EOTO Pt.2

A term I found most interesting in group 3’s terms was gatekeeping. The gatekeeping theory is the link between two inarguable facts, events occur everywhere all of the time and the news media cannot cover all of them. And so, when an event occurs, someone has to decide whether and how to pass the information to another person, such as a friend, an official, or even a journalist. Gatekeeping was one of many theories applied to the new doctoral-level academic field of communications, mass communication, and journalism in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, the first PhDs in communication were graduated. Many degree holders became university professors, expected to teach and study their new field. They were influenced by the theories that had been introduced by their doctoral faculty, who had come from the social sciences, especially psychology, sociology, social psychology, political science, and anthropology. So, it is no coincidence that gatekeeping’s father, Kurt Lewin, was a psychologist turned social psychologist. This interdisciplinary social science perspective broadened the study of mass communication beyond the narrow confines of professionally oriented journalism schools. Billions of events occur in the world each day, but only a few of them become news. The process through which this occurs is referred to as gatekeeping. Billions of events occur in the world each day, but only a few of them become news. The process through which this occurs is referred to as gatekeeping. Some is withheld and the rest is not unchanged, as if it were merely squeezed from a gatekeeping sponge.

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