News Release
When Is News Not News?
Online news websites have improved access to international news but because fewer news sources are used, the variety of perspectives offered is limited, according to research by the University of Ulster’s Centre for Media Research. According to media lecturer Dr Chris Paterson, the study challenges conventional wisdom of the online news environment providing new perspectives to the public, as the reality is that it offers little real information diversity, a situation sharply at odds with a decade and a half of fervour for the democratising potential of new media.
Dr Paterson said that much of what passes as ‘news’ online is often from just two sources, Reuters and Associated Press, who provide most of the English language international news, television news pictures, and text for international stories on the internet.
He suggests that the millions of people who access news headlines online using popular portals like MSN.com, AOL.com or Yahoo.com, are being duped by the online news industry.
“Through an examination of the content of major web news providers, our study confirms what many web surfers will already know – that when looking for reporting of international affairs online, we see the same few stories over and over again.“We are being offered an illusion of information diversity and an apparently endless range of perspectives which in fact what is actually being offered is very limited information.”
Dr Paterson says that even though international news flow on the Internet has increased in apparent diversity of original reporting, in terms of actual diversity of original reporting, it has decreased or remained static.
“This is done by offering readers a variety of additional links to local and regional newspapers around the world. However since most of these outlets have used the same news agency copy as the online version, the story is basically the same and the links are irrelevant as they do not give another perspective.
“While the online news industry continues to pretend for the moment that it brings readers a diversity of reporting on world news, it is a pretence which cannot last.”
Traditionally journalists have relied on news agencies to collect and redistribute news, both at home and abroad. In the 1970s, there was growing concern that the international news flow was being facilitated by just five agencies yet by 2000, when Reuters, Associated Press and AFP were the only global agencies, there was no such outcry.
A key finding of the Centre for Media Research project is that it shows no change in news agency dependency between 2001 and 2006; and suggests that in some respects, the problem has even grown worse. With most of the content of online news sites today coming from the UK based Reuters and the US based Associated Press, Dr Paterson says the AP/Reuters duopoly which allows them to dominate the coverage of international events needs to be challenged.
“News agencies play a crucial role because of the way they set the agenda for other media and this role has grown even more crucial as they increasingly bypass intermediary processors of news in cyberspace to reach a large portion of the mass news audience directly.
“They are often accused of producing a bland and predictable news product, devoid of colour and enterprise reporting and dependent on official sources and definitions of news. But in the realms they know best, like conflict zones and developing regions of the world, the news agencies frequently break stories other major media miss. Despite this, news agency research has demonstrated a highly constrained, homogenous content dictated by the ideological, structural, and cultural nature of these organisations.”
With international news online consisting mainly of stories from the wire services, Dr Paterson predicts that the online news industry will use cosmetic changes such as minor editorial adjustments and the addition of further bells and whistles at news sites to distract readers and disguise its dependence on such limited resources.
“But in the longer term the industry must invest in more original reporting as an alternative to the few genuinely international news organisations now on offer, and give more prominence to buying, and properly translating, original non-English language reporting from around the world. Without such change, new media will continue to present to most users the dangerous illusion of multiple perspectives which actually emanate from very few sources,” said Dr Paterson.
http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/cicr/exhibits/42/cicrpaterson.pdf
For further information, please contact:
Press Office, Department of Communication and Development
Tel: 028 9036 6178
Email: pressoffice@ulster.ac.uk
