Black Witness by Amy McQuire

Author:Amy McQuire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2024-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

NEWSWORTHINESS

As Stuart Hall and his co-authors say in Policing the Crisis, stories are not ‘naturally’ newsworthy in themselves but are deemed to be so during the news production process.7 A story is constructed based on its assumed audience and social context: by mapping ‘unusual and unexpected events’ to the broader ‘cultural knowledge’, the media allows readers to make sense of those events.8

Newsworthiness, or at least the White Witness’s version of it, therefore rests on a ‘consensus’ in society, a consensus in which we are all able to identify the same ‘maps of meaning’.9 But of course, this assumes that all readers share the same viewpoint and cultural underpinnings. Hall et al. write that ‘the rule of law protects us all equally’ is a consensus view that is particularly enforced by the media.10 This reinforcement of a status quo means the media has a crucial role in framing the way events are seen and spoken about, especially when those events are outside the realm of the audience’s everyday experiences:

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