2024年5月12日发(作者：甘涵)

Part of the reason why I write about the media is because I am interested in

the whole intellectual culture, and the part of it that is easiest to study is the media.

It comes out every day. You can do a systematic investigation. You can compare

yesterday’s version to today’s version. There is a lot of evidence about what’s

played up and what isn’t and the way things are structured.

My impression is the media aren’t very different from scholarship or from,

say, journals of intellectual opinion—there are some extra constraints—but it’s

not radically different. They interact, which is why people go up and back quite

easily among them. You want to study the media the way, say, a scientist would

study some complex molecule or something. You take a look at its internal

institutional structure and then make some hypothesis based on the structure as

to what the media product is likely to look like. Then you investigate the media

product and see how well it conforms to the hypotheses. Virtually all work in

media analysis is this last part—trying to study carefully just what the media

product is and whether it conforms to obvious assumptions about the nature and

structure of the media.

Well, what do you find? First of all, you find that there are different media

which do different things, like the entertainment/Hollywood, soap operas, and so

on, or even most of the newspapers in the country (the overwhelming majority of

them). They are directing the mass audience.

There is another sector of the media, the elite media, sometimes called the

agenda-setting media because they are the ones with the big resources, they set

the framework in which everyone else operates. The New York Times and CBS, that

kind of thing. Their audience is mostly privileged people. The people who read the

New York Times—people who are wealthy or part of what is sometimes called the

political class—they are actually involved in the political system in an ongoing

fashion. They are basically managers of one sort or another. They can be

political managers, business managers (like corporate executives or that sort of

thing), doctoral managers (like university professors), or other journalists who are

involved in organizing the way people think and look at things.

The elite media set a framework within which others operate. If you are

watching the Associated Press, who grind out a constant flow of news, in the

mid-afternoon it breaks and there is something that comes along every day that

says "Notice to Editors: Tomorrow’s New York Times is going to have the

following stories on the front page." The point of that is, if you’re an editor of a

newspaper in Dayton, Ohio and you don’t have the resources to figure out what

the news is, or you don’t want to think about it anyway, this tells you what the

news is. These are the stories for the quarter page that you are going to devote

to something other than local affairs or diverting your audience.

These are the stories that you put there because that’s what the New York

Times tells us is what you’re supposed to care about tomorrow. If you are an

editor in Dayton, Ohio, you would sort of have to do that, because you don’t

have much else in the way of resources. If you get off line, if you’re producing

stories that the big press doesn’t like, you’ll hear about it pretty soon. In fact,

what just happened at San Jose Mercury News is a dramatic example of this.

2024年5月12日发(作者：甘涵)

Part of the reason why I write about the media is because I am interested in

the whole intellectual culture, and the part of it that is easiest to study is the media.

It comes out every day. You can do a systematic investigation. You can compare

yesterday’s version to today’s version. There is a lot of evidence about what’s

played up and what isn’t and the way things are structured.

My impression is the media aren’t very different from scholarship or from,

say, journals of intellectual opinion—there are some extra constraints—but it’s

not radically different. They interact, which is why people go up and back quite

easily among them. You want to study the media the way, say, a scientist would

study some complex molecule or something. You take a look at its internal

institutional structure and then make some hypothesis based on the structure as

to what the media product is likely to look like. Then you investigate the media

product and see how well it conforms to the hypotheses. Virtually all work in

media analysis is this last part—trying to study carefully just what the media

product is and whether it conforms to obvious assumptions about the nature and

structure of the media.

Well, what do you find? First of all, you find that there are different media

which do different things, like the entertainment/Hollywood, soap operas, and so

on, or even most of the newspapers in the country (the overwhelming majority of

them). They are directing the mass audience.

There is another sector of the media, the elite media, sometimes called the

agenda-setting media because they are the ones with the big resources, they set

the framework in which everyone else operates. The New York Times and CBS, that

kind of thing. Their audience is mostly privileged people. The people who read the

New York Times—people who are wealthy or part of what is sometimes called the

political class—they are actually involved in the political system in an ongoing

fashion. They are basically managers of one sort or another. They can be

political managers, business managers (like corporate executives or that sort of

thing), doctoral managers (like university professors), or other journalists who are

involved in organizing the way people think and look at things.

The elite media set a framework within which others operate. If you are

watching the Associated Press, who grind out a constant flow of news, in the

mid-afternoon it breaks and there is something that comes along every day that

says "Notice to Editors: Tomorrow’s New York Times is going to have the

following stories on the front page." The point of that is, if you’re an editor of a

newspaper in Dayton, Ohio and you don’t have the resources to figure out what

the news is, or you don’t want to think about it anyway, this tells you what the

news is. These are the stories for the quarter page that you are going to devote

to something other than local affairs or diverting your audience.

These are the stories that you put there because that’s what the New York

Times tells us is what you’re supposed to care about tomorrow. If you are an

editor in Dayton, Ohio, you would sort of have to do that, because you don’t

have much else in the way of resources. If you get off line, if you’re producing

stories that the big press doesn’t like, you’ll hear about it pretty soon. In fact,

what just happened at San Jose Mercury News is a dramatic example of this.