Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (Paperback)

~ Herbert Gans (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Gans...demolish[es] the myths of an anti-establishment press."--Richard Reeves, The Washington Monthly
"A refreshing view of journalism from a perceptive cultural sociologists 'outside' perspective...[and]...a thought-provoking look at news as a cultural process."--Library Journal

Product Description

For ten years, Herbert J. Gans spent considerable time in four major television and magazine newsrooms, observing and talking to the journalists who choose the national news stories that inform America about itself. Writing during the golden age of journalism, Gans included such headline events as the War on Poverty, the Vietnam War and the protests against it, urban ghetto disorders, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and Watergate. He was interested in the values, professional standards, and the external pressures that shaped journalists' judgments.
Deciding What's News has become a classic. A new preface outlines the major changes that have taken place in the news media since Gans first wrote the book, but it also suggests that the basics of news judgment and the structures of news organizations have changed little. Gans's book is still the most comprehensive sociological account of some of the country's most prominent national news media. The book received the 1979 Theatre Library Association Award and the 1980 Book Award of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. This is the first work to be published under the Medill School of Journalism's "Visions of the American Press" imprint, a new journalism history series featuring both original volumes and reprints of important classics.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 420 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Books Ed edition (March 12, 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394743547
• ISBN-13: 978-0394743547
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #919,782 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An illuminating study of the Media world of yesteryear , April 15, 2007

By	Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

This book which was first published over twenty- five years ago is a throwback to another time. That was the time when the great share of Americans sat around and got their news from one of the three major networks. The more informed read one of two major weekly news- magazines. We are now in a far more fragmented, diverse news- acquiring time when the 'Internet' has given the 'consumer' a far greater capacity to select and develop knowledge of current events.
Gans analyzes the major networks and sees great similarity in the way they operate. He offers at the end of the book his own suggestions for how to provide a more educational and informative news diet to the American public.
A topflight sociologist Gans studeis CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time.He speaks with a large number of journalists in trying to understand the way the system works.He treats such subjects as 'story selection' 'story suitability' 'objectivity values and ideology' 'profits and audiences' 'pressures censorship, and self- censorship' ' values in the news'
An illuminating study.