Critical realism and news production

Abstract

Critical realism provides a fresh viewpoint concerning news production. The prevailing typology in the sociology of news production is critiqued and supplemented by a distinction between extraneous factors constraining journalists and internal factors deriving from journalists themselves. While approaches focusing on extraneous factors are implicitly realist, the philosophical underpinnings of approaches focusing on internal factors are varied, with the result that anti-realist interpretations of news are prone to be made. To counteract this, realist accounts of the internal factors of news values and routine journalistic practices are provided. This enables a unified realist approach to news production. The implications of such a realist analysis for understanding news as a representation of reality are discussed.