International News Selection by the Elite Press: A Case Study

This study examines the news factors influencing the selection of international news for publication-frequency, threshold, unambiguity, meaningfulness, personal and national elitism, and negativity. The subject of investigation is The Times (London) during a two-week period (January-February, 1975). Comparisons are made between published and unpublished news events, coded according to World Event/ Interaction Survey event categories. To avoid some of the problems inherent in testing individual news factors, the complementarity and additivity hypotheses were also tested; both are supported by the data. In addition, relevance of the study to policy issues such as agenda setting by the press and recent Third World criticism of Western news coverage is discussed. Sophia Peterson is Professor of Political Science at West Virginia University. This research was supported by grants from West Virginia University and the West Virginia University Foundation. The author is indebted to William Rees-Mogg, Editor, and to Louis Heren, Deputy Editor and Foreign Editor, The Times (London), for their cooperation in the conduct of this project. The contributions of graduate research assistants P. Douglas Fawcett and Cary W. Smith are also gratefully acknowledged. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the International Studies Association, St. Louis, Missouri, March 16-20, 1977. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 45:143-163 ? 1981 by The Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier North-Holland, Inc. 0033-362X/81/0045-143/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.92 on Wed, 22 Jun 2016 06:48:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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