Gatekeeping (communication) - History

History

Gatekeeping as a news process was identified in the literature as early as 1922, though not yet given a formal theoretical name. In his book, The Immigrant Press, Park explains the process, “out of all of the events that happen and are recorded every day by correspondents, reporters, and the news agencies, the editor chooses certain items for publication which he regards as more important or more interesting than others. The remainder he condemns to oblivion and the wastebasket. There is an enormous amount of news ‘killed’ every day” (p. 328).

Formally, gatekeeping was identified in Lewin’s (1943) publication Forces Behind Food Habits and Methods of Change. Working during WWII, Kurt Lewin conducted field research initially among Midwestern housewives to determine how to effectively change their families’ food consumption during this time of war. Lewin recognized that for food to go from a store or a garden to the dining table, there were various decision-making processes it had to pass on the way there. At a time when men were thought to control all household decisions, Lewin found that “food does not move by its own impetus. Entering or not entering a channel and moving from one section of a channel to another is affected by a ‘gatekeeper’” (p. 37). The gatekeeper in this case was typically the housewife, or sometimes a maid in more affluent households. Lewin’s research demonstrated that not all members of a family have equal weight in making household food decisions, and that the wife, who typically shops for and prepares the food controls the gates, based on a variety of considerations. Lewin’s study published in 1943 became the impetus for another article in 1947 in which he introduces the idea of feedback in group decision making, which complicates the role of the gatekeeper. Feedback acknowledges that the set of considerations a gatekeeper uses in making decisions may vary depending on considerations of the group.

In 1950 gatekeeping was officially applied to news. White looked at the factors an editor takes into consideration when deciding which news will make the paper and which news will not. White contacted an editor, a man in his mid-40s with 25 years of experience who was the wire editor of morning newspaper with 30,000 circulation in a mid-west city of 100,000 whom he calls Mr. Gates. The editor retained all copy that he rejected from the paper. After his shift, made notes on why that story was rejected, assuming he could still remember the reason. White wanted to know if these are subjective decisions based on the editor’s own set of experiences, attitudes and expectations. He found that rejections could be classified in two ways: 1) rejecting based on not being worthy of being reported or 2) rejecting based on duplicate of other reports on the same thing. These considerations fit with what we call news norms today. However, Mr. Gates also admitted to preferring political news to other types, trying to avoid sensationalism, not liking suicide stories, preferring stories that were more narrative and did not contain facts or figures, and that he did not like giving page space to a scandal that had been going on in the Catholic Church at the time.