Gatekeeping (communication)
Gatekeeping is the process through which information is filtered for dissemination, whether for publication, broadcasting, the Internet, or some other mode of communication.
Currently, the gatekeeping theory also addresses face-to-face communication and the many-to-many dynamic inherent on the Internet.
According to Pamela Shoemaker and Tim Vos, gatekeeping is the "process of culling and crafting countless bits of information into the limited number of messages that reach people every day, and it is the center of the media's role in modern public life.
In his book 'The Immigrant Press', Robert Park explains the process, "out of all of the events that happen and are recorded every day by correspondents, reporters, and the news agencies, the editor chooses certain items for publication which he regards as more important or more interesting than others.
Formally, gatekeeping was identified in Kurt Lewin's (1943) publication Forces Behind Food Habits and Methods of Change.
Lewin recognized that for food to go from a store or a garden to the dining table, there were various decision-making processes it had to pass on the way there.
At a time when men were thought to control all household decisions, Lewin found that "food does not move by its own impetus.
Lewin's study published in 1943 became the impetus for another article in 1947 in which he introduces the idea of feedback in group decision making, which complicates the role of the gatekeeper.
In 1950, David Manning White, a journalism professor at Boston University, looked at the factors an editor takes into consideration when deciding which news will make the paper and which news will not;[7] intending to examine how a "gate keeper" examines his "gate" within a channel of mass communication.
At the end of the week that the study took place, White found that nine-tenths of the wire copy got rejected and the process is made by highly subjective decisions based on the editor's own set of experiences, attitudes and expectations.
White found that in this particular study, the majority of the rejections could be classified in two ways: 1) not worthy of being reported or 2) there was another story on the same event.
White examined Mr. Gates' performance for a specific day and put the data in tables which show the amount and type of news which appeared on the front pages and the total number of dispatches used.
[9][10] In both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections, she studied how the Internet was changing the process for newspapers, contending that, "the power of gatekeepers seems to diminish in a modern information society.
In the study of the 2004 coverage, Singer posed the following research questions: 1) What did editors of websites affiliated with major newspapers see as their goals and their most noteworthy achievements in covering the 2004 political campaign and election?
Further, journalists were beginning to take a step back from their traditional gatekeeping role such that many websites had sections in which journalists provided baseline information and users could manipulate according to their needs and interests like interactive maps, Electoral College scenarios, and ballot building tools based on zip codes.
Traditional mass communication gatekeeping theory has focused on how we get news, however Barzilai-Nahon's approach applies to all information.
These are (p. 1501): A typology of combinations of these characteristics then allows for evaluation of potential interactions between the gatekeeper and the gated based on the number and type of attributes an individual has.
While they may work in teams with oversight, the fact remains that decision are made about the content that will exist on the site and how it is displayed.
The notion of audience gatekeeping consists with Luke Goode's (2009)[16] discussion on metajournalism, whereby users' role in reprocessing and rebroadcasting the existing online contents are as equally emphasized as users' original creation in nurturing citizen journalism as reshaping the existing hierarchy of the journalism system.
Schiffer also found that user-created content creators utilize a type of gate-keeping as it concerns the comments on their publications.
[20] What makes social media so formidable lies in the diffusion process of user engagement, primarily seen through likes, shares, comments, and reposts.
[20] Welbers and Opgenhaffen build off of gatekeeping theory by defining two new channels that correlate to the influence news outlets have over the media.
Likewise, the alternative channel refers to all other ways news items enter public mainstream circulation.
[20] Some fear that modern social media content has become increasingly monitored and gatekept, which in turn has allowed for agendas to be pushed, undermining the role of the fourth estate.
This can prove to be quite dangerous, as an audience's selective exposure to certain news media can skew perceptions, lessen the diversity of ideals and reinforce prejudices.
[21] Many modern political institutions follow a chain of command in which first-stage players (such as chief executives in presidential systems and/or prime ministers in parliamentary governments) have a procedural-right to hinder second-stage players from participating in collective choice; this is known as Political Gatekeeping.
[22] Gatekeeping practices include attaching riders (provisions) to bills and the House's ability to enforce rules that expedite consideration of otherwise blocked legislation, as in the case of combatting a filibuster.
[23] The term "gatewatching", coined by Axel Bruns (2005),[24] refers to "gatekeeping as a concept in the digital era" (Vos, 2015).
[25] Bruns argued that gatekeeping did not accurately describe the process in which news currently flows between participants and public circulation.
[20] According to American political scientist Doris Graber, journalists rely on the five criteria when choosing a news story.
