Enlist some ways in which people can take action on the basis of news stories and evens reported by media ?
Answers
Among the many lists of news values that have been drawn up by scholars and journalists, some, like Galtung and Ruge's, attempt to describe news practices across cultures, while others have become remarkably specific to the press of certain (often Western) nations. These lists show the considerable overlap in the conceptualization of news values, while at the same time point to the vastly different aspects of news production that news values may refer to (see further discussion of this point in the section ‘Conditions of news’ below).[1]
Galtung and Ruge, in their seminal study in the area put forward a system of twelve factors describing events that together are used as a definition of 'newsworthiness'. Focusing on newspapers and broadcast news, Galtung and Ruge devised a list describing what they believed were significant contributing factors as to how the news is constructed. Their theory argues that the more an event accessed these criteria the more likely it was to be reported on in a newspaper. Furthermore, three basic hypotheses are presented by Galtung and Ruge: the additivity hypothesis that the more factors an event satisfies, the higher the probability that it becomes news; the complementarity hypothesis that the factors will tend to exclude each other; and the exclusion hypothesis that events that satisfy none or very few factors will not become news.
According to A. Boyd: "News journalism has a broadly agreed set of values, often referred to as 'newsworthiness'..."[2]The language of news is linear, elaborating on event report along a single dimension with added information, illustration, quotation and discussion. More often than not it is the news values of a particular event that slots it into the number one position but perceptions as regards news values can differ.[3] News values, sometimes called news criteria, determine how much attention a news story is given by a media outlet, and the attention it is given by the audience. They explain how editors and other journalists decide that one piece of information is news while another is not.[4] News values are not universal and can vary widely between different cultures. In Western practice, decisions on the selection and prioritization of news are made by editors on the basis of their experience and intuition, although analysis by J. Galtung and M. Ruge showed that several factors are consistently applied across a range of news organizations.This theory tested on the news presented in four different Norwegian newspapers from the Congo and Cuba crises of July 1960 and the Cyprus crisis of March-April 1964, and the data are in the majority of cases found to be consistent with their theory.[5] Some of these factors are listed below, together with others put forward by Schlesinger[6] and Bell.[7] According to Ryan, "there is no end to lists of news criteria".[8] In 2001, this 1965 study was updated by Tony Harcup and Deirdre O'Neill, in a study of the British press. The findings of a content analysis of three major national newspapers in the UK were used to evaluate critically Galtung and Ruge's original criteria and to propose a contemporary set of news values. Forty years on, they found some notable differences, including the rise of celebrity news values and that good news (as well as bad news) was a significant news value, as well as the newspaper's own agenda. They examined three tabloid news papers.