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An Editorial Comment
Daniel Riffe Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 2011 88: 240 DOI: 10.1177/107769901108800201 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jmq.sagepub.com/content/88/2/240.citation

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AN EDITORIAL COMMENT
By Daniel Rifle,
University of North Carolina

Influences on News Content

The myth that news media content represents a mirror image of events and happenings of the world was dismissed decades ago. Traits, states, and contextual factors-ranging from individual journalists psychologies and role perceptions to professional routines and practices,* and from market competition and organizational profit orientatiod to the structural pluralism of a community-have long been acknowledged as influencing all the news thats fit to print. In Mediating the Message: Theories of lnjluences on Mass Media Content, Shoemaker and Reese5 created a model illustrating the range of influences that help shape the content of mass media. Writing at the beginnings of the digital age, when the Internet was viewed by many mass communication scholars simply as an alternative delivery means, the authors could not have foreseen how communication activities like blogging and Tweeting would influence reporters and news content. Nonetheless, in their hierarchical model of influences, they identified the attitudes and values of individual media workers as nested within concentric circles of professional media routines; organizational roles, structure, policies, and economics; extramedia forces; and ideology. It is a fairly straightforward process to place particular influencing factors within one of the rings of the hierarchical model. A journalists ethnicity, sexual orientation, or personal religious orientation, for example, would clearly rest within the innermost circle at the individual media worker level. Patterned reliance on expert sources for science news falls within the media routines circle. Changes in ownership of a media company would be identified as an influence occurring at the organizational level. Bowing to advertiser pressure not to cover something is an extreme example of extramedia influence. Finally, consistent, non-conspiratorial patterns of media coverage (the result of institutional, occupational, and cultural practices that make up the mass media)bthat lend support to military actions advocated by powerful elites and executed by government would be evidence of how ideology influences media content. The ease of dealing with this ring becomes a bit more problematic because of ideologys influence on each of the inner rings.
0 . .

The first four articles in this issue demonstrate how scholars can traverse-both conceptually and in method-the rings of the Shoemaker and Reese hierarchical model. Two feature a contemporary focus, with Reichs reconstruction interview data exploring commonality in reporting practices across print, radio, and online cultures, while Correa and Harp examine how individual media workers gender and an organizations gender balance influence coverage of a gendered issue. However, the first two articles use an historical lens to discover how extramedia and perhaps ideological influences affected individual journalists and media content. Meg Lamme examines how the first two elected presidents of the national Womens Christian Temperance Union employed a sophisticated program of communications that at once embraced mass communication and interpersonal outreach, reflecting the Social Gospel and womens roles as spiritual and moral guardians of the home. [p. 2451 These

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6 MASS COMMUNICATION

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WCTU public relations pioneers strategy resonated with the press, recruited as an ally in influencing public sentiment. [p. 2541 Matthew Cecil also chronicles an extramedia organizations recruitment of individual journalists to a cause, one with clear ideological implications, but one that appealed to the chosen journalists individual values. Cecil documents how, for decades, iconic FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover used stuff-written personal letters (over Hoovers signature) to Special Correspondents who were working journalists, in order to cultivate a community of journalist-adjuncts, friends of the bureau who stood ready to promote and defend the FBI in their publications, [p. 2671 and, in at least one case, to provide Hoover with information about the nascent civil rights movement in the Deep South. Other articles in this issue include Kim, Scheufele, Shanahan, and Chois exploration of effects of attention to news coverage of a controversy in South Korea over relocating a government center. The data reveal how news media use relates to informed issue assessment and identification of specific arguments about the issue. In the next article, Coleman extends her program of research on journalists ethical reasoning about using photos to accompany stories, finding that black student journalists did not demonstrate preference for their own race in deciding ethical dilemmas. Beginning with the US Supreme Courts landmark Tinker TI, Des Moines student speech case, Kozlowski concludes that subsequent court interpretations have left Tinkev toothless, with the Supreme Courts vision of education and student speech distorted and replaced instead by a hands-off judiciary that all-too willingly defers to school officials actions. [p. 3641 Bates brings historical analysis to another legal question-invasion of privacy. Sidis D. F-R Publishing is an invasion-of-privacy case familiar to media law scholars and students, but Bates provides a close examination of the life of the man at the center of the case, William James Sidis, who was originally a celebrated child prodigy. A 1937 New Yorker article written under a pseudonym by James Thurber profiled his life, mocking him as an eccentric failure. Sidis sued the publisher, alleging that the article constituted malicious libel and invasion of privacy. The last article in this issue is a methodological essay / commentary by Lana Rakow, outlining and highlighting key conceptual assumptions and approaches in the use of interviews and focus groups in critical and cultural research. This is the second in a series of peer-reviewed contributions on methodology7part of a planned effort to introduce particular methods and techniques to young and established scholars, and to shed light on what journal reviewers anticipate in manuscripts employing them.
NOTES
1. E.g., David H. Weaver, Randdl A. Beam, Bonnie J. Brownlee, Paul S. Voakcs, and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, The Amrricari [ournnlist iri TIIPZlst Ceirtury: U S NLWSPmple nt The Dawn @ A New Millennium (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007) For an earlier exploration, see the classic lthiel d e Sola Pool and Irwin Shulman, Newsmens Fantasies, Audiences, and Newswriting, Public Opiniori Qirarfcdy 23 (summer 1959): 145-58. 2. See, generally, Dan Berkowitz, Social Meanings ofNieuw A Text-Reader (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997) and, mure specifically, Gaye Tuchman, Making News by Doing Work: Routinizing the Unexpected, American [oournal of Sociology 79 (July 1973): 110-31. 3. E.g., Stephen R. Lacy, The Effects of Intracity Competition on Daily Newspaper Content, lournalism Quarterly 6 4 (summer/autumn 1987): 281-90; Randal A. Beam, Content Differences between Daily Newspapers with Strong and Weak Market Orientations, [uurnalisni b Mass Conrmunication Quarferly 80 (summer 2003): 368-90. 4. E.g DouglasB. Hindman, Community Newspapers, Community Structural Pluralism, and Local Conflict with Nonlocal Groups, [oirrnalism Qiinrfrrly 73 (autumn 1996): 708-21. 5. Pamela J. Shoemaker and Stephen D. Reese, Mediating the Message: Theories of Influences on Mass Media Corifmt,2d ed. (White Plains, N Y Longman, 1996). 6. Shoemaker and Reese, Mediufirr~ thr Mcssnge: Thcuries of Ii1f7iit~ricc~s on Mass Medin Cuntent, 251. 7. Jane B. Singer, Ethnography, lournalism 6 Mass Coinniunicnfiori Q u a r f t d y 86 (spring 2009): 191-98. 8. Daniel Riffe, Editorial Comment: Minimum Standards, [ournalrsrri G. Mass Cornmiinicatiun Qunrterly 85 (wmmer 2008): 234-35.

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