CSS Journalism and Mass Communication key facts

Communication theory

Communication process and models

• Elements: sender (source), message, channel, receiver, feedback, noise. Encoding is done by the sender, decoding by the receiver.
• Noise can be physical (static, a bad line) or semantic (words the receiver does not understand).
• Lasswell (1948): Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect? These give control, content, media, audience and effects analysis.
• Shannon and Weaver (1949): source, transmitter, channel, receiver, destination, with a noise source. It came from telephone engineering and is criticised as one-way.
• Schramm (1954): people communicate only where their fields of experience overlap.
• Osgood and Schramm: a circular model in which each party is encoder, interpreter and decoder.
• Berlo (1960): SMCR, that is Source, Message, Channel, Receiver. Skills, attitudes, knowledge, social system and culture affect both source and receiver.

Mass communication theories and effects

• Hypodermic needle (magic bullet): powerful, direct, uniform effects on a passive audience. Rejected because it ignored differences among people.
• Two-step flow: Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet studied the 1940 election in Erie County, Ohio ('The People's Choice', 1944). Ideas flow from the media to opinion leaders, and from them to others.
• Agenda-setting: McCombs and Shaw, Chapel Hill study of the 1968 election, published 1972. The media tell people what to think about, not what to think.
• Uses and gratifications (Katz, Blumler and Gurevitch): asks what people do with the media. The audience is active and goal-directed.
• Cultivation: George Gerbner, Cultural Indicators Project. Heavy viewers come to see the world as it appears on television ('mean world syndrome').
• Spiral of silence: Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. People who think they are in the minority keep quiet for fear of social isolation.
• Gatekeeping: the term comes from Kurt Lewin; David Manning White applied it to news in his 'Mr Gates' study (1950).

Normative theories of the press

• Authoritarian: the oldest; from the age of absolute monarchs. The press serves the ruler, with licensing and censorship before publication.
• Libertarian: the press is free of state control and acts as a check on government. Linked to Milton's 'Areopagitica' (1644) and the free marketplace of ideas.
• Social responsibility: freedom comes with duties to society. Linked to the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press (1947) in the United States.
• Soviet communist: the press is owned by the state and serves the party. Rooted in the ideas of Marx and Lenin.
• Development media theory: the media should support national development (literacy, health, agriculture) and may accept some limits for that goal.
• Democratic-participant theory: local, small-scale, interactive media; a right of access and reply for citizens; a reaction against commercialised and centralised media.
• Authors of 'Four Theories of the Press' (1956): Fred Siebert, Theodore Peterson and Wilbur Schramm.

History and media in Pakistan

History of the press and broadcasting

• Order of events: Acta Diurna (ancient Rome), Gutenberg's press (about 1450), Daily Courant (London, 1702), Hicky's Bengal Gazette (1780).
• Hicky's Bengal Gazette: first newspaper of the subcontinent; an English weekly started by James Augustus Hicky at Calcutta in 1780.
• PTV: first transmission from Lahore on 26 November 1964, during the presidency of Ayub Khan.
• Dawn: founded by Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah at Delhi; moved to Karachi after Independence.
• Jang: started at Delhi in 1939 by Mir Khalilur Rahman; moved to Karachi after Independence.
• Nawa-i-Waqt: founded at Lahore in 1940 by Hamid Nizami.
• Pakistan Times (English) and Imroze (Urdu): Progressive Papers Limited, founded by Mian Iftikharuddin; Faiz Ahmad Faiz was an editor; taken over by the government in 1959.

Role of the press in the freedom movement

• Zamindar: Urdu paper of Lahore, edited by Maulana Zafar Ali Khan, who was also a poet. It was founded by his father, Maulvi Sirajuddin Ahmad.
• Comrade: English weekly started by Muhammad Ali Jauhar at Calcutta in 1911; it later moved to Delhi.
• Hamdard: Jauhar's Urdu daily, published from Delhi.
• Al-Hilal: Urdu weekly started by Abul Kalam Azad at Calcutta in 1912; closed in 1914. He then started Al-Balagh in 1915.
• Jauhar led the Khilafat Movement (1919 to 1924) and died in London in January 1931 during the First Round Table Conference.
• Azad later became a senior leader of the Indian National Congress and wrote the commentary Tarjuman-ul-Quran.
• Dawn: founded by Jinnah as a weekly in 1941 and made a daily in 1942; first editor of the daily Pothan Joseph. Inqilab (Lahore, 1927): Ghulam Rasul Mehr and Abdul Majid Salik.

Media laws and ethics in Pakistan

• Article 19 grounds for restriction: the glory of Islam; the integrity, security or defence of Pakistan; friendly relations with foreign states; public order; decency or morality; contempt of court; incitement to an offence.
• PEMRA: Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority, set up under an ordinance of 2002. It licenses private television channels, FM radio and cable operators, not newspapers.
• Press and Publications Ordinance (Ayub Khan era, 1960s): tightened state control over newspapers.
• Press Council of Pakistan: set up under an ordinance of 2002; hears complaints against newspapers under an ethical code.
• Defamation: a false statement that lowers a person's reputation. Libel is in permanent form (print, broadcast); slander is spoken.
• Defences to defamation: truth (justification), fair comment made in good faith, and privilege.
• Contempt of court: includes publishing matter likely to prejudice a case still being tried. Official Secrets Act 1923: penalises disclosure of certain official information.

Journalism skills

News: values, sources and structure

• Main news values: timeliness (it is new), proximity (it is near), prominence (well-known people), impact or consequence (many people affected), conflict, unusualness (oddity) and human interest.
• 5Ws and 1H: who, what, when, where, why and how.
• Hard news: timely reports of serious events (crime, politics, disasters). Soft news: human-interest items such as profiles and lifestyle stories.
• Summary lead: gives the main facts at once. Delayed lead: opens with a scene or anecdote and comes to the point later.
• Byline: the reporter's name. Dateline: the place (and date) from which the story was filed.
• Primary source: a person who witnessed or took part in the event, or an original document. Secondary source: a report based on others' accounts.
• A follow-up story reports new developments in a story already published.

Reporting, interviewing and writing

• Good news writing: accurate, brief, clear and objective; short sentences, plain words, active voice; every opinion attributed to a source.
• Open-ended questions (how, why) invite full answers. Closed questions bring 'yes', 'no' or a single fact.
• News story: timely, factual, inverted pyramid, no opinion of the writer.
• Feature: longer, descriptive, rich in scenes and quotations, not tied to the day's events, often with a descriptive lead.
• Editorial: unsigned; the opinion of the newspaper as an institution. It explains, criticises, praises or persuades.
• Column: signed, regular, personal in style; the writer's own opinion.
• Op-ed page: the page opposite the editorial page, carrying columns and articles by outside writers. A beat reporter has a fixed area; a general assignment reporter covers whatever is assigned.

Editing, headlines, layout and photojournalism

• Stet: 'let it stand'; ignore the correction. Three short lines under a letter: make it a capital. The paragraph sign: begin a new paragraph. The transposition mark: change the order of letters or words.
• Headline: accurate, short, specific, present tense, active voice; no opinion and no detail that the story does not support.
• Layout principles: balance, contrast, proportion and unity.
• Dummy: a sketch of the page showing where each item will go. Nameplate: the newspaper's title on page one.
• Broadsheet: the large page size. Tabloid: about half that size.
• Caption: the text under a photograph; it names the people and adds facts the picture cannot show.
• Cropping (trimming a picture) is acceptable. Adding, removing or staging content in a news picture is a breach of ethics.

Broadcast journalism

• Broadcast style: short sentences, present tense where possible, active voice, round numbers, simple words.
• Attribution comes first: 'Police say two men were arrested', not 'Two men were arrested, police say'.
• Running order (rundown): the planned sequence of items in a bulletin.
• Package: a pre-recorded, edited report with narration, pictures and interviews. Live report: the reporter speaks from the scene as events happen.
• Voice-over: narration read over pictures while the speaker is not seen. Sound bite: a short clip of a person speaking.
• Cutaway: a shot of something other than the main subject, used to cover an edit. Lower third: the caption in the lower part of the screen naming a speaker.
• Teleprompter: shows the script in front of the camera lens so that the anchor can read while facing the viewers.

Media and society

Public relations and advertising

• Grunig and Hunt's four models of PR (1984): press agentry or publicity (one-way, truth not essential); public information (one-way, accurate); two-way asymmetric (research used to persuade); two-way symmetric (dialogue, both sides may change).
• Pioneers: Ivy Lee, Declaration of Principles (1906), open and accurate information for the press; Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud.
• AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.
• USP (unique selling proposition): one benefit that only this product offers; the concept of Rosser Reeves.
• Types of advertising: classified and display; product and institutional (builds the image of a company); public service (promotes a social cause).
• Propaganda devices: name calling, glittering generalities, transfer, testimonial, plain folks, card stacking, bandwagon.
• PR functions: media relations, employee relations, community relations, publicity, crisis communication.

Media and society

• Lasswell's three functions: surveillance, correlation, transmission of social heritage. Entertainment was added by Charles Wright.
• Walter Lippmann, 'Public Opinion' (1922): people act on the 'pictures in their heads', which the press largely supplies.
• Joseph Klapper: the media usually reinforce existing attitudes; they rarely convert people.
• Opinion polls measure public opinion by questioning a representative sample.
• Propaganda by source: white (source openly stated), grey (source unclear), black (falsely credited to another source).
• Development journalism: reports and critically examines development projects and their effect on ordinary people. Its risk is that it turns into government publicity.
• Media pluralism: many independent outlets offering different viewpoints.

International communication and new media

• Reuters: founded in London in 1851 by Paul Julius Reuter.
• AP (Associated Press): United States; began in the 1840s as a cooperative of New York newspapers.
• AFP (Agence France-Presse): France; successor of the Havas agency, founded in Paris in 1835.
• APP (Associated Press of Pakistan): the national news agency of Pakistan.
• MacBride Report: 'Many Voices, One World' (1980); commission chaired by Seán MacBride and set up by UNESCO.
• Misinformation: false information shared without intent to deceive. Disinformation: false information spread deliberately.
• Online journalism: instant updates, hyperlinks, multimedia and interactivity; it weakens editors as gatekeepers. Clickbait: a misleading headline written to attract clicks.