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Interest in News and the Selection of Sources*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
Extract
Radio's pre-eminent position as a medium of news is one factor often mentioned as tending to ensure its continuing vitality. There are indeed no reasons for questioning radio's present advantages in that field. First among these, though perhaps only temporarily, is the elementary fact that radio, as compared with television, enjoys nearly universal coverage. Well over 95 per cent of all households in Canada have radios but not quite 50 per cent have television. Moreover, radio has a certain flexibility in reporting news. It can provide up-to-the-minute bulletins more frequently and more quickly than the newspaper, and it can be set up for on-the-spot coverage where access via television would be much more difficult, costly, and time-consuming. The greater flexibility of radio also stems from the way it is used: newscasters do not have to choose between news value and picture value when covering or selecting a story. Finally, there is the great advantage over print that radio shares with television: the listener is given less opportunity to evade the actual content of the news than the newspaper reader, who is free to ignore items dealing with “serious” news if these fail to interest him. Furthermore, the amount of attention given to items in radio news bulletins, even if exposure is casual and non-deliberate, is determined more by the presentation than by the dispositions of the listeners.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , November 1956 , pp. 535 - 545
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1956
Footnotes
*
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the C.B.C. and its Director of Audience Research, Mr. N. M. Morrison, for permission to use the data from this C.B.C. survey.
References
1 The latest count puts the figure for radio at 96.4 and the figure for T.V. at 47 per cent. Canada, D.B.S., Survey of Household Facilities and Equipment, Sept., 1955.
2 A national survey in the United States showed that 67 per cent of the respondents credited the newspaper with being the “most complete” source, but 94 per cent credited radio for giving the news most quickly. Cf. Lazarsfeld, P. F. and Field, H., The People Look at Radio (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1946), 41.Google Scholar
3 A study undertaken in the late thirties in the United States offers figures that result in a strikingly identical ratio: cf. Lazarsfeld, P. F., Radio and the Printed Page (New York, 1939), 232.Google Scholar But later surveys have shown that this figure fluctuates considerably. Cf. Lazarsfeld, P. F. and Kendall, P., Radio Listening in America (New York, 1948), 34.Google Scholar
4 Campbell, A. et al., “Television and the Campaigns,” Scientific American, CLXXXVIII, 1953, 46–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 The Importance of Radio in Television Areas Today, a nation-wide survey by Alfred Politz Research, Inc. (n.d.), 34. T.V. saturation of the sample was 72 per cent.
6 Stouffer, S. A., Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties (New York, 1955).Google Scholar
7 According to the listening diaries, fewer than 2 per cent failed to qualify by this criterion. But with only a 50 per cent return, it is more likely that this figure somewhat underestimates the proportion.
8 Analysis not here reproduced showed that this conclusion is indeed correct.
9 This corroborates a conclusion of Lazarsfeld, drawn from his observation of the relatively greater similarity of news listening compared with newspaper reading among different strata of the population. Radio and the Printed Page, 227.
10 The term “serious” is of course an invidious one. As used here, it is intended to suggest an interest in “cosmopolitan” news about national and world affairs, public policy, scientific and cultural achievements, etc., as distinct from news about the neighbourhood, personalities, and so-called “human interest” news about tragedy and good fortune.
11 Schramm, W. and White, D. M., “Age, Education, and Economic Status in Newspaper Reading,” Journalism Quarterly, 06, 1949.Google Scholar
12 The proportion is extremely unreliable as it is based on only nine respondents.
13 Interest, Information, and Attitudes in the Field of World Affairs (a survey conducted in the Albany, N.Y., metropolitan area by the Survey Research Center, University of Michigan, Nov., 1949), 18. Lazarsfeld and Field, The People Look at Radio, chap. v. These studies bear out the relationship between interest in serious news and preference for print. An analysis of listening to this national radio news feature in relation to such other factors as daily news listening, amount of radio listening, and “media preference” (not included here) points to an explanation for this exception. Briefly, the radio news habit is such that the supplementary functions it fulfils seem equally well served by other news programmes, if these are more conveniently scheduled.
14 Cf. Graham, Saxon, “Cultural Compatibility in the Adoption of Television,” Social Forces, 12, 1954.Google Scholar Graham found that the adoption of T.V. was related to steady radio listening, and the rejection of T.V. to reading serious non-fiction.
15 The tradition was undoubtedly established also by such dramatic episodes as the Lindbergh kidnapping, during which radio ran well ahead of the paper in bringing the news. But T.V. news stories may well displace radio in all but a few instances, as they did, for example, during the campaign in the United States (Campbell et al., “Television and the Campaigns”).
16 According to one survey conducted in New York, a majority of respondents believed that television rather than radio or the newspaper brought the news most quickly. (Private communication.)
17 Beville, H. M., “The Challenge of New Media,” Journalism Quarterly, 03, 1948.Google Scholar
18 Both Lazarsfeld, Radio and the Printed Page, and Schramm, W. and Huffer, R., “What Radio Means to Middleville,” Journalism Quarterly, 06, 1946 Google Scholar, present evidence that the acceptance of radio is higher among young people who grew up with radio than among the older generation. See also Meine, F. J., “Radio and the Press among Young People” in Radio Research 1941, ed. Lazarsfeld, P. F. and Stanton, F. N. (New York, 1941), 189 ff., on the vitality of print in the face of such changes.Google Scholar