Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time

Herbert J. Gans

Northwestern University Press, 2004 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 393 pages

For ten years, Herbert J. Gans spent considerable time in four major television and magazine newsrooms, observing and talking to the journalists who choose the national news stories that inform America about itself. Writing during the golden age of journalism, Gans included such headline events as the War on Poverty, the Vietnam War and the protests against it, urban ghetto disorders, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and Watergate. He was interested in the values, professional standards, and the external pressures that shaped journalists' judgments.

Deciding What's News has become a classic. A new preface outlines the major changes that have taken place in the news media since Gans first wrote the book, but it also suggests that the basics of news judgment and the structures of news organizations have changed little. Gans's book is still the most comprehensive sociological account of some of the country's most prominent national news media. The book received the 1979 Theatre Library Association Award and the 1980 Book Award of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. This is the first work to be published under the Medill School of Journalism's "Visions of the American Press" imprint, a new journalism history series featuring both original volumes and reprints of important classics.

Contents

• Part 2The Journalists: 71
• Part 3News Policy: 301
• Notes: 337
• Bibliography: 365
• Index: 377

About the author

Herbert Gans is a German-born American sociologist who was educated at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. Active in urban planning and housing at the beginning of his career, he taught planning and sociology at Columbia Teachers College and subsequently at Columbia University. He is best known for his work on American communities, including The Urban Villagers (1962), a study of Boston's West End and The Levittowners (1967). He has focused much of his research on the American middle class.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time; Medill School of Journalism Vi; Medill School of Journalism Visions of the American Press Series; Medill Visions Of The American Press, ISSN 2690-7674
• Author: Herbert J. Gans
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2004
• ISBN: 0810122375, 9780810122376
• Length: 393 pages
• Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / Journalism; Performing Arts / Television / History & Criticism; Social Science / General; Social Science / Media Studies