News Values and the Vividness of Information

Abstract

Cognitive social psychologists have examined the characteristics of information that make it likely to be incorporated into processes of memory, judgment, decision making, and inference. The “vividness” of information is the degree to which it is emotionally engaging, concrete, imagery producing and proximate. Vivid information is most likely to be used in these cognitive processes and also seems to satisfy most requirements for newsworthiness. Journalism practice systematically selects for vivid information, and journalism writing enhances or creates such vividness. It can be argued, however, that vivid information may not be the best information for use in decision making and inference drawing and that overreliance on it can lead to errors of perception and judgment. An example is the colorful but irrelevant personal anecdote. Journalism may select only what is vivid—concrete and personal events, conflict, sensation, and “bad news”—rather than what is truly informative, thereby institutionalizing errors of perception and inference in newswork.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Altheide, D. L. (1976). Creating reality: How television distorts events. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Atkin, C. K. , & Guadino, J. (1984). The impact of polling on the mass media. In L. J. Martin (Ed.), Polling and the democratic consensus. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Bohle, R. W. (in press). Negativism as news selection predictor. Journalism Quarterly, 63(4).

Boorstin, D. J. (1961). The image. New York: Atheneum.

Breed, W. (1955). Social forces in the newsroom: A functional analysis. Social Forces, 33, 326-335.

Cohen, B. (1963). The press and foreign policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cohen, S. , & Young, J. (1981). The process of selection. In S. Cohen & J. Young (Eds.), The manufacture of news (rev. ed.). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Crouse, T. (1974). The boys on the bus. New York: Random House.

Fishman, M. (1980). Manufacturing the news. Austin: University of Texas Press.

10.

Galtung, J. , & Ruge, M. (1981). Structuring and selecting news. In S. Cohen & J. Young (Eds.), The manufacture of news (rev. ed.). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

11.

Gans, H. J. (1979). Deciding what's news. New York: Random House.

12.

Harriss, J. , Leiter, K. , & Johnson, S. (1981). The complete reporter (4th ed.). New York: Macmillan.

13.

Henry, W. A. (1983, December 12). Journalism under fire. Time, pp. 76-77.

14.

Hess, S. (1981). Newswork: The Washington reporters. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

15.

Ismach, A. H. (1984). Polling as a newsgathering tool. In L. J. Martin (Ed.), Polling and the democratic consensus. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

16.

Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution theory in social psychology. In D. Levine (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Vol. 15). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

17.

Kelley, H. H. (1971) Attribution in social interaction. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.

18.

McCombs, M. (1976a). All the news... In M. McCombs , D. L. Shaw , & D. Grey (Eds.), Handbook of reporting methods. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

19.

McCombs, M. (1976b). Social indicators for local communities. In M. McCombs , D. L. Shaw , & D. Grey (Eds.), Handbook of reporting methods. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

20.

Mencher, M. (1977). News reporting and writing. Dubuque, IA: Brown.

21.

New directions for news. (1983). Washington, DC: Women's Studies Program and Policy Center, Georgetown University.

22.

Nisbett, R. E. , Borgida, E. , Crandall, R. , & Reed, H. (1976). Popular induction: Information is not always informative. In J. S. Carroll & J. W. Payne (Eds.), Cognition and social behavior. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

23.

Nisbett, R. E. , & Ross, L. (1980). Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

24.

Roshco, B. (1975). Newsmaking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

25.

Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 10). New York: Academic Press.

26.

Rosten, L. (1937). The Washington correspondents. New York: Arno.

27.

Sanoff, A. P. (1982, September 20). The press in deeper trouble with the public. U.S. News and World Report, pp. 68-70.

28.

Schneiders, G. (1984, September). Sorry wrong numbers. Washington Journalism Review, pp. 47-50.

29.

Stamm, K. (1976). The nature of news: New concepts. In M. McCombs , D. L. Shaw , & D. Grey (Eds.), Handbook of reporting methods. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

30.

Taylor, S. E. (1981). The interface of cognitive and social psychology. In J. Harvey (Ed.), Cognition, social behavior, and the environment. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

31.

Taylor, S. E. , & Crocker, J. (1981) Schematic bases of social information processing. In E. T. Higgins , C. P. Herman , & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), Social cognition. The Ontario Symposium (Vol. 1). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

32.

Taylor, S. E. , & Fiske, S. (1978). Salience, attention and attribution: Top-of-the-head phenomena. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 11). New York: Academic Press.

33.

Tuchman, G. (1978). Making news: A study in the construction of reality. New York: Free Press.

34.

Tversky, A. , & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124-1131.

35.

West, S. G. , Gunn, S. P. , & Chernicky, P. (1975). Ubiquitous Watergate: An attributional analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 55-65.

36.

Wheeler, M. (1976). Lies, damn lies and statistics. New York: Dell.