Noise and the Values of News

This chapter poses the question of whether news values can serve a contemporary media environment that is chaotic, crowded and noisy. Drawing on examples from the 2016 American presidential campaign, Stephanie Craft and Morten Stinus Kristensen argue that norms of impact, conflict and novelty are increasingly incompatible with a media environment that demands and rewards sharing news incrementally and repeatedly, treating every new piece of information with breaking news intensity. These mismatched values are further fueled by commercial pressures that favor such values, as well as by bad faith actors who seek to game these values to steer coverage in ways that promote their causes or muddy public understanding of core issues. Rather than advocating for a return to a romanticized simpler time of journalistic gatekeeping power and professional authority over news, Craft and Kristensen argue that journalists and journalism educators need to rethink some of the basic premises of journalistic norms and practices, with the aim of developing news values better able to provide publics with the information necessary for political life to function.