Perpustakaan Pusat LAN RI

Jurnalistik

Tunstall, a British sociologist, probes an aspect
of mass communication now relatively neglected
in the United States. As in his earlier Westminster
Lobby Correspondents (1970), which dealt with
a uniquely British variant of national political
reporting, he is concerned with media personnel
and institutions, in contrast to the dominant concern here with media effects. In this country, the
operation of news organizations is usually a subject
for journalists (Gay Talese of the New York
Times) or for temporary drop-outs from the
Fourth Estate revealing the inside story in novels
(Theodore White on Collier's). Undoubtedly, an
ex-employee is right now spilling the beans about
Life.
The sociology of news organizations began in
the United States, with Leo Rosten's still-useful
"The Washington Correspondents" (1937), and
continuing with Warren Breed's "Social Control in
the Newsroom" (published in this journal in
1955). Tunstall follows Rosten's method as well
as his tradition, using interviews and questionnaires (though too few of the former) to study
207 correspondents who cover special "beats"-
ranging from fashion to foreign correspondencefor 23 British news organizations: 2 television networks, 2 wire services, and 19 newspapers. Rosten's
127 political reporters had represented 186 newspapers.
While not directly comparable to the earlier
American work, Tunstall's study bears out its findings. Using a far more elaborate conceptual scheme
than his predecessors, Tunstall shows how organizational needs constrain the role-performance of
the news specialists and how their role-sets of
editors, sources, and "competitor-colleagues" both
limit and maintain their functional autonomy. The
book is useful for its quasi-replication outside the
United States and for suggesting the terms of
further research.
Missing, despite the potentially colorful subjectmatter, is the sense of flux and tension that are a
large part of gathering and publishing daily news.
The text is painfully dry and obviously the product
of diligently tabulated questionnaires rather than
any useful amount of on-the-spot observation,
despite the interviews and field work. More important, the book fails to explain the basis of fundamental editorial decisions in choice-ridden news
enterprises. (Neither, for that matter, did Talese
in his 500-page, best-selling ramble among the
Times' inttamural squabbles.)
As Tunstall points out, newsmen have a constant choice among "crises" -large and small,
genuine and trumped up-from which they select
a few to headline. Pointing out that most "discussions of the news media usually adopt the news
values of journalism," he does raise, briefly, a
vital question: How do social values shape news
values? The question remains to be explored, and
the answer is of fundamental sociological interest.
As the author points out, "much of a social scientist's broad map of the society in which he lives
comes to him through journalism."