What was the central question that Galtung and Ruge attempted to answer in their study of the Norwgian press in the mid 1960s?
How do events (specifically, foreign events in their case) become news?
What are the 12 news values that Galtung and Ruge identify?
- Frequency
- Threshold
- Unambiguity
- Meaningfulness
- Consonance
- Unexpectedness
- Continuity
- Composition
- Reference to elite nations
- Reference to elite people
- Reference to persons
- Reference to something negative
Galtung and Ruge suggest 3 hypotheses about the relationship among these news values, real events and news stories, what are they?
- The more events satisfy criteria mentioned, the more likely that they would be registered as news.
- Once a news item has been selected what makes it newsworthy according to the factors will be accentuated (distortion)
- Both the process of selection and process of distortion will take place at all steps in the chain from event to reader
What do Harcup and others suggest are the shortcomings of Galtung and Ruge's study?
- It concentrated on major, international crises ignoring day-to-day coverage of “lesser” events
- Made no reference to how visual elements affected the content
- Doesn't explain the ideological meaning
- Doesn't explain why the stories were deemed news worthy
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