A Discoursive Review of Galtung and Ruge‟s News Factors in Iranian Newspapers
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| Title | A Discoursive Review of Galtung and Ruge‟s News Factors in Iranian Newspapers |
| Authors | |
| Abstract | The criteria on which journalists and news editors judge about newsworthiness of an event or news story are called “news values”. The most prominent and widely studied list of news values (also called news criteria or news factors) was proposed by Galtung and Ruge in 1965 in which twelve selection criteria such as frequency, threshold, unambiguity and meaningfulness were pinned down as the factors by which gatekeepers make decision about newsworthiness of a news item. This leading and seminal article rose many positive and negative reactions and for decades Galtung and Ruge’s list of news values has been reviewed, revisited and criticized by many linguists and media experts. In this article we review the application of this set of news values in Iranian media atmosphere to observe which news values play the major role in selection process of newspapers in this middle east country. The data of this research are composed of 100 news stories gathered from four international morning newspapers published in Iran in winter 2010 and we try to distinguish the news values of Iranian newspapers based on Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) list of news factors. The results of this study show that while reference to elite people (especially politicians) is the most important and frequent news value, some criteria which are not mentioned in Galtung and Rge’s list of news values have a considerable role in news selection process of newspapers in Iran. The most considerable factor for which there is no room in Galtung’s list is the impact of ideology and its role in overall news selection process. This study also shows that although the twelve factors of Galtung and Rug’s list are influential in Iran media, we should not limit selection process to them and the role of social metalingual elements such as ideology and competition with other media in the gatekeeping process should not be ignored. |
| Publisher | ACADEMY PUBLISHER |
| Date | 2012-05-01 |
| Source | Theory and Practice in Language Studies Vol 2, No 5 (2012) |
| Rights | Copyright © ACADEMY PUBLISHER - All Rights Reserved.To request permission, please check out URL: http://www.academypublisher.com/copyrightpermission.html. |