News valuesA B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWpersonal terms; and the more negative the event
is in its consequences, the greater the likelihood
of selection. Consequently, once a news item has
been selected, what makes it newsworthy will be
accentuated (the authors call this stage Distor-
tion). Selection and distortion will, it is argued,
take place at all steps in the chain from event to
reader (Replication).
Although Galtung and Ruge’s study deals only
with newspaper content, Jeremy Tunstall in
Journalists at Work (Constable, 1971) adapts the
Galtung and Ruge thesis to the analysis of TV
news values. He itemizes four points of diff er-
ence. (1) In TV the visual is given pre-eminence.
Th e possession of fi lm footage of an event will
often increase the prominence given to a news
story. (2) News items which include fi lm of ‘our
own reporters’ interviewing or commentating
on a story are preferred. (3) TV makes use of a
small fraction of the number of stories the news-
papers carry, and even major TV items are short
compared with newspaper coverage. (4) Th ere
is preference for ‘hard’ stories or actuality on
TV news.
In ‘Th e global newsroom: convergences and
diversities in the globalization of television news’
published in Communication and Citizenship:
Journalism and the Public Sphere (Routledge,
1991), edited by Peter Dahlgren and Colin
Sparks, Michael Gurevitch, Mark R. Levy and
Itzhak Roeh write that ‘in a pictures-driven
medium, the availability of dramatic pictures
competes with, and often supersedes, other
news considerations’.
Th ey also argue that for an event to be judged
newsworthy ‘it must be anchored in narrative
frameworks that are already familiar to and
recognizable by news men as well as by audi-
ences situated in particular cultures’; for ‘diff er-
ent societies tell themselves – on television and
elsewhere – diff erent stories’.
Th e news values posited by Galtung and Ruge
have had a justifi ably long life and a number of
them still operate in an age of immensely greater
media diversity. Paul Brighton and Dennis Foy in
New Values (Sage, 2007) cite a number of major
trends which have altered the media landscape
since Galtung and Ruge’s time – the internet,
spin doctoring, rolling news, citizen jour-
nalism (see journalism: citizen journalism)
and advances in interconnectivity, between
communicators and audience and between
modes of transmission and reception. Not the
least of the new phenomena since the 1960s is
what Brighton and Foy call ‘the burgeoning of
celebrity, an all-encompassing term that can benalists are on the look-out for with fi ve tenets:
confl ict; hardship and danger to the community;
the unusual (oddity, novelty); scandal; and
individualism. He quotes Lord Northcliffe
(1869–1922), one of the original press barons,
who once declared, ‘News is what somebody
somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is
advertising.’ Stuart Hood in Hood on Televi-
sion (Pluto Press, 1980) refers to news sense as
‘the ability to judge the language and attitudes
permissible within the opinion-forming organi-
zation of our society’; well within consensus
thinking.
One of the most succinct and influential
explanations of news values is that of Norwegian
scholars Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge. In ‘Struc-
turing and selecting news’, fi rst published in the
Journal of International Peace Research (1965),
the authors state that events will be more likely
to be reported if they fulfi l any, some or several
of the following criteria. (1) Frequency: if the
event takes a time approximate to the frequency
of the medium. A murder, for example, is more
newsworthy than the slow progress of a ‘Th ird
World’ country. (2) Amplitude: the bigger, the
better, the more dramatic, the greater is the like-
lihood of the story achieving what the authors
call ‘threshold value’. (3) Unambiguity: the
more clear-cut and uncomplicated the events,
the more they will be noticed and reported.
(4) Familiarity: that which is ethnocentric, of
cultural proximity, and that which is relevant; so
things close to home matter most, unless things
close to home are aff ected by faraway events.
(5) Correspondence: that is, the degree to which
the events meet with our expectations – our
predictions, even. In this case, say Galtung and
Ruge, ‘news’ is actually ‘olds’. Th ey term this the
‘hypothesis of consonance’ – that which is famil-
iar is registered; that which is unfamiliar is less
likely to be registered. (6) Surprise: this forms an
antidote in terms of criteria to (4) and (5), and
works to the benefi t of good news: ‘Events have
to be unexpected or rare, or preferably both, to
become good news.’ (7) Continuity: that which
has been defi ned as news – which has hit the
headlines – will continue to be newsworthy
even if amplitude is reduced. (8) Composition:
the need for a ‘balance’ in a news-spread leads
the producer or editor to feed-in contrasting
elements – some home news if the predominant
stories have been foreign; a little good news if
the news has generally been gloomy.
Galtung and Ruge draw the following general-
izations: the more events concern elite nations
or elite people, the more events can be seen in