Theory of Objectivity

The most central concept in media theory relating to information quality has been that of objectivity, especially as applied to news information. Objectivity is a particular form of media practice and attitude to the task of information collection, processing and dissemination. One main feature of objectivity is the adoption of a position of detachment and neutrality towards the object of reporting. Secondly, there is lack of partisanship: not taking sides in matters of dispute or showing bias. Thirdly, objectivity requires strict attachment to accuracy and other truth criteria (such as relevance and completeness). It also presumes lack of ulterior motive or service to a third party. The process of observing and reporting should thus not be contaminated by subjectivity , nor should it interfere with the reality being reported on. Objectivity has links with the principle of freedom, since independence is a necessary condition of detachment and truthfulness. The link with equality is also strong: objectivity requires a fair and nondiscriminatory attitude to sources and to objects of news reporting, all of which should be treated on equal terms. Additionally, different points of view on matters where the facts are in dispute should be treated as of equal standing and relevance. The established conventions of objectivity demand that media distance their editorial content from the advertising matter that they carry. People are media-literate and therefore, they can understand the principle of objective performance well enough, and its practice helps to increase public credence and trust in the information and opinions the media offer. The media themselves find that objectivity gives their own news product a higher and wider market value. According to the theory of objectivity envisaged by Westerstahl (1983), the ingredients of objectivity are factuality and impartiality. Factuality entails truth, informativeness and relevance. Impartiality implies balance and neutrality. Factuality refers first of all, to a form of reporting which deals in events and statements which can be checked against sources and are presented free from comment, or at least separated from comment . Factuality involves several other

truth criteria: completeness of an account, accuracy, and an intention not to mislead or suppress what is relevant. The second main aspect of factuality is 'relevance'. It relates to the process of selection rather than to the form of presentation and requires that selection take place according to clear and coherent principles of what is significant for the intended receiver or the society. In general, what affects most people most immediately and most strongly is likely to be considered most relevant. According to Westerstahl's scheme, impartiality presupposes a 'neutral attitude' and has to be achieved through a combination of balance (equal or proportional time/space/emphasis) as between opposing interpretations, points of view or versions of events, and neutrality in presentation. 'Informativeness' refers to qualities of informational content: being noticed, understood and remembered by the intended audience. The main information quality requirements are as follows: Mass media should provide a comprehensive supply of relevant news and background information about events in the society and the world around. Information should be objective in the sense of being accurate, honest, sufficiently complete and true to reality, and reliable in the sense of being checkable and separating fact from opinion. Information should be balanced and fair (impartial), reporting alternative perspectives and interpretations in a non-sensational, unbiased way, as far as possible. Bias in news content can refer, especially, to distorting reality, giving a negative picture of minority groups of many kinds, neglecting or misconstruing the role of women in society, or differentially favouring a particular political party or philosophy. We can summarize the most significant and best-documented generalizations in the following statements about news content: Media news over-represents the social 'top' and official voices in its sources. News attention is differentially bestowed on members of political and social elites. The social values which are most emphasized are consensual and supportive of the status quo. Foreign news concentrates on nearer, richer and more powerful nations.

 News has a nationalistic (patriotic) and ethnocentric bias in the choice of topics and opinions expressed and in the view of the world assumed or portrayed. More attention and more prominence are given to men than to women in the news. Ethnic minorities and immigrant groups are differentially marginalized, stereotyped or stigmatized. News about crime over-represents violent and personal crime and neglects many of the realities of risk in society. Health news gives most attention to the most feared medical conditions and to new cures rather than prevention. Business leaders and employers receive more favoured treatment than unions and workers. The poor and those on welfare are neglected and/or stigmatized.

The Spiral of Silence

The concept of the 'spiral of silence' was developed by Noelle-Neumann. The theory is concerned with the interplay between four elements: mass media; interpersonal communication and social relations; individual expressions of opinion; and the perceptions which individuals have of the surrounding 'climate of opinion' in their own social environment. The main assumptions of the theory are as follows: Society threatens deviant individuals with isolation. Individuals experience fear of isolation continuously. This fear of isolation causes individuals to try to assess the climate of opinion at all times. The results of this estimate affect their behaviour in public, especially their willingness or not to express opinions openly. In brief, the theory proposes that, in order to avoid isolation on important public issues (like political party support), many people are guided by what they think to be the dominant opinions in their environment. People tend to conceal their views if they feel they are in a minority and are more willing to express them if they think they are dominant. This is the spiralling effect referred to. In the present context, the main point is that the mass media are the most readily accessible source for assessing the prevailing climate, and if a certain view predominates in the media it will tend to be magnified in the subsequent stages of personal opinion formation and expression. The theory was first formulated and tested to explain puzzling findings in German politics where opinion poll indications were inconsistent with other data concerning expectations of who would win an election and signally failed to predict the result. The explanation put forward was that the media were offering a misleading view of the opinion consensus. They were said to be leaning in a leftist direction, against the underlying opinion of the (silent) majority. A different test of the theory concerned the issue of nuclear energy. Noelle-Neumann (1991) found evidence of increasing press attention on the issue, accompanied by a steady increase in negative reporting. Over time, public support for nuclear energy also

declined markedly, and the timing and sequence of changes suggested an interactive spiralling effect as predicted in the theory. The spiral of silence theory is a close neighbour of mass society theory and involves a similar, somewhat pessimistic, view of the quality of social relations. There is continuing support for the view that 'fear of isolation' is a key factor in affecting willingness to speak out on a controversial issue. BJPs India Shines Campaign with Vajpayee as the Prime Minister was the best example for the spiral of silence theory media projected BJP victory but the silent majority voted for the Congress. Related to the spiral of silence theory is the idea of third-party effects of media on public opinion, first proposed by Davison (1983). The key point is that many people seem to think (or say to pollsters) that other people are affected by various kinds of media content, but not they themselves.

Agenda-Setting Theory
News regularly appears through different media at particular times during day and night. Is there a pattern in news presentation? Is one news item more important than another? Are front page news items more important than other-page news items? Is the editorial page more important than the front page? To all these questions, the answer is 'yes' and 'no'. The importance of a news item depends on the newspaper reader, or the TV viewer or radio listener. But generally, media users have been oriented to certain conventions. The producers of news and the news editors decide the priority. In course of time, the readers' and viewers priorities coincide with the newspaper organization's or the broadcast station's. Most news media give the same news items on the front page most of the days. On TV and on radio also what is announced first becomes the top priority news. In fact, the news reader or television anchor first presents a set of items under "Main" news or "Major" news of the day/hour." By doing this, the news media are telling the media users that certain news items are the most important, certain others are important but not so important as the first. In the newspapers, the item that appears on the left hand side of the front page is considered more important simply because most languages are read from left to right. Some newspapers have three editorials and a couple of long feature articles on the editorial page. The first editorial is usually considered the most important. The second is slightly less important; the third is usually a tongue-in-cheek, deliberately saucy, funny, human-interest type. The feature article that appears first may be on a topic that is considered the most important political, military, economic or social development in recent times. The second feature may be on a less important topic and if there is a third feature, it may be on something of a light nature. The positioning of news items and articles is in accordance with the priority attached to them by the news-editorial staff of the newspaper. Their decisions, in course of time, coincide with the priority decisions of the newspaper readers. Agenda-setting is in a way related to this. Newspapers or the news media attach importance to certain items. Eventually, the "order of importance given in the

media to issues and the order of significance attached to the same issues by the public and the politicians" could be the same. At least that is what McCombs and Shaw found in their study in 1972 and 1993. It was these researchers who coined the term, AGENDA-SETTING. This phenomenon had long been studied in the context of election campaign. Lazarsfeld and others referred to it as the "power to structure issues." They said that "politicians try to convince voters as to what, from their standpoint, are the most important issues. People think about what they are told... but at no level do they think what they are told." To put it differently, the news media do not ask media users what to think but they certainly tell their users what to 'think about.' Thus news media introduce the public to the priorities by highlighting them. This is the essence of the theory. Do the public always vote or act politically according to the agenda set by the media? There are many instances where media support to certain candidates in the election have not helped. The voters do not always behave on predictable lines. It was Bernard Cohen who said: The press is significantly more than a purveyor of information and opinion . It may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think ABOUT. And it follows from this that the world looks different to different people, depending not only on their personal interests, but also on the map that is drawn for them by the writers, editors, and publishers of the papers they read. Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald Shaw articulated their interpretation of agenda-setting in 1972, based on their research carried out during September and October in 1968 presidential election in America: In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part, in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but how much importance to attach to that issue form the amount of information in a news story and its position The mass media may well determine the important issues that is, the media may set the agenda of the campaign.

According to Rogers and Dearing (1987), we need to distinguish clearly between three different agendas: the priorities of the media, those of the public and those of policy. These interact in complex ways and may have effects in different directions. The same authors also note that media vary in their credibility, that personal experience and the media picture may diverge, and that the public may not share the same values about news events as the media. However, in certain socioeconomic matters, media's agenda has influenced the public. Sometimes the media ignore certain world events or give low coverage and show very little interest. The readers do not even know certain facts about international events. For a long time, there was no coverage of China in the U.S. media. Similarly, Vietnam news was covered with bias. Iran's Shah was depicted as a great Emperor and the opposition forces as misguided communists under the influence of the Soviet Union. Unless the media cover international events with balance and without bias, the priorities set by the media will mislead whole populations who form their images of other countries through what is reported in the media. Many researchers, therefore, have found fault with the agenda-setting theory. At best they have given it "the status of a plausible but unproven idea."

Information Society Theory

In recent decades, the United States, Japan, and most European nations have become information societies, defined as countries in which information workers are more numerous than such occupational categories as farmers, industrial workers, or service workers. Information workers are individuals whose main job responsibilities are to gather, process, or distribute information, or to produce information technologies like computers or telecommunications equipment that are used by other information workers. Typical information workers are computer programmers, teachers, journalists, and managers. In the United States todav, more than two-thirds of the workforce are information workers. India as a nation is still far from becoming an information society. About 25 percent of workers in India are engaged in service occupations, while 60 percent are farmers and 15 percent work in factories. Of those engaged in service occupations, however, tens of millions are information workers. India has more information workers than Japan, and about the same number as the United States. So India has an information society within this nation of over one billion people. These millions of information workers are mostly urban and educated, living lifestyles similar to information workers in Silicon Valley, Tokyo, or London. In an Information Society, information is the crucial ingredient, as energy was in the Industrial Society and manual labor in the Agricultural Society. The computer is to the Information Society what the steam engine was to the Industrial Society. India is a developing nation that is making remarkable progress toward development through the infornatization strategy, the process through which communication technologies are used as means of furthering socio-economic development. Gradually, over recent decades, we have realized that telephones, the Internet, and other communication technologies can greatly increase business activity by connecting individuals and organizations into the global economy. Such informatization can benefit all levels of society, including highly profitable high-tech companies like Wipro or Infosys in Bangalore, a peasant village in Andhra Pradesh, or a paanwallah in Uttar Pradesh. Informatization fits with free-market capitalism, the dominant economic ideology of the West, adopted by the Indian government in 1991. Informatization also presents 9

opportunities to use communication technology to improve delivery of education, health, and nutrition, especially in rural India. It also fits with the notion of creating an efficient, responsive, and transparent government, as exemplified by the infotech policies of Andhra Pradesh's former Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu . India represents a unique path to development characterized by informatization and globalization. India is an unusual setting in which to analyze the communication revolution. While the new communication technologies of cable television, computers, the Internet, satellites, and telecommunications are impacting Indian society in dramatic ways. The subcontinent is still mainly a developing nation in which many citizens depend on the bullock cart for transportation and on human labor for making a daily living. In the 63 years since independence from Britain in 1947, India has made remarkable progress in certain sectors: the life expectancy of its citizens has doubled from 32 years to 63 years; the literacy rate has increased from 18 percent to 62 percent; and infant mortality has been cut down by half from 134 to 69 deaths per thousand. However, during this time, India's population has risen from 35 crores to 110 crores, of whom 32 crore people live in abject poverty in villages and urban slums. India has more university students than any other nation in the world today, but also the most illiterates. While India has world-class Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), few Indian universities are research universities. Most brainy young Indians migrate to America to pursue scientific training for Master's and Ph.D. degrees. The Indian government in 1991 made a radical policy shift toward free-market forces, which strongly impacted the informatization of Indian society, opening the nation's boundaries to Coca Cola, McDonalds, Baywatch and Nike, and to the highly profitable exports of its computer software companies. The New Economic Policy of 1991 allowed India to become a major player in the global village. However, globalization and material progress have done little to improve the quality of life of India's poor. Their preoccupation is with raising two square meals a day, not with McDonalds and Coca Cola. The Western world and Japan passed through the industrial society where science and technology helped them to achieve tremendous progress in every field. Sociologists

10

in the advanced countries then began to think of the post-industrial society. Daniel Bell in the U.S. and Y. Ito in Japan used the terms 'post-industrial society' and 'information society', respectively for the first time, to describe the 1970s and 1980s. Their thesis was that human civilization has already passed through the industrial society and reached the post-industrial society because a very large number of people in their own societies were depending on the service sector or service industries. The number of jobs in the manufacturing sector had gone down in the U.S. and in Japan. Some writers choose to use the term 'network society' instead of 'information society'. The large majority of the people in the world are still depending on low-paying agricultural jobs, although the European, North American and Japanese regions of the world (ENAJ) had succeeded in reducing their heavy dependence on agriculture in the 1950s and did the same for industries in the 1980s. They were in the comfortable position of assuming that people were moving more and more to the service sector informationbased employment avenues : hotels, insurance, telecommunications, actuarial business, stock exchange, software development, etc. They had already succeeded in producing more food than was needed for their own people and for export. Similar was the situation in clothing and housing materials, for medical treatment, transportation, etc. The hard work required for the production of many things was entrusted to the Third and Fourth Worlds where labour was cheap . The great promoters of the idea that the world has reached the Information Age (first it was the Ice Age, then the Iron or Metal Age, the Atomic Age and now the Information Age) are Rogers, Dordick, Wang and Melody. But one has to raise a logical question : if everyone in the world is going to be engaged in the service sector, where will the goods come from? Where will the food, clothing, housing materials, etc. come from? Half of the world's population have not even used the telephone once in their life time. Almost half the world is still illiterate, illhoused, malnourished and ignorant even after so many centuries of 'progress'. How can we then claim that we are in the information age and in the service economy ?

11

Uses and Gratifications Theory

Uses, gratifications, and dependency theories predict that audiences rely on media to gratify specific needs and in the process develop certain dependencies on the media. The more an individual depends on a specific medium to fulfill needs, the more important that media will become to that person. This can ultimately lead to cognitive, affective, and behavior effects of media use. Framed by Elihu Katz, Jay Blumler, and Michael Gurevitch in the 1970s, uses and gratifications theory turned attention away from media sources and message effects to audience uses of media content. An individual who has exposed himself or herself to news from a variety of media is likely to be better informed, more knowledgeable, and have a better, more in-depth understanding of world events than someone who relies solely on television news for information gathering. Why do children watch Television? Studies have listed the following motivations: Learning: Children turn to television to learn things Habit: Children may view television out of habit. It can become an addiction. Companionship: Children watch TV because it gives them a sense of connection to other people Arousal: Some children watch television because it stimulates them, excites them, and increases their arousal level. Arousal refers to the physiological system and involves responses such as heart rate, blood pressure, sweat, and respiration. Relaxation: Children watch television to ease their tension and for entertainment. Escape: Children use media to escape from the unpleasant duties and to release tension. Passing Time: Waiting creates frustration and therefore, television becomes a medium for passing the time.

12

Cultivation Theory
Cultivation, also known as cultivation theory or cultivation analysis, is the area of communication research that investigates relationships between exposure to television and beliefs and attitudes about the world. Briefly, cultivation hypothesizes that heavy viewers of television will be more likely to hold beliefs about the world that are congruent with what they see on television. For example, television programs-are often seen to be highly violent; cultivation hypothesizes that heavy viewers of television will be more likely to see the world as a violent place. Cultivation was an outgrowth of the Cultural Indicators project, a research program begun by George Gerbner at the Annenberg School for Communication in the late 1960s. The project asserted that television was overtly and overly violent. The basic hypothesis of cultivation is that watching a great deal of television will result in a tendency to hold specific and distinct conceptions of reality, as depicted in the medium. It eventually led to the notion of the mean world syndrome, in which heavy viewers are more likely to see the world as a scary, mean, violent, and dangerous place. Gerbner found that fear of crime was actually enhanced by television viewing in the high-crime areas, a phenomenon termed as resonance: a phenomenon in which the lived experience of the individual would be confirmed in the television world. In this theory of media effect, television is not a window on or a reflection of the world but a world in itself. The theory holds that viewing television gradually leads to the adoption of beliefs about the nature of the social world which conform to the stereotyped, distorted and very selective view of reality portrayed in a systematic way in television fiction and news. For example, regular and heavy viewers of police detective and violent serials on television, particularly adolescents and young adults may become paranoid about the police and the world outside. The cultivation theory is also a plausible but not a valid theory universally applicable.

13