Definition
"A person who controls access" - Merriam-Webster
"Guardian, Monitor" - Dictionary.com
"Guardian, Monitor" - Dictionary.com
“Thus a story is transmitted from one “gate keeper” after another in the chain of communications. From reporter to rewrite man, through bureau chief to “state” file editors at various press association offices, the process of choosing and discarding is continuously taking place.” | David Manning White conducted a seminal case study on gatekeeping in local newspapers. He states that reporters and newspapers form the initial gates deciding whether or not a story is important enough to talk about in the first place. The news is therefore reliant on the subjective attitudes, experiences and viewpoints that the gatekeepers hold. |
History
Stuart Soroka (Political Science Professor at McGill University) provides a brief history of gatekeeping theory within mass media. Gatekeeping as a theory of communications began with Kurt Lewin’s pioneering work in 1951 on community dynamics. The notion of gate keeping was laid out in terms of food and consumption, and the selection process that takes place getting food to the dinner table or not. He saw this selection process in a grocery store as a product of communication channels and gates. This was then associated with news channels and the selection process within the mass media. The term ‘gatekeeping’ was shortly after applied within the communications discipline and to students of mass communication.
It was noted that the traveling of news through communication channels was dependent on certain channels within the system acting as gates. In a grocery store, there are many options to choose from that without the selections the shopper has to make, there is no way that food would ever get to the table. This was Lewin’s view of the gatekeeping process within the mass media. With information and news stories coming from all ends, selections have to be made in order to bring the news to the public. Media institutions are given the power of making the decisions between what is in and what is out.
As mentioned above, White’s case study of a wire editor at a small town newspaper brought this idea of gatekeeping to the forefront. He catalogued the news stories provided to the editor and the news stories that ended up in the newspaper. He looked deeper into the reasons for including and excluding certain stories. He emphasized the potential for agenda setting and the effect that one man’s choices can have on the delivery of the daily news to a small town. These two theorists provide the background to what is now a commonly used term within communications studies and the exploration of the mass media as an institution that brings millions of people the news every single day.
Impact
Stuart N. Soroka states that we know that the selection of news stories are systematically biased and driven by a number of organizational factors, news norms and audience interests. The result of this is that news content is skewed towards stories that are more sensational, unusual, conflictual or geographically proximate. Bennett, Lawrence and Livingston suggest that storylines of the news tend to track closely with journalists’ perceptions of power in government institutions. They feel that rather then engaging in a consideration of facts, gatekeeping has led us to an examination of credentials and personal motives. Rather then effectiveness, the news is about praise and status, often for the handful of media elite. | "Gatekeeping is [...] more than just a product of an individual’s preferences, whims, or errors. Regardless of the editor, or the media outlet, certain types of stories will be selected, while others will not. There is thus a strong possibility that there will be systematic differences between news content and the real world" - Stuart N. Soroka It is clear that the way in which the news covers issues often affects what people think about and how they think about it. The news sets the public’s agenda and in matters of public policy. But with this filtering of information and agenda setting functions of the mass media through various gatekeepers, we often don’t know what the real world looks like. The mass media tend to produce content that is systematically more negative then reality making the |
world seem different then it really is. Although there are various alternative news sources from which the public can get any information they want, gatekeepers within the mainstream system still play a crucial role. It helps to think of the mainstream press as producing the default reality, a highly visible and focused version of events in the midst of a sea of alternative accounts. The mainstream press serves as a function of reality and provide the framework for which people want their news. This disallows most of the alternative information sources from entering public discourse.
Gatekeepers provide the framework for which the world is understood.