The gatekeeper is essentially the quality controller, the one who chooses what we know, who tells us what we think we know about the world around us. The one with the power.
In journalism the gatekeeper filters news through to the masses. But who is responsible for this filtration? Who actually gets to choose what constitutes as news? ‘The Gatekeeper’ by David Manning White, suggests that gatekeeping is affected by the gatekeepers characteristics, life experiences, attitudes and expectations of what the news is. White suggests he is a middle aged man with 25 years of journalistic experience.
Organisationally, news is constructed by a certain criteria given to the gatekeeper, but ‘what is news’ is ultimately shaped by the gatekeepers perception of this question, along with questions such as; Who is your audience and what is their perception of news? Does the story attract attention? Or even provide entertainment? Does the story fit in with the current organisational or governmental ideologies?
The power wielded by the gatekeeper can go as far as having a major handle on social control. Governments can use the this gatekeeping to suit their own ends, fabricating or distorting the news to influence social conscience.
A good example of this is (again) the Fox news networks’ coverage of the early days of the Iraq conflict. It presented the war as a continuing success, showing footage of Iraqi teenagers ‘training for the Olympics’ in order to persuade viewers of the good America was doing in the region. This would lead to Fox viewers having a distorted view of the Americans activities and the actual international feelings towards the occupation.
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