators of a nascent appreciation of the need to engage social theory more rigorously as well as the need to call upon the broader insights that can be derived from social science generally. Elizabeth Bird, for example, has impressed communication scholars of varying disciplinary backgrounds with the rich insights offered by her anthropological attention to audiences. Among her incisive research outcomes is her conclusion that we need to understand audiences as simultaneously creative and constrained, and never being in one place. Guided by this perspective, we need to continue studying real people and their interactions with the media, but let us attempt to understand how their daily choices are limited not only by their own social and economic circumstances but also by the power of inscription held by media producers. (Bird 2003, 186)

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This is precisely the manner in which the analysis of reception is approached here. Bird’s conceptualization of audiences clearly extends beyond a preoccupation with the capacity to be creative in our reception experiences. Indeed, it moves well beyond that to also appreciate the structural constraints of reception as well as the need to acknowledge the impact of production upon the text that is produced and subsequently received. Like Bird, Miller (2008) is among those concerned about the dangers of a radical conceptual shift from the presumably passive audiences of “Media Studies 1.0” (the original inclination to disregard mediation and the critical capacities of audiences) to the demonstrably active and creative audiences of “Media Studies 2.0” (the subsequent inclination to grant audiences almost unlimited agency – to the extent that interpretations are understood to be boundless and so diverse as to render any conclusive analysis of reception patterns impossible). Considerations of social structure are almost entirely absent from both of these visions. Texts are also rendered irrelevant because texts are understood to be so absolutely polysemic that the range of possible interpretations is virtually limitless. In effect, the shift is from one extreme, in which agency is erased, to yet another extreme, in which structure is denied. As Miller (2008) expresses it, with refreshing bluntness: In Media Studies 2.0 the all-powerful agent is the audience. Media Studies 2.0 claims that the public is so clever and able that it makes its own meanings, outwitting institutions of the state, academia, and capitalism that seek to measure and control it ... Sometimes faith in the active audience reaches cosmic proportions. It has been a donnée of Media Studies 2.0 that the media are not responsible for – well, anything ... All this is supposedly evident to scholars from their perusal of audience conventions, web pages, discussion groups, quizzes, and rankings, or by watching television with their children. Consumption is the key to Media Studies 2.0 – with production discounted, labour forgotten, consumers sovereign, and governments there to protect them. The Reader’s Liberation Movement is in the house. (219, emphasis in original) Clearly, it is not useful to merely shift the conceptual gaze from one extreme of the agency-structure spectrum to the other. The



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ample empirical evidence that audiences are active should not be seen to circumvent media power or to negate media contributions to hegemony, nor should the multiplicity of social conditions that mediate between media and audiences be seen to necessarily undermine communication power. As Briggs expresses it, citing Kitzinger: “Rather we should see them as ‘integral to any efforts to understand how that power operates ... it is only through such complex mediations that any effects could occur at all’” (Kitzinger 2004, 180–1, emphasis in original, cited in Briggs 2010, 10). In his current summary of audiences research approaches, Briggs reiterates Kitzinger’s earlier point that applications of Stuart Hall’s encoding-decoding model, which first opened the gates to the active audiences of Media Studies 2.0 in the 1970s, have tended to focus upon the diversity of responses by audiences rather than the sources and the impacts of those responses.5 As Kitzinger (2004, 188–9) points out, we cannot overlook either the continuing dominance of hegemonic meanings within televisual and other media texts or the reality that these meanings are, in her words, “products of a time and place, embedded in power structures, shaped by patterns of everyday life, conventions and common sense” (see also Buckingham 2000; Hill 2007; Philo 2008). At this juncture in the evolution of communication research, then, the conceptual contradictions remain, together with a tremendous imbalance between the weight of assumptions about “the audience” – like “the media,” also frequently, and tellingly, invoked in the singular – and the relative paucity of empirical research focused upon the actual reception experiences of populations at large or, even more importantly, all of the subgroups found within those populations throughout various societies. In lieu of extensive attention to actual reception experiences, analytical labour has been directed at studies of production and examinations of texts that result from the production process. Of the three essential components of communication processes commonly typologized and ordered as production, text, and reception, the contemporary research literature is heavily skewed in the direction of textual analyses to the comparative neglect of empirical attention to reception. How are these research tendencies to be explained? Just as Katz (2009b) finds at least one strong explanation of American sociology’s divorce from communication research in the peculiarities of research funding opportunities (see also Pooley and Katz 2008),

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Ross (2001, 420) similarly points to economic realities that at least begin to explain the widespread empirical neglect of reception: It is certainly the case that reception studies has become a deeply unfashionable locus for serious academic endeavour and, while part of this falling from grace can be understood as a consequence of the increasing costs involved in conducting research with human subjects (as opposed to simply using one’s own critical skills to negotiate and analyze specific media texts), I would argue that there has been a more fundamental and ideological driver ... The (always) uneven terrain of audience studies is now under threat of collapse from the weight of those analyses which can no longer allow shared forms of identification among media audiences. In contrast to those contemporary analyses that are inclined to privilege the social-psychological exploration of the identities formed by atomized individuals within a population, there is clearly a need to not only permit but also to actively encourage the examination of shared forms of identification among audiences. Ross’s observations also place in perspective the contemporary abundance of textual analysis, in all of its varieties, during a period of research funding restraints amidst a general economic crisis. In sharp contrast, reception research can be a very costly undertaking, which undoubtedly contributes to its relative rarity. No less disconcerting are her observations regarding the splintering effect within the reception literature, which has been at least partly inspired by popular interpretations of Hall’s decoding typology and a broader emphasis upon the diversity of news publics that has followed from it. As Ross implies, there has been a resultant reticence to generalize about news publics even where commonalities are observed and noted; and yet, sociologically, we know that commonalities among different news publics are both demonstrable and explicable. Reception research that seeks to match specific “effects” with specific demographic groups bounded by, for example, age or ethnic differences is, not surprisingly, inclined to produce “inconclusive” results. A different research direction must be pursued, one that seeks to detect patterns and similarities rather than differences. This is the fundamental intent of the present analysis. Originally ­commissioned



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by the bbc’s Radio 4, Ross’s (2001, 421) analysis of “disabled” radio listeners demonstrated unreservedly that a ‘disabled’ audience for radio (or any other medium, probably) simply does not exist. Not that people with a disability do not listen to radio, but rather that they are radio listeners with a disability: they are not a disabled audience ... The point was made consistently during the interview phase, that radio stations should spend more time getting the ‘right’ messages over to non-disabled listeners, and less time thinking about what an imaginary ‘disabled audience’ might want from the medium. (emphasis in original) The work of Ross and many others suggests that broadcasters as well as communication scholars might move beyond preoccupations with market niches, audience fragments, and atomized individuals towards a more holistic attention to audiences at large, including general needs that are widely experienced as unmet. Different news publics do inevitably share reception experiences, and, in the population at large, there are a number of common experiences that can be observed and that should be of interest to broadcasters as well as to communication scholars. Above all, as this analysis will demonstrate, greater attention needs to be accorded to the experience of information poverty. Despite differences in education levels, levels of media and political literacy, and news usage routines, news is perceived by all to be a vital connection to the social world, even if its credibility is seriously challenged and repeatedly questioned. The reality that many are regularly left at a loss to understand significant economic, political, and other developments provides a magnificent example of Bird’s insistence that we examine the limits imposed by modes of news production, which carry with them consequences above and beyond the different social circumstances of different social groups. Contemporary work directed at identity formation, identity politics, and self-valorization through media consumption can often be too focused upon sources of division and fragmentation, to the neglect of sources of commonality and, indeed, of potential solidarity. Sources of commonality can extend throughout entire populations of citizens and entire classes of workers, all of whom are dependent upon journalism, primarily

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television journalism, to inform them about the social world and to provide them with essential political knowledge. While such political knowledge is not in itself the basis of political action, there is consensual agreement among scholars of varying disciplinary and theoretical stripes that a minimal level of political knowledge is among the vital prerequisites to political engagement of any sort (Curran 2009a). Viewed from the perspective of neoliberalism, the medium of television, in all of its program genres, including news, is mobilized to promote the psychological “empowerment” of citizenconsumers. Neoliberalism demands a population of psychologically empowered, consuming citizens – those who at least appear to be civically engaged, including the research participants discussed here, who are active in a variety of community organizations yet who may nevertheless be ideologically and politically disempowered by information poverty. The present analysis is concerned to examine how reception operates within the exceptionally media-rich households of Canadian society. There is deliberative attention to the commonalities throughout these households and across news publics – commonalities that, in view of their shared foundations, are (not surprisingly) shared with countless other households situated throughout various societies elsewhere. Apart from information poverty, another of the related commonalities experienced by many is their exclusion – from the sight lines of mainstream journalism, from access to information that might be seen as politically pertinent to their socio-political circumstances, and, thereby, from at least one potential means to formulate and to pursue a clearly articulated political agenda within the “public” domain that is pertinent to their own needs and interests. Those who are excluded along these dimensions comprise entire social groups – most significantly, workingclass and women news users. Both of these groups constitute a majority of the population; indeed, these are two of the largest news publics. Nonetheless, both are largely excluded from the so-called “public sphere.” Livingstone (2005, 19) expresses the general phenomenon of exclusion, and what is increasingly acknowledged as the inadequacy of Habermas’s notion, most concisely: “In relation to Habermas’ theory of the public sphere, we have become familiar with the cry of elitism for the theory’s idealization of a public sphere that has, too often, turned out to devalue or to exclude some people (or discourses or topics) while privileging others.”



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As discussed in the following section, there may be a need to retheorize hegemonic processes or revisit original formulations in order to move beyond what are often dangerously token references to Habermas’s “public sphere” concept, which idealizes the means of “free” and “public” expression promoted by the press and sees journalism as a “neutral” and apolitical arbiter of relations between the state and the citizenry. The research presented here suggests that, at least with respect to journalism’s presumed contribution to it, the very concept of a “public sphere” is highly deceptive: what is “public” does not necessarily encompass the population at large. On the contrary, many social groups are positioned around the perimeter while others are entirely excluded. Before the phenomenon of exclusion is examined further, it is useful to specify the broader theoretical parameters of the analysis; in particular, to assess the general contributions of news to the survival of hegemony.

NEWS AND HEGEMONY The contribution of news to the survival of hegemony and, therewith, to the reproduction of social order is a continuing analytical puzzle, significantly related to the question raised by Buttigieg (2008, 3) in a 2008 interview: The concept of hegemony is a concept that enables an analysis of the prevailing forces. It is not a concept that starts as a strategy. It is a concept that emerges out of an analysis of the situation, an analysis prompted by the question, how is it that in certain moments in history, the progressive forces who set in motion the process of change do not end up being, in fact, empowered? Within Gramsci’s vision, hegemony is sustained principally, although not exclusively, through the institutions of civil society, such as the education system, organized religion, and the press. As Buttigieg (2008, 4) expresses it, we still need “to understand how, in our societies, we generate legitimacy for power and therefore perpetuate it, through consent.” Later in the interview, he adds: “We see what everyone might call the progressive forces, in the United States, lacerated by identity differences, not [united] by the overlapping and merging of perceived interests” (9). In many ways, one can

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discern parallels between that perception of populations lacerated by “identity” differences and the contemporary configuration of communication research objectives, often characterized by a recurrent determination to seek out sources of divisiveness and fragmentation. Research attention might be usefully redirected towards those “overlapping and merging” interests that can be seen as shared by publics at large and, in particular, by different news publics as well as by the “non-public” social groups who are excluded. If conceptualized as the process whereby a social group sustains a position of power with the active consent of other social groups, hegemony is at least partially contingent upon the extent to which that domination is incorporated into the micro-level operation of households and the concrete practices of everyday life in such a way that consent continues to be granted. If we are to adequately explain why the residents of a particular household are politically engaged in their everyday lives, and why those in a different household are not, we cannot point simply or exclusively to their ICTs. In addition to differences such as those based upon class, gender, and age, we can also point to commonalities such as common beliefs that are part and parcel of the practice of everyday life throughout entire, heterogeneous populations. Media, especially broadcast media, are key institutions in the time, space, and life management of entire societies at the macro level (see Silverstone 2005, 13) and in the everyday operation of households at the micro level. There is a need to explore and highlight how media help to sustain the “normality” and “ordinariness” of everyday domination. The present analysis demonstrates that multi-modal reception research, in conjunction with a prerequisite examination of the social conditions of production, is highly suited as a methodological means to pursue that exploration.6 It is also important to consider Woodfin’s (2006) clarification of the ways in which Gramsci formulated and utilized the concept of hegemony, based upon her meticulous and thoughtful reconsideration of his original untranslated Italian Notebooks.7 She observes, for example, that, throughout the original Notebooks, Gramsci often uses the term direzione, signifying direction or leadership, as a substitute for egemonia (“hegemony”), “to further distance it from notions of coercion and to further identify hegemony with the construction and organization of consent” (134). As Woodfin documents, one of the greatest strengths of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony lies in



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its sophisticated explanation of the more subtle manifestations of domination that are less readily apparent yet nevertheless powerful within the social formations of late capitalist societies. She deplores misuses of the concept in British and later American cultural studies, suggesting that, in some instances, it is scarcely recognizable as a concept that was developed in order to understand and to overcome domination. These are not, however, grounds to dismiss the utility of the concept, especially as it was originally developed by ­Gramsci throughout the entire collection of his notebooks. In addition to its extensive abuse as a convenient alternative to the word “domination,” at least part of the distortion rests with the way in which the concept appeared in English – first, in a very scattered manner, with dotted references to it in what were only “Selections” from his notebooks (as the title made clear) published in 1971 (­ Gramsci 1971). Nevertheless, the publication of those selected notebook fragments was a landmark event at the time, and the collection continues, unfortunately perhaps, to be the most oft-cited of Gramsci’s translated works. The entire collection of his notebooks did not begin to appear in English until the 1990s, and the third volume was only published in 2007 (see Gramsci 1992, 1996, 2007). What further problematizes the use of the concept is that, even in the case of the three volumes, there is no particular place within those volumes where a dedicated and/or extensive discussion of hegemony appears. Instead, it is truly necessary to absorb all of Gramsci’s voluminous notes in order to appreciate his formulation of the concept and its subtleties. Let it simply be noted that, while sometimes used interchangeably with the word “domination,” the concept of hegemony as it is used here is not intended as, and should not be read as, merely equivalent to or synonymous with “domination.” Like Marx, Bourdieu, and a full range of classical and contemporary theorists, Gramsci – also from his perspective as a former journalist – wrote quite extensively about the press. It is fascinating that, early in Notebook 3, originally compiled by Gramsci in 1930, he proposes “a study of how the ideological structure of a ruling class is actually organized ... Its most notable and dynamic part is the press in general ... Such a study would be gigantic if conducted on a national scale; therefore, one could do it for a single city or do a series of studies for a number of cities” (Gramsci 1996, 52–3). Free from any possible accusations of mediacentrism, Gramsci immediately follows this thought with a caution:

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The press is the most dynamic part of the ideological structure, but not the only one. Everything that directly or indirectly influences or could influence public opinion belongs to it: libraries, schools, associations and clubs of various kinds ... Such a study, conducted seriously, would be quite important: besides providing a living historical model of such a structure, it would inculcate the habit of assessing the forces of agency in society with greater caution and precision. (53) There are no claims here to have completed such a study in accordance with Gramsci’s vision, although it is useful to revisit his cautious and meticulous theorizations regarding hegemony, which can certainly continue to be utilized as a highly insightful concept. Stuart Allan (2010) concisely pinpoints three features of hegemony that render it especially attractive to news analysts and useful to the understanding of news reception. First, hegemony is a lived process – it constitutes “a sense of reality for most people in the society” (96). That sense of reality is nurtured, at least in part, by journalistic reports about what transpires in the society. Second, hegemony is founded upon everyday “common sense,” which needs to be constantly renewed and reconstructed as new developments unfold and new events occur about which news stories must be told. ­Gramsci points out that “common sense,” while it can appear to be fixed and finite and full of long-established, seemingly unquestionable wisdoms, is in fact dynamic and regularly subject to change and revision. The task of revision frequently falls to the press, although not, of course, exclusively. Other institutions of civil society, such as the education system and organized religion, also contribute to the ongoing modifications. The brilliance of Gramsci’s discussions of common sense – which he declared to be the crux, the absolute core, of hegemony – is found especially in his appreciation of the extent to which common sense is deeply embedded within ideological structures as well as within economic and political structures. Third, hegemony is always contested. Consent, as Gramsci understood it and importantly clarified, is never fully assured or absolutely stable. It needs to be continuously “won” and secured by those whose interests would be threatened by its collapse. In this persistent endeavour, journalism can be pivotal, although in ways that we still need to elaborate fully through empirical research into the news reception experiences of audiences.



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With regard to the examination of journalism, Stuart Allan (2010, 119) recommends greater attention to the insights that can be gleaned from the use of the concept of hegemony: I would argue that the concept of hegemony needs to be elaborated much further than it has been to date in journalism studies ... a much greater conceptual emphasis needs to be placed on how news conditions what counts as “truth” in a given instance, and who has the right to define that truth. At the same time, though, equal attention needs to be given to discerning the openings for different audience groups or “interpretive communities” to potentially recast the terms by which “truth” is defined in relation to their lived experiences of injustice and inequalities. I certainly agree that these phenomena are entitled to equal attention. The question of how news conditions hegemonic “truth” needs to be understood through the examination of the social conditions of news production, addressed in the following chapter as a necessary prelude to the examination of how different audience groups frequently recast that “truth” in accordance with their concrete everyday “lived experiences of injustice and inequalities.” Indeed, I argue that attention to those conditions of news production is a vital prerequisite to the understanding of the particular ways in which hegemonic “truth” is recast – or not – by members of different news publics. The emergence of a renewed, and in many ways reinvigorated, attention to Gramsci’s original vision of hegemony by Allan (2010), Boothman (2008), Woodfin (2006), and others in recent years is probably not incidental. With his characteristic wisdoms regarding longitudinal patterns of intellectual thought in the analysis of communication, Curran (2006) discusses how the adoption of ­Gramsci’s work by Stuart Hall and other British scholars in the 1970s was rather selective, inclined to embrace ideas such as the prospect of a “united popular front” that would challenge and supplant hegemonic “truth” with new alternatives derived from the social experiences and identities of the populace at large. The study of popular culture, including everything from fashion to music and beyond, assumed a whole new momentum as a field of inquiry, reconceptualized as a field of contest, within British cultural studies. Through the

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course of the successive reinterpretations of hegemony that were part of its development, however, notions of struggle and ascendancy were lost while media, as dominant cultural forms, came to be seen as open, liberal fora in a sense that was more closely aligned with a liberal pluralist vision. Social groups bounded by gender and ethnicity occupied centre stage while social classes moved almost completely out of sight. The “decisive break,” as Curran (2006, 132) describes it, occurred at the point where the connection between cultural struggle and a collective political strategy – fundamental to Gramsci’s original vision – was entirely lost. Ironically, as discussed in the following section, that liberal pluralist misinterpretation has re-emerged at the forefront of “new media” studies, which, albeit usually without claims of allegiance to Gramsci, tend to persist in the relative absence of attention to social inequalities.

POST-HEGEMONY? ONLINE NEWS PRODUCTION AND RECEPTION Historically, the introduction of a new medium of communication, as well as the introduction of major technological innovations in the development of existent media, have been accompanied by the rapid spread of both unfounded fears and exaggerated claims about social transformation. These often extreme declarations of optimism and panic have penetrated both academic and public discourse. In his plenary address to the 2009 “Future of Journalism” conference at Cardiff University, Curran provided a number of examples, such as the words of Britain’s technology minister, Kenneth Baker, who informed the Commons in 1982 that cable television “will have more far-reaching effects on our society than the Industrial Revolution two hundred years ago” (cited in C ­ urran 2010a, 464). In North America also, as Magder (1997, 352) explains, the introduction of cable as a television delivery system generated euphoria about its perceived potential to democratize: In Canada and the United States in the early 1970s, cable was seen not merely as a way of improving television reception and modestly increasing the number of available channels but also as a means by which audiences could be given their own voice through community or access channels. The Canadian Radiotelevision and Telecommunications Commission (crtc) first



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encouraged and then obliged cable companies to provide facilities for local, community-based television production and to promote fair and balanced access for all groups within the community. In theory, the policy of community programming was a breakthrough for democratic communication and an expansion of public discourse; in practice, community channels have too often become a banal outlet for multicultural boosterism, local sports events, and local council meetings. Cable companies themselves are legally responsible for all programming on community channels, and most have developed “better safe than sorry” programming; risqué, alternative programming is rarely encouraged. The introduction of computer-mediated communication (cmc) was no different. During the early 1990s, the expansion of the internet beyond research and US military domains also launched the spread of various “web-based” mythologies. Chief among these was the notion that cmc generally, and the internet specifically, would actually enable every conceivable criterion of “democracy” – however defined – to be finally fulfilled. Freshly coined terms and phrases proliferated, many of which signified the anticipated new social transformations, such as “the new digital age,” “the electronic frontier,” “the electronic commons,” and the term “netizen” (intended to capture what was expected to be a newly direct connection between the net and a much “empowered” citizenry). There was even use of the phrase “electronic democracy.” Many of these terms entered into popular usage and became commonly abbreviated and utilized as “e-democracy,” “e-frontier,” “e-commons,” and so forth, yet the reality of continuing, persistent digital divides means that cmc has produced only “e-exclusion” as countless social groups in Canada (and globally) find themselves still unconnected to the socalled “World Wide Web.” Indeed, more than two full decades later, it remains the case that less than 30 percent of the world’s population is connected to that World Wide Web. Even within societies in the global North, there are significant population segments without internet connectivity, including Canada, where, as recently as the year 2012, more than one in five households were without internet access (see crtc 2013). Whatever criteria might be invoked in any definition of democracy, from any political perspective, there is at least a degree of

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c­ onsensus regarding its essential attributes. Inclusivity tends to rank very highly in such lists of democracy’s fundamental requirements, and it is commonly understood to mean that everyone within a population has the means to participate. Even such a minimal consensus about democracy’s rudimentary essentials is directly contradicted by the exclusivity that is evident in the internet’s infrastructure. In his article titled “Reports of the Close Relationship Between Democracy and the Internet May Have Been Exaggerated,” Schuler (2004, 69) highlights the related contradiction between the original vision of the internet’s theoretical potential and the reality of its actual development: For the first time in history, the possibility exists to establish a communication network that spans the globe, is affordable, and is open to all comers and points of view: in short, a democratic communication infrastructure. Unfortunately, the communication infrastructure of the future may turn out to be almost entirely broadcast, where the few (mostly governments and large corporations) will act as gatekeepers for the many, where elites can speak and the rest can only listen ... A decade ago commercial content was barred from the internet; now an estimated 90 percent of all Web pages are for financial gain. In the mid-1990s the media were filled with talk about “electronic democracy,” an idea that now seems quaint and antiquated in the e-commerce stampede. Similarly, it is perhaps a bitter irony that the “bitter irony” projected by Coleman in 1999 has indeed come about. At that time, he wrote: “It would be a bitter irony if ‘the information revolution,’ far from democratizing access, exacerbated existing inequalities and created new power disparities” (Coleman 1999, 17).8 Those of substantively different theoretical persuasions, from American authors who refer to “socio-economic status (SES)” to those who speak more freely of class inequalities, have nevertheless produced parallel findings with regard to digital divides and e-exclusion. Drori (2006, 63), for example, demonstrates that “the contours of the digital divide follow the markings of social marginality in general.” As she concludes: “Social stratifying characteristics reinforce technological stratification. In this sense, it is social inequality in general that is at the heart of the digital divide” (65). Schlozman, Verba, and Brady



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(2010, 503) directly compare the American offline and online relationships between “ses” and political activity, and conclude that: “We have found little evidence that the association between ses and political activity is any different when politics is on the Internet.”9 With theoretical perspectives that differ sharply from those of Drori and the Schlozman research team, Cuneo (2002) and ­Hindman (2009) assemble similarly demythologizing data in their respective studies of the Canadian and American digital divides. Both authors are also attentive to the broader significance of digital divides at the global level. Cuneo (2002, 3), for instance, asserts the nature and scope of global digital divides at the outset of his analysis: Not only is the vast majority of the world not connected to the Internet, most people do not even have the computers, skills, experience, interest, or awareness to become connected. The disconnected are not randomly distributed, but have specific demographic, social, economic, racial, ethnic, gender, gerontological, and political characteristics that amount to a systematic bias of exclusion. (emphasis added) As his data demonstrate, those who are systematically favoured for inclusion consist principally of white, abled, ict-skilled, highincome, educated young men in developed societies.10 There was a time during the early expansion of the internet in the 1990s when mass market writers, and, indeed, some academic authors, believed that e-exclusion could eventually be entirely overcome, including the notion that digital divides would actually disappear with the passage of time as personal computers and all of their associated equipment became more affordable. Cuneo’s meticulously detailed analysis fully deflates the notion that digital divides are merely ephemeral. In addition to the systematic exclusion of entire social groups, he lists such phenomena as poverty, low income levels among the waged, and unemployment as major deterrents to a more global internet (Cuneo 2002, 66). Subsequent research regarding the permeability of digital divides (e.g., van Dijk 2005; Drori 2006; Hindman 2009) continues to reinforce the conclusions of Cuneo’s analysis. Hindman’s analysis in The Myth of Digital Democracy (2009) supports Cuneo’s research outcomes and also directs attention towards

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a new form of exclusivity that has developed among internet users. With a research gaze that moves beyond access and usage to internet content, Hindman is able to demonstrate unequivocally that the same exclusive social group most favoured to use the internet – namely, white, highly educated, high-income male professionals – is also inclined to dominate online political discourse. Ironically, it is members of this same social group who have made the grandest and loudest claims about the supposed “democratization” of politics engendered by the internet. These claims include the arguments that new online information sources have provided better political information to citizens; that new forms of internet organizing, including social media, have helped to recruit previously inactive citizens into political participation; that cyberspace has become “a robust forum for political debate”; and that “the openness of the Internet [allows] citizens to compete with journalists for the creation and dissemination of political information” (Hindman 2009, 1–2). Through the course of his extensive landmark analysis of online political content, Hindman (2009, 18–19; see also Johnson 2007) sets forth compelling evidence that explodes many such unfounded claims – claims that nevertheless continue to underlie major mythologies about the internet within popular discourse: Again and again, this study finds powerful hierarchies shaping a medium that continues to be celebrated for its openness. This hierarchy is structural, woven into the hyperlinks that make up the Web; it is economic, in the dominance of companies like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft; and it is social, in the small group of white, highly educated, male professionals who are vastly overrepresented in online opinion ... The Internet has served to level some existing political inequalities, but it has also created new ones. More recently, Curran (2012b, 11) summarizes the absurdity of the idea that structured social inequalities might be somehow eradicated by the internet and other digital media: In short, the idea that cyberspace is a free, open space where people from different backgrounds and nations can commune with each other and build a more deliberative, tolerant world overlooks a number of things. The world is unequal and



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mutually uncomprehending (in a literal sense); it is torn asunder by conflicting values and interests; it is subdivided by deeply embedded national and local cultures (and other nodes of identity such as religion and ethnicity); and some countries are ruled by authoritarian regimes. These different aspects of the real world penetrate cyberspace, producing a ruined tower of Babel with multiple languages, hate websites, nationalist discourses, censored speech and over-representation of the advantaged. There are multiple myths associated with online news production and reception, myths that persist despite solid empirical evidence which refutes them. In the first place, there are myths regarding both equal and extensive access to the internet. Even those who concede that access is not equal might insist that access is nevertheless extensive. Particularly from a cmc-privileged middle-class perspective, it has become too easy to presume that everyone is online, and the important distinctions between levels of access, levels of literacy, and levels of usage are also easily overlooked. Digital divides along each of these dimensions remain firmly in place, nestled into structures of social inequality that continue to be deeply embedded within contemporary capitalist societies. Second, there are myths regarding online news production, myths which suggest that those who are online can find a new and tremendous amount of news diversity and information wealth. Included in this category are myths that surround and celebrate the “citizen journalism” that, in theory, can be produced by anyone. In reality, as Hindman (2009), Huesca and Dervin (2004), Redden and Witschge (2010), and others have already demonstrated, the so-called “new” media provide news that is neither abundant nor diverse. Indeed, it is actually quite “old” news in the sense that it remains very much a product of traditional journalistic principles. Substantively, in terms of content, online news differs little from offline news. Huesca and Dervin (2004, 285) surveyed the comparative research literature regarding offline and online news, and concluded that: Studies of online newspaper content, for example, have found no difference, other than minor formatting changes, between print and electronic products ... computers and the internet are used exclusively to extend existing journalistic practices (e.g., fact checking, generating story ideas, gathering background

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material, and monitoring the competition), rather than in ways that exploit the new opportunities they present. The overwhelming trend portrayed in the scholarly research is that reporters and editors interpret and use new media in ways that conform to traditional tenets of journalism and established news industry practices. Moreover, the vast bulk of the online news that is regularly consumed is not user-generated, nor is it derived from a variety of “alternative” online news sources; rather, it is consistently obtained from the mainstream news sites, such as cbc.ca and ctv.ca in the Canadian case, where the offline news produced by major news organizations is essentially duplicated or reproduced with minor embellishments.11 This points to a third set of myths regarding online news reception. The notion that news reception has been somehow “liberated” or transformed by access to online information is merely that: a notion without any empirical foundation. Where new technological developments in communication are concerned, there is a common tendency to exaggerate the rapidity of change, especially under the weight of a pervasive promotional culture and the extensive “spin” of ict marketers and public relations professionals. However, none of the sweeping claims and observations produced by these sectors are borne out by the empirical evidence. Most importantly, contrary to what even some communication scholars have argued, the traditional “journalistic field” has not been displaced by online developments such as the expansion of the internet or the appearance of citizen journalism. As ­Curran described it in his keynote address at the 2009 “Journalism in Crisis” conference, there has been a good deal of “unanchored optimism” in the scholarly literature regarding online journalism, particularly with regard to the “promise” of citizen journalism, much of it expressed in the absence of detailed empirical research (see Curran 2009a). Similarly, with respect to the promise of “alternative” journalism, Atton and ­Hamilton (2008) point out the over-emphasis upon participation in the scholarly literature at the expense of direct research examinations of audiences. Other myths related to “digital democracy” and online news reception include the presumption that the internet is used extensively as a means to engage in political discussions. Dahlgren (2005), ­Hindman (2009), and others document that its use in this



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manner tends to be very limited in comparison with other online activities, such as entertainment, non-political networking, shopping, and online chat. Likewise, presumptions of interactivity and participatory journalism need to be examined critically. While there is comparatively little Canadian research to date, analyses of American and European news sites find few interactive opportunities, apart from the traditional option to participate in the aftermath of news production with comments about news stories that are otherwise complete and not subject to change (Domingo 2008; Quandt 2008; Redden and Witschge 2010; Schultz 1999). Finally, there is considerable international evidence that not only are the practices and products of offline news production replicated online but so, too, are the highly converged ownership structures that oversee these production processes (see, for example, Dahlberg 2005; McChesney 2005; Salter 2005). This certainly contradicts the expectations that the internet would broaden the parameters of public discourse and provide a contrast to the dominance of corporate monopolies elsewhere in the mediascape. In the case of Canadian society, it is a particularly grave violation of expectations in that the level of ownership convergence is among the highest in the world, to the extent that it is difficult to address journalism issues without attention to related ownership issues. These ownership issues are discussed further in chapter 4.

AUDIENCES, CITIZENS, AND PUBLICS: DIVERGENT CONCEPTUALIZATIONS Much of the contemporary communication studies literature regarding what are perceived to be distinctive features of “postmodernity,” however conceptualized, has been consumed with issues of citizenship, democracy, and political engagement.12 Perhaps driven at least in part by the politically pregnant 9/11 aftermath, it would appear to signal a shift in emphasis from a well-established preoccupation with audiences to a more determined focus upon citizens and publics, especially their levels of political (dis)engagement. Like much of the established literature regarding audiences, however, the more contemporary contributions are inclined to offer a wealth of conceptual formulations to the relative neglect of ambitious empirical investigations into the actual experiences of citizens and the conditions that determine the nature of their political activities. In

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short, frequently absent from much of the newly intensive attention to citizenship is analysis of the perspectives of citizens. There are a number of notable exceptions. One of these is M ­ adianou (2005a, 2005b), who compares the news experiences of Greek, Greek ­Cypriot, and Turkish-speaking groups in Athens and whose fascinating work underlines a need to appreciate the heterogeneity of plural news publics (see also Fraser 1992; Robinson 1995, 1998; and Warner 2002). At this juncture in the history of reception research, the parallel need to conceptualize audiences principally in the plural has come to be widely acknowledged. It might even be argued that the word “audience” should be abandoned by communication scholars in both its singular and plural usages. As the Danish scholar Kirsten Drotner remarks: “It seems paradoxical that the international scientific community has struggled to unravel the complex relations between audiences and publics and come to terms with their political implications without realizing the fact that English is the only major scientific language in which the term ‘audience’ figures as a common category” (cited in Meinhof 2005, 213). A shift, therefore, to the use of “publics” can be seen as welcome, in that only the English and French languages are burdened by the misconception that audiences are subsets of publics. After all, as Livingstone points out, the common usage of “audience” frequently conveys the problematic imagery of a group of passive spectators bound attentively to a particular public communication, such as a television broadcast or theatre performance (see her contribution to M ­ einhof 2005, 2 ­ 16–19). Furthermore, this common usage can be seen to nurture the persistently common third-person perceptions found throughout audiences (Peiser and Peter 2000), whereby individuals imagine that only others are affected by media and that these effects are strong, unmediated, and unresisted. Established dictionary definitions of the noun “public” refer unambiguously to “the people as a whole,” which, in the absence of any accompanying connotations of homogeneity, is surely the object of reception analysis par excellence. In everyday research practice, the multiplicity of divisions throughout a society at large demands the plural usage of the term “publics” and – fortunately – insists that these divisions cannot be overlooked (see also Katz and Dayan 2012). While a shift in focus from audiencehood to citizenship might also be seen as a fruitful direction, some of the contemporary efforts



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to refine the concept of citizenship have tended to forge restrictive conceptualizations. This is apparent in particular uses of the notion of “cultural citizenship” (e.g., Turner 2001). In his introduction to the edited collection titled Culture and Citizenship, Stevenson (2001, 1, 2) suggests that the notion “invites a dialogue across disciplinary boundaries” and provides “an opportunity to link the way changes in the economic and political sphere have had impacts upon the ways in which citizenship is commonly experienced.” Critics caution, however, that these finely tailored conceptualizations present dangers of mediacentrism and reification (e.g., Silverstone 2005; Thompson 1995). The concept of “cultural citizenship” is not problematic in itself – see Murdock (1999) for a very differently crafted formulation – although it becomes problematic where it is understood that the cultural component of citizenship is separable if not autonomous. In other words, while it is useful to pursue the citizenship direction, it is not useful to isolate “cultural” citizenship as if it were a distinguishable realm of experience. If it is envisioned more broadly and inclusively, “citizenship” embellishes “audiences” with contextualization: it recognizes that active audiences are nevertheless embedded within and confined by their particular social locations. The concept of “publics” enriches this embellishment further in that it also recognizes diversity, a diversity that should not be confused with Abercrombie and Longhurst’s (1998, 69) notion of “diffused audiences” or their rather extreme argument that “media are actually constitutive of everyday life” (emphasis in original), nor is this meant to engage Grossberg’s (1992) distinction between everyday life and daily life. Just as it was essential to move beyond linear cause-effect models of communication power, it is likewise essential to steer clear of linear models of the relationship between media use and political activity. Silverstone’s (2005) overview of how such matters have been and should be conceptualized from a sociological perspective implicitly summons closer attention to critical concepts such as hegemony and habitus in order to examine domination as everyday practice and ritual. As discussed, if we are to adequately explain why the residents of a particular household are politically engaged in their everyday lives and why those in a different household are not, we cannot point simply or exclusively to their – fundamentally similar if not identical – news sources. In addition to differences of class,

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gender, age, and so forth, we can point to shared beliefs and rituals that are part and parcel of the practice of everyday life throughout entire, albeit heterogeneous, social groups. One of the sharpest points of conceptual divergence is that between journalistic and scholarly conceptualizations of those who use news regularly. Journalists and news producers generally, whether employed by private or public enterprises, are structurally obliged to retain a vision of their audiences, however ill-informed that vision may be – a vision that, some argue, is increasingly dominated by a perception of their audiences as consumers rather than citizens (perhaps more frequently in the case of private news enterprises). It is more than ironic that news users are not inclined to perceive themselves in this manner; rather, as the reception research discussed here and elsewhere discloses, news “consumers” are inclined to reject that imposed vision (see further discussion of the “citizens/consumers” paradox in chapter 4). Instead, members of news publics are inclined to embrace a self-perception that is more closely aligned with citizenship, however it might be defined or understood. Needless to note, this fundamental source of divergence between journalists and their audiences is among the most consequential differences between the two groups. Where, then, do “citizens” figure within journalistic conceptualizations? In their analysis of textual representations of citizenship in American and British television newscasts, Lewis, Inthorn, and Wahl-Jorgensen (2005) demonstrate that the place of “citizens” in news is severely constricted in a ritualized manner that is deeply embedded within the mode of news production. Those citizens who are without perceived authority, celebrity, or expertise are systematically excluded by virtue of their failure to meet standardized criteria of newsworthiness. Those citizens who do appear in newscasts are situated by the researchers along a continuum of political engagement that extends from the active and deliberative to the passive and apolitical. In the cases of both American and British primary network newscasts, it is found that those who can be identified as fully engaged citizens make extremely rare appearances (see Lewis, Inthorn, and Wahl-Jorgensen 2005). That journalists are without opportunities to gain access to substantive knowledge about their audiences and are forced to operate merely with their own presumptions has been demonstrated repeatedly in news production research (see, for example, Caldwell 2008;



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Cottle 2007; Deuze 2007). Even more disturbing is Lewis, Inthorn, and Wahl-Jorgensen’s documentation of the extent to which journalists, in their statements about “public opinion,” are led to rely upon their own assumptions and inferences about the consensual views of the population at large. The most astounding datum reveals that “only three percent of references to citizens or publics on television news in the usa or Britain make any reference to polling data” (Lewis, Inthorn, and Wahl-Jorgensen 2005, 134, emphasis in original). The repercussions of this are powerful in view of what has been well documented regarding the distinctively unrepresentative socio-demographic traits of most professional journalists (see chapter 2). It is also astonishing to learn that “in both Britain and the usa, our study suggests, 84 percent of ideologically inflected references to public opinion portray citizens as being on the right” (135). What emerges from their analysis is, on the one hand, an existent yet largely invisible citizenry and, on the other hand, a nonexistent, imagined citizenry that forms the basis of “public opinion” as it is expressed by journalists who are without any evidentiary support. This may well be one of the most significant powers of the journalistic field – namely, the capacity to construct an imagined citizenry that becomes referenced routinely as “the public” in a much reified and entirely misguided vision of the population. Overall, there continue to be both sharp and subtle distinctions between the various ways in which audiences are conceptualized by communication scholars of different disciplinary and theoretical stripes, by journalists and other media producers, and by audiences themselves – or, as we must see it, by audiences ourselves. Schudson (2000, 194) once pointed out that critical analyses of journalism routinely assume that its principal purpose is to “serve society by informing the general population in ways that arm them for vigilant citizenship” (see also Lewis 2006). At that time, he recommended that the sociology of journalism needed to dedicate more direct research attention to journalism’s audiences and publics. Some years earlier, Golding (1994, 461) discussed the need for communication research to “reconnect with wider questions of social inequality, power, and process.” Both of these needs are addressed in the analysis here. In view of the work of Butsch (2008), Dayan (2001), and others, we also need to consider the implicit class distinctions invoked by references to “crowds” as opposed to “publics” and to appreciate

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what might be seen as the classlessness of the latter descriptor. As Butsch (2008, 15) explains: “Publics presume a society of equals where various parties can reason with each other and achieve a consensus or settlement without resort to force. A public sphere is premised on the existence of a common ground not only physically but also socially and politically” (emphasis added). Hence the “public sphere” originally formulated by Habermas can only be seen as aspirational and idyllic. It does not exist because it presumes, and it also requires, the equality of all parties. It is most unfortunate that, as Butsch observes, “the scholarly work on crowds and on publics have remained separate, depending upon whether scholars emphasize the class and social issues of crowds or the political issues of publics” (15). While it is difficult to move beyond a preoccupation with publics in the analysis of political exclusion, there is no need to therefore exclude social classes from consideration. On the contrary, it is vital to recognize the importance of class as one source of the social divisions between publics generally and between news publics in particular.

PUBLIC AND NON-PUBLIC SPHERES: EXPERIENCES OF EXCLUSION From the perspective of Morley, a celebrated “first-generation” reception researcher (see Alasuutari’s [1999] typology of the three “generations”), the foundation of political communication is the series of inclusions and exclusions whereby only the private, domestic experiences of some social groups are connected to the sphere of citizenship. He insists upon careful attention to the processes that confine the frame of television’s “window on the world” and the need to understand why, to some groups, that window is wide open, while to other groups it is double-glazed or even nailed shut ­(Morley 1999b, 203–4). This is a central objective of the present analysis, which seeks to explore a number of related research questions: What are those (production) processes that confine the frame of television’s “window on the world”? And what are the differential social foundations of wide open access to that window as opposed to exclusion from it? Further, what differentiates the television news experiences of those social groups with the means to participate in a “public sphere” from those of social groups who experience political exclusion? Finally, what is the nature and



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extent of journalism’s contribution to these processes of political inclusion and exclusion? In his introduction to Geographies of Exclusion, Sibley (1995, x) poses similar questions, not about mediascapes per se but, rather, about cityscapes, in very straightforward terms, and he also insists upon similar epistemological principles: To get beyond the myths which secure capitalist hegemony, to expose oppressive practices, it is necessary to examine the assumptions about inclusion and exclusion which are implicit in the design of spaces and places. The simple questions we should be asking are: Who are places for, whom do they exclude, and how are these prohibitions maintained in practice? ... [E]xplanations of exclusion require an account of barriers, prohibitions, and constraints from the point of view of the excluded. (emphasis added) As cited earlier, Livingstone charges that Habermas’s theorization of an idealized public sphere is in itself exclusionary. Unfortunately, the public sphere concept continues to be read quite literally by many as if it were a concrete, existent place or space, one that is sometimes even directly equated with “the media” in that ambiguously abstract vision.13 This is not to suggest that we cannot speak of it in the abstract. Yet, if we are to imagine it as a place or, specifically, as a social space that exists somewhere between the state and civil society, then we need to acknowledge that, like the other social spaces that intrigue Sibley as a social geographer, such a public sphere cannot but be a social space that is not entirely inclusive: it is, after all, situated within a society that is permeated by deeply structured social inequalities. One difficulty is that some continue to cite directly from ­Habermas’s original formulations in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), in which he first sketched a notion of the public sphere as a “forum in which the private people come together to form a public” and “[to] compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion” (Habermas 1991, 25–6). Ironically perhaps, his original language evokes a vividly neoliberal picture of a literally concrete auditorium in which entire communities assemble in a town-hall-type forum to ensure that their civic needs are met. This clearly transforms the concept into a visible

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“public” space that can even appear to be inclusive to the extent that all citizens are formally welcome, and even expected, to attend and participate in such a forum. Apart from Livingstone, there are, of course, countless critics of Habermas’s original formulations throughout the international community of communication scholars. Buckingham (2000, 29), for example, states definitively that these theorizations are not useful to the understanding of audiences because “Habermasian distinctions between information and entertainment, between reason and emotion, and between public and private, cannot be sustained in light of the complex ways in which audiences make sense of, and respond to, what they watch.” In the 1990s, Curran (1993, 38–45) assessed Habermas’s central historical arguments about “transformation” in general and the British press in particular against the weight of evidence gathered by both liberal revisionist and radical British historians, only to find that the arguments had been at least “tacitly repudiated.” He expressed further dismay regarding ­Habermas’s presumptions about the “stupefying and narcotizing” impacts of contemporary media upon a presumably malleable “mass public” (41–2). One of Curran’s key conclusions is that “Habermas’s analysis – though stimulating and thought-­provoking – is deeply flawed. It is based on contrasting a golden era that never existed with an equally misleading representation of present times as a dystopia. The contrast does not survive empirical historical scrutiny” (45). Similarly, Schudson (1992, 146) responds as follows regarding the applicability of Habermas’s historical arguments to the case of American society: The idea that a public sphere of rational-critical discourse flourished in the 18th or early 19th century, at least in the American instance, is an inadequate, if not incoherent, notion. Its empirical basis, in the American case, seems to me remarkably thin. When we examine descriptions of what public life was actually like, there is not much to suggest the rational-critical discussion Jürgen Habermas posits as central to the public sphere. In response to his many critics, Habermas has attempted repeatedly to revise his original (1962) formulation of the concept, as evident in his “three revisions,” which appear in the Calhoun collection titled Habermas and the Public Sphere (Habermas 1992, 430ff.);



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in his subsequent references to multiple public spheres, including a plebeian public sphere; and in his 2006 plenary address to the International Communication Association conference (see ­Habermas 2006).14 What is frequently either omitted or understated in the countless, often seemingly token, contemporary references to a public sphere – especially those that crudely equate it with the internet – is the important point, underlined by Knight (2010, 175), that Habermas acknowledges a contradiction between ideas of open participation, on the one hand, “and actual practices of widespread exclusion (of women and the proletariat in particular),” on the other. Whether or not the public sphere is perceived to be real or illusory, it is difficult to argue against those “actual practices of widespread exclusion” that are a central concern here. With regard to the prospect of a single contemporary public sphere, Morley is seemingly at least somewhat swayed by Fraser (1992), Negt and Kluge (1993), Robbins (1993), and others whose arguments suggest the need to acknowledge that a multiplicity of public spheres do exist (see Morley 2000, 113–27). Fraser, for example, is among those who insist that there is also a “counter-public” sphere in which women can find a “subaltern” voice and in which various social movements can organize. By definition, however, these can only be seen as non-dominant spheres, which effectively destroys the momentum of Habermas’s original formulation of the concept. The same applies to the declared existence of multiple public spheres – in effect, sub-spheres – bounded by class, gender, ethnic, and other divisions. Overall, however, Morley’s own empirical work is inclined to suggest that television addresses a homogenized, imagined community that excludes as many as, if not more than, it includes. His own research demonstrates that, if it is possible to envision a single public sphere, then it must at least be acknowledged that this can only be a highly classed and gendered space. On the other hand, Dahlgren (e.g., 2003, 2009; see also ­Verstraeten 1996) makes a number of efforts to salvage the concept of the public sphere. He reframes the notion of the “civic” as a prerequisite to the political in order to suggest that it encompasses different sets of knowledge, commitments, and actions that can be seen as the foundation of political participation (Dahlgren 2003, 155ff.). In this manner, he intends to apply it to the whole population of a society, not to any one particular dominant or dominated social group. One of his concerns is to recognize that

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everyone, at one and the same time, can be engaged yet ambivalent, committed yet disengaged, and active yet distrustful – a level of ambiguity also reflected in the research outcomes of Couldry, Livingstone, and Markham’s (2007) study of the relationship between media reception and political engagement in the uk (see also Livingstone 2009a, 148–50). From Dahlgren’s perspective, participation can be very broadly conceived to include the everyday articulation of values, a minimal sense of affinity with other social subjects, political knowledge sufficient to select from different political directions, and a set of practices and traditions that signify the meanings associated with democracy. Also included are identities, understood as “the reflexive sense of social belonging and subjective efficacy required to mobilize people as a public or citizenry” (see ­Livingstone 2009a, 149; Dahlgren 2003), and discussion, or a means of communicative interaction that incorporates principles of inclusiveness. Needless to note, this final required ingredient is in itself singularly problematic. In particular, in her analysis of children’s use of the internet, Livingstone (2009a) tries to assess whether it is legitimate to regard the internet as a public sphere in the original Habermasian sense. However, she is led to agree with Murdock that, if one considers those original high ideals – very differently formulated than ­Dahlgren’s minimal requirements – one can only conclude that “the virtual political sphere clearly fails the test” (see Murdock 2002, 389) in that it is neither sufficiently inclusive nor interactive nor consequential. And, as Livingstone found, this is especially true of internet use by children and young adults. At worst, as Golding (2000, 176) expresses it, “individualization, unequal access, and disenfranchisement may be the outcome of net politics” (cited in Livingstone 2009a, 149). While there is certainly less in the way of unequal access to television as a medium, it will be seen that similar experiences of individualization and political disenfranchisement result from regular television news reception by research participants in the present analysis. Further empirical demonstrations of the exclusion of citizens from the perceived public sphere and, specifically, from television news are provided by Lewis, Inthorn, and Wahl-Jorgensen (2005) in their textual analysis of more than five thousand American and British news stories. Their work shows clearly that the two active, primary subjects of television news are the state and private



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c­ apital. Citizens are seen to follow and respond to these two central actors, or sources of action, in the social world as it is presented televisually. Citizens might be permitted to comment, yet do not initiate action or otherwise participate in the world portrayed by television news, and are rarely seen in the role of advocates or politically active citizens. Not only are citizens excluded textually, but concrete knowledge about the citizenry is also excluded from journalistic references to “the public” and “public opinion.” While 30 to 40 percent of all news stories make some reference to or inference about “public opinion,” almost half of these are derived from “in-the-street” interviews, or what, classically, were tellingly known as “man-in-the-street” interviews. As discussed, Lewis and his team found that no more than 3 percent of the uk and US news stories that referred to citizens made any reference at all to survey data (2005: 99). The overwhelming majority of references to citizens and “public opinion” were absolutely devoid of any evidentiary support. Under the constraints of time and limited research resources, journalists are commonly forced to rely upon their own assumptions about and impressions of “the public” (and what is often presumed to be its singular, homogeneous “opinion”) or those of their political and academic “expert” sources, who are not necessarily equipped with solid quantitative data. Moreover, these portrayals of “public opinion” consistently tend to suggest more right-wing perspectives than what are actually revealed in survey data about the actual population. In essence, it means that, within news, “the public” is largely “a construction, a product of journalistic, political, and scientific discourses” (Dahlgren 2009, 132). All of these discourses – the academic, the journalistic, and the political – are associated with middle-class professionals who are inclined to interact and socialize almost exclusively with other middle-class professionals. Their everyday knowledge of “the public” is limited to a very small sector of the population at large, and their professional knowledge of “the public” may also be very limited. In particular, this has been well demonstrated in the case of journalists, who have few opportunities to accumulate such knowledge. Finally, in his more extensive discussion, which considers the data provided by Couldry’s team (2007) regarding the uk and Lewis’s team (2005) regarding the uk and the United States, Dahlgren is more guarded about the relationship between television and political participation. He acknowledges that “the immediate civic

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­ ractices and sense of empowerment to be derived from television p news as such are limited” (Dahlgren 2009, 147). The limitations of those weak connections between television news and phenomena such as civic practices and “empowerment” become more clearly evident in the results to be presented here.

PARAMETERS OF THE PRESENT ANALYSIS Like news publics elsewhere, Canadian news publics are diverse along numerous demographic, linguistic, regional, and other dimensions, and are also situated within a variety of diverse family forms and household types. Jeffrey (1994, 515ff.) summarizes the many reasons why Canadian audiences are of special interest. In addition to their tremendous diversity, there are the exceptionally high levels of media, and particularly television, usage. There are the continuing, historically rooted concerns over the impact of American media, especially in the case of television. There are the exceptional contrasts between audiences of English-language and French-language television, most notably the preference of the former for foreign media products and the preference of the latter for domestic media products. There is the extensive history of state intervention in the broadcasting industry, and the historical emphasis placed upon the cbc’s mandate to preserve and promote a national cultural identity, which remains largely untested by scholarly audiences research. Indeed, the very question of news public responses to the cbc, which is formally founded upon goals of public service, has rarely been systematically investigated except by those within the corporation.15 In the relative absence of scholarly research attention to Canadian news audiences, one can only minimally call upon some basic quantitative data to provide at least a rudimentary picture of their activities. Since 2008, the crtc has compiled its annual Communications Monitoring Report, which seeks to offer a comprehensive quantitative overview of the broadcasting and telecommunications industries and which incorporates some quantitative reception data gathered by private-sector research agencies. These data are indeed extraordinary and reflect the persistent historical patterns of voracious ict usage by the Canadian population. The most pertinent data, derived principally from the 2012 and 2013 reports (see crtc 2012, 2013), are outlined briefly below and summarized in table 1.1.



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Table 1.1 Significant media usage patterns in Canada Average household expenditures on communication services, 2012 Proportion of households equipped with television, 2012–13 broadcast year Proportion of households subscribed to a television distribution service, 2012–13 broadcast year Proportion of households subscribed to a broadband internet service, 2012 Proportion of wireless devices equipped with internet access, 2012 Average hours of television viewing per week, all Canadians aged 18+, 2012–13 broadcast year Average hours of radio listening per week, all Canadians aged 18+, 2012–13 Average hours spent online per week, all Canadians aged 18+, 2012–13

$2,220 99% 94% 78% 52% 29.8 hours 18.3 hours 18.0 hours

Sources: crtc, Communications Monitoring Report, 2012; Communications Monitoring Report, 2013; Television Bureau of Canada (2013).

With regard to household equipment, the approximately 13.7 million households in Canada spent an average of $181 monthly on communication services in 2011.16 Approximately half of this amount was spent on mobile and internet services, while the other half was spent on television and landline telephone services. The total monthly amount increased to $185 or a grand total of $2,220 spent per household in 2012 (CRTC 2013, 29). Households in the lowest income quintile spent the greatest portion of their communication budgets on cable television, while those in the highest income quintile allocated the largest portion of their communication expenditures to cell phone services (CRTC 2013, 30). In 2011, 72 percent of households subscribed to broadband internet services, a modest increase from 68 percent in 2010, although the proportion increased to 78 percent of households in 2012 (CRTC 2013, ii). Mobile media such as smartphones and tablets were used to gain access to broadband services, although not to the extent commonly presumed: less than half or 48 percent of wireless devices in the Canadian market were equipped with internet access in 2011 (crtc 2012, i), and this figure increased to just 52 percent in 2012 (see CRTC 2013, 165, table 5.5.9). More than 90 percent of Canadian households continued their subscriptions to a television distribution service in 2011. Among those with a television subscription, 69.9 percent of the households were cabled, while

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24.5 percent ­subscribed to either a satellite or multipoint distribution provider, and 5.6 percent subscribed to an Internet Protocol Television (iptv) service (crtc 2012, iii). The 2012 data regarding cable television subscriptions also reflect a seemingly developing movement to abandon the exceptionally high costs of these subscriptions in favour of satellite services and other options (see CRTC 2013, 109–18). With regard to patterns of usage, all Canadians aged eighteen and over watched an average of 29.8 hours of television per week during the 2012–13 broadcast year (tbc 2013). The average has remained persistently above 29 hours weekly since the 2009–10 broadcast year (see crtc 2013, 77, table 4.3.2) and it marks a contemporary apex in the long historical record of exceptionally heavy television consumption within Canadian society. Radio usage also remains at remarkably high levels. The heaviest radio users – those who listen to twenty or more hours of radio weekly – tend to be those aged 50 to 64 (see crtc 2013, 58, table 4.2.3). Overall, as table 1.1 indicates, all Canadians aged eighteen and over listened to an average of 18.3 hours weekly during 2012–13, which slightly trumped the average of 18.0 hours spent online weekly by the same group, according to bbm data report by the tbc (2013, 26). Ironically, the internet is used heavily to gain access to so-called “old” media, including television and radio. In 2011, more than 30 percent of Canadians aged eighteen and over watched television programs online, and approximately 20 percent listened to a radio station’s audio stream over the internet (crtc 2012, 111, fig. 4.5.7). Among those who viewed television online in 2011, almost three hours weekly were spent on this activity (crtc 2012, 112, fig. 4.5.9). It should be borne in mind that these three hours are in addition to those almost thirty hours weekly that are spent viewing television content “directly” through the use of a television set. The crtc’s 2012 data suggest that overall internet use increased to 20.1 average weekly hours among anglophones and dropped slightly to 13.0 average weekly hours among francophones (crtc 2013, 186, table 6.2.3), while, as noted above, the tbc reports that all Canadians aged eighteen and over spent an average of 18.0 hours weekly online during 2012–13. Despite these outstanding usage patterns, Canadian communication scholars have been reticent to undertake comprehensive studies of audiences, which is likely due, at least in part, to the many



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epistemological issues and methodological challenges associated with such research. Other key deterrents include, not least of all, the costs of the research – recall Ross’s observations cited earlier – and the sheer volume of time required to conduct it, all of which may appear to produce nothing more than inconclusive and nongeneralizable results. There seems to be a general agreement that such research is one of the least attractive forms of communication research in that it is very costly as well as very time-consuming. In order to address the central research questions of the current project, particularly those regarding the relationship between journalism and deliberative political participation, the research was directed at a targeted sample of community activists resident in a central Canadian city during the period between 2001 and 2007. Initially, a preliminary focus group inquiry was held in December 2000 in order to observe interactions in a general discussion of television journalism, to explore specific themes and questions that would be potentially useful in the fieldwork, and to gather some preliminary data. All of the research participants, a total of 188 adults, were members of, and were contacted through, a variety of community organizations.17 The organizations included a diverse range of locally based, provincially based, and nationally based activist groups; charitable organizations; union locals; and other non-profit community organizations. Thus the organizations were also diverse in terms of the nature of their objectives, their activities, and their politico-ideological affiliations. Three modes of investigation were utilized: structured questionnaires, unstructured interviews, and semi-structured news diaries. All of the 188 research participants minimally completed a structured questionnaire that gathered both qualitative and quantitative data (see the questionnaire in appendix 2). With the advance agreement of the community organizations, questionnaires were distributed to them and subsequently circulated to their members. Of the 188 participants who completed questionnaires, a total of 103 also participated in the sixty-nine unstructured interviews conducted within their private households.18 Adult members of each household, including partners, adult offspring, and other adult housemates, were interviewed extensively before, during, and after their viewing of national network newscasts. All of the interviews were personally conducted. As anticipated, the smallest subsample consisted of the forty-seven research participants who voluntarily recorded

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their reception experiences in the one-week news diaries.19 Triangulation was utilized to compare and ensure mutual support between and among the qualitative interview data, the qualitative news diary data, and the mixed qualitative and quantitative data derived from the questionnaires. The unstructured interviews ranged in length from one to three hours and enabled direct observations of television news reception within a diversity of household settings. Demographic and usage data derived from questionnaires were utilized to inform the direct field observations of the interactions between household members before, during, and following news viewing. More substantive commentaries obtained from both questionnaires and news diaries were also assessed against the results of the direct observations. By means of such triangulation, the limitations peculiar to each of these methods were minimized to the greatest possible extent. In addition, follow-up interviews were conducted in 2006 and 2007 with a number of research participants first interviewed earlier in the decade. The interview sample, like the larger sample of questionnaire respondents and the smaller sample of news diarists, was diversified by age, gender, social class, household type, and politico-­ideological perspective, which was initially presumed on the basis of participants’ memberships in particular community organizations. In these respects, the samples do encompass a wide range of life circumstances and social characteristics, yet cannot be seen as systematically representative of the Canadian population at large – nor can this ever be the case in audiences research unless one is content with merely quantitative survey data and not concerned to assemble meaningful qualitative data (see also the discussion of epistemological issues in chapter 3). More detailed information regarding the social characteristics and news usage patterns of the samples appears in chapter 3 and appendix 1. Before reception is examined at greater length, however, it is first necessary to examine the precedence of production in the production-reception relationship. This is the central concern of the following chapter.

2 Changes and Continuities in the Conditions of News Production It should go without saying that to reveal the hidden constraints on journalists ... is not to denounce those in charge or to point a finger at the guilty parties. Rather, it is an attempt to offer to all sides a possibility of liberation, through a conscious effort, from the hold of these mechanisms. Pierre Bourdieu, On Television and Journalism

At the “Journalism in Crisis” conference held at the University of Westminster in 2009, Curran began his keynote address with the comment that the use of the word “crisis” to describe the current state of journalism is appropriate only within the language of journalese in that it assures a good eye-catching headline. He proceeded to make the case that there are truly no serious contemporary threats to the survival of professional journalism, despite the rise of citizen journalism, despite increased levels of press ownership convergence and the accompanying job losses, and despite other economic conditions that have contributed to those losses and to the rationalization of journalistic labour (see Curran 2009a). His arguments point to the remarkable continuity and imperviousness of professional journalistic practices even in the face of significant economic and broader social changes. The essential rules of news production have remained persistently intact and largely unchanged in the face of wider economic and macro-social changes, which have included a degree of economic distress within the news industry (particularly in the United States), the introduction of new icts, as well as digitalization and other significant changes to the labour process. Concerns about such perceived crises intersect to a great extent with debates regarding the future of journalism.1 For example,

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some suggest that the perceived crisis of the classical economic model of journalism will engender a new social model driven by a partnership between professional and amateur journalists. The term “pro-am” journalism has been coined (see Curran 2010a, 466ff.). What is expected to evolve, according to these arguments, is a new form of “networked journalism” in which amateurs – theoretically, at least, anyone in the population at large – research, write, and produce news stories. Within this vision, classical journalism associated with vertical gatekeeper institutions will be supplanted by a less formalized range of journalistic activity that will feature openended, reciprocal, horizontal, collaborative, extensive, and inclusive reportage and commentary, the likes of which is historically unprecedented. Rather than indulge in such speculation about perceived crises and possible futures, there is greater concern here with the history and the present-day reality of journalism as a “field” in ­Bourdieu’s sense. More concretely, there is a concern to identify some of the historical continuities evident in news production and how these may have contributed to a parallel and not unrelated history of limited political participation.2 For example, it is classical journalese to equate what is important with what is new, whereas it can be much more insightful to explain what is – and the best means to explain “what is” is usually to examine “how it came to be” – hence the importance of the historical context that is structurally absent from the journalistic field. In pursuit of these concerns, this chapter first outlines briefly the way in which Bourdieu’s concept of the journalistic field is to be utilized. It proceeds to examine the history and underlying political economy of that field, which is understood to be comprised of professional journalistic practices or the essential rules of news production. Thereafter, the infrastructures and processes of news production are examined, followed by special attention to the place of journalists or, more broadly, news producers in these infrastructures and processes. There is also a discussion of their social characteristics and the contemporary conditions of their labour. Finally, the constraints intrinsic to the news production process, as well as the emergent constraints that have resulted from the digitalization of news production, are summarized. This is a vital prelude to the analysis of their reception implications in the subsequent chapters. It will be argued that there is clearly a need not only to include a consideration of production in the analysis of reception



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but also to emphasize and highlight the precedence of production in the reception process. In other words, the rules of news production that comprise the journalistic field are seen to strongly shape the news reception experiences discussed in later chapters.

JOURNALISTS, JOURNALISM, AND THE “JOURNALISTIC FIELD” In the epigraph to this chapter, drawn from the prologue to On Television and Journalism (1996), Bourdieu refers to the constraints experienced by journalists in their production of news and, by implication, experienced also by their audiences, who are similarly frustrated by the limited capacity of news to provide substantive information. This is one of the chief reasons why his “field” concept is useful; namely, that it enables a clear separation between, on the one hand, the “field” of journalism, comprised of a system of established practices and principles, and, on the other hand, the individual journalists who are expected to abide by those practices and principles. Hence there are no connotations of any “blame” or “fault” that can be attributed to those professionals, either individually or collectively. A critical discussion of the journalistic field – in accordance with Bourdieu’s formulation of the concept – must therefore be clearly distinguished from what is often articulated as Media Blame Syndrome in popular discourse, whereby all social ills become the “fault” of “the media” generally and journalists particularly. Another useful dimension of the field concept is that it enables a direct examination of the relationship between production and reception that begins with production, rather than with the analysis of a text already produced, which enables a more extensive understanding of how the dynamics of reception unfold. Not inconsequentially, this also makes it possible to envision how the journalistic field might be altered in such a way as to change reception experiences. Bourdieu’s field theory can be seen as epistemologically compatible with Gramsci’s conceptualization of hegemony in that it develops and extends analysis of the processes whereby hegemony is sustained through consent.3 Furthermore, Bourdieu’s formulations make it possible to chart the relationship between the journalistic field and the political field, a relationship that he clearly viewed as problematic:

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The journalistic field produces and imposes on the public a very particular vision of the political field, a vision that is grounded in the very structure of the journalistic field and in journalists’ specific interests produced in and by that field ... [T]he journalistic evocation of the world does not serve to mobilize or politicize ... Especially among those who are basically apolitical, this worldview fosters fatalism and disengagement, which obviously favours the status quo. (Bourdieu 1998, 2, 8) In his works dedicated directly to television journalism (see ­ ourdieu 2005, 2001, 1998),4 Bourdieu sometimes refers to journalB ists and the journalistic field interchangeably, yet a thorough reading of these works makes it clear, just as the epigraph also clarifies, that he envisioned the two separately, and that he was concerned about the impact of the “mechanisms” of the journalistic field upon journalists themselves (see also, for example, Bourdieu 1998, 68). Interestingly, he accords considerable significance to ownership, making the point that the autonomy of individual journalists “depends first of all on the degree to which press ownership is concentrated” (ibid.), although elsewhere he emphasizes that, while ownership cannot be overlooked, it can only be one component of a comprehensive sociological explanation. Ownership is not in fact very significant within the composition of the journalistic field. It is clearly trumped by a central “code of ethics” or “a system of overlapping constraints” upon the labour that journalists perform and the news that is produced as a result (70–1). Bourdieu clearly distinguishes journalists from the journalistic field: “The journalistic field is the site of a specific, and specifically cultural, model that is imposed on journalists through a system of overlapping constraints and the controls that each of these brings to bear on the others” (ibid.). Elsewhere in his writings about television journalism, Bourdieu (2001, 247) reveals more of his conceptualization in his expressed admiration of the work of Patrick Champagne, which shows, in Bourdieu’s words: “how journalists are carried along by the inherent exigencies of their job, by their view of the world, by their training and orientation, and also by the reasoning intrinsic to the profession itself.” In the same article, he also refers to “their shared cognitive, perceptual, and evaluative structures, which they share by virtue of common social background and training” (254).5 These statements help to elucidate Bourdieu’s concept of the journalistic field, yet, as



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he discussed in a 1995 lecture translated and published in 2005, the concept is meant to be a research tool (Bourdieu 2005, 30). The example in his lecture is televisual election coverage, during which three fields – “the political field, the social science field, and the journalistic field – are present, but they are present in the form of persons” (31). As he suggests, these persons might include a political commentator situated within the political field, a well-known historian who specializes in political history, and a journalist. The journalist appears as a person who interviews the historian, yet, ultimately, it is the journalistic field that speaks to the social science field in this example, and the interchange between them “express[es] the structure of the relationship between the journalistic field and the social science field” (ibid.). In this example, we see that field theory provides a useful means to unravel the larger macro-social relations that are operative in the exchange among all three persons who operate within three different fields. The fields are far more significant than their personal identities because knowledge regarding their respective fields can better explain the nature of their interactions. A useful illustration is Walter Cronkite’s reflective account of how his renowned sign-off, “And that’s the way it is,” came to enter into nightly cbs news parlance: I didn’t clear it with [cbs] in any way. I started using it, and [Richard Salant, cbs News President] said, “This presupposes that everything we said is right, that that’s the whole picture of the day’s news. I don’t really think you ought to be doing that.” I think he was correct. But the thing had already caught on. It really was just rolling. So I got to kind of a point of being stubborn about it and said, “Well, I like it.” [Salant] said, “Well, it’s up to you.” He let it go. It has been much criticized by serious television critics ... because of that argument that ... it was presumptive that everything we said is correct. Which was wrong. I shouldn’t have said that ... And particularly when we got into controversial subjects like the Vietnam War. In fact, there’s a New Yorker cartoon with a guy coming half out of his chair and shouting at his television, saying, “That’s not the way it is” (Cronkite and Carleton 2010, 176–7, emphasis in original) From a sociological perspective, the origin and significance of the sign-off needs to be traced much further than the identity of

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the person who routinely uttered it. The sign-off needs to be situated within the codes and rules of the journalistic field according to which Cronkite was trained and with which he was long experienced. It can be understood, for example, in terms of the need to frame the content of the newscast authoritatively in response to a genuine market need as well as the need to separate that content as strictly “factual” and distinct from the views of any individuals involved in the production of the newscast. This illustration also points to the highly and necessarily presumptive tendencies of the journalistic field, although not of journalists per se, who are commonly without the practical resources necessary to acquire information about their audiences and who therefore often rely upon intuitive impressions about what has “caught on” –- despite awareness of contradictory reception experiences, such as those signified by the cartoon figure’s response. Overall, it is much less a reflection of the personal defiance, or “stubbornness,” of which Cronkite speaks with reference to his personal character than a reflection of the ambiguous social distance between the journalistic field and its audiences. Despite the limitations of Bourdieu’s field theory in general identified by Benson (2000, 2006), Calhoun (1993), Couldry (2003a, 2003b), and others, there are important questions raised by his concept of the journalistic field in particular. Fundamentally, we are led to ask precisely how the journalistic field is composed. What exactly is encompassed by the concept? How should it be utilized in practice? The “journalistic field” is utilized here to refer concretely to the essential rules of news production, rules that embody professional principles and that govern professional practices. In this sense, the journalistic field is conceptually distinct from journalists and others engaged in news production. The generic term “news producers” encompasses all those engaged in the process, without any implied reference to specific positions or titles within newsroom hierarchies. There might well be news producers who follow the rules of news production uncritically through the course of their everyday labour, and perhaps such a level of conformity is encouraged by conditions of job insecurity during periods of economic crisis and/ or by the circumstances of ownership convergence. Yet these probably represent a minority of all those who are active in news production. More commonly, journalists and other news producers are inclined to follow the rules with various levels of ­resistance. Before



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those levels of resistance are examined, the immediate concern at this juncture is to outline the underlying political economy of those everyday professional practices.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTIC PRACTICES Two interrelated phenomena transformed the character of the news industry during the late nineteenth century: economic consolidation and the professionalization of journalism. The forces of economic consolidation contributed directly to the consolidation of journalistic practices, organized around the newly imposed need for a consistently professional and (philosophically elusive) “objective” news supply. The economic crisis of the 1880s and early 1890s occasioned the large-scale consolidation of capital into a fewer number of larger hands. Markets became monopolized, and the form of economic organization shifted from the small entrepreneurial firm to the large corporation. The press was not spared either the economic or the political consequences of corporate consolidation. Economically, consolidation meant the need to create mass markets as the increasing dependence upon advertising as a source of revenue and profits dictated the need for expansion and growth (see Knight 1982, 22). Freely competitive partisan journalism fell victim to these momentous economic and political forces, overcome by the need to generate mass markets and replaced by a new mass-produced press. The overall effect was to consolidate, centralize, and homogenize the process of news production and distribution, including its infrastructural distribution system and the practices and ideologies of its producers. The foundations of professional journalism in its contemporary form were established at this crucial historical stage, and the roots of present-day journalistic ideologies, couched within a philosophy of social responsibility and embodied in the principle of objectivity, trace directly to the dynamics of the political economy of the period. Outwardly manifest in a shift from partisan to “objective” journalism, these developments reflected the propelling force of economic consolidation, which, first in the newspaper industry, assumed the decisive form of horizontal integration or chain ownership. It is possible, then, to trace a line of historical development along which changes in journalistic practices have responded to shifts and

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changes in the political economy. The numerous and highly partisan newspapers of the mid-nineteenth century, their sheer numbers and their ability to service small and specialized audiences, reflected the relatively low capital requirements of newspaper entrepreneurship at the time. These conditions changed dramatically in the decades that followed, presaging the shift to a mass press directly dependent upon advertising revenue. The press became a vehicle of mass marketing, and content was increasingly shaped by the need to produce audiences for advertisers. Steadily rising publication costs ultimately spawned the wave of newspaper closures and mergers characteristic of the period following the First World War. Collusion between newspaper publishers became the only efficient means by which to manage a market overloaded with a bounty of struggling newspapers that were without a solid base of market support. In the Canadian case, closely tied to all of these developments was the establishment of the Canadian Press (cp) news agency in 1917, which proved to be a successful market tool geared towards the restriction of competition.6 cp was and is a monopolistic device that assured the death of the competitive press in the 1920s. The small group of dominant newspaper owners assumed and exercised control of the agency from its outset, populated its board of directors, formulated the rules of its operation, and thereby achieved an almost impenetrable control over the supply and distribution of Canadian news. cp’s directors constructed a web of policy entanglements that effectively denied access to the news supply system by any aspiring new publishers who posed a competitive threat. Through their judgments, all such threats to the established news monopoly were quickly extinguished. These successive changes in the patterns of ownership and control and the structure of news production and distribution were accompanied by related changes in the way in which news was reported. Once the complex of advertising, improved production techniques, and organizational changes combined to produce a mass press, the principle of objectivity could be entertained. As Rutherford observed: “Objectivity begins to make sense only in the context of mass production. The collapsing of separate publics into one mass audience requires standardization of the product, and the need for universally intelligible stories requires the segmentation of the social world into simple causes and effects” (cited in Cayley 1982).



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Market realities made these changes all the more imperative after the appearance of cp. The new agency was required to service a wide range of newspapers – Liberal, Conservative, French Catholic, and so forth – and, in light of that mandate, cp needed to supply news material that would appear to be composed exclusively of “objective” facts, useful to newspapers of all politico-ideological persuasions, facts that would appear to be totally divorced from all hint of petty partisanship and therefore of wide appeal. By the 1920s, then, “at the very time that the free press is dying, you have a sort of uniform belief on the part of publishers and journalists in the need for objective fact” (Rutherford, cited in Cayley 1982). The rise of the mass-produced press and the increasingly specialized division of labour within the news industry meant that different news organizations were forced to develop and distribute a common, marketable product. Similarly, at the international level, the prime counterpart to these developments was the rise of the international news agencies. After the First World War, once the international cartel was formally broken, these agencies were required to service subscribers who represented not only different political perspectives but also different national allegiances (Elliott 1978, 183–4). By formalizing a distinction between “news” as fact and “opinion” as ideology, the new style of journalism offered a product that could be dispensed to large and diversified markets at the local, national, and international levels. Three concurrent developments, then, resulted from the economic consolidation first set in motion at the close of the nineteenth century: (1) the practical and professional shift from partisan to “objective” journalism, (2) the formation of a centralized system of news supply and distribution (i.e., cp) at the national level, and (3)  the ascendancy of the dominant news supply and distribution agencies at the international level, which forged the global infrastructure of news production that continues to support the contemporary news industry. As these relationships of supply and distribution crystallized into a worldwide network of interdependence, the need to package news in the form of straightforward “fact,” a form that appeared to transcend the specialized interests of particular classes and nations, became all the more imperative. The spread of such ostensibly objective journalism served political as well as economic ends. In the words of Knight (1982, 22–3):

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As the press became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a smaller number of large newspaper (later media) chains, so it became increasingly vulnerable to the charge of limiting opportunities for freedom of speech and diversity of opinion. Commitment to objectivity, then, served to displace such criticism by eschewing an overtly partisan orientation, by separating “fact” from “opinion,” and by relying upon formally accredited sources as the primary definers of news content. The potential contradiction between a monopoly press and the ideology of free speech was blunted by a commitment to practical objectivity-through-impartiality. At the same time, the emergence of journalism as a distinct occupation under the control of large media monopolies was perfectly congruent with the claim of objective practice: Commitment to objectivity, then, served a dual purpose: on the one hand it enabled owners to fend off potential political interference on the grounds that press monopolies contravened freedom of speech; on the other hand it enabled employee journalists to fend off editorial interference on the grounds that objectivity meant professionalism, and professionalism meant self-control (Knight 1982, 24) The connection between news and ideology was further obscured by the introduction of television in the early 1950s, with its theoretical capacity to allow viewers to see the world “as it is” without the visibly apparent mediation of a news producer. The visual imperative, one of the most important principles of television journalism, derives its momentum from the capacity of television to reaffirm “objectivity” and, thereby, the professional autonomy of television news producers. The extensive use of visuals, which results from the tremendous emphasis upon the importance of visuals to accompany a news story, reinforces the professional autonomy of journalism and appears to remove the last trace of mediation. The new production techniques of television influenced the entire character of the news industry and, in the process, elevated both its level of prestige and its level of profitability. At the same time, the entry of broadcasters into the activity of news production served to solidly entrench



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the objectivity principle within the values and procedures of the news production process. The key historical forces that underlie the progression of broadcast journalism and the rise of the contemporary system of news production can be summarized briefly. The capital investment required to serve mass markets made it more and more imperative that journalism produce a common, predictable, and marketable commodity. In contrast to earlier periods, in which a small staff shared all of the work required to write and publish a newspaper, journalists became part of a much more complex division of labour, assigned to perform more specialized tasks oriented to the short- and longrange objectives of large-scale organizations. That division of labour extends from single organizations to the entire international news gathering and processing system. The elaboration of the global system through supply agencies, syndication, and satellite distribution also served to transform news into a routine and predictable product (Elliott 1978, 186). To ensure that the system is properly coordinated and efficient, it is essential that all those who contribute to it and work within it share common criteria by which to judge and process its final product. These criteria must include not only measures of newsworthiness but also a shared set of fully formulated practices that guide the production of the news commodity from its origins to its final distribution. These historical forces, then, can be called upon to account for the global uniformity of news practices as well as the historical specificity of professional journalistic principles such as objectivity. The international division of labour with respect to news production and distribution is the backdrop against which we can comprehend both the nature of news practices and the nature of the news production system within Canadian society, which is perhaps best understood as a system of auxiliary news distribution. In view of its particular location within the international division of labour, we should not expect otherwise. The effects upon the substantive content of Canadian news are somewhat less predictable, although it could be argued that it creates a peculiarly “passive” style of journalism in the Canadian case.7 In sum, the essential character of Canadian broadcast journalism owes its origins to the transformation of the news industry that first took root in the late nineteenth century. The process of ­economic

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consolidation and the associated shift to mass production led logically to the consolidation of journalistic practices, based upon a model of the “objective” and professional reportage of world events. Later, exploitation of the potentialities of radio and television solidified the trend. Evolving market requirements successively initiated the series of practices that presently constitute the specialized professional values of broadcast journalism and are thereby directly responsible for the constitution of the journalistic field (see also Clarke 1987).

THE PROCESS OF NEWS PRODUCTION The political economy of the Canadian broadcasting system and the organizational parameters of the major national networks structure the process of televisual news production in critically important ways. A clear identification of the relationship between the organizations that produce the two dominant national network television newscasts is also prerequisite to any understanding of their respective programming operations. The nature of that relationship is best revealed through a comprehensive history of the broadcasting system (see Peers 1969, 1979; Raboy 1990; Vipond 1992), which is clearly beyond the spatial parameters of this discussion, although a few of the historical highlights can be noted. The 1929 Report of the Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting chaired by Sir John Aird, commonly known as the Aird Report, was the first to articulate the issues that have historically been at the heart of debates about the organization and structure of broadcasting within Canadian society. The Aird Report consists of no more than nine pages, yet the principles espoused in those nine pages established the foundations of the present-day broadcasting system, forged the peculiar duality of its ownership structure, and came to be successively endorsed and reiterated by many subsequent state investigatory bodies. Most important, through its outright declaration that private enterprise is inherently incapable of satisfying the demands of the Canadian market, the Aird Report left no doubt that the state would be a persistent force in the evolution of the broadcasting industry in Canada. Consequently, it sparked the heated (and in many ways still raging) debates regarding the ownership of broadcasting enterprises and the structure of the broadcasting system. The issues raised in the Aird Report framed the fundamental



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problem as one of “public service versus private enterprise,” and it was that polarity which set the tone and marked the substance of the conflict. Ultimately, the Aird Commission recommended a system based exclusively upon public ownership, and it justified this recommendation with reference to the realization of nationalist objectives. There was, in the words of the Aird Report, “unanimity on one fundamental question – Canadian radio listeners want Canadian broadcasting” (Canada 1929, 7).8 During the 1930s, the problems afflicting the broadcasting industry were reconsidered by two parliamentary committees appointed to examine radio broadcasting in 1932 and 1936. Private broadcasters, represented by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (cab) and its allies, accepted the principle of public ownership, provided that private stations could continue to co-exist with public stations and provided that the public broadcaster existed strictly in order to correct the deficiencies of commercial broadcasting as well as to supply the programs and the national distribution that private broadcasters could not profitably offer. In effect, the wishes of the private broadcasters were fulfilled beyond their grandest expectations. The 1936 parliamentary committee recommended “a public corporation modelled more closely on the lines of a private corporation” (cbc 1976, 5, emphasis added). As the battle continued to rage, successive federal governments deliberately maintained the coexistence of private and public stations, both within and beyond the cbc’s network operations. The arrival of television in the postwar period accelerated the debate by virtue of its clear significance as a powerful new means of communication. Private television broadcasting had already been comparatively well established in the United States by the late 1940s. Canadian broadcasters were anxious to capitalize on the increased advertising budgets of the postwar economic boom and so fought hard against the state’s presence as both broadcaster and regulator of the mixed public and private system. The state’s first television policy announcement, released in 1949, nonetheless declared that the cbc’s board of directors would be responsible for the development of television in Canada, and the corporation was authorized to construct production centres in Toronto and Montreal. In the same year, the Massey Commission was appointed to investigate the cultural industries, including broadcasting. Its 1952 report (see Canada 1952) concurred with the principles established by the

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Aird Commission and at least partially embodied in the Broadcasting Acts of 1932 and 1936. The Massey Commission endorsed the principle of a single national system that incorporated public and private components, and it rejected the private broadcasters’ arguments for a division between these two components. The early expansion of television was nothing short of phenomenal. At the same time, anti-cbc hostility escalated within the private sector, culminating in a series of complaints regarding the cbc’s operations and finally forcing the creation of another Royal Commission, chaired by Robert Fowler, in 1955. The public hearings of the Fowler Commission provided private broadcasters with a nationwide public forum. It was perhaps the height of their campaign and the fiercest moment of the historical debate. As Porter (1965, 468) observes in The Vertical Mosaic: Many of the newspaper publishers who also controlled broadcasting outlets used both media to solicit public support for private broadcasting. Ownership links between radio and television stations further facilitated the campaign ... In their trade association, the cab, the owners of broadcasting outlets have acted with a uniformity that could scarcely be more complete if all the outlets were owned by the same person. Like the earlier Massey Commission, the Fowler Commission rejected the position of the private broadcasters. There was little evidence that the cbc had treated the private sector unfairly, either in terms of competition or regulation. The Fowler Commission, however, in contrast to all of its predecessors, agreed that the cbc occupied conflicting roles as the regulator of all broadcasting licences and the operator of a broadcasting enterprise, and it therefore proposed a separate regulatory body, the Board of Broadcast Governors (bbg), which was established in 1958. The bbg granted permission for a private network operation linking the independent stations, and the privately owned ctv network was formally launched in 1961.9 Reiterating the principles of the 1929 Aird Report, the Broadcasting Act of 1968, subsequently revised in 1991 and still in effect, continues to maintain that the Canadian broadcasting system “makes use of radio frequencies that are public property and provides, through its programming, a public service.”10 Therefore, the view that public airwaves are public property, and that the system is



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a public service, has been endorsed throughout the system’s history and continues to be formally enshrined within legislation. Despite perennial slashes to its fiscal infrastructure in the contemporary period, the cbc continues to invest far more into the provision of broadcasting services than the private sector. This becomes particularly evident if the corporation’s total revenues and total programming expenditures are contrasted with the comparable data regarding its private “competitors.” In the first place, while some are still inclined to perceive the cbc exclusively or principally as the operator of English- and French-language television networks, in reality, under its formal title and mandate as cbc/Radio-­Canada, it operates a very extensive range of radio, television, internet, and satellite-based services that are provided in six time zones and in two official languages as well as eight Aboriginal languages, in addition to Radio Canada International (rci), which operates globally in five languages. It is therefore deceptive to regard the cbc as a traditional broadcaster with a presence on the internet or as a predominantly “old media” service provider. For example, literally millions of cbc/ Radio-Canada program podcasts are downloaded each month. The cbc.ca website continues to be among the top three news and general media sites in Canada, with more than 4 million unique visitors monthly, and Radio-Canada.ca is among the top three for francophone visitors, with more than 1 million unique visitors monthly. Moreover, in January 2010, Radio-­Canada launched tou.tv, which quickly became the leading French-­language on-demand Web television site (cbc 2010, 3) although it is only one of what are currently four digital platforms operated by Radio-Canada in addition to its four television networks and two radio networks (cbc 2013). Second, in proportional terms, the cbc far outspends its privatesector counterparts with respect to program production. In 2011, the most recent year for which data are available, the corporation’s revenues from its conventional television services amounted to $500 million, or just 10 percent of total private- and public-sector revenues, compared to the $2.2 billion received by private conventional television (excluding pay, pay-per-view, video-on-demand, and specialty services) (crtc 2012, 34, 36).11 Yes, the cbc can call upon other, albeit very limited, revenue sources (such as its increasingly restricted parliamentary appropriations). Yet private conventional television owners can call upon far more abundant alternative revenue sources as many converge at the ownership level with cable

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and specialty service providers, not to mention their other lucrative media operations. Direct revenues from their conventional ­television services are more than sufficient to enable very substantial contributions to Canadian program production. The cbc is, in fact, severely disadvantaged in this regard, and yet it must fulfill its mandate under the Broadcasting Act. In 2011, it managed to contribute more than 27 percent of the total Canadian programming expenditures (cpe), while private conventional television broadcasters, with their revenues of $2.2 billion that year, contributed less than 22 percent of the total (crtc 2012, 61). In view of the extensive overlaps between private owners of conventional and other broadcasting services, this figure needs to be considered in the context of the total broadcasting industry revenues, which reached $16.6 billion in 2011 (crtc 2012, 33). Third, in terms of Canadian content, historically seen as vital by significant majorities of the population, the private sector’s provision falls far short of what the cbc has offered. In view of the extent to which its production budgets have been devastated, it is remarkable that, even during the fiscally very fragile 2008–09 broadcast year, cbc Television provided 81 percent Canadian programming throughout the full broadcast day, including news and other information programs, feature films, drama, comedy, children’s programming, and programs representing other genres. It is by far the leading English-language broadcaster of original Canadian content, with twenty-one hours of Canadian programming weekly in regular prime time, literally 100 percent Canadian content between 8:00 pm and 11:00 pm every night. That figure of twenty-one hours compares to approximately seven hours of Canadian programming presented by private broadcasters (cbc 2010, 3). The cbc figure is all the more remarkable in view of the close to 20 percent, or $50 million, largely unanticipated shortfall in advertising and other revenues experienced during the same (2008–09) broadcast year.12 These are perennial patterns, demonstrated yet again in the most recent crtc data regarding 2011–12, during which the cbc’s total cpe in conventional television broadcasting total $733.6 million while all of its private sector counterparts spent no more than $661.7 million (32.5 percent) of their total television broadcasting revenues (crtc 2013, 104, tables 4.3.15 and 4.3.16). Indeed, throughout its history, the cbc has shouldered the bulk of the astounding costs entailed in radio and television production and distribution for a country of the vast geographical dimensions



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and the exceptionally demanding linguistic and regional requirements of Canada. More significantly, the cbc has historically underwritten the costs of creating the broadcasting system’s infrastructure, to the short- and long-range benefit of the private sector. It will be seen later that the same role is assumed by the corporation with respect to the supply and distribution of news. Boyle (1982) once observed that the cbc has never quite filled the bill of a public broadcasting entity in the usual sense; rather, it is structured as a quasi-public, quasi-private corporation with both an annual dependency upon state funding and a seemingly chronic dependency upon advertising revenue. Unlike the models of public broadcasting implemented elsewhere, public broadcasting exists in Canadian society by virtue of its interdependence with the private sector of the industry. In this sense, it can be accurately and not just rhetorically proclaimed a “single” broadcasting system. Private broadcasters have depended upon and continue to depend upon the cbc in a multiplicity of ways. The cbc has historically depended upon private stations for the distribution of its programming, and private stations continue to be responsible for a large proportion of the distribution of cbc television. After all, it is frequently forgotten that the cbc owns only a limited number – currently, only twentyseven – of the television stations that carry its national network programming (crtc 2013, 76).13 The cbc’s much greater number of privately owned affiliates depend entirely upon advertising revenue. While it might appear to be a mixed private and public broadcasting system situated midway along a spectrum between the American and British models, in reality the “single system” is one in which private ownership clearly predominates. As the most recent data regarding the distribution of television revenues illustrate, the “public” broadcaster poses no serious competitive threat to the very substantial commercial television revenues that continue to be enjoyed by its private-sector counterparts (see figure 2.1). There are many additional facets of the cbc’s operations that serve the interests of private broadcasters. One obvious way in which this occurs is through the corporation’s establishment of broadcasting stations in those regions where it is plainly not profitable for private broadcasters to operate. At the same time, it would be difficult to lay claim to a truly “national” broadcasting system that serviced only the lucrative urban markets of Ontario and ­Quebec. Second, it has been the cbc’s policy, even if not consistently its practice, to provide regional programming and to originate production as

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cbc 10%

Rogers 11%

bce 29%

Astral 7%

Shaw 16%

Quebecor 6%

Corus 7%

Remstar 1%

Top 5 broadcasters: 80% Figure 2.1  Distribution of commercial television revenues by broadcaster, 2012 Source: crtc (2013, 52).

Note: In the crtc’s calculation of the top five broadcasters, Corus and Shaw were combined. The cbc’s portion reflects advertising, subscriber, and other commercial revenues and excludes parliamentary appropriations.

much as possible in its regional centres, thereby deflecting attention from the historical concentration of private production in the major urban centres of central Canada – principally, Toronto. Third, as discussed, the cbc has historically assumed the greatest burden of indigenous program production. The same factors that discourage the private production of indigenous Canadian programming also discourage the private ­production of news. In the early 1980s ctv’s average weekly production of sixty-five programming hours included only twelve hours of “news and current affairs,” or a mere 18 percent of its total program schedule, whereas the cbc’s average weekly production of eightyone English-language television programming hours included thirty-eight hours of information programming, or 47 percent of its overall English-language television program schedule (cbc 1982a, 13). How do these data compare broadly to the current period? While there are no directly comparable data in the crtc’s annual monitoring reports, the 2013 report documents that private broadcasters spent just 32.5 percent of their total revenues on Canadian programming in 2012, and 53.4 percent of that expenditure was



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directed at news production – consistently, the most costly type of programming to produce.14 During the same year, the cbc spent a total of $197 million on English- and French-language conventional television news production, considerably higher than the amount spent on any other program genre, although it represented only 27 percent of the corporation’s total cpe. In the private sector, the total cpe in that year was $662 million compared to the $734 million spent by the cbc (crtc 2013, 104).15 Other key differences in their respective productions are discussed later, as is the significance of private- and public-sector divisions to Canadian news audiences.16 A broadcasting system based strictly upon private ownership, then, would place severe restrictions upon the type, quantity, and quality of programming that could be offered. As the Aird Commission emphasized very early in Canada’s broadcasting history, private enterprise simply does not lend itself well to the activity of broadcasting. It is intrinsically poorly suited to meet the demands of radio and television production – demands that are aggravated by regional, demographic, geographic, linguistic, and other imperatives. The existence of the public ownership component within the “single system” thus safeguards the short- and long-term interests of private broadcasters and, in fact, complements their operations by filling in those “gaps” – hinterland markets, indigenous Canadian production, and current affairs production, among others – where private broadcasters cannot lucratively function. It is precisely that symbiotic relationship between the public and private networks that explains their distinctive undertakings in news broadcasting. The extent to which it is further manifest in clearly distinctive news programs is a highly contentious matter, about which members of news audiences are by no means in agreement, as later chapters illustrate. Before we proceed to such reception issues, however, it is important to trace a number of significant moments in the history of the news production process at the two major private and public networks. While the wartime overseas unit began operations in 1939, the domestic cbc News Service was not officially established until 1941. Prior to that date, all cbc news bulletins were prepared by cp. cp continued to be one of the principal news sources, but in 1941 the corporation created its own central and regional newsrooms. Toronto became the headquarters of the English-language news service while Montreal became the centre of the French-language operations. Policies regarding accuracy and objectivity in news reportage, simplicity in writing style, and the decision to allow no

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c­ ommercial sponsorship of news programs were all set in place at that time. By the autumn of 1941, more than 20 percent of the cbc network radio schedule was dedicated to news (cbc 1976, 8). The need to establish some sort of original newsgathering infrastructure first became evident during the 1939–41 period, in which Canada was formally at war while the United States had yet to officially enter the Second World War. Demand for news about the activities of the Canadian contingents overseas underlined the need to develop a radio news service that would do more than simply reproduce cp wire copy (Stewart 1975, 68). Hence, in 1941, regional news bureaus were established in Halifax, Montreal, Winnipeg, and Vancouver, and a central newsroom was created in Toronto. The final national bulletin of the day, broadcast at 11:00 pm est, soon came to be referred to as The National. During the war, at the request of the state, the cbc moved The National to 10:00 pm est in order to encourage earlier bedtimes and thereby reserve power and fuel for the war campaign. Accordingly, “it became a fixed habit for most Canadians to listen to Lorne Greene read the news and then trot off to bed” (ibid.). Significantly, the cbc broadcasts were made available to literally all radio stations in Canada regardless of ownership or affiliation, including privately owned stations. The first cbc television newscast on the English-language network was aired in Toronto in 1952, shortly after cblt, the network’s Toronto station, signed on the air with its station identification slide upside down. Throughout the course of the next half-century and beyond, newscasters, reporters, and other news producers would come and go, but the form of the early newscasts, their essential mode of news delivery, and the practices underlying their production, would change little. In sharp contrast to other genres of television programming, television news forms and practices sustain themselves amidst long years of change and struggle in the world around them. The so-called “first generation” of sociologists and others who studied news production in various societies during the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Epstein 1973; Gans 1979; Glasgow University Media Group 1976, 1980; Golding and Elliott 1979; Schlesinger 1978; Tracey 1978; Tuchman 1978) all pointed to the strongly patterned regularities and routines that characterize the production process, including the consistency of professional ideologies that steer decisions about form and content. Barring minor variations in detail, most of their observations apply to the organization and structure of news work in Canadian society as well.



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Despite access to what is by far the largest reportorial network in the country, a wide range of external news sources have classically fed into The National’s regular news supply. For example, a nonparticipation observation study conducted in the 1980s (Clarke 1987) found that international news agencies were represented in the newsroom by Reuters, Associated Press (ap), United Press International (upi), the international newsfilm agency Visnews, and the Eurovision news exchange. Among the domestic news wires, cp, Broadcast News (bn), and the Canada News Wire were the key suppliers. Perhaps most important were the cbc’s contractual agreements with the American networks cbs and nbc, which entitled the corporation to the use and/or rebroadcast of material from: (1) their respective evening newscasts, (2) the syndicated features feed supplied by each network nightly, and (3) each network’s early morning news program. By way of other broadcast sources, the newsroom television monitors were able to provide any channel available to Toronto cable subscribers, among the best served of Canadian cable audiences in terms of channel availability. cbc Radio news was also monitored, and complete details of its line-ups were circulated throughout the network television newsroom. With respect to print sources, most major daily newspapers were reviewed and copies were distributed widely, notably The Globe and Mail – by far the key print source – the Toronto Star, the Toronto Sun, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Internal sources included the networks of cbc regional radio and television newsrooms across Canada. While regrettably there have been few “second-generation” production studies at the Canadian networks since the 1980s, it is safe to assume that online sources have become increasingly significant and that the convenient use of public relations sources, including video news releases (vnrs), has likely become more commonplace at both cbc and ctv.17 A cursory glance at the structure of the Canadian broadcasting system, with its mixed public and private components, might lead one to assume that cbc and ctv operate in accordance with different principles and seek different objectives. Likewise, one might infer that their news operations are organized in different ways, motivated by different sets of interests. Such inferences are contingent upon a belief that the cbc is a truly public corporation, organized along different principles than a private enterprise and operating under different market circumstances. As discussed, however, the cbc is at best a “quasi-public” corporation, which, more

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accurately, is “structured along the lines of a private corporation,” to cite the Broadcasting Act that created it. The interests of the ­corporation, the structure of the corporation, and the production practices of the corporation are strikingly similar to those found at both public and private broadcasting enterprises elsewhere in Western societies. Similarly, in the Canadian context, cbc and ctv share the same market conditions and many of the same market imperatives. Both are dependent upon advertising revenue, and both must therefore direct their operations and their programming towards the creation and maintenance of general and specific target audiences. It is contingent upon both to produce a requisite amount of Canadian programming and, therefore, to confront all of the barriers to indigenous production that are intrinsic to the broadcasting marketplace – in both cases, attempting to meet these requisites while maintaining a profitable, or at least deficit-free, existence. These common constraints outweigh any superficially apparent differences between the two broadcasting organizations, and this, in turn, is reflected in their respective programming operations. In essence, the differences between news production at cbc and ctv are differences of degree, not differences of substance. These differences of degree pertain largely to a reduced quantity of programming and not necessarily to a different quality of programming offered by their respective English-language television networks. At ctv, it means fewer – and generally poorer – facilities, fewer production workers, and fewer program offerings in the realm of news and current affairs. At the primary network level, the flagship news program continues to be the evening newscast, ctv National News. During a period of extensive fieldwork at both cbc and ctv in the 1980s (Clarke 1987), it was found that the patterns, routines, and, above all, the sources of news production at ctv were more or less identical to those at cbc’s The National. For example, Reuters was the most heavily utilized news service at both The National and ctv National News. Importantly, such commonalities lead inevitably to repetitive patterns of cross-media content duplication, which, in themselves, become significant sources of aggravation to audiences, as later discussion demonstrates. Beyond the parallels in news sources, production at both networks was organized along strikingly similar lines, and it therefore provoked the same intrinsic production constraints. It was clearly evident that differences between the “public” and private production of television news are merely differences of degree – not substantive differences



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in the structure of the labour process, the daily routines followed, or the policies and practices pursued. At ctv, the quantitative differences were reflected in a smaller newsroom, fewer facilities, and a smaller force of news workers. The much reduced size of its workforce meant that the division of labour was more fluid than that at the cbc, that there was less scope for specialization, and a greater overlap of responsibilities. Under these circumstances, news workers must work harder and longer and acquire a number of diverse skills. It is also significant that these conditions of labour were in place well prior to the process of digitalization, which has served to further accelerate these pressures upon journalists. In the 1980s, the smaller journalistic contingent at ctv also meant that there were fewer potential stories from which to select the ctv news lineup, although, as noted, the sources of the stories were largely the same as those of the cbc. The contemporary availability of internet sources has likely trumped this difference. The quantitative differences in the resources allocated to the production of ctv National News did not contribute in the 1980s, and apparently do not contribute in the twenty-first century, to substantial distinctions in the essential practices of news production. Rather, the fewer resources committed by ctv to the news production process merely aggravate the effects of the constraints that are, at root, common to both of these major national news organizations.

NEWS PRODUCERS: SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS AND CONDITIONS OF LABOUR One of the first national studies of a whole labour force of journalists gathered data regarding 370 Israeli journalists in 1955 and four hundred Israeli journalists in 1959 (Gill 1961). Gill found that, in Israel, newspaper journalism was predominantly a male occupation; that journalists originated from the middle and wealthy classes; and that broadcast journalists included more women, were younger, more highly educated, and of somewhat “higher”-class origins than print journalists (Gill 1961, cited in Tunstall 1971, 57). A decade later, Tunstall’s analysis of British journalists found that their mean age was forty and that most recruits to British journalism in the 1960s were born into “middle and lower middle class” families (Tunstall 1971, 57, 61). In the United States, Johnstone, ­Slawski, and Bowman (1976, 223) studied a large sample of more than ­thirteen hundred print and broadcast journalists during the

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1970s by means of telephone interviews and revealed that American journalists tended to be young, male, and 79 percent were of “middle or upper middle class origin.” Like ownership data, demographic data regarding those employed in the communication industries within Canadian society have not been gathered systematically. Questionnaire data obtained from journalists and other producers at the five major Canadian network information programs during the 1980s (Clarke 1987) provided a preliminary demographic picture of Canadian television journalists at that time. The questionnaire asked about year of birth, place of birth, gender, class origin, ethnic origin, level of formal educational attainment, and affiliations with professional associations and trade unions. Respondents also provided general information about their previous journalistic work experience in order that the patterns of their career paths could be plotted. The social composition of these key groups of news producers was remarkably consistent. Most of those who produced the major network programs at that time – at cbc, The National, The Journal, and the fifth estate, and at ctv, ctv National News, and w5 – were relatively young and well-educated white men of British ethnicity and urban middle-class backgrounds. These results were compared to those of Golding and Elliott (1979), based upon their three-nation analysis of broadcast journalists in Ireland, Nigeria, and Sweden. Their findings regarding class origin were consistent across the three societies: “Broadcast journalism is a middle class occupation in the sense that few journalists in any of the countries had fathers who were manual workers ... [A] large proportion came from what might be termed the educated, literate, or professional elite. This was spectacularly true of Sweden, where 45 percent had professional fathers” (170–1). Of the Canadian journalists surveyed, a total of 64 percent had professional fathers, almost 20 percentage points higher than the Swedish group and a near two-thirds majority.18 Only 12 percent of the Canadian group were the offspring of manual workers. At one program production unit – namely, w5 – there was virtually no one with any direct personal experience of working-class life. A full 60 percent of the staff hailed from managerial and professional families in particular. In the Canadian group as a whole, 78 percent had completed a university degree and a further 15 percent at least attended university, such that 93 percent were university-educated, a figure



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much higher than those for their colleagues in the three societies studied by Golding and Elliott. In terms of class origins, education levels, ethnic origins, and other social traits, the Canadian group was most exceptional compared to the Canadian population at large. Together, these social characteristics render Canadian journalists very different from their audiences, and there is little reason to believe that their social traits have changed significantly. The implications of these differences for reception experiences will become evident in later chapters. Overall, there has been scattered yet substantial evidence from around the globe that points to the consistent and continuing dominance among professional journalists of those with middle-class origins.19 The general demographic picture that emerges is one of a professional group that, in Canada and elsewhere, is very much dominated by white middle-class men. In the Canadian case, the extent of homogamy has been overshadowed somewhat by long-held perceptions of sharp differences between anglophone and francophone journalists and between private- and public-sector journalists. These views were contradicted by Pritchard and ­Sauvageau’s (1999a, 1999b) comparative national data gathered in the 1990s. Their telephone interviews with 554 journalists at various large and small news organizations in 1996 yielded results that demonstrated many more commonalities than differences. The general finding regarding the demography of Canadian journalists was that “the typical journalist is a man (72 percent) at the beginning of middle age (about 40 years old) who has a university degree (56 percent), works in a unionized newsroom (63 percent), and who in 1995 made a little more than $49,000 from his news work” (285). Apart from the obvious ethnic difference, there were no significant demographic differences between anglophone journalists at English-language news outlets and their francophone counterparts at French-language news outlets. Anglophone and francophone journalists at cbc/Radio-Canada, however, differed somewhat from their private-sector colleagues in that the former tended to be older, were more likely to be women, and were much more likely to be university-educated (296). Despite these differences, private- and public-sector journalists alike voiced a shared commitment to what Pritchard and Sauvageau refer to as the “credo” of Canadian journalism, which includes essentially the same news values discussed here as part and parcel of the “journalistic field.”20

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In their more recent demographic inquiries, which focus particularly upon those who serve as Canadian television news directors, Barber and Rauhala (2005, 2008) find differences between those in the private and public sectors, and point to the fact that women and ethnic minorities are “dramatically underrepresented” in these senior positions (Barber and Rauhala 2005, 281). Their general finding is that “the average news director is a white male who is well educated and comfortably middle class” (286). Class origins are more markedly middle class than in the other samples of general journalists: more than 40 percent of the television news directors had managerial or professional fathers and a further 16 percent had fathers who were “business owners,” while less than 10 percent identified their fathers as “labourers” (ibid.). Despite the fact that there are more women employed in television journalism than in any other news medium, and despite their increased presence in the broadcast journalism labour force – from 20 percent in 1974 to almost 40 percent in 1994 (Robinson and Saint-Jean 1998) – women continue to be “vastly underrepresented among newsroom decision-makers” (Barber and Rauhala 2005, 287). Barber and Rauhala found that only 20.9 percent of ­Canadian television news directors were women (ibid.). Regarding ethnicity, it was found that virtually every cbc news director and 86 percent of those in the private sector were white (ibid.). While it is difficult to obtain comprehensive current data regarding the demography of the journalistic labour force in Canadian society, there is little to indicate major changes in its demographic composition. Perhaps one of the greatest misconceptions about demographic changes is the popular wisdom that women have attained or nearly attained equality with men in the journalism profession. Women journalists may be more visible on camera and even within newsrooms than was the case during the 1980s and earlier, yet their greater presence should not be mistaken as greater equality with men, who retain quantitative dominance and, more significantly, of course, substantive power. What further feeds these misconceptions is the ambiguity of the data released by industry sources. For example, the Canadian Newspaper Association reported in 2002 that 43 percent of all newspaper employees were women, although it acknowledged that only 12 percent of publishers and only 8 percent of editors-in-chief were women. In fact, most of the women employed by newspapers were confined



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to “pink-­collar” jobs in accounting and advertising departments, where women comprised 80 percent and 70 percent of the employees, respectively (see Ruvinsky 2008, 69). Later in the same decade, MediaWatch (now renamed MediaAction), the Toronto-based non-profit organization that monitors gender issues, found that, while more than half of Canadian journalism graduates are female, only 30 percent of the newspaper articles published in Canada are written by women (cited in Ruvinsky 2008, 69). Ruvinsky reports that, at the global level, 38 percent of professional journalists are women and 28 percent of newspaper editors are women, yet women represent only 5 percent of managing editors and editors-in-chief (ibid.). It is important to stress that, despite some increases in the number of professional women journalists, women continue to be largely excluded from senior editorial and managerial positions as well as opportunities to report about “hard” news such as political journalism. Almost half a century after Tunstall’s classic study of journalists in the 1960s, European researchers van Dalen and Van Aelst (2012, 517) surveyed 960 journalists who reported about national politics in eight western European countries during the period between 2006 and 2009 and concluded that “political journalism is still a predominantly male profession.” The full extent of the persistent gender inequalities within professional journalism is discussed at greater length in chapter 5. The reception implications of class, gender, and other social differences between Canadian journalists and their audiences will become readily evident in later chapters. Research directed at the conditions of labour experienced by professional journalists shows less consistent patterns. In their 1970s analysis, Johnstone and his colleagues found that work satisfaction was lowest among the most qualified and most educated young journalists. Even more profound was their discovery that dissatisfaction was less a function of purely economic grievances than of “professional considerations” – namely, the discrepancies between journalistic ideals and everyday production realities (Johnstone, Slawski, and Bowman 1976, 239–45). Dissatisfaction was likewise frequently expressed by the Canadian journalists interviewed during the 1980s (Clarke 1987), and it is probably best explained as symptomatic of the contradictory conditions of their labour. In the late 1990s, ­Pritchard and Sauvageau (1998, 1999a, 1999b) found commonalities between anglophone and francophone journalists

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in journalistic values, as discussed, and also along dimensions such as politico-ideological perspective – a tendency to be more liberal than their news organizations – and concern regarding ownership convergence. Recently, Bernier and Barber’s (2012, 338) analysis of Quebec journalists found that all of their subjects “embrace the same creed,” yet all experience frustrations in their pursuit of journalistic ideals in the face of production conditions at their workplaces. In fact, the authors conclude that Quebec journalists “place more importance on their creed’s journalistic values than their employers” (343). Internationally, Hanitzsch and his colleagues (2012, 482; see also Hanitzsch and Mellado 2011) recently found a number of cross-cultural variations in journalistic values throughout the eighteen countries included in their analysis, although it was also noted that “the importance of the political information function of journalism remains relatively unchallenged across all investigated nations.” Relative to those engaged in other professions, journalists work exceptionally long and very irregular hours. The all-consuming nature of journalistic labour is such a pervasive feature of their working conditions that it readily becomes a “given” and is therefore rarely raised explicitly as a complaint, perhaps in part because few if any are exempt from the incessant cycle of long, work-filled days. Journalists spend most of their time at work, and, even when not at work, much of their leisure time is consumed by work-related activities, such as reading and watching the work of other journalists. The remainder of their leisure time is often spent in social encounters with other journalists, either from their own or other news outlets. These work and leisure patterns are reflected in high rates of marital breakdown and alcohol consumption – what some describe as the “booze culture” of professional journalism. Relief from work stress is sought, however, not through drinking among family at home but more often in the company of fellow journalists at restaurants and bars near their workplace. As Golding and Elliott (1979, 184) observe: “Their odd working hours destroy normal social life, so that they are thrust for conviviality into the company of their colleagues.” There is little reason to expect that these patterns are significantly different at the present time. Compared to those in most other occupations, their number and frequency of associations with family members and other primary groups are astonishingly limited. Social interchange with others is almost always



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interchange with others of the same profession, which ­effectively serves to reinforce the p ­ rofessional rules that form the core of the journalistic field. The social world of journalists is thus constituted by a limited professional and social circle, marked by only brief, transitory, and restricted exposure to the life experiences of other social groups. All of these common features of their professional and social lives contribute to the intensification of their professional culture, including their labour and their leisure environments, which may well serve to pressure many journalists to maintain a strong, regularly reinforced commitment to the rules of the journalistic field. In another sense, it further strengthens the interdependence of news media through the formal and informal interchange between journalists of different news organizations. As Tunstall (1971, 231) expresses it: “The greatest significance of colleague exchange lies not in the information exchange on particular days, but in the ongoing ‘group culture’ which develops over time through such exchanges.” A vivid Canadian illustration is that of the parliamentary press gallery in Ottawa (Siegel 1983, 199–206), where the strength of the “group culture” is further enhanced by the close, day-to-day proximity of journalists representing the full gamut of Canadian news organizations. Beyond Ottawa, there are indications of a relatively intensive group culture that is sustained throughout the national journalistic labour force, as suggested, for example, by a journalist interviewed by Ruvinsky: “Journalists as a group in Canada also have a kind of clubby, in-group attitude” (cited in Ruvinsky 2008, 40). We will see later that, together with the other implications hinted at here, the “group culture” contributes regularly and in important ways to audiences’ experiences of cross-media content convergence (see, in particular, chapter 4). Among those who have empirically examined the actual conditions of journalistic labour, issues of autonomy and control almost invariably arise. In his early study of British journalists, Tunstall (1971, 121, emphasis in original) resolved the autonomy problematic as follows: “The news organization exercises control by defining the field and its goal, by appointing the [journalist], and by its daily exercise of news processing. The [journalist] maintains a degree of autonomy by emphasizing his [sic] newsgathering role, by cultivating personal contacts and personal knowledge which can be shielded from the news organization.” Other sources of “control” limit the

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autonomy and work satisfaction felt by journalists, ­ including a range of concrete everyday conditions that may be peculiar to their ­particular workplace or common to news organizations elsewhere. A far more significant source of reduced autonomy and work satisfaction was identified as early as Tunstall’s study – namely, “indications that specialist correspondents feel themselves controlled by (and autonomous within the limits of) broadly held ‘news values’” (173). While he focused upon specialist correspondents, Tunstall’s observations continue to apply to journalist-producers of every specialization at every rank within newsroom hierarchies. Tunstall, at that early juncture, pointed to the fact that journalists are controlled less by their employers or by their organizations per se than by much broader forces – namely, the broader and more extensive constraints imposed by the journalistic field. These constraints, of course, transcend the peculiarities of individual news organizations. Where journalists experience a desire to reform the journalistic field, recognition of these constraints is likely to further reduce their sense of autonomy and their work satisfaction. High levels of work dissatisfaction may also at least partially explain the high levels of (mostly lateral) job mobility among Canadian journalists. Among those interviewed and surveyed in the 1980s, the average period of time spent at each of their past jobs was under three years, with time spent at their present network jobs averaging between four and five years. In most cases, it appeared that these job changes usually entailed movement from one production unit to another and, quite often, movement from one organization to another. There also appeared to be common and very considerable movement between the private and public sectors. Geographic mobility also appeared to be high. One can only speculate that these high job mobility rates, which set journalists distinctly apart from those in most other professions, may reflect the tendency of many to perceive the dissatisfactions of their professional lives as a function of the specific conditions of a given workplace, whether seen as peculiar to a particular news production unit or to a particular news organization. On the other hand, there are ongoing indications that many journalists attribute their dissatisfactions directly to the constraints of news production. For example, a ctv health and science reporter wrote as follows about her frustrations in a 2011 Globe and Mail article:



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It’s my job as a communicator to write a story that conveys important information in an understandable fashion. I got the whole complex business of antimatter down to a 45 second voiceover and soundbite. Certainly not my finest work ... I often try to explain to the people I interview the inherent constraints of television news, such as the need for brevity, good video, and meeting constant deadlines. (Owen 2011, emphasis added) Finally, it is remarkable that, in the twenty-two countries in which Weaver and Willnat’s (2012, 532) contributors examined work satisfaction, the average proportion of “very satisfied” journalists was only 27.5 percent. In response to the fundamental question of who the journalists of the twenty-first century are, their answer is that “the typical journalist is still primarily a fairly young college-­ educated man who studied something other than journalism in college, and who came from the established and dominant cultural groups in his country” (544).

CONSTRAINTS INTRINSIC TO THE NEWS PRODUCTION PROCESS At this juncture in the history of journalism research, it is useful to reflect upon the original observations of the sociologists and other scholars who entered newsrooms to conduct fieldwork in the 1970s and 1980s and who observed features of news production that have remained impermeable to change. For example, based upon his study of a British documentary series, Elliott (1972) identifies three principal “chains” – the subject chain, the presentation chain, and the contact chain – that inhibit the communication of information through television. Two fundamental constraints reinforce and sustain these limitations: (1) the nature of news sources and (2) related economic constraints that determine what is available and what can be economically produced. Elliott highlights the redistributive nature of news production, including the inter- and intra-media perpetuation of production constraints. His major conclusions are that production is organized in such a way as to ensure the repetition and continuity of these conditions and that there are “standard perspectives” that are reinforced and reproduced by means of the labour process (240). Chibnall (1977, 223–4) observes the same

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cyclical process of reproduction in his analysis of crime reportage in British newspapers: The economic contexts within which production takes place, the restricted time period within which the [news] must be reproduced, the conventional wisdoms of professional journalism, the largely shared and complementary expectations of editors, sources, colleagues, and readers all work towards the creation of the same type of product, which, in turn, recreates the condi­ tions for its reproduction ... Professional communicators are not simply puppets on strings pulled by capitalists. Nor do they necessarily feel oppressed by the power of the machine they serve. They are men and women who exercise choice and construct their own realities within the constraining parameters set by their ideal and material interests and their professional stock of knowledge. This is one important sense in which journalists need to be understood as simultaneously “creative and constrained,” just like their audiences. In the apt phrasing of Hoggart (1973, 214), “most popular journalists are not, with cynical and detached intent, peddling a certain view of the world; this is their world.” Their world is perplexed by fundamental ambiguities and overriding constraints that inextricably shape their work and its products. The most basic and most crucial constraint is the economic one. The economics of news production necessitate the capture of markets – not mass markets necessarily but sustaining markets for the news product. In the case of television, the news product is, above all, a televisual product – hence the visual imperative that derives from the economic imperative and acts as a further constraint. Overall, the political economy of news production spawns a set of social relations of production and a set of market imperatives from which devolve a systemic body of production values legitimized by professional journalistic principles and operationalized in professional journalistic practices. Among the social relations of production are two other integrated yet conceptually separable structures that create additional constraints and that otherwise shape the news text: the organization of the labour process (e.g., the constraints of time and technology) and the division of journalistic labour.



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During the late 1970s, Tracey’s (1978) identification of the constraints of time, money, and technology pointed to the short-term, logistical constraints of news production. All three of these constraints tend to interact with each other and to congeal in the creation of consequences for the news text. Monetary and temporal constraints reinforce the dominant tendency to shy away from stories with poor visual potential. These constraints are effectively timeless in their impact, and a cbc producer once articulated their repercussions as follows: Editors shy away from them too. There are minefields that are very tough to get into because people have failed at them so often in the past ... [I]n terms of daily news people who’ve been commissioned to do daily news coverage with short turn-arounds and Canada-limited production budgets, you tend to go for the tried-and-true rather than to break new ground, particularly if it’s on a project that may not work and that may end up costing an awful lot in terms of crew time or material cost or per diems or travel time or just straight salary time. (cited in Clarke 1991, emphasis in original) The monetary constraint is by far the most critical, apparent in the absence of lengthy documentary productions, extensive travel, elaborate facilities, and the specialized investigative labour required to conduct “bare-knuckled” reporting. The economics of news production can be observed to constrain all facets of newsgathering and story assemblage at both cbc and ctv. The geographical contours of news coverage arise directly out of the division of journalistic labour. Less tangibly derived are the production values which further shape the form and content of the news product and which arise from the economic imperative of market retention. These production values include, for example, criteria of newsworthiness and other rules according to which the world is delimited and events are assessed and categorized or otherwise deemed worthy of transformation into a story. From the perspective of most journalists, these values are deeply entrenched within the assumptions and organizational principles underlying their everyday production routines and, as such, are sometimes nebulous and difficult to specify concretely. Yet, as Golding and Elliott clarified,

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there is truly nothing mysterious or vague about them. News values, or, more broadly, “story values” or production values, are working rules that guide newsroom practice and steer decisions about story selection and program composition (e.g., those that determine the line-up of a newscast). In essence, these production values include perceived characteristics or qualities of events derived from assumptions and judgments that are, in turn, based upon a number of primary considerations. One of these considerations, not necessarily the first or most important, is that of the assumed interests of the audience-market. Others include the accessibility of the event or whether it is known to journalists and whether it is available to them – in other words, practical considerations regarding whether the event can actually be covered. Also among the primary considerations are issues of congruence with basic production needs, which raise very practical questions regarding whether it is logistically possible to cover the event and produce the story. At root, then, production values derive from three immediate and ongoing production requirements: (1) the need to reach and sustain a market, (2) the availability of a source of news supply, and (3) the practical economics of a story’s production. Production values have been variously identified and typologized by different observers of the news production process. Among them are the qualities of drama, visual attractiveness, entertainment appeal, the perceived importance of the event, the proximity of the event to the intended audience-market (hence the priority ordering of local, regional, national, and international stories), the immediacy or recency of the event, and the characteristics of its key players, especially whether the event involves a member of a particular elite or celebrated group. Chibnall’s (1977, 22–45) classic list of production values includes immediacy, dramatization, personalization, simplification, titillation, conventionalism, and novelty. Gans (1979) argues that domestic news judgments are typically based upon the presence or absence of four qualities. The first is rank in governmental hierarchies. The federal state is always and unquestionably deemed important, and the higher someone is positioned within the federal state hierarchy, the more important are his or her activities. The second quality is the impact of the event upon the nation and “the national interest,” however that might be defined or understood. Producers tend to attribute importance to activities ostensibly carried out by the whole nation, such as national



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e­ lections, and those ostensibly carried out on behalf of the nation at large, such as space exploration and national anniversary celebrations. Gans argues further that story selectors tend to choose actors and activities that express or embody what are seen as “national values,” which, in his list, include ethnocentrism, altruistic democracy, responsible capitalism, small-town pastoralism, individualism, moderatism, the preservation of social order, and the need for national leadership (42–69). The third quality is the extent of the event’s impact in terms of the sheer quantity of those seen to be affected by it. Because news producers often lack data regarding the numbers affected by any event, there is a routine dependence upon impressionistic judgments. The key basis of these judgments is their perception of the population, which derives largely from their own immediate social circle – that is, the more highly educated urban male middle class – which also serves as a very important source of story ideas. The fourth quality is the perceived significance of the event for the past and the future. Broken records or benchmark historical events are almost invariably deemed newsworthy. These determinations are often intuitive on the part of news producers and are further determined by whether or not, and the extent to which, stories are also carried by other news outlets, which serves to verify judgments that stories are airworthy. The parameters of the labour process serve in other ways to fragment the social world as it is re-presented through the genre of televisual information. The temporal frameworks of the labour process and of the narrative news genre itself, the constraints of time and the principle of timeliness, which translate concretely into a necessary preoccupation with the “facts” of the immediate moment, together create the conditions whereby the social world is re-­presented in a fragmentary manner, devoid of history, other contexts, and any notion of social structure or social process (Golding and Elliott 1979). The ongoing trajectory of the social world is fragmented into a selective flow of decontextualized and disconnected events, which, by means of the temporal structures of the televisual world and the production value of immediacy, appear to be the outcome of individual actions. Structure and process are excluded in favour of concrete everyday actions on the part of individuals and, under the conditions of structured access and the principles of newsgathering, these individuals are most often representatives of governmental institutions.

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Briefly, the structuring elements and general characteristics of news discourse include tendencies to: (1) unify the audience-­market into a single “population” of citizens-consumers and thereby mask its class divisions; (2) fragment the social world and its evolution into a series of discrete, seemingly disconnected events; (3) decontextualize these events and strip them of their actual historical relations and social conditions; (4) present the events outside of any framework of social processes or structures; (5) individualize events and personalize conflicts; and (6) reduce “politics” to the actions and statements of representatives of governmental institutions and thereby reproduce that official discourse. All of these discursive features effectively constrain the re-presentation of the social world in such a way as to provide the foundations of a hegemonic, or preferred, reading of the social world. The structuring elements of news discourse, derived from the imperatives of the journalistic field, are arguably the most potent. Perhaps most significantly, the practices and principles of professional journalism, the organization of the social world, and the consequent organization of both the process and the product of news production conjunctively lead news producers to assume the “obvious.” The “obvious” is the social world as it is together with “common sense” about how it operates. Yet “common sense,” as Gramsci so insightfully emphasized, is the core, the crux, the absolute foundation of hegemony. From the perspective of entrenched news production values, “common sense” includes the idea that “government” is at the centre of the social universe, and so it is government that occupies centre stage in the re-presentation of “politics.” Other important power holders, especially those in the private sector, are more or less out of sight, thanks also to the geographical infrastructure of news production, libel chill, and other production constraints. Labour, meanwhile, comes to the foreground only when it upstages the state or disrupts the obvious, taken-for-granted peaceable harmony of the social contract – typically, in the “event” of strikes. The preoccupation of news with parliamentary politics has been very well documented over the course of several decades.21 In the Canadian case, the distribution of journalistic labour – most notably, the high concentration of journalists and newsgathering facilities in Ottawa – leads to a high volume of Ottawa-produced stories, which, in turn, leads to the thematic dominance of ­parliamentary



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politics in news content. As a result, the state comes to be portrayed as the locus of power within Canadian society, while “politics” is defined around the day-to-day activities and utterances of state officials. Hackett (1983, 9–11), who monitored cbc and ctv newscasts in 1980, was among the first to document that “federal and provincial politicians dominated the field numerically, constituting 35.1 percent of all interviewees. Moreover, they were accorded relatively high forms of access; 66 percent of their appearances consisted of speeches or news conferences.” Similarly, Belanger (1980, 9–11) monitored a one-month period of Canadian network news and found that 67 percent of the coverage was exclusively focused upon the thought and opinion of government officials. The highly privileged access of the state and its dominance as the central player within news discourse are underlined by the forms of its access and the ways in which it is re-presented. Several tendencies can be identified that set it apart from other actors. First, there is the sheer number of journalists who are assigned to cover its activities and, in particular, the deployment of state specialists or “parliamentary correspondents” of the sort that rarely exist for other sectors of the social world. Second, there are the high forms of access accorded to government officials, who frequently communicate through pre-planned speeches and press conferences – tellingly termed “newsers” – and pre-scheduled interviews, where there is the opportunity to plan and prepare their presentation, unlike most others who appear in newscasts. Third, state officials are accorded more air time than others, a privilege granted in recognition of their crucial role as sources of news supply and commentary. Moreover, their interviews are routinely “cleaned” of “ums” and “ahs” and other affectations, which produces a smoother delivery and enhances their presentational appearance vis-à-vis others featured in news stories. Finally, there is the exceptionally high volume, duration, and prominence of stories about federal, provincial, and municipal governments as well as the “special” and “live” coverage awarded to them, despite the typically low visual potential of news stories about their operations. There are at least three production constraints that free privatesector power holders from the close scrutiny of professional journalism. The first is the phenomenon of “structured access” – that is, those conditions that render the state much more accessible and that thereby serve to largely exclude private-sector power holders

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from view. Second, there are legal constraints and, more important, perceived legal constraints. Private capitalists are protected by law (defamation, libel, slander, etc.) and by the extreme caution exercised by the networks’ legal departments. In view of the relative absence of private capitalists from the sightlines of news producers, the state becomes a much safer and more conventional object of journalistic critique. Beyond actual legal constraints, even more extensively constraining is the pervasive phenomenon of libel chill, which is based upon commonly shared and widely held perceptions of the likelihood of legal repercussions, perceptions that tend to exaggerate the actual extent of legal risk. Moreover, private capitalists are exceptionally well shielded by public relations professionals, who offer the kind of fettered information that has traditionally been offensive to journalistic integrity, although it has, of necessity, become more acceptable under the constraints of contemporary multi-platform digitalized news production. A third, and not the least important, constraint is the absence of investigative resources, including the lack of any significant commitment to the kind of investigative labour required to critically follow private-sector activity. One major result is that official representatives of the formal institutions of government come to appear as the central and most pivotal players in the nexus of power relations within a society and within what news centrally conveys as “politics.” Fundamentally, the process of news production is comparable to other instances of commodity production in that it combines instruments of labour, raw materials of production, and so forth, and it proceeds according to a set of institutionalized practices. These practices consist of the types of labour required to transform the raw material of production into the processed news product. Since the raw material of news production is, at least in theory, the world at large, the prima facie delimitation of the world for news producers is its reduction to the event, which, in turn, is reduced to the newsworthy event, which, in turn, is reduced to the report of the newsworthy event. Ultimately, the report of the event that has satisfied professional criteria of newsworthiness is the completed commodity of the production process. Through the course of production, the event is still further reduced to the “angle” of the coverage – that is, to its extraordinary, dramatic, tragic, humorous, or other selected elements, and to its key factual components (who, what, when, where, why). It will also be compartmentalized or assigned



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to specified news categories (“consumer” story, “political” story, “human interest” story, etc.), all in accordance with the canons of the journalistic field. All of these considerations and some additional ones – the operation of other news values, the nature of news sources, assumptions about audiences, etc. – have consequences for what is produced, for the way that “the world” is presented, and thus all act in some fashion to constrain the presentation of the world in the newscast. With that broad conceptualization of “production constraints” in view, it is possible to summarize some of those most commonly operative in the production of television news. Table 2.1 provides examples of these production constraints alongside examples of the ways in which the news text, and thus news reception, are affected by their operation. Time, money, and technology, the three production constraints emphasized by Tracey (1978), are probably the most immediate and most pressing constraints faced by producers, and those most plainly observable. Yet there are others that, while not so immediate and not so readily evident, suggest more extensive textual and reception outcomes. Many additional long-term constraints can be identified, among them: the patterns of interrelationships with other news media, the social control of news workers, the constraints imposed by the visual nature of the television medium and the entertainment context within which most news is produced, assumptions about news audiences, the distribution of news sources, the compartmentalization of news stories, and other exigencies of the journalistic field, such as rules about objectivity, evidence, and the use of authoritative sources. These constraints, of course, do not operate independently or in isolation but, rather, tend to “overlap” (as Bourdieu describes it) or to intersect in a multiplicity of ways.

THE DIGITALIZATION OF NEWS PRODUCTION In most cases, the production constraints in table 2.1 point to longstanding social conditions of news production that are among those seemingly impermeable “continuities” associated with the production process. However, the contemporary digitalization of the process has introduced a number of significant changes to the manner in which television news and other news is produced (see, for example, Allan 2006; Belanger 2005; Cushion 2012a; Deuze 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c; Dickinson, Matthews, and Saltzis 2013;

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Table 2.1 Examples of production constraints and their textual outcomes Production constraints*

Some textual consequences

Time constraints, such as: • Limited production periods • Limited program lengths • Limited news story lengths

•

Economic constraints, especially limited facilities and resources, including human labour-power and technological resources

•

Division and distribution of journalistic labour

•

Structured, unequal access to nations and regions

•

Structured, unequal access to potential subjects who might appear in news

•

Criteria of newsworthiness

•

Production values regarding subject selection, official spokespersons, and verification

•

Limited research resources, dependence upon official information suppliers

•

Legal constraints and fear of legal repercussions or “libel chill”

•

Limitations of established program formats

•

Limited social demography of journalists

•

The “event” orientation of the news genre • Decontextualization of events, including the necessary ahistoricism of news • A focus upon actions and individuals rather than processes and structures Widespread effects upon the quantity, form, and content of news stories

Limited news definitions Limited story geography

•

Limited story geography Limited demography of subjects Limited conceptualizations of power and politics

•

Limited criteria of story selection Officialdom and the reproduction of official definitions of social reality Officialdom and the reproduction of official definitions of social reality Limited investigative journalism Critical attention is largely restricted to the public sector, while the private sector is rarely examined critically

•

Exclusion of incompatible stories Limited patterns of story origination Story treatments that serve to disengage entire population sectors

•

Limited range of highly converged news sources

•

Limited original newsgathering Similarity of news agendas across different news organizations • Homogeneity of news formats, news values • Cross-media content duplication

Production values spawned by visual media and the entertainment context in which news is produced

•

•

Effects upon both the form and content of programs and stories



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Table 2.1 continued Tendency towards consensual forms of presentation • Exclusion of contexts, including ahistoricism • Exclusion of non-visual or weakly visual topics •

Absence of comprehensive knowledge of news audiences

•

Potentially erroneous assumptions that underlie the construction of news texts and that serve to disengage entire population sectors

Contemporary labour shortages

•

Contemporary shift from specialized to more generalized journalistic labour

•

Contemporary multi-platform storytelling

•

Limited supply of original news, extensive cross-media content duplication • Limited verification opportunities, increased levels of inaccuracy Decline of specialized expertise, nurtured contacts • Greater dependence upon Google, spin merchants Limited “shoe leather” investigative journalism • Less original news, less depth information • Greater cross-media content convergence

Source: Expanded and updated version of figure 1 in Clarke (1990, 91–2).

* Note that the examples of production constraints are not listed in their perceived ­order of importance, nor is it possible to convey here the interactions of these constraints. The list is illustrative rather than exhaustive.

Goyette-Côté, Carbasse, and George 2012; Klinenberg 2005, 2007; Lee-Wright 2012; Machil and Beiler 2009; Saltzis and Dickinson 2008; Skovsgaard, Alboek, Bro, and de Vreese 2012; Vesperi 2010; Wallace 2013; Zelizer 2004; Zelizer and Allan 2002).22 While these changes are sufficient to warrant extensive analysis, and all require further research investigations, space permits only a brief summary of some of the more insightful arguments and findings to date regarding the impact of digitalization upon news work and the news product. Unfortunately, there has sometimes been a regrettable tendency in this literature to dwell upon digitization and the digital technology itself to the relative neglect of the underlying economic conditions and wider social structures into which the technology

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has been inserted. The concern here is to examine the implications of technological changes in view of concurrent economic forces and broader social changes. At the current juncture in the history of news production, it is evident that digital “ultra-optimism” has led many media managers to exaggerate the decline of newspaper readership and to assume a present and future shift away from legacy print and broadcast news media to online news consumption. It is frequently and widely assumed that the internet has already become, or at least will inevitably become, the primary news source of the population at large. A related assumption is that the digital facilitation of user-­generated content (ugc) and especially “citizen journalism” will inevitably and significantly affect professional journalism: some perceive a potentially “democratizing” effect whereby news users are empowered to become news producers or “produsers” (e.g., Bruns 2008; Hermida 2010), while others emphasize the threat posed to professional journalistic canons, a threat that some regard as a “crisis” within contemporary journalism. There are a number of difficulties with these assumptions. First, the bulk of the population has remained wedded to deeply entrenched and highly routinized patterns of news consumption, which include: (1) a greater comfort with and comparatively greater trust in news produced by professional broadcast journalists, whose work is favoured online as well as offline; (2) the continuation of “appointment” viewership; and (3) a dominant tendency to use the internet principally as a source of entertainment rather than information. A more critical problem, also seen to be of “crisis” proportions, is that the perceived shift to predominantly digital news consumption threatens the existing revenue sources of mainstream legacy news media, particularly newspapers. What feeds the perception of a “crisis” is that, to date, there are no business models in place that can assure a similar level of revenue from the production of online news. In fact, online advertising revenue constitutes a meagre “drop in the bucket” compared to what can be earned from advertisements in legacy media, especially television. Nevertheless, the winds of presumed change in news consumption patterns have swept through newsrooms, with direct consequences for the production and content of the news product. The most severe consequences have been job losses – greatest in the United States, and especially profound since the economic collapse



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of 2008. In the Canadian case, six hundred news workers, or 10 percent of the workforce at the Sun Media newspaper chain, lost their jobs at the end of 2008 (Sauvageau 2012, 30). The Canadian Association of Journalists (caj) reported that more than twelve hundred full-time workers in Canadian news organizations lost their jobs in 2009 (cited in Bernier and Barber 2012, 333). Newspapers have experienced the greatest losses, including the largest national newspaper in Canada, The Globe and Mail, which offered early retirement to 10 percent of its staff (Dvorkin 2009, cited in Bernier and ­Barber 2012, 333). Layoffs also occurred at the Postmedia newspapers, including the flagship National Post, in 2010 and 2011, and at ­Torstar, owner of the Toronto Star, in 2011 (Sauvageau 2012, 30). While news is disseminated widely by media such as television and the internet, it is still the case that many of the stories originate as newspaper stories. As Sauvageau (2012, 30) recently reaffirmed, newspapers continue to play a dominant role in newsgathering: “Their newsrooms are far better staffed than those of the other media, and each day, in most of the communities they serve, they cover more events than their competitors do, and often in greater depth.” Globally, the prestige accorded by most journalists to The New York Times is such that it continues to effectively set the daily international news agenda.23 Contemporary threats to the economic viability of newspapers are seen to effectively threaten the existent newsgathering infrastructure of all news media and, in the views of both journalists and scholars, raise the risk that news stories will become increasingly shallow and vacuous. More concretely, the contemporary labour shortages provoked by newspaper staff cuts have contributed to a shrinkage of political coverage that Waddell (2012) traces back to the late 1980s as he laments what he calls “the death of political journalism.” ­Waddell sees its origins in the deskilling of journalists, driven by the shift from specialized to generalized journalistic labour. In particular, he observes the progressively widespread elimination of specialized reporters and the shift to a much greater use of general assignment reporters who are expected to perform a diversity of tasks, to produce a variety of stories, and to prepare those stories for distribution via more than one medium or platform (such as a network television newscast and its associated website). Classical beat systems have been supplanted by this more predominant use of general assignment reporters, notably in the case of political ­coverage

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by the Ottawa bureaus. Waddell describes how this has led to the decline of specialized political expertise among journalists as well as the loss of nurtured contacts with political figures that previously sustained greater depth in political coverage. These journalistic resources have been replaced by Google dependence and a dependence upon “party spin merchants” (110–11). The Canadian developments discussed by Waddell are essentially mirrored in the altered division of journalistic labour and organizational restructuring of newsrooms throughout Western and other societies (see, for example, Gans 2003, 2007; Ryfe 2009, 2012; and Witschge 2012, 2013). Among other outcomes, it has resulted in a depleted supply of original news as well as limited fact-checking and, therefore, increasing levels of inaccuracy in news stories. Lewis and his colleagues are among those who argue that the resultant inaccuracies have been sufficient in themselves to erode news credibility (Lewis, Williams, Franklin, Thomas, and Mosdell 2008; see also Porlezza and Russ-Mohl 2013). At the same time, multi-­platform storytelling has largely eradicated “shoe leather” investigative journalism of the sort that originates outside of newsrooms; instead, journalists find themselves increasingly confined to their newsroom workplaces and increasingly dependent upon internet and other media sources as a way to “originate” stories. In fact, these stories are increasingly less original, lack depth information, and contribute to the currently vast extent of cross-media content duplication. With special attention to political journalism, Waddell (2012, 127) also decries the rise of “BlackBerry journalism”: journalists and political party operatives now interact principally through BlackBerrys and other smartphones as well as social media such as Twitter. Yet, as Waddell concludes: “Instead of using technology to bridge the communications gap between voters in their communities and the media, the media has [sic] used it to turn its [sic] back on the public, forging closer links with the people reporters cover rather than with the people who used to read, watch, and listen to their reporting.” Based upon fieldwork conducted in various British newsrooms between 2007 and 2010, Witschge (2013, 161) writes eloquently of how journalists are currently caught in a contradiction “between, on the one hand, change in and challenges to their profession, and, on the other, their strong commitment to traditional values.” She argues that digitization – referring to the technological changes in newsrooms – has organized newsrooms differently, altered



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the p ­ rofessional identities of journalists, and shifted the emphasis within newsrooms from “research” and “content” towards the production of mere “output” as journalists are forced to produce much more, for multiple platforms, and with less time to undertake the traditional work of research and verification. It is a testament to the endurance of traditional journalistic values that she finds “old ways of doing the work are preserved in the daily routines even with the introduction of new technological solutions” (162). In sum, digitalization, which encompasses the broader social changes associated with the digitization of the labour process, has introduced new production constraints and exacerbated existent ones. Yet the production of news is, of course, far more than the sum total of the conditions and constraints of its production. By its very nature, the production of news engages, quite irrevocably and systematically, the (re)production of ideas about the social world. A truly comprehensive attempt to expose that larger process might proceed beyond a documentation of the constraints that lie within the organization of news production to the analysis of the news text that results. In other words, it should be possible to disclose the social construction of the text by reference to its material genesis in the social relations of news production. Regrettably, some textual analyses are still inclined to treat the text as a “disembodied cultural artefact” that produces its own immanent messages independently of social relations, whereas here it is understood that the interpretations of audiences are socially situated rather than dormant or resident in texts. Other analyses of news texts can usefully complement the empirical sociology of news producers and news audiences. The concern here is to investigate how the potentialities offered by news texts come to be negotiated by audiences through the process of reception. The following chapters proceed to explore how the social conditions of news production and their impacts upon news texts are experienced by news audiences. The first task is to examine the social composition of news audiences, the significance of their social characteristics, and the significance of the social contexts in which news is experienced. These are among the objectives of chapter 3.

3 The Process of News Reception Audiences actively interpret media texts, but not under conditions of their own choosing. Hackett and Carroll, Remaking Media

With a view to the precedence of production in the productionreception relationship, this chapter introduces a central object of the present analysis – namely, the process of news reception itself. First and foremost, it is useful to review the epistemological literature in order to appreciate the extensive debates regarding how best to approach the analysis of reception. By means of this prefatory discussion, the rationale underlying the research design, as well as its distinctiveness and its (inescapable) limitations, can be better understood. Along the way, those unfamiliar with the lengthy record of epistemological debates are also likely to appreciate the extraordinary complexities associated with “the slippery field of television audience research,” as Bagley (2001, 436) fittingly describes it, and why, for these and other reasons, reception studies continue to be comparatively uncommon. In that it is a costly, laborious, and precarious research activity, it is no surprise that it rapidly fails even the most rudimentary cost-benefit assessments conducted by communication scholars in search of new projects.1 Perhaps even more difficult to convey is the continuing primacy of television vis-à-vis other ICTs as the dominant information source to most of the populations of most Western societies. Despite the flood of speculative rhetoric within both academic and popular discourse regarding cmc and the rise of so-called “information societies,” “network societies,” and so forth, the attention of the Canadian population to television journalism persistently trumps attention to other sources of news. There is a need to explain its continuing dominance, of course, as well as a need to examine the



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range of contexts in which television news is experienced, including, for example, workplace contexts in which stories produced by television journalists are viewed online at the most popular news websites (see ­Boczkowski 2010a, 2010b). It will be argued that, despite the apparent diversity of reception contexts and the increased portability of news sources via mobile ICTs, the household remains the ideal context in which to study news reception. The discussion proceeds to a brief explication of the concept of intersectionality and, in particular, how intersectionality operates in practice with respect to the multitude of social characteristics and other social conditions that are actively operative during reception experiences. Finally, by way of introduction to the reception research findings presented in the chapters that follow, the social characteristics and news usage patterns of the research participants are outlined, including those who completed questionnaires, those who completed news diaries, and those who assented to interviews in their private households. The patterns and traits of these various participants are compared to those of the Canadian population at large, whereupon it becomes apparent that, while there can never be a perfectly representative sample in qualitative reception research, there are nevertheless strong parallels between the social characteristics of the participant samples examined here and the social composition of the general population.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL ISSUES IN THE ANALYSIS OF RECEPTION It was first articulated more than three decades ago, yet Morley’s (1980, 162) statement in his seminal work The “Nationwide” Audience: Structure and Decoding continues to resonate: “The relation of an audience to the ideological operations of television remains in principle an empirical question: the challenge is the attempt to develop appropriate methods of empirical investigation of that relation.”2 In his critique of Lembo’s (2000) contribution to the continuing epistemological debates, Knight (2001) asserts that all of the approaches used to analyze television audiences have failed to account fully for the sociality of television usage, which, he argues, is shaped by the spatial and temporal contexts in which television is experienced – principally, although by no means exclusively, the household context – as well as by the presentational structure of the

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medium itself. With attention to Knight’s crucial point, here it is argued that, in order to understand the sociality of television usage within the plurality of social settings in which it is experienced, we need to engage multiple varieties of qualitative analysis. In order to understand the presentational structure of the medium itself and the genre of television journalism in particular, we need a fully integrated analysis of television production and television reception, or at least a reception analysis that refers back to the production process and the ways in which it shapes the presentational structure of the medium. As a prelude to the introduction of the reception analysis undertaken here, it is helpful to at least briefly summarize the “three generations” of contemporary reception research (Alasuutari 1999). The first generation, as discussed in chapter 1, was spawned by S ­ tuart Hall’s influential encoding-decoding model (see Hall 1977, 1980),3 which marked a radical shift from the behaviouristic stimulus-­ response model of “media effects” to a paradigm in which media messages were understood as social texts, encoded ideologically by their producers and subsequently decoded by their receivers. The effects were seen as largely contingent upon the interpretations of media messages. Ultimate responsibility for the politico-ideological impact of media was reconceptualized, such that media owners and media content, long at the forefront of North American “effects” research, were displaced in favour of more direct attention to the experiences of audiences and the broader process of media reception. It was henceforth understood that media messages could have no “effect” until decoded, either in accordance with the “dominant” code inscribed by producers, or “oppositional” codes that resist these embedded hegemonic meanings, or “negotiated” interpretations situated somewhere along the spectrum between the dominant and oppositional alternatives. Televisual news content, for example, was seen as pertinent to the extent that it led many viewers to decode news output in accordance with a “preferred reading” consistent with the dictates of “common sense.” As discussed, Hall’s formulation also marked a radical shift from a deterministic model of audiences as passive onlookers invariably subservient to a hegemonic worldview towards a model that celebrated the prospect of “active” audiences free to adopt any possible interpretation of a news text. As Livingstone (1999, 95) points out, a central achievement of Hall’s encoding-decoding model is its emphasis upon the



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i­nteractional dynamics between production, text, and reception. Regrettably, those who practised the approach sometimes disregarded these interrelationships in favour of a preoccupation with either the text, which became the subject matter of textual analysis in its various forms, or, less commonly, its reception by audiences. Voluminous studies of media production, particularly television news production, tended to follow a distinctly separate path, often propelled by a strikingly contrary political economy approach. There was thus little in the way of integrated analysis of the three integral “moments” in the communication process – production, text, and reception – as Hall envisioned them and as many communication scholars came to regard them. Nevertheless, his student Morley’s pioneering work, in which audiences were interviewed extensively about their decodings of the bbc program Nationwide, set the stage for subsequent empirical studies of reception. By the outset of the following decade, Corner (1991), Curran (1990), and others had prepared challenges to the “new” audiences research on the grounds that it undermined media potency and shifted attention away from the politico-ideological impact of television. Curran (1990, 135) argued that the “active audiences” revisionists, in their celebration of the semiotic democracy of the text, had resurrected discredited “conventional wisdoms of the past” associated with long-buried pluralism, while Corner (1991, 269) accused them of “a form of sociological quietism” that favoured micro-level viewership patterns to the neglect of macro-level power relations (see also Tulloch 2000, 191ff.). In response, Morley sternly defended the need to examine how macro-level power relations are reproduced through micro-level processes of reception. He continued to insist that such power relations are pivotally dependent upon “the presence or absence of ... cultural resources necessary in order to make certain types of meaning, which is, ultimately, an empirical question” (Morley 1996, 288). A second generation of reception studies moved beyond in-depth interviews about television news reception towards a broader framework of “ethnographic” research, which expanded the realm of analysis to other program genres, to other media, to the ways in which television usage reflects and reproduces gendered relations of power within households, and to the identification of broader “interpretive communities” bounded by class, gender, and other parameters. This expansion of the realm of analysis seemed to justify

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the use of the term “ethnography” to describe the methodology in that it required extensive fieldwork. In practice, however, the fieldwork rarely extended beyond singular interviews with research participants, whether with household members or focus groups. After all, long-term observation in the private households of research participants, in accordance with the classical anthropological meaning of ethnography, is scarcely pragmatic, although the use of this label to describe the approach continues. The third generation is the newest of the approaches to the study of reception, one that calls upon multiple varieties of qualitative analysis in efforts to more accurately and more thoroughly capture the complex specificities of the reception process. These more recent studies attempt to fulfill what has been called “the new agenda” of audiences research. The multi-modal nature of this approach, utilized in the present analysis, is discussed at a later juncture. The range of factors found operative in the reception process includes, yet is not limited to, the following: class, gender, age, level of formal educational attainment, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and politico-ideological posture as well as other factors less frequently examined, such as household type and region of residence. As one would expect, these factors tend to intersect with each other in their contributions to the patterns whereby media messages are interpreted in distinctive ways by distinctive segments of a population. Riggs (1998), for example, in her analysis of American seniors, examines the plurality of ways in which age intersects with class, gender, ethnicity, education, marital status, sexual orientation, and other social characteristics. The operation of class in itself raises a plethora of potential analytical challenges. The temptation to dwell upon revelations of domination is great, just as there may be a temptation to regard research participants as “politically deficient” in their responses (Jensen and Pauly 1997, 165). Not surprisingly, British audiences tend to exhibit a greater sensitivity to class issues as well as a more fully attuned sense of their class locations, especially if compared to American audiences. In all cases, including the Canadian one, a researcher must carefully refrain from any assumptions that research participants think about social class in the same way as the researcher. The various ways in which social class comes to be envisioned and articulated by different audiences or news publics are illustrated in chapter 5.



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The operation of gender in the reception process is no less difficult to document with a degree of comprehensiveness that will satisfy the abundance of critics. Gray (1992), Morley (1986), and Radway (1984) have all been accused, rightfully or not, of deterministic and essentialist renderings of its importance within reception. One of the methodological complications that arises in this respect is that, where men and women are interviewed together, whether in focus groups or households, it may restrict or otherwise modify women’s responses. Gray (1992, 12) deliberately set out to overcome the tendency of many women to report about other family members rather than talk about themselves. She chose to exclude men and children from her sample on the grounds that, in her words: “Women are far too readily seen as representatives of their families by researchers and the state alike, and my concern here is to address them as individuals occupying particular positions, and not to lose sight of their own distinctive viewpoints.” Despite the distinctively gendered patterns of television viewership, however, it is inappropriate to exclude those who are regular participants in the everyday social interactions that serve as important mediational forces in everyday interpretations of televisual texts. Hence, in the present analysis, women were interviewed together with men and adult offspring in those cases in which men and/or adult offspring were co-resident in their households. The concurrent use of news diaries and questionnaires in conjunction with the interviews, and the triangulation of all three data sources, serves to offset, at least to some extent, these methodological concerns. The multiplicity of conditions that affect these interpretations are but one of a mélange of methodological challenges posed by audiences research. These challenges include, first and foremost, the recruitment of research participants and the related issue of sample size. All hopes of a systematically representative sample must be abandoned at the outset. The only means to approach a representative sample would be to undertake a clearly inappropriate and inevitably unsatisfactory quantitative survey. Quantitative data can shed light upon issues of access and the quantitative dimensions of usage, such as reported hours of weekly television viewing, yet such data are plainly inadequate either as a means to unravel the act of reading a televisual text or as a means to assess the broader politico-ideological implications of that act. Apart from target sampling, other less desirable methods, such as quota and snowball sampling,

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may need to be employed. The economic and other practicalities of research design, set against the sheer magnitude of the object of analysis, have led to frustration and cynical resignation on the part of some communication scholars who believe that such research can only ever be “local and partial” (Anderson 1996, 79; yet see also Barker 2006). Inevitably, limited sample sizes are accompanied by a loss of generalizability, a not inconsiderable sacrifice in view of the funds and the time required to conduct such research. Within the primary reception setting of the household, there is the need to question individual informants and, at the same time, to observe the mediations of other household members during the reception experience. This is essential in order to minimally capture the sociality of television usage within the spatial parameters of alternative household contexts. As some have suggested, it could even be seen to require a minimum of two researchers at each session at each household in a sample. If the analysis extends to other social contexts, such as recreational or workplace settings, it would follow that a whole team of observers would be required to fully capture each nuance of interaction whereby media messages are discussed and mediated. The household, after all, is only one of many social settings in which individuals negotiate and renegotiate their interpretations of media material. In effect, the process of reception can potentially occur in every conceivable social setting. That reality places the challenges of “dispersed audiences” and “nomadic subjects” among the methodological complexities associated with qualitative audiences research. In the best, and bestfunded, of all possible research worlds, it would mean the need to meet repeatedly with research participants in different settings and under different circumstances throughout a (preferably) long-term period. Other epistemological issues that arise are common to fieldwork generally. As mentioned earlier, there is the impact of differences in the social characteristics of the researchers and the researched. Seiter (1999) counts herself among the many who consider the very presence of the researcher to have a strong, inescapable impact upon the interactions of the observed and the limits of what is expressed. In addition to attentive observation of non-verbal communication, she recommends that research participants be offered more than one opportunity to communicate with the researcher and more than one means to do so – yet another reason to ­pursue



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a multi-modal approach. There are, of course, numerous limitations to interview-based research and to small group research, and these, too, are long familiar to sociologists and other social scientists.4 There is the “halo effect” which occurs as participants may be inclined to respond defensively about their media usage, particularly their usage of television. Alasuutari (1992) delineates the “moral hierarchy” of television program genres, according to which research participants may discuss their news viewing as if it were a civic duty, while their discussions of fictional programs are often prefaced by excuses or explanations. The “new agenda” proposed by Alasuutari and others for twentyfirst century understandings of reception seeks to grasp the “big picture,” as he describes it, to pursue the “big question” of the place of media within the larger society (Alasuutari 1999, 7). That may include questions about the meanings of particular media to particular social groups, yet it also includes questions about the larger political issues that surround media production, media messages, and media usage. Analytically, the new agenda offers a means to reclaim the importance of fieldwork with audiences and to reap all of its benefits by means of extensive, first-hand observations and depth interviews in conjunction with qualitative surveys and viewer diaries (see also Hobson 2008; Livingstone 2010; Ruddock 2008). Where these methods are used in conjunction with each other, the limitations of one method can be offset at least to some extent by the concurrent use of other methods, particularly if the research design is sensitive to each of the various intricacies of reception. There are a number of ways in which many of the epistemological challenges of such research can be met. Clearly, it is useful to call upon a variety of modes of qualitative and quantitative data collection, such as structured questionnaires, semi-structured viewer diaries, and, most important, extensive field observations, including preferably large numbers of lengthy, unstructured interviews in conjunction with direct and indirect examinations of how television usage operates within a diversity of social settings. Demographic and usage data derived from questionnaires can be utilized to inform the direct field observations of the interactions of household members around the television set. More qualitative commentaries obtained from viewer diaries can also be assessed against these direct in-home observations. This is precisely the methodological rationale and procedure that is followed in the present analysis.

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The collection of these multiple datasets, even if on a grand scale, still requires that one assess all of the data with a view to those “big questions” regarding the place of journalism in the larger society, including the extent to which it contributes to the formulation and reproduction of “common sense” as well as the ways in which it serves to exclude entire social groups from the so-called “public” sphere. As a prerequisite to understanding the social relations that connect individual research participants, there is also a need to abandon, as much as possible, the treatment of participants as individuals. Dayan (2001, 743, emphasis added) argues that “watching television is always a collective exercise, even when one is alone in front of the set.” The very act of television viewing necessarily engages one with a “public” and with a sense of what comprises “public” or common knowledge. That same sense of common knowledge is called upon by television journalists, who feel obliged to draw from it in order to render intelligible their presentations of news stories. The obligation is deeply embedded within professional journalistic ideologies and practices; hence, the critical need to study reception in conjunction with production, or at least to incorporate into one’s explanations of reception a serious consideration of the ways in which production practices, and the presentational structures of televisual information that result from them, powerfully shape reception outcomes. While Dayan’s line of argument follows a very different route, he nonetheless offers another distinctive insight where he states that “the point is no longer to remain preoccupied with the response (good or bad, homogeneous or diverse) given to texts or programmes ... It is rather that of the formation of a common sense or public opinion” (756). Similarly, it is argued here that only by means of analyses attuned to the integral relationship between production and reception will the dynamics of the process whereby “common sense prevails” come to light. At a very early stage of his ethnographic work, Morley (1974) identified a range of important characteristics of audiences to be considered in any reception analysis, including social class, gender, age, ethnicity, region of residence, and level of formal educational attainment. All of these characteristics were seen to correspond with different audience groups and subgroups and, likewise, with alternative cultural codes and meaning systems. At that early juncture in the emergence of “ethnographic” audiences research, ­Morley wrote that “what is needed is the development of a ‘cultural



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map’ of the audience so that we can begin to see which classes, sections of classes and subgroups share which cultural codes and meaning systems, to what extent” (12). Together with Morley’s later work (see especially Morley 1980, 1986, 1992), Ang’s work (see especially Ang 1985b, 1991, 1996) contributed profoundly to the continuing debate about how television audiences should be investigated. In Desperately Seeking the Audience (1991), she claims that our knowledge of audiences has been formed and shaped by what she calls “the institutional point of view.” This point of view – the way in which industry and mainstream academic research were inclined to perceive audiences – has prevented, she argues, a genuine understanding of audiences. Ang insists upon a perspective that is sensitive to the everyday experiences and practices of actual audiences. Institutional knowledge, according to Ang, is formed by the industry’s need to “get” an audience. Perceived as a singular entity, the audience as seen by the industry is a taxonomic collective, a collection of individuals with identifiable and categorizable attributes: age, gender, and so forth. Ang argues that this view of “the audience” is a discursive construct that fails to match any actual audience, which, in turn, explains why broadcasting organizations are bound to be “desperately seeking the audience.” Despite sophisticated methods of audience measurement (see Webster, Phalen, and Lichty 2013), the industry is never truly assured that it will reach targeted audiences. In Ang’s view, audiences can be seen as whimsical, unpredictable, and constantly changing their preferences; therefore, the attempt to describe the audience in neatly defined categories is in itself absurd. She proceeds to describe the uncomfortable relationship between both private and public broadcasting organizations and their respective audiences. Although the two types of organizations differ in their conceptualizations – private broadcasters are more inclined to see audiences as consumers to be sold to advertisers, while public broadcasters are more often obliged to see audiences as citizens to be educated and informed – both lack insight into the behaviour of their viewers. Ang provides detailed insights into institutional conceptualizations of audiences and the difficulties encountered in their efforts to attract viewers. Finally, she points out that communication researchers have often too easily adopted the institutional point of view. She argues that mainstream communication research, with its search for generalizations, stands

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in total contrast to the “ethnographic” approach that she advocates. Rather than seek to generalize, Ang suggests that such research need only ask how specific audiences differ in the social production of meaning within their daily lives. She also emphasizes the diverse social settings in which media are received. Unfortunately, Ang’s extensive attention to diverse textual readings and diverse social settings has led her to be identified, along with Fiske (see, for example, Fiske 1984, 1986, 1989, 1990, 2011), as a celebratory populist whose approach conforms with a liberal pluralist interpretation of reception. Despite that inclination in the work of some audiences researchers, there has been a definitive overall shift towards research that embraces a model of active audiences. The bulk of this literature stresses the diversity of textual interpretations, the importance of the ways in which programs are processed in everyday discourse with others about media output, the skills used by audiences to criticize what is seen and heard, and the ways in which television, in particular, is persistently referenced to everyday life.5 A related concern is to identify the ways in which ICTs are actively incorporated into, and embedded within, the daily routines of family life and the micro-geography of the household, including the dynamics of gender relations within households.6 As discussed earlier, critics of active audiences models raise several significant issues. Those who prefer to argue that texts are more inclined to constrain audiences than to activate them find that the active audiences concept tends to overstate the agency of audiences in the reception process. It is frequently pointed out that active audiences studies are inclined to underplay the overriding weight of the preferred, or hegemonic, reading that is invariably inscribed into a text, along with the inescapable limitations that a hegemonic reading places upon both the agency of audiences and alternative readings (see, for example, Philo 2008). A second and closely related problem arises out of the confusion between active readers and resistant readers, in that the active reader is not necessarily resistant, although this is frequently implied. The confusion, however, is needless. To be active in one’s reading of a text is not in itself “empowering,” nor should it imply the capacity to resist. Audiences can actively derive their own interpretations of texts without any implication that the preferred reading has been subverted. In any event, even when a subsection of the audience subverts the



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­ referred reading of a text, others in that audience are likely to find p their perspectives confirmed or reinforced by the preferred reading (see Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998; Cobley 1994). Critics also raise the issue that the centrality of the concept of active audiences, and the emphasis upon the polysemic nature of the text, run the risk that “the issue of power will slide off the agenda altogether or, more likely, will be allocated a less central place in the theoretical debate and ensuing empirical work” (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998, 30). Both Curran and Morley point out other implications for the structure and regulation of broadcasting: The implicit valorization of audience pleasure in this work leads easily into a cultural relativism which, as Curran notes, is readily incorporated into a populist neo-liberal rhetoric which would abandon any concern with cultural values – or “quality” television – and functions to justify the positions of the deregulators who would destroy any version of public service broadcasting (Morley 1992, 26) Most fundamentally, the active audiences approach has been accused of a failure to connect its results to “the complex economic determinations, technological and policy changes occurring around television nationally and internationally” (McGuigan, cited in Ang 1996, 9). In response, Ang (1996, 10) admits to the gap between the economic and the cultural “in most audience studies, new or otherwise,” yet, as she argues, there is a need to proceed beyond the view that “attention to the ‘active audience’ is necessarily antagonistic to a consideration of media power.” To some extent, this can be seen to place the categorization of her work as “celebratory populism” into question. Deacon, Fenton, and Bryman (1999, 7) question the utility of the perceived opposition between, on the one hand, those who insist that media inevitably constrain the beliefs of audiences and, on the other hand, those who insist that audiences have the capacity to “resist all manner of ideology by generating meanings entirely of their own making.” Where audiences or users generate their own content, as in the case of citizen journalism or ugc texts, these same claims are reiterated at a much grander level. With respect to research preoccupations, a fundamental split was created between those focused upon political economy and the process of media

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(especially news) production and those focused upon the process of reception. Deacon, Fenton, and Bryman point to evidence that the divide has mellowed somewhat and to indications that audiences researchers have also mellowed their stance. As discussed, the active audiences approach has been generally criticized for its tendency to distract attention from the social reality of media as instruments of power. At the same time, in the case of some active audiences studies, there have been suggestions that research evidence has been misinterpreted. The common finding that audiences derive their own pleasures from texts does not necessarily justify the conclusion that audiences derive their own interpretations or undermine the inscribed messages of those texts. While audiences are active in their consumption of texts, it should not be implied that audiences are necessarily critical or that alternative views are necessarily generated. A related criticism is that the active audiences approach fails to recognize that authors of texts are able to frame issues and messages through both what is present in the text and what is absent. Indeed, the silences can be just as potent as the manner in which the text is framed and the substantive messages that are present within the text. Second, Deacon, Fenton, and Bryman (1999, 7) suggest that, as a result of increased sensitivity to the framing power of texts, more circumscribed accounts of the active engagement of audiences emerged. These are more readily inclined to acknowledge that, while audiences at different social locations may arrive at distinctive interpretations of a text, the essential hegemonic effectivity of the text is rarely subverted in the process. As a result, the capacity of news producers to frame reception remains largely unchallenged. Third, Deacon, Fenton, and Bryman observe that a number of key scholars in active audiences research later distanced themselves from it to a degree. In fact, as early as 1990, Ang expressed concern that such reception studies are too myopic in that there is a tendency to isolate and, thereby, over-emphasize the significance of a single moment in the overall process of production and reception. In her view, there is also a tendency to under-emphasize the wider socio-cultural conditions of audience practices. At the time, she proposed that “what we need is not more ethnographic work on discrete audience groups, but on reception as an integral part of popular cultural practices that articulate both ‘subjective’ and ‘objective,’ both ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ processes” (Ang 1990, 244;



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see also Schrøder 1994, 340). Later, in a work subtitled Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World, Ang (1996) makes the crucial point that to be “active” is not the same as to be “powerful” and that the extent to which audiences genuinely exert power over the text is limited. Likewise, Morley (1993, 15), in his article titled “Active Audience Theory: Pendulums and Pitfalls,” criticizes the neglect in most active audiences research of “the economic, political, and ideological forces acting on the construction of texts.” These points can be usefully situated within the broader agencyversus-structure debates, in which, historically at least, cultural studies and other humanities-based approaches were inclined to emphasize agency while political economy and other social science approaches insisted upon greater attention to social structures. Fortunately, there has been a progressive movement towards a middle ground that reconciles the conflict between the two approaches. It is reflected, for example, in Hackett and Carroll’s epigraph to this chapter, which exemplifies a more balanced compromise: namely, a recognition that audiences, like journalists, are at one and the same time both creative and constrained in their interpretations of texts. Lewis (1991, 61) observes that “television’s power lies in the specificities of its encounter with the audience.” As he immediately proceeds to acknowledge, however, this idea is “often difficult to grasp empirically.” The issue of how the idea works in practice remains full of methodological puzzlement. Much of the complexity derives from the nascent discovery that specific readings of texts originate in both macro-social structural forces (such as class and gender inequalities) as well as in micro-social conditions and circumstances (such as household dynamics), which can serve to mediate the larger macro-social structural forces that are operative (see also Schrøder 1994, 339). What further complicates any research design is the reality that reception occurs in a variety of settings, of which the household is but one – albeit primary – setting. Moreover, reception is mediated and negotiated in a still greater variety of multiple social settings. Schrøder points out that even research which summons together naturally interactive social groups, such as families or peer groups, is problematic in that each member of such a group, or “interpretive community,” is simultaneously a member of many other social groups. Just by virtue of the act of selecting one of these as the unit of analysis, the researcher unavoidably accords priority to that unit of analysis, to the necessary exclusion

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or ­neglect of all other interpretive communities to which the individual belongs (341): If, say, we wanted to explore the role of broadcast news and its social signifying processes among the population of a country, it would be impossible to do justice to the vastness of this subject through a study of one interpretive community. To interview families/households, for instance, is clearly insufficient if one wants to capture the multiple interpersonal discourses through which people make sense of the news. (Schrøder 1994, 341–2) Despite that acknowledgment, Schrøder’s “solution” is “to use the individual interview in the informant’s home as the research setting that best does justice to the whole array of cultural discourses that the individual inhabits” (342). After all, one need not directly observe the individual in each and every possible social setting that she or he might inhabit. While the individual is situated in the household setting, one can at least raise questions about the multiple socio-cultural circumstances and scenarios that might contribute to her/his readings and uses of television or other media. As Schrøder concludes, “this is ultimately an empirical question” (ibid.). Because the dominant setting of reception research is the household, there are potentially useful linkages between discussions of households in the family studies literature and discussions of household media reception in the communication studies literature. There is much to be gained from the intersection of communication studies and family studies, especially if one is concerned to unravel the operation of the reception process within its everyday household context. For example, there is a tendency within audiences research to treat families and households in a monolithic manner, to consider so-called “nuclear” families almost exclusively, and to overlook the extensive and increasing diversity of family forms and household types within contemporary societies, including one-­parent households, child-free families, gay families, multi-­ generational households, one-person households, and so forth. In other words, there is a tendency to overlook the variety of ways in which households are differentially structured, which, in turn, leads to differential configurations of interactional dynamics, which, in turn, can be expected to result in additionally differential patterns



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of media usage and reception experiences. There are also several components of media usage patterns that can be distinguished, including the type and quantity of media available within a household, the extent of usage, gendered patterns of usage, and, not unrelatedly, power and control over media usage as it is exercised within the patterned interactional dynamics of household reception experiences. The importance of a comparative dimension in the study of media usage across different household types is at least implied by Ang, Morley, and others. Morley (1994, 107), for example, refers to “seemingly elementary considerations – such as the determining effect of the structure and size of the domestic space available to different families – that have been improperly neglected by researchers in this field to date.” While it may not have been his intent, we might interpret his use of “structure” to include household composition, a micro-level social condition that clearly structures the domestic spaces in which media are experienced. A tremendous amount can be gleaned from the sociological and other scholarly literature regarding families and households that sheds light upon the reception process, which continues to occur principally within the household and within a complex set of interactional family dynamics. For example, the family studies literature is contemporarily inclined to reject the use of “the family” because it is understood to be a monolithically biased conceptualization of the primary object of analysis, not unlike the problematic use of “the audience” in the singular. In its place, there is a renewed focus upon “households” in the plural and the polysemic character of diverse household structures (Eichler 1997). Another example of pertinent family studies scholarship is Zaretsky’s (1976, 61) historical analysis of the process whereby the household was transformed from a unit of production into a unit of consumption, including media consumption, which seemingly created “a new sphere of social activity” distinct from the mode of production. Tomlinson (cited in Morley 1994) carries the analysis further in his discussion of the ongoing development of the household as a self-­contained and self-sufficient unit of consumption, ever-transforming in a continuing process of privatization. Additionally, there is the relative wealth of sociological literature about the gendered division of household labour, crudely yet succinctly captured in the observation that the household is principally a site of leisure for men and an ambiguous site of labour

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and leisure for women (e.g., Armstrong and ­ Armstrong 1994; ­Coltrane 2000; Davies and Carrier 1999; Doucet 2001; Eichler and Albanese 2007; Eichler et al. 2010; Hank and Jurges 2007; and, classically, Luxton 1980). This literature should be seen as required reading prior to the formulation of any explanations of the highly gendered patterns of media usage within households. What needs to be explored is how these contributions could intersect in such a way as to construct a comprehensive and sensitive analysis of the reception process. Morley (1994, 104–5) perhaps comes closest to such an intersection in that his work begins from the premise that any analysis of the uses of ICTs must confront a set of parallel oppositions, including public/private, masculine/feminine, production/ consumption, and labour/leisure. One of Silverstone’s (1994, 33) earlier formulations articulated that household reception occurs within a complex social setting in which different patterns of cohesion and dispersal, authority and submission, freedom and constraint, are expressed in the various subsystems of conjugal, parental, or sibling relationships and in the relationships that the family has between itself and the outside world. These relationships are played out in variously cramped or expansive, highly differentiated or undifferentiated domestic spaces; and they are played out through variously organized or disorganized, routinized or chaotic domestic temporalities. They are played out in public and they are played out in private. Patterns of media consumption – especially television viewing – are generated and sustained within these social, spatial, and temporal relations. He acknowledges that some reception researchers, such as Lull and Morley, are attentive to family structures and family dynamics, “yet these researchers need to recognize ... that families are problematic entities” (Silverstone 1994, 33). In this regard, he points to the quantitative decline of so-called “nuclear” families and the concomitant growth in the numbers of one-parent as well as oneperson households. In his observations of the debates about families and television in the uk, Silverstone notes that, while television has often been perceived as a displacement of other family activities or as somehow destructive of family relations – the nature, path, and repercussions of the destruction are rarely elaborated,



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let alone documented, in these more or less exclusively speculative and unidirectional moral debates – it has also been perceived as both a focus of family activities and as a resource (37). The idea of television’s status as a resource harks back to the work of uses and gratifications researchers who studied media usage from this perspective during the 1940s (for example, Berelson 1949; Herzog 1942; ­Suchman 1942).7 Yet, despite its attention to the context of media usage, uses and gratifications research is fundamentally centred upon the individual, addressed to the central research questions of how individuals use media products and what gratifications are derived from them. Lull’s (1990, 146–73) discussion of cultural variations in family viewing and the rituals and rules of social interaction within households moves further towards a comprehensive and contextualized understanding of the reception process. His notion of “cultural variation” extends to three levels of analysis: the first level is “the culture,” which refers to characteristics of a social context beyond the micro-level parameters of the household; the second level is “the household,” which encompasses the structure of family relations as well as the physical place in which television is experienced; and the third level of analysis is “the person” (151). He acknowledges that television viewing occurs most commonly within the household, understood to be a complex, intricate mix of persons, social roles, power relations, ritual activities, processes of interpersonal communication, physical factors that characterize the household environment, and technological equipment (159). Television is seen to serve a variety of purposes in everyday family relations. In households with children, it can be called upon to alleviate somewhat the burden of child care by occupying the attention of children while other household labour is performed. In one-parent households, it is sometimes used to play out symbolically the role of the second parent. And in all but one-person households, it can be incorporated into strategies to avoid physical and/or emotional contact with other household members. As Morley (e.g., 1980, 1986), Rogge and Jensen (1988), and others demonstrate, the uses and patterns of television viewing may be highly routinized, yet are not at all static. Where household circumstances change – for example, where the composition of the household changes or where a member becomes unemployed – family viewing patterns can be dramatically affected with respect

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to the amount of viewing, the content of viewing, and the linkages between viewing and other household activities. In the case of a coupled household struck by unemployment, relations between partners can be expected to change as new viewing patterns are negotiated in order to arrive at a viable arrangement that will work within the nexus of prefigured social relations in the household. Another potential source of family conflict is related to the gendered patterns of television consumption within households. As Morley (1994, 108) expresses it: “Men’s and women’s differential positions in the domestic sphere – home as, fundamentally, a site of leisure for the one but, more contradictorily, a site of both leisure and work for the other – determines their differential relation to television.” One might expect that these well-established gender-based patterns would lead to a consideration of differential reception experiences in households in which both genders are represented, yet that has not always been the case. Morley’s own classical analysis in Family Television (1986) clearly reveals the structuring effect of gender relations, whereby gender is consistently associated with distinctive viewing patterns, amounts and styles of viewing, and distinctive program preferences. Furthermore, it has been well established, by Morley and others, that power and control over program choice are very much the outcome of gender relations. What needs to be acknowledged, therefore, in any analysis of reception is the critical connection between the social construction of gender and the domestication of television (see chapter 5). Clearly, reception analysis can benefit from the use of a variety of research methods. It can also be useful to collect both qualitative and quantitative data. Schlesinger and his colleagues (1992), for example, in their analysis of women’s responses to televised violence against women, obtained quantitative data from questionnaires about personal backgrounds and individual responses to screenings of televisual violence as well as qualitative data from group discussions of the programs. In this case, interviews with women in their family context were ruled out in order to enable women to express their views freely, especially in situations where family violence prevailed. The questionnaire data made it possible to more fully understand how the social characteristics of viewers shaped their responses. The use of quantitative data in this manner, to identify broader patterns, provides reinforcement to qualitative results focused upon a limited number of interpretative positions



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(to the possible neglect of others). In this manner, as Schlesinger and his colleagues suggest, quantitative and qualitative results can be synthesized into a more comprehensive and more fully contextualized analysis of reception. However, the seven-nation News of the World project researchers provide reminders of the limitations of quantitative methods in this field and call for the consolidation of qualitative methodologies: Certain aspects of communication and reception can only be known by qualitative inquiry ... and do not lend themselves to hypothetico-deductive forms of research, representative samples, standardized categories of analysis, and the quantitative processing of data sets. The alternative would be either willful ignorance or a forcing of alien analytical categories on to, in this case, media experience as situated in cultural contexts ... The most general implication of the News of the World project is a plea for the consolidation of qualitative methodologies in media and communication research. (Jensen 1998, 193–4) As discussed in the first chapter, the current inventory of literature addressed to journalism divides into three broad categories: production research, research concerned with the text of what is produced, and reception research. To a regrettably large extent, each of these constitutes a separate, non-integrated corpus of work. Within the first category, three subcategories are identifiable: first, occupational studies of journalism, including those of the traditional sociology of occupations and professions genre (e.g., ­Dickinson 2007; Johnstone, Slawski, and Bowman 1976; Tunstall 1971) and those of the phenomenological mode (pivotally, Tuchman 1972, 1973, 1976, 1977, 1978); second, the tradition of gatekeeper studies (classically, White 1950); and third, short- and long-term studies of the production process (among the many, Altheide 1976; ­Caldwell 2008; Epstein 1973; Halloran, Elliott, and Murdock 1970; Ryfe 2009, 2012). Production studies can also be typologized according to the object of analysis, as follows: studies of journalists, studies of news selection (the gatekeeper tradition), studies of the treatment of particular events or short-term production studies, and, finally, studies of the overall production process or long-term production studies. These categories are neither mutually exclusive nor necessarily mutually incompatible.

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What needs to be emphasized is that we can accommodate the insights of all of these production studies within our analyses of reception. Indeed, it is argued here that we need to use these insights to at least partially explain the patterns according to which reception experiences are configured. The epigraph to this chapter expresses a crucial point that captures the essence of the reception process and, at the same time, strikes a wise balance within the agency-versus-structure dilemma. Hackett and Carroll’s (2006, 30) beautifully succinct statement posits that “audiences actively interpret media texts, but not under conditions of their own choosing.”8 As audiences, the conditions not of our choosing include the very conditions of our existence, especially those associated with our social location. Those conditions can be expected to shape our interpretations of news texts in particular ways, or to at least steer our interpretations in particular directions. Those conditions not of our choosing are also very directly a consequence of the conditions of news production, which inevitably shape the nature of the news texts that we receive as news audiences. Within the limits imposed by those structural forces that act upon news texts and upon ourselves as audiences, we nevertheless do have agency – that is, we most certainly have the capacity and the means to actively resist the hegemonic messages inscribed in the texts. However, while we can act, we are also acted upon. As a neo-Marxist theorist, Gramsci was concerned to accommodate such agency within his formulations regarding everyday, individualized consent in a manner that was not easily afforded by classical Marxism. Bagley (2001) elucidates Gramsci’s contributions to the shift away from a straightforward determinism and towards an understanding of daily, individual activity which requires that we either consent to, or dissent from, the hegemonic views that we encounter every day in our television spectatorship and our other experiences. As Bagley emphasizes, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony “is indeed collective, shared by the mass of individuals, yet that collectivity will always remain connected to an a priori conscious exercise of individual will, a will attracted, consenting, to the common view” (445). As communication scholars, we do need to at least address, if not dwell principally upon, “the big picture” in our reception studies, whether apart from or in conjunction with the analysis of specific texts and/or their reception. In that pursuit, we cannot expect to overcome, although we can remain sensitive to, all of the



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e­ pistemological issues that have been identified, such as: the sample recruitment and selection issues; the phenomenon of observer’s paradox, which arises necessarily as we observe reception experiences; the halo effect, which can lead research participants to respond defensively about their television spectatorship and other media usage routines; the need to encourage participants to make explicit what is often a private and tacit process of negotiation with media material; the need to question individual participants and to simultaneously observe the mediations of family members during reception experiences; the possible need to meet repeatedly with participants under different circumstances and in different reception settings; the impact of differences in the social characteristics of the researcher and the researched; and – not least – the inevitably limited sample sizes and the accompanying loss of generalizability. Is it even possible to envisage a research design that might overcome each of these potential limitations as well as others that might be specified? No. Yet we can retain a sensitivity to their impact upon the research that we produce and their possible impact upon our interpretations of research results. Where, for example, our social characteristics conflict with those of our research participants, we cannot expect to overcome that, or even be fully attuned to the methodological and specifically analytical repercussions of those differences.9 At the same time, however, we must not permit either these belaboured epistemological disputes or any social differences between research participants and ourselves to preclude our engagement with audiences research. While it is undoubtedly costly, difficult, and “slippery” research (Bagley 2001, 436), it remains precisely the sort of research that must be done as part and parcel of any argumentation that even remotely alludes to the social significance of media. To those who insist upon generalizable and verifiable explanations, Barker (2003, 7, emphases in original) articulates one very important epistemological hurdle: There may be ways in which qualitative research, differently conceptualized and on some specific questions, may be able to give us checkable, generalizable explanatory models of media/audience relations. To get to this point, we may have to give up certain still common assumptions – the most critical of which is that from the point of view of research, all audience members are equal.

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We can generalize about audiences to some extent, we can identify commonalities in reception experiences, and, at the same time, we must be attentive to the divisions and inequalities between and within audiences – above all, class and gender inequalities, which are arguably the most primary. There is a need to connect generalizations about reception experiences directly to these grander macro-social phenomena, especially social inequalities, which figure so powerfully in the ways in which journalism is experienced and in the ways in which the social world is encountered and understood by different audiences comprised of differently situated social groups. Reception analysis that is attuned to the fundamental social stratification of news publics can also provide a means to “theorize context as socially determining,” as Radway (1991, 6) suggests in her reflections upon her own analysis. Yes, there are countless complexities associated with both reception and our analysis of it, yet those must not be permitted to obscure the fundamental relationships that are observably at play in the connections between audiences and texts.10 Through the course of her reflections, Radway reiterates the importance of one of these fundamental relationships: In fact, there are patterns or regularities to what viewers and readers bring to texts in large part because they acquire specific cultural competencies as a consequence of their particular social location. Similar readings are produced, I argue, because similarly located readers learn a similar set of reading strategies and interpretive codes that they bring to bear upon the texts they encounter (8).11 A perhaps even greater insight is provided by her insistence upon the need “to distinguish analytically between the significance of the event of reading and the meaning of the text constructed as its consequence” (Radway 1991, 7, emphasis in original). Hence, while interviewees in the present analysis were observed in the act of reading particular news texts, and while news diarists often wrote about their readings of particular news texts during the act of reading itself, there is no concern here to document all of the specific interpretations that pertained to specific news texts. Similarly, there is no textual analysis, nor is there a need to undertake one. While textual analysis can provide rich insights into reception, a primary objective here is to pursue the central arguments that texts are p ­ rincipally



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the outcome of production infrastructures and their intrinsic constraints and that textual interpretations are socially situated rather than exclusively resident within specific news texts. This is the grander significance of the “event” of reading texts to which Radway refers. Not incidentally, Radway (1991, 5) also stresses the need to differentiate clearly between respondents’ remarks and one’s observations about them, a consideration that is also reflected in the presentation of the analysis here.12

THE CONTINUING PRIMACY OF TELEVISION JOURNALISM Those writers who proclaim the “death” or the “end” of television usually do so without reference to usage data. Some of these writers also unfortunately display, tacitly if not overtly, the class bias of those who regard television as a culturally inferior medium and who dismiss television spectatorship on the basis of a misperception that it is a principally working-class activity. There can also be a gender bias expressed by those who regard television as a “feminine” and “passive” medium and who dismiss television viewership as principally the domain of women. In reality, there is nothing in the usage data to indicate the death of television. On the contrary, those data demonstrate lucidly and strongly that television remains the dominant medium in the early twenty-first century, just as it has always dominated other media since the time of its introduction in the mid-­twentieth century. What some have mistaken as its death is nothing more than the apparent loss of a particular feature of the television reception experience that was more apparent during the early decades of the medium’s use. What has perhaps been lost to some extent, in the words of Katz (2009a, 7), is the television of “sharedness,” or the shared experience of television (with the possible exception of sports): The television of “sharedness” – of nation-building and family togetherness – is no longer with us, having made room for a television of hundreds of channels, of “niche” broadcasting, of portability, one that is part of a system that integrates with the Internet and the other new media. One might say that television is retracing the footsteps of radio, which, miniatured and modulated, has now become everyman’s [sic] personal companion,

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where, to exaggerate, no two people are attending the same program at the same time. Others describe the phenomenon as television’s shift from a “collectivist” phase to an “individualist” phase. Alternatively, television reception can be seen as an increasingly privatized experience, in that it is received via multiple digital and non-digital, mobile and stationary platforms, often delivered through communication vehicles directed at personal and private consumption (such as smartphones and tablets). These developments might throw into question whether we can continue to speak of the “sociality” of television usage – except that, as discussed earlier, there are many who insist that it remains a social act even if one views television while entirely alone. Katz (2009a, 11) points out that it was radio broadcasting that first “moved politics inside the home and away from the fervour of the public square,” although, as we have seen, the extent and scope of that perceived fervour is exaggerated in contemporary Habermasian references to a public sphere. The Canadian data are especially definitive regarding the consistent and continuing pre-eminence of television over all other media, with respect to: (1) its assured presence within Canadian households, all but a few of which are equipped with television and the majority of which are multi-set households; (2) the sheer number of weekly hours in which Canadians have historically been and continue to be tuned to television;13 and (3) the extent to which it continues to be the primary source of news about the social world, whether that news is derived directly from television or via popular television news websites such as cbc.ca and ctv.ca. In October of 2012, the Canadian Journalism Foundation (cjf) released data which again confirm that so-called “old,” or traditional, media – most importantly, television – continue to trump the internet as a news source (see cjf 2012a). The most pertinent data from that source and others are summarized in table 3.1. In terms of direct comparisons between television and internet use, Catherine Murray (2010, 88) examines historical as well as contemporary tendencies, with the following result: “Historical analysis shows that total time spent with the internet is still barely one-­ seventh of the time spent viewing television, which is at historically high levels in Canada and, since 1995, has grown along with time spent with the internet.”14 She assesses the implications as follows:



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Table 3.1 The continuing primacy of television journalism In Canada, the proportion of households that are television-equipped has been persistently at the 99 percent level since the medium was introduced in the 1950s. • Since at least the 1960s, a majority of Canadian households have been multi-set households, equipped with two or more television sets – the figure increased from 54 percent in 1990 to 65 percent in 2005 to 74 percent in the 2012–13 broadcast year. • Television Bureau of Canada (tbc) data regarding the 2012–13 broadcast season confirmed that television has a higher reach (82 percent of adults 18+ reached “yesterday”) than radio (78 percent), the internet (75 percent), newspapers (42 percent), and magazines (25 percent). • More time is spent with television than with any other medium: during 2012–13, adults 18+ used television 29.8 hours per capita weekly, radio 18.3 hours weekly, the internet 18.0 hours weekly, and newspapers 2.1 hours weekly. • Average weekly television viewing hours per capita (adults 18+), which remained steadily in the range between 22.4 hours and 25.0 hours during the 1968–94 period (see Kiefl 1995), increased to 26.1 hours in 1995, 26.3 hours in 2005, and to 29.8 hours weekly during the 2012–13 broadcast season. • In 2012, forty percent of adult Canadians “always” consulted a television newscast daily, compared to 23 percent who “always” consulted a newspaper daily, 14 percent who “always” consulted cbc Radio news broadcasts daily, 13 percent who “always” consulted a daily newspaper’s website, 13 percent who “always” consulted a social media site such as Facebook to obtain daily news, and 10 percent who “always” consulted television news websites. The proportion who “always” or “sometimes” consulted a television newscast daily – 74 percent – also outranked all other news media. •

Sources: bbm, crtc, and Statistics Canada data cited in Television Bureau of Canada (2010, 2013); Canadian Journalism Foundation (2012a); crtc (2013); Kiefl (1995).

So if the internet does not displace television viewing, are there signs that engagement with it more and more resembles television? ... Certainly, online presence is reinforcing Canadian media outlets. Among the major media brands visited online, cbc.ca and ctv.ca were tied at 24 percent, tsn and Global both 15 percent and mtv 6 percent, apparently reinforcing the reach of existing producers. (90) As her figure 5.3 (Murray 2010, 92) demonstrates strongly, Canadians overwhelmingly prefer Canadian news programs to foreign newscasts. While the data suggest extensive attention to news, especially news that appears in Canadian news outlets, it cannot be surmised that such high levels of attention to news necessarily imply high levels of satisfaction with the news that is received. On the contrary, the responses of research participants presented in the following chapters convey high levels of dissatisfaction along multiple

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dimensions. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to dispute that, at least minimally, news usage – the term least imbued with connotations of satisfaction or dissatisfaction – is at exceptionally high levels in the adult Canadian population at large. A different source, the 2003 Statistics Canada General Social Survey on Social Engagement, reported that 89 percent of Canadians followed news and current affairs daily or several times a week (Foote 2007, cited in Murray 2010, 94). Interestingly, the quantitative survey data, which are gathered much more frequently (by private- and public-sector research agencies) than are the qualitative data that truly need to be gathered by communication scholars, regularly indicate enthusiastic interest in local and national news, while successive election studies find that fewer than one in five Canadians report following politics closely. This phenomenon positions Canada fourth in a ranking of seventeen nations in the cross-national study conducted by Gidengil and her colleagues (2004). Like many Western and other societies, frequency of discussion about politics is low and is strongly influenced by gender, education, and income. While news usage levels are high, a majority of Canadians do not ordinarily discuss politics in everyday conversations. The Gidengil team also found a relatively low level of political knowledge of “Canada’s history, geography, system of government, and rights and responsibilities of citizenship” – only one in five of their research participants received a passing grade from the authors (41). Especially interesting is the absence of any significant changes in the low levels of political knowledge that have been documented. While voters report that new information is acquired from election campaign coverage and that it contributes to their decisions, the level of political knowledge during Canadian elections does not change (Gidengil et al. 2004; Murray 2010, 95). In fact, election campaign coverage can actually extend knowledge gaps between women and men, young and old, and the poor and the wealthy. Not unrelatedly, of course, participation in Canadian federal elections has continued to decline since 1988, and voter turnout at all jurisdictional election levels is low, particularly among those born after 1970 (Murray 2010, 95). As Murray concludes, “political scientists have been much more active than communication scholars in exploring the interaction between media consumption and political influence in Canada” (95). She also laments that “critical empirical audience research has been underdeveloped” (97, emphasis in original).



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Beyond Canadian borders, a transnational analysis by Aalberg, van Aelst, and Curran (2010, 257) concludes that “there is not much evidence suggesting that the Internet has been established as a primary source of news, either in Europe or in the United States, save for a minority.” The authors also cite an unpublished 2009 study by Blekesaune and colleagues, based upon European Social Survey (ess) data from thirty European countries, which also indicates that the internet is a supplement, not an alternative, to traditional news media. The relationship between news consumption and political knowledge is discussed at greater length in later chapters.

TELEVISION NEWS RECEPTION IN DIVERSE SOCIAL CONTEXTS Various reception researchers have found that news consumption practices are by no means random but, rather, tend to be highly structured, relatively predictable, and deeply embedded in the everyday routines of the vast majority of Canadian and other populations (see Barfield 2008; Bogart 1989; Eaman 1994; ­Gauntlett and Hill 1999; Hagen 1994a, 1994b; Jensen 1990; Lull 1982; Petryszak 1980; Ross and Nightingale 2003; Staple 1993).15 Some research has been able to readily identify specific periods during the day in which different news media are consumed: typically, radio and newspapers dominate morning consumption, while television news reception occurs most commonly in the evening – not surprising in view of paid and unpaid labour routines and broadcast news program schedules. Interestingly, Boczkowski’s (2010a) study of online news consumers in Argentina highlights the developing body of international research that finds a newer form of news consumption during the period that usually falls between morning radio and evening television – namely, online news consumption at one’s workplace. As he points out, “evidence from North America, Europe, and South America ... converges in signalling the emergence of the workplace and work hours as key spatial and temporal markers of news consumption for a large and growing portion of the public” (471). Perhaps the keyword here is “portion.” As always, there is a need to exercise caution where observations of widespread, revolutionary changes in media usage are concerned, largely because these unfounded observations are often generated by cmc equipment marketers with embedded interests in the

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spread of such beliefs. Based upon what we know of what continues to be limited cmc and internet access at the workplace for most working-class people (recall the discussion of persistent digital divides in the first chapter), it would be difficult to suggest that new patterns of daily online workplace news consumption are evident throughout entire populations. It is more viable to argue that these observations of news consumption routines overlook those other “portions” of populations, such as the very large working-class “portion” and the very large female “portion” in whose cases such daily, fixed routines are not enabled. With regard to women, for example, Gauntlett and Hill (1999, 77) certainly hint at women’s exclusion from these patterns in their statement that “patterns of news consumption can be linked to how much leisure time is available to an individual on a daily basis.” Even more telling is their finding that “men and women like to watch television news and current affairs programmes, although women are less likely to find the time to watch the news” (78). Overall, it appears most accurate to state that the observed routines of daily news consumption become possible if these consumption routines “fit” into the (paid and unpaid) work schedules that must be accommodated within household and workplace routines. Moreover, in the case of the research participants examined in the present analysis, who frequently work a third shift of unpaid volunteer labour in various community organizations, many find it difficult to “fit” news consumption into regular timeslots within their everyday lives. Nevertheless, a clear majority make it a point to consume news in some form and on a daily basis. Many scholars have pointed to the significance of news consumption generally, and household news consumption specifically, within everyday normative social interactions. Some have argued that news consumption is embedded within, and is even a prerequisite to engagement within, the relational structures of everyday life (e.g., Bogart 1955; Chan and Goldthorpe 2007; Martin 2008; Palmgreen, Wenner, and Rayburn 1980; Robinson and Levy 1986; Tewksbury, Hals, and Bibart 2008). There can be little question about its general significance within family dynamics inside private households, where, for example, uses and gratifications researchers have identified a number of secondary functions, or “uses,” of news consumption. Until the 1980s, many scholars associated with the uses and gratifications approach insisted that individuals exercised free choice in their selection of television programs that corresponded



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with their personal interests (e.g., Darmon 1976; Greenberg 1974; Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch 1974b). Subsequently, works by Heeter and Greenberg (1988) and Manschot and van der Brug (1986, cited in Mutsaers 1996) cast doubt upon the free choice of individual viewers, suggesting that the link between viewing behaviour and personal interests is limited and that viewers also watch programs that are (at least initially, at the moment of selection) of no personal interest. This is commonly explained with reference to the temporal and visual nature of the medium, such that viewers can sometimes only determine after a program is seen whether or not it matched their needs or interests (e.g., Comstock 1989). In the absence of empirical support for free choice on the part of individual viewers, sociological concepts such as “primary group” and “significant others” found their way into investigations of television spectatorship as early as the 1950s and 1960s.16 Although not termed as such, the notion of intersectionality entered into the analysis of Riley and Flowerman (1951), who argued that individuals do not simply respond to television as isolated personalities but also as members of their various social groups (see also Riley and Riley 1951, cited in Mutsaers 1996, 89). In the 1960s, scholars such as Forsey (1963) and Wand (1968) first accorded serious attention to the family context of television, carefully clarifying that all household members did not necessarily watch television together. By 1980, Lull (1980) developed his complete typology of the “social uses of television,” which, he argued, indicates how television usage patterns structure social interactions within a family. These were later documented and specified extensively by European scholars such as Mutsaers (1996) and others who demonstrated, for example, that program selection is often a collective activity and that television is often used to make contact or to avoid contact with housemates. With his newer emphasis upon news consumption in the workplace, Boczkowski (2010a, 2010b) appears to almost bemoan the inclinations of both television broadcasters and television scholars to regard the household as the primary site of news reception. One of his distinctive research results suggests that online news reception in the workplace is comparatively tepid or less active than either direct online or television news reception in the privacy of one’s household. His research participants report that conversations about news content with co-workers are very different from such conversations with family members and friends. Co-worker conversations are

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inclined to drift towards “light” topics and work-related news stories and tend to steer clear of “sensitive political or economic topics” (Boczkowski 2010a, 477), whereas “conversations about online news with family and friends are focused on personal matters to a greater degree. They are also more tolerant of contentious arguments over sensitive topics” (478). Ultimately, ­Boczkowski’s analysis demonstrates the continued force of the routines that shape information acquisition – routines that are consequential in household, workplace, and other social contexts. Moreover, his research adds further evidentiary weight to the primacy of the household context as the site in which the most active mediation is likely to occur. Regarding the household context of news reception, a few additional points are important to note. It needs to be stressed that, largely due to the sheer practicalities of research procedures, the household was selected as the site of the research discussed here, particularly for the purposes of the field interviews (although it is increasingly evident that reception occurs in a diversity of social settings). Other reception researchers have also found that the household becomes not only the most practical yet also the most effective site in which to explore experiences of news reception in all of the social contexts in which news is encountered. It is imperative, however, to acknowledge the distinctions between families and households. In Television and Everyday Life (1994), Silverstone rues the absence of a sufficiently clear demarcation between families and households, suggesting that studies of the household context have tended to be studies of families (e.g., Lull 1988; Morley 1986), focused centrally upon television’s place within the internal matrix of family dynamics. This is, of course, important and useful work, yet, as Silverstone urges, we also need to examine households composed of those who are not so-called “nuclear” families. There must be attention to the diversity of household types, including those that consist of only one person (Silverstone 1994, 44–5). This attention was incorporated into the present analysis, and its significance becomes evident in the chapters that follow. Another, much less tangible yet crucial, component of the diversity of social circumstances in which television is received is expressed by the concept of intersectionality. Here it is useful to briefly outline the intersectional significance of some of the various social group memberships that figure within the reception process, such as class, gender, age, education, ethnicity, politico-ideological



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affiliation, religious affiliation, household type, and region of residence. Illustrations of their operation are presented and discussed at greater length in later chapters, yet, at this juncture, it is useful to clarify how intersectionality is treated within the parameters of the present analysis. Unlike those who use the concept in contemporary debates that follow the so-called “psychological turn” within neoliberal social science, in which the inclination is to assume that individual identities are a matter of personal choice, self-selected and chosen freely through consumption activities (including media consumption activities), I concur with Gillespie (1995, 208) and others who are disturbed by the absence of substantial evidence to support these assumptions, by the association of these notions with right-wing discourse regarding consumer choice and freedom, and by “the emergence of the politics of identity as an apparent successor to class politics” (see also Levitas 2008). In her analysis of television reception among Asian youth in the UK, Gillespie clarifies her empirical results as follows: While consumption activities are undoubtedly important, and increasingly so, in constituting identities, there is no significant empirical evidence that the market and the media now shape identities more powerfully than categories of class and ethnicity, religion and “race,” nation and region – at least not for many social groups. Certainly among the youth of Southall, the continuing power of social structures and political power relations is manifest in the range and kind of identities which are ascribed to them and by them to one another, or which are assumed and contested by them. Young people seek to contest, subvert and transform what they experience as imposed, “racialised” or “ethnicised” identities, and consumption practices are one key means of doing so. But class position, which determines differential and unequal access to material and cultural resources, continues to shape consumption practices, and ethnicity and gender also continue to frame the limits of their creative freedom. (14, emphasis added) Gillespie concludes her study with a further important clarification: Though much of this book may be read as an affirmation of media consumers’ resourcefulness in constructing their own

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identities, we should not lose sight of the very real constraints upon their freedom to do so: the nation state continues to define its ethnic minorities as internal others; and class, gender, religion, locality, generation and other factors, which are not freely chosen, continue to set limits on self-invention. (208, emphasis added) Mahtani (2008) appears to be impressed with the seminal research carried out by Gillespie in the uk, and she sets out to conduct a rare and preliminary, yet extremely valuable, analysis of how ethnicity figures within the reception of Canadian English-language television news. Many of her general results regarding news reception are supported by the present analysis (see especially chapter 5). Based upon interviews with journalists as well as focus group research with Chinese and Iranian immigrants in Vancouver, Mahtani’s analysis also aims to flesh out several components of the production-reception relationship. Neither the Chinese-Canadian nor the Iranian-Canadian focus groups were very attracted to channels that catered to “ethnic audiences” – to use that semantically and otherwise problematic phrase – because these channels were seen to “ghettoize” their experiences. Instead, her research participants were inclined to pursue a variety of television news sources as well as multilingual internet news sources. The latter were consulted in their efforts to satisfy a particularly strong interest in international news, and the interest could be more readily pursued thanks to their abilities to visit multilingual sites. Like Ross’s earlier point that there are no “disabled audiences,” the “calendar journalism” often practised by “ethnic” specialty channels fails to appreciate the intersections between ethnicity and other axes of identity as it seeks to attract non-existent “ethnic audiences.”17 Similar results found by British researcher Annabelle Sreberny (2005) led her to conclude that “the challenge is to avoid the ... reductionism of racial and ethnic classifications – and that includes thinking that a minority media channel alone and in itself satisfies the expressive needs of a minority group” (cited in Mahtani 2008, 652). While it is important to appreciate the intersections between various axes of identity, it is clearly not analytically practical to examine all of the conceivable intersections that might be found among news audiences. Hence the central focus here is upon class and gender, both of which are understood to intersect with other axes



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of identity (such as ethnicity), yet which are also understood to constitute independent, non-relativist social conditions that are each fully and independently forceful in shaping reception experiences. If anything, it is perhaps too easy to overstate the intersections between gender and class, gender and age, gender and sexuality, and so forth. This point is addressed by Sarikakis (2011) while she reflects upon the tenth anniversary of the journal Feminist Media Studies. Yes, it is difficult to name “women” as a homogeneous or unitary social group, yet the multiple intersections of class, age, sexuality, and so forth can also be seen as a challenge to adopt “what Arendt named ‘enlarged thought’ that is sensitive to difference, yet not relativist” (119). As Sarikakis proposes, it is precisely that “enlarged thought,” or grander vision, that can free us to go beyond divisions and ruptures in order to observe and appreciate the commonalities of women’s experiences as news workers and as news audiences (see also McKercher and Mosco 2007; McLaughlin 2008).

SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE QUESTIONNAIRE, INTERVIEW, AND NEWS DIARY SAMPLES In order to examine the relationship between news reception and political engagement, the current project called upon a targeted sample of adults, resident in a medium-sized central Canadian city, who were active in a variety of community organizations. The research subjects participate actively in their local, regional, national, and/or international communities and share a commitment to active civic engagement directed at the improvement of those communities. Therefore, it becomes particularly compelling to examine the extent to which their voluntary activities are informed by their news reception. In total, the samples consist of three overlapping participant groups: first, those participants who completed the semi-structured questionnaires circulated to the membership of the community organizations, the group that forms the largest sample; second, those participants within this sample who also agreed to private unstructured household interviews; and third, those participants who also completed semi-structured, one-week news diaries that were also entirely voluntary. As anticipated, the third group of research participants formed the smallest sample. All of the interviewees in each household also completed

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questionnaires, either through their community organizations in advance of their interviews or at the outset of the interviews in their homes, which enabled triangulation of the data collected from their interview and questionnaire responses. In those cases in which news diaries had also been completed, the diaries enabled triangulation of the data gathered from all three sources. In each of the sixty-nine field interviews, the adult members of each household were interviewed extensively before, during, and after their viewing of cbc or ctv network newscasts.18 The selection of newscasts to be viewed was random in that participants viewed the prime-time network newscasts that were broadcast the evening prior to their scheduled interview. The unstructured interviews ranged in length from one to three hours. The interviews enabled direct examinations of how the sociality of television usage operates within a diversity of household settings. Demographic and usage data derived from questionnaires were utilized to inform the direct field observations of the interactions between household members before, during, and following news viewing. More substantive commentaries obtained from both questionnaires and news diaries were also assessed against the results of the direct observations. Also by means of such triangulation, the limitations peculiar to each singular method were minimized to the greatest possible extent. As discussed, reception research samples cannot be systematically representative of entire populations unless one seeks only quantitative survey data, which are extremely restricted in their capacity to provide insights into the complex nuances of the reception process. A targeted sample is also inevitably subject to limitations in that one sacrifices the means to ensure that a diversity of demographic traits are represented. On the other hand, because it is a targeted sample directed at those who are active in community organizations, one should not expect their social traits to mirror those of the population at large. Nevertheless, in the case of the three overlapping samples examined here – the questionnaire sample, the interview sample, and the news diary sample – the research participants represented a wide range of diverse social characteristics. In the case of the first and largest of these samples, a total of 212 questionnaires were completed, including 103 questionnaires that were completed by interviewees as a prerequisite to the private household sessions. The vast majority of these were completed in advance of the interview, with the use of questionnaires that had



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been p ­ reviously distributed to the community organizations. In a few cases, individuals who forgot, lost their questionnaire, or had no time to complete it, proceeded to complete it at the outset of their interview. In this manner, virtually every person interviewed provided the essential demographic, usage, and other quantitative data as well as the qualitative data sought by the questionnaire (see appendix 2). Another 109 members of the community organizations who were not interviewed also completed questionnaires, including sixty-nine persons who completed the questionnaire only and another forty persons who completed the questionnaire as the preface to their news diaries (see appendix 2). The second sample consists of the 103 individuals who participated in the sixty-nine household interviews, while the third sample includes those who completed a total of fifty-six one-week news diaries. Forty of these news diaries were completed by non-interviewees, while another sixteen were completed by those who were interviewed and who thus also completed questionnaires.19 Table 3.2 summarizes the class locations, genders, ages, levels of formal educational attainment, and household types of the three overlapping samples. It can be seen that working-class and middleclass research participants are evenly divided in the news diary sample and close to evenly divided in the questionnaire and interview samples. Women dominate men numerically in all three samples, just as women dominate men numerically in the Canadian population at large: women represented 51 percent of the total population of 33.5 million in the most recent (2011) census.20 The age range of the samples extends from eighteen to eighty-nine years. Research participants are well distributed throughout the age categories in each of the three samples, with some significant differences between the samples in terms of age distribution. While participants are more evenly divided in the questionnaire sample, those under the age of fifty are somewhat overrepresented in the interview sample at 57 percent and somewhat underrepresented in the news diary sample at 36 percent. It might be largely explicable with reference to the respective time commitments of these two different research participation activities. Those under the age of fifty are perhaps less inclined to commit to the completion of a full oneweek news diary and more inclined to agree to a single interview. As the table indicates, the research participants are also well distributed with regard to formal education levels. Finally, it can be seen

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that the participants inhabit a good diversity of household types. Unfortunately, census data are not organized to reflect the full extent of the contemporary diversity of family forms and household types in Canadian society. The most recent census (2011) counted a total of 13.3 million households, of which 3.5 million (26 percent) were occupied by couples with children, 3.9 million (29 percent) by couples without children, 1.4 million (11 percent) by one-­parent households, 3.7 million (28 percent) by single adults, and the remainder – close to a million households – comprise an increasingly vast “other” category that encompasses all other (undifferentiated) household types.21 Overall, therefore, despite the “sectoral” nature of the three samples that were all deliberatively targeted and not intended to be representative, their general social characteristics do mirror, to a remarkably great extent, those of the Canadian adult population at large.

NEWS USAGE PATTERNS OF THE SAMPLES Like the majority of Canadian households, the majority of the households occupied by the research participants were very well equipped with broadcast media. The vast majority of the households were equipped with at least one radio and at least one television, most were equipped with multiple radios and televisions, and 88 percent of all participants lived in cabled households while a further 8 percent lived in households with satellite television service. Only one middle-class subject and one working-class subject, both participants in the questionnaire-only sample, reported that their households were without television. Just four percent reported that their households were without either cable or satellite television service: these included three working-class participants who were all women in one-person households, one middle-class woman who identified newspapers as her primary news source, and two other middle-class women who identified radio as their primary news medium. Additionally, the majority of the total households sampled were equipped with at least one video cassette recorder (vcr), and virtually all of the households in the interview sample were vcrequipped – it was, after all, essential to the interview sessions. Although print media were less directly visible during the interview sessions, questionnaires completed by all three samples reported that newspapers were available regularly in 89 percent of



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Table 3.2 Social characteristics of the samples Questionnaire sample

Interview sample

News diary sample

class Working Middle

53% 47%

54% 46%

50% 50%

gender Female Male

56% 44%

52% 48%

52% 48%

age 18–29 30–39 40–49 50–59 60–69 70–79 80–89

13% 18% 18% 21% 20%  9%  1%

18% 21% 18% 18% 19%  5%  1%

 7% 13% 16% 25% 23% 14%  2%

education Some secondary Secondary graduate Some college College graduate Some university University graduate Graduate degree(s)

14% 23% 11% 14% 11% 17% 10%

 8% 20% 18% 17% 10% 20%  8%

20% 25%  5% 16% 11% 11% 13%

household type Single adult Single adult with children Cohabitational couple Cohabitational couple with children Married couple Married couple with children Multi-generational Unrelated co-residents

21% 10% 10%  5% 28% 15%   6%  5%

18% 12% 12%  8% 21% 16%  6%  8%

27% 11%  9%  2% 32% 13%  5%  2%

Note: “Single” encompasses all those who are unpartnered, including never-married, separated, divorced, and widowed adults; and “with children” signifies children resident in the household. “Multi-generational” households include those in which three or more generations are co-resident, including adult offspring and/or elderly parents. Some column data do not amount to precisely 100 percent due to rounding.

the households while news magazines were available regularly in 39 percent – Maclean’s and Time were specified most frequently. There were no sharply significant class differences in the availability of print news media: for example, newspapers were available regularly in the homes of 85 percent of the working-class participants and in

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Table 3.3 Primary news source by social class

Newspapers Radio Television Internet Unavailable* Totals

Working-Class participants

Middle-Class participants

All participants

 25.0%  20.5%  52.7%   1.8% – 100.0%

 21.0%  22.0%  54.0% –   3.0% 100.0%

 25.0%  21.2%  53.3%   0.9%   1.4% 101.8%**

* While all research participants were asked to identify a single medium as their ­primary news source, two middle-class participants identified newspapers and radio as equally important and a third middle-class participant specified that all media, i­ncluding magazines, were equally important news sources. ** The data in this column amount to more than 100 percent due to rounding.

93 percent of the middle-class participants’ homes. Only 46 percent of all participants’ households featured a computer with internet access, and these were notably class-skewed in their distribution. In the case of the working-class households, eighty-one of the 112 households (72 percent) were without internet-linked computers, whereas all but thirty-four of the middle-class households (66 percent) had such equipment. While the issue of workplace internet access was not addressed formally in the questionnaire, it can at least be noted that no more than a few of the working-class interviewees had the opportunity to use the internet at their workplaces. As table 3.3 illustrates, television was the most important of all these media as the primary news source to 53 percent of all participants, and it ranked at a very similar level of importance to middleclass (54 percent) and working-class (52.7 percent) participants. Newspapers ranked second among working-class participants at 25 percent, radio ranked third at 20.5 percent, and there were only two young male working-class participants, both in the questionnaire-only sample, who identified the internet as their primary news source (1.8 percent). Somewhat ironically, in that the middle class is much better equipped than the working class with internet access, none of the middle-class participants in any of the three samples identified the internet as a primary news source. In their case, radio (at 22 percent) slightly trumped newspapers (21 percent) as the second- and third-ranked primary news sources, respectively.



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It is important to point out that the relative significance of television as a news source may have been understated by some research participants, particularly middle-class participants, in their questionnaire responses. Weekly hours of television viewing in the area, according to bbm data, averaged 26.7 hours in the spring of 2003, approximately midway through the fieldwork period. At the time, that figure exceeded the national average by 5.5 hours. Moreover, newscasts ranked third and sixth among the ten most widely viewed television programs in the area during the same period (bbm 2003). Such blind bbm data might more accurately portray the extent of television’s primacy within the samples here. The longitudinal and other differences in average weekly hours of television viewing are probably little more than indications of variations in levels of television viewership. After all, we need to expect that viewership levels will vary from one social group to  another, from one place to another, and from one time period to another. The latter can also occur, conceivably many times, within the lifespan of a singular individual. Rather than pursue inevitably futile efforts to arrive at precise television viewership data, it is more important to question the nature of the variations that may occur and to understand why, for example, formerly extensive news users choose to abandon those patterns entirely. Such changes point to the commonalities in critical perceptions of television journalism and what is, in the case of some research participants such as the two examples cited below, a serious disenchantment with available news sources: Watching ctv is a habit, not a news source. I’m becoming aware that I really don’t care about news anymore ... [News Diary, Day 4:] I am losing interest in the news. I watch it mostly out of habit. Some days the television isn’t even on ... [final Diary comments:] Most news is of the negative type ... When does one hear about millions upon millions of volunteer hours for such things as Habitat for Humanity, Greenpeace, Pollution Probe, etc.? News reflects the profit motive. It’s cheaper to send a reporter to one negative event than to have a team uncover the currents of positive efforts on behalf of one or more disadvantaged groups. (Middle-Class Man (mcm), retired college instructor, News Diary)

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I have not had a television for nineteen years ... I have a definite preference for written news, particularly newspapers, which are open to reader participation in their “letters” section. This opportunity to become involved makes following a news item day by day far more vibrant than anything heard on television. Not only to write letters myself, but also to read others’ comments and perhaps discoveries. My impression of television news involvement is one purely of frustration, that the common voice is not heard, nor cared for. (Middle-Class Woman (mcw), retired teacher, News Diary) The critical commonalities in news reception experiences shared by these research participants and others are addressed in the following chapter, which also seeks to establish the linkages between news production practices, news usage patterns, and the critical reception outcomes that result.

4 Social Conditions of Reception: Commercialization, Convergence, and Content Mainstream media reinforce political apathy and discourage political engagement. Media convergence and the concentration of media have led to the homogenization of information, not to its diversification, thus widening the divide between those with discursive legitimacy – i.e., the right to speak and be heard – and those without. Langlois and Dubois, Autonomous Media

During his so-called “campaign against television journalism” (see Benson 1998), Bourdieu (2001, 246) discussed a set of mechanisms that enables television journalism to wield what he described as “a particularly pernicious form of symbolic violence,” one that enjoys tacit complicity between its victims and its agents in the sense that “both remain unconscious of submitting to or wielding it.” As he pointed out, it is the task of sociology, as it is of every science, to reveal that which is hidden. In this manner, sociology can help to minimize the symbolic violence within social relations and, in particular, within the relations of communication. In Bourdieu’s view, the profound paradox is that “television can hide by showing. That is, it can hide things by showing something other than what would be shown if television did what it is supposed to do, provide information” (247). The production of television news and the provision of information are oxymoronic. By virtue of the very way in which “news” is conceptualized and defined, it is intrinsically unable to inform citizens about the world. The world as it is, including all of its history and all of the intricate social relations that configure it, must be taken as a given. It can only serve as the incidental backdrop or stage upon which the events of television news occur.

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According to the rules of the journalistic field, what is “news” is not the world itself but, rather, what is “new” about it – namely, specific events that have occurred within a very recent time span, preferably dramatic events that can be highlighted with strongly evocative imagery. These specific events are the subject matter of “news” as it is conceptualized within the rules of the journalistic field. Therefore, “news” must not be confused with “information” as commonly conceptualized by all those who are not obliged to heed the rules of the journalistic field. Not only communication scholars but also general news viewers are inclined to perceive “information” differently, to regard that which is informative as that which contextualizes and explains events. Unfortunately, the distinctions between news and information tend to be blurred in many of the debates regarding journalism and political communication. More seriously, the disparities between the availability of “news” and the availability of “information” are, as a consequence, overlooked. A more fundamental consequence, one that remains hidden within the largely private domain of news reception, is a disconnection between news values and democratic values. These contradictions  – between news and information, between news values and democratic values – effectively ensure that a particular hegemony is preserved. Attentive to its own subject matter, television news places the seemingly random and disconnected events that unfold daily on stage, accompanied by forceful images. It cannot contextualize or explain “the world as it is” because interest in “the world as it is” directly contravenes the most fundamental journalistic principles of newsworthiness. Such contextualizations and explanations, the basis of what most research participants conceptualize as “information,” are necessarily excluded from the realm of all that can be potentially “covered.” Moreover, in the words of Bourdieu (2001, 248), “there is nothing more difficult to convey than reality in all its ordinariness.” Under the weight of economic constraints, time constraints, and established news story formats, journalists are invariably led to disregard the ordinary and seek the extraordinary, which, together with the exceptional force of televisual imagery, can be captivating and compelling. The structural need to capture audiences, a structural need shared by private and public broadcasters alike in the case of Canadian society, ensures that these features of a potential news story are among the most highly valued.



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Unfortunately, there is no comparably powerful structural incentive to inform audiences. Is the symbolic violence of television journalism truly an “unconscious” experience on the part of both “its agents and its victims,” as Bourdieu presumed? Are those who produce news oblivious to the informational limitations of their programs? Are news viewers oblivious to television’s inability to inform? In this chapter, it is suggested that most “agents and victims” are fully cognizant of their complicity in the ongoing process whereby television journalism “hides while it shows”: there is a necessarily intrinsic relationship between news production and news reception. The limitations of television news production lead to restricted experiences of television news reception, and in such a manner that those who produce news and those who receive it are entirely “conscious” of the limitations that connect production and reception. The tremendous extent of dissatisfaction with the pursuit of news values and other established production practices became richly evident through the course of the present analysis. The empirical material presented in this and subsequent chapters demonstrates that, where reception outcomes are considered in the light of production practices, political economy can contribute useful insights into the former and powerful explanations of the latter. In other words, a prerequisite consideration of the relations of news production can very effectively assist to explain the complexities and peculiarities of news reception. The social conditions of production powerfully shape news content and, thereby, invariably set the parameters of the news reception experience. Conditions of production include the commercial imperatives that restrict information flows, whether the information originates from private- or public-sector news producers. The dependence of many news organizations upon the dominant international news agencies represents a well-entrenched form of convergence that has long resulted in the cross-media content duplication of international news. Among Canadian news organizations, extensive use of cp as a historically pivotal source has assured the same results in the production of national news (see Canada 1981, 1 ­ 19–33). More contemporarily, as Hindman (2009) and others have demonstrated, a widespread journalistic dependence upon the same limited number of search engines that dominate the internet, and a shared dependence upon the same limited number

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of online sources, has not only kept convergence in place but has actually exacerbated the consequences for the duplication of news content that continues to persistently frustrate news audiences. Two contemporary developments have rendered both owners and journalists vulnerable to “interference”: first, the rapid acceleration of cross-media ownership convergence to the point at which only a few multi-media enterprises control the major news outlets in Canadian society and, second, a notable decline in the sanctity of the “objectivity” principle alongside the resurgence of blatantly partisan journalism in, for example, the very visible form of the rightwing Sun News Network launched in 2011. These developments have placed issues of press freedom and democratic communication at the forefront of scholarly and non-scholarly debates.1 Apart from implications of ownership convergence, the implications of cross-media source and content convergence are most evident to audiences in the homogeneous form that news tends to assume across all print, broadcast, and online media and in the extensive duplication of the substantive content of news stories. Their frequent observations of the homogeneity of news, both in its form and in its content, reflect the similarities between the production practices of cbc and ctv as well as between their news production units and others. Despite perceptions of change and “crisis” in professional journalistic practices, the essential rules of the journalistic field, particularly professional news values, continue to reproduce and sustain themselves amidst long years of change and struggle in the social world around them. As discussed in chapter 2, production constraints are constraints by virtue of the way in which these features of the news production process shape the nature of the news text that results. The full spectrum of production constraints, including the interactions between them, serves to powerfully shape the form and content of television news to the extent that it is clearly the process which produces the news that audiences see, not the producers. News producers themselves tend to be keenly aware of the limitations intrinsic to the process – not at all, as Bourdieu theorized, “unconscious” of these limitations and the fundamental failure to inform that results.2 Time constraints in the form of limited production periods and limited program and story lengths underlie the “event” orientation of television journalism, the decontextualization of those events, the focus upon actions and individuals rather than processes and



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s­ tructures, as well as the customarily structured ahistoricism of the television news program genre. No less important are those economic constraints in the form of limited facilities and resources, including human labour power and technological resources, that exert widespread effects upon the quantity, form, and content of news stories. Technological constraints impose economic and logistical restrictions upon story form and content. Even more profound in their impact upon the ways in which audiences receive news are constraints that arise out of the division of journalistic labour, including a structured, unequal access to entire nations and regions  – hence the limited story geography  – and a structured, unequal access to individuals who might potentially appear in news stories  – hence, among other ramifications, limited conceptualizations of “politics” and of “power.” Production values generally reinforce the limited criteria of story selection and impose a limited set of guidelines regarding the presentation of stories. Specific production values regarding the selection of subjects and the use of official spokespersons act in conjunction with the division of labour, time constraints, limited research resources, and a dependence upon official information suppliers to ensure that “official” definitions of social reality are the most prominently featured. Legal constraints and the fear of legal repercussions create a climate of “libel chill” that effectively deflects critical attention away from privatesector power holders and confines it largely to those within the public arena of formal governmental institutions.3 These are but a few of the ways in which the dynamics of the production process shape the form and substance of the news text. A more extensive list of production constraints is provided in table 2.1. As these constraints invariably shape the reception experiences of news audiences, it is useful to remind ourselves of their impact before we examine directly the reception experiences of audiences in this and subsequent chapters in order to appreciate the explanatory capacity of production analysis. The phenomenon of libel chill, for instance, can help to explain why audiences are inclined to be more familiar with the textual consequences of ownership convergence – such as the degree of inter-media dependence, the homogeneity of form and content, and the limited extent of original newsgathering – than with the full extent of ownership convergence itself.4 The “show-and-hide” paradox thus extends to the ways in which convergence in its various forms is experienced:

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t­elevision journalism shows all of the ramifications of convergence at the same time that it hides the highly converged news infrastructure that feeds it. While there appears to be a multiplicity of diverse print, broadcast, and online news sources available to audiences in the much-celebrated “information age,” the nexus of corporate interrelationships between these media, which ensures that news originates from a remarkably limited number of sources, remains largely hidden. The question of how news audiences have accommodated these developments within their everyday news usage routines therefore acquires heightened interest. The research results presented in this chapter draw from the household interviews as well as from the questionnaires and news diaries – specifically, with respect to discussions of ownership and content convergence and, generally, with respect to issues of commercialization, critical as well as non-critical perceptions of news, and the use of internet and other alternative news sources. It will be seen that research participants in all demographic and other social categories are highly critical of the news that is produced by Canadian and other news organizations for television and other media. Based upon his 1990s research with focus groups in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, Kavoori (1999, 386) observes the emergence at that time of “a global culture of critical media consumption.”5 Audience groups in all four societies displayed what he describes as “sweeping similarities” in their critical assessments of television news (391). Kavoori suggests that the critical posture of news audiences arises out of their familiarity with the narrative conventions of the genre and their awareness of the institutional imperatives of the communication industries as well as the broader politico-ideological environment of news reportage (396). The same critical commonalities, or “sweeping similarities,” were found among the Canadians interviewed in the current project, where it was evident that, in many cases, the familiarity has evolved into a weariness and accelerated frustration with the relatively unchanged endurance of long-established textual strategies as well as the repetitive nature of discursive content in television news and other news media. In addition, the Canadian interviewees in particular (who, of the three participant samples, enjoyed the greatest opportunities to voice their dissatisfactions at length) directed their criticisms at both general and specific journalistic practices, and beyond that, towards the economic “shortcuts” p ­ ursued by national



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television networks and other news providers and, still beyond that, to those who own and control the major news production enterprises. The critical commonalities cut across all demographic groups within the samples, although the criticisms were expressed with varying degrees of anger, frustration, and mystification as well as ridicule and satire. The commonalities will first be illustrated with regard to ownership convergence, cross-media source and content duplication, and the accelerated commercialization of the news produced by both private- and public-sector broadcasters.6

CRITICAL COMMONALITIES: AWARENESS OF OWNERSHIP CONVERGENCE Frequently dismissed or simply disregarded in international studies of journalism and political communication, the significance of ownership demands attention, at least in the case of Canadian society. With regard to the more general significance of ownership, Artz (2006, 38–9) states frankly that there are concrete, everyday manifestations of the interests shared by private owners of media: Class power is diffuse, but nonetheless it has names and addresses. Media conglomerates have significant interlocking directorships ensuring the sharing of corporate goals, the review of tactics and plans (such as embedding journalists during the US war on Iraq), and reinforcing ideological stances. This is not conspiracy; rather it is the efficient implementation of a shared interest in a social system. The airwaves are a vital public resource that, with a few noteworthy exceptions, have been surrendered to these privately shared interests. In the case of Canadian broadcasting, the model of mixed private and public ownership is commonly seen to occupy a position along the spectrum between the American laissez-faire model of exclusively private ownership and the classical British model, which insists that broadcasting is a public service that needs to operate centrally on the basis of public ownership. However, as discussed in chapter 2, this perception is misguided in that the Canadian broadcasting system was designed historically as a “single system” in which private ownership remains dominant. In order to appreciate levels of ownership convergence between the broadcasting industry and

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other communication industries, ownership of broadcasting needs to be seen within the context of the entire media ownership structure. A key problem underlying the failure to appreciate the extent of ownership convergence is that media ownership structures have not been examined regularly and systematically by state regulators or communication scholars (although Winseck’s recent creation of a website dedicated to information about Canadian media ownership provides a splendid opportunity to fill this historical gap).7 As ­Savage (2008) found through the course of his interviews, the absence of any sustained, annual documentation of ownership changes is of great concern to academic and non-academic researchers as well as to public broadcasters and both private- and public-­sector journalists. In particular, the journalists he interviewed raised questions about the impact of high levels of ownership convergence upon the commercialization of journalism. Consider the comments of the president of the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec (fpjq): In the Québec context, the geographical centralization of information is called la montrealisation de l’information. Another paradox is that whereas there are more modes of communication of information with the development of new media, the number of journalists has not risen. The multiplication of sources of information does not mean access to more varied information, but the circulation of the same kind of information through different platforms. (cited in Savage 2008, 295) More recently, Bernier and Barber’s (2012, 344) quantitative study found that “journalists at the dominant news organizations in Québec are uncomfortable with media convergence and concentration of ownership.” Those employed by the private media conglomerate Quebecor “firmly believe that economic pressures and the need to meet the demands of shareholders are threatening the public’s right to quality information” (ibid.). Currently, there are only three organizations that employ the vast majority of Quebec journalists: Radio-Canada employs the greatest number, while the private-sector Gesca and Quebecor employ the remainder. All of these journalists expressed concern about the impact of all forms of convergence upon the quality, diversity, and integrity of the information produced under these circumstances. Taras’s (2001, 61–92)



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distinctions between technological convergence, corporate convergence, cultural convergence, and the convergence of information and entertainment continue to form one of the most useful convergence typologies, although at this point in time we might add “content convergence” in order to convey the currently tremendous extent of cross-media content duplication. The journalists surveyed by Bernier and Barber (2012, 344) were “firmly in agreement that sensationalism and entertainment news are increasingly threatening the public’s right to quality information.” With a reference to Quebecor’s activities in particular, and the convergence between broadcasters and broadcasting distributors in general, Edge (2011, 1,276) concludes his analysis of “unregulated convergence” in Canada as follows: Convergence in Canada has indeed, as its critics warned, allowed too much power over public perceptions to be placed in the hands of too few owners who will use it to their advantage. As demonstrated by Quebecor’s lockout at the Journal de Montréal, convergence has also allowed media owners disproportionate power over journalists and other media workers. Ultimately, convergence helped to enable yet another round of consolidation in Canadian media, this time between the networks and the carriage companies. It created even larger and more powerful media owners, whose sway over public perceptions and over media workers should concern Canadians. The overall picture presented by ownership data features continuity in many respects, and certainly with respect to persistently high levels of ownership convergence. In the sixth edition of The (New) Media Monopoly, Bagdikian (2004) reflects that the number of corporations in control of more than half of the newspaper, broadcasting, and film industries in the United States dropped from fifty in 1984, to twenty-three in 1990, to no more than five corporations in 2004 (cited in Winseck 2008, 36). There was essential concurrence with McChesney’s (2000) report that only six conglomerates controlled most of the American and international media markets by 1999.8 Winseck (2008) presents evidence that international media markets have become even more consolidated in the twenty-first century. As he reports, the top ten global media enterprises are also

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among the largest corporations in the world. All are media conglomerates in the sense that all are engaged in cross-media ownership. Their properties extend across the international mediascape, from television, to film, to newspapers, to other varieties of publishing companies, and to the internet, “where their websites are now among some of the most visited sites worldwide” (38). Winseck also notes that six of the global top ten are based in the United States and that at least four of the ten are strongly identified as “ownercontrolled” enterprises (ibid.). At the national level, Canada has historically represented one of the most extreme cases of concentrated media ownership in the world, commonly seen as second only to Mexico in this regard.9 Among the contemporary evidence is the 2004 Senate study which found that the top five Canadian newspaper owners increased their share of the total newspaper circulation in Canada from 73 percent in 1994 to 79 percent in 2003. In the case of television, the top five owners controlled 68 percent of all stations in 2000, more than double the extent of their control over all stations twenty years earlier. Furthermore, the top five’s share of English-speaking audiences in terms of conventional as well as cable and satellite channels also increased from 42 percent in 1997 to one-half in 2002 (Canada 2004, 18–20). Importantly, it is almost deceptive to refer to “newspaper owners” and “television station owners” – it has also been the case historically that media owners in Canada are simultaneously dominant, powerful owners of non-media enterprises found throughout virtually every economic sector. Indeed, Winter (2007, 279) reported in 2007 that five of the top seven richest families in Canada derive a portion of their wealth from their media properties. This needs to be considered when one reads in a 2012 crtc report that, in 2011, “the five largest companies in the communications industry captured 83 percent of revenues” (crtc 2012, ii). Winseck (2010, 2011) provides the most systematic data regarding the contemporary dominance of no more than four conglomerates – Bell Canada Enterprises, Quebecor, Rogers, and Shaw – over all of the major media within Canadian society. Their extensive control encompasses each of the following media markets: • • • •

86 percent of cable and satellite distribution; 70 percent of wireless revenues; 63 percent of the wired telephone market; 49 percent of Internet Service Provider (isp) revenues;



• • • •

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42 percent of radio; 40 percent of television; 19 percent of newspaper and magazine markets; 60 percent of total revenues from all of the above sectors combined. (Winseck 2011, 1–2)

Despite their claims to the contrary, Winseck demonstrates that the “Big Four” control a diversity of exceptionally profit-rich, horizontally and vertically integrated media operations that extend throughout every sector of the communication industries, as the above data indicate. Their combined revenues increased from $42 billion in 1998 to $73 billion in 2010 (Winseck 2011, 1). In terms of their television properties alone, he documents elsewhere that pay television and specialty television profits have ranged between 21 and 25 percent annually since 2002, which is almost three times the profit rate for all industries. These profit levels were sustained at 22 and 23 percent, respectively, during 2008 and 2009, despite the economic crisis. As crtc documentation cited by Winseck demonstrates, their cable and satellite distribution enterprises are equally lucrative. Overall, the television sector expanded from a $5 billion market in 1984 to $10.1 billion in 2000 and to $14 billion in 2008 (Winseck 2010, 368, 377).10 The aftermath of the 2008 economic collapse led to increased levels of television viewership and correspondingly higher television revenues. By 2012, the “Big Four” owned a total of 171 television channels which together generated almost 80 percent of all television revenues (Winseck 2013, 17; see also fig. 2.1). In the words of Winseck (2010, 369), “television is not in crisis, but one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative sectors of the economy!” The profit levels are sustained in large part by the historically consistent, intensive use of media by the Canadian population generally, even in comparison to populations elsewhere in the West. Among those Canadians who are online, their use of the internet, online video, social media, and blogs exceeds that of their counterparts in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States (Winseck 2010, 371–2). As Winseck emphasizes, these trends in the direction of heavy online media usage serve to increase the profitability of the communication industries rather than reduce it or threaten the economic viability of conventional media. Zamaria and Fletcher (2008, 9) support his argument: “Online activities appear to supplement rather than displace traditional media use.

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In general, new media … activities are being added to an existing media diet that includes substantial time spent with ­conventional media, even for youth and younger Internet users” (cited in Winseck 2010, 372). Regardless of what can be seen as direct implications of the agency of owners in terms of the conditions of news production and reception, reception researchers have been inclined to disregard the significance of ownership convergence. ­Jensen (1998, 188) indicates that television broadcasting structures with varying degrees of privatization and state control “did not as such appear to elicit markedly different audience responses despite the expression of varying degrees of frustration or mistrust.” In the case of Canadian society, however, levels of private media ownership concentration have historically been so extreme that it is difficult to overlook ownership issues. In recent decades, as Winseck (2008, 2010, 2011), Winter (2007), and others have documented, the extent of cross-media ownership has accelerated rapidly, to the point where the “Big Four” control the majority of the news outlets. In addition, several of the most wealthy Canadian families, such as the Aspers and the Irvings (whose properties encompass both multi-media and nonmedia enterprises), and individuals, such as the recurrently notorious Conrad Black, have received extensive press attention. Despite their high profiles, research participants are more inclined to be directly critical of the content convergence that frequently results from ownership convergence rather than to be directly critical of ownership convergence per se. Concerns about content convergence were expressed far more frequently in the interviews, news diaries, and questionnaires. On the other hand, once the topic of ownership was introduced during the interviews, many participants proceeded to attribute a great deal of power to owners, while a significant minority displayed disinterest in and/or exasperation with the issue of concentrated media ownership.11 Journalists are sharply aware of the implications of ownership convergence, with daily reminders of its impact as their work is carried out. At the 2003 “Who Controls Canada’s Media?” conference organized by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, the president of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (cjfe) discussed the budget cuts, staff reductions, and increasing generalization of expertise that accompany convergence. He concluded with the compelling comment: “Convergence is never done to make better



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j­ ournalism” (cited in Thrift 2003, 229). At the same conference, the issue of owner intervention was debated by the then CanWest news and information president and, on the other side, a former Ottawa Citizen publisher. The CanWest executive insisted that “owners have every right to direct their operations in terms of both content and ideology” (230). He disputed the notion that owners should remain “silent and uninvolved” in content issues and stated frankly that, in his experience, owners have always influenced content. In contrast, the former newspaper publisher argued that “facts should never be selected based on owners’ opinions” and that “truth can only be pursued successfully in a climate free from pressure” (ibid.). He referred to CanWest founder Israel Asper’s provocative 2002 speech in which Asper complained about anti-Israel “bias” that he believed was pervasive throughout Canadian and other news media. The experienced newspaper publisher argued that the editors of Asper’s newspapers could not but be affected, and in a not very subtle manner, by their owner’s widely publicized remarks. Unofficially, journalists who were employed by CanWest’s news media discussed the “unwritten rule” that their news stories could not report anything that might be seen as unfavourable to Israel. Yes, there is such directly active agency on the part of owners, and their management recruitment practices are clearly significant as well, although the range of their agency is limited relative to the impact of larger structural forces, such as their vested interests in forms of content convergence that lead to extensive news content duplication, among other outcomes. Another such outcome was hinted at earlier as the Quebec journalists’ union leader referred to the “montrealisation” of information in Quebec. As he suggested, sources of information might multiply, whether as a consequence, for example, of the proliferation of cable and satellite television channels or the expansion of the internet. Yet, in a highly converged ownership structure, there is no reason to assume that a proliferation of information sources will lead to either a greater amount or a greater diversity of information. On the contrary, it is more likely to lead to redundant information that only serves to aggravate audiences, not to enlighten them. With reference to television channels, Murdock (1982, 120) articulated this vital point as long ago as 1982: “It is possible to greatly increase the number of channels … without significantly extending diversity. More does not necessarily mean different.”

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It is also important to ask how and to what extent Canadian audiences have accommodated the accelerated convergence in their everyday news usage routines and in their general efforts to comprehend the implications of ongoing developments in their society. How and to what extent do their critical postures result in the use of alternative information sources? There are indications that the contemporary scope of convergence has led some to retreat from long-established Canadian patterns of extensive television news consumption and to seek out media, such as radio and the internet, that are seemingly less constrained by time, the visual imperative, and other production-based limitations. Of greater concern are those who display little or no interest in news produced by any medium, including those whose disenchantment has led to a complete disengagement from political communication. These are patterns that can be easily overlooked by those who examine reception in isolation or who implicitly celebrate any and all actively critical interpretations of news texts. Ownership issues need to be considered in the analysis of news reception, particularly as it unfolds in Canadian society. However it might be theorized, the impact of ownership convergence and its related forms of convergence is too consequential to be disregarded. It needs to be considered as one significant factor that contributes to the ways in which news production and reception relate to each other, to the nature of the news that is produced and received, and to that larger, even more entangled relationship between news and hegemony. At the risk of anecdotalism, a few brief representative criticisms regarding convergence-related themes will illustrate a number of production-reception linkages. As indicated earlier, research participants were more likely to be directly critical of content convergence than of ownership convergence per se. Moreover, in almost every case, issues of cross-media source and content duplication were raised at the initiation of interviewees, and often raised repeatedly during newscast viewing. On the other hand, throughout the unstructured interviews, it was frequently necessary to purposely introduce ownership questions or at least to clarify participants’ regular use of the vaguely ominous “they”: When you use the word “they,” are you thinking of the producers of news programs, or the owners, or the journalists who report the stories?



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mcw: I wouldn’t blame the journalists. I think it’s the producers and the owners. mcm: Yeah, I think the owners are saying “this is what we want” and “this is what we want you to produce” and obviously, if they want a job, and they want to get paid, then they have to go out there and do that. I’m sure many of them [journalists], they enjoy what they do but they have to do what they have to do. (middle-class couple, MCM age 45, mcw age 46, Interview #044) Once the topic arose, many research participants proceeded to attribute a great deal of power to owners, while a significant minority displayed disinterest in and/or exasperation with the issue: wcm: I think if the owner’s political views aren’t followed, then things don’t happen the way the producers want them to. It’s the way of business. After all, the news is run as a business. It’s the same thing with the cbc, because if they don’t go along with where their cheques come from, they’re not going to get their cheques ... I really feel that the owners of large companies and politicians are all intertwined. I did know that he [Conrad Black] was involved with [the local newspaper] for a little bit, but it doesn’t mean anything to me, you know. I suppose I don’t really care who owns anything, really. See, I’m just not, I’m not very, well, I don’t know whether the word is “worldly” or, you know. Those things just don’t concern me because they don’t – they probably do somewhere, but I don’t know – they don’t affect the way that I go to work every day, do what I do every day. I don’t think they do, but maybe in actual fact they really do. (wcm, age 21, Interview #011). Whereas their actions and powers were envisioned in concrete, specific, and sometimes very blunt terms, Canadian media owners persistently occupied the obscure “they” category. Only infrequently were owners or their enterprises readily identified by name, and rarely was the true extent of their media properties realized. Two former New Brunswick residents were among the exceptions.12 After detailing many of the Irving family’s media and non-media assets, the couple stated  – in unison  – “It was terrible!” and continued at length. Only brief highlights of their very extensive comments appear below:

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mcw: The Irvings own New Brunswick … mcm: They dominate everything ... The news stories that come out about them, they are edited. mcw: They are in control of what is written about them. mcm: There are very few negative things … mcw: Their family is so secretive, they don’t let you know who they are even, that they own certain companies, things like that. So they are so in control of their own privacy that what gets printed in the newspapers is nothing. It’s scary to think what they’re in control of in the province. (middle-class couple, MCM age 34, mcw age 31, Interview #017) Significantly, both had been employed in Irving-controlled industries while resident in New Brunswick, both were keen environmentalists with special interests in the activities of their Irving family employers, and both believed themselves to be better informed about the Irvings than many in New Brunswick. The couple also observed, with apparent accuracy, that there is much less awareness of the extent of media ownership convergence on the part of Ontario residents. While the full extent of ownership convergence may not be widely known, there is nevertheless a common tendency among research participants to assume that journalists are by no means entirely free to report about the world without restrictions imposed by owners and their managers. Some research participants pointed more broadly to “big business” and/or to “government,” as exemplified by a working-class woman who rued the demise of the cbc’s legendary current affairs program This Hour Has Seven Days,13 and explained it as follows: wcw: The lines were crossed, and they got shut down by business and government. You can do things as long as you’re nicey-nicey. But if you really start pointing your finger and saying why? How come? What does this really cost? They are going to find a way to pull the plug on you. You’re muzzled – and that’s what they do, they muzzle you. Who do you think is responsible for the muzzling? wcw: Big business. Do you think, in that sense, that media ownership is important? Are you thinking about who owns or controls the paper while you read it?



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wcw: You bet! It’s going to be censored, according to the views handed down from the top brass. (wcw, age 52, Interview #015) It is more than apparent that responses to ownership convergence are at least one source of commonality between journalists and their audiences, to the extent that it is perhaps important, at least in the context of this discussion, to abandon the generic use of “news producers” and to distinguish clearly between owners and news workers – two groups whose interests are by no means necessarily shared (see Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011; Mosco and McKercher 2008). For example, tng (The Newspaper Guild) Canada surveyed its membership of journalists and other news workers regarding ownership concerns and other issues and presented the results to the Senate’s Standing Committee on Transport and Communications, results that were first cited in that Committee’s interim report of 2004.14 In response to questions about the impact of ownership convergence, clear majorities of the membership expressed “serious” levels of concern about “a loss of local independence in editorial policy” (75.2 percent), “a decrease in the overall quality of journalism” (68.2 percent), and “a reduction in the diversity of opinion published” (67.2 percent) (Canada 2004, 64). Nevertheless, in its interim report, the committee was inclined to dismiss the concerns of journalists and others on the grounds that a direct relationship between ownership convergence and homogeneity of news content had not been demonstrated with solid evidentiary support. Significantly, the committee appeared to be more impressed with the explanatory comments of Sauvageau: Why are all daily newspapers similar? Because in the schools of journalism, students are being taught the same journalistic techniques … The fact of the matter is that all media are seeking to retain as many readers as possible, and that brings about a certain level of homogenization in journalistic practices. (cited in Canada 2004, 70) At the same time, Lise Lareau, as president of the Canadian Media Guild (cmg), pointed out to the Senate Committee that the professional concerns of journalists are tied to very pragmatic workload and stress issues raised by convergence:

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Many of our people are being asked to serve many media and file the same story in radio, television, print, or whatever. You have heard that. It is a concern from [a] workload and stress view, and we are dealing with that in a traditional union way. However, there is no question that those are developments that also lead to fewer points of view out there and fewer eyeballs on a story. This is what happens in the markets that you are referring to with the cross-ownership issue. (cited in Canada 2004, 71) Likewise, Michael O’Reilly, as president of the Periodical Writers Association of Canada (pwac), explained the impact upon their members: The simple reality is that those who own our newspapers, our magazines, and our airwaves are demanding more and more from us, the writers, and they are paying less and less. Large publishers such as CanWest, Transcontinental, Quebecor/Sun Media, Rogers, and Thomson are demanding more work, more content, and more rights; and they are paying less for it. (cited in Canada 2004, 72) tng Canada’s subsequent brief to the Senate Committee in 2005 recommended the eradication of cross-ownership between newspapers and broadcast media. As noted in their brief, both the crtc and the Competition Bureau have not only permitted but actually encouraged increased levels of ownership convergence. The principally, although not exclusively, journalistic union expressed a range of concerns regarding such consolidation, including the widespread illusion of information diversity: The existence of a multitude of information-packed websites doesn’t necessarily make the information found on them fair, balanced, or accurate … Even the most reliable independent websites (if there were a way to divine them!) cannot be invoked to dismiss concern about media consolidation for the same reason that a proliferation of alternative media and radio and television stations cannot be used for that purpose. That’s because the local daily newspaper retains the greatest newsgathering



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c­ apacity, with the greatest number of reporters and editors and the most sustained coverage of events. (tng Canada 2005, 6) While these concerns are shared with their audiences, journalists are necessarily more aware of the practical ramifications of convergence for news content and, thereby, better positioned to directly trace the resultant linkages between conditions of news production and conditions of news reception. For example, in the same 2005 brief to the Senate Committee, tng Canada specified some of the consequences of convergence, a presentation excerpt worth citing at length in that these are consequences that audiences inevitably experience and about which most research participants were repeatedly critical: One trend is a growing number of news outlets, with corporations competing for every “market niche.” This proliferation brings more diversity, as the media chains and their supporters are quick to trumpet. But it is an appearance of diversity and depends more on packaging than reality. Much of the material is simply “re-purposed” content. Any fresh material is also most often lighter fare – entertainment, lifestyle, consumer news – rather than original reporting on diverse communities or populations, or the type of in-depth analysis and investigation that gets under the skin of a story and so requires a substantial commitment of time and energy. Simultaneously, another trend is that a growing number of news outlets are chasing relatively static or even shrinking audiences, putting more pressure on revenues and profits. As a result, much of the new investment in journalism today is in disseminating the news and re-packaging it, not in gathering it. So, ironically, consolidation has led to the creation of more media outlets, including new giveaway city dailies … In addition, in broadcasting, to vie for audiences, effort is devoted to getting the story to air first, no matter how partial and jumbled. The focus then remains on covering a few blockbuster stories ad nauseum [sic]. In this way, the raw elements of news increasingly become the end product. At the same time, the number of reporters researching and producing actual stories and analysis is dropping. Tragically, resources devoted to investigative

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r­ eporting have become a shadow of what they were a decade ago. (tng Canada 2005, 7, emphasis added) Finally, the union could not help but point out the irony in the fact that Canada’s large cross-media owners provided very little news coverage of the Senate Committee’s public inquiry into “the state of the Canadian news media” throughout the more than three years of its deliberations (tng Canada 2005, 9).

CRITICAL COMMONALITIES: CROSS-MEDIA SOURCE AND CONTENT DUPLICATION Ownership convergence is inextricably tied to the convergence of news sources and news content. Interviewees and other research informants were frequently frustrated by the latter, yet rarely likely to connect the two. The frustration has led some to reduce their consumption of television news and to seek alternative news sources. According to one middle-class woman: mcw: I don’t always turn on the news anymore because, especially the television news, they have to fill the half hour, whether something important has happened or not. And they don’t have, what was it, I guess it was Associated Press and some of the press bureaus have been collapsed and there’s only one now so there’s no competing story??? So there’s no two points of view. Are you concerned about that? mcw: No. No? mcw: Well, I think with the internet, people who want to find out can. And the fact that there were two competing stories or two points of view, was it ever really discussed or pointed out ten years ago or fifteen years ago? I really can’t say. I mean, I watched the news and I listened and I read Time magazine and stuff like that, so whether I was getting opposing views, I don’t know. I used to read the Star in the morning. It comes here first thing in the morning, it’s my morning paper. And I’d listen to cbc, and their taglines or headlines were word-for-word almost what the Star headlines were. And I’d think, well, who’s feeding whom here? Obviously, they were getting it from the same news agency. And I wasn’t aware of that ten years ago. (mcw, age 42, Interview #034)



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This response is indicative of the lack of clarity regarding news providers, evident here in the confusion about ap as well as the tendency to assume: (1) that internet access is widespread and (2) that such presumed access has rendered the issue of ownership convergence defunct. In this case, the interviewee enthusiastically pointed out on her computer a bookmarked online news source that she had started to consult regularly. Tellingly, however, when asked to identify the operator of the site, she was unable to do so. Overall, it was apparent that most interviewees and other research participants were more immediately concerned about the manifestations of convergence, such as content duplication, and less directly concerned about ownership convergence itself. Nor were participants necessarily attentive to source duplication as the origin and explanation of content duplication. In his typology of convergence, Taras (2001, 83–6) includes the convergence of news and entertainment  – evident, for example, in a tendency to frame news stories in a dramatic, sensational way that appears to value imagery more than substance. The research participants were inclined to associate this with American news outlets. In fact, it was often seen to be a major source of distinction between Canadian and American television news, and one reason why the former is preferred. The following interview excerpt is illustrative: wcw: I won’t watch American news because at an early age, about fifteen probably, that early, I noticed that their newscasts were a lot different than ours, especially in worldwide things. They like things to favour them. Everything has to favour them, and it’s always someone else’s fault. Or if it was their fault – well, you know! And their news is made for people with maybe a Grade 8 education. There are not a lot of big words. Do you find Canadian news that substantially different? wcw: Yes, and bbc news also ... I only watch cbc and I used to watch Global news, and, a couple of weeks ago I noticed that they were having cnn clips on Global. Now, cnn is tabloid news! Don’t try to come across like you know what you’re talking about if you’ve got cnn news on there! I thought, I don’t know what’s happening to Global but there must be other news stations other than cnn that they can get information from. But maybe it comes cheap, I don’t know.

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When the war [in Afghanistan] was on, and you turned to cnn, that was more entertainment than it was seriousness. It was like an ongoing movie, you know, how they made it. You could sit here and watch the war going on in another country just like you would a movie, a drama. I don’t know if it was a good thing or not. We need to be informed, but I don’t think you need play-by-play. You don’t turn it on necessarily to find out what’s going on in the world. It’s entertainment, it’s more like turning on that daily soap opera. (wcw, age 33, Interview #051, emphasis in original)15 Like the Canadian population at large, the research participants principally call upon Canadian rather than American news providers in their everyday news consumption routines. cnn and other American news outlets are consulted more extensively than usual during major developments in which the United States figures prominently, such as 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the outbreak of these “stories,” it was commonly anticipated that the American networks would provide more current and somewhat more detailed reports. Many research participants demonstrated a tired and irksome familiarity with Canadian dependence upon American network news feeds, which underscored their decisions to watch American news sources directly rather than await rebroadcasts of American reports by Canadian networks. Nevertheless, in the vast majority of cases, the American networks continued to be regarded by participants as “supplementary” news sources.

CRITICAL COMMONALITIES: THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF “PUBLIC” NEWS In a follow-up to Hallin and Mancini’s landmark analysis (2004), Aalberg, van Aelst, and Curran (2010) present comparative transnational data gathered from six nations  – the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway – during the twenty-year period between 1987 and 2007.16 That outstandingly extensive longitudinal dataset is utilized to tackle their central research question: “Has the increased commercialization in the media market increased or decreased the flow of political information?” (Aalberg, van Aelst, and Curran 2010, 255). The authors are compelled to observe that “different media systems create a structural bias in favour of different political information



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environments. This can produce, in turn, significant cross-national differences in the levels of political knowledge and misperceptions” (258).17 Previously, Dimock and Popkin (1997) had demonstrated that Europeans were significantly better informed about world events than Americans. These authors explained the difference in terms of “substantial differences between countries in the communication of knowledge by television” (223). Similarly, Curran’s research teams (Curran et al. 2009; Curran et al. 2010) and Iyengar’s research team (2009) have also demonstrated that highly commercialized systems display a soft news focus that renders American and British citizens less politically informed than those who reside in nations with strong public service broadcasting systems (see also Aalberg, van Aelst, and Curran 2010, 258). The work of Carlson and ­Harrie (2001) as well as that of Syvertsen (2002) suggests a need to distinguish between “traditional” public service channels that provide a demonstrably larger share of information programs and those “commercial” public service channels that are more focused upon genres such as drama, entertainment, and sports. It can be argued that the cbc’s non-specialized English- and French-language channels have historically occupied a position between the aforementioned polarities as public channels that were never truly “traditional public service channels” and that are increasingly qualified to be included among the “commercial public service channels.” The case of Canadian broadcasting poses exceptional challenges to such analytical parameters by virtue of: (1) the historically ambiguous structure of its “mixed private and public” broadcasting system, (2) the increasingly contradictory status of the increasingly commercialized cbc, and (3) the accelerated commercialization of the broadcasting system at large and, indeed, the entire Canadian mediascape in the politico-economic context of contemporary neoliberalism. The Canadian case is also of special interest in that Canadian news audiences have historically experienced the opportunity to receive political information from different media systems based in their own and other societies, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom. Regarding the former, it is interesting that Aalberg, Aelst, and Curran (2010, 260ff.) document a distinct decrease in the amount of American television information between 1987 and 2007, concluding: “We find that peak-time supply of political information varies ­according

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to media system, or rather the degree of commercialization. It is lowest in the most commercialized of these countries, the United States” (266). This is neither particularly evident nor necessarily very significant to Canadian news audiences, whose general inclination is to use American television journalism only as a secondary news source. Nevertheless, the extent of familiarity with American television journalism is such that commercialization issues rank highly among the critical comments of research participants regarding the general limitations of television news. Most participants agreed that the near-absolute commercialization characteristic of the American broadcasting system is in itself sufficient reason to regard the private American networks as last-resort news sources, to be called upon only in extraordinary cases of immediate and seemingly severe crisis. Somewhat higher on the ladder of trusted news sources are the private Canadian networks such as ctv and Global, while the greatest level of trust is usually accorded to the cbc. Not coincidentally, levels of trust and usage are closely related to levels of commercialization. While concerns about the accelerated commercialization of both private- and public-sector Canadian news were widespread among research participants in all social categories, and were expressed frequently in all three research fora (interviews, news diaries, and questionnaires), private-sector commercialization was more often presumed or seen as a “given,” whereas public-­ sector commercialization was more often seen as non-essential and, accordingly, a greater source of distress. The distress extended well beyond the level of “concern” regarding television journalism. It was sometimes traced directly to the contradiction between the ideal of public service, expected of a public broadcaster, and the commercialization which most expected only of private broadcasters. Particularly among older participants, the distress of commercialization in the public broadcasting sector was born of long-time loyalty to the cbc and long-held expectations of it that differed sharply from their expectations of private broadcasters. For example: mcm: My car radio is always tuned to cbc, and I was telling my daughter about this school in Toronto where the Grade 1 kids came up with different specific items which would allow them to do good – pick up the garbage when you find it under your bed, help a friend in need, and so on. And the principal decided to



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announce this over the pa system, for the entire school. And so, very, very slowly, the school started to change, and this is in one of the rougher neighbourhoods in Toronto. And whoever it was that sponsored the original project outside the school, after the project had started, came up with I think two thousand tickets to Ice ­Capades or something like that, so that the entire school is going to go. But anyway, see, that to me is a newsworthy item. Very newsworthy. And no one except the cbc will broadcast that. Why do you think that is, how do you explain that to yourself? Do you think the fact that the cbc is a public broadcasting organization is significant? mcm: It is not subject to commercial dollars. It is not after a share of the audience. And the programs that they have – Blind Goat and all these others – make me feel like I’m a member of the larger community called Canada. Because people call from all over Canada into these shows, you know, Cross Country Check-Up, you know … [continues to discuss favourite cbc radio and television programs]. And so these kind of things really are entertaining but in a different way, because they’re also informative. Because often times they’ll talk about the stories, the author, and so on. So, for me, cbc is it. And I’m so peeved at the fact that the government is cutting and cutting and cutting the cbc. (mcm, age 79, Interview #036) Beyond comments directed specifically at the commercialization of the cbc, many other participants expressed more general concerns regarding the commercialization and tabloidization of news, whether private or public, Canadian or otherwise. For example, the following participant links the commercialization issues raised by others with ownership convergence: mcw: It’s very important that we have a free and vibrant press and media. If we do not, we are in danger of losing our democracy because they are the watchdogs. And do you believe that we have that free and vibrant press in the case of Canada? mcw: No. That is an issue. That is the issue: we do not. And it becomes more and more apparent that we do not. There was a time when there were all kinds of independent small newspapers. And everyone had a chance to have their point of view, and it was

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considered a very intellectual and honourable job to be a journalist. Now we have a few, a very small number of media barons or multi-media corporations that own all of the media. And they have one agenda, and that agenda is to ensure that the status quo survives or is prodded on to do better to ensure that they are profitable. That is what their agenda is. So it is for selling ads, it’s for selling air time, it’s for selling concepts, and it’s for adhering closely to the prevailing political point of view, whichever that’s going to be. Because that political point of view is the status quo. (mcw, age 62, Interview #018, emphasis in original) As suggested by these interview excerpts, the critical resistance to television journalism extended well beyond immediate content issues to much larger issues, frequently raised at the initiative of the participants, whether in news diaries or, more commonly, during the interviews. In the following section, we see that attention to their critical responses to news content needs to be tempered with equal attention to their non-critical responses.

OTHER CRITICAL AND NON-CRITICAL PERCEPTIONS OF NEWS CONTENT In view of their access to Canadian as well as American, British, and other network news, research participants were highly critical of the production constraints associated with television news generally, many of which were readily perceived in the newscasts that were viewed during the interview sessions and in the newscasts discussed throughout the news diaries. Time constraints in the form of limited story and program lengths, for example, were seen by many to necessarily preclude a comprehensive understanding of the events reported. These and other production constraints were also seen to extend to other news media, including newspapers. There are certain ones [news stories] that may pique your interest. You’d like to know a little more and then – boom! – you’re on to something else. You know, I would think that a lot of the stories that went in here, all the different news that they showed, you know, there’s a lot in that short span of time, and you didn’t have enough time to focus on certain things. They had a lot of different things going on in that short period of time.



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I find that a lot of things I want to know information about, that I don’t get the details of it that I want to hear. I just get a briefing on it, and then you are left to, you think you’ll turn on the news and hear what you want to hear, but then, no, you are left to, you have to go to the newspapers. So you’ve got to go and find out from all different places bits and pieces of what you want to know, because you’re not getting it all ... If there is something that I really want to know about, I’ll sit here and I’ll flicker through all the different news stations, and just keep going over them. And I’ll have to watch the same ones a few times just to make sure that’s all they’re all telling us right now, you know. And it is frustrating because there are certain things you want to know about, but you can’t find out as much detail as you want. (wcm, age 39, Interview #014) Perhaps the most definitive confirmation of television journalism’s fundamental inability to inform was experienced by research participants who attempted to make sense of news reports that were not subject to conventional time constraints. The events of 11 September 2001 led broadcasters throughout the United States, Canada, and elsewhere to abandon regular program schedules in their entirety in order to provide unprecedented amounts of continuous news coverage. Rather than render the events intelligible, however, many interviewees remained confounded and perplexed months and even years later, as discussed in both preliminary and followup interviews.18 For example, in November and December of 2001, these research participants continued to struggle with their understanding of the events: Since September 11th they have been going on and on and on about what happened on September 11th and what’s following it, the war and everything else, and yet they are beating around the bush. They are not telling very much. They are holding a lot of information back, maybe for our own protection and everything, but by the same token I would like to know if they’ve got a bomb over there that’s going to explode ... Personally, I’m not ever quite sure that I know why the attacks happened in the first place. (wcm, age 31, Interview #009) It gets to the point that it gets to be too much, what is seen on tv, and they’re making it more difficult to sit down and watch because

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we watched at the beginning, when it started, when the towers came down. We watched it for a couple of days, but then it was like that’s all we were hearing constantly on all the different stations, and it was getting to the point where that’s all you heard. Therefore, we shut it off and said we’re not going to watch the news for awhile because it’s getting too overwhelming because you’re hearing it constantly. You know, this was on and it was repeating, you know, you’d see the buildings coming down all the time. Once was hard enough, I mean it was shocking. It was so overwhelmingly sad to see what was going on and to have to keep seeing that over and over again. So after about two days or so I had to turn it off. I couldn’t keep watching the towers coming down ... We saw on tv, I guess, what they want us to see, and anything else is left to the imagination. And we’re still left to ask what’s going on with the whole situation. I think there is still the question of why it happened. (wcm, age 39, Interview #014, emphasis in original) The experience of the 9/11 coverage was in itself sufficient to lead a significant number of participants to conclude that television “hides by showing.” As in the case illustrated above, some participants simply shut off their television sets out of sheer exasperation with the absence of comprehensible information. In a disturbing number of cases, however, the “shutdown” was of a longer-term nature: participants, often younger participants in working-class households, proclaimed either a newly acquired or ongoing contentment with political apathy, derived at least in part from their frustrations with the informational limitations of television and other news media. Older and well-educated middle-class participants were rarely driven to such extremes, educationally equipped as most were with the means to fill in at least some of the gaps left by television journalism. Their frustrations with the specific content of everyday news stories had therefore somewhat abated, which enabled more reflective criticisms of the state of journalism generally. One such critique, by a middle-class woman who had participated in a recent strike, effectively articulates the views of many: mcw: All the way through life now I see the essential questions never being asked. That’s the problem. We saw it up close and intimate with our own issues in the strike. But the same thing applies to the focus on the corruption, let’s say, in the federal



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­ overnment around who went to stay at whose lodge for a vacag tion, when in fact there is a serious malaise happening there, that no one is questioning ... [Journalists will ask] why is the Prime Minister behaving the way he’s behaving? And there’s a little conjecture, and a little of this and a little of that. But the focus is always on the wrong thing! Why do you think that is? How do you understand that yourself? mcw: It’s frightening to me to think that there could be two reasons for it, and each one is equally frightening. One, that the journalists themselves can’t see the forest for the trees. That’s pretty scary. They don’t know to ask the bigger questions because they don’t know what the bigger question is, they’re so wrapped up in chasing the minutiae. That’s one theory. The other theory is that they have a very clear idea of what the big question is, but their editorial boards prevent them from publishing it, so therefore there’s no point in asking it! That’s also scary. So either one is indicating that there is a creeping rot in the actual media system. And I don’t think it’s a huge conspiracy, I think it’s going back again to who owns it, what is the purpose? The purpose, don’t forget, for the owner of the publication or the media, the purpose is not about informing the public. That is not their purpose. Their purpose is the bottom line, is to make money, is to consolidate their power base. Those are their purposes. Informing the public is of no particular interest whatsoever. So there you go! And you have a whole bunch of people who are desperate to be working, because we’re churning out all of these journalists and reporters and what have you, and they’re shrinking the numbers of media outlets to work in, so they’ll do anything, in order to work. They’re not going to risk their careers or their positions or whatever by asking the questions over and over again that their editorial board says not to. So there you go. That scares me. (mcw, age 62, Interview #018, emphasis in original) The interview material that has been cited thus far makes it apparent that, while there are commonalities in the criticisms directed at television and other forms of journalism, there are important underlying distinctions as well. Just like the distinctions that were observed in the more specifically evaluative responses evoked during the viewing of news stories, many of these distinctions can be

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traced to the social locations of participants, which suggests a need to pursue rigorous classifications of Canadian news audiences based upon class, gender, age, and so forth. Such efforts at classification can draw upon the work of Press and Cole (1999), Riggs (1998), and others who have examined age- and gender-based reception experiences at length. Political economy can certainly utilize some of the analytical techniques of constructionism, just as Deacon, ­Fenton, and Bryman (1999) utilized a natural history model, derived from constructionism, to track a particular British news story from its production through to its reception. In their words: “The time is ripe ... for re-tying once more the strands of production and reception” (10). Above all, it is plainly in the interests of communication scholars to explore questions such as how and why contemporary journalism fails to enlighten the impoverished and the oppressed. The research discussed here seeks to contribute a response to these and other related questions. At this juncture, it is already quite apparent that, again, rather than enlighten audiences, the highly converged Canadian mediascape is more inclined to generate anger and frustration: it activates audiences not in the direction of a collective will to participate in progressive social movements but, rather, in the direction of a socially isolated experience of mystification and rage that plays itself out on a daily basis within the private domain of individual households. In this everyday sense, the responses of audiences are also “hidden.” The contemporary extent of corporate convergence has accelerated the rage through a reduction in the already limited range of information sources, through extensive cross-media source and content duplication, through the increased political homogeneity of news, through the aggressive commercialization of news, and so forth. Those who proclaim that the internet is a revolutionary or “democratizing” alternative need to examine the access data and, much more important, need to consult internet users specifically about their news experiences, especially as more and more evidence indicates that the internet is not used as a primary or even secondary news source. Moreover, the accumulated evidence demonstrates that, where internet users do use the internet for news-seeking purposes, their searches almost invariably lead to websites operated by “traditional” news media such as the major broadcasting organizations. While many of the research participants expressed interest in



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online news sources, only middle-class participants were equipped to gain ready access to them, reflecting the continuing class-based digital divide in the population at large. Furthermore, as discussed in the following section, it cannot be assumed that those who are so equipped and who do seek online news sources necessarily find that their informational needs are adequately met.

USE OF INTERNET AND OTHER ALTERNATIVE INFORMATION SOURCES It is also important to ask how and to what extent audiences have accommodated the accelerated convergence in their everyday news usage routines and in their general efforts to comprehend the implications of ongoing developments. In other words, how and to what extent do these highly critical postures result in a search for and use of alternative information sources? There are indications that the contemporary scope of convergence may have led some audience groups to retreat somewhat from long-established Canadian patterns of extensive television news consumption and to at least occasionally choose other media, such as radio and the internet, that are less constrained by time, the visual imperative, and other production-based limitations. For example, radio was cited as a preferred news medium by some of the women participants who find radio news stories, and especially current affairs programs (such as cbc Radio’s The Current), somewhat more focused upon issues rather than events, and in a manner that renders those issues more intelligible in the absence of the visual imperative. Some of the same women also stated that it is easier to listen to a radio than to watch television while in the midst of household labour (e.g., a radio can be conveniently and routinely heard in the kitchen during meal preparations). Nevertheless, as documented in table 3.2, radio serves as a primary news source to little more than 20 percent of participants in all three samples. As discussed in chapter 1, the internet cannot be seen as a grand new “remedy” for the ills experienced by audiences as a result of television journalism’s limitations. In the first place, even those who are comparatively privileged with home-based cmc and/or mobile, internet-equipped ICTs are not necessarily inclined to use that access in order to seek alternative information sources. It has been clearly demonstrated that the internet is more likely to be used for

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­ urposes other than the search for news and information (e.g., p entertainment; social interaction via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites; and other leisure activities such as gaming). In the case of the Canadian samples discussed here, less than one percent (0.9 percent) of all participants identified the internet as their primary news source (see table 3.3), and only a minority referred to it as a secondary news source during interviews or documented it as a regular news source in the news diaries. Mahtani (2008) makes the same observation in her reception research with Chinese-­ Canadian and Iranian-Canadian focus groups in Vancouver. Despite their criticisms, she found that both groups “emphasized that they consume mainstream English-language Canadian television news regularly and that they have great respect for the Canadian Englishlanguage television news media in general” (655). In contrast with results elsewhere, such as those of Gillespie and Cheesman (2002), who found that British multilingual viewers turned to the internet out of dissatisfaction with British television news, Mahtani’s (2008, 655) Canadian groups examined online sources yet remained “avid consumers of Canadian television news.” These observations are supported by Keown (2007b), whose review of 2003 General Social Survey (gss) data also found that television is the “staple food” of the Canadian population’s news diet. All the more interesting is Keown’s identification of the pattern according to which those who depend principally upon television news tend to participate in fewer non-voting political activities (17).19 This relationship is explored further in chapter 6. Second, where the internet is utilized to seek alternative information sources, users are likely to either go directly to mainstream news sites based upon television news stories (such as cbc.ca and ctv.ca) or be directed to these sites after a search via one of the mainstream search engines (such as Google). As Hindman (2009) and others have documented, the notion that a wealth of diverse information can be acquired from the internet is precisely that – a notion – and one that is without any empirical foundation. Third, and by no means least significant, there is a need to acknowledge and to examine the circumstances of those who are without ready access to digital media. The persistence of class-based and other digital divides rooted in structurally embedded social inequalities cannot be underestimated (see chapter 1). In the Canadian samples, there are many like the following participant, a skilled



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tradesperson who could only gain access to the internet through the computers at the public library, where he only had time to use the internet in order to obtain essential parts for his construction projects: wcm: I go down to the library almost daily … it’s a matter of finances, that’s all. We don’t have a computer. We would like to get one. We have some money coming. We may have enough to get one; we want a car first. We don’t have a vehicle at this moment, but we have a fair-sized cheque coming … We may get a computer, I don’t know. I’d love to have a computer. And so would she [refers to wife, present at the interview] and so would the boys. When you use the ones at the library, do you use them to access news sources? wcm: No, no, because it’s so, my time is restricted … I go on the internet for business. (wcm, age 62, Interview #015) Of perhaps even greater concern are those audience groups who display little or no interest in online news or, for that matter, in any other news medium. In a number of these cases, the disenchantment has led to a complete disengagement from political communication. These are the sorts of behaviours and patterns easily overlooked by analyses that examine reception in isolation, or by those which assume that the internet has eradicated long-standing frustrations with the informational limitations of television news, or those that implicitly celebrate any and all actively critical interpretations of televisual texts. As Jensen (1990) pointed out more than two decades ago, even a critically “oppositional” reading, in the classical sense formulated within Hall’s original encoding-decoding model, is not in itself necessarily a political act, nor is it necessarily an act of political opposition (see also Deacon, Fenton, and Bryman 1999, 24). As Hackett (2000) suggests, there is also a danger that any celebration of “active” audiences can contribute to political quiescence and to the subversion of movements to restore journalistic freedom and “media democracy.” Likewise, there is a pivotal need to be cautious about presumptions regarding the nature and extent of the critical responses observed among audiences. At a minimum, it is necessary to distinguish between those who actively articulate a developed critique of the social world within which convergent

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media operate and those who merely feel obliged to conform to what Kavoori describes as “the global culture of critical media consumption.” Beyond that is the need to determine the forms and types of resistance as well as their correlates. As the literature regarding social movements attests, there is little to justify the conclusion that actively critical audiences are necessarily prepared to actively engage in social movements directed at communicative reform. With those precautions in mind, it can be safely stated that the majority of research participants in this project would welcome initiatives intended to improve the process of political communication in Canadian society. Despite the stability of institutional and structural imperatives, the work of Philo and others in the Glasgow University Media Group (gumg) suggests that the reform of journalistic practices could potentially lead to greater levels of both audience interest and audience comprehension, at least with respect to news regarding the developing world and the conflicts within it.20 Philo (2002) reports about a pilot study undertaken pursuant to the gumg’s extensive research with 165 participants in twenty-six focus groups. The study found that audiences were both confused by and disinterested in news reports of the developing world. Focus group members freely acknowledged that “they simply did not understand the news and thought that the external world was not being properly explained to them” (177), which the researchers traced directly to production practices that leave stories decontextualized and devoid of explanatory power. In a preliminary follow-up to another rare three-dimensional analysis of production, content, and reception, senior British journalists participated directly with bbc news viewers in a focus group discussion of how audience interest and comprehension might be affected by changes in the structure and content of international news stories. The results indicate that a greater degree of contextualization and explanatory power, especially explanations of how viewers themselves are directly affected by the core system of relationships between the developed and developing worlds, can produce a distinctly pronounced change in levels of audience interest as well as in audience understanding (Philo 2002, 185–6). The journalists were therefore encouraged to routinely incorporate such explanations into their reports. There can be little doubt that Canadian news audiences would likely appreciate the same incorporation of contexts and



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e­xplanations into international news. As expected, based upon reception research conducted elsewhere, the Canadian participants were almost invariably inclined to be highly self-referential: those stories clearly seen to affect them directly were the stories that consistently attracted the greatest levels of interest. Unfortunately, among these were participants who felt that only local news stories could satisfy this criterion, and who therefore excluded all but local newscasts from their daily news diet. If television journalism could consistently reveal these “hidden” linkages and relationships, it might well serve to reduce the level of “symbolic violence” against which Bourdieu protested. Issues of self-referentiality in relation to communication activism and journalism reform are discussed at greater length in the final chapter. At this juncture, however, it is useful to proceed towards a number of conclusions regarding the nature and extent of critical resistance to news texts in the case of the Canadian research participants.

CRITICAL RESISTANCE AND NON-CRITICAL CONFORMITY Table 4.1 summarizes the responses of research participants in the largest sample, the questionnaire sample, to the ten questionnaire statements that were designed to provide a preliminary and purely quantitative assessment of levels of satisfaction with television news.21 Once again, it should be borne in mind that all three samples are targeted samples that consist principally of individuals who are active members of one or more community organizations – organizations that span the politico-ideological spectrum yet which are all committed in various ways to social change at the local community level and beyond. Therefore, it could be argued that such sample groups are likely to be more predisposed towards dissatisfactions with televisual reportage than the population at large. As the table illustrates, however, the results are somewhat contradictory in this regard, to the extent that this argument cannot be sustained. The questionnaire statements were designed to test responses to recurrent themes in the news production research literature  – specifically, themes that journalism researchers have frequently perceived to be related to the textual outcomes of production constraints. It can be seen that, in the case of all but one of the ten statements, the majority of both working-class and middle-class research

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Table 4.1 Criticisms of television news and other news sources Questionnaire statements Television news stories are too short to offer the information I would like to know about events. Television news is too focused on daily events without enough background or context. Television news does not provide enough information about other parts of Canada and the world. Television news does not provide enough stories about the lives of ordinary working Canadians. Television news is too dependent on “official” sources without enough background investigation. Television news is more critical of government power holders than of other powerful people. Television news often seems to be more entertainment-oriented than information-oriented. Television and other news media seem to report many of the same news stories on any given day. I feel that the news sources available to me keep me well informed about major developments. I am often critical of what I see, hear, and read in the news media.

Agree strongly

Agree somewhat

Disagree somewhat

Disagree strongly

No Answer

wc* 25.0% mc 29.0% wc 25.9% mc 28.0% wc 23.2% mc 26.0% wc 47.3% mc 29.0% wc 30.4% mc 33.0%

wc 50.0% mc 41.0% wc 52.7% mc 48.0% wc 38.4% mc 45.0% wc 37.5% mc 45.0% wc 47.3% mc 44.0%

wc 17.9% mc 16.0% wc 10.7% mc 14.0% wc 22.3% mc 14.0% wc 8.9% mc 16.0% wc 9.8% mc 12.0%

wc  4.5% mc  9.0% wc  8.0% mc  3.0% wc 12.5% mc  9.0% wc  3.6% mc  3.0% wc  8.0% mc  4.0%

wc  2.7% mc  5.0% wc  2.7% mc  7.0% wc  3.6% mc  6.0% wc  2.7% mc  7.0% wc  4.5% mc  7.0%

wc 35.7% mc 30.0% wc 24.1% mc 32.0% wc 51.8% mc 56.0% wc 36.6% mc 32.0% wc 22.3% mc 34.0%

wc 39.3% mc 45.0% wc 46.4% mc 45.0% wc 42.0% mc 36.0% wc 50.0% mc 44.0% wc 52.7% mc 45.0%

wc 15.2% mc 8.0% wc 17.0% mc 9.0% wc 2.7% mc 3.0% wc 8.0% mc 12.0% wc 24.1% mc 19.0%

wc  5.4% mc  7.0% wc  8.9% mc  7.0% wc – mc – wc  5.4% mc  8.0% wc  0.9% mc –

wc  4.5% mc 10.0% wc  3.6% mc  7.0% wc  3.6% mc  5.0% wc – mc  4.0% wc 2 mc  2.0%

* wc = working class, mc = middle class. ** Percentages do not consistently total 100 percent due to rounding.



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participants agree upon the various limitations of television journalism. For example, 75 percent of working-class participants and 70 percent of middle-class participants agree that television news stories are too short to be informative. Approximately 79 percent of working-class participants and precisely 76 percent of middle-class participants agree about decontextualization. Perhaps a reflection of “glocalization” and, in particular, a greater working-class concern with local news, 61 percent of working-class participants and 71 percent of middle-class participants are in accord regarding the limitations of story geography. The distinctive attractions of local news are examined further in chapter 6. There is, however, unquestionably strong working-class agreement regarding the relative invisibility of their social class in television news, with 85 percent of working-class participants agreeing and nearly half (47.3 percent) of all working-class participants agreeing strongly. At the same time, middle-class participants are also compelled to acknowledge the persistent class bias, with 74 percent generally agreeing that the working class is comparatively absent from the sight lines of television journalism. At levels of 78 percent among working-class participants and 77 percent among middle-class participants, there is no significant class difference in the agreement that stories relayed by “official” sources usually trump investigative journalism. Similarly, both class-based groups agreed at the identical level of 75 percent that television journalism is more inclined to direct critical attention towards the exercise of power by individuals in the public sector rather than by private-sector power holders. A somewhat greater, although still not significant, class difference is apparent in the responses regarding entertainment-oriented versus information-oriented news: 70.5 percent of working-class participants and a full 77 percent of middle-class participants observed a balance – or, rather, imbalance – in favour of the former. Slightly more than one-quarter of working-class participants (25.9 percent) disagreed that there is a greater entertainment orientation. In a significant number of these cases, respondents of both classes clearly noted their own choices of news media that are not inclined in this direction. The general tendency to steer clear of news outlets expected to be offensive in this respect was also evident in the interviews and particularly in the news diaries, in which news outlet choices were specified in written detail. In essence, those who are

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likely to be offended by explicit tabloidization are likely to avoid it as much as possible in their news choices. Overall, compared to some American research outcomes, and compared to other sources of discontent with Canadian news productions, tabloidization was not emphasized as a central issue by research participants in any of the three samples. In sharp contrast, a pivotal issue is that of source and content duplication as a recurrent outcome of ownership and technological convergence as well as, and in conjunction with, widely shared professional news values. As the earlier discussion in this chapter indicates, the strongest consensus by far is around this issue: more than 90 percent of all questionnaire respondents, including 93.8 percent of working-class respondents and 92.0 percent of middle-class respondents, agreed at least somewhat. More than half of both groups agreed strongly: 51.8 percent of working-class respondents and 56 percent of middle-class respondents. Unlike any of the other statements in the questionnaire, this one attracted virtually no strong disagreement. It is important to note that, even in this case, where there is evidence of strong, widespread critical resistance, there is at the same time evidence of a non-critical conformity whereby the daily recurrent repetition of the same limited number of news stories is presumed to be inevitable and is not questioned. For example, one middle-class woman added the following note to her strong agreement with the statement “Television and other news media seem to report many of the same news stories on any given day”: “Of course, that is the day’s news!” (mcw, Questionnaire). Further evidence of the non-critical conformity that exists alongside critical resistance can be found in the unanticipated level of agreement with the statement “I feel that the news sources available to me keep me well-informed about major developments.” In this case, almost 90 percent of working-class respondents (86.6 percent) and 76 percent of middle-class respondents conveyed a curious, seemingly contradictory contentment with their news sources, while only a very insignificant minority – 5.4 percent of the working-­ class group and 8 percent of the middle-class group  – expressed strong disagreement. Despite other strong indications of discontent throughout the other questionnaire responses, therefore, most were ultimately inclined to be uncritically satisfied, to perceive themselves as “well-informed.” Nevertheless, as the responses to the final statement indicate, there is also frequent critical resistance: exactly



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75 percent of working-class respondents and 79 percent of middleclass respondents agree that “I am often critical of what I see, hear, and read in the news media.” This suggests that, while we might readily summon evidence of the critical capacities of news audiences, we also need to acknowledge and explain what continues to be an ultimate conformity with the hegemonic cycles of daily news production and reception. To summarize, the questionnaire results point to profound commonalities in the criticisms directed at television news in particular, criticisms that clearly emerge out of a widely shared dissatisfaction with the principles and values that underlie the production of news. While there are limits to the criticisms and these limits need to be recognized and addressed, the broad dissatisfactions extended throughout the questionnaire, interview, and news diary samples as well as across class, gender, and other demographic boundaries. As van Zoonen (2011) argues, our conceptualizations of audiences may need to move beyond the contemporary focus upon situated uses and interpretations, especially those perceived to be highly individuated, yet even those seen as peculiar to particular social classes, particular genders, or particular ethnic groups may need to be reconsidered. In this light, she suggests that there may also be a need to re-examine the “big” and “old” questions about how journalism contributes, in the end, to the preservation of hegemony. After all, despite resistant readings and situated uses, it continues to be the case that individuals, as well as populations at large, are affected in broadly similar ways by their experiences with news reportage. In that same light, and in the same collection, Ross (2011) articulates her vital point that reception researchers have been inclined to highlight critical resistance at the expense of attention to conformity. We are still left to specify and explain the microlevel mechanisms that contribute to the larger process according to which hegemony is preserved. With regard to the Canadian research discussed here, it is not difficult to summon, on the one hand, illustrations of critical resistance to televisual news texts as well as dissatisfactions with television journalism and, on the other hand, illustrations of conformity that are frequently associated with political disenchantment. It would be inaccurate, however, to presume that these different experiences are associated with different individuals or with differently characterized groups in the samples. Rather, one of the many complex

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specificities of news reception is that different experiences of conformity and resistance can be observed in the case of the same individual and within the same social group. In other words, there can be conformity at the same time, although not at the same moment, that there is resistance. Furthermore, it is rarely possible to observe either conformity or resistance that is entirely free of ambiguity. For example, the following middle-class woman, who was otherwise not inclined to critically challenge the news stories that she viewed, was not at all reticent to express her general dissatisfactions at the conclusion of the newscast: As usual, I find the stories are offered in sound bites. They go by very quickly. There is no time really for reflection or chatting about it till the next story, and I find I’ll talk over a sports story or two … Where there have been quote unquote “political panels,” those too are never really thorough in their analysis of things. People are expected to give their little mouthfuls in just a few seconds, and that’s just so unsatisfying. (mcw, age 42, Interview #039) On the other hand, a person of the same class and gender, and of precisely the same age, expressed contentment around the same issues in her news diary: I truly do not like to swamp myself with too much information on Saturdays. When I was a student I would see news at breakfast, spend a good two hours going through the Toronto Star on Saturdays, and watch the news again at six. Today I like my news doses in little bites. I have learned to “accept the things I cannot change.” (mcw, age 42, News Diary) On a remarkably similar note, the following working-class woman articulated her inclination towards conformity in a manner that recurred throughout the interviews: We have to accept the things that we cannot change because you can get too frustrated. Because the United States is sooo powerful and George Bush is such an idiot, and I say that with all my heart [laughs]. One person or even a hundred or two hundred in [local city] can’t stop the United States military, so all we can do is try



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and keep our spirits up. You know, it hurts that there are going to be people killed and murdered and their country will be devastated, but I am so powerless that I just want to cry and yet I don’t want to cry … I don’t feel powerless. I mean, I can write my mp, sign petitions, and make phone calls. And I have done all of those … Poor people join the army so they can get a salary. Some of them do it because they want to be there, but people do it for economic reasons. They’re the ones that will be killed. I know. As a peace-loving poor person, I feel really upset. (wcw, age 53, Interview #040, emphasis in original) Finally, while it is possible to summon a level of support for the “fear theories” of risk communication associated with Ulrich Beck and others, the importance of the fear that can sometimes be generated by news reports can be overstated, such as where it is seen as essential to the maintenance of a police-state in order that social order can be preserved and where it is theorized that news media perform this function unproblematically. Nevertheless, one should not be surprised to find examples of these types of experiences, sometimes extremely manifest, as in the case of a middleclass couple who, immediately after 9/11, purchased a new motor home, stocked it with cash, food, and other essentials, and kept it parked in their driveway, confident that, in the event of another such crisis, the couple could be out of their home and on the road within fifteen minutes. First interviewed in March 2003, the couple had recently reviewed and increased the supplies in their driveway motor home immediately following the 2003 attack on Iraq. Interestingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, the woman’s primary news source was a local privately-owned radio station that offers minimal news content, while her husband identified his primary news source as the Toronto Sun. In the end, however, risk communication theorizations cannot stand alone as solid, empirically supported explanations of conditions of news reception. In sum, just as Kavoori identified “striking similarities” in the eagerly critical commentaries of his American and European informants, there are also critical commonalities in the nature and extent of resistance throughout these Canadian samples. It is important to clarify, however, that there are commonalities – critical and non-critical – that are shared by all audience groups at the same

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time that there are news reception experiences that remain particular to specific audience groups who represent specific social groups within the population. Most important among these distinctive reception experiences are the experiences of those who represent different classes and genders. Their particular experiences are the subject of the following two chapters.

5 Social Conditions of Reception: Class, Gender, and Other Social Divisions The overvaluing of a male audience reflects the sexism of patriarchy as surely as the overvaluing of an upscale audience reflects the classism of capitalism. Eileen Meehan, “Gendering the Commodity Audience”

At the same time that we need to appreciate the commonalities experienced by all social groups throughout a population during the process of news reception, we cannot lose sight of the particularities of socially situated reception experiences. Audiences, after all, are socially structured and stratified, as Morley (1980) demonstrates powerfully in his highly influential study of the bbc program Nationwide’s audiences. It is very much a reflection of the circuitous trajectory of reception studies that, many years later, Kim (2004) was compelled to resurrect that long-neglected lesson in a re-analysis of Morley’s data which retraces and quantifies the empirical connections between social class and news reception. Additionally, progress towards the refinement of the concept of intersectionality has redirected attention to class, together with other social traits seen to delimit a multiplicity of interpretatively significant clusters within audiences. While these are useful conceptual directions, the analytical danger is that too much emphasis can be placed upon what some perceive to be highly situated reception experiences. This can occur to the extent that some communication scholars conclude their studies of reception with exasperation regarding its multiple complexities or, faithful to the current social psychology turn, with a needless insistence upon attention to extremely individuated processes of identity constitution and reconstitution that are seen to pivotally shape reception outcomes. More problematic are those analyses inclined to abandon, dismiss, or neglect the use of class,

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gender, ethnicity, and other social boundary markers to the point at which macro-social and even micro-social insights can be lost. This raises the difficult questions to be addressed in this chapter regarding how class, gender, and other social divisions among audiences figure within the news reception process. At the micro-level of individual reception experiences, families and households must be acknowledged as important phenomena that contextualize and that can either facilitate or constrain the ways in which a particular individual responds to news stories, whether the news is received inside or outside a household setting. Whether the familial impact is inclined to constrain or facilitate a critical interpretation of news is undoubtedly a fascinating question, although even the most extensive and genuinely ethnographic fieldwork cannot expect to trace and document the precise nature and extent of that familial influence, nor can individual research participants be expected to appreciate it fully and report it accurately to researchers. Nevertheless, household interviews do present the opportunity to directly witness some of the impacts of familial interactions during news reception. While familial influences extend to all other reception settings as well, with or without the actual physical presence of family members, it is within the household that such influences become most evident, rendered explicit through social interactions around the television set. Concurrent with these significant impacts are the visible operations of the impacts of macro-level class and gender inequalities at the micro-level of the households in which news is regularly received. Clement (2002, 3) situates households together with labour markets and state practices as sites that are each “infused with particular class and gender relations.” Furthermore, he clarifies a crucial point regarding how class and gender need to be perceived in relation to everyday practices and experiences within households. He makes it clear that class and gender “are not ‘outcomes’ so much as organizers of practices and experiences” (5–6, emphasis added). This is precisely how the actions of class and gender in news reception need to be understood – not as “outcomes” that somehow predispose some social groups towards inevitable and immutable interpretations and responses but, rather, as existent, powerful social conditions and sources of social division whose power resides, at least in part, in their capacity to structure and organize the different experiences of different social groups. Those different experiences can, at least



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to some extent, be expected to shape specific experiences of news reception. Clement (2002, 18) also makes the point that “households can be complex sites for class.” What has added further complexity to analyses of the operation of class within households generally, and within household news reception particularly, is the contemporary preoccupation with “identities,” or “perceived interests,” of individual social subjects, frequently understood to be tied to a multi-­ textured negotiation of multiple intersecting social conditions, among which class is sometimes included although no longer necessarily deemed primary. Other conditions extend, for example, to gender, ethnicity, age, nationality, and citizenship, all of which are similarly understood to contribute to how social subjects are constituted, come to perceive their social location, and identify their selfinterests. Clement (for example, 2002, 2004), Mosco (2009), and others suggest that the time has come to revive a relational conceptualization of class – one that can connect it to gender, ethnicity, and to the “social movements that organize the energies of resistance to class (and other forms of) power” (Mosco 2009, 191, emphasis in original). This conceptualization understands class as much more than merely a particular attribute of institutions or individuals (see also Clement 2004, 43). Above all, as Mosco (2009, 191) suggests, there is a need to connect class more tightly to hegemony. With shared concerns, Golding (1994, 461) insisted almost two decades ago that communication research “must reconnect with wider questions of social inequality, power, and process.” During the same period, Garnham (1992, 362), like many others, observed “the creation of a two-tier market divided between the informationrich (provided with high-cost specialized information and cultural services) and the information-poor (provided with increasingly homogenized entertainment services on a mass scale).” Have either of these disconnections been overcome in the twenty-first century? On the contrary, neoliberalism has effectively erased class issues, as such, from the political agenda as well as the research agenda of many scholars, while digital divides, contrary to popular mythology and the vast propaganda of ict marketers, have become established as a new and largely impermeable dimension of social stratification, such that entire segments of the population remain without the full benefits of access to online communication. This continuing digital exclusion results in direct detrimental impacts upon various

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social groups (see DiMaggio et al. 2004; Mesch and Talmud 2010; ­Robinson 2012; van Dijk 2005; Witte and Mannon 2010), although class differences remain “the strongest predictor of digital inequality” (Robinson 2012, 91). The extent to which digital exclusion is tied to broader forms of political and social exclusion is a very serious research question that needs to be explored thoroughly. Levitas (2006, 2008) is among those stalwart researchers who challenge the observed disappearance of class politics and other such neoliberal arguments which insist that class has lost its political and even its general social significance. As she points out, one of the important distinctions missed by these arguments is the distinction between class politics as a form of resistance and struggle by the working classes, and class politics as a form of attack on the working classes, broadly defined as those who must sell their labour to survive. I argue that class is not dead. Class remains the key structuring principle of people’s life chances ... the apparent absence of class politics – that is, a class-based politics of resistance from below – is actually the product of the presence of class politics: three decades of class war from above that has been successful both economically and hegemonically. ­(Levitas 2008, 1, emphases added) Nevertheless, she grants that class appears to be less significant “as an organising identification for a politics of resistance and transformation” (2). She explains it with reference to the particular economic and political dynamics operative under Thatcherite and New Labour neoliberalism in the uk – a set of dynamics by no means unique to that society. The rhetoric of neoliberalism there and elsewhere promotes the notion that complex identities and affiliations are associated with ethnic origin and religion. These are not, however, “intrinsically antithetical to class-based politics,” although, as Levitas points out, notions of complex identities that somehow supersede class can be used, and are used, to marginalize class “as the basis of collective self-understandings” (3). As she concludes, “the hegemonic representation of reference to class as divisive works very well to prevent the development of class consciousness, and to conceal this still fundamental division between the super-rich and the bulk of the population” (ibid., emphasis in original).



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While the term “social class” may not be at the forefront of research participants’ discussions of their social locations or their motivations as activists and volunteers (nor should that be expected, in view of the discursive patterns of hegemonic neoliberalism), it is nevertheless clear that there is, among the workingclass participants, a fundamental awareness of social inequalities and many of their concrete, everyday repercussions. There are certainly various levels of such awareness among many middle-class participants as well. What is also evident, particularly among the working-class participants, is a common disenchantment with the comparative invisibility of their class in news, a common dissatisfaction with the manner in which the infrequent appearances of working-class people are framed in news, and a common sense of disconnection from the middle-class manner in which news is presented. These class-based reception experiences are illustrated in the interview, news diary, and questionnaire material cited in this chapter. Bourdieu (2008, 197–8) expresses one of the most fundamental class differences in news production and reception: The dominated classes, dominated even in the production of their self-image and therefore their social identity, do not speak, they are spoken. Among other privileges, the dominant have the privilege of controlling their own objectivation and the production of their own image – not only inasmuch as they possess a more or less absolute power over those who contribute directly to this work of objectivation (painters, writers, journalists, etc.); but also inasmuch as they have the means of prefiguring their own objectivation through a whole labour of representation ... By contrast, one of the fundamental dimensions of alienation lies in the fact that the dominated have to reckon with an objective truth of their class that they have not made. This can be usefully understood as the nature of working-class exclusion and one of the most important class differences operative within political communication. Middle-class journalists and other news producers have the opportunity to fashion, or at least to participate in the creation of, their own representations, whereas their working-class audiences can only reconcile themselves to a

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representation of their own class that is externally imposed. This, in turn, becomes a primary source of their alienation from all class representations that appear, tacitly and otherwise, in the political discourse of news. The discussion of class here is undoubtedly briefer than it needs to be, and it can only call upon what has been remarkably scant attention to class in the otherwise extensive scholarly and non-­ scholarly literature regarding journalism. It is at least possible to draw attention to questions such as how and why class is visible and in other ways invisible in news, and to the inescapable implications for the different, class-based ways in which news is received.

THE (IN)VISIBILITY OF CLASS IN NEWS Based upon her analysis of news sources in the case of British newspapers, Karen Ross (2011, 11) sets forth a strong argument that concisely captures the essence of who continues to be heard and visible, and who remains largely unheard and invisible, in news: Who is invited to speak as a commentator on and in the news says vitally important things about who “counts” in society, and whose voices have legitimacy and status. The hierarchy of news values identified by Gans thirty years ago, which made clear that some sources were more equal than others, is alive and well in the twenty-first century journalist’s toolbox: citizens are simply not as equal as government spokespeople, and women are almost never as equal as men. The infatuation which journalists have with the authoritative male source means there is little room for other kinds of voices, namely those of women, minorities, the general public or challengers to the status quo. With regard to the American case, Ehrenreich (2007, 1) presents a yet more broadly sweeping picture of the class blindness that is ubiquitous throughout American news media, which she sees as “an entirely local phenomenon: the disappearance of the American working class – from the media, from intellectual concern, or more generally, from the mind of the American middle class.” Her definition of working class is also comparatively sweeping, to the extent that it is seen to comprise 60 to 70 percent of the US population.1 As she describes it, a limited and by no means unproblematic



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attention to the working class in the 1970s, principally in a number of noteworthy mass market films such as Blue Collar, The Deer Hunter, and Saturday Night Fever, eventually culminated, following the acceleration of neoliberalism in the 1980s, in the abrupt and more or less complete disappearance of the working class from mainstream American media.2 At the same time, the working class largely disappeared from academic discourse, and “discourse” itself, as a newly fashionable object of analysis, supplanted scholarly interest in class, which was largely dismissed as a pertinent social category (2007, 2). In the news, “working class people are likely to cross the screen only as witnesses to crimes or sports events, never as commentators or – even when their own lives are under discussion – as ‘experts’” (ibid.). If we ask why the working class is largely unheard and unseen in news, it is useful to consider the class backgrounds of journalists and other professionals who produce news. As discussed in chapter 2, their current social locations are solidly within the middle class, and there is considerable international evidence that most have spent their entire lives in that class location. It can be seen as consequential in the sense that professional journalists, while bound in many ways by the structures of the journalistic field (including the news values that dictate, for example, that stories must be substantiated by official and other “authoritative” sources who are almost invariably middle-class spokespersons), can nevertheless exercise degrees of agency vis-à-vis those structures – for example, in their selection of stories and of other interviewees. In other words, while their professional need to justify a story with suitably “credible” sources frequently directs them away from the working class, particularly in view of the time constraints, there are also moments of agency in which some freedom of choice can be exercised and, during such moments, the proclivity towards middle-class stories and middleclass spokespersons is evident in the news texts that result. Hence, while we cannot call upon class monogamy exclusively to explain the class-blind character of news, it needs to be at least entertained within our accounts of that class blindness.3 The limits to a strictly demographic explanation of class blindness are suggested by Pritchard and Sauvageau’s (1999a, 288) finding that more than two-thirds of Canadian journalists declared “letting ordinary people express their views” to be a very important function of journalism. Clearly, as discussed in chapter 2, there are structural

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constraints as well as specific organizational constraints that effectively prohibit the fulfillment of that perceived function, ­including the dictates of the journalistic field which confine the voices of “ordinary people” to brief “vox pop” (vox populi, or “voice of the people”) segments within newscasts. As Pritchard and Sauvageau conclude, “these findings are consistent with research that has demonstrated that the content of news stories is determined principally by organizational needs, not individual journalists’ personal opinions” (301). To what extent can we call upon the predominantly middle-class composition of the news production workforce in order to explain working-class exclusion from news, or what may actually be a tacit or implicit classism in news content which arises from that demographic composition? Heider and Fuse (2004), in their analysis of local broadcast news,4 address this question in their direct examination of newsroom decisions regarding class. While their inclination is to emphasize the individuals in the newsroom and their social characteristics, there is a need to emphasize the underlying political economy of decisions that routinely exclude the working class. Their own observations reveal that only two classes exist within newsroom discourse: a privileged class of people who are in the target market and all those who are not. Rather than attribute a class bias to news producers based upon their class locations and class backgrounds, it is more useful to see this demography as a factor that reinforces what is a major structural force – namely, the fundamental economic need to attract wealthy and middle-class audiences. That those who produce news content are inclined to be middle class themselves merely helps to ensure that working-class news is absent. Heider and Fuse conclude definitively that “news was constructed as a product aimed primarily at those who had disposable income, lived in the suburbs, and had significant purchasing power” (105). A news producer in their study expressed it rather bluntly: A lot of us don’t come from poor backgrounds. A lot of us don’t understand that and don’t think those people watch. You know, we do homeless stories when the weather gets cold and so forth because it is something we can feel compassion for. But on a dayto-day basis we aren’t going to do a lot of those stories. (cited in Heider and Fuse 2004, 104)



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To that explanation, Kurpius (2004, 333–4) adds that there are also other factors, intrinsic to the structure of the everyday news ­production process, that act in conjunction with market forces to limit the working-class presence in news: Market forces are not the only reason for limited coverage of class. The complexity of the issue does not lend itself to television coverage. Journalists need an educational background and experience in lower and working class communities to more fully develop an understanding of class issues. This makes reporting in that area difficult at best for many reporters. Time and resource constraints also limit the possibilities for developing coverage on such a complex topic ... These are not neighborhoods that journalists can simply parachute into, get a story, and get out with good contextual information that accurately portrays issues of class. What may exacerbate the difficulties described by Kurpius is the long-standing cultural insularity of the professional middle class, a cultural insularity that some suggest has intensified with the rise of neoliberalism and the class polarizing tendencies that became evident during the 1980s. Ehrenreich (2007, 2), for example, speaks of the “natural solipsism of the professional middle class” and suggests that “classes are less likely to mix in college (with the decline of financial aid), in residential neighborhoods (with the gluttonous rise in real estate prices), or even in the malls (with the now almost universal segmentation of the retail industry into upscale and downscale components). Only the homeless disturb the middle class’s contemplation of itself and its self-images.” In her comments cited earlier, Ross made reference to Gans’s seminal Deciding What’s News, which, as long ago as 1979, demonstrated that “the news especially values the order of the upper-class and middle-class sectors of society” (Gans 1979, 61). Gans demonstrated further that, because journalists are positioned within these sectors themselves and many have never experienced life outside of these classes, it is the wealthy and middle classes who are best represented in news. Almost a quarter-century later, in his Democracy and the News, Gans (2003, 104) expresses his regrets that “the newsroom class makeup, and therefore the racial one, remain sadly deficient. Good intentions are clearly not working and in the academy

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as in the newsrooms, new recruitment methods and criteria of merit must be invented to end discrimination against people of working class origin and varied skin colors.” As Hindman’s (2009) seminal research in The Myth of Digital Democracy demonstrates, the news dominance of white middle-class men extends from print and broadcast newsrooms to online news sites and across the Web to the entire blogosphere of political communication. A great paradox of the internet is that, despite the claims of marketers and scholars who have insisted upon its “democratizing” potential, the empirical reality is that the same exclusivity characteristic of so-called “old” media has been replicated throughout cyberspace (see also McChesney 2013). Hindman’s documentation clearly establishes that online political discourse is dominated by a remarkably small group of men who are exceptionally well equipped with the resources needed to establish a strong presence and voice. The economic power of the few corporations that control digital information flows, in conjunction with related technological factors that intrinsically favour a hierarchical rather than a collective egalitarian internet exchange, ensures that existent structures of social inequality and political exclusion are perpetuated and reinforced. In Hindman’s words, “ultimately, blogs have given a small group of educational, professional, and technical elites new influence in US politics. Blogs have done far less to amplify the political voice of average citizens” (103).5 Moreover, Schradie’s (2012, 569) recent analysis of social inequalities in the blogosphere concludes: “Instead of a trend toward more egalitarian findings, blogging shows a consistent gap ... [I]t is socio-economic class inequality that is most persistent.” Some of the ways in which these class-based exclusions figure within news reception are considered in the following section.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CLASS IN NEWS RECEPTION The extensive history of class bias in scholarly and non-scholarly visions of audiences has been traced by the historical sociologist Richard Butsch (see especially Butsch 2000, 2001, and 2008). Sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton first used the term “narcotizing dysfunction” in 1948 to describe media effects, with the implication that working-class people in particular were especially vulnerable to the perceived “narcotic” effects that – so it was



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believed but never demonstrated – would literally immobilize them and thereby necessarily preclude their participation in civic life ­(Lazarsfeld and Merton 1948). Quantitative survey research supported by commercial sources, including broadcasters such as cbs and nbc as well as advertising agencies, and reported to general readers in books such as The Age of Television (Bogart 1956), The Effects of Mass Communication (Klapper 1960), Living with Television (Glick and Levy 1962), and The People Look at Television (Steiner 1963), led to the creation of the concept of the heavy viewer, defined by the sheer quantity of viewing. The concept of the heavy viewer, and the distinction between light and heavy viewers, clearly suited the interests and needs of the advertisers and broadcasters who financed such research. The quantitatively measured heavy viewing later came to be associated with indiscriminate viewing as well as with a parental failure to supervise children’s viewing, all of which were attributed to working-class viewers and became known as a syndrome called “passive viewing” (Butsch 2008, 131, 174–5). Significantly less research attention was directed at “active” viewers who presumably used television selectively (or at least used it less, because other leisure pursuits are affordable to middle-class viewers) and who presumably restricted children’s viewership. As Butsch (2008, 131) found in his historical analysis, one of the worst outcomes of this early television research was “the construction of the image of the inert, slovenly, working class male television viewer.” For example, in Living with Television (1962), two market researchers, Ira Glick and Sidney Levy, focus upon class differences and literally equate working-class viewers with children who sought “immediate gratification” from television and who cultivated no other interests. In contrast, wealthier viewers were perceived to be selective and tasteful in their television spectatorship, displaying high levels of cultural capital. Butsch (2008, 131) points out that “such descriptions contributed to the larger discourse that used television use as an indicator of status.” Arguably, it also contributed to the disconnection between, on the one hand, scholarly researchers, who are commonly without any direct personal experience of working-class life and, on the other hand, the television medium as well as television research in general and television reception research in particular. Unfortunately, the class biases of predominantly middle-class scholars also crept into research conducted regarding children’s

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television use. A pivotal early study was carried out by Wilbur Schramm and his graduate students at Stanford, Jack Lyle and Edwin Parker, who reported their results in Television in the Lives of Our Children (Schramm, Lyle, and Parker 1961). Their work established a path that has been well-travelled by many publications about children and television and that also influenced the direction of the oft-cited US Surgeon-General’s reports in 1972. That path began, directly and explicitly, with class bias. Schramm and his students literally introduced their argument with a claim that television effects were contingent upon a family’s social norms, “by which they meant social class differences. Particularly striking is the negative language they used to characterize the working class and to summarize their findings about them” (Butsch 2008, 131). It was argued that the middle class pursued a “work ethic” that resulted in less television viewing and in viewing that was principally directed at documentary and self-improvement programs. In contrast, what was perceived as the working-class “pleasure ethic” was presumed to increase both the overall amount of television viewing and the volume of entertainment and fantasy programs viewed. That entire viewership group was labelled the “fantasy group,” which ostensibly contrasted sharply with the middle-class “reality group” (Schramm, Lyle, and Parker 1961, cited in Butsch 2008, 132). Furthermore, “fantasy” was associated with passivity, surrender, emotion, and pleasure, while “reality” was connected to activity, alertness, cognition, and enlightenment. It was concluded that working-­class men – a gender bias was also operative – were overwhelmed by their personal troubles and therefore pursued escape and relaxation, while middle-class men courageously confronted their own challenges and resolved their own problems. These sharply divergent classbased visions nurtured their ultimate argument that middle-class children are socialized in households distinguished by a “mature” television usage pattern of deferred gratification, whereas workingclass children are victimized by their “immature” parents in accordance with what was termed the “Principle of Maturation” (Butsch 2008, 132). Buckingham (2001) also makes the all too frequently missed point that “the debate about children and media ... is really a debate about other things, many of which have very little to do with the media. It is a debate that invokes deep-seated moral and political convictions” (cited in Press 2011, 107).



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All of the traits that were associated with the middle-class “reality group” are linked with good citizenship, while the opposite was the case for the working-class “fantasy group.” Most important, as Butsch points out, Schramm and his students acknowledged the stereotypes in their analysis, claimed that their use of the term “social class” was not intended to be pejorative, and yet their analysis effectively awarded legitimacy to the class-based stereotypes as it granted them the seal of “scientific” approval. This is particularly consequential if we remember that their work and other early works about television were not restricted to the confines of scholarly discourse but, rather, were widely distributed beyond the scientific community, addressed to and marketed to the population at large. Finally, as Butsch (2001, 113) carefully clarifies, there are no grounds to contest either the rigour of the research that was conducted or the overall findings or the motives of the researchers. In fact, the strengths of the methods utilized, and what some might interpret as the “sympathetic outlook” of the authors with regard to the working class, rendered the class bias all the more persuasive, and even led the bias to appear entirely appropriate. As Butsch is concerned to do, we must always examine the assumptions underlying the interpretations of those early research findings. These assumptions came to pervade both academic and popular perceptions of working-class reception experiences. That pathway of thought regarding class-distinctive media effects, established not long after the medium of television was first introduced, is paralleled by, and in many ways supported by, the class-biased imagery featured in the medium of television itself (and in other media as well). The class bias spans decades of argumentation regarding “media effects” and it extended to all subordinate groups, including children, women, and various ethnic minorities, all of whom were seen as somehow susceptible, vulnerable, and intellectually incapable of defence against the declared dangers of television and other media usage. Alongside that trajectory, visual images and other non-visual representations unfavourable to the working class were extended to all subordinate social groups and the intersections between them, such that, for example, working-class children were more readily identified as “juvenile delinquents,” who were judged in courts that were distinct from adult courts. However, those scholars who actually

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observed working-class people and their use of television, first in the 1950s and later in the 1970s and beyond, found that working-class men were actually resistant to televisual content that contradicted their own values. During the 1970s, for example, working-class viewers of All in the Family were found to object strongly to its class-biased content. Likewise, working-class women interviewed about daytime serials in the 1980s expressed nothing that could be interpreted as a “vulnerability” to the ideological output of the programs. Casey (2010, 226) argues that “there remains a tendency within sociology to categorize the working classes according to three camps; namely, as ‘romantic rebels,’ as vulnerable desperate victims and/ or as dangerous and deviant ... [W]hat is absent from much classbased sociology is a fair and realistic picture of the everyday processes and practices of ‘being’ working class.” Also absent from news is news about the working class and, particularly, news about those everyday processes and practices of “being” working class, including, as Casey describes them, the “pains and pleasures” of workingclass life (228). This also tends to render the working class invisible in many respects and to situate it outside of the sight lines of communication scholars. Another outcome is that there are persistent, daily disparities between how news represents the social order and the everyday realities of the class experiences of audiences. For example, among her sample of young Canadian students, Madeley (2005) found that middle-classness was associated with normality, despite the presence of working-class students, who, in this respect, were largely uncritical of the dominance of middle-class subjects and related visions of classless publics. Perhaps less surprisingly, however, the working-class students at the same time demonstrated a much clearer and well-developed understanding of the class structure, to a much greater extent than their middle-class counterparts. Casey suggests that confusion regarding the nature of contemporary class identities, together with persistent news presentations of a “classless public” within British society, has occurred alongside a reticence to discuss class. The reticence is not exclusive to those who participate in sociological research. It has also led to what Casey perceives, together with Morley and other British scholars, as a shift away from class-based analysis within sociology.6 Yet, as Morley argues, while the working class is fragmented along lines of gender, ethnicity, geographical region, and so forth, it has by no means disappeared, and there is no reason to abandon the use of



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“class” as a unitary social category. Just as there are contemporary feminists who apologize about the treatment of “gender” as a unitary social category, it would be absurd to claim that gender inequalities are no longer meaningful. Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984) assumes a special importance in the understanding of class as a phenomenon that encompasses a complete range of experiences, including “being” working class and “being” middle class. As he articulates in his own analysis of class differences in media usage and political choices, “it is possible to draw fairly precisely the simultaneously political and cultural dividing-line between the working classes ... and the middle classes” (Bourdieu 1984, 446–7). This analysis led Bourdieu to assert that “political choices are much less independent of social class than is generally supposed” (453). Before a fuller discussion of those linkages in the following chapter, the concern at this juncture is to illustrate some of the many ways in which class matters to the target audiences sampled here. A number of representative comments appear below, including two examples of questionnaire comments and a final news diary entry that are all the more compelling in view of the absence of specific questions regarding representations of class in news or workingclass exclusion. Such issues arose frequently during interviews, especially those with working-class participants, and commonly at the initiative of the interviewees. Sometimes I feel that the little people or lower-income people are left out of a lot of news because no one wants to hear our stories. Maybe if there was more publicity about how we struggle day to day. (wcw, age 38, Questionnaire) It is very evident to me that, as a worker and trade unionist, our news, events, points of view, and stories are muted or excluded altogether from the media – except when we are on strike, subject to massive layoffs, or die horribly in large numbers. I would like to see the creation and growth of a mass worker-controlled media where our stories can finally be told. (wcm, age 49, Questionnaire) And at the conclusion of his one-week news diary, the following unemployed participant wrote:

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It’s interesting that as this week ends I feel more than ever like a bystander without much to do with the world as it changes so fast and so much, day to day. It’s hard to follow all the lives, economies, governments, wars, who’s the “good guy,” who’s the “bad guy.” I think as I change jobs – it’s just that the economy news is a bit discouraging. I’m sure that my own desperate feeling taints my perspective. (wcm, age 44, News Diary) Unquestionably, the predominantly middle-class character of news is a concern expressed by both working- and middle-class audiences, who perceive a more or less direct connection between the social class of journalists and the treatment of class in news. Consider, for example, the case of the following middle-class woman: Let’s take two journalists. One came from, you know, a very wealthy family, you know, just walked through, tuition was never a problem. They didn’t have to work, they didn’t have a student loan, nothing. You know, they drove their new car to class every day. And then you have the other journalist who had student loans and scholarships and, you know, bought used furniture and photocopied their books, things like that, and, you know, took the [subway] to school every day. I think they’re going to look at the same story and have a different view on it. Definitely, definitely. But that’s human nature and I don’t think that can be helped ... If they are writing a story, let’s say, on a ceo of a company who is being investigated for embezzlement, you’ve got to look at the story one way, and report it one way, and the other is going to look at it and report it [with] a totally different slant on it. Definitely. The next day they go and they do a story on – let’s see – somebody stealing a couple of steaks from a grocery store. They’re going to look at these stories and report them differently. The one that, you know, never had to worry about feeding their family is not going to understand why somebody would have to do that. (mcw, age 39, Interview #031, emphasis added) Finally, as a very interesting prelude to the discussion of gender in the next two sections, the following working-class participant, who had responded in her questionnaire that she had no interest in national politics, explained her disinterest during her subsequent interview as follows:



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wcw: Yeah, I am not into politics. Why is that? wcw: It’s just, a lot of stuff I don’t agree with, and the little guy, we have no control, we have no say. Even if people have, oh what do they call it, when they – not a strike, a rally, you know. Or a protest? wcw: Yeah, you can cry out against it all you want, in large numbers, and it seems like they’re just, to hell with you, we’re gonna do it anyway ... I don’t understand politics a lot. Probably because I’m not interested in it, so I don’t try to understand it, but also I just feel that they go ahead and make whatever decisions they want. They are supposed to be for the people that they are governing over, but, you know, it doesn’t seem like they care what we want or what we don’t want. They just go ahead and make changes whenever they feel like it. (wcw, age 37, Interview #005, emphasis in original) Through a direct focus upon gender differences and gender inequalities in the processes of news production and reception, the following sections examine how class and gender intersect in the development of the political apathy that she describes.

GENDER INEQUALITIES IN PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISM Sociologists of every theoretical inclination, whether feminists or not, are compelled to recognize that gender is a primary category of social organization. In the multidisciplinary study of journalism, however, gender is only infrequently the focus of research attention. The discussion here addresses the broad question of how gender figures within the process of news reception. Just as class issues are better understood if we trace the entire trajectory from production through to reception, where gender issues are concerned news reception needs to be understood in conjunction with news production as well as the nature of the news text that results from a highly gendered production process. The discussion proceeds from a brief review of the literature regarding gender divides within professional journalism to a discussion of the research conducted here regarding gendered patterns of news reception evident among the Canadian samples. Highlights of interviews conducted in their

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households and observations regarding gender dynamics operative in news reception are reported, as well as related material from the news diaries and questionnaires. Finally, it remains to explain women’s lesser engagement with offline and online news sources and, in the following chapter, the extent to which this phenomenon can help to explain gender differences in various levels of political engagement. Overall, the research results regarding gender shed light upon the classical debates about journalism and political participation as well as upon the debates about gendered conditions of news production and reception. In terms of overall numbers, across the nineteen nations and territories regarding which data were summarized by Weaver (2005, 47), the average proportion of female journalists was one-third, or 33 percent. Interestingly, Robinson (2005, 183) found that male journalists are inclined to interpret the one-third participation rate of women as closer to a more equitable one-half. Fröhlich’s (2007) research even suggests that the proportion of women journalists, at least in Western societies, has actually declined since the mid1990s.7 In any event, as discussed in chapter 2, the numbers alone are highly deceptive, and the greater proportion of women in television journalism adds to the deception. Their on-air appearances in television news create the false impression that women are numerically and otherwise closer to equality with their male colleagues. In reality, however, literally all of the international and national data demonstrate otherwise. The vast and persistent gender inequalities within the journalism profession have been quite extensively documented and discussed (see, for example, Chambers, Steiner, and Fleming 2004; Lang 1999; Mahtani 2005; North 2009a, 2009b, 2009c; Poindexter 2008; Robinson 2005, 2008a, 2008b; Robinson and Saint-Jean 1998; Ross 2010; Torkkola and Ruoho 2011; van Zoonen 1994; Whitt 2008; Zelizer 2004). Robinson’s (2008b) transnational evidence regarding management-level positions demonstrates that women continue to be largely excluded from any exercise of control over the output of news production.8 In the United States, a tiny 0.8 percent of newspaper editors-in-chief were found to be women, while in Canada the figure was comparatively higher, although still pathetically low, at 10 percent. Furthermore, “European figures demonstrate that their ‘glass ceilings’ are located at the bottom of the managerial hierarchy in comparison to North America” (83, emphasis in ­original), with the



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effect that European women find it difficult to penetrate any level of the managerial ranks. Women are somewhat better represented in television news management, where in Canada 18 percent of executive producer positions are occupied by women while in the United States the figure is 12 percent (84). Robinson’s comparative 1975 and 1995 survey data demonstrate that the proportion of women among Canadian print journalists increased from 21 to 28 percent during that twenty-year period. The increase in women’s representation was no more than 7 percent over the course of two decades, and it remains below the international norm. Among broadcast journalists, women’s representation increased by 17 percent (125). Despite these increases in their numbers during the two decades, women continued to be assigned to lesser beats, experienced slower promotion rates, and were paid less than their male colleagues (Robinson 2008a, 125–6). Beyond the limited range of social characteristics shared by journalists yet not shared with their audiences, those who have studied the everyday operations of print and broadcast newsrooms invariably observe their fundamentally masculinist character, associated with a professional work culture from which women, as well as working-class men and non-whites of both genders, are largely excluded. Those women and non-whites who do enter into newsrooms experience that work environment very differently than their white male colleagues.9 The remarkable persistence of these extensive gender inequalities across time and place points to the fundamentally gendered nature of news production, which continues to characterize professional journalism and, within it, the journalistic field. Again, B ­ ourdieu’s concept of the journalistic field captures those fundamental commonalities in the process whereby news is conceptualized, gathered, and subsequently disseminated to news audiences. While it is also important to appreciate cross-cultural and historical variations in journalistic practices, there is nevertheless a readily identifiable set of core practices and principles associated with news production – practices and principles that extend across national boundaries and that remain stubbornly resistant to change. In addition to the concrete everyday material practices, which require that news be pursued in accordance with established criteria of newsworthiness, there are also the “symbolic practices” that serve to sustain the predominantly masculine character of newsrooms as well as the news produced within them. Robinson (2008a, 131–2) ­discusses three such

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s­ ymbolic practices that have been widely documented by researchers in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. These include the newsroom’s communicative style, variously described as “locker room humour” (Melin-Higgins and Djerf-Pierre 1998, cited in ­Robinson 2008a) or “banter” focused upon team sports, and gender-biased jokes. In the Canadian case, Robinson’s research participants identified the centrality of football and ice hockey within informal newsroom discussions, both contact sports in which women’s participation is not widely legitimated and in which women are not generally encouraged to acquire strong interests. In Robinson’s words, “this informal communication practice turns out to be a not too subtle mechanism for excluding female reporters from workplace interactions and making them feel like outsiders” (131). A second gendered aspect of newsroom culture is the competitiveness through which beat assignments and interview assignments become objects of internal struggle rather than cooperative arrangements. One key result is that women are routinely assigned to beats and interviews perceived to be low priority, gender-­appropriate, or “soft” stories (such as those concerned with health or parenthood). Other examples of masculinist newsroom practices, and other dimensions of the gendered division of newsroom labour, have been examined by Stuart Allan (2010), who, in his latest edition of News Culture, titles a chapter “The Gendered Realities of Journalism,” as well as Barber and Rauhala (2005); Djerf-Pierre (2011); North (2009a, 2009b, 2009c); Poindexter (2008); Poindexter and Harp (2008); Ross (2011); and Ross and Carter (2011), among others. Another such example of exclusionary practices is seen in the masculinist social interactions that extend beyond the newsroom, particularly pub visits “which enable the ‘old boys network’ to influence work assignments and to affect promotions. These visits extend the already long working day into the wee hours of the night and informally exclude all those female reporters with family responsibilities” (Robinson 2008a, 132). In view of the similarly persistent gender inequalities found within the division of household labour, most women journalists, particularly the majority who are married, are without the freedom to engage in these frequently pivotal afterhours social networking rituals, which contributes further to their experience of professional exclusion. Women are therefore disadvantaged by the dual and conflictual operations of the gendered



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division of household labour and the gendered division of newsroom labour.10 Alongside the exclusion of women from significant journalistic, editorial, and management positions within newsrooms, there is the ongoing, persistent, and very much related exclusion of women from significant positions within the news that is produced – for example, their exclusion from the sight of audiences in roles such as “expert” news sources and op-ed writers in newspapers, as well as the exceptionally well-documented overall absence of women’s voices throughout what are fittingly termed “malestream” broadcast, print, and online news media. In 2010, the Informed Opinions research organization, formerly known as Media Watch, monitored the commentary pages of six major English- and French-language daily newspapers in Canada as well as the guest lists of three wellknown radio and television discussion programs, only to conclude that “women’s perspectives are missing in action in some of the highest profile media vehicles most likely to influence Canadians’ opinions on key public policy issues. Both English- and French-language media chronically under-represent women’s views” (Informed Opinions 2010, 1).11 Only 16 percent of the op-eds in these six newspapers were written by women, while women columnists comprised only 15 percent of the regular contributors in the English-language dailies and only 23 percent in the French-language dailies. The overall gender ratio, including newspaper columns, op-eds, signed editorials, and discussion program contributors, was a mere 20 percent, or no more than one woman’s voice amidst every five men’s voices (1–2). Likewise, in 2009, Marinelli and Savage documented the same five-to-one gender ratio in their study of newspaper commentaries, which demonstrated that women’s authorship remains at one-fifth the level of men’s authorship in newspapers, and it remains largely absent from “hard news” stories regarding economics and politics (cited in Informed Opinions 2010, 2). The 80 to 20 percent split was consistent in both The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star and was also similar to the results of a US study conducted by the Op-Ed Project. In all cases, men contributed 90 percent of all commentary regarding economics (or “business”), politics, and all other items under the rubric of national and international affairs (2). In sum, there can be no dispute that the gender gap, both in news

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­ roduction and in news content, continues to be, as the Informed p Opinion researchers describe it, “dramatic” (1–2).

GENDERED NEWS PRODUCTION AND GENDERED NEWS RECEPTION How much agency are women journalists able to exercise in view of such strongly structured and well reinforced gender inequalities inside and outside of newsrooms? In view of these persistent inequalities, women’s level of agency is probably minimal, although there are indications that male journalists as well as female journalists perceive changes as a result of the sheer quantitative increase in the number of women who can currently be found in newsrooms.12 The extent of any actual changes, and the influence of women journalists upon such changes, is not clearly evident. Despite a somewhat greater numerical presence of women within newsrooms – or, as Fröhlich suggests, what has actually been a reduction in their numbers since the mid-1990s – news organizations in Canadian society and elsewhere remain both quantitatively and qualitatively dominated by men. This is not to suggest that women journalists need to be seen as oppressed “victims” of masculinist domination. In the Canadian case, for example, women members of the Canadian Association of Journalists (caj) organized a “Women in Media” caucus in 1990 and continue to operate a vital website. Nevertheless, with regard to the impact of the minority of women journalists upon the long-gendered nature of news content, Robinson (2005, 179, emphasis in original) characterizes it as follows: “What is clear, however, from the comparative evidence, is that the assumption that greater employment of females in the media professions will automatically lead to more equitable portrayal[s] of women and their concerns is definitely mistaken.” Freeman (2001, 18), as a well-experienced female journalist and journalism historian, regards it as “naïve” to believe, like some liberal feminists once believed, “that an increase in the number of women in the newsroom would necessarily translate into better coverage of women and their issues.” She also cites the research by Robinson and Saint-Jean (1998), which found women “frozen” at 28 percent in print journalism and 37 percent in television journalism, or roughly one woman to every two men in the profession, which, as she notes, is the reverse of the gender ratio in most journalism schools.



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One reason why it cannot be assumed that more women in journalism will mean more women in news stories, or better representations of women, or more women’s news is the extent of both horizontal and vertical gender segregation (Robinson 2005, 166). Horizontal gender segregation is persistently evident in the differentiation between beats, interviews, and types of stories assigned to women and men, while vertical gender segregation continues to be evident in men’s dominance of the managerial hierarchy within news production. Not surprisingly, both forms of gender segregation become manifest in news content, a relationship that has been extensively documented by means of every mode of textual analysis undertaken by both private- and public-sector researchers, including those engaged in a variety of continuous and ongoing media monitoring projects. A very extensive current source of comparative data is the Global Media Monitoring Project (gmmp), which documents the representation of women and men in news. gmmp research has been conducted by literally hundreds of researchers around the globe in a coordinated project that has produced data in five-year cycles since 1995. The most recent report, for example, issued in 2010, examines the news produced by a total of 1,365 newspapers, radio stations, and television stations in a total of 108 countries representing 82 percent of the world’s population. Online news was also monitored and discussed in the 2010 report, including seventy-six national news websites in sixteen countries and eight international news websites. The four gmmp studies produced to date – in 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010 – have all demonstrated clearly that: Women are grossly under-represented in news coverage in contrast to men. The outcome of under-representation is an imbalanced picture of the world, one in which women are largely absent. The studies equally showed a paucity of women’s voices in news media content in contrast to men’s perspectives, resulting in news that presents a male-centred view of the world. (gmmp 2010, 1) While at least half of the world’s population is composed of women, in 1995 only 17 percent of the people discussed in news were women, a figure that increased slowly to what was still no more than 24 percent in 2010. Of those who were interviewed or whose

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voices were otherwise heard in news, women remain confined to the vox pop or “ordinary people” categories, in which their representation increased from 34 percent in 2005 to 44 percent in 2010. Regardless of these minimal gains, in 2010 a full 80 percent of “experts” and 81 percent of spokespersons were men (gmmp 2010, 2). With respect to the contributions of women journalists relative to their male colleagues, the proportion of news stories reported by women across the three media of newspapers, radio, and television increased from 1995 until 2005. The 37 percent figure attained in 2005 remained at that level in 2010, due to a decrease of eight percentage points in the proportion of radio news stories reported by women between 2005 and 2010. Women presented less than half (49 percent) of the total radio and television news stories in 2010, a decline of 4 percent since 2005 and lower than the 1995 level of 51 percent. Moreover, in terms of classically gendered news topics, men in 2010 reported 60 percent of stories regarding the economy, 67 percent of stories regarding “politics/government,” and 65 percent of stories in the “crime/violence” category (2). The most recent data demonstrate once again that stories by male journalists exceed those by female journalists throughout virtually all news topics. While most topics have seen at least minimal increases in the extent of reportage by women, the proportion of “science/health” stories reported by women has actually declined since the year 2000 (2). Significantly, therefore, increases in the presence of women in news – whether as journalists or as news subjects (i.e., individuals who appear in news stories) – cannot be seen as either consistently progressive or steady, nor is there any necessary relationship between women’s greater presence in news and improved representations of women. On the contrary, as these extensive international data demonstrate, there are regular instances of decline in the presence of women. Above all, the overall extent of improvement in the quantity of women’s voices compared to men’s voices is astonishingly limited. With respect to the visibility of women in prime time evening newscasts, then, men continue to report the majority of the stories, men continue to dominate the “expert” roles in these stories, and men otherwise occupy a much more visible presence throughout the news that is offered by all media, including online news that draws extensively from offline news sources. If anything, what is sometimes observed as an increased women’s presence can be



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seen as disadvantageous to women in that it often amounts to little more than greater visibility of women in so-called “man-on-thestreet” interviews.13 Clearly, that classic journalistic term is in itself telling with respect to the hegemony of masculinism in news. In accordance with journalistic field traditions, the practice is to randomly catch members of “the (classless, ungendered, singular) public” off-guard and query them about their “feelings” regarding a current news event. Again, it is too easy to assume that structured gender inequalities in professional journalism have lessened and that women’s presence in news has increased, based upon nothing more than sheer impressions that women appear more frequently in television news, whether as journalists, “expert” sources, or perhaps as “woman-on-the-street” vox pop interviewees. Even in the case of the latter, however, there are empirical data such as those gathered by Cross (2010), who found in her analysis of television election coverage that twice as many men as women appear in vox pop interviews. In her words, “the ‘man on the street’ is, on average, still literally true” (419).14 Liss Jeffrey’s (1995) conclusion, based upon a survey of Canadian newspapers, continues to apply: “Canadian publishers and editors do not appear to recognize either the opportunities or the urgency involved in improving the coverage and hiring of women” (cited in Robinson 2005, 173). Jeffrey also points to the relative exclusion of Aboriginals and ethnic minorities. For example, a 2000 study demonstrated that 97 percent of professional journalists across all media in Canada were white (cited in cjf 2012b). A decade later, cbc/Radio-Canada reported that minority groups, including Aboriginals, comprised 8 percent of their journalistic staff (cjf 2012b).15 These and other social groups continue to be comparatively absent from news. As discussed earlier, also excluded is the entire working class – who, like women, also comprise a majority of the Canadian population. Moreover, the intersectionalities of reception operate in such a way that working-class women experience a twofold exclusion by virtue of their class as well as their gender. A fuller consideration of the class-gender nexus in the reception process must await later discussion. Based upon her multinational analysis of gender inequalities throughout Canadian, American, and European newsrooms, ­Robinson (2005) concludes that any opportunity to change news values in a way that favours women’s portrayal will be contingent upon

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four vital preconditions. First, it will depend upon the level to which women are permitted to rise in the editorial hierarchy. Second, she recommends formal equity programs to improve women’s access to training and promotion. In the relative absence of these programs at Canadian newspapers, most dailies have “lost their important female baby-boomer readership base” (187). Third, a clear majority of women journalists need to go beyond awareness of gender inequalities in their societies, act upon this feminist understanding in their professional life, and be prepared to struggle against malestream journalistic norms. Finally, in her view, the prospect of a more equitable inclusion of women in news also rests upon relationships that women journalists need to establish and nurture with their audiences and with women who can be consulted as “experts” and sources. In the absence of these relationships, many women news consumers continue to experience the absence of a strong connection with the news that is produced. What is the best means to comprehend the widespread disconnection experienced by women during news reception? The most useful understanding can be derived from a direct examination of how reception is affected by production and, more broadly, of how the dynamics of the “public sphere” (in which news parameters are defined, established, and structured) affect the patterns of reception within the private sphere of households. Silverstone (1994, 102) insists that it is entirely appropriate to bypass textual analysis in the study of gendered television experiences: “Its [television’s] place in the home, its domestication, just as much as the construction of individual identity, of which gender is a crucial but not the only element, is something that cannot be understood exclusively from the analysis of public texts.” As he articulates it, there is a good deal of indeterminacy “just at the point where television crosses the threshold of the public and the private spheres” (102). We can specify his argument regarding how the gendering of television is a dialogical process if we examine the gendering of news reception in particular and appreciate that it emerges out of that “dialogue between publicly defined relations inscribed into the design and marketing of all technologies, television included, and privately negotiated relations inscribed in and through the patterns and discourses of everyday life” (102). Indeterminacy comes into play at the point at which those private negotiations result in private adaptations to publicly defined relations – adaptations



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that are ­manifest in the form of conformity or resistance or, more commonly, a complex mixture of conformity and resistance. That the negotiations and resultant adaptations are private, worked out within private households, need not lead us to assume that there is tremendous diversity in these adaptations or that there are no discernible patterns in the ways in which gender relations within households affect the process of news reception. While it can provide important insights into the gendered nature of informational texts, textual analysis cannot enable the identification of such patterns. Only concrete, on-the-ground studies of reception as it occurs within private households can illuminate these gendered reception patterns. Useful, albeit skeletal, information can be derived from survey data regarding control of the remote, ownership and use of a household computer, and gender differences in television genre preferences, although the actual gender-differentiated patterns of usage and reception are best observed directly. What gender-differentiated reception patterns have been documented to date? Within the expanding “gender and media” literature, there are a number of insightful discussions regarding gender differences in media consumption generally (e.g., Ang and ­Hermes 1991; Baehr and Gray 1995; Beale 2008; Schwichtenberg 1994; Wood 1994) and the gendered use of media such as television (e.g., Hermans and van Snippenburg 1996; Kaid and HoltzBacha 2000; Montiel 2006; Press 1991, 1989; van Zoonen 1993; Wood 2009) and the internet (e.g., Bimber 2000; Helsper 2010; Kennedy, Wellman, and Klement 2003; Menzies 1999; Shade 2002) in particular. At the general level, Bird (2003), for example, points to frequent findings of basic gender differences in communication styles, whereby women are inclined to be collaborative and inclusive while men are inclined to be more confrontational and concerned to make decisive points that “win” an argument (see also Maltz and Borker 1999; Tannen 1993). Internet scholars suggest that the argumentative male style is the dominant mode of communication in that medium (e.g., Coates 1998, cited in Bird 2003, 66). The confrontational style of television news – notably, where political pundits form a panel to debate news topics – can be off-putting to many women viewers. Another recurrent finding, one that makes good sense to sociologists familiar with the still-gendered division of household labour, is the pattern whereby women’s television spectatorship is somewhat erratic and intermittent in view of their

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domestic work, particularly in those households in which the work includes child care.16 On the other hand, men’s television spectatorship can be more focused and intense, with the opportunity to watch entire programs without interruption. The documentation of this well-established and continuing pattern, observed repeatedly through the course of the present analysis, harks back at least as far as Morley’s analysis in Family Television (1986, 150), in which he comments about his British participants as follows: Indeed, many of the women feel that to just watch television without doing anything else at the same time would be an indefensible waste of time, given their sense of their domestic obligations. To watch in this way is something they rarely do, except occasionally, when alone or with other women friends, when they have managed to construct an “occasion” on which to watch their favourite programme, video, or film. In his assessment of the gendered digital divide, Cuneo (2002, 28) extends the sweep of gender-based differences to literally all technologies, not merely digital icts: The gender statistics on access to the Internet are only the tip of an iceberg that hides much deeper social psychological and social structural mechanisms reinforcing a gender typing in almost all aspects of technology. Hence, the gendered digital divide is not likely to disappear any time soon, especially in those countries that have well-entrenched patriarchal structures. In Gendered Media, Ross (2010) summarizes a number of the documented gender differences in digital media use. For example, women tend to view relatively few websites, spend less time overall on the internet, and are more likely than men to view the net from home (127ff.). While men are much more inclined to download music, play interactive games, cruise porn sites, and seek other internet entertainment, women are more likely to use the net as a means of personal communication with those in their social networks and in order to obtain general information (not necessarily news-related). In the words of Ross: “Women are more likely to use the Internet instrumentally rather than recreationally, seeing the computer and the Internet as tools rather than technologies”



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(128). She underlines her conclusion that, “although the hardware of technology might be gender neutral, its appropriation and use certainly is not” (147). Explanations of the decline in newspaper readership are principally economic and technological yet can also extend to gender issues. For example, American data indicate that 65 percent of men and only 60 percent of women were regular newspaper readers in the early 1990s, figures that declined to 61 and 53 percent, respectively, by the turn of the century (Robinson 2005, 160). How should we explain the contribution of gender to readership decline? Again, this needs to be understood in relation to women’s double burden of paid labour and unpaid household labour, particularly during one of the busiest periods of baby boomer women’s lives. In this context, the relative absence of “free time” led to women’s reduced opportunities to read newspapers and to see television news. After all, the need to perform more than eighty hours of paid and unpaid labour each and every week necessarily limits the nature and extent of women’s media usage in general and their news consumption in particular. In the case of women in the samples discussed here, their everyday workload can mean a “treble day” of labour or a triple burden that includes their paid labour, their unpaid household labour, and their volunteer labour (see also Moser 1993). Their extensive daily labour commitments are critical to bear in mind during any examination of their news reception. In addition to gender differences in the choice of medium, there is a significant gender gap in terms of interests in different types of news content. Men’s content priorities include sports and international news, whereas women tend to privilege local news over international news. Generally speaking, women are inclined to express least interest in business news and local sports, while men are least interested in fashion and lifestyles stories, food pages, and letters to the editor. Despite these expressed differences that appear to enjoy continuity over time, business news and sports news are invested with much higher levels of staffing resources by newspapers and other news media. Women are therefore inclined to call more upon books and magazines as information sources as these serve their interests more effectively in terms of time management and their double or triple shifts of paid and unpaid labour. Arguably, these print media can also be seen to be somewhat less inclined towards gendered information. The keyword here is “arguably,” in

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view of the dominance of white middle-class men in newspaper and magazine bylines.17 Historically, broadcasters have tended to be the least well informed of all news producers regarding the interests and needs of their women audiences, who are frequently assumed to share the interests of men and are commonly perceived to constitute a homogeneous group undifferentiated by important social characteristics such as age, class, education level, and ethnicity. Yet beyond the apparent misinformation and mistaken assumptions about women viewers, of greater explanatory weight in the exclusion of women is the recurrent and readily observable disconnection that many women experience during news reception: stories that, as brief tidbits of news, appear unconnected to each other and, in turn, are unconnected to women’s everyday experiences, stories that tell only what happened and not why it happened, and content that fails to address women’s interests. This appears to explain why there is a remarkably direct relationship between the somewhat greater visibility of women journalists in international, national, and local news and the propensity of women audiences to express greater interest in these same three types of news stories, perhaps with at least the hope (albeit a false one) that their greater numbers will mean more content that is of direct interest to women. As discussed, this reception research was conducted with a targeted sample of community activists, which raises seemingly perennial issues such as the absence of any necessary linkage between community activism and full-scale political engagement, regardless of how the latter might be conceptualized. There was a concern to examine empirically the contribution of professional journalism to the frequently observed disjuncture between active community participation and a well-informed critique of the social order that inspires a politically driven agenda. Apart from Bourdieu, the sources of theoretical influence here, as discussed in the first chapter, include Gramsci and his classical formulations regarding the nature of hegemony, the widely granted consent that it requires in order to survive, and the conditions that are prerequisite to the development of “organic intellectuals” who might inspire and/or organize challenges to that consent. While it cannot be argued that there is a direct or even a necessary relationship between journalism and political exclusion, it nevertheless appears to be at least one means to explain the extent of exclusion found among the research



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participants. The participants, it will be recalled from chapter 3, include those of different classes, genders, and those with other diverse social characteristics, all of whom had committed themselves in various ways to work towards the betterment of their communities at the local, regional, national, and/or global levels. In the particular case of women, it was rare not to observe a disenchantment that could be traced to the inability of professional journalism, especially network television journalism, to either adequately inform them about the social world or to engage them in progressive movements to change it. Before the full extent of the exclusion experienced by women is discussed at length in the following chapter, it is useful to first convey something of the nature of their reception experiences. What follows are a few examples that illustrate the operation of intersectionality as well as gender-based commonalities. The first case is that of a ndp supporter whose rage responses increased her blood pressure. She explained why she has essentially abandoned daily television news viewing: wcw: I found that, as a diabetic, my blood sugars go up when I watch the news ... I wasn’t watching it and in preparation for this [interview] I thought I should watch the news once in awhile and find out what’s going on in the world and so I watched it, and I watched cpac but cpac was okay – the parliamentary channel – and my blood sugar went up [laughs]. But that’s because of the war, that the US will attack no matter what, you know. And did you find that you experienced anger as you watched it? wcw: Anger, frustration. I hate when the cbc [promotes the war in] Iraq, just like as if they’re copying right from the American networks, you know. I think that’s a chauvinistic [story], you know, as if they can boss another country and another religion and another culture way across the world. They have no business interfering. Mostly because I know about the suffering from the sanctions, I was just pretty upset ... [later in the same interview] I do get angry. I think my blood pressure’s going up too ... well, it’s temporary, it will go back down again. Well, Dr. Hans Selye, he’s an authority on stress, advises people not to watch the news. And my mother’s former doctor, he’s dead now, but he told her not to watch the news. They put all the horrible tragedies of the world and all the atrocities on and that’s what you get for an hour and occasionally

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you get a nice story here and there, something positive. It’s mostly fires, earthquakes, murders, child abuse, elder abuse. (wcw, age 53, Interview #040) Another case is that of a middle-class woman in her sixties who reported that she had little interest in either news or politics until she was influenced by a new partner (identified here as “D”) during her late fifties: mcw: He is my primary source. He keeps me informed, because he might flip it [the television] on several times a day ... [before she coupled with her partner] I didn’t even watch news or pay attention to news for fifty-seven years. D’s got an outward focus, a political interest. He’s got a strong political interest, and my focus has been inner. Now being more with D and his exuberance about it, I’m taking more interest in politics. Would you say that you were apolitical before? mcw: It just wasn’t my focus. It wasn’t a priority. But that’s changing. And I want to be aware, and I’m becoming active with D. (mcw, age 60s, Interview #038)18 The following case of a divorced working-class woman with two adolescent sons resident in her one-parent household illustrates a more common pattern whereby those of her class and gender are without either the time or the incentive to undertake regular news viewing: wcw: I don’t get to watch news much. I listen to the radio. I don’t read the papers, and I don’t usually get to see the news at eleven. I usually go to bed. And at six, I’m making supper, so I don’t get to see the newscast very often ... When I sit down in the evening, I want to be entertained ... Sometimes I think I’m happier not knowing what’s going on in the world. You don’t have to think about all of that stuff that happens. It may be a naïve way of looking at things, but I’m an optimistic kind of person and I like to be happy as much as I can, and the news is not a happy thing. Most of it ... the newscast, for the most part, is pretty depressing. (wcw, age 46, Interview #047) Perhaps most striking is the fact that this woman was not even inclined to read one of the many newspapers delivered to her house



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regularly for her son’s paper route, not even while she drove him along his route during snowy days. Even under those circumstances, in which newspapers were available to her at no cost and right next to her in her vehicle as she waited while her son delivered them, she was still not inclined to read the news. While it might appear to be extraordinary, her case exemplifies a recurrent pattern of disconnection from news in any form and a related disconnection from any form of political engagement, apart from the volunteer labour that is not ordinarily perceived to be “political” in nature. By virtue of their social class as well as their gender, working-class women such as the one cited above are effectively twice removed – or experience “double the distance,” as it were – from the middle-class masculinist culture of professional journalism. If, as Liebes and Katz (1993, x) argue, “decoding is an interaction between the culture of the viewer and the culture of the producer,” then, within the limitations of these social conditions of news production and reception, there is little or no basis of interaction. Many questions arise from these participant comments. A classic question concerns whether information itself is somehow intrinsically gendered. It was Smythe (1981) who provided clarity to that debate when he asked about the relationship between communication and information and replied that information is not intrinsically gendered, although communication – conceptualized as the means of information production and distribution – is unquestionably gendered. In essence, communication as it is presently structured is indeed gendered, yet the important point is that the gendering of communication is the result of a social structure that is not impermeable to change. It is entirely possible to envision a set of production and distribution arrangements that could at least potentially satisfy women’s informational needs and interests. Finally, in view of the persistence of gender differentiation in political participation, how might gendered news production and reception contribute to that persistence? This question must await further discussion in chapter 6.

OTHER SOCIAL DIVISIONS OPERATIVE IN NEWS RECEPTION While the focus here is the central significance of class and gender in news reception, it is difficult to overlook the operation of other

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social characteristics in the process, and therefore other key social traits will be discussed briefly. Primary among these is age. Kiefl (1981) provided early identification and documentation of the monotonic relationship between age and news viewership in the case of Canadian television audiences. His research, conducted internally at the cbc, demonstrates the remarkably steady increase in amounts of news consumption throughout the life cycle, such that, for example, by the age of sixty, more than one-quarter of anglophone television viewing and one-third of francophone television viewing was directed at information programs (11). In fact, he found “that age is a better predictor of program choice than language, and that there are striking age-group similarities which transcend language” (12–13). Age continues to be a significant predictor of program choice, as well as the choice of medium. More current research demonstrates that this monotonic relationship between age and the volume of news consumed has sustained itself since Kiefl’s early identification of the pattern. Regarding choice of medium, the Canadian Internet Project (cip) 2007 survey found that usage of traditional media increases steadily from forty hours weekly among those aged twelve to seventeen through to the just over fifty hours weekly committed to traditional media by those aged sixty and over (Zamaria and Fletcher 2008, cited in Canadian Media Research Consortium [cmrc] 2011a, 8). Survey data solicited by Zamaria and Fletcher (2008) and the cmrc (2011a) strongly show that, in the case of all age groups (including the younger groups), online news is used to complement, not to displace, the use of conventional news media such as radio and television. Moreover, as expected, the cip’s 2007 survey confirmed that age is inversely related to general internet use. The important questions for our purposes here, less frequently asked, are those regarding the precise nature of that internet usage – particularly, whether younger groups view online information sources that offer a genuine alternative to offline news. Heider’s very insightful American research (2000) regarding the exclusion of ethnic minorities finds the source of that exclusion in conceptualizations of news that are embedded within everyday news production routines and, more broadly, within the essential relations of news production. He adapts Essed’s (1991) concept of “everyday racism” and formulates his own concept of “incognizant racism” to explain how it happens – in an almost incidental



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and by no means deliberative manner – that professional journalists “all work together each day to produce a product that consistently excludes stories about entire segments of the viewing audience” (Heider 2000, 51). As a well-experienced, award-winning journalist who became a journalism scholar, he perceives that, within everyday news production practices, there are various structural barriers to the inclusion of meaningful news stories that address the complex experiences of communities of colour. Among these barriers is a reticence to tackle issues that threaten white hegemony, as well as a structured absence of journalistic attention that derives from “years of cultural training in White, middle-, and upper-class norms and values” (52). Furthermore, while (predominantly white) news managers find it difficult to integrate coverage of people of colour into daily news products, those who desire coverage – he includes Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and many other groups – are without opportunities to gain access to newsrooms, and least of all, access to the decision-making processes of news managers. Instead, these communities are only likely to be granted coverage during those infrequent occasions in which their experiences correspond with news values and meet specific criteria of newsworthiness, such as a highly visual cultural festival or when their members are involved in crime. What is especially notable about Heider’s research results is that he found these barriers to be securely in place “even” at the level of local television news production. Less surprising is his discovery that activist groups were routinely and systematically dismissed: “If the consensus in the newsroom is that the status quo is good, that social conditions are generally acceptable, then such activists may have little chance of finding an audience in newsrooms” (Heider 2000, 55). A well-worn disenchantment with this “given” was most certainly evident among the sampled groups of Canadian community activists. A news producer interviewed by Heider explains it as follows: There’s a problem of exactly knowing how to get access for any group of these folks. Most folks don’t understand how the process works and that presents a barrier for any charity or you know any volunteer group or anything. They just don’t understand. They think their event is as worthy as any other but they just don’t sell it the right way (cited in Heider 2000, 56)

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The stories that are far more likely to be “sold” to news workers and news managers are those submitted in the form of professionally prepared press releases, especially fully produced video news releases (vnrs) that are effectively ready to be aired as news stories, issued by the public relations departments of major private corporations and public-sector institutions. Those who are without economic power – including not only ethnic minorities but also other non-publics such as women and the entire working class – are without the means to hire public relations professionals, distribute costly press packets, or produce elaborately sophisticated vnrs. This fundamentally economic disadvantage serves to further ensure their invisibility in news. As Heider points out, there are also groups that, in view of their long history of limited and poor coverage, make absolutely no attempts to seek publicity. Finally, the reticence of journalists to undertake reports about these groups also affects their exclusion. As one assignment editor states: “I often times shy away from covering a story that affects certain ethnic groups simply because I may not totally understand the issue” (cited in Heider 2000, 60). That statement might very well contribute to the explanation of Pritchard and Stonbely’s (2007) finding that African-American journalists at American newspapers write stories that are principally addressed to “minority issues,” while their white colleagues write the vast majority of the business and government news stories. By the time of their analysis, “minority journalists,” including African Americans, Latinos, and other unspecified ethnic minorities, had increased their representation among all American journalists from less than 4 percent in 1982 to a little more than 8 percent in 1992 to 9.5 percent in 2002 (231). Nevertheless, as in the case of the (somewhat less restricted) entry of women into newsrooms and the stubborn persistence of masculinist newsroom norms, there are few challenges to what Pritchard and Stonbely describe as “the hegemony of whiteness” throughout American newsrooms. On the contrary, the authors document a racially segregated division of newsroom labour that not only limits the topics covered by minority journalists but also, and thereby, effectively limits their opportunities to move into positions of editorial control, in large part because their white colleagues, assigned to the more prestigious business and politics beats, are much more likely to become news managers. Pritchard and Stonbely’s comprehensive research, which includes interviews with news workers and news managers



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and a content analysis to assess the relationship between ethnicity and story assignments, confirms that ethnicity is indeed a major determinant of story assignments, rationalized in terms of a general practice to assign stories to journalists based upon their life experiences. However, regardless of their ethnicity, all journalists discussed ethnic diversity only with reference to minority journalists and their “minority topics,” while there was no expressed concern about the impact of whiteness in the largely white realms of business and politics. In short, Pritchard and Stonbely’s results demonstrate that “the hegemony of whiteness can persist even in a newsroom with a relatively high level of racial diversity” (232). Unfortunately, there is comparatively little Canadian research that addresses the ways in which ethnicity figures within either news production or news reception. The bulk of the work completed to date consists of textual analyses of different varieties, including content analyses and discourse analyses, that focus upon the misrepresentation and underrepresentation of ethnic minorities in news texts.19 The work of Mahtani (2008, 2009a, 2009b) is exceptional in this regard, in that she is concerned with production and reception as well as with the relationship between them. Regarding production, she suggests that the same level of white hegemony found in American newsrooms is sustained in Canadian newsrooms: The racialized structures within the newsroom make it difficult for journalists to challenge or disrupt prevailing discourses of storytelling in the newsroom. Fear of challenging the status quo within newsrooms means that many journalists keep silent about problematic reporting for fear of losing their hard-earned jobs, especially in a climate of consolidating media ownership and increasing convergence, where positions for Canadian journalists are becoming increasingly scarce. (Mahtani 2008, 657) The maintenance of those racialized newsroom structures results in a continued disconnection experienced by racialized immigrant audiences who remain without “a space through which to see themselves accurately reflected as part of Canada’s rich social life beyond the celebration of ethnic events and festivals” (Mahtani 2008, 656). Mahtani’s participants appreciated and continued to watch Canadian English-language television news, yet yearned to see the creation of spaces in which their ethnic identities could

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be “reflected against the backdrop of the Canadian multicultural state” (656).

INTERSECTIONALITY IN PRACTICE Finally, some further points regarding the relationship between these social conditions of news reception – class, gender, ethnic, and other inequalities – and, particularly, how the social characteristics of audiences intersect with each other, can be noted briefly. There is a sense in which each of these characteristics becomes, in effect, a social condition of reception because each is significantly operative in the process and each can be observed to operate independently. For example, Kim’s (2004, 91) re-analysis of Morley’s original data regarding the British audience of Nationwide finds that “each reading is over-determined by class, gender, race, and age factors that are relatively autonomous from each other. Here, what I mean by ‘relatively autonomous’ is that each factor, though related to other factors, still has its own explanatory power on viewers’ readings.” In this sense, one can point to gender, for example, and see that it can independently explain how a news story that invokes potentially objectionable representations of women is likely to be read differently by women than by men. At the same time, however, in the case of these Canadian samples, it is evident that, just as in Kim’s re-analysis of Morley’s data: Audiences’ social positions, which are structured themselves in particular ways in a given society, structure their understandings and evaluations of television programmes in quite consistent directions and patterns. Those patterns illuminate the fact that the discursive power of media texts through communication of preferred meanings cannot be understood as simply the incorporation of dominant ideology, nor can it be understood evaporating into free plays of meaning constructed by audiences. Rather, the frames and positions of media texts exert their influence on viewers’ interpretations in the ways of shaping, reinforcing, or conflicting with viewers’ frames and positions, figuring in their particular social conditions ... The reanalysis of nwa [Morley’s Nationwide Audience data] also contributes to the restoration of the importance of class on interpretation, which has been



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­ isplaced and ignored in many current media studies. (Kim d 2004, 103–4, emphasis in original) In conclusion, while we can draw attention to seemingly linear connections between a singular social trait and a particular interpretation that follows from it, as a social condition of news reception, we also need to dissect the points of intersectionality in which, for example, the class-gender nexus that we observe in news production connects with a parallel class-gender nexus in news reception. Of the two social conditions in that nexus, class clearly figures more importantly than gender. While it is perhaps excessively reductionist to insist, like Ebert and Zavarzadeh (2008, 139), that “all social differences, such as gender, are effects of class,” it is nevertheless difficult to overlook the pre-eminence of class vis-à-vis other social conditions of news reception.

6 Journalism, Information Poverty, and Political Exclusion We are in the grips of neo-liberalism – a political system that is as much to do with institutional transformation as it is about understanding our sense of self and civic identities. This new grand narrative – the way we think of our world – has sought to abandon the social for the economic. It presumes an integrated system of global capitalism, economic growth, and productivity rather than class struggles and social progress. One pressing point of media studies is to expose the fact that neo-liberal democracy has failed in critical ways. Natalie Fenton, Critiquing Power and Contesting Meaning

That said, Fenton (2011, 2) appears to remain hopeful that there is “always the possibility for change,” although she implies that many scholars, journalists, and others are much too hopeful about new spaces for political engagement and political change ostensibly opened by citizen journalism, social media, and other contemporary expansions of the digital mediascape. As she and other digital media scholars have argued, such spaces often enable little more than “clickable” participation in fleeting, short-term issues. A contemporary Canadian example is that of the protest launched in 2010 against proposed usage-based billing (ubb) by internet service providers (ISPs). Organized by OpenMedia.ca, it was initially possible to participate in the protest with only a few “quick clicks” in order to add one’s name to a national petition directed at the crtc. That preliminary component of the anti-ubb campaign struck at the very direct personal and financial interests of many internet users in Canadian society, particularly heavy users. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the petition quickly attracted a huge volume of signatures. At its website and through other means of communication, the OpenMedia.ca organization articulated the larger issues at stake in what some might have perceived to be a short-term



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billing issue, such as whether there needs to be more or less internet service competition, whether the crtc will continue to favour the few dominant ISPs known as “Big Telecom” or whether it will instead fulfill its “public interest” mandate under the Broadcasting Act, the still larger issue of whether the internet can be made more affordable to the population at large, and so forth. The organization’s insistence that the entire future of the internet in Canada is at stake is by no means overstated. As in the case of other such rallies conducted at least in part via social media, however, the greater challenge is to extend the clickable petition-level support into other forms of political participation, such as offline appearances at subsequent crtc public hearings regarding the issue or at any of the variety of anti-ubb protest activities organized within the public environments of the 2011 federal election campaign. The dilemmas associated with the organization of those greater levels of political participation have been examined by Pammett and DeBardeleben (2009) among many others. In the case of American society, Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995) find that there are apparent demographic prerequisites to the position of “activist.” Their research demonstrates that the most actively and effectively politically engaged American activists come disproportionately from advantaged social groups. Again, the dominant group in this case is composed principally of white, well-educated middle-class men. There is a need, however, to go beyond matters of demographic representation per se and to assess the information inequalities that are not directly attributable to professional journalism yet that are very much exacerbated by its fundamental failure to inform. At the same time, it cannot be overlooked that information inequalities derive largely from those structured macro-social inequalities that systematically disadvantage entire social groups. Most crucially, of course, these structural disadvantages are experienced at the economic level, which, in turn, sets in place the political disadvantages that are experienced by those who strive to be effective political activists. To those community activists in the Canadian samples who are without the structurally induced advantages of well-educated white middle-class men, their voluntary organizations, even those far removed from specific political ends, can perhaps offer what Verba, ­Schlozman, and Brady (1995, 4) perceive as “opportunities to develop skills that are relevant for politics. These skill-endowing

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opportunities can serve a compensatory function, enhancing political resources among ... activists whose educational and occupational levels might otherwise predispose them to political quiescence.” While undemonstrated and undoubtedly overstated in their analysis, it is partially on these grounds that any distinction between “political” and “non-political” voluntary activity is not useful for the purposes of the present analysis. Verba and his colleagues insist upon the distinction, examine both “types” of voluntarism in their analysis, and the two types of activities are found to intersect in multiple ways. The concern here is neither to formulate typologies of either activism or voluntarism nor to dwell upon what some might regard, for their own research purposes, as significant distinctions between activities and organizations. What is most significant here is that the targeted samples are comprised of demographically diverse groups, all of whom share one particular commonality: namely, a commitment, concretely tangible in terms of both time and unpaid labour, to work towards the improvement of their communities, whether at the local, regional, national, or global levels. Overall, however, in the majority of cases, that admirable desire does not translate into a fully-fledged, informed political engagement. Instead, there is evidence of information poverty and political confusion, if not outright political apathy which is at least partially the outcome of the information poverty. Not unrelatedly, a high degree of self-referentiality is recurrently evident throughout the observations of news reception, and it is further articulated in the news diaries and questionnaires. In this chapter, we consider the path from self-referentiality to political engagement with a view to the contributions of professional journalism. Anthony Elliott (2001, 55), for example, declares grandly that it is citizenship which “liberates us from the prison-house of self-referentiality.” In Gramscian terms, “organic intellectuals” are seen to proceed through three levels of political consciousness, from the self-aware (a somewhat less self-­ preoccupied state than self-referentiality per se), to a sense of solidarity with others who share the same interests, to a broader social solidarity that is prerequisite to a “war of position,” which seeks systemic transformation.1 Minimally, there is a need to question whether and how professional journalism actually encourages progress along the path from self-referentiality to political engagement, in accordance with the oft-repeated neoclassical canon that it



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falls to journalism to inform a citizenry in such a way that there can be active political engagement. Does journalism merely supply inconsequential background noise along that route, or does it in fact serve to impede movement along the path towards political engagement? Here it is argued that professional journalism contributes to the information poverty that, among other things, severs appreciation of the connections between private troubles and public issues, which is one of the central means by which it can thereby block the path beyond self-­ referentiality to political engagement. A key consequence is that many social groups that are already disadvantaged by their positions within the social structure – such as the working class, women, and ethnic minorities – find themselves further disadvantaged by the absence of opportunities to formulate critical, well-informed perspectives about the relationships between their own circumstances (i.e., “private troubles”) and the macro-social forces operative in the larger world around them (i.e., “public issues”).2 In the case of those such as activists who nevertheless seek social change, at least to the extent of improved social conditions for themselves and others, there are limitations to the available explanatory accounts of these conditions. In turn, there are limitations to the level of understanding that might otherwise enable a fully-fledged, informed political engagement. In other cases, there is a clear failure within political communication, whereby extensive ambiguities and contradictions in political knowledge become evident, for example, in large numbers of floating or swing voters; and in other cases, there is a complete disengagement evident, for example, in low voter turnouts. While political scientists and others argue that the act of voting cannot be considered a form of political participation, it is nevertheless significant that more than 40 percent of those eligible did not vote in the Canadian federal election of 2008, which set a new precedent as the poorest voter turnout in Canadian history. In essence, the infrastructural principles of professional journalism can be called upon to explain, at least in part, both limited voter turnouts as well as the limited presence of other behaviours that might be more readily deemed acts of political engagement. The chapter begins with a brief summary of commonalities and variations in social conditions of news reception found among the three samples. One of the most outstanding commonalities, the

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widespread experience of information poverty, is illustrated ­further through specific attention to a pre-eminent example of journalism’s failure to inform and of the reception consequences of that failure; namely, the original as well as the “anniversary” coverage of 9/11. Reception implications are examined with reference to original interviews conducted shortly after 9/11 as well as follow-up interviews conducted with the same research participants while the “anniversary” coverage was observed by them a number of years later. There is also a focus upon another set of reception conditions not discussed in previous chapters. These are the insular, localized, and self-referential conditions of news reception that were frequently observed throughout the fieldwork and that participants recorded in the research documents. The discussion of selfreferentiality informs the subsequent discussion of the relationship between information inequalities and inequalities in political participation. The particular relationships between classless news and working-class political exclusion, and between gendered news and women’s political exclusion, are also examined.

COMMONALITIES AND VARIATIONS IN CONDITIONS OF NEWS RECEPTION Audiences researchers often find it difficult to generalize about the reception experiences of their research participants, yet participants themselves sometimes generalize freely about the reception experiences of others, particularly other television viewers. This was certainly the case in the present analysis. With regard to the experiences of others, many participants expressed third-person perceptions of the television reception process, which was expected in view of the common tendency to believe that others are more vulnerable to media influence, and more inclined towards undesirable viewing behaviours, than one’s self and one’s immediate others. The tendency to assume these third-person effects has been observed repeatedly throughout the populations of many different societies (see, for example, Peiser and Peter 2000).3 Beyond this expected commonality, more common among middle-­class participants than working-class participants, the most outstanding recurrent pattern was that most participants displayed, and often articulated quite vehemently, their essential distrust of news. Regardless of class, gender, and age, there was a seasoned



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cynicism regarding the news content produced by both private- and public-sector news producers, albeit with a general inclination to favour the public broadcaster (the cbc, in particular) as the most dependable news source, especially in the event of major crises. There were absolutely no research participants who lacked the capacity to be critical of news. Many of those who perceived others to be uncritical described such a response as “naïve,” or “unhealthy,” or “unsophisticated,” and so on. One of the many complexities of news reception is that, at the same time that there is a uniform capacity to be critical of news, there is also a capacity to find it credible, particularly in those very common circumstances in which there is little alternative information to contradict it. Nevertheless, the essential distrust appears to remain intact, and it was evident throughout the fieldwork period, most notably in the immediate post-9/11 interviews, as illustrated in the following case, in which a workingclass woman expresses her distrust of the ongoing 9/11 coverage, regardless of the news source: wcw: If I send you a video of what is happening in this apartment, and say, “Here, this is what is going on in here,” what basis does anyone have to know if it is fact or not? It’s not really whether or not it is American or Canadian or Western or Afghani or whatever ... Apparently, there was a scene of some Palestinians celebrating what happened at the World Trade Center and there was a group, I think it was in Brazil, who said, look, you know, we did some research and this is from the ’93 Gulf war, this isn’t even footage from what’s going on right now. Now, again, who do you believe? I don’t know which group is telling you the right information but, I just try to, I try not to be completely paranoid and cynical, but I also try to realize that if I decide to tell you what is my truth, the exact same event according to somebody else’s impression could be a completely different truth. So I just try to keep [in mind] the fact that it is usually, there is a side being represented and even if there are two sides, you are still looking at just two representatives of those two sides. Maybe they don’t represent all of the Afghani people, maybe they don’t represent all of the American people. I mean, people who have lost loved ones in the World Trade Center said, “Don’t give this as your excuse to kill people in Afghanistan, I don’t want my son or daughter to be your excuse for killing more innocent people.” You don’t get to hear those people very much.

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So, there is a side that is not being very well represented. (wcw, age 32, Interview #007) Together with the very extensive criticisms, there were many recommendations and suggestions regarding how to improve or reform professional journalism. Other reception researchers have similarly found that their research participants are usually very eager to discuss both their criticisms and their suggestions at great length. For example, in Bad News from Israel, Philo and Berry (2004, 240, 243) observe the following in their focus groups: There was a strong feeling in the groups that the news should explain origins and causes and that journalists should speak more directly to viewers about [what] was happening and why. The participants in the groups did not want news that was in any way biased or inaccurate, but the desire for clear, straightforward accounts was very apparent. It was also the case that when viewers did understand the significance and relevance of what they were watching, then this could strongly affect their level of interest in the news ... A clear majority in the groups as a whole stated that their interest increased when they understood more. There are at least three important parallels between Philo and Berry’s results and the results of the present analysis. First, the outcomes of their focus group sessions with news audiences are traced back to time pressures, news supply infrastructures, and other constraints of news production, which, in their case, for example, mean that Israeli perspectives are easier to feature in news stories than ­Palestinian perspectives.4 Second, their participants were inclined to provide both extensive criticisms of television news and suggestions about how it might be improved. As the results presented earlier in table 4.1 and elsewhere indicate, the suggestions of the Canadian research participants ranged from longer and better contextualized news stories to the inclusion of working-class news, reduced levels of source and content duplication through greater originality and more genuinely investigative journalism, greater and more critical attention to private-sector power holders, and limits to the use of “official” sources, other public relations spin, as well as tabloidization. Third, participants in both analyses drew their own connections between, for example, levels of interest in news and levels of



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understanding of news stories. Simply expressed, where contextualization increases the latter, there are correspondent increases in the former. On the other hand, incomprehension, as Philo and Berry also discovered (2004, 257ff.), can lead to detachment and it can increase the sense of powerlessness that many viewers experience. The following section illustrates these reception experiences further, with particular attention to the story of 9/11, widely regarded by many professional journalists as one of the “biggest” stories of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

INFORMATION POVERTY IN THE “INFORMATION AGE”: THE EXAMPLE OF 9/11 At the outset of her analysis of the 9/11 news coverage, Marusya Bociurkiw (2011, 124) makes the following personal observation, based upon her review of the first eight hours of cbc’s television broadcasting: “More than anything else, I was struck by the repetitiousness of the footage and the stunning lack of empirical information provided by the pictures and commentary from announcers and interviewees.” From her different perspective as an American journalist, Lisa Finnegan (2006, xix) likewise declares at the outset of her critique that she found the absence of information to be the most striking feature of the news coverage: Very few news reports filled in the basic blanks – the who, what, where, when, and whys – about US foreign policy, the usa Patriot Act, the administration’s insistence on the need for secrecy and for more power, the truth about WMDs [weapons of mass destruction] in Iraq, and the need for our soldiers to topple another country’s dictator and send a tenuous region into dangerous imbalance. Very few reports are filling in those blanks now. Ebert and Zavardeh (2008, 106) observe that, to the extent that explanations were offered, 9/11 was framed as a “clash of civilizations” rather than as the “unfolding of material contradictions.” During the period since 9/11, countless authors have commented about the limitations of the original 9/11 news coverage, the subsequent and successive “anniversary” coverage, and the voluminous other news reports about the event.5 Their comments have been directed at a full spectrum of issues, from the absence

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of ­fundamental information to the manner in which the event has been predominantly framed (see, for example, Archetti 2010; ­Burney 2002; Carey 2002; Cushion 2012b; Engle 2009; ­Entman 2003; Krebs and Lobasz 2007; McChesney 2002; Naylor 2006; Rutherford 2004; Schmierbach, Boyle, and McLeod 2005; Steuter and Wills 2008, 2009; ­Zelizer and Allan 2002; Zwicker 2006). While many have speculated about the impact of the coverage upon news audiences, few have undertaken empirical research to examine the actual experiences of audiences. In a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Gillespie (2006) introduces reports about the collaborative project conducted by twenty researchers who interviewed 320 news viewers in the United Kingdom between December 2001 and April 2002. Apart from English, interviewees watched news in a variety of languages, including Arabic, Farsi, Hindu, Kurdish, Pasto, Punjabi, Turkish, and Urdu. A diverse range of topics arose throughout the interviews, beyond memories of the 9/11 coverage per se, including viewers’ experiences of, and news reportage about, war and death as well as household rituals and routines of news consumption. There were also recurrent themes such as anti-Americanism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, and xenophobia. As a sociologist, Gillespie thoroughly articulates the dangers of mediacentrism and the ever-important need to be wary of empirically unsubstantiated assumptions regarding the significance of news: We also need to be cautious about making overblown claims about the nature, pace and scope of transformation brought about by transnational communications technologies and avoid technologically determinist assumptions. We need to assess critically and empirically whether, and under what circumstances, uses of transnational media and communications actually empower people and serve purposes of democratisation or political mobilisation and resistance ... It may be that transnational audiences, publics and users of technologies can now seek out media that simply confirm a narrow, rigid view of the world. Their uses of media may entrench them in world-imagining and world-making activities that cocoon them in ideological ghettos, preventing exposure to competing or alternative discourses and representations of social, political and cultural life, thus eroding the possibilities of democratic public spheres of debate. (907)



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Rather than desensitize audiences – another frequent and unfounded assumption – images of death and suffering can at least potentially contribute to the mobilization of political consciousness. Nevertheless, as Gillespie (2006, 909) also cautions, while images might move us, only narratives can enable our understanding. A number of other common assumptions are shattered by ­Gillespie and others who examine audiences directly and empirically. For example, while it might appear reasonable to assume that religious affiliation will affect interpretations of news coverage generally and 9/11 coverage particularly, in fact it is not consistently primary nor is it necessarily even significant at all. Like the participants in the Canadian samples, reception among the ethnically and religiously diverse subjects in the British samples varied greatly in accordance with gender differences, generational differences, differences in levels of formal educational attainment, differences in levels of media and political literacy, and, not least of all, class differences. There is no necessary relationship, and certainly no straightforward relationship, between social class and levels of media and political literacy. In their large European samples, Gillespie (2006, 915) and her colleagues observed that greater levels of media and political literacy were probably explicable in terms of their migrant, multilingual participants, whose greater than average news appetites and greater than average use of multiple news sources led them to become “armchair anthropologists” or “competent cosmopolitans” and frequently also “skeptical zappers.” Extensive use of alternative news sources in a persistently comparative manner was found to encourage high levels of criticism and skepticism that led these groups to effectively construct their own news narratives in order to render events intelligible. Essentially, like the participants in the Canadian samples, these viewers were led to formulate their own accounts and their own understandings of the events associated with 9/11. On the other hand, those in Gillespie’s (2006, 915) European sample with lesser levels of media and political literacy “were at a complete loss to understand the underlying causes and consequences of September 11.” These participants were dependent upon their own pre-existent beliefs, beliefs that were often held rigidly and that tended to be less critical of the 9/11 coverage. Yet some of these same viewers oscillated between positions that were

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dogmatic and essentialist, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, more flexible postures that permitted ambiguities. Overall, as in the Canadian samples, television news was perceived to be a vital connection to the social world, even where, as in the majority of all cases in all of the samples, its credibility was seriously challenged and repeatedly questioned. Miladi (2006) finds the same consistently active criticism throughout Arab and Muslim audiences. His research demonstrates that transnational television news outlets such as Al-Jazeera provide alternative perspectives to those of Western media and are judged to be comparatively credible by virtue of their relative independence from Arab as well as Western states. The alternative understanding of 9/11 that was often articulated by Arab and Muslim audiences is one that recognizes the American need to exploit Afghanistan’s oil and other resources. In order to explain the 9/11 attacks, there is a common perception of initiatives undertaken by the American state to encourage the attacks as a means to justify a military invasion that would enable those resources to be developed and utilized to the benefit of American economic interests. However, this explanation of 9/11, although shared widely by Arab and Muslim audiences as well as viewers in the Canadian and European samples, has been dismissed as “conspiracy theory” by the globally dominant Western news media. Together with the dehumanizing language used by Western news outlets to describe Arabs and Muslims throughout the 9/11 coverage and beyond (see, for example, Steuter and Wills 2008, 2009), these mutual “otherings” have contributed significantly to the escalation of ongoing Western/IsraeliArab/Muslim conflicts (see also Gillespie 2006, 916). Adams and Burke (2006) also demonstrate that the 9/11 reception experiences of white audiences were remarkably homogeneous. While white audiences in Britain were less active in their news usage than their Muslim fellow citizens, the response patterns of the two were similar in that 9/11 tended to elicit what was at least initially a deeply emotional response, one that led many viewers of all ethnicities to call upon their social networks – particularly friends and colleagues – in their efforts to make sense of what had transpired. Adams and Burke argue that the dominant discourse of political correctness, spread and sustained by both professional journalism and the state, effectively restricted free speech and regulated social conduct.



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The research by Matar (2006) and Mousavi (2006) illustrates the significance of loyalty to one’s ethnic group among Palestinians and Afghanis, whereby, in both cases, news produced by those of their own ethnicity was perceived to be the most credible. All such studies have been limited by small sample sizes, which, as discussed, is a necessary reality of meaningful audiences research. Nevertheless, as Gillespie (2006, 919) argues, such critical audiences research, carried out in the field, preferably in a multi-modal fashion that includes yet also goes beyond household interviews, is truly invaluable on several counts. In the first place, it becomes possible to go beyond mere documentation of what people report about their news reception, and, particularly when questionnaires and news diaries are utilized in conjunction with direct household interviews, it becomes possible to contrast those reports with direct observations of what people actually do while a newscast is watched. Even more important, it draws attention to voices that would not ordinarily be heard and to experiences that might not otherwise be represented, either in news discourse or in political discourse more broadly. Above all, it highlights the oft-neglected experiences of political exclusion shared by large sectors of the populations within ostensibly “democratic” societies. As seen in a number of the interviews and news diaries cited earlier, the Canadian research participants were likewise left with the sense that little was learned from the original 9/11 coverage or, for that matter, from the recurrent “anniversary” broadcasts. For example, five years after she watched the original coverage intensely, the following working-class woman found that her original 9/11 reception experiences were merely duplicated as she watched an anniversary broadcast during a follow-up interview: You were among those who told me that, despite all of the coverage, you didn’t feel that there was that much information. wcw: No, it was just the planes hitting the buildings and going over that and over that, and it wasn’t really “What is really going on here?” And even when it got to the point of [asking] “what is really going on here?” we still didn’t learn what was really going on. You just know that these guys in Al-Qaeda decided to get the States. Why? Are you still asking those questions five years later? wcw: “Yeah. Why did they do it?”

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How do you make sense of those questions yourself? wcw: I have no idea. I do not know why they have that big vendetta, or whatever you want to call it. I don’t. I have no idea! Was it just to say “Ha ha, we could do this!” or is there some politics, has there been politics going on through the years? I don’t know. I still don’t know why we’re there ... You look at some of the protests that I’ve seen on the news, little clips of them. Who’s listening? Nobody’s listening! “Oh yes, we still need to be there.” For what? It still doesn’t get explained. “Oh, because we might piss off the States if we’re not there.” Well, yeah, there could be some ramifications from that, but what’s more important? We’re supposed to be over there peacekeeping and saving lives, and our guys are all getting killed! So, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. (wcw, age 41 [46 at follow-up interview], Interview #055) At the same time, it needs to be pointed out that the journalists who provided the coverage were commonly frustrated by their difficulties with the reportage of 9/11. On the fifth anniversary in 2006, Tony Burman, then editor-in-chief of cbc News, reflected upon what was learned by journalists in their efforts to convey the story. In a short article posted at cbc’s website, he recommended three “lessons” to be learned by all news media: (1) “Keep it accurate,” (2) “Remember the wide shot,” and (3) “Cut through the spin” (Burman 2006, 2). The third lesson was emphasized in view of what he described as “this five-year journey of distortion, alarmist rhetoric, and spin – from all sides” (2–3). While admirably voiced, all three lessons are structurally very difficult to implement. More than a full decade later, the constraints of journalistic practices have only become more severe, and coverage of 9/11 and other stories has become more restricted and increasingly less able to inform news audiences.

INSULAR, LOCALIZED, AND SELF-REFERENTIAL CONDITIONS OF NEWS RECEPTION Beyond widely shared experiences of information poverty, yet another outstanding recurrent pattern, witnessed in the household reception setting although not exclusive to that reception site, is the particular impact of the habitual nature of news usage within the perceived insularity of private households. Is that perceived ­insularity



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accelerated under contemporary conditions of individualization? Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) envision individualization as a contemporary phenomenon that extends well beyond individualism to a fully articulated dominant discourse. The discourse insists that individuals live their own lives and assume personal responsibility for their own personal circumstances, even where these personal circumstances are clearly associated with collectively experienced social problems. In essence, individualization insists that all individuals are now compelled to find “biographic solutions to systemic contradictions” (see Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, xxii; Brodie 2008, 178–9). Brodie (2008, 179) describes it as a “new governing formula” that effectively separates individuals from group-based issues and identities, encourages them to disconnect from identifications with others who share their circumstances, and insists that individuals conduct their own private lives without recourse to others with similar fates or, least of all, to those with the means to enact state policies that might alter their “personal” circumstances. In this perspective, social conditions are reduced to personal and private circumstances that are entirely the responsibility of the individuals who experience them. In Brodie’s words: Living your own life thus includes taking personal responsibility for your own failures, especially dependency on social assistance. As a result of this discursive manoeuvre, structurally disadvantaged groups are collectively individualized, both in popular cultural representations and in public policy ... Individualization redefines poverty as arising from personal deficits.6 (179, emphasis added) Furthermore, the phenomenon of individualization fits well with policy formulations that are configured as, for example, the “child’s” agenda. A “save-the-child” agenda also serves to effectively target women, especially divorced or never-married mothers, as individual perpetrators of their own children’s misfortunes. Embedded within the political discourse of the neoliberal state, these same ideological tenets expressed as the “child’s” agenda and even as the agenda of “families” act to absent women and contribute to their political exclusion. Among the popular cultural representations to which Brodie refers, these discursive conditions inevitably creep into news output and can readily acquire prominence

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in the ­necessarily hasty explanations of severely time-constrained journalese, with the unsurprising result that working-class women are further disconnected from news output and, at the same time, distanced from engagement with policy reform campaigns or other political activities. The experience of perceived insularity acts in conjunction with the localized and self-referential conditions of news reception. The tendency to prioritize attention to first local, then regional, then national, and finally international news is clearly evident throughout the sampled groups. Localization is notably practised by women in general and working-class women in particular. Ross (2011, 11) suggests that local news media are “less constrained by the demands of ‘big’ news culture” and differ importantly from national news media in their specific appeal to the local community (with which women are most directly engaged). With that localism comes the capacity to directly engage audiences with stories that feature their neighbours, their immediate area of residence, and the services available there, the latter a category of news that is especially useful to women. Selfreferentiality was more generally practised by all groups within the samples at the same high rate of frequency. Together, these conditions act to facilitate commonalities in the interpretation of news stories, such that “events” – the prima facie objects of professional journalism’s everyday attentions – are more inclined to be perceived as distant from, and not necessarily consequential for, the personal circumstances of audiences. These everyday interpretations are empowered by the continued sense that what transpires in the macro-social world at large is very remote from the immediate concerns of the highly individuated resident within a private household who interacts with significant others principally at the local level. While these interpretations are common and recurrent in the reception process, and were frequently articulated by interviewees while newscasts were watched, there is nevertheless a need to question whether news reception is at all times genuinely insular, localized, and self-referential. We might also ask whether that apparent response is somewhat superficial, perhaps masking sincere humanitarian impulses, such as the desire to unite with others in the pursuit of collective goals of social change.7 Sociologically, we can understand the disconnection that results from insularity, localization, and self-referentiality in terms of the disjuncture between private troubles and public issues. That triad of



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news reception experiences contributes very effectively to the maintenance of this disjuncture. As Bauman (1999, 2–3, 7) explains, the disjuncture is among those forces that lie at the root of political disengagement: There is no easy and obvious way to translate private worries into public issues and, conversely, to discern and pinpoint public issues in private troubles ... [I]n our kind of society the bridges are by and large absent and the art of translation seldom practised in public ... In the absence of strong and permanent bridges and with translating skills unpractised or altogether forgotten, private troubles and pains do not add up and can hardly condense into common causes ... The art of reforging private troubles into public issues is in danger of falling into disuse and being forgotten; private troubles tend to be defined in a way that renders exceedingly difficult their “agglomeration,” and thus their condensation into a political force. Interestingly, in her study of American activists and volunteers, Eliasoph (1998) found that many of her research participants had forged linkages between private troubles and public issues, although fully fledged “political” discussions of those linkages were quite deliberatively suppressed within their volunteer organizations. For example, in the organizational meetings that she observed, “volunteers never drew connections between their everyday acts of charity and public issues” (24). In order to attract and sustain new members, most of the organizations were concerned to sustain a belief throughout their memberships in the personal “empowerment” that volunteers might experience through their charitable acts. Paradoxically, it means a need to curtail political discussion, at least at the level of “front stage” social interactions (à la Goffman’s “front stage/back stage” distinction)8 in the context of organizational meetings. It was widely assumed that such a discussion would “sap vigour” from the agenda of immediate, practical organizational objectives, and that it might also intimidate new members (24). In the “back stage” context of her personal interviews with volunteers, there was a greater likelihood that politics would be discussed, and not only because she specifically asked interviewees about such issues. In this more private setting, volunteers acknowledged that the suppression of political discussion is problematic, “that it is impossible to divorce caring

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about people from caring about politics; that there are few purely personal or local solutions to social problems” (24). At the same time, however, these groups were emphatic that their work is “not political,” and, as Eliasoph states, “most members barely held political opinions, and most held no political opinions passionately” (45). These same seemingly apolitical tendencies were also found among community volunteers in the Canadian samples. In fact, however, in both cases there were more than scattered seeds of resistance to the existent political and social order. Commonly, there were at least fragmentary formations of political orientations that awaited further development, development that could potentially be nurtured by a greater level of access to good-quality information. In her American case, Eliasoph (1998, 63) observed that the “inner beliefs and values” of the volunteers led them to care about others and the larger social world and also contributed to a lack of faith in corporations and governments: “they had not simply bought a ‘dominant ideology’ that told them that the world was fine as it was.” Ironically, in what she refers to as “the evaporation of politics in the US public sphere” (230ff.), the volunteers, activists, and others in her sample “missed a chance to ignite that magical kind of power that can sparkle between people when they self-reflectively organize themselves ... [N]one of the people I met just thought everything was fine as it was. There were just too few contexts in which they could openly air their political discontent and their curiosity about the wider world” (230–1). Regardless of the type of their voluntary organizational attachments – whether charitable organizations, other community service organizations, or trade unions – it was evident that the Canadian participants found political discussions to be similarly stifled within most of their organizations.9 Through the course of the interviews, for example, there were virtually no references to debates held within their respective organizations that related to the recent news stories seen during interviews. Rather, their organizations are more inclined to be regarded as distinct, separable units of volunteer labour directed at immediate, concrete ends and less inclined to be regarded as places of assembly in which social problems and political issues might be discussed. In the vast majority of cases, it appeared that private troubles were not ordinarily connected to public issues either in their organizational contexts or in their news reception contexts. Such connections are not inclined to be



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encouraged or nurtured by television journalism, not even in the household setting, where a “back stage” political discussion is more potentially enabled. Moreover, the absence of quality information, and the absence of such encouragement in television news, means that the absence of meaningful connections between private troubles and public issues in either their organizational or news reception experiences is not necessarily perceived to be problematic. What results from these absences is a political silence that, as Eliasoph (1998, 255) observes in her American study, cannot be simply explained as apathy. If it were merely apathy, one might expect to observe persistently hollow dismissals of political interest. Yet, on the contrary, one is far more inclined to observe much lively curiosity about the world that extends beyond the immediate local settings of households and community organizations. That level of curiosity is reflected, after all, in the exceptionally high level of “information-seeking” evident in levels of news consumption. There are other reasons to consume news, and there are those (exceptional) participants who, out of exasperation, have almost entirely shut down their news consumption. Yet, overall, there is little to suggest that curiosity has disappeared or that information is no longer sought. However, there are inequalities in access to quality information of the sort sought by audiences, as well as related inequalities in levels of political participation. The following section explores that relationship.

INFORMATION INEQUALITIES AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION INEQUALITIES Differential access to information, particularly of the sort required to develop political knowledge, is far from a bygone relic in the so-called “information age” of contemporary neoliberal capitalist societies. Beyond the everyday limitations of continuing digital divides discussed in the first chapter, there are broader, continuing disparities in levels of access to sources of political knowledge, including higher education, networks of sociality within which political exchanges can prosper, and other informational sources with explanatory power. For example, Delli Carpini and Keeter (1996) found that mean levels of political knowledge in the US population had not changed significantly throughout the half-century since the conclusion of the Second World War.

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Levels of political knowledge are invariably found to be strongly related to levels of political participation, and scholars associated with a variety of theoretical perspectives commonly share the perception that the former is a vital prerequisite to the latter. The relationship between the two has been repeatedly demonstrated, to the extent that it is exceptionally well established. It is more than a straightforward linear relationship, however. Political knowledge has been found to facilitate political participation, to strongly affect the formation of political views and the manner in which new political information is processed, and to improve the speed and efficiency of information processing.10 Junn (1991, 203–9) found the relationship to be reciprocal and argued that knowledge eclipsed all other “predictors” of various forms of political participation. A few clarifications of terms used throughout this literature and in the present analysis will be useful. First, there are those who distinguish between the “civic” and the “political” with reference to both “engagement” and “participation.” For example, Delli Carpini (2004) distinguishes between “civic engagement” and “political engagement.” The “civic” is understood as participation (he uses “engagement” and “participation” interchangeably) that is addressed to social issues through means outside of the realm of elections and governments, while the “political” consists of activities related to the selection of elected representatives and/or the development of state policy through “government” means, such as voting, working for a political party, or contacting an elected official. This can be a useful distinction in the case of the sampled Canadian organizations, most of which can be readily seen as “civic” and highly unlikely to extend their operations into the realm of the “political” as Delli Carpini defines it. It is precisely that disconnection from the political realm, on the part of the organizations yet more so on the part of their members, that is of special interest here. While it might be seen as restrictive, Delli Carpini’s definition of “political” is apt with regard to those comparatively few research participants, principally “activists” rather than union members and volunteers, whose activities have formally extended beyond “civic” activities and voting into the “political” realm of resistant activities directed explicitly at the state. While scholars such as Delli Carpini see no need to do so, it is also useful to distinguish between “engagement” and “participation.” Delli Carpini (2004, 397) describes “a democratically



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engaged ­citizen” as “one who participates in civic and political life, and who has the values, attitudes, opinions, skills, and resources to do so effectively.” This definition of engagement comes closest to the one used in the present analysis, in which the term “engagement” is reserved for that level of participation in which there is a deliberative pursuit of political efficacy, based upon the availability and utilization of essential skills and resources, informed by a clear, well-formulated worldview. In other words, those who are fully politically engaged are sufficiently advantaged, with political knowledge and other resources, to be active at the highest level of political participation. While engagement and participation overlap in this sense at the highest level of political participation, there are other forms of participation that fall short of full engagement. Here it is argued that, while voter turnout rates are not without interest, the act of voting needs to be excluded entirely from all forms of “political participation.” Voting is sui generis, categorically distinct from all other forms of political participation that might be specified. With regard to the American case, Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995, 24) point out that “the unambiguous decline in electoral turnout is not matched by decreases in all other forms of activity.” In their view, “it is a mistake to generalize from our extensive knowledge about voting to all forms of participation” (ibid.). Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995, 16) define engagement by its absence and argue that professional journalism contributes to that absence, which is described as “little interest in politics or little concern with public issues, a belief that activity can make little or no difference, [and/or] little or no knowledge about the political process.”11 These inclinations are seen as indicative of “disengagement” in the present analysis, although this term implies a level of agency that renders “political exclusion” most appropriate as a means to capture the structurally induced restrictions upon full political engagement. Attention to the structural constraints upon fully active political engagement is too often largely absent from, and/or inadequately theorized within, political communication research. In particular, there might be greater attention to structural constraints such as those fundamental social inequalities that underpin both information inequalities and political participation inequalities. The frequently veiled attention to formal education as “the principal factor” underlying participation inequalities masks the ultimate source of these inequalities in the class structure.

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With these clarifications in mind, there are a number of important points to observe regarding the political activities of participants in the Canadian samples. As discussed, the organizations from which participants were drawn extended across the full range of “civil society organizations,” from community service organizations staffed by volunteers to trade union locals to more avowedly “political” organizations with formally articulated social justice objectives. One might perhaps expect a gradation, therefore, in their respective levels of political participation, yet in fact there was no such strongly evident linearity based upon organization type. Another distinction between the organizations is that many operate as local branches or chapters of larger, usually national, organizations while a minority operate exclusively at the local level without formal ties to groups or organizations outside of the city. In her research, Changfoot (2007) notes that these localized groups and organizations, positioned to target the municipal state in their pursuit of various forms of support with which to meet their social justice objectives, can express a critical resistance to the social order and at the same time choose to adapt the economic preoccupations of neoliberalism to the realization of those objectives, in such a manner that their fiscal and other needs are more likely to be met. In other words, while there is participation in the discourse of neoliberalism that could be interpreted superficially as a form of political quiescence, in reality there is critical resistance alongside a recognized need to attain pragmatic goals such as municipal funding support. The resultant ambivalence can be seen as “conformity to neoliberal policy orientation that embodies resistance to it” (134). Interestingly, then, her research suggests that localization can inspire a pragmatic activism that accommodates neoliberal economic growth objectives at the same time that it enables progress towards short-term social needs, such as the improved provision of food to the homeless. As illustrated in previous chapters, a similar fusion of conformity and resistance can be seen in many of the participants’ news reception experiences (although it is without such clear and practical incentives). Overall, there are differences between different types of participants – whether activists, union members, or volunteers – as one would expect, yet these differences do not extend to the common reception ambiguities, including the fundamental information inequalities, that are experienced by all and that become manifest in political participation inequalities. In his overview of



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trade unions in Canadian society, Camfield (2008, 71–2) underlines a vital distinction between the power held by trade unions and the limited revolutionary potential of activist organizations: [The] potential to be the organizational framework for largescale collective action simply does not exist in campaigning organizations (such as Greenpeace or the Council of Canadians) whose “members” are people who donate money and who lack any way of coming together to act collectively ... Nor does this potential exist when social movement organizations are groups of activists who do not have a structured relationship to a mass base of the people for whose interests they fight (as is true for most anti-poverty groups). Proulx and Raboy (2003) studied a group of Quebec subjects with activism experience, inquired about their television usage and their views regarding Canadian broadcasting policies, and found that some had high expectations of public television, yet there was no interest in the organization of collective demands to change the broadcasting system (337). Instead, there was a widespread sense of their powerlessness to change the system. Their responses were individualist rather than collectivist. Concretely, most of their research participants preferred to change channels rather than to change the broadcasting system. In sum, their relationships with the medium were “ambivalent” (343): television was appreciated yet, at the same time, it provided many fertile and rich opportunities to complain about its operations. Proulx and Raboy conclude that television reception experiences are largely explicable in terms of the social locations and cultural capital of their research participants. In their review of studies of Vancouver activists conducted over the course of three decades, Carroll and Ratner (2010) found that a majority understood injustice in political-economic terms. Crossmovement activists adopted a political economy frame, which indicated that “wider participation fosters more holistic political views, leading to recognition of commonalities that cut across different movements, so that activists from diverse constituencies are better able to grasp the interconnectedness of resistance struggles” (11; see also Carroll and Ratner 1996). However, their study of the Action Canada Network, the first national coalition of social movements in Canada, discovered that shared political sensibilities

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among ­networked activists are not necessarily advantageous. In their view, the growth of a fully oppositional and self-sustaining counterhegemonic culture is contingent upon three developmental tasks: the need to build a community, to satisfy the needs of its constituents, and to mobilize and engage in collective action (Carroll and Ratner 2010, 13). The great challenge is to pursue these tasks in ways that retain a social movement’s focus upon structural transformation rather than mere reformism. Carroll and Ratner also note the “asymmetrical dependency” between social movements and news media, according to which the former are highly dependent upon the latter to mobilize their constituents, to validate their political significance, and to expand the scope of the conflict in order to attract the support of third parties and thereby shift the balance of forces in a direction that supports the movement’s objectives. Based upon their analysis of the press experiences of three major activist organizations in Vancouver, a key conclusion is that mainstream journalism offers “at best, unpredictable support to movements engaged in counter-hegemonic politics” (16). No surprise there, yet two of their other conclusions are also pertinent here: first, that there is a class reductionism in the assumption of a working-class core to the “historic bloc” (as Gramsci originally envisioned it); and, second, that organizers of dissent need not either originate from or represent a social class per se, as long as there is common ground in a project that unifies oppositional cultures (Carroll and Ratner 2010, 20). A central question that arises from these conclusions is that of why the working class is excluded from Carroll and Ratner’s reformulation of Gramsci’s theorizations. Implied in their reformulation is the recognition, if not the resignation as well, that the working class is likely to be excluded from any projects that unify oppositional cultures in a movement to transform the social order.12 This question is pursued further in the following section.

CLASSLESS NEWS AND WORKING-CLASS POLITICAL EXCLUSION wcm: I don’t care about politics. What do you think has turned you off it? wcm: I don’t care about money problems. I am very sure that everyone has their own money problems. Why hear about how



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bad it really is? Why hear something depressing, why not just live life and be happy? You don’t need to be depressed. It just brings people down ... I remember that part of the questionnaire, and my comment was that I didn’t watch as much news as what the average person does, because of the fact that my life is such that it is depressing. Why do I need to hear more depressing news? Life is depressing enough such as it is without injecting more. (wcm, age 21, Interview #011) Before a specific discussion of class-based experiences, it is useful to first examine the broad category of all those who are “politically disconnected” – sometimes understood as a deliberative choice to “tune out the world of news and current affairs” (Blekesaune, Elvestad, and Aalberg 2010, 1). It encompasses all those who actively avoid news, who never read or hear or see news, based upon a decision not to seek information and not to acquire political knowledge, at least not from journalistic sources. Blekesaune’s team in Norway analyzed European Social Survey (ess) data from 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008 regarding a total of thirty-three European societies in which, overall, levels of political interest have been low in recent decades. As a general mean, 30 percent of those throughout European populations never discuss politics, while less than 15 percent claim to discuss politics frequently (van Deth and Elff 2004, cited in Blekesaune, Elvestad, and Aalberg 2010). Among their research questions were the issues of who the disconnected are and why these groups have effectively “tuned out” of news reception. In contrast to those who argue that many people keep informed by means of the internet rather than more traditional news media, those who subscribe to “normalization theses” argue that internet use supplements rather than supplants traditional media use (e.g., Norris 2001; Räsänen 2006) and that there is increasingly abundant evidence to support the argument. According to this perspective, those who are disconnected from traditional news media are not more likely to connect online in lieu of television or other news media usage; rather, it is argued that “information inequalities will not be reduced or eliminated due to an increase in Internet use, but rather ... traditional social cleavages will continue to persist. New media like the Internet have generally increased citizen’s information opportunities, but the opportunity to consume news is not equal for all citizens” (Blekesaune, Elvestad, and Aalberg 2010, 4).

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In their view, education is a pivotal factor and, indeed, its significance has been comparatively well documented. It has been variously argued that skills attained through higher education substantially increase the ability to acquire political information (Delli Carpini and Keeter 2000, cited in Blekesaune, Elvestad, and Aalberg 2010), that prior political knowledge facilitates the understanding of new political information (Rhee and Cappella 1997), and, more specifically, that those with larger stocks of prior political knowledge are better able to understand new political information provided in news because of their stored information, which can be used to generate more considered and more thoughtful interpretations of news material (Höijer 1989). Unfortunately, many such analyses tend to restrict their focus to differences in levels of formal educational attainment and the different levels of political knowledge that result, without any broader contextualization of these inequalities that would situate them firmly within class structures. Just as Bourdieu underlined the relationship between social class and cultural capital, such differences trace directly to structured social inequalities that have historically disadvantaged the working class. These structurally induced information inequalities are reflected in many working-class experiences of news reception, including experiences of journalism “tune out” and political disconnection, such as that illustrated in the interview with the young working-class man cited at the outset of this section. Analysis of the relationship between media use and what Putnam refers to as “social capital” is by no means unprecedented (see, for example, Putnam 1995a, 1995b, 2000; Shah, Kwak, and Holbert 2001). Putnam argues that those who watch many hours of television are without time to develop social networks and to engage in political activities, while others respond that the direction of this (largely presumed and weakly demonstrated) relationship might be reversed; namely, that those without social networks are inclined to spend more time with television. Some past research suggests that program genre is a key factor, that many hours of general television spectatorship can be connected with levels of engagement, yet that news spectatorship specifically can be “positively correlated” with engagement (e.g., Newton 1999; Norris 1996). At least in this regard, news needs to be kept analytically distinct from other television program genres. Beyond the medium of television, similar “the-rich-get-richer” research (as Blekesaune and colleagues



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describe it) finds connections between internet use and social activity (e.g., Kraut et al. 2002). Currently, of course, the increased use of social media has led some commentators to attribute the rise of entire social movements to their introduction and extensive use. As discussed in chapter 1, there is a well-documented historical pattern whereby the introduction of a new medium into a society is often accompanied by the spread of highly speculative and frequently phobic notions about its actual and potential impact. While this should not be reduced to crass technological determinism, it is not useful to pursue Putnam’s contention that the medium of television carries with it the intrinsic means to increase the privatization of domestic life and to decrease levels of civic and political participation. Above all, the terminology of the “social capital school” associated with Putnam and others must not be confused with Bourdieu’s theoretical formulations regarding cultural capital.13 In the case of Blekesaune, Elvestad, and Aalberg’s (2010, 9) extensive European analysis, which generalizes about European societies yet acknowledges large differences between them, it is evident that, in all of the thirty-three societies studied, “people with economic problems” are much more likely to be disconnected from various news media and/or from all news media.14 Again, it is found that there is “no evidence to support the argument that the disconnected reconnect online. Rather [their data] support the idea that the internet is used often as a supplement rather than instead of traditional news media” (10). Moreover, during the period of their analysis, from 2002 to 2008, there was evidence of a slow yet steady increase in the proportion of disconnected citizens in each of these thirty-three societies: “Our analysis shows that there has been an overall increase of news-disconnected citizens across Europe ... We believe that this decreasing interest in news media represents an important challenge to democracy and societies throughout ­Europe” (13). Unfortunately, the authors choose to seek explanations in “individual traits” with emphasis upon the “low levels of social capital” associated with individual disconnected citizens. Like other news reception experiences, the experience of news rejection and political disconnection is perhaps best explained with reference to both the nature of the news that is supplied and the social characteristics of those who choose to reject it. We might ask: Is it exclusion in this case or repulsion? Addressed to the news supply issues, a ­revelatory

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journalistic commentary suggests that both of these responses are not only possible but also explicable in view of the limitations of the news supply. In his article titled “The ‘News’ of Election Campaigns,” posted online during the 2011 federal Canadian election campaign, Elly Alboim (2011) writes as a former cbc Television Parliamentary Bureau Chief who is currently a journalism professor at Ryerson University. First, he reflects upon the dissatisfactions of everyone – news workers and news audiences alike – with the eight weeks of news coverage that unfolded during the 1989 federal campaign. The coverage became a central topic at a post-election conference attended by academics, journalists, and politicians, where there was a collective feeling of a 56 day (yes, campaigns were eight weeks long then) failure to conduct and report on the campaign and its choices in a way that properly served the public interest. At the heart of the discussion and the multiple sense of grievance, was a set of dilemmas and questions that persist, and once again was dominant in week two of the current [2011] election campaign. (1) Those dilemmas and questions raised serious epistemological issues about the compatibility, and the utility, of professional news values in the special case of election communication. For example, criteria of newsworthiness such as urgency, novelty, and drama are not well suited to the communication of intricate policy issues. Yet so deeply embedded are these criteria in everyday news production practices that there are literally no mechanisms to supplant them with other criteria, definitions, and standards that might convey election issues more effectively, to the greater satisfaction of audiences as well as journalists themselves. As Alboim (2011, 2–3) explains in a discussion of the process that is worth citing at length, the rigidity of traditional news values invites manipulation by the political managers who are the central sources of election “news”: And so, traditional news values superintend. Gaffes, inconsistencies, personal dramas, process controversies, highly charged emotional outbursts and confrontations (real and contrived), candidate and staff difficulties all become the “news” of the campaign ... [I]t is also clear that none of this is a mystery to the people who put together political campaigns. They understand



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the news imperatives just as well, and perhaps better than the journalists themselves. The news decision making process is predictable and highly vulnerable to manipulation. Political managers have developed sophisticated tactics to frustrate journalists’ quest for information, to box in their ability to operate freely, to manufacture impression and image, and perhaps worst of all, to cynically leverage journalists’ professional obligations of fairness and balance in reporting even the most obviously distorted statements and allegations. They create the illusion of news and pander to the desire for conflict. They work around and over the heads of media to stymie transparency and access ... No one in the system likes it very much and in virtually every campaign the bitterness and sense of grievance on both sides begins building quite quickly. By the end of week two [of the 2011 federal campaign], that too has become part of the story ... As for those who have checked out of the process altogether, there is the possibility that they have done so in part because they feel excluded or have been repelled. Many of the Canadian research participants express at least some level of discontent with both traditional news values and these recurrent instances of political manipulation which effectively exploit those seemingly impermeable values. As discussed, only a small minority had actually “checked out of the process altogether.” The rationale underlying that decision was often class-based, and it was apparent that such decisions were motivated by a sense of exclusion from classless news reported by overwhelmingly middle-class journalists. Among those who remained “checked in” to the process, in the sense that news was at least consumed intermittently if not regularly, there was a visible distance on the part of working-class participants. Less readily apparent in the Canadian interviews was the relationship between social class and political participation. In the American case, Verba’s (1995) research team find the path to political participation strongly driven by social class, manifest in the impact of education levels upon other participation factors such as “family income” and “the occupational and organizational commitments that provide opportunities for political recruitment and the practice of civic skills” (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995, 20). The conclusions of their remarkably extensive analysis underline the

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s­ ignificance of social class and also stress that explanations pointed at “education” are in fact pointed at class: Despite the absence of references to class in our political discourse, when it comes to political participation, class matters profoundly for American politics ... so long as inequalities in education and income persist – and income inequality in America has become more pronounced of late – so long as jobs continue to distribute opportunities to practice civic skills in a stratified manner, then individuals will continue to command stockpiles of participatory factors of very different sizes and, thus, to participate at very different rates ... [B]ecause political participation is so deeply rooted in the essential structures of American society, we can expect that the voices heard through the medium of citizen participation will be often loud, sometimes clear, but rarely equal. (532–3, emphasis added)15 In the case of the Canadian samples, the place of class in political participation was less straightforward, not to be dismissed by any means although not as definitive as Verba and his colleagues in the United States were able to demonstrate. There were numerous examples of contradictions between social locations and political postures, as well as contradictions between social class and voting proclivities, and there were further ambiguities in the actual relationship between social class and political participation. This frequently tangled web, which needs to be illustrated at some length to be conveyed fully, is illustrated to some extent in the following case of a class-conscious couple who voted for the Alliance Party because of their religious values. The discussion below followed from their response to a news story regarding cuts to the health care system: Are you disturbed ... by the cuts to the health care system? mcm: That depends. And especially when it affects the poorest people the most. And if we are heading towards a two-tier health care system, the poor people are going to suffer a hundred times more than the wealthy. And further polarizing the gap between the rich and the poor, and this society of classes that we have going on here, where the important people are put up on a pedestal and valued as golden and the lesser, the lesser gifted people



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are put down in the gutter with the rest of the less gifted people and then we’re treated accordingly. And everything in our life is geared to how important you are in society. Now if you work your butt off, you deserve more, there’s no question. Or if you have a career of high responsibility level, of course you deserve more remuneration and a higher quality of life for that. So, I’m not, like, a communist or anything. But, I do think that when there are people starving in the world at the same time that other people are billionaires, I mean, that’s just insanity, we’ve gone berserk. How can you have a billionaire living in the lap of luxury with more money than he’ll ever be able to spend in a hundred lifetimes, and at the same time you’ve got people starving, children starving that haven’t even had a chance to have a life, or make a life. I’ve lost my train of thought. That’s a very interesting train of thought since I noticed in the questionnaire that you identify yourself as an Alliance Party supporter. Are you both Alliance Party supporters? mcf: The last time [election]. mcm: Yeah. And it’s a party that’s normally perceived to be right wing, as you know. mcm: Yeah. And it’s interesting that you would hold those views and support a party which operates from a very different perspective. mcm: Actually, to be honest I’m not, I don’t know if I’d vote Alliance again. I’m not even exactly sure what the Alliance stands for, to be honest. I generally don’t bother paying a whole lot of attention to elections because, in my opinion, we’re pretty much powerless in that area anyway ... [He turns to his spouse and asks:] What does the Alliance stand for, do you know? mcf: Well, I, the reason that I personally support the Alliance is because of their stance on family and [interrupted by mcm] mcm: Christian values. mcf: Yeah, Christian values. mcm: Yeah, that’s basically why. It’s not so much an economic thing. It’s more of a religious thing. I would say neither one of us are religious fanatics, but we [interrupted by mcf] mcf: We’re political. mcm: We’re political, I would say, but we’re not religious fanatics. (mcm, age 43, MCW, age 38, Interview #008)

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This passage also serves to illustrate the operation of gender dynamics in news reception and political participation (see the following section). Finally, it is useful to conclude this section with at least a brief discussion of the emergent literature regarding social class and online political activity. Schlozman, Verba, and Brady (2010, 503), for example, tested the popular expectation that well-established patterns of participatory inequality in American politics might have been disrupted by the expansion of internet usage, yet her team finds “little evidence that the association between socio-­ economic status and political activity is any different when politics is on the Internet.” Fifteen years earlier, the same authors (Verba, ­Scholzman, and Brady 1995) pointed – in what can now be seen as a prescient manner – to the common tendency to overstate the significance of social media and other online “mobilization” sites: “In an era in which so many political communications are delivered electronically, it nonetheless seems that personal connections among acquaintances, friends, and relatives – often mediated through mutual institutional affiliations – are still crucial for political recruitment” (17). The political significance of digital media to all social classes, rarely identified as such in exuberant popular accounts, continues to be grandly overstated by, to quote Deuze (2008b, 199), “feverish techno-fetishist utopians.” Due to the class-based digital divide discussed in chapter 1, the working class is the least likely of all social classes to have broadband access at home or at the workplace. However, among those who do have regular access to the internet, there is a strong relationship between class and internet-based political engagement. Yes, there were indications that the internet might have the potential to ameliorate the participatory deficit among youth, yet, as Schlozman, Verba, and Brady (2010, 503) conclude in their later analysis: “Within generational groups, we found sharp ses stratification in online activity.” The question of whether social media can enable a less class-­ stratified venue for political activity remains to be investigated thoroughly. Unfortunately, the current explosion of research activity addressed to the political significance and revolutionary possibilities of social media is, ironically, often class-blind and otherwise inattentive to entrenched digital divides. With a few exceptions, this



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developing literature is predominantly inclined towards classless visions of social media usage and their future prospects.

GENDERED NEWS AND WOMEN’S POLITICAL EXCLUSION Historical documentation indicates that, since at least the late nineteenth century, women have been active in voluntary organizations such as those included in the samples, or what are also referred to as “third-sector” organizations or civil society organizations. That same historical literature is divided around the question of how to interpret the additional voluntary activity performed by women – whether as a bridge between the private sphere of the household and the public realm of political action or as indicative of women’s solidarity in that these organizations are often committed to the needs and interests of women and children. Some feminist theorists argue that the division between private and public spheres is entirely superficial and increasingly blurred, such that there is a need to recast what constitutes “the political” in order to include the largely unacknowledged “third-sector” labour of women. For example, through their creation of a healthy, supportive infrastructure of community organizations, women’s labour has helped to sustain communities through periods of economic and other crises. As indicated earlier, however, most of the women in the Canadian samples are not inclined to perceive their labour as political. Ross (2002b, 16) finds a parallel in the British case: “The sadness, in some ways, is that many women do not recognize their acts as political, seeing them more as ‘community’ which again makes the call for a recasting of what politics actually means, more pressing.” Alternatively, or concurrently, the organizations can be seen as inadequate outlets for women who are otherwise excluded from the public sphere. Approaches to the interpretation of women’s participation and the significance of the third sector are very different in the early twenty-first century, yet the disagreements regarding these questions continue (Ishkanian and Lewis 2007).16 Ishkanian and Lewis observe that, while women have always been present in these organizations that are perceived to be situated “outside the state,” women generally have not occupied leadership positions, although in a few societies, notably the United States, women have

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been able to exercise some influence simply by virtue of their membership (409). As discussed, their participation can also be seen as yet another shift in a treble day that also includes paid labour and unpaid household labour, the latter including the provision of care to family members such as children and resident or non-resident adult offspring and elders. The historical record also demonstrates the importance of these organizations to those who lack “recognition,” as Nancy Fraser and her colleagues describe it (Fraser et al. 2003, cited in Ishkanian and Lewis 2007, 409) and who are economically, politically, and more broadly, socially marginalized. Like their news reception, women’s participation in civil society organizations is affected by their social class, ethnicity, and religious affiliation. In the case of women who represent ethnic minorities, the existent research is unclear about whether these organizations serve to celebrate or to exacerbate ethnic differences. Ishkanian and Lewis (2007, 410) do insist that women’s “outside-the-state” activity has been “enormously important for campaigning and lobbying on issues of particular concern to women and for developing political skills.” On the other hand, ­Einhorn and Sever (2005) argue that women’s activity in these organizations might also be seen as a “trap” or “dead end” in the sense that, in some societies (such as those in central and eastern Europe), it has not led to increased political participation.17 It is not a central concern here to pursue these debates regarding third-sector activity with respect to the community organizations that were sampled. If that were the case, it would have been important to directly observe the volunteer labour of participants within each of their respective organizations, as, for example, Eliasoph (1998) was led to do in her analysis of American activists, volunteers, and recreation group members. There can be little dispute, however, that, in terms of the population at large, political participation in Canadian society is limited overall and it continues to be gendered in various ways.18 While there are many ways in which these continuing patterns might be explained, the focus here needs to be upon how the participants are inclined to perceive their activities within these organizations, and particularly, whether their activities are perceived to be a form of political participation with political objectives that are articulated as such. In effect, this was true of only a small minority, comprised mostly of those who were formally associated with activist organizations. Moreover, even



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in these cases, participants’ discussions of their activities in these organizations were more inclined to emphasize the social character of their interactions with other members rather than the political character of their organizational activities. Ultimately, the concern here is to identify ways in which their news reception experiences might contribute to the predominant pattern of political exclusion. For example, it was striking to regularly observe that neither women nor men were inclined to make connections between their volunteer labour and political issues that arose in the news stories that were watched during interviews. Not only is political participation highly gendered but so, too, as discussed, are both news production and news reception. These commonalities, of course, are by no means coincidental or random, and clearly reflect the broadly entrenched structural gender inequalities within Canadian society at large. Feminist political theory effectively evolved from the question of how to explain and rectify the exclusion of women from political life (Tronto 2007), and the gender differentiation in political participation persists. The question becomes: How might gendered news production and gendered news reception contribute to its persistence? What is the relationship between women’s disengagement from news and their political disengagement and/or exclusion? Again, voter turnout is seemingly a distinctive category unto itself, to the extent that Harell (2009) found it necessary to explain why there is comparatively little gender differentiation in voting attendance, at least at this juncture in the twenty-first century. She assesses detailed survey data found in the Canadian National Survey on Giving, Volunteering, and Participating to examine why women’s current voter turnout levels are similar to those of men. In the process, she utilizes the “resource model of participation” developed by Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995; see also Brady, Verba, and Schlozman 1995), in which participation is understood to require resources such as networks of sociality, psychological engagement, time, skills, and the economic resources associated with the middle and wealthy classes – although, unfortunately, the model is otherwise class-blind and gender-blind. Harell, however, draws attention to the fact that women are disadvantaged on most if not all of these counts. Of special interest is the recurrent finding in this literature that women tend to display less political interest and acquire less

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­ olitical knowledge than men (e.g., Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; p ­Gidengil et al. 2006; Mondak and Anderson 2004; Verba, Burns, and Schlozman 1997). There is also some evidence of gender differences in the type of organizational activity (Eliasoph 1998; ­Vickers 1988), whereby men are inclined to engage with more explicitly “political” organizations while women are drawn more to charities, religious organizations, and other such volunteer work outside of the officially “political” public sphere, although such gender differences were not strongly evident in the present analysis. In any event, along with those who propose a redefinition of “the political,” some feminist research suggests that the classical construct of “political participation” within political science fails to capture the multiplicity of formal and informal ways in which women engage with their societies, more often at the local level, where it tends to be less recognized. Nevertheless, if we acknowledge the limitations of mainstream conceptualizations of “the political” and “political participation,” we are still left with the need to explain why women continue to be largely excluded from the dominant, official realms of political activity. There is certainly not the space here to tackle that grand question in its entirety, yet it is at least possible to identify characteristics of news production and reception, and of political communication more broadly, that likely contribute to women’s fundamental political exclusion. Above all, if political knowledge is a vital prerequisite to political participation, as most political scientists appear to agree, and if political knowledge needs to be derived at least to some extent from journalism, then its essential failure to inform clearly disadvantages those who are already disadvantaged by lower levels of formal education, including those who are already politically marginalized by their social class and/or their gender. In the particular case of gender, the evidence indicates that political knowledge generally is not distributed equally to women and men, which clearly places women at a serious disadvantage. That unequal distribution can be explained with reference to gendered news production, the masculinist nature of news discourse that consequently permeates news texts, and gendered reception experiences which deter women from a full engagement with the news texts that emerge out of a highly masculinist newsroom environment. Also implicated here are the limitations of women’s news reception environments, in which, for example,



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their continuing primary responsibility for household labour necessarily restricts their attentiveness to the news that is offered as well as their opportunities to seek alternative sources of political knowledge. Unlike the men in the Canadian samples, women were much more inclined to discuss their greater satisfaction with sources such as books and magazines, at the same time that their frustration was expressed about their limited opportunities to read these sources. Radio emerged as a favoured news medium among the women, often because it can be heard while household work is undertaken, yet, with the exception of women in child-free one-person households, the household dynamics are such that television retains its primacy as the most extensively consumed, and in some cases the only, news source. Based upon Statistics Canada data, Keown (2007b, 17, emphasis added) demonstrates a relationship between (1) diversity and frequency of news consumption and (2) level of political engagement: Frequent followers of the news participate in more political activities, but relying only on television results in a pattern of political activity that closely mirrors those who do not follow news at all. Those who follow news frequently in a variety of media sources seem more likely to be politically engaged Canadians. Elsewhere, Keown (2007a) has used data from the 2003 General Social Survey (gss) to demonstrate that those who are “plugged into” the news – in a manner permitted much more to men than to women – have a greater proclivity towards political involvement. That greater proclivity requires a more consistent, and consistently attentive, consumption of a diversity of news sources than what is ordinarily possible in the case of women, particularly women volunteers who perform as many as three shifts of labour in a day. She adds that “television is the news medium that is least likely to have a motivating influence on future [political] action” (39). There are, of course, various other economic, political, and ideological forces that have contributed to the political exclusion of women as a social group. Brodie (2008), for example, elaborates upon what she refers to as the “invisibilization” of women – their effective erasure from the state policy agenda since the 1980s – supplanted by the “child’s” agenda under Mulroney’s Conservatives in the 1990s and, more recently, by the “families” agenda promoted

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by Harper’s Conservatives in the 2011 federal election campaign. If women are absent from the state policy agenda as well as from the masculinist discourse of professional journalism,19 the incentive to participate in political activity, even to merely vote, can be sharply reduced if not entirely eradicated. In her conclusion to Women, Politics, Media, Ross (2002b, 167) writes: “Women recognize that most media professionals and certainly all the owners and controllers of media institutions are men and that the way in which politics is reported is determined, to a large extent, by a male-oriented agenda which privileges the practice of politics as an [essentially] male pursuit.” As a final illustration of how not only gender but also gender in conjunction with class can act upon the incentive to vote, consider the response of the following working-class woman, who was asked during an interview if she planned to see the live television coverage of the federal budget scheduled later that day: wcw: No, I’m not watching the budget. What can we do about it anyway? It’s okay to watch it so I guess you can find out what they’re gonna do, but you can’t do anything about it. They’re just going to take more money away from the poor and give it to the rich ... I don’t vote very much, because I figure – and I don’t think there’s anybody in my house who’s voted for the last three years – because, especially for national affairs, whatever, because I’ll say, “Well, let’s go down and vote.” Nobody’s gonna vote because it’s not gonna do any good anyway. (wcw, age 59, Interview #016)

Conclusions Journalism, which, in theory, should inspire political involvement, tends to strip politics of meaning and promote broad depoliticization. It is arguably better at generating ignorance and apathy than informed and passionately engaged citizens. Robert McChesney, The Political Economy of Media Hegemony works not simply by instilling consensus, but by fostering inconsistent and fragmented belief systems and by blocking citizens from linking expressions of dissent to effective public action. Chad Raphael, Investigated Reporting

It has become almost compulsory to conclude discussions of professional journalism with profound comments regarding one or more of its current “crises” and its ostensibly precarious future (see, for example, Barnett 2011; Franklin 2012; Gitlin 2009). There can be little question that the profession is presently under siege, although not by citizen journalism or ugc, nor by the decline in newspaper readership. Those most besieged are journalists themselves, in Canadian society and elsewhere, as a direct result of aggressive cross-media ownership convergence and radical cuts to newsroom workforces. In the United States, a total of twenty-three thousand newspaper jobs were lost between 2007 and 2009 (Compton and Benedetti 2010, 494) and newspaper layoffs increased by 30 percent between 2010 and 2011 (see McChesney 2013, 176). Canadian newspapers have suffered somewhat less drastic staffing declines, until 2012 and 2013 when Quebecor (one of the four dominant media owners discussed in chapter 4) announced total reductions of almost 20 percent in its news media division workforce. Sun Media, the largest newspaper chain in Canada, controlled by ­Quebecor, also announced the closure of eleven daily newspapers

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as well as the expansion of firewalls at its digital news platforms (cjf 2013). A union leader (cited in cjf 2013) commented: “Yes they’re going to expand their product across some digital platforms, but it’s going to have less news ... spread over a bigger area. It’s trying to do more with less ... Nobody in the world can produce a better quality of journalism with less journalists.” Compton and Benedetti describe some of the effects of labour force reductions upon the labour of those journalists who remain: The result is fewer reporters with heavier workloads, not solely in terms of coverage of news events, but in how those events are covered in the converging newsrooms. The remaining staffs are required to post to the Internet, collect audio and video clips, shoot digital photographs, post updates to blogs, and most recently, update live to Twitter. In similar cost-cutting measures, some news organizations have outsourced their foreign coverage to a network of part-time correspondents. (2010, 494–5) There has been a greater impact upon journalists than upon journalism, or the “journalistic field” to which Bourdieu refers, which continues to feature age-old rules of professional conduct, shamefully archaic principles of newsgathering, and practices of news production that have been repeatedly demonstrated to serve only the interests of the dominant. Among others, the principle of journalistic objectivity has remained largely impermeable to change, with the notably disturbing exception of explicitly partisan newer outlets such as the right-wing Sun News Network in Canada. Overall, the objectivity principle remains essentially intact, despite the constraints upon the labour of journalists, such as the need to seek “official” commentators and sources who contribute only to a reinforcement of the predominantly white, middle-class, masculinist character of news and to a sustained distance between those who appear in news and the audiences who receive it. Historically designed to mitigate the worst visible effects of ownership convergence, to defend against accusations of political partisanship, and to deter interventions by the state, the principle of objectivity has served the needs of owners much more than those of journalists, who are presently more inclined to acknowledge the futility of the pursuit of objectivity and, instead, to strive towards impartiality, or at least a minimal balance, in the presentation of oppositional views.



Conclusions 263

Journalists, after all, are by no means oblivious to the restrictions upon their work, and upon the news product, imposed by a set of professional principles and practices that constrains the news production process in various and consistent ways. On the contrary, there are daily and direct experiences of, and frustrations with, these production constraints. Nevertheless, the constraints are deeply embedded within everyday production routines, such that there is a widespread sense among journalists, particularly more seasoned journalists, that the constraints are merely a “given” within the news industry, not ordinarily questioned or challenged. A rare public challenge was expressed in the summer of 2011 by a twenty-four-year-old former ctv Québec City Bureau Chief, who had also worked at cbc/Radio-Canada, and who posted a lengthy reflection online titled “Why I Quit My Job”: I quit my job because the idea burrowed into my mind that, on the long list of things I could be doing, television news is not the best use of my short life. The ends no longer justified the means ... Television news is a curious medium. You don’t always know whose interests are being served – or ignored. Although bounded by certain federal regulations, most of what you see in a newscast is actually defined by an internal code – an editorial tradition handed down from one generation to the next – but the key is, it’s self-enforced. Various industry associations hear complaints and can issue recommendations, or reward exemplary work with prizes. There are also watchdogs with varying degrees of clout. But these entities have no enforcement capacity. Underneath this lies the fact that information is a commodity, and private television networks are supposed to make money. All stations, publicly funded or not, want to maintain or expand their viewership ... ctv, in my experience, maintains high standards in factual accuracy. Its editorial staff is composed of fair-minded critical thinkers. But there is an underlying tension between “what the people want to see” and “the important stories we should be bringing to people.” I remember as the latest takeover was all but finalized, Bell Media executives came to talk about “growing eyeballs” in the “specialty channels.” What they meant was, sports are profitable – so as long [as] they keep raking in cash, we can keep funding underperforming

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assets like our news division. (The same dynamic exists at the cbc, by the way.) ... Despite modest gains in certain markets (and bigger gains for reality shows like Dragon’s Den and Battle of the Blades), [cbc Television is] still largely failing to broadcast to the public. More damnably, the resulting strategy is now to compete with forprofit networks for the lowest hanging fruit. In this race to the bottom, the less time and money the cbc devotes to enterprise journalism, the less motivation there is for the private networks to maintain credibility by funding their own investigative teams. Even then, “consumer protection” content has largely replaced political accountability. (Nagata 2011, 2–5) Based upon the responses to Nagata’s article posted by other journalists, and much earlier feedback from those journalists interviewed by the newsroom ethnographers of the 1970s and 1980s, there is abundant evidence that journalists are keenly attuned to the underlying political economy of news production, as Nagata himself illustrates above. Moreover, like Nagata, many journalists are inclined to lament the failure to broadcast to “the public,” the decline of investigative journalism, and the shift from a perceived responsibility to render political institutions accountable to a greater emphasis upon “consumer protection.” What also persists, however, is a set of misguided perceptions regarding audiences and their news interests – perceptions that can be attributed in large measure to the insular professional and social networks within which news producers generally circulate, and that are also derived, at least in part, from private-­sector quantitative survey results which tend to be adopted uncritically (or, in other cases, disregarded) by news managers and their consultants. That set of misperceptions regarding audiences, held by news managers as well as by many news workers, is simply not matched by what audiences have disclosed to communication scholars in more extensive qualitative research. However, it must not be assumed that the perceptions of journalists are necessarily homogenous or without critical exceptions. To illustrate further, in a different online post, a senior journalist and former producer at The National expressed his own disenchantment with the contemporary trajectory of that news program: In a cruelly ironic touch, The National’s campaign to persuade Canadians to watch the news we pay for was overseen



Conclusions 265

by ­expensive American news doctors. If you really want more ­Canadians to watch, those doctors advised, don’t spend your money on all that international crap. Nobody cares. If you must run international stuff, you can get most of it for free from other broadcasters and do the voice-over here in Canada. Anyway viewers don’t want you explaining the world they live in. They want “human” stories. They want celebrities. Crime sells. Disasters sell. Weather sells. Fires sell. Get with it Canadians! The result – The National today. A news program that’s lost its soul, its journalistic innocence ... I don’t blame the journalists – that dwindling band of digitallystained wretches – who serve The National as best they can. In fact, cbc News still has a few of the finest, most dedicated journalists in all Canada. When they can get airtime, its handful of experienced, travel-worn foreign correspondents are among the very best in the world. Its investigations into wrongdoing are exceptional, if only occasional. In the main, however, Canada’s public broadcasting flagship The National is no longer in service to the Canadian people. It would rather run “acts of God” disaster stories, and fawn over [celebrities] such as Will and Kate, than tell truth to power. It’s forgotten that as journalism goes, so goes democracy. (Knight 2011, 1–2) Nor are journalists “blamed” here – on the contrary, it is evident that many journalists are frustrated by their increasingly stifled efforts to fulfill widely respected standards of professional reportage, such as the pursuit of genuinely investigative “shoe-leather” reporting that can originate from outside of the confined, insular spaces of highly converged newsrooms, or the pursuit of accountability from those who are substantial private- and public-sector power holders (see also Witschge [2013] regarding professional journalism’s contemporary inability to fulfill journalistic standards). As Bourdieu clarifies in the epigraph to chapter 2, his criticisms of the constraints of the “journalistic field” are intended to liberate “all sides” – including journalists and audiences – from the obstructive “mechanisms” that prohibit the satisfaction of journalists’ professional needs as well as the informational needs of their audiences. As the senior journalist Tim Knight comments above, it is ironic that the American news doctors advised managers at The National that “viewers don’t want you explaining the world they live in.” In

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fact, both the results of the audiences research conducted here and some of the cbc’s own internal research indicate precisely the contrary. One cbc manager at the time, Richard Stursberg (2012, 190), refers to more than one cbc survey completed during the 2000s which found that “Canadians were dissatisfied with all the newscasts” – including those of cbc, ctv, and Global. He states: “The studies showed that the public was clamouring for much better news coverage” and that one of the key demands was for context and meaning. They wanted to know what they needed to know to make sense of the news. They wanted cbc to provide the necessary background, history and explanations for them to figure out how to think about the news. They wanted the tools to allow them to reflect intelligently and make up their minds ... They wanted depth and investigative materials. They wanted interpretive pieces. (191) It is also ironic that the journalism-democracy relationship envisioned by neoliberalism – a perspective ordinarily preoccupied with the economic – is blind to those economic forces that work to defeat the realization of the idyllic relationship that is imagined between journalism and democracy. Such economic forces include: (1) the intrinsic tendency towards increasingly concentrated media ownership, which leads to the dominance of giant media conglomerates well positioned to restrict or eradicate competition; (2) the prohibitively high capital cost of entry into the communication industries, which further restricts competition and effectively deflates the prospect of a diverse array of multiple voices in the mediascape; and (3) the importance of advertising revenues to commercial media as well as to quasi-commercial media outlets such as the cbc, revenue concerns that drive the imperative to attract middle-­class and wealthy audiences who are thereby addressed principally as “consumers” rather than as “citizens” (see Compton and Benedetti 2010, 492). Audiences, however, do not forge their personal identities on the basis of their retail purchases. While newscasts were viewed, research participants repeatedly initiated critical comments, without prompting, to the effect that it is condescending and otherwise offensive to be addressed in such a manner. That “don’t-reduce-me-to-a-consumer” response also illustrates further the disjuncture between journalists and audiences – the



Conclusions 267

reality that journalists are without regular, structured access to qualitative information about their audiences. And it is but one illustration of the myriad of ways in which audiences are critical of news texts. Very importantly, however, that critical resistance needs to be seen in conjunction with the non-critical conformity that frequently accompanies it, in a very literal sense, such that both reception behaviours can be observed at the same time, in the same individual, and in the same social group. One result is that, despite Stuart Hall’s brilliantly seminal encoding-decoding model, there can be no elaborate classificatory schema or tidy typology of news “readers” beyond the three very broad categories – the dominant, the negotiated, and the oppositional – that he originally envisioned. Hall’s highly abstract model of reception carries with it interpretative dangers, as witnessed in the literature regarding “active audiences” that has developed since Hall first formulated the model in the 1970s. Among those interpretative dangers, for example, S ­ arikakis (2011, 116) and others have cautioned that “overzealous attention” to active audiences and to the polysemy of texts can actually subvert feminist objectives and provoke a dismissal of the everyday impacts of gender inequalities upon women and men. Similarly, “overzealous attention” to intersectionality can lead to dismissals of the essential, and primary, organizers of news reception experiences, such as class and gender. Under conditions in which entire social groups, such as women and the working class, experience political exclusion as a result, in part, of their news reception experiences, it cannot be expected that other social traits will intersect with these in such a way as to ameliorate or reverse the exclusion or to otherwise “trump” its foundation. After all, that foundation is a social location that is structurally bounded by class, gender, and other social divisions. As Sangster (2011, 129) reflects upon her historical research regarding working-class women in Canadian society, accommodation of hegemony and resistance to hegemony can be observed to operate together in a manner that is rarely straightforward: Both views may co-exist, overlap, or appear at different times, in a person or in a group ... Accommodation and resistance are both part of a complex ideological process, in which ideology is not a seamlessly unified and homogeneous system of beliefs, values, and practices, but rather is fragmented, uneven, and

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c­ ontradictory – and it may appear particularly meaningful and “real” to working people precisely for these reasons. This appreciation is very much in accordance with how Gramsci theorized the multiple complexities of the politico-ideological processes whereby hegemony can be challenged and yet concomitantly retain the ultimate consent of those who are dominated by it. Those scholars who appreciate Gramsci’s formulations regarding hegemony can also appreciate the absurdity of the notion that the introduction of digital communication provided the means to overthrow hegemony and to “democratize” entire societies. As discussed in chapter 1, the dissemination of such grandiose notions has historically accompanied the introduction of virtually every communication medium, and all of these grand claims have failed to withstand the test of empirical investigation. Claims of “digital democracy” associated with the internet have been no different, propagated widely throughout popular discourse yet carefully and meticulously refuted by scholars such as Curran (2012a, 2012b), Fenton (2012), Hindman (2009), McChesney (2013), and others. Digital divides remain solidly and structurally in place, while those privileged with internet access are not ordinarily inclined to utilize it in order to seek the information and political knowledge that is not available through television news. Amidst the vast propaganda of ict marketers and the necessary digital “ultra-optimism” of internet researchers dependent upon limited research funding sources, television quietly remains the primary news source, and there are no signs of its demise as the principal “informer.” On the contrary, its reach now extends to much enlarged hd and 3-D screens that can be found prominently in private households as well as a multitude of public settings, ranging from subway stations, restaurants, and sports bars to dental offices and hospital waiting rooms. The contemporary reach of television also extends beyond massive television screens to a variety of other screens, including desktop monitors and laptop screens, smartphones, and tablets, to the extent that some argue that the medium has acquired a new legitimacy and status, prompted by its reception across these multiple digital platforms and thereby its connection to “more highly valued media and audiences” (see, for example, Newman and Levine 2012). Whether or not television is the object of greater prestige in that it is no longer perceived as a principally feminine or working-class



Conclusions 269

medium, it remains remarkable that television usage has increased to the extent that adult Canadians of all classes and both genders commit almost thirty hours weekly to that medium, while internet access continues to be relatively privileged and considerably more limited. In the same vein, Zamaria and Fletcher (2008, 229, table 11–2) find that less than half (43 percent) of Canadian internet users agree that it “increases political understanding,” and only 53 percent of heavy users, defined as those who use it more than fifteen hours weekly, agreed. Their international comparisons reveal that a majority of internet users in the twelve other nations surveyed do not believe that internet information is reliable. Only in the Czech Republic and the UK were there slim majorities (54 and 55 percent, respectively) of adult users who believe that most online content can be trusted. Canadian internet users are in the middle of the credibility spectrum: while more than two-thirds believe that the internet is an important information source, only 38 percent believe that most of the information is reliable (275, table 14–11). ­Zamaria and Fletcher’s conclusion is that “Canadians remain among the more sceptical countries of Internet users regarding the reliability of information online” (284). More recently, a national survey conducted for the Canadian Media Research Consortium (cmrc) reported that nearly 90 percent of Canadians judge the information provided by legacy news media (such as television) to be reliable and trustworthy. Interestingly, a majority believe that “professional journalism is better at performing critical democratic functions than citizen journalism” (cmrc 2011a: 1). There is much less trust vested in social media information, wikis, and similar sites: only 26 percent of adult Canadians rate their information as very reliable or reliable (1, fig. 1), and the “crowd editing” associated with these sites is deemed less trustworthy than information edited by professional journalists. Newspapers and television news networks such as cbc’s Newsworld were found to be the most trusted information sources, considered very trustworthy or trustworthy by 87 percent and 83 percent, respectively, compared to online companies (53 percent), governments (42 percent), and major corporations (38 percent) (3, fig. 2). Like those in the samples studied here, television and online news sites such as cbc.ca are the most important information sources. The established processes of verification and ­editing

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a­ssociated with professional journalism continue to inspire the greatest trust by the Canadian population, whether the news is delivered online or offline (6). In sum, this evidence, together with the evidence discussed in chapter 3, makes it clear that television news, and television-based news sites such as cbc.ca and ctv.ca, continue to retain their primacy as the most extensively utilized and most trusted news sources. Whether these are also sources of quality information and political knowledge or understanding is much more highly contentious, yet it remains the case that professional journalism is generally trusted more than citizen journalism and “crowd-edited” websites. In at least this one respect, professional journalism is assuredly free of any “crisis.” Nevertheless, the limitations of professional journalism result very directly in dissatisfactions and frustrations throughout news audiences. Their dissatisfactions and frustrations derive from the exceptionally brief, usually decontextualized, and highly fragmentary presentation of developments in the social world in the form of short, disconnected news “stories.” The form and content of news stories is commonly found to be inadequate and limited, to the extent that journalism is more inclined to generate anger and political disenchantment rather than prompt citizens to pursue a fully engaged and informed level of political participation in their society. That is the case whether or not citizens are active in community organizations and social movements and, thereby, as one might expect, predisposed to exhibit such fully engaged and informed participation. On the whole, however, this level of political participation was not exhibited by the community activists in the targeted samples examined here. Instead, most of the research participants spoke and wrote extensively of their own dissatisfactions and frustrations with television news and other news media. Their criticisms were frequently directed at the persistent absence of contextualized information, explanations of events, or the political knowledge and understanding that was sought from, although not provided by, their news sources. Moreover, these frustrations are accelerated among women and working-class activists in particular, who are often without the means to gain access to alternative information sources. Rather than inspire well-informed political participation, journalism is more inclined to leave entire social groups in a state of disenchantment, information poverty, and, in some cases, in a state of total disengagement from political communication in any



Conclusions 271

form. The contemporary “crises” of professional journalism – those manifest, for example, in accelerated commercialization and severe labour shortages – have exacerbated these outcomes and heightened the level of political exclusion experienced by women and working-class news publics. Unlike the “counter-publics” theorized by, for example, Fraser (1992), Ryan (1992), and Warner (2002), these major social groups comprise “non-publics” who are without their own competitive public spheres or “parallel discursive arenas” (Dolber 2011; Fraser 1992). These are among the most disturbing results of the present analysis. Regretfully, there is not the space here to thoroughly examine other non-publics excluded from the dominant “public sphere” such as ethnic, religious, and other minorities, beyond the brief discussion in chapter 5 (see, for example, Fleras 2011; Jiwani 2005, 2006, 2008; Karim 2009). However, Heider (2000), in his American study titled White News, addresses the relationship between production and text as it pertains to people of colour. He attributes their exclusion to the decision-making processes of white newsroom managers, to the absence of a sustained commitment to report about communities of colour, and to the “incognizant racism” of the otherwise well-intentioned journalists who “participate in journalistic practices that systematically exclude meaningful coverage of people of color” (82–4). Mahtani’s (2008, 2009a) research demonstrates that some Canadian newsrooms have experienced what she calls “diversity fatigue,” a condition that has led journalists and senior managers to be discouraged by initiatives to diversify ethnic representations. Her work is extremely valuable in that it provides a rare focus upon production amidst a corpus of communication research regarding ethnicity that is dominated by the analysis of textual misrepresentations. That, in turn, points to other conclusions to be derived from the analysis here. While it is admittedly difficult and time-consuming to develop a fully integrated analysis of production and reception, it must at least be acknowledged that news reception is a process that is conditioned, first and foremost, by the nature of news production. In addition, audiences need to be conceptualized as “audiences” in the plural, not as a singular, homogeneous “public” but, rather, as a complex configuration of multiple news publics who experience news differently in accordance with their respective social locations and their particular social characteristics. At the same time, we must

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not lose sight of the fundamental commonalities in the otherwise varied experiences of news audiences. Nor, in view of the concurrent tendencies towards uncritical conformity, must we hasten to celebrate the actively critical capacities of news audiences. These are among the insights that sociology can provide, within the parameters of what must be at least a multidisciplinary, if not interdisciplinary, examination of reception. Finally, in view of the extensive focus upon professional journalism, it is probably useful to clarify once more that professional journalism can only be seen to contribute to the political exclusion of major social groups such as the working class, women, and various ethnic groups. Other forces far more significant than journalism need to be held principally responsible. As Gans (2003, 57) expresses it in Democracy and the News: “Although audience studies indicate that informed people are more likely to participate politically than others, their participation, whether in voting or organizational activity, results from their higher levels of income and education.” In the end, therefore, ultimate responsibility rests with the structural inequalities – including the class, gender, ethnic, and other social inequalities – that privilege the political participation of some social groups at the expense of others.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX ONE

Methodological Notes

As discussed at length in chapter 3, the epistemological issues that arise in reception research are best resolved through a multi-modal analysis that enables the triangulation of data. Therefore, this analysis utilizes a combination of three methods of data collection: (1) self-conducted in-depth household interviews, which included unstructured discussions before, during, and after the viewing of network newscasts by research participants and their adult (18+) co-residents, if any; (2) one-week semi-structured news diaries; and (3) structured questionnaires that elicited quantitative data as well as some qualitative information. All of the research participants and their community organizations were assured of anonymity; hence, only the pertinent demographic data appear in the list of interviewees in table A.1 below. The interviews were entirely unstructured, and interviewees were encouraged to determine and guide the content of the interviews as much as possible. In this manner, efforts were made to discourage disingenuous criticisms of the newscasts in view of what Kavoori (1999) describes as the “global culture of critical news consumption.” From the outset of the fieldwork, including the preliminary focus group session that was held to acquire a sense of whether and what questions might need to be posed explicitly, it was evident that there would be no such need. The vast majority of interviewees were anxious to voice their criticisms from the moment that the research topic was raised, and the occasion of the interview frequently seemed to unleash a flow of accumulated frustrations regarding the limitations of professional journalism in general and television news in particular. In fact, following the interviews,

276

Appendix 1

a number of ­participants initiated comments to the effect that the experience was unexpectedly “cathartic” or “therapeutic.” The interview transcripts and the news diaries were reviewed and analyzed with attention to the “Listening Guide” recommended by Doucet (2006, 278–84, Appendix C). The Guide suggests multiple and successive readings of interview transcripts – also applicable to the analysis of news diary material – in such a way that each reading pays special heed to a different component of the narrative told by research participants. These readings can serve to disclose, among other things, the impact of one’s own bio-social characteristics upon relationships with interviewees. As Doucet found during her interviews with single and stay-at-home fathers of different social classes, it was advantageous to interact with the variously socially situated interviewees as a white middle-class woman raised in a working-class family. In terms of the effects upon interview responses, my working-class experiences facilitated the largely unfiltered honesty of most working-class participants, while my middle-class experiences made it possible to anticipate – and, as much as possible, overcome – the halo effect apparent in the greater reticence of some middleclass participants to acknowledge and discuss the extent and nature of their television viewership. As discussed in chapter 3, among reception researchers, Seiter (1999) is one of many who insist that the very presence of the researcher in reception settings will invariably affect the interactions of those who are observed and the limits of what is expressed by research participants. This becomes yet another reason to pursue a multi-modal approach: in order that research participants can be afforded more than one opportunity to communicate with the researcher and more than one means to communicate. In this case, participants were offered the means to convey their thoughts through the news diaries and/or the questionnaires and/or private household interviews. Beyond the initial reflexivity procedures pursued in accordance with the Listening Guide, the interview transcripts were subsequently analyzed systematically with the use of NVivo software. This was utilized principally in order to identify the most significant commonalities throughout the interview sample and also to thereby compare the results with those of the news diary and questionnaire analyses. The social characteristics of the interviewees – including their class, gender, age, and education level – as well as their household types and organization types (activist, community service, trade



Methodological Notes

277

union) are outlined in table A.1. Class was operationalized on the basis of the questionnaire data supplied by all participants regarding education level, occupation, and current occupational status. The questionnaire is presented in appendix 2. The news diary began with an explanatory cover page, then proceeded to incorporate the questionnaire (see appendix 2) into the next four pages, and then provided seven diary pages as well as a final blank page that could be used for additional general or specific comments. Rather than reproduce the news diary in its entirety here, the format of the diary – including the cover page and a sample diary page – is outlined in appendix 3.

Occupation

retail store manager teacher’s aide housekeeper taxi dispatcher college student nurse waitress home day care owner engineer carpenter unemployed college student college student college student college student college student college student unemployed unemployed utilities worker daycare worker unemployed resident care worker machinist unemployed unemployed

Interview #

001** 002** 003** 004** 005 006 007 008** 008** 009** 009** 010 011 011 011 011 011 012 012 013 013 014 014 015 015 016**

Table A.1 Interviewees

university graduate some college secondary graduate university graduate some college secondary graduate college graduate college graduate graduate degree some secondary some university some college some college some college some college some college some college college graduate some college college graduate college secondary college graduate some college secondary graduate college graduate

Education male female female female female female female female male male female female male male male male male female male male female female male male female female

Gender 50 41 50 52 37 56 32 38 43 31 23 37 43 22 20 21 21 24 27 37 33 37 39 62 52 27

Age* 1-person 1-parent 1-person 1-person 1-parent 1-person 1-person married couple married couple cohab couple cohab couple 1-person unrelated co-residents unrelated co-residents unrelated co-residents unrelated co-residents unrelated co-residents married couple married couple married couple with children married couple with children married couple with children married couple with children married couple with children married couple with children 1-parent

Household type

activist service service activist activist activist service service service [co-resident]*** service service service [co-resident] service activist [co-resident] [co-resident] Service union [co-resident] [co-resident] service service [co-resident] service

Organization type

retired physician

college student

retired secretary retired factory worker

028

028

029 029

024 025 026 026 027 027 028

unemployed data analyst public sector professional public sector professional public sector professional unemployed factory worker correctional officer clerical worker unemployed teacher retired clerical worker public sector professional retired waitress retired homemaker computer technician bank teller clerical worker call centre worker retired physician

016** 017** 017** 018 018 019 019 020 020 021 021 022 023

Table A.1 continued

some secondary some secondary

some college

graduate degree

some secondary some secondary university graduate university graduate some college secondary graduate graduate degree

some secondary university graduate university graduate university graduate degree secondary graduate secondary graduate some college secondary graduate university graduate graduate degree secondary graduate university graduate

female male

female

female

female female male female female male male

female female male male female female male male female female male female male

65 65

19

58

63 77 23 25 28 27 66

59 31 34 57 62 51 54 44 40s 50s 53 78 46 1-person 1-person cohab couple cohab couple married couple with child married couple with child married couple, unrelated adult co-resident married couple, unrelated adult co-resident married couple, unrelated adult co-resident married couple married couple

1-parent cohab couple cohab couple cohab couple cohab couple married couple married couple married couple with children married couple with children married couple with children married couple with children 1-person 1-parent

service service

[co-resident]

service

service service activist activist service [co-resident] service

service union union union service, union service service, union activist, union activist service [co-resident] service service

Occupation

restaurant manager personal support worker college student

college student

college student

unemployed artist retired clerical worker clerical worker retired college teacher retired library technician factory worker clerical worker unemployed college instructor unemployed teacher university student health care worker retired teacher retired contractor retired salesperson homemaker clerical worker

Interview #

030 031 032

032

032

033 034 035 035 036 036 037 037 037 038 038 039 039 040 041 041 042 042 043

Table A.1 continued

secondary graduate graduate degree secondary graduate some university graduate degree some university secondary graduate secondary graduate secondary graduate university graduate some university graduate degree some university university graduate graduate degree some university college graduate college graduate some college

some college

some college

some college some college some college

Education

female female female female male female female male male male female female male female female male male female female

male

male

male female male

Gender

41 42 89 61 79 71 53 55 34 63 60s 42 18 53 66 64 72 62 50s

20

21

21 39 20

Age* 1-person 1-parent cohab couple, unrelated adult co-resident cohab couple, unrelated adult co-resident cohab couple, unrelated adult co-resident 1-parent 1-person multi-generational multi-generational married couple married couple cohab couple with rao cohab couple with rao cohab couple with rao married couple married couple 1-parent 1-parent 1-person married couple married couple married couple married couple 1-person

Household type

activist service service service activist activist, service service [co-resident] [co-resident] Service Service activist, service [co-resident] activist, service activist, service activist, service activist, service [co-resident] service

activist

activist

activist service activist

Organization type

clerical worker carpenter clerical worker clerical worker unemployed clerical worker clerical worker retired library technician salesperson

047 048 048 049 049 050 051** 052 053

university graduate university graduate college graduate university graduate university graduate secondary graduate college graduate some college secondary graduate some college some college Some university Some university some college female male female female male female female female male

female male male female male 46 28 30 37 39 49 33 62 35

46 45 50 60s 67 1-parent cohab couple with children cohab couple with children married couple married couple 1-person 1-person 1-person 1-parent

married couple married couple 1-person married couple married couple

activist, service [co-resident] service service [co-resident] activist service service service

[co-resident] activist, service service, union service service

Abbreviations: “cohab” = cohabitational, “rao” = resident adult offspring. * In some cases, interviewees preferred to identify their age only in terms of the decade. ** In these cases, follow-up interviews (#054-#069) were also conducted. *** The term “co-resident” refers to those who share a household with a community activist (such as a spouse, cohabitational partner, or rao) yet who are not personally active in any community organizations.

clerical worker funeral home worker utilities worker retired professional retired professional

044** 044** 045 046 046

Table A.1 continued

APPENDIX TWO

Questionnaire

TRENT UNIVERSITY, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY THE PROCESS OF NEWS RECEPTION IN CANADIAN HOUSEHOLDS The following questionnaire will need no more than 30 minutes of your time. Please complete it and return it in the stamped envelope. Thank you very much for your assistance and input. ALL of your answers and comments will remain STRICTLY ANONYMOUS AND CONFIDENTIAL. Along with information from questionnaires completed by others, it will be used to identify general patterns and tendencies in the uses and effects of news media. No identifying information will appear in any reports of the research. Any questions that you don’t wish to answer should be ignored. Please feel free to add any further comments about your experiences of news media on the final page. In order to better understand your experiences of television and other news media, we would first like to ask about your personal background. 1. Age ____ years 2. Gender: Female (  )  Male (  )



Questionnaire 283

3. With whom do you live? Please check all that apply: Spouse (  )  Children (  )  Parents (  )  Other Relatives (  ) Female Partner (  )  Male Partner (  )  Female Friend or Friends (  )  Male Friend or Friends (  )  No one (  ) 4. In what area of [city] do you live? North End (  )  South End (  )  East End (  )  West End (  ) 5. At what age did you leave full-time education? ____ years 6. How much formal education did you complete? Some high school (  )  High school diploma (  )  Some college (  )  College diploma (  )  Some university (  )  University degree (  ) Graduate or professional degree (  ) 7. Occupational status: Employed full-time (  )  Employed parttime (  )  Self-employed (  )  Unemployed (  ) Full-time homemaker (  )  Full-time student (  )  Part-time student (  ) Retired (  )  Other, please specify ____________________________ 8. If employed, what is your occupation? ______________________ If retired, what was your occupation? __________________________ 9. If you live with a partner or spouse, is that person employed? No (  )  Yes (  ), Full-time (  )  or Part-time (  ) What is that person’s occupation? ____________________________ [Page 2] 10. If you have any children in your household, please indicate their age and gender below: Child 1: Female (  )  Child 2: Female (  )  Child 3: Female (  )  Child 4: Female (  )  Child 5: Female (  )  Child 6: Female (  ) 

Male (  )  Male (  )  Male (  )  Male (  )  Male (  )  Male (  ) 

Age _____ years Age _____ years Age _____ years Age _____ years Age _____ years Age _____ years

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Appendix 2

11. Are you active in any of the following types of organizations? Please check all that apply: Political (  )  Environmental (  )  Community Service (  ) Church (  ) Other, please specify ______________________________________ 12. Do you have any interest in national politics? Yes (  )  No (  ) 13. Which political party do you support? Liberal (  ) Conservative (  )  Alliance (  )  NDP (  ) Other, please specify ______________________________ 14. On average, how many hours of television do you tend to watch? per weekday: _____ hours per Saturday: _____ hours per Sunday: _____ hours 15. Which television channels do you personally watch most often? Please rank them by frequency (1 = most often watched, 2 = second most often watched, etc.): (1) ____________________ (4) ____________________ (2) ____________________ (5) ____________________ (3) ____________________ (6) ____________________ 16. In your household, which television channels are seen most often? Please rank them: (1) ____________________ (4) ____________________ (2) ____________________ (5) ____________________ (3) ____________________ (6) ____________________ 17. In your household, which television newscasts are seen most often? Please rank them: (1) ____________________ (4) ____________________ (2) ____________________ (5) ____________________ (3) ____________________ (6) ____________________ 18. In your household, which radio station is listened to most often? _______________



Questionnaire 285

19. Which newspapers do you read most often? Please rank them by frequency: (1) _________________________ (3) _________________________ (2) _________________________ (4) _________________________ [Page 3] 20. How often do you read a newspaper? Every day (  )  More than once a week (  )  Once a week (  )  Less than once a week (  )  Rarely (  ) 21. Which news magazine do you read most often? _____________ 22. Which of the following media are available regularly in your household? Newspapers (  )  Magazines (  )  Radio (  ) Television (  )  Cable Television (  )  Satellite Television (  ) Video Cassette Recorder or vcr (  )  Computer with Internet Access (  ) 23. Which of these media is your primary news source? Please check one only: Newspapers (  )  Magazines (  )  Radio (  )  Television (  ) ­Internet (  ) 24. Please indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with the following statements: Television news stories are too short to offer the information I would like to know about events. Agree strongly (  )  Agree somewhat (  )  Disagree strongly (  ) Disagree somewhat (  ) Television news is too focused on daily events without enough background or context. Agree strongly (  )  Agree somewhat (  )  Disagree strongly (  ) Disagree somewhat (  )

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Appendix 2

Television news does not provide enough information about other parts of Canada and the world. Agree strongly (  )  Agree somewhat (  )  Disagree strongly (  ) Disagree somewhat (  ) Television news does not provide enough stories about the lives of ordinary working Canadians. Agree strongly (  )  Agree somewhat (  )  Disagree strongly (  ) Disagree somewhat (  ) Television news is too dependent on “official” sources without enough background investigation. Agree strongly (  )  Agree somewhat (  )  Disagree strongly (  ) Disagree somewhat (  ) Television news is more critical of government power holders than of other powerful people. Agree strongly (  )  Agree somewhat (  )  Disagree strongly (  ) Disagree somewhat (  ) Television news often seems to be more entertainment-oriented than information-oriented. Agree strongly (  )  Agree somewhat (  )  Disagree strongly (  ) Disagree somewhat (  ) Television and other news media seem to report many of the same news stories on any given day. Agree strongly (  )  Agree somewhat (  )  Disagree strongly (  ) Disagree somewhat (  ) I feel that the news sources available to me keep me well-informed about major developments. Agree strongly (  )  Agree somewhat (  )  Disagree strongly (  ) Disagree somewhat (  ) I am often critical of what I see, hear, and read in the news media. Agree strongly (  )  Agree somewhat (  )  Disagree strongly (  ) Disagree somewhat (  )



Questionnaire 287

[Page 4] Please add any further comments about your experiences with news media. Thanks very much for your contributions to this research.

APPENDIX THREE

News Diary Format

The news diary was composed of the following elements: (1) the explanatory cover page (below); (2) the questionnaire (pages 1–4, see appendix 2); (3) the seven news diary pages (pages 5–11, see the sample page below); and (4) a final blank page where diarists could add further comments (page 12).

figure a.1: NEWS DIARY COVER PAGE TRENT UNIVERSITY, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY THE PROCESS OF NEWS RECEPTION IN CANADIAN HOUSEHOLDS NEWS DIARY The news diary asks that you record your daily experiences of television news and other news media during a period of one week. In order to better understand your experiences, it starts with a brief questionnaire about your background and your routine use of news sources. The diary is intended to examine your thoughts about the coverage of news stories that you see on television, read about in newspapers or magazines, hear about from the radio, or learn about from the internet during this period. All of the information that you enter will remain STRICTLY ANONYMOUS AND CONFIDENTIAL. Together with information from diaries completed by others, it will be used to identify general patterns and tendencies in the uses and effects of news media. No



News Diary Format

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identifying information will appear in any reports of the research. All of the diaries will be stored in locked file cabinets at the home office of the primary researcher. There will be no opportunity for others to access them. Once the research is complete, all of the diaries will be destroyed. Since television continues to be the primary news source for most Canadians, we are especially interested in the place of television news within your everyday life and how well you feel that it informs you about the world. On each diary page, we would appreciate your responses to questions such as why you watched a particular newscast that day, whether you were able to watch it without any distractions (for example, the need to attend to children or household tasks), what stories you were able to see, how you reacted to these stories and, if you watched the stories with others in your household, please describe whether and how you discussed the stories with each other. Each diary page is mainly blank in order that you can freely reflect upon your home life that day, the television and other news that you experienced, and how you experienced it. The diary can be started any day of the week, and you need not make your entries every day. You may find it more convenient to set aside a little time once or twice during the week to enter your thoughts about how you have reacted to stories over the seven-day period. We would prefer, of course, that you keep the diary by your favourite chair and jot down your thoughts while you watch television news or use other news sources. Please return the completed diary in the stamped envelope at your convenience. Thank you very much for your contributions. If you have already completed our questionnaire, we thank you and ask that you simply go directly to Page 5 in order to record your experiences.

figure a.2: SAMPLE DIARY PAGE NEWS DIARY DAY 1: Please identify the day of the week (Sunday, Monday, etc.): _______________

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Appendix 3

News Sources Used Today (please specify names of newspapers, magazines, radio stations, local and national TV news programs, website addresses): Newspapers _______________________________________________ Magazines ________________________________________________ Radio Stations _____________________________________________ tv Newscasts ______________________________________________ Websites __________________________________________________ Do you usually call upon these same sources as a matter of daily routine? Yes (  )  No (  ) If yes, there is no need to enter them for each day of your diary. TODAY’S NEWS EXPERIENCES (why you used these news sources today, how you reacted to today’s news stories, how you discussed the stories with others, any other comments): [This page was replicated for each of the seven days.]

Notes

CHAPTER ONE 1 The distinction between “old” and “new” media is not a useful one, as later discussion demonstrates. 2 On this point, see Silverstone (2005, 10). Note that the pagination in this case refers to a longer draft of Silverstone’s published (2005) article, which was made available online at the lse website prior to publication. 3 Schoenbach (2001) provides what is still one of the most comprehensive summaries of the multiple mythologies which surround the relationship between media and audiences. 4 Curiously, that final plea to connect political economy to everyday life at every opportunity was deleted from the published edition of the speech (Livingstone 2009b). 5 The inclination to celebrate the diversity of audience responses, in accordance with a liberal pluralist interpretation of Hall’s encoding-decoding model, might be at least partially explained by the divorce between American sociology and communication research. See Katz (2009b); Pooley and Katz (2008). 6 Deacon (2003) is among those who argue that there is a need to integrate production and reception research. 7 On the multiple origins of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, see also Boothman (2008). 8 See also, more currently, the analysis by Coleman and Ross (2010). 9 It is by no means Schlozman, Verba, and Brady’s (2010) intent, nor is it mine, to hastily skirt past the voluminous academic literature regarding

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Notes to pages 37–52

citizen participation in American society. There is simply not the space to do justice to that literature at this juncture. See later chapters, especially chapter 6, in which it is discussed in conjunction with the Canadian evidence presented. See especially Cuneo (2002, 53, figure 5). Interestingly, these embellishments of online versions of news stories rarely include links to other websites. For example, Redden and ­Witschge’s (2010, 177) content analysis finds that, with the exception of the bbc and the Independent, most mainstream news sites “rarely provide links to external sites in connection with their own coverage.” This result leads the authors to suggest that online news, as a potential source of greater information, is further limited by the gatekeeper role occupied by the major news outlets. Among the many communication scholars who have contributed, see, for example, Carpentier (2011); Couldry (e.g., 2006; 2010); Curran (e.g., 2002); Fuchs (2011); Giroux (2006); Hermes (2005); Jones (2005); ­Kellner (2005); Lewis, Inthorn, and Wahl-Jorgensen (2005); and van Zoonen (2005). Note also that the discussion in this section builds upon ideas originally articulated in Clarke (2007). See Lunt and Livingstone’s (2013) recent assessment of the continuing fascination with the concept of the public sphere among communication scholars. See also Garnham’s (1992) excellent summary of the weaknesses as well as the virtues of the concept of the public sphere in the same collection (Calhoun 1992). Research about broadcast audiences in Canada continues to be conducted primarily by researchers within the broadcasting industry. Clearly, this research is by no means free of limitations, and it exists at some distance from the interests of scholarly researchers. The distance is such that it has traditionally been difficult to acquire information about the activities and projects of industry researchers and, likewise, difficult to gain access to the data gathered by them. Organizations such as the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement and the Print Measurement Bureau are owned and operated by their members and are expected to serve the latter primarily if not exclusively. In both cases, members occupy formal categories that include advertisers, advertising agencies, broadcasters, and publishers. Thanks to their contemporary operation of websites and the greater availability of their data to university libraries, academic researchers are better able to gain access to the research results generated by these industry organizations, although there is not the fully interactive exchange of



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materials that might potentially lead to fruitful collaborations between academic and industry researchers. Those in the highest income quintile spent an average of almost $250 monthly. The full distribution of household communications expenditures by income appears in table 3.1.5 of the crtc’s Communications Monitoring Report (2012, 27). Exceptions were partners and other adult housemates who participated in the household interviews. In many cases, both partners in a couple relationship were active in the same organization(s). In fact, additional household interviews were conducted although some of the interview tapes were of insufficient clarity to enable precisely accurate and thorough transcription suitable to the nvivo software analysis. See the news diary format in appendix 3.

CHAPTER TWO 1 A very good assemblage of the contemporary debates is featured in a joint special issue of Journalism Practice (4:3) and Journalism Studies (11:4) published in August 2010. 2 Among the histories of professional journalism, see Baym (2010), ­Conboy (2004), Cook (2005, esp. Part One), Kesterton (1967), and Rosner (2008). 3 On Bourdieu’s more general contributions to the sociology of communication, see esp. Hesmondhalgh (2006), Neveu (2007), and Wacquant (2004). 4 Excluded here are earlier works that address media yet precede ­Bourdieu’s development of the concept of the “journalistic field,” such as Bourdieu and Passerson (1963); Bourdieu (1980); and Bourdieu (1984, chap. 8). 5 Relatedly, Bourdieu (1988, 112) also lamented “the intrusion of journalistic criteria and values” into the scholarly field, as he discusses in Homo Academicus. Gripsrud (1999a, 41) interprets this as follows: “It is no longer only a question of preferring, for instance, easier short-term forms of production which are rewarded with immediate signs of some social recognition over the long-term uncertain work on more ambitious projects ... bending to the norms of journalism now represents a more thoroughgoing abandonment of scholarly virtues; it implies a near total immersion in the suspect machinery of publicity.” 6 Nichols (1948), who served as CP President during the early 1930s, provides a richly detailed historical narrative regarding the agency’s

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f­ oundational operations during the period between 1907 and 1948. See also Gene Allen’s recent (2013) history of CP. Other contemporary accounts of agency news production are supplied by Czarniawska (2011) and Paterson (2011). In fact, this descriptor recurs to some extent in the interview transcripts, news diaries, and questionnaires. See chapter 4. On the significance of the Aird Commission, see, in particular, chapter 3 of Peers (1969), chapter 9 of Vipond (1992), and Gasher (1998). The Aird Report is reprinted as an appendix to Daniel J. Robinson’s edited collection, Communication History in Canada (2nd ed., 2009, 302–11). See Nolan’s (2001) fascinating history of the network. See Canada (1991, c. 11 [Section 3], 3 [1] [b]), http://laws-lois.justice. gc.ca. See crtc (2012, 34, table 4.1.1) as well as crtc (2012, 36, fig. 4.1.3). See cbc (2009, 34). The soft advertising market and the decline of conventional television advertising revenue are current concerns that carry serious ramifications for the future fiscal health of the cbc, particularly in view of the sharply limited parliamentary appropriations under Harper’s government – appropriations that cannot be expected to increase. See crtc (2013, 76, table 4.3.1). The second datum was calculated from the data that appear in table 4.3.16 in the same crtc report (crtc 2013, 104). See crtc (2013, 104, tables 4.3.15 and 4.3.16). In addition, the co-existence of public and private broadcasting enterprises presents the appearance of competition over advertising revenue, whereas in practice the cbc’s share of the available advertising revenue has steadily decreased to the point at which it is now relatively insignificant. In 1960, the cbc claimed no more than 3.7 percent of the total radio advertising revenue, which declined to 1.8 percent in 1968 and to zero in 1975 when it discontinued commercial radio advertising altogether. The peak period of the cbc’s share in the total television advertising revenue was, interestingly enough, the year 1960 – that is, just prior to the bbg’s authorization of the ctv network. At that time it claimed 51.9 percent of the total, which decreased rapidly to 28.5 percent in 1962 and further to 23.9 percent in 1968 (Canada 1970, II: 527). At the same time, the state has become increasingly important as the corporation’s major funding source. The private broadcasters’ portrayal of the cbc as a “competitor” in the advertising revenue market is therefore highly deceptive. On the significance of the increasingly widespread use of public relations sources as news sources, see Cottle (2003) among others.



Notes to pages 80–92

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18 See Clarke (1987, 473, table 8.3). 19 It is unfortunate that the class backgrounds of journalists have not always been studied consistently, despite the various large national surveys that have deliberately set out to learn about their social characteristics. For example, Weaver and his colleagues carried out surveys in 1982, 1992, and 2002 to gather demographic data, although none of their questionnaires asked about class origins. Their studies, published in 1986, 1996, and 2006, respectively, reported higher than average education levels among American journalists and their origins in the dominant ethnic groups, although class was not investigated directly (Weaver and Wilhoit 1986; Weaver and Wilhoit 1996; Weaver et al. 2006). Weaver (2005, 46) acknowledges this omission frankly, yet without explanation, in a 2005 article titled “Who Are Journalists?” On the other hand, in his edited collections, The Global Journalist: News People Around the World (1998) and The Global Journalist in the 21st Century (2012), many of the contributors supply such data. 20 Miljan and Cooper (2003) also posed a number of questions about demographic traits to a sample of Canadian journalists in the late 1990s. Their general finding was also that Canadian journalists do not “match” their audiences demographically; on the contrary, journalists both derive from and continue to comprise a privileged social group that consists of comparatively well-educated white men. Absent from their analysis, however, is any reference to social class. Their research inquired about such things as alcohol consumption, marital status, and religious beliefs, all of which were thought to influence journalists as individuals and “thereby” the content of their news stories, although there were no questions about class origins or even current income levels. It was undoubtedly difficult to overlook gender, however, in that 77 percent of the anglophone journalists and 80 percent of the francophone journalists in their sample were men (70, 85). The curious parameters of their analysis need to be understood in the context of Miljan’s conservative background as a research director at the radically right-wing Fraser Institute. As Robinson (2007, 219–21) points out in her review of their work, their guiding hypothesis is fundamentally flawed. It harks back to a very dated gatekeeper model, which insists that individual journalists express personal values in their reportage and thereby “cause” news “bias.” Most communication scholars long ago dismissed both of these terms as not useful. As Robinson observes, their own data reconfirm the need to dismiss such hypotheses. 21 Regarding this point and other “blind spots,” see Hackett, Gruneau, ­Gutstein, and Gibson (2000).

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22 The use of “digitalization” encompasses the broader social changes associated with the “digitization” of the labour process. The latter term is ordinarily used to refer principally to the technological changes. 23 In the United States, a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 95 percent of the stories circulated in Baltimore’s news “ecosystem” which contained original information originated in legacy news media – mostly, newspapers – and that “these stories then tended to set the narrative agenda for most other media outlets” (Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism 2010a, 1). In Canada, especially in French Canada, Sauvageau (2012, 30) argues that newspapers remain primary sources of news for other media, although their primacy is tempered somewhat by the presence of the public broadcaster in that approximately 30 percent of French-language journalists are employed by Radio-Canada, and approximately 20 percent of all journalists in Canada are employed by cbc/Radio-Canada.

CHAPTER THREE 1 Savage suggests that Canada risks falling far behind the progress of international communication research in view of the rarity of audiences studies in this country. In “Gaps in Canadian Media Research” (Savage 2008), he observes that empirical research regarding media usage and interpretation has not emerged from communication studies programs in Canada. 2 Much of the material in this section is a revision and update of the literature review in Clarke (2000) that also calls upon Savage’s (1993) contribution and Jeffrey’s (1989) review of the audiences research literature. 3 As Livingstone (2012) has recently reminded us, Hall’s original “encoding-decoding” paper was first written and distributed in 1973. 4 Nevertheless, Livingstone (2010) strongly heralds the crucial role of the interview in the history of reception research, and it is certainly difficult to argue against the depth of what can be learned from research participants during unstructured household interviews. 5 See, for example, the work of Lewis (e.g., 1991, 1985); Livingstone (e.g., 1994, 1990); and Livingstone and Lunt (1994). 6 See, for example, the work of Gray (e.g., 1992, 1987); Lull (e.g., 1990, 1988, 1982); and Moores (1993). 7 See also Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch (1974a, 1974b). 8 The epigraph, of course, parallels a classical statement by Marx and also echoes to some extent a 1994 “pre-ugc” statement by Silverstone (1994, 151): “Texts confine but do not confirm readings and viewings.



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­ udiences create but, like Marx nearly said of history, not on the basis of A texts of their making.” On the other hand, Lindlof (1991, 24) states that “some degree of active intervention by the investigator is needed to successfully generate these [reception] data. While some researchers strive to lessen the effects of their presence on the social action they study, others believe that such relational effects are not only unavoidable, but can disclose vital information.” On this point, see also Brunsdon’s (1989) classical formulations. Despite her line of argumentation here, Radway (1991, 8, 10–18) dismisses the utility of Fish’s (1980) concept of interpretive communities. In fact, this was among her regrets regarding the first edition. Radway also recommended that interviews be cited at greater length and described in greater detail, a recommendation that has been incorporated into the present analysis as much as space permits. The use of “tuned” in reference to women viewers is important in that, as discussed in chapter 5, women’s use of television is more inclined to be intermittent than the usually more focused, intensive viewership behaviour patterns of men. See also Murray (2010, 89, figs. 5.1 and 5.2). Additional Canadian data regarding internet usage are provided by Crowley (2002); Gentikow (2010); and Middleton and Sorensen (2005). See also CBC 1991. See Mutsaers’ (1996) useful outline of these developments that led to recognition of the sociality of television usage. To use her examples, Mahtani (2008, 652) describes calendar journalism as focused upon “ethnic events” such as the Chinese New Year or the Iranian celebration of Nowruz. In view of the central objectives of the analysis, household members younger than eighteen were not participants in the household interviews. The news diary combined the questionnaire with the diary format. See appendix 2 and appendix 3. See Statistics Canada (2012a). See Statistics Canada (2012b).

chapter four 1 On the general implications of the various forms of convergence that have emerged, see, for example, Jenkins (2006), Meikle and Young (2012), and Pitts (2002).

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2 Among the many journalistic accounts, see British journalist Nick Davies’s (2009) investigation of market-driven “churnalism.” A remarkably candid illustration is provided by Kai Nagata, former ctv Quebec City ­Bureau Chief and former cbc journalist in “Why I Quit My Job” (see Nagata 2011, also quoted in the Conclusions). 3 Not only is such libel chill evident throughout earlier observations of production at both networks, it is also readily evident to news audiences. In addition to the frequent comments during interview sessions, questionnaire results indicate overwhelming agreement with the statement: “Television news is more critical of government power holders than of other powerful people.” See table 4.1 later in this chapter. 4 See also Fletcher and Wozniak (2005) regarding perceptions of ownership convergence in the Canadian case. 5 Kavoori’s research was undertaken in association with Akiba Cohen, Michael Gurevitch, Mark Levy, and Itzakh Roeh. The focus group study results are discussed in Cohen et al. (1996). 6 The first portion of this chapter draws to some extent from Clarke (2005). 7 Winseck’s Canadian Media Concentration Research Project (CMCRP) website can be found at http://www.cmcrp.org. See, in particular, the recently released Media and Internet Concentration in Canada Report, 1984–2012 which can be found directly at the following URL: http://www.cmcrp.org/ wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Media-and-Internet-Concentration-inCanada-Report.pdf. 8 From a very different American perspective, see the compelling case against media ownership concentration articulated by Baker (2007). 9 See Porter’s (1965) original documentation of media ownership concentration patterns in The Vertical Mosaic as well as Clement (1975), Pitts (2002), and Winseck (for example, 2002, 2008, 2010, 2013). 10 See, in particular, Winseck’s (2010, 368) figure 1, which tracks the growth of television and other communication sectors between 1984 and 2008, and his table 1 (377), which summarizes the revenue levels and revenue sources of the top ten owners, including the cbc. 11 See also Clarke (2005), in which some of the preliminary results regarding audience experiences of convergence are reported. 12 In the province of New Brunswick, it is difficult if not impossible to remain unaware of the power of the Irving family, which, in addition to its many non-media enterprises, has exercised a nearly virtual monopoly over all New Brunswick media since Kenneth Colin Irving – more commonly known as “K.C.” Irving – first began to purchase the province’s daily



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­ ewspapers in 1944. The early history of the family’s empire is discussed n in Hunt and Campbell (1973). The program aired during just two broadcast seasons in the mid-1960s, yet its exceptionally aggressive investigative journalism and confrontational interviews with power holders quickly became notorious and consistently attracted one of the largest audiences in Canadian television broadcasting history. Among the journalists and producers who have offered insights into why the CBC cancelled the program despite its immense popularity, see Koch (1986), Nash (1998), and Stursberg (2012). tng Canada/CWA – renamed CWA/SCA (Communications Workers of America/Syndicat des communications d’Amérique) Canada in 2007 – represents more than nine thousand communication workers in various print, broadcast, and online media based throughout Canada, including front-line journalists and other news staff as well as clerical, sales, technical, and other organizational staff. Their May 2005 brief to the Senate Committee was made available online at http://www.cwa-scacanada.ca/ EN/releases/050503_senate_brief. Unless otherwise specified, all emphases in these and other interview excerpts are original. The Netherlands is the focus of the analysis by Bardoel and d’Haenens (2008). See also Aalberg, Blekesaune, and Elvestad (2013). See further discussion of 9/11 news reception experiences in chapter 6. The American pattern in this regard has been examined by, among others, Jennings and Zeitner (2003); Putnam (2000); and Shah, McLeod, and Yoon (2001). See, for example, Glasgow University Media Group (2000). See the questionnaire in appendix 2.

chapter five 1 In her definition of working class, Ehrenreich (2007, 1) includes “not only industrial workers in hard-hats, but all those people who are not professionals, managers, or entrepreneurs; who work for wages rather than salaries; and who spend their working hours variously lifting, bending, driving, monitoring, keyboarding, cleaning, providing physical care for others, loading, unloading, cooking, serving, etc.” 2 See, however, Butsch (2011) who examines the significance of the few yet recurrent “male working-class buffoons” featured in prime-time American network television family series between 1946 and 2004.

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3 It is also important to consider Morley’s (2009, 489) argument regarding “class essentialism” in audiences research, in which he raises the question of who is qualified to judge whether working-class people are adequately represented. 4 On the peculiarities of news production constraints at the local level, see, for example, Poindexter, Heider, and McCombs (2006) and Ross (2011). 5 See especially his summary of class, gender, and ethnicity data (Hindman 2009, 122–5). 6 On this point, see also Skeggs (1997), among others. 7 Yet see also Geertsema’s (2009) response to Fröhlich’s results. 8 See her summary in Robinson (2008b), 83–4. 9 On the experiences of women journalists in what continue to be highly gendered and strongly masculinist newsrooms, see North (2009a, 2009b, and 2009c), Poindexter (2008), Robinson (2005), Smith (2013), and van Zoonen (1994). 10 Robinson’s (2008a, 132) 1995 survey of Canadian journalists found that 65 percent of female journalists and 81 percent of male journalists were married. 11 Included in their sample were The Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, Le Devoir, Le Droit, cbc Radio’s The Current, ctv’s Power Play, and the rdi program Sans Frontieres. 12 See Robinson’s (2005, 185) data in her Table 7.5. 13 See, for example, the misinterpretations of women’s increased presence in the profession by Erin Research (1993, cited in Robinson 2005, 166). 14 These very cheaply produced segments, often used to fill air time, especially in the production of local news, serve the needs of the political economy of local and other levels of news production. As Cross (2010, 419) suggests in her study of Canadian television election coverage, vox pop segments can also be seen to serve a need to convey voter populism. 15 In 2012, a cbc spokesperson and former journalism professor stated: “We are constantly striving to have more diversity but our classrooms in Radio and Television Arts are still very white. Part of the reason why we don’t have people from diverse backgrounds applying to the program is because they don’t see themselves on radio and television” (cited in cjf 2012b). 16 Women are more likely than all other demographic groups to perform household labour during their time spent with television. Of course, other groups are not necessarily visually and aurally attentive to the television screen. Schmitt, Woolf, and Anderson (2003), for example, found that almost half (46 percent) of all viewers’ time with television is spent in



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activities other than, or in addition to, watching the television: most commonly, social interaction, followed by playing and eating in the case of children, and reading in the case of adults. 17 On the gender gap in byline counts, see especially Friedman (2006). 18 A minority of research participants preferred not to specify their exact age in the questionnaire; in these cases, only the decade appears. 19 These are, of course, very important contributions to the general communication studies literature regarding ethnicity. With reference to the Canadian case, see, for example, Fleras (2011) and Jiwani (2005, 2006, 2008).

chapter six 1 See Kozolanka’s (2010) application of the concept to the activism of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, and see also Saul (2010) in the same volume. 2 The reference here is to Mills’s (1959) classic distinction in The Sociological Imagination. 3 Research undertaken in Germany and elsewhere at least hints at a class bias underlying the third-person effect. In the German case studied by Peiser and Peter (2000), it was demonstrated that third-person perceptions are more likely if the “others” in question are perceived to be of lower education levels. 4 See their chapter 4, which asks: “Why Does It Happen?” (Philo and Berry 2004, 244–56). 5 See Cushion’s (2012b, 128–34) recent overview of the international coverage. 6 Brodie (2008, 179) suggests that individualization was not prominent in federal social policy discourses until the mid-2000s, although its logic was certainly pursued earlier at the provincial level (e.g., in workfare policies adopted by Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario). 7 In this regard, see also Eliasoph’s (1998, 24) discussion of “back stage” conversations, in which humanitarian impulses, more expressive of the political, become articulated. 8 The reference here is to Goffman’s (1959) classical dramaturgical model of social interaction. 9 It should be borne in mind that, unlike in the case of Eliasoph’s direct analysis of American recreation group members, activists, and volunteers, in the case of the present analysis, the Canadian community organizations were not observed directly. Nevertheless, her point regarding this form

302

10 11

12

13

14 15

16

17

Notes to pages 242–56

of political engagement appears to be applicable: “Volunteer-style citizenship is the most temptingly easy, hegemonic format for involvement; it works by defining the floor for citizen participation in particular settings; by setting the boundaries for what citizens can say and how they can say it in the settings of the potential public sphere” (Eliasoph 1998, 257). See, for example, Delli Carpini and Keeter’s (2005) brief overview of this literature. On the various definitions and varieties of participation, see chapter 2 of Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995, 37–48). On the use and decline of “civic engagement,” see especially Berger (2009). Among those who have speculated about forces that have militated against such a working-class movement in Canadian society, see Camfield (2008, 79–80) and Yates in the same 2008 collection, especially, pp. 85–7 and 98–104. In his 1995 Ithiel de Sola Pool Lecture published in PS: Political Science and Politics, Putnam (1995b, 664–5) clarifies his conceptualization of “social capital” as follows: “By ‘social capital,’ I mean features of social life – networks, norms, and trust – that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives ... Social capital, in short, refers to social connections and the attendant norms and trust.” He acknowledges that his central concern rests with civic objectives, and he carefully distinguishes between political participation (“our relations with political institutions”) and social capital (“our relations with one another”) (665). Furthermore, he defines “civic engagement” as “people’s connections with the life of their communities, not merely with politics” (ibid.). Just as in this final clarification, it is understood here that civic engagement is by no means synonymous with, nor is it necessarily a prerequisite to, political participation. See their impressively detailed breakdown by medium and society in Blekesaune, Elvestad, and Aalberg (2010, 9, table 1). Almost inexplicably, Eliasoph (1998, 264–5), on the other hand, observed only “minimal” class differences between the groups that she studied, yet she is otherwise content to conclude, in a discussion delayed until her first appendix, that “showing how class determined political participation would not have been very interesting.” Verba, Scholzman, and Brady (1995) also point to the absence of monetary and temporal resources and civic skills as well as to isolation from networks of recruitment through which citizens can be mobilized. See also the Canadian contributions of Caroline Andrew (2009) and Bashevkin (2009) to these debates.



Notes to pages 256–60

303

18 On the gendered nature of political participation in the Canadian case, see, for example, MacIvor (1996), Newman (2008), and Newman and White (2006). 19 On the masculinist discourse of news, among many other sources, see ­Stuart Allan’s “(En)Gendering the Truth Politics of News Discourse” (1998), Kitzinger’s (1998) contribution to the same collection, and Mahtani (2005).

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Index

9/11: and information poverty, 169–70, 227–36; news coverage, 13, 41, 183, 236; news ­reception, 164, 169–70, 227–36, 299n18 age and news reception, 11, 15, 17, 26, 44, 54, 106, 132–5, 137, 139, 171–2, 187, 217–18, 222, 301n18. See also reception research; television usage; viewership patterns Ang, Ien, 111–15, 117 “appointment viewing,” 7, 98 Associated Press (AP), 77, 162 audiences, 6–13, 17, 19, 22–3, 32, 34, 40–6, 48, 52–6, 59, 62–4, 75, 77–8, 81–8, 95, 97, 101, 102–42, 144–84, 185–223, 228–60, 262– 72, 291n3, 292n15, 295n20, 296nn1–2, 296n8, 298n3, 299n13, 300n3. See also internet usage; reception research; television usage; viewership patterns Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE), 74, 152. See also ownership convergence

Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG), 70, 294n16 Bourdieu, Pierre, 9, 13, 31, 57–62, 95, 143–8, 177, 189, 199, 203, 214, 248–9, 262, 265, 293nn3– 5. See also “journalistic field” concept British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 12, 27, 105, 163, 176, 185, 292n11 Broadcast News (BN), 77 broadcasting: private, 14, 16, 44, 68–79, 111, 144, 149–62, 165–7, 263–4, 294n16; public, 3, 14, 68–79, 111, 165–7, 265 (see also Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada); radio, 3–4, 8, 27, 53–4, 68–72, 75–7, 125–9, 138, 140, 153, 156, 160, 166–7, 173, 205, 207–8, 216, 218, 259, 294n16, 300n15; television, 3–4, 6–8, 10, 12, 15, 18, 24, 28, 34–5, 42, 44–6, 49–61, 66–79, 87–122, 125–35, 140–9, 152–6, 160, 162–3, 165–71, 177–81, 193–201, 207–13, 215–16, 218–19, 221–2, 228, 230–1, 234,

350 Index 241, 245, 248–50, 259–60, 263– 4, 268–70, 294n12, 294n16, 298n3, 298n10, 299n13, 300nn14–16 Cable News Network (CNN), 5, 163–4 Canadian Association of Broad­ casters (CAB), 69–70 Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), 99, 206 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)/Radio-Canada, 52, 69–82, 89, 93, 126–7, 136, 146, 157–8, 162–7, 173–4, 209, 215, 218, 229–31, 236, 250, 263–6, 269–70, 294n12, 294n16, 296n23, 298n2, 298n10, 299n13, 300n11, 300n15; cbc.ca, 40, 71, 126–7, 174, 269–70; Radio-Canada, 71, 150, 296n23; Radio Canada International (RCI), 71. See also broadcasting, public; broadcasting, radio; broadcasting, television Canadian Internet Project (CIP), 218 Canadian Journalism Foundation (CJF), 8, 126 Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE), 154 Canadian Media Guild (CMG), 159 Canadian Media Research Consortium (CMRC), 218, 269 Canadian Press (CP), 64–5, 75–7, 145, 293n6 Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), 4, 34–5, 52, 74, 152–3, 160, 224–5

citizen journalism, 4, 39–40, 57, 98, 113, 224, 261, 269–70. See also user-generated content (UGC) class, 4, 11, 14–17, 20, 28, 30–1, 34, 36, 43–6, 49, 51, 91–2, 105–6, 115, 124–5, 130–5, 140, 149, 170, 173–4, 181, 185–201, 220, 222–7, 243, 246–55, 270–2; and news reception, 20, 28, 30, 43–6, 106, 110–11, 124–5, 130–5, 138–40, 158, 162, 170, 179, 182, 185–201, 209, 216– 17, 222–3, 233, 243, 246–55, 260, 270–2; and political exclusion, 241–55. See also political exclusion; working-class political exclusion class origins and class locations of professional journalists, 16, 51, 79–86, 189–94 classless news, 190–4, 246–55 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 61, 77, 195 commercialization, 3, 6, 9, 16, 143, 148–50, 164–8, 172, 271 convergence, 5, 16, 18, 143–64, 173, 180, 297n1, 298n11; content convergence, 5, 9, 85, 145–9, 151, 154–6, 162–3, 172, 180; ownership convergence, 16, 41, 57, 62, 84, 146–62, 180, 262, 298n4; source convergence, 146–9, 162, 172, 180; technological convergence, 151, 180 Couldry, Nick, 50–1, 62, 292n12 CTV, 70, 74, 77–80, 86, 89, 93, 136, 141, 146, 166, 263, 266, 294n16, 298n2, 300n11. See also broadcasting, private; broad­



Index 351

casting, television; ctv.ca, 40, 126–7, 174, 270 Curran, James, xi, 4–7, 28, 33–4, 38, 40, 48, 57–8, 105, 113, 129, 164–5, 268, 292n12 digital divides, 4, 15, 35–9, 130, 173–4, 187, 212, 241, 254, 268 digitalization, 8, 18, 57–8, 79, 95–101, 296n22. See also online news digitization, 97, 100–1, 296n22. See also online news ethnicity: and news production, 80–2, 209, 217–22, 271, 295n19, 297n17, 301n19 (see also “news producers,” social characteristics); and news reception, 26, 33–4, 37–9, 106, 132– 5, 181, 186–8, 197–8, 222–3, 227, 234–5, 301n19 (see also audiences; reception research; television usage; viewership patterns); and political exclusion, 272, 301n19 (see also political exclusion)

110–12, 117–18, 132–5, 172, 186–7, 206–17, 222–3, 233, 254–60; and political exclusion, 17, 200–1, 228, 254–60, 303n18. See also political exclusion; women’s political exclusion gender inequalities in professional journalism, 16–17, 83, 201–6, 295n20, 300n9, 301n17 gendered news, 83, 228, 255–60, 303n19 gendered news production, 16, 83, 206–17, 222–3, 300n9, 301n17 Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG), 176 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), 207–8 Global television network, 127, 163, 166, 266. See also broadcasting, private; broadcasting, television Gramsci, Antonio, 14, 29–34, 59, 92, 122, 214, 226, 246, 268, 291n7. See also hegemony

Fédération professionnelle des journalists du Québec (FPJQ), 150

Habermas, Jürgen, 14, 28–9, 46–50, 126. See also “public sphere” concept hegemony, 14, 29–34, 59, 92, 122, 214, 268, 291n7. See also Gramsci, Antonio

gender, 4, 11, 15–16, 20, 30, 34, 44, 49, 56, 80, 83, 105–7, 110– 12, 115, 117–18, 120, 124–5, 128, 132–5, 137, 139, 172, 181– 2, 186–7, 196, 198–217, 222–3, 233, 254–60, 267, 272, 295n20, 300n5, 301n17, 303nn18–19; and news reception, 17, 105–7,

information poverty, 14, 17, 27–8, 224–60, 270 insularity: in news production, 193, 264–5 (see also “news producers,” social characteristics); in news reception, 17, 228, 236–41 (see also reception research; television usage; viewership patterns)

352 Index internet, 3–7, 16, 35–41, 49–50, 53–4, 71, 79, 98–100, 125–30, 140, 145, 148, 152–6, 162–3, 172–7, 194, 211–12, 218, 224–5, 247, 249, 254, 262, 268–9, 297n14, 298n7; access, 4, 35–9, 50, 53, 127, 130, 140, 172, 194, 212, 225, 268–9 (see also digital divides as information source), 7, 16, 39, 98, 126, 129, 140, 172–7, 247, 249, 268–9; myths about, 3–4, 35–41, 49–50, 98, 129, 155, 162–3, 172, 194, 268; usage, 4, 40, 53–4, 126–7, 140, 153, 156, 172–7, 212, 218, 224, 247, 249, 268, 297n14 intersectionality, 17, 103, 106, 131–5, 185, 187, 201, 209, 215, 222–3, 267 “journalistic field” concept, 13, 40, 45, 58–68, 81, 85–6, 92, 95, 144, 146, 191–2, 203, 209, 262, 265, 293n4. See also Bourdieu, Pierre Livingstone, Sonia, 19, 21–2, 28, 42, 47–8, 50, 104, 292n13, 296nn3–5 localized nature of news reception, 228, 236–41, 244. See also reception research; television usage; viewership patterns McChesney, Robert W., 5, 151, 261, 268 mediacentrism, 13, 20–1, 31, 43, 232 mediation, 11, 19–21, 25, 42, 108, 115. See also audiences; reception research

Morley, David, 12, 46, 49, 103, 105, 107, 110-11, 113, 115, 117–20, 185, 198, 212, 222, 300n3 Murdock, Graham, xi, 5, 43, 50, 155 National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), 77, 195 “new” media, 7, 19–20, 34, 39–40, 125, 150, 153, 247, 291n1. See also “old” media “news producers,” 8, 15–18, 44, 58, 62, 66, 76, 79–87, 91–4, 98, 114, 145–6, 159, 189, 192, 214, 229, 264; defined, 8, 62; social characteristics, 79–87 news production constraints, 11, 15, 78, 87–101, 146–7, 168, 177–8, 263, 300n4 news publics, 14, 16, 19–52, 124, 271 news sources, 16, 40, 43, 75–8, 87, 95–6, 103, 134, 140–1, 148, 162–6, 172–7, 180, 190, 205, 208, 233, 259, 270, 294n17 news values, 5, 81, 86, 90, 95–6, 144–6, 180, 190–1, 209, 219, 250–1 “old” media, 7–8, 54, 71, 194, 291n1. See also “new” media online news, 10, 14, 34–41, 98, 129, 148, 172–7, 194, 205, 207– 8, 218, 269, 292n11. See also digitalization; digitization ownership, xi, 14, 41, 57, 60, 63–4, 68–76, 149–62, 221, 266, 298nn8–9. See also ownership convergence



Index 353

Periodical Writers Association of Canada (PWAC), 160 political engagement and partici­ pation, 9, 12–14, 17, 28, 38, 41, 44, 49–51, 55, 58, 135, 143, 202, 214, 217, 224–8, ­241–6, 249, 251–9, 270–2, 302n9, 302n13, 302n15, 303n18 political exclusion, 14, 46, 194, 214, 224–60, 267, 271–2. See also class and political exclusion; ethnicity and political exclusion; gender and political exclusion; women’s political exclusion; working-class political exclusion political information and knowledge, 5–6, 28, 38, 50, 84, 128– 9, 164–6, 227, 241–8, 257–9, 268–70 production research, 44, 57–101, 121, 177. See also news production constraints; news sources; news values; professional journalistic practices “produsers,” 98 professional journalistic practices, 10, 13, 57–101, 146. See also news production constraints; news sources; news values; production research “public sphere” concept, 14, 28–9, 46–50, 126. See also Habermas, Jürgen

174, 177, 181, 195, 214, 230, 275–7, 291n6, 296n4. See also internet usage; television usage; viewership patterns Reuters, 77–8 Robinson, Gertrude J., xi, 202–4, 206, 209, 295n20, 300n8–n10, 300n12 Rogers, 74, 152, 160. See also ownership convergence Ross, Karen, 26–7, 55, 134, 181, 190, 193, 204, 212, 238, 255, 260, 291n8, 300n4 self-referentiality in news reception, 17, 177, 226–8, 236–41. See also reception research; ­television usage; viewership patterns Shaw, 74, 152. See also ownership convergence

Quebecor, 74, 150–2, 160, 261. See also ownership convergence

Television Bureau of Canada (TBC), 53, 127 television usage, 4, 6–8, 10, 52, 103–5, 108–9, 125–35, 196, 245, 269, 297n16. See also reception research; viewership patterns textual analysis, 10, 23, 26, 50, 105, 124, 207, 210–11 The Newspaper Guild (TNG) ­Canada/Communication Workers of America (CWA), 159–62, 299n14 time constraints, 10, 87–96, 144–7, 168–9, 191. See also news production constraints

reception research, 7, 13, 15, 26, 42, 44, 46, 103–25, 129–36, 154,

United Press International (UPI), 77

354 Index usage-based billing (UBB), 224 user-generated content (UGC), 3, 20, 98, 113, 261. See also citizen journalism video news releases (VNRs), 77, 220 viewership patterns, 6–7, 98, ­124–5, 131, 141, 145–84, ­195–223, 228–41, 297n13, 300n16. See also reception research; television usage

Visnews, 77 Winseck, Dwayne, 150–4, 298n7, 298nn9–10 women’s political exclusion, ­255–61. See also gender and political exclusion; political exclusion working-class political exclusion, 246–55. See also class and political exclusion; political exclusion