Multiperspectival news revisited: Journalism and representative democracy

Abstract

Thirty years ago, I published an ethnographic study of four mainstream national news organizations entitled Deciding What’s News (Gans, 2004 [1979]). In a final chapter devoted to news policy, I urged that the news become more multiperspectival, that national news depend less on top down news from high level government and other official and authoritative sources. Instead, the news media should do more reporting from and about other levels and sectors of society and how these see and interpret the country and its problems. The mainstream news media as well as the economy and polity in which the news media are embedded have changed over the past decades and the arrival of the internet offers a chance to add different kinds of news. These changes justify a revisit to multiperspectival news which focuses particularly on the journalists’ role in representative democracy.