In the Western tradition, decisions on the selection and prioritization of news are made by editors on the basis of their experience and intuition, although analysis by Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge showed that several factors are consistently applied across a range of news organizations.
This approach is influenced by linguistics and social semiotics, and is called "discursive news values analysis" (DNVA).
[6][better source needed] It focuses on the "distortion" step in Galtung and Ruge's chain of news communication, by analysing how events are discursively constructed as newsworthy.
[3] In their seminal 1965 study,[3] Galtung and Ruge put forward a system of twelve factors describing events that together are used as defining "newsworthiness."
The findings of a content analysis of three major national newspapers in the UK were used to critically evaluate Galtung and Ruge's original criteria and to propose a contemporary set of news values.
A variety of external and internal pressures influence journalistic decisions during the news-making process, which can sometimes lead to bias or unethical reporting.
The aim here is to ensure a balanced spread of stories with minimal duplication across a news program or edition.
Basing his judgement on many years as a newspaper journalist Hetherington states that: "...anything which threatens people's peace, prosperity and well being is news and likely to make headlines.
[16] Psychologists and primatologists have shown that apes and humans constantly monitor the environment for information that may signal the possibility of physical danger or threat to the individual's social position.
Analysis shows that journalists and publicists manipulate both the element of change and relevance ('security concern') to maximize, or some cases play down, the strength of a story.
This boundary may be manipulated by journalists, power elites and communicators seeking to encourage audiences to exclude, or embrace, certain groups: for instance, to distance a home audience from the enemy in time of war, or conversely, to highlight the plight of a distant culture so as to encourage support for aid programs.
[17][better source needed] In 2018, Hal Pashler and Gail Heriot published a study showing that perceptions of newsworthiness tend to be contaminated by a political usefulness bias.
The stronger avoidance reaction to moderately negative stimuli has been explained as it being the role of men in evolutionary history to investigate and potentially respond aggressively to threats while women and children withdrew.