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Expanding the News Frame: The Systems Theory Perspective

1996; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 51; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/107769589605100405

2161-4326

Laura Hendrickson, James W. Tankard,

Media Studies and Communication

As criticism of journalism increasingly points to narrowness of news coverage, what role in expanding news frame might we expect from future reporters now in journalism classrooms? And what role might journalism educators play in preparing them? Critics of contemporary journalism claim news media too often report news without sufficient context,' focus excessively on events,2 and rely too heavily on routine channels and official sources.3 Election coverage is criticized for dwelling on horserace aspects to exclusion of issues4 and for being increasingly negative as campaign progresses.5 growing use of sound bites by broadcast media means audience members are getting increasingly smaller snippets of information.fi In other words, news frame may be due for expansion. A news frame suggests how events and issues should be viewed by readers and viewers. news is framed by reporters through processes of selection, emphasis, exclusion, and elaboration7-processes influenced by traditional routines and news values. These processes result in inevitable narrowing of news frame, and ultimately of readers' views of events and issues. One tool educators can offer journalism students for expanding news frame is general systems perspective. A systems perspective provides means for thinking about problems and events at number of levels, and can effectively broaden our conception of journalist's role. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, developer of general system theory, suggested that most of major problems facing world can only be solved if approached with systems perspective. Davidson notes that the fault, as viewed from perspective of Bertalanffian GST, is not in our stars and not entirely in ourselves-but substantially in our systems. 8 This article outlines main features of systems perspective, focusing on general system theory, and suggests that teaching future reporters to think of news events and issues in systems terms may be one approach to expanding news frame. General systems systems perspective as applied to task of teaching news reporting has three major components that will be discussed here: interaction among variables (or notion that phenomenon is `more than sum of its parts'), mutual causation and outcomes, and hierarchy. We suggest that if future reporters can learn to think of social phenomena and events in these terms, they can contribute to expansion of news frame. credit for founding of general system usually is given to Ludwig von Bertalanffy, eclectic scholar whose early training was in biology.9 In 1940, Bertalanffy introduced theory of organism as open system.10 General system came about largely as response to inadequacies that Bertalanffy saw in dominant model of scholarly inquiry at time-the analytical, mechanistic model that originated in physics. This model assumes that an entity investigated can be resolved into, and hence can be constituted or reconstituted from, parts put together. This analytical model shows up in search for isolable causes or sequences of causes and seeking of basic or atomic units. Bertalanffy wrote: The meaning of somewhat mystical expression, `The whole is more than sum of parts' is simply that constitutive characteristics are not explainable from characteristics of isolated parts.12 He defined system as a set of elements standing in interaction.13 Another important concept of general system is mutual causation. In contrast to mechanistic, analytical model of thinking found in physics, which suggests one-way causal path, GST suggests that is often mutual, multiple and circular. In book relating general system to communication, Ruben and Kim claim that causality is multi-lateral among parts of system, among systems, and among systems and their environments. …