Dr. Kundan Aryal

When the level of media literacy among the general audience is enhanced, consumers start evaluating the different forms of media products like news reports and views. Today, with the increased level of general literacy, people who consume media products try to understand the basis of selection and rejection of certain issues. This is a worldwide trend and the Nepali society is no exception.

Objective interpretation
For Jake Lynch, a tireless advocate of peace journalism, a journalist is a gatekeeper, allowing some aspects of reality through the public eye and keeping the rest in the dark. Presenting the simple definition to the process of gatekeeping in journalism, he states that to report is to choose. A journalist claims that s/he just reports the facts. But, Lynch holds, "the fact" is a category practically of infinite size. Thus, many a time a journalist may think s/he chooses and interprets the news objectively and on the basis of professional news values. However, there could be several factors affecting their decision or the process of gatekeeping.
‘All the news that's fit to print’. This is the motto of The New York Times, an American daily newspaper with worldwide fame. The publication has placed that slogan above the masthead since its inception in 1851. However, findings of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, in their seminal work Manufacturing Consent (1988), reveal that the paper uses several filters to consider a piece of news fit to be printed. Their study focuses on existing inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power can filter out the news fit to print, marginalise dissent, and allow the dominant interests to get their messages across to the public.
According to Chomsky and Herman, the mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. They view that it is their function to entertain and inform and inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. However, the duo thinks that in a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda. Hence, the process of gatekeeping, even in the US and some other countries of liberal democracy, is employed for silent propaganda.
Principally, the gatekeepers are entitled to determine which information will be passing out to people through their outlets. However, in practice, a gatekeeper has to face social, cultural, ethical and political influences. Theory of gatekeeping describes the process through which events are covered or the news stories are killed by the mass media. It explains how and why certain information either passes through or distorted or restricted.
Selection, as well as organisation process of the information as per the level of importance and interest ideally, depends on a team or a person. The gatekeepers determine how much of the information gets published or aired. According to Pamela Shoemaker, a communication theorist, gatekeeping is the process by which billions of messages that are available in the world get cut down and transformed into the hundreds of messages that reach a given person on a given day. James Watson, a communication scholar, states that gatekeeping is about opening or closing the channels of communication. In his views, it is about accessing or refusing access.
Shoemaker along with Reese argues that the factors affecting the decisions of gatekeepers include news values, government, culture, personal judgment, politics, ethics and beliefs. One of these factors could also invoke the self-gatekeeping for the media. Watson holds that in studying the news one needs to explore three linked features of production gatekeeping, agenda setting and news values. For him, the operation of the first two depends upon the demands of the third which in turn regulates the conventions of news presentation. However, in practice, when controlled by the vested interests, media do not regard news values rather try to set the vested agenda. Hence, the process of framing and priming prevail time and again in the case of global as well as local news and other media products.
Defining the news values, Walter Lippmann states that the news is not a mirror of social conditions, but a report of an aspect that has obtruded itself. He stresses that journalists need to adhere chiefly by the news values for the audience. There are widely known news criteria such as impact, timeliness, new, human interests, proximity, important and prominent which are being taught in the journalism schools over the years. Nevertheless, it is not that easy to develop a common and agreeable yardstick for determining news values. Socio-cultural, political and economic atmosphere outside the newsrooms and the domestic rules and practices within the newsrooms determine thematic as well as technical frames for gatekeeping.
There could be a quest for common, obvious and transparent parameters of gatekeeping in any media outlet. However, the theory regarding the marketplace of an idea or notion of pluralism provides a judgemental privilege to the gatekeepers to select or discard the events and issues. In theory, the only condition for the gatekeepers is to take care of their credibility, accountability, fairness and respect for accuracy while covering or discarding any news.

Technical aspects
Journalism schools could teach the technical aspects such as grammar of news, the process of verification, treatment, the notion of fairness and equidistance to all actors and presentation style. But the atmosphere and hidden filters directing the process of gatekeeping in the newsrooms are omnipresent across the world. The embedded filters are in full automation. Many issues and voices are being side-lined and marginalised. Particular pieces of information are getting time and space with the hidden interests of mediatisation. Thus, in the age of commercialisation and hyper commercialisation of mass media, the process of gatekeeping is greatly employed in a bid to set a vested agenda of political-economy across all walks social lives.

(Dr. Aryal is associated with the Central Department of Journalism and Mass Communication of Tribhuvan University.)