International News and Advanced Information Technology?

I n a recent critique of American politics and journalism, sociologist Herbert J. Gans emphasizes the importance of analyzing news according to the defining structural elements of the media. “Journalistic work,” says Gans, “is almost always performed under difficult conditions of one kind or another, and most of the important imperfections … reside in the structures of the news media.” 1 We share this perspective and use it as our point of departure for the development of a news gatekeeping model. 2 There are several useful but incomplete gatekeeping models found throughout the political communication research literature. Each model tends to emphasize important aspects of news selection and production processes while underutilizing alternative factors. Developing a more complete news gatekeeping model would contribute to the development of more sophisticated political communication theory. With that objective in mind, we present the basic outline of a multigated news gatekeeping model and apply it to a preliminary analysis of media coverage of the war in Iraq. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.