Gatekeeping.docVIP

Gatekeeping theory: An evolution Chris Roberts Doctoral Student The University of South Carolina chrisrob@ Presented August 2005 Communication Theory and Methodology Division Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication San Antonio, Texas ABSTRACT: Gatekeeping theory, one of the original theories to come from mass communication research, has remained important since its debut shortly after World War II. While not necessarily the most interesting or controversial of mass communication theories, a series of scholars has advanced it during the past decades. The foremost gatekeeping scholar today says the theory remains relevant, and the emergence of “weblogs” has returned gatekeeping to the forefront of research considerations. Gatekeeping Theory: An Evolution 2 Gatekeeping theory: An evolution Because of Winn-Dixie1, mass communication has a theory of gatekeeping. Not the Florida-based retailer specifically, but the food business plays a minor role in the development of the theory that considers how mass media whittle（削减） the large number of available messages into the select few offered to an audience. What started with German émigré Kurt Lewin’s experiments to entice Iowa women to eat more beef (hearts, livers, kidneys, and other secondary cuts of meat) as a patriotic duty during World War II (Rogers, 1994) has evolved into numerous models and hundreds of studies of media gatekeepers and gatekeeping – and into contemporary study of whether the Internet has turned solid “gates” into little more than screen doors. As will be discussed in this paper, gatekeeping models have become increasingly sophisticated as theorists consider wider ranges of the external pressures on gatekeepers and the internal characteristics of the individual gatekeepers and the system that employs them. Moreover, gatekeeping theory has contributed to theories of social control and agenda setting. Other researchers have spent the succeeding decades defining and refining the orig