Explaining News. Cristina Archetti. New York, NY: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010. 257 pp.
Cristina Archetti is a British political scientist with teaching experience in Washington and Amsterdam and an interest in international news. Explaining News is her ambitious study of eight newspapers in four countries that explores what shapes the news. The book, based on her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Leeds, is a tough read. It is clearly written, but densely packed with data, hypotheses, and theories. Advanced graduate students and faculty can perhaps fully appreciate it, especially for its wealth of data.
Archetti looks at how elite newspapers in the United States, France, Italy, and Pakistan covered the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The author believes the U.S. newspapers (the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) and the Pakistani papers in the study (Dawn and Nation) operate within an objective model of journalism. Newspapers in France (Le Monde and Liberation) and Italy (Corierre della Sera and Repubblica) operate in what she calls an interpretive model, providing commentary within their front-page news articles. Archetti coded sixty-four days of front-page articles in the period from 9/11/2001 to 11/14/2001, the day that Kabul fell to U.S. and coalition forces. She has four general research foci, examining, (1) correlation of news and political discussion, (2) news flow from the West to other countries, (3) globalization vs. localization of news coverage, and (4) the impact of organizational variables on journalists.
She wound up with more than 1,000 coded entries that generated more than 18,000 “idea elements” related to coverage of either 9/11 or the “Afghanistan issue.” In the end, Archetti, like previous researchers, finds that her research was unable to explain news patterns fully, although she does believe that politicians (“sources”) play a strong role in “framing” the news, especially international news. But she also finds that just about anywhere you look, journalists reshape the frame to conform to “editorial policy,” which in turn reflects “national interests” that are shaped by “political and economic elites.” And so forth. There is no indication that Archetti used a panel or other assistance in categorizing or coding, which always raises the question of a coder’s subjectivity. She uses charts to emphasize and simplify, but the database is at times so segmented that her charts are difficult to comprehend. One pie chart on newspaper sources has twenty-seven segments, while another has twenty-one. Even the clear-headed specialist will find these a challenge.
Although Archetti’s research method is basically correlation, like all content analysis users, she hopes to identify causation, but finds little evidence of it. The problem in correlating political statements with news content is, of course, a question of which caused which. Although she defines “news,” especially international news, as what sources say is the news, she does not find any correlations. She does find in the newspapers studied that variables such as national political policy, journalistic culture, and editorial policy influenced selection of news sources. But she found little evidence that these sources directly influenced the news, or that a newspaper’s editorial policy translated into tight control of front-page content. She sees this as a refutation of the claim that “news management” is an important variable in shaping coverage. Neither in Pakistan, with its military government, nor in the United States, where the Bush administration famously tried to control the political messages that went to the public, did she find a significant correlation between political statements and news content. This suggests a substantial editorial barrier still exists against political efforts to shape the news. These barriers are local, she says, with no indication that there is a homogenization of news because of global pressures.
Archetti defines news as not what happens but what someone says has happened or will happen. This is, of course, necessary because no news operation can cover everything, especially during national crises such as 9/11 and the Afghanistan war. She does identify several key variables—national journalistic culture, editorial policy, and national political culture—that do shape news. But she says they do so indirectly by affecting the selection of sources. This is, of course, gatekeeping theory, but Archetti prefers to call these editorial gatekeepers “bouncers.” Rather than select sources, she says, these newspaper editors act like nightclub “bouncers” to keep out sources with views that are not “respectable” in the eyes of their readers. Still, these “bouncers” allow lots of conflicting statements onto their news pages. The New York Times, for example, accepted sources saying, “This is war!” and “This is not war!” about the 9/11 attacks. Coherence can be found only on the editorial pages, she notes.
This is an impressive work, and the thirty-three pages of notes and eighteen pages of bibliography in English, French, and Italian show the depth of the author’s research. But in the end, Archetti comes to the same conclusion as many other researchers in trying to find out what shapes the news. It is a difficult challenge, especially when dealing with international news. She believes that additional multidisciplinary approaches integrating political communication, international communication, and news sociology will help us better understand the process.
JAMES F. SCOTTON
Marquette University