Abstract
The essay addresses these questions: What is news? Why do we have news? My answers involve the synthesis of theories from biology and culture; I also show how the constructs time and reality can be used in news studies. Deviance is my primary construct, which in biology is defined as a threat or something novel in the environment. In studies of culture, deviance is defined according to whether the rules and norms of a society are followed. People are innately hard wired to survey the environment and attend to threats, but threats are defined by culture. The brain’s circuitry prioritizes information about negative stimuli, which results in more negative news than positive or neutral.
Hard Wired for News Revisited
In this essay, I discuss news and the processes that produce it by reviewing several theoretical approaches, with the goal of helping scholars develop theories about news. Creating theory requires asking difficult questions, questions that sometimes seem to have no answers or answers applicable only within specific contexts. Yet, theory cannot develop if we do not ask such questions. To explain why we have news, we must first define what we mean by it within such contexts, both in single- and multiple-context combinations. We must provide logical reasons for why we are surrounded by news and for the roles that news plays in the world and in our personal social realities. Adopting theories from other disciplines is one strategy to build theories of news that are useful in our news studies. I urge more scholars to take up the challenge of creating theory involving news as a social artifact and newsworthiness as a cognitive construct.
What Is News?
Defining news is not a simple task. Although news is thought to convey new information, consider the many contexts of the term new: New at what point in time—at one or multiple points in time? New to and from which receivers and senders? New through which channels? New within which levels of analysis—individuals, organizations, social institutions, or societies? How much of a message must be new information for the message to be called news? To decide what is news requires considering these contexts and more.
Unlike those who study news as a social institution, I suggest that we have news because we’ve always had news. Even before the printing press made newspapers possible, people exchanged new information from one another: Visitors sharing what they knew, neighborhood gossips, town criers, and watchmen were precursors of journalists. Although news was once thought to be the purview of the mass media, in this essay, I also include information from the social media.
As Wilbur Schramm (1960), a founding father of communication study, has written: The roots of communication come from “forces set in motion when groups of manlike animals first huddled together against the cold and danger of primitive times” (p. 3). Communication was functional (in a sociological sense) and adaptive (in a biological sense), leading to communal living and cooperative ventures, such as hunting, gathering food, and eventually farming. People shared information because this was advantageous—or even key to growth and survival (Schramm, 1960, 1988)
Not all information our ancient ancestors shared would be considered news as we understand it now, but there were benefits to their telling people about the location of food and of threats to survival, such as lurking tigers, poisonous plants, and approaching bad weather—in other words, new information about important things. News is “new information about a subject of some public interest that is shared with some portion of the public” (Stephens, 1988, p. 9).
News Within an Environment
The construct news environment refers to the aggregation of everyone and everything that might influence information gathering and processing (Shoemaker & Reese, 2014). But, this essay borrows from theories of biological and cultural evolution to define environment more broadly, as the totality of all animate and inanimate things or events that people experience. Both biological and cultural evolution occur when people respond to negative, positive, and neutral stimuli in the environment in ways that increase their chances of surviving and living.
Sefcek et al. (2015) explain ecological niche as referring to the entirety of the environment, whether living or not, that affects the reproductive fitness of people. Because humans are not born with knowledge about even the usual threats they will face, the brain has evolved to adapt to ordinary changes in the environment. In contrast, unexpected events in the environment require sudden responses in the brain that, for example, help people avoid being eaten by predators. In general, the human brain reacts differently to novel than usual situations, but some people are more inclined to explore new, even dangerous things (Sefcek et al., 2015). Perhaps, this is why emergency personnel and journalists run toward danger rather than away.
The importance of news crosses cultures and societies, but not all new information diffuses quickly or completely throughout a population. The speed and extent to which news is transmitted depends on many factors, including how worthy people decide the event is of appearing in the mass or social media. My doctor’s appointment is of interest to very few, but if I were a country’s head of state, even this routine information might become news. News items can be sent to receivers using many technologies and can be re-transmitted from one receiver to another.
News and Newsworthiness
Whereas, news is a social artifact, a message that can be received and manipulated, newsworthiness is a cognitive construct representing the extent to which people judge an event to be important or interesting. Any person can assess the newsworthiness of an idea, person or event; it is not just the purview of journalists. Hence, social media users locate and evaluate information according to whether they should transmit it to other people. If deemed sufficiently newsworthy, the gatekeeping process proceeds through a series of decisions about how to create a message, as well as how to shape, revise, time, and transmit it (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). The outcome of cognitive judgments about newsworthiness and other variables (including a sender’s personal attitudes, the sender’s and media’s norms, and characteristics of media organizations) is ultimately the social artifact news (Shoemaker & Cohen, 2006; Shoemaker & Reese, 2014).
Newsworthiness is typically defined according to journalistic values. Many news values relate to the construct deviance, including conflict, controversy, sensationalism, and oddity, as well as prominence. These represent a differentiation from the norm. Other news values are culturally derived: importance, human interest, timeliness, and proximity. Objectivity includes guidelines for fairness and accuracy (Shoemaker, 2017). Most social media users are not trained in these journalistic practices and therefore use different criteria, such as personal importance, in creating online content.
My approach synthesizes several theoretical ideas. I begin with a brief discussion of the surveillance function, then go on to the brain and biological evolution. The social aspects of the news are covered as cultural evolution, which then combines with biology as the coevolution of biology and culture. A shorter discussion of these ideas appears in my article “Hard-wired for news: Using biological and cultural evolution to explain the surveillance function” (Shoemaker, 1996). My thoughts about news having become more complicated over the years, this essay also addresses how time and reality should be incorporated in news theories.
The Surveillance Function
People continually survey the environment for newsworthy events, mostly for threats or violence. The surveillance behavior evolved over eons. Our ancient ancestors looked out for threats or new foods. Those who were better at this were more likely to live and have children than those who were less attentive of their environment. As I suggested in my 1996 essay, warning others about threats such as lurking tigers enabled our ancestors to avoid injury or death. Survivors of such threats in the environment were more likely to transmit their genes to future generations. Therefore, people who got the news about the tiger had a reproductive advantage over whose who did not. “[S]uch communication repeated itself over thousands of years until the social behavior of surveillance pervaded the population” (Shoemaker, 1996, p. 35).
Thus, we have news because paying attention to threatening and unusual events in the environment has benefits. When people give others new information, it can diffuse slowly or immediately throughout the population. We use the term viral communication to describe a message, article, story, video, post, or text that diffuses exponentially. Lasswell (1948/1971) called such behaviors the surveillance function of news: People routinely look for threatening and important news in much the same way they look for approaching cars before crossing the street.
Sometimes people witness an event or participate in it. In other cases, they seek information about events, as journalists do. Events may be positive (such as the cure for a disease), negative (such as a political scandal), or even neutral, but people tend to pay more attention to negative events. As a result, news tends to be more negative than positive.
Social traits, such as surveillance, evolve based on the type of environment people find themselves in, their innate reactions to the environment, and how well society has prepared them. If members of a social group have previously experienced a threat, individuals are more likely to survive and reproduce; moreover, the more often individuals successfully confront a threat, the more likely others in the social group will also do so. Although surveillance behaviors vary at the individual level, evolution has spread it to one extent or another throughout the human species. The transmission of information within a social group has been crucial to human evolution.
Biological Evolution
Charles Darwin described how the characteristics of species evolve to best fit the challenges of their environments, and he extended his analyses to humans. In On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and The Descent of Man (Darwin, 1871/1936a, 1859/1936b) lies the kernel to answering the questions I posed above about news. What is news? In essence, the “content” of new information in ancient times amounted to whatever was newsworthy or, as Darwin might say, whatever enhanced the reproductive success of the individual—finding potential mates, avoiding predators and poisonous food, recovering from natural disasters. Why do we have news? The contemporary news industry exists because the human brain is hard wired to pay attention to conflict and controversy, politics, invading armies, recalls of deficient food and products, new diets, potential mates, natural and man-made disasters, plus taking care of the household and children. My theory about how this occurred begins with biological evolution.
Multicellular organisms first began evolving many hundreds of millions of years ago. But 300 million years ago organisms first developed the ability to sense that something is a problem and to move away from it (Grinde, 2015). Biological evolution occurs over thousands or millions of years (Fiddick, 2015), with Homo sapiens first appearing about 300,000 years ago (Devlin, 2018). These ancient ancestors evolved to have three important characteristics: They had learned to walk upright, they had opposable thumbs, and their brains were relatively large (Zeigler-Hill et al., 2015). Over time, they became better than other proto-human species at hunting, making tools, forming social groups, and fighting. By making adaptive changes in response to an often-threatening environment, they evolved to become us. And information about their environment helped them.
Adaptive changes that occurred in the distant past—such as learning how to defend against tigers—still influence the way humans look at the world, even if the threats are no longer part our modern environment. Thus, biological evolution can help us understand today’s fascination with phenomena that threaten not only our immediate worlds, but also dangers in the larger world, even if these phenomena are not direct threats to our fitness (Fiddick, 2015, p. 22). Darwin stated that changes in the human species are the consequence of our ancient ancestors having adapted to their environment in ways that enhanced their survival over hundreds of generations. Fitness is an individual’s ability to reproduce. Natural selection predicts that the fittest of each generation would survive to reproduce and that over many generations the population would include those best adapted to their environments. An adaptation is a characteristic that helped humans successfully live in their environment. Surveillance of threats and rewards is a successful adaptive response to an often-chaotic environment.
Gregor Mendel’s (1865/2018) research is credited for recognizing that the transmission of traits is due to what later would be called a gene. Now, we know that genes and their interactions are changed by evolutionary processes.
The Process of Evolution
In the 1970s, scholars began thinking about how biological evolution could also influence psychological factors (Zeigler-Hill et al., 2015). Strategies for adapting to an environment may be fast (emphasizing the individual’s ability to reproduce (e.g., by overcoming threats, so that, people can have more children) or slow (working toward subsequent survival, including by creating and supporting families) (Figueredo et al., 2015). These strategies require reallocating resources in the ecological niche to achieve each goal. Where many environmental threats are unpredictable, individuals use whatever resources they need to pass on their genes before they are killed. In more stable environments, people are less likely to die from an attack by a predator and more likely to die of disease or old age (Figueredo et al., 2015). People in the unstable and threatening environment tend to exhibit deviant behaviors and are “in a perpetual state of conflict of interest with all others,” whereas in the more predictable environment, people tend to have more stable social relationships “due to the relative safer and more favorable social selective pressures of environment” (Figueredo et al., 2015, pp. 366–367).
Adaptive behaviors and characteristics of individuals result from “interactions between genetic, environmental, and developmental/epigenetic processes” (O’Connell & Hofmann, 2010, p. 320). These are shaped both by genetic inheritance and by the social environment (Coulson, 2021; van den Berg & Weissing, 2015), meaning that biology and society influence one another (Araya-Ajoy et al., 2020).
The Brain
Evolution affects our physical traits, such as speed, but its role in shaping the human brain has been more important. Information about the environment comes to us from our senses—taste, sight, smell, hearing, and touch, which includes sensing temperature and body position. The “neural and molecular mechanisms underlying social behaviors—as is the case for all phenotypes—are the result of interactions between genetic, environmental, developmental, and epigenetic processes” (Hofmann et al., 2014, p. 584). In addition, visceral input comes from the abdomen and pelvis, and thoracic input comes from the heart and lungs. These sensory inputs are directly connected to other parts of the brain, including those that initiate the fight-or-flight response to threats; interactions among neurons in the brain control the release of adrenaline and blood sugar (Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones, 2015). In response to immediate danger, individuals may engage in defensive behaviors, such as freezing or escaping, and their heart rates and blood pressure may increase. Such responses are innate and automatic (LeDoux, 2003).
Encoded information about a threat may initiate a fast innate response, such as running from a snake, or a slower response, when the danger seems less imminent. Such reactions are due to activating different areas of the brain. Immediate threats are processed by the thalamus and the amygdala. Less dangerous threats also activate the cortex; this interaction takes more time but allows more thoughtful decisions about the real danger—allows interpretation of the threat (Wright, 2020). For example, seeing a person attacked in a horror movie may cause an immediate increase in heart rate, but the realization that there is no personal threat allows the heart to slow.
There are two amygdalae, located deep in the center of the brain in each hemisphere; they may function differently but how is unclear. Connections between the amygdalae and the brainstem occur when danger is imminent. The amygdala selectively processes information that is relevant to the survival of individuals and to their species, involving it in many “cognitive-emotional behaviors” (Pessoa, 2010, p. 3,427). For example, when faced with an ambiguous situation, the amygdala gathers information that detects the relevance of the thing or event. “Projections from the amygdala to the cortex are believed to contribute to the experience of fear and other aspects of emotional processing” (LeDoux, 2003, p. 733). The senses provide information to help the amygdala establish “what a stimulus is and what the organism should therefore do”; this is the genesis of emotion (Pessoa, 2010, pp. 3,416, 3,427). The brain prioritizes information that includes negative emotion more quickly than positive or neutral information (Pessoa, 2010). When people are exposed to a constant and large amount of information, they select information most consistent with their goals (Van Dillen & Paples, 2015). In this way, humans use their senses to create environments to which they are best suited (Bateson, 2013, p. 270).
Although some people argue that they are more interested in positive news, consistent with the third-party effect, they tend to believe that other people prefer negative news. In fact, most people tend to pay more attention to threats and less to rewards or neutral stimuli. Negative affect also prompts people to look for successful adaptations to the environment (Van Steenbergen, 2015); however, intaking a lot of negative affect (such as bad news) can stimulate the fear response, producing anxiety (Grinde, 2015). Other possible outcomes of negative affect include problems with the immune system, including infection; high blood pressure; and diabetes (Pruessner & Baldwin, 2015). Although the cortex helps us moderate inputs from the amygdala, negative stimuli prioritize processes involving the subcortical areas of the brain (Grinde, 2015). In studies of attention to news, some scholars have found physiological responses that represent disgust, fear and anger (Soroka et al., 2019). When fear or pain has previously been experienced, working memory helps people retain and apply information to help them avoid these responses in the future (LeDoux, 2003; Murty et al., 2012). Emotional memories are connected to many parts of the brain and control endocrine, behavioral, and autonomic responses to fear (LeDoux, 2003).
Biological evolution was once thought to produce human brains that are blank slates, ready to be written on by culture. Now, we know that our brains come equipped not only with innate reactions to the environment, but also with established neural pathways that influence how we react to environmental stimuli. Yet, human environments are created by cultures, which differ in distributing the amount and sort of negative, positive, and neutral stimuli to which people are exposed.
Cultural Evolution
Humans evolved within social contexts, often forming families and sometimes communities within social, political, and historical contexts (Andrews, 2007). The glue that holds families and communities together is culture, a set of normative ideas and behaviors about what is acceptable. Although the terms country and culture are often considered synonymous, this ignores cultural variations within countries and multi-country regions that have cultural ties (Peterson et al., 2018; Taras et al., 2016). Therefore, culture may be shared by people within social groups who share values, but not necessarily geography.
Biological evolution has yielded not only individuals who can “adhere to group norms” (Lopez et al., 2015, p. 52), but also has shaped several regions of the brain that are known to regulate social behavior (O’Connell & Hofmann, 2010). Biological evolution suggests that adaptions spread throughout a social group, but it is evident that people vary in the number and speed with which they adopt adaptations. In the 20th century, scholars suggested everyone within a culture shares the same norms or values, creating cultural universals—the idea that an extremely successful adaption to the environment should manifest in all individuals (Nisbett et al., 2001). More recently, however, scholars have observed many differences within cultures—“a large number of ‘basic’ cognitive processes” (Nisbett et al., 2001, p. 304). For example, some people survey the world—take in news—more than others, suggesting that variation in news consumption may result from both biological and cultural evolution (Van den Berg & Weissing, 2015). Scholars believe that the success of an adaptation such as surveillance is not only a function of its adoption by individuals, but also of its spread within the culture (Sefcek et al., 2015). Although some cognitive content (information received) results from innate processes and is shared by those within a culture, other cognitive content is “highly alterable” by the environment and culture (Nisbett et al., 2001, p. 303). Both biology and culture shape the brain and the way we think (Brekhus, 2015).
Shared cultural beliefs are called sacred values, “nonnegotiable preferences whose defense compels actions beyond evident reason, that is, regardless of risks or costs” (Atran & Sheikh, 2015, p. 401). Sacred values can be shared by people in both real (geographic areas or cultural regions) and imagined (social media networks) spaces. Individuals who share sacred values have strong connections with others in their in-group and see themselves competing with out-groups that do not share the same values. In-group members may be willing to make extreme sacrifices and to engage in deviant behaviors in defense of the group (Atran & Sheikh, 2015). People in such a group tend to fight for the ideas that define the group’s identity, especially if they perceive threats from opposite ideas. If group identity is defined by an idea, then groups with limited materiel power may be able to overcome groups with more power, such as money or social position (Atran & Sheikh, 2015).
For example, several groups that shared the idea of a stolen election, including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, helped organize and lead rioters who invaded and damaged the U.S. Capitol building in 2021. Members were joined not by money or power, but by the (false) idea that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. Ideology led people to drive long distances and risk arrest to fight for their culture and its values. Their actions generally were perceived by newsmakers as highly deviant—negative and emotion ridden. As a result, this one event generated a huge amount of news coverage, which continues years later.
The construct deviance, the extent to which an individual’s or group’s ideas and behaviors differ from those of the social group or larger culture, is part of several social science theories, including social learning theory, social control theory, labeling theory, and conflict theory (Kubrin et al., 2008). Deviance (especially when negative) is said to elicit an orienting response, the processing of which requires cognitive resources, such as attention. For example, drug use, crime and violence, prostitution, and sexuality have been used to marginalize individuals, defining them as near the boundary of acceptable behaviors or even outside of it. Theories of biological evolution treat both threats and rewards as deviant; whereas threats diminish the odds of sexual reproduction, rewards can enhance survival.
People consume deviant news to effectively survey the environment (Lee, 2008). Information about deviance travels interpersonally and through mass and social media; gossip about deviance can enhance social bonds (Peterson et al., 2018). Journalists frequently treat newsworthy people, ideas, and events as deviant, solidifying norms by spotlighting people and actions that are outside cultural boundaries. The deviance of events in news coverage varies dramatically, with terrorism getting the most prominent news coverage (Weimann & Brosius, 1991). The deviance of events enhances people’s memories of news stories and posts, because their content is associated with fear and anger (Pritchard & Hughes, 1997). If visuals are part of the news, content producers may see an event as more newsworthy (Golan, 2008). Emotion-laden visuals are more likely to elicit physiological changes in research subjects (Winkielman et al., 2011).
Cultures change when their frames—paradigms that we experience every day—are attacked, either from inside or out (Phillips & Milner, 2020). Stabilizing forces in a culture represent mainstream values and tend to reinforce existing frames. Catalyzing forces, which tend to come from the grassroots, try to subvert existing frames, often using media channels outside of the mainstream (Phillips & Milner, 2020).
Coevolution of Biology and Culture
Biological and cultural evolution interact, each affecting the other. The fact that much news covers deviance has roots in biological evolution—surveillance of environmental threats—but culture defines what is deviant. People, ideas, and events that are considered deviant in one culture may not be in others. News helps spread memes throughout cultures, sometimes destabilizing existing norms. Social neuroscientists, who study the nexus of biological and cultural forces, assert, “Humans are fundamentally a social species whose social environment has shaped our genes, brains, and bodies, and our biology has fundamentally shaped the social environments we have created” (Cacioppo & Decety, 2011, p. 3). The formation of social bonds is a function of neural connections between the brain’s cortex, amygdala, and brainstem. Humans need to belong to one or more social groups (Leotti & Delgado, 2011).
The development of human language was a major force in social interactions, being necessary to the formation of families, societies, and larger cultures. Changes in the brain are the result of both biological processes and people’s adaptations to the environment, but “social information can alter brain gene expression and behavior; furthermore, variation in behavior shapes the evolution of genomic elements that influence social behavior” (Robinson et al., 2008, p. 896). Social behaviors are actions that people use to ensure their reproduction and survival. Communication is fundamental to this process (Robinson et al., 2008), and language evolved biologically to become learnable within multiple cultures (Smith, 2011). Social cognition comes from knowledge and the acceptance of skills and values that people require to exist in their culture (Parr & Waller, 2011). For example, the ability to find information about the environment is a valuable skill in many social settings, including the use of social media, which “provide information about social interactions or important aspects of an environment” (Parr & Waller, 2011, p. 43).
Not only do biological and cultural evolution occur over time, but so also do social behaviors—adaptations, sharing values, finding information, defining who is inside or outside of the group, reading social media posts. In fact, none of the theoretical approaches I discuss here could exist without a temporal component. Creating theory about a process, such as communication, requires thinking about how time molds the process and is affected by it.
News and Time
In a metaphysical sense, we are immersed in time. We swim in it, as we do the ocean of air around us. Because time is invisible, we may not be aware of its relationships to us. Yet, time organizes our lives. Although the construct time is theoretically a continuous variable, in our everyday lives, we measure it crudely: past, present, and future; before and after; years, seasons, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds.
To Einstein, time was an inextricable part of multiple universes and of reality (Boyce et al., 2020). He talked about space and time as a continuum, and space-time continues to be important as others test his theory. To news makers, time is an adversary to be beaten, rescheduled, repeated, and recycled. Journalism is tightly bound with time. News has been organized in cycles that result in the discrete, scheduled discharging of information said to represent the important events of a specific time period, such as the day or week. The advent of the 24/7, always on, news cycle is essentially the continuous collecting, presenting and producing of information about events across time.
Time and Evolution
Although any change must be understood over time, theories of biological and cultural evolution by definition predict change over time. Human biological processes, such as cell division or metabolism occur across time, and time is crucial to any form of human development (Boyce et al., 2020), especially in childhood (Bateson, 2013). Even biologically innate reactions—such as jumping away when seeing a snake—are time-defined as before and after.
Darwin conceived of (biological) evolution as involving relationships among beings in a system over time (Boyce et al., 2020). The same could be said for the evolution of culture. Surveillance is continuous over time, but news about an event refers to multiple time periods, for example: before seeing the tiger, paying attention to it and deciding to take defensive measures, picking up a branch and lighting it with fire, threatening the tiger with fire, and either being eaten or chasing the tiger away, plus subsequent reactions to the outcome. Our thinking about an event, particularly a threatening one, is not linear and continuous, but instead relates to our memory of previous events (Brekhus, 2015). News is about the past, according to cosmological time, because the present flicks by before we are much aware of it.
Our ancient ancestors faced environments with many threats and conflicts, with the time period between recognition of the threat and the need for reaction being often very short, perhaps milliseconds to seconds (Boyce et al., 2020). Deciding how to respond to threats requires not only actively surveying the environment for information, but also cognitively processing it (Figueredo et al., 2015). People were more likely to survive if they remembered past conflicts with predators, because to remember is to relate the events of the past to the present in some time frame. People are more likely to remember information about a deviant event— be it a snake, tiger, or invading army—than they are about the usual, normative world (Shoemaker et al., 1991).
Time reveals its human aspects in narrative accounts of such events (Brekhus, 2015). Communication with others draws on our memory, whether news stories or gossip, and tends to have a nonlinear organization (Brekhus, 2015). For example, many news stories are not told chronologically: The news event’s climax—the most important information—generally precedes information about both the event’s beginning and ending. This is an outcome of the journalistic inverted pyramid style of news writing, adopted when newspaper type was made of molten lead. If a story had to be shortened, printers would literally saw off the least important sentences; and putting the least sentences at the end made this shortening easier. One outcome of this structure has been that readers do not understand events in terms of causes leading to effects and consequences (Shoemaker & Reese, 2014).
Although information can be organized in narrative, chronological, or inverted pyramid styles, the information in our memories of the past are influenced by not only past, but also present events. Present threats often draw on memories of highly deviant past events; the brain makes these most accessible because they are often previously overemphasized in memory and sometimes also distorted (Brekhus, 2015). Therefore, substantial news coverage of a deviant event may contribute to over-representation and distortion of similar events in memory. For example, if across time crime news stories are mostly about minority perpetrators, then the audience might conclude that people of color are more likely to be criminals. News stories emphasize deviance and ignore the primarily normative lives of the people they cover. Furthermore, if news from the past is similar to present-day news, then the past may affect both people’s understanding of the present and ideas about the future. People tend to organize specific memories to help them deal with the present.
Memory depends on social context, which includes both group contexts, such as organizations, nations, or political groups, and the values and norms associated with them (Brekhus, 2015). The assemblage of such patterns across time (Chadwick, 2017) is sometimes referred to as collective memory (Brekhus, 2015).
Comprehending cultural changes—which occur over time—is essential when studying the news or any other form of communication. In evolution, change occurs within a system of actors, with the patterns of change fluid across time. Changes in information processing take place over milliseconds to seconds, while changes in the cellular location of the brain’s genetic material can occur within minutes or hours. Biological evolution happens over years, even hundreds or thousands of years. Cultural evolution, on the other hand, can occur much more quickly, such as over years, but cultures can also change suddenly, as in the case of revolution. In contrast, changes in individuals within a culture can take months to years (Boyce et al., 2020).
Time and Media Routines
The term routine refers to normalized practices of information gathering and massaging within news organizations (Shoemaker & Reese, 2014). Changes in routines occur over a short time (such as the introduction of the internet as a news platform) or over decades (e.g., reductions in mass media audiences and the economic viability of local media).
Information circulates within the social and mass media across time among both elite and non-elite actors; for example, journalists and politicians tend to use information differently from most social media users. Many non-elites create, transmit, and consume information online, often from within the social media, advancing their own positions or trying to change those of various elites. With journalists increasingly using social media, opportunities have increased for social media users to influence them (Chadwick, 2017). Information can now move in multiple directions at both one point in time and over time. Before 2009, Facebook users’ content was organized chronologically, with the most current on the top. In 2009, the company gave people an opportunity to “like” and eventually “share” posts. Although the chronological timeline accurately reflected what was posted and when, Facebook began using an algorithm to rearrange posts according to the users’ like and share data. The timeline lost its connection to time.
Many aspects of the news process are connected to an element of time: Scoop a story (get to it first). Meet a deadline. What is the competition doing now? This is a developing story. Make that video shorter. When is that event scheduled? Why is the President late? Work faster. How long is that going to take? What is trending on social media now? How did Twitter beat us to the story? Our web page is getting stale. What time is it?
Although time is an important element of news, it is seldom acknowledged or used as a variable in news studies. We do not think much about time unless it is pertinent to our own lives, but we should. Experimental researchers use time as a variable in controlled experiments—pretests and posttests—but the low external validity associated with this method limits what experiments can say about time as a part of our lives, our realities.
News and Reality
Whereas time is familiar and we measure it regularly, the construct reality is less familiar. We speak loosely about the “real world” and “reality TV,” but we do not measure how real something is. Yet news is presumed to be related to reality—the notion that people and things in the news are actual and not imaginary, that a fact is truthful, and that our biological senses produce reliable information.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that reality was chaotic, with only our perceptions of things able to impose order on them (Critchley, 2020). Metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that deals with aspects of realism, considers beliefs in both the seen and unseen worlds. In contrast, science tends to study seen phenomena, although quantum mechanics theorizes that the world is made of tiny and, in the everyday world, unseen subatomic and quantum particles. The accumulation of all scientific knowledge is called scientific reality.
Our everyday understanding of reality may use both the metaphysical and scientific perspectives. People live in societies in which all manner of knowns and unknowns are defined. Each person’s cognitive reality is based on personal memory of interconnected bits of information, possibly influenced by science, religion, and/or other people and institutions. But each person in a social system is also connected to others, with interconnected interactions. These interactions result in a social reality that reflects the norms and values of the system. Whereas an individual’s cognitive reality (individual level of analysis) may differ from the experienced social reality (societal level), too much discrepancy between them results with society defining that person as deviant and an outsider.
News influences what we think about the world. Social reality is created as we communicate with each other, including seeing what others have posted. In contrast, preindustrial societies relied on interpersonal communication to establish the community’s values. This included not only facts about the world, but also cultural understandings of the relationships among the facts. For instance, who is an insider and who an outsider? What does it mean to be declared an outsider? Which ideas lie within the normative reality of the insider? Industrialization brought increased the physical movement of people between rural areas and the new cities, where people primarily lived among strangers. As a result, those who formerly were insiders lived in a new geographic and psychological space with different ethics and standards or even none at all. Lines of communication grew vertically from worker to worker to the employer, who got to largely define social reality.
The mass media were born from this anomic environment, providing information about the outside world, which was presented as the real world. The penny press of the 1800s offered content that appealed to the new middle class, primarily about deviant events. Gossip, sensationalism, and crime news sold newspapers, and advertisers made up the difference in income between a newspaper costing one cent and the elite newspapers, which charged more. In trying to meet the expectations of different audiences, as well as advertisers, these newspapers’ content created different views of the real world.
Mediated Reality
Media cannot represent the complexity and richness of any community or society, but they are often our only way of knowing about the world. If people could consume all media content—an impossible task—their understanding of the real world would still be limited. In any case, most people snack on only a smattering of the day’s media content, and this content is selected generally according to the views of people and their social groups. As a result, people’s existing values are reflected back to them from the media as if from a mirror, perhaps with a little new information added to justify the label news. Therefore, the reality presented by the media people chooses shapes people’s cognitive and social realities.
Mediated reality is the world view presented by news and entertainment media used by people. Media content is shaped not only by culture, but also by humans’ biologically innate desire for information about deviance, and according to the preferences of audiences. Actually, audiences are only a vessel to justify the price of ads that subsidize the content. Media economics shapes the view of the real world that is published.
The view of reality offered by the news media is both incomplete and distorted. The omissions are not random. Some topics are routinely covered by the news, such as crime or politics. Others are covered only when there is a related deviant event, and a few topics are emphasized far out of proportion to their actual frequency. For example, Zeigler-Hill et al. (2015, p. 9) state that “the world is a far less violent place today than it has been at any point in human history,” yet world news is frequently about violence. Of course, we expect violent events to be reported more because they are deviant and negative. In contrast, topics such as education are less often in the news unless they are associated with deviant events. For example, in January 2023, a 6-year-old boy shot his first-grade teacher. The shooting event was normatively deviant, whereas the age of the shooter was statistically deviant; the result was a series of mass media stories and social media posts over many weeks. Deviant events are far more likely to become news than those that are normative or routine.
Mediated pictures of the world are influenced by their content producers and outlets, which often have fiscal ties or ideological connections with social groups. Exposure to such media is deliberately selective. People look for content that reinforces their existing ideologies, norms, values, and so on, to avoid opposing content and thereby to avoid cognitive dissonance. Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance predicts that receiving competing messages puts people into a state of dissonance, a psychological or even physiological reaction of uneasiness. The theory predicts that people will try to alleviate dissonance, including exposing themselves only to reinforcing content “even if it requires reinventing reality” (Critchley, 2020, p. 131). Critchley (2020, p. 131) says that some supporters of former President Donald Trump have adjusted their realities, One person said: “I’m not a racist, and I wouldn’t support a racist. Therefore Trump can’t be a racist.”
What if the News Is Not True?
If a thing is said to be real, we expect it to be valid and truthful. Although news presents an incomplete picture, the news is not supposed to be imaginary or a constructed fiction. That said, reality is more complex than such a binary, true-false distinction can describe; and realities differ based on cognitions, emotions, experiences, and expectations—our own and those of people around us.
If people pay attention to news that contains misinformation, such as conspiracy theories, then their working memory may retain false information. Even if misinformation is shown to be false, people’s memories tend to retain the false information along with its correction. Once information—true or false—is in memory, it is difficult to change or delete it, especially if it is repeated frequently. “Repeated, catchy words and phrases capture our attention, lodge in our memory, take on a feeling of familiarity, and thereby gain our trust” (Critchley, 2020, p. 83).
When people read, view, and listen primarily to content that supports their ideas, both their individual cognitive reality and their group’s social reality are reinforced. If news content supports what we think, we assume it is valid and truthful, whereas we believe that wrong-headed people read, watch and listen to media that support their wrong thoughts. In stressful situations, such as highly contested elections, media create realities for “us” and “them,” and these tend to differ from one another. Only an objective observer can say whether different realities are based on false information, and the concept of a totally objective observer is more idealistic than realistic.
Conclusion
Completing this essay has taken a long time, with much reading outside of my own field. Although I have learned much about these many academic disciplines, I am no neurophysicist, anthropologist, or biologist. Any errors in representing others’ work are mine alone. Moreover, I could write more; I collected boxes of resources for this essay that I did not use. Yet, this essay still represents the most comprehensive summary of my thoughts to date. Although the theoretical path I laid out makes intuitive sense to me, I also tried to represent my case in an adequate, linear fashion. Hopefully, it will pique the curiosity of news scholars and encourage some to explore beyond the usual boundaries of communication studies. As my mentor Steve Chaffee once said to me about other academic disciplines, “They’re all communication departments but don’t know it yet.” In my reading for this essay, I found that the concept information crosses most disciplines, and the study of communication is inherently multidisciplinary. Universities offer riches to the curious and to those who are not afraid of being scholarly outsiders.
I am especially hopeful that more thought is given to the constructs time and reality, which are precursors and outcomes of communication, as well as embedded in its processes and effects. Although the idea of a mediated reality is consistent with news analyses from post-Gutenberg times, to my knowledge, ideas about a mediated time (or a temporal media?) have not yet been proposed. And what about finding ways to measure reality?
We live within news nearly as much as we do time: it is everywhere. If you include at least some social media content as news, as I do, then we cannot escape it. My mother hated news; the propensity of bad news made her anxious. I have no doubt that when bad news is rampant, such as following a terrorist event, public anxiety increases. A sudden environmental threat elicits innate reactions, such attention and changes in blood pressure; consistent exposure to lots of bad news can lead to depression and anxiety and a view of the world as broken. As a result, I propose that the bad news surrounding us is itself an environmental threat. While certain periods (during war, e.g.) bring lots of bad news, the amount of negative information being offered has never been greater. Bad news found a home in the mass media, but negativity thrives in the social media. The internet is not to blame, but it has been used as a vehicle for despair and anger.
Our reactions to horror movies are not unlike our feelings when watching videos of airplanes toppling a skyscraper or rioters invading and damaging the Capitol. Although our brain’s cortex interprets what we see on our devices and tells us that we (probably) are not in danger, such as lurking rioters and terrorists, we still must confront environmental threats that loom ahead—threats to culture, the political system, the economy, and health; and those are just a few examples. No one’s media exposure is selective enough to avoid bad news.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.