COMM2210/UGEC2623 News and Society
Week 5 – News sources and journalistic objectivity
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Prof. Macau Mak
School of Journalism and Communication
Feb 4, 2026
1
From last week
• Political economy: emphasize that economic and political factors influence
news media in tandem
1. Media monopoly: more concentrated ownerships around the world
2. Market force: those who have purchasing power have a say
3. Advertising pressure: more intense competition, especially during the
digital media era
From last week
• Situation of Hong Kong
• Party-press parallelism in 1970s → journalistic professionalization (e.g.,
objectivity) in the 1980s
• The dual power structure from the 1980s to 1997
• Media ownership: “concentrated” not on the hand of single corporations, but
the group of business people with heavy business interests in the mainland
• Social and political capital brought to the owners
• Cable TV & Ming Pao: not a profit-making business to the owner?
• Allocative and operational control
• Market force and advertising pressure intertwined with the political force
• How has objectivity been practiced?
From last week
• Based on the political economy perspective,
Herman and Chomsky developed a
propaganda model explaining how public
consent is manufactured
• Five elements: ownership, advertising,
sourcing, flak, ideology
• How does the relationship between news
media and (official) sources shape the
manufacture of public consent?
1. Individuals
2. Routines
3. Organizations
News
4. Social institutions
production
5. Social systems
Medium
1. Individuals
2. Routines
3. Organizations
News
4. Social institutions
production
5. Social systems
Medium
Lecture outline
01
News sources
02
Journalistic objectivity
03
Tutorial 2 (Div A)
01
News sources
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How to handle the unexpected?
• Tuchman (1973): News production =
Routinizing the unexpected
• Journalism as a profession is consisted
of practices and routines, to fulfill
deadlines, publication needs, and the
“predictable unexpected events.”
How to handle the
unexpected?
• Examples
• Typification: Hard news, soft news,
developing news, continuing news, and
feature news
• Medium-specific: Fixed news categories
on newspapers (political news, financial
news, sports news), routinized news cast
(fixed time, fixed sequence)
• Standardized news editing process
• Prescheduled processing of news (e.g.,
obituary).
[Link]
How to handle the
unexpected?
• Examples
• Typification: Hard news, soft news,
developing news, continuing news, and
feature news
• Medium-specific: Fixed news categories
on newspapers (political news, financial
news, sports news), routinized news cast
(fixed time, fixed sequence)
• Standardized news editing process
• Prescheduled processing of news (e.g.,
obituary).
A 2000-word story in less than an hour?
[Link]
Another example:
Beat journalism
• Mark Fishman (1980)
• Beat system: Route reporters
exclusively through governmental
agencies and corporate bureaucracies
in their search for news
• “Beats” generally follows the
organizational arrangement of the
government (跟beat = 專注於某⼀政策局)
Another example:
Beat journalism
• Examples:
• Political reporters: legislative council
meetings
• Crime reporters: police
• Court reporters: lawyers, DoJ
• Medical reporters: Doctors, nurses,
scientists
• Perfect system?
• How about cultural and tech policies
some years ago?
The consequences of routinization of news
• Journalists’ decision making becomes more predictable
• Knowing how journalists do their work help external powerholders
manipulate them
• Especially when they serve as the sources to provide
information to journalists
Sources
• Leon Sigal (1973): Journalists work within
their own limitations, i.e., time and access to
information. News are not what journalists
think, but what their sources say
• Presumption of hierarchy (層級假定):
Knowns (people who have power, authority,
or exclusive access to resources) and
unknowns (ordinary people, minority)
Sources
• Sigal: 46.5% of the front pages of The
Washington Post and The New York Times
consisted of news provided by national officials
• 4.1%: reports of state and local government
officials
• 16.5%: originated from non-governmental
sources.
• This influences newspapers located outside of
Washington DC: follow the lead of “media
elites,” such as the wire services, the television
networks, The New York Times, The
Washington Post, etc.
• Fine to rely on authority if they are trustworthy.
But this is not the case on some occasions.
Watergate scandal
• US President Richard
Nixon (from the
Republican Party)
• Democratic National
Committee
[Link]
Watergate scandal
• In 1972, some burglars sought to
break into the Watergate complex
to surveil Democratic National
Committee
• Later on arrested
• Started as an ordinary crime
news story
• Veteran political reporters are not
interested in this story
Watergate scandal
• Two young reporters, Carl Bernstein
(joined in 1966) and Bob Woodward
(as an intern) from the local
newspaper Washington Post revealed
a potentially illegal White House
political espionage program
• Based on an anonymous source
• Got rebutted by other major news
outlets using sources from the White
House
• Presumption of hierarchy:
officials from the national
institution have higher authority
Watergate scandal
• But the revelation is also
attributable to the
presumption of hierarchy?
• FBI associate director
Mark Felt as the
anonymous source
• The authority of Felt
increases the
Washington Post’s
confidence in their
news coverage
Journalist-source relationship
• Important to understand the journalist-source relationship which affects
news production
• Matt Carlson (2009): Journalists often turn to outside sources to provide
evidence for their accounts (to be “objective”), instead of using their own
reportorial experience
• Three kinds of journalist–source relationship:
1. Symbiotic and mutually beneficial (Dancing),
2. Dominated by sources who set the definition of events and
problems (Dominating),
3. Incessant competition over the ability to shape news frames
(Dueling).
1. Mutual legitimation (Dancing)
• Benefits for the sources
• Have an effective and direct means to express their views
• Gain status through being used as a source
• Benefits for the journalists
• Complete a story more efficiently
• Gains authority through having access to authoritative sources
[Link]
1. Mutual legitimation (Dancing)
• Journalists’ structured reliance on a core set of sources → magnify
the significance of particular sources/powerholders
• This reliance is repeated across media organizations (“pack
journalism”)
2. Sources define the news (Dominating)
• Journalists’ reliance on attributions → end up systematically over-
accessing those in power
• The powerholders can offer information subsidies (訊息贊助) to
journalists
• These sources become the primary definers of the news
• Journalists are the secondary definers
• Reproduce the interests of the powerful by using their
interpretations in news stories
2. Sources define the news (Dominating)
• Lance Bennett (1990, 2011):
Indexing theory
• News media index implicitly to the
dynamics of existing political
debates among elites, reflecting
consensus and disagreements
about them
• Not necessarily among the
public
2. Sources define the news (Dominating)
• Political spinning: The practice that someone, especially in politics,
who tries to influence public opinion by putting a favorable bias on
information presented to the public or to the media
• Politicians, press officers, or public relation specialists.
• Not straight propagandists
• Examples: close-door policy briefing
[Link]
推?utm_campaign=non_native&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=01webshare
3. Competitive definers (Dueling)
• Journalists retain the control over the presentation of source
information in a news text
• Some journalists want to find out things which the primary
definers would rather keep quiet or when primary definers do
not always coincide
• Competitive definers
• Journalists vs. sources
• Sources vs. sources
3. Competitive definers (Dueling)
• Lee (2023): While the dueling perspective addresses the complexity
of news production in reality, it is conceptually less parsimonious
than dancing and dominating perspectives.
Any questions?
02
Journalistic objectivity
***
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From Week 2…
• The origin of objective reporting?
• The “information” model of the New York Times (compared to
partisan press and yellow journalism)
• The rise of telegraph and global news agencies (e.g., the
Associated Press)
• Not yet the major trend
• So when?
US journalism before and after WWI
• Before World War I, the U.S. journalists did not
think about the subjectivity of factual statements
provided by sources
• Experience of wartime propaganda and the rise
of public relations
• Many journalists lost faith
• Realized that the world they reported was
one that interested parties (e.g., the political
parties, PR practitioners) had constructed for
them to report
Schudson, M. (1981). Introduction. Discovering the news: a social
history of American newspapers (pp.3-11). Basic Books.
Journalists’ responses
1. Institutionalization in the newspapers
• Separating news reports and opinion
columns
• Proper identification of news sources in
news reports
2. Proposing the journalistic ideal of objectivity
• Be cool, rather than emotional, in tone
• Represent fairly each leading side
• Journalists in Hong Kong adopted the
objectivity ideal and related practices in the
1980s
To inform
Objectivity the public of
the truth
Ritual?
Procedure?
Objectivity as “strategic ritual”
• Gaye Tuchman (1972): Journalists use “strategic
ritual” to reduce uncertainties and protect
themselves from the risks of their work
• Challenging the notion that objectivity is a
purely objective and neutral approach to
reporting
• Rituals:
• Routine procedures which have relatively
little relevance to the end sought
• Symbolic meaning
• Adherence to the procedures is often
compulsive
• Examples: Bleeding patients to “cure”
fever in the 18 th century
Challenges in journalistic works
• Complex reality filled with conflicts
• What to present if the truth cannot
be determined?
• Deadline pressure
• Immediate decisions, no time for
detailed reflection
• Legal and reputation risks (libels, losing
readers and advertisers)
• Every story entails dangers for the
reporters and their organizations
• Objectivity as the means (or rituals) to
deal with these challenges
Three aspects influencing “objectivity”
1. Form
• The attributes of news and the procedures of news production
2. Content
• The notions of social reality applied in news coverage
3. Inter-organizational relationships
• Journalists’ experiences with the organizations/sources that
lead them to cover certain notions of social reality
[covered in the first half of this lecture]
1. Form: procedures of achieving “objectivity”
• Examples:
1. Presentation of conflicting possibilities
• Not favoring any source
2. Presentation of supporting evidence
3. Judicious use of quotation marks
• Removing journalists’ participation in
the story
4. Structuring information in a standard
sequence
• Inverted pyramid; 5W1H style
1. Form: procedures of achieving “objectivity”
• By doing all these, a reporters can claim they are “professional” and
withstand external pressure.
Exceptions
• Sports news: When the national
team win major tournaments
• Humanities concerns
• Patriotism
• The previous examples indicate that there are some occasions or
issues that reporters are not expected to be objective or neutral.
• Thus, content (i.e., what issue is covered) also influences the
practice of “objectivity”.
2. Content: social reality for different issues
• Daniel Hallin (1986) proposes a theory of news reporting
with the conception of three spheres (also called the
Hallin’s spheres)
• Sphere of consensus: Journalists assume everyone agrees
• Examples: saving children; “bloody” killer
• Sphere of legitimate controversy: Standard political
debates that journalists expected to report neutrally
• Examples: abortion rights, immigrant policy
• Sphere of deviance: Controversies fall outside of the
bounds of legitimate debate, so that can be ignored.
• Examples: outright racism
Discussion
• Let’s apply the Hallin’s spheres to the context of
Hong Kong. In groups of 4–5, spend 10 minutes
discussing:
a. Identify one issue that falls within the
sphere of consensus.
b. Identify one issue that falls within the
sphere of legitimate controversy.
c. Identify one issue that previously belonged
to the sphere of deviance but has moved
into the sphere of legitimate controversy
d. Identify one issue that previously belonged
to the sphere of legitimate controversy but
has moved into the sphere of consensus
[Link]
Hallin’s spheres and criticisms on journalists
• The evaluation about whether an issue belongs to the sphere of
consensus, legitimate controversy, or deviance
• Follows the debates among the political elites or among the
general public?
• Related to public’s criticisms on journalists’ work
Hallin’s spheres and criticisms on journalists
• Example: global warming in the U.S.
• The strategic rituals does not necessarily shedding light on facts
and could become excuses of controversy avoidance → being
criticized as providing “false balance”
• Producing information far away from truth
Is “objectivity” good?
• By nature, objectivity—understood as the pursuit of truth and
fairness—is a valuable ideal.
• The key is to remain reflective about whether the procedures used
to achieve “objectivity” genuinely bring us closer to that goal, or
instead move us further away from it.
Any questions?
Summary
• Tuchman: News production = routinizing the unexpected
• Typification, routinized news cast, standardized editing process,
prescheduled processing, beat journalism
• Sources
• Sigal: presumption of hierarchy
• Carlson: three types of journalist-source relationship
• Mutual legitimation; dominated by sources; competition
• Objectivity
• In response to wartime propaganda and public relations
• Tuchman: objectivity as “strategic ritual”
• Form; content; inter-organizational relationships
• Hallin’s spheres: consensus; legitimate controversy; deviance
Next week
• Tutorial 2 for Division B!
Censorship
• Lee, F. L. F., & Chan, J. M. (2009). The organizational production of self-
censorship in the Hong Kong media. International Journal of Press/Politics, 14,
112-133.
• Koo, A. Z. X. (2024). The evolution of self-censorship in Hong Kong online
journalism: Influences from digitalization and the State. The International
Journal of Press/Politics, 29(1), 143-163.
Tutorial 2 for Division B (next week)
• Explain 1-2 potential project topic(s)
• Background of the topic(s)
• Significance of conducting a research on the topic(s)
• Preliminary research plan (methodology, sample)
• No need to prepare slides!
03
Tutorial 2 (Division A)
***
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Tutorial 2 (this week)
• Explain 1-2 potential project topic(s)
• Background of the topic(s)
• Significance of conducting a research on the topic(s)
• Preliminary research plan (methodology, sample)
• 3-5 minutes
Tutorial 3 (next time)
• Prepare to talk about:
• Your final project topic
• Research plan
• Dataset/sample involved (estimated number)
• Access to data?
• Timeline for data collection and analysis
• Around 5 minutes
See you next week!
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