Gatekeeping

  

 

    Imagine living in a world where we have access to massive amounts of information and content, but we have to look through all of it to decide what is real and fake. One source tells us that President Biden is the second coming of Gandhi, while another source says Biden makes Mussolini seem reasonable. Most Americans simply do not have the energy, nor the time to go sort through all of this different information to find the truth. Instead, we give agency to people in the media to go through all of these different news stories and pick which ones they feel are relevant and need to be brought to the people's attention to keep them informed. This idea is known as the Gatekeeping Theory. The Gatekeeping Theory was first introduced by German psychologist Kurt Lewin who was interested in how a person understands their own world through memories, desires, and goals. Lewin found that while men were thought to make the decisions of the household, women decided what food would be brought into the house. He described this as there being several different food items. Decisions have to be made of what food should be purchased and what food should be left at the store. There is a figurative gate where the item is moved through when it is being decided if the item is going to be purchased or not. The movement is determined by the person making the decision. This makes the person deciding on the items the gatekeeper, picking what to bring home and what to put back. How food ends up on the dinner table was the basis for Lewin's theory. In 1950, author David Manning White released his book The “Gate Keeper”: A Case Study in the Selection of News, which took Lewin's gatekeeping theory from the kitchen to the news. White created a study to analyze how many stories the news media covered in one week. He found that the majority of stories sent in were rejected for being irrelevant and not what the outlet wanted to cover. White concluded that the stories picked were "highly selective" and very influential. 

    Pamel Shoemaker and Boris Johnson describe gatekeeping as "the process of culling and crafting countless bits of information into the limited number of messages that reach people everyday, and it is the center of the media's role in modern public life. This process determines not only which information is selected, but also what the content and nature of the message, such as news, will be." There is a process that determines the gatekeeping model. Information travels through channels. How many channels and for how long info is in each channel varies. Information has to pass a gate to move from one channel to another. Forces impact the channels. Opposing forces create resistance which can impact movement through the channels. Several channels can lead to the same result. Different people can control the channels and act as gatekeepers.

    It seems like gatekeeping is an essential and positive tool used to filter out irrelevant information for us. People are hired to do a job that we do not have the time to do. We should be able to hear about all the important issues going on in the world from Covid to war. However, we have to account for the fact that the people going through the information and picking out what we should see have their own biases that will reflect their views and the views of the company they work for. An editor working for CNN is going to pick topics to cover that are completely different from an editor working for Breitbart. It is impossible to avoid bias. Anyone who says they are going to be objective in picking news for us to see is lying. They have an agenda that they are trying to highlight. This chart shows the political leanings of all the major online and television news sources. They are going to pick issues that support their side. The Daily Beast will choose to cover a story about how Governor Ron DeSantis' Covid policies are killing people but fail to mention how Florida is now one of the states with the least amount of infections in the country. This is done because saying that DeSantis is killing people appeals to the narrative and people who read the Daily Beast. The Daily Beast has no incentive to report about how cases are down in Florida. Their viewers do not want to hear it so they filter it out before we can see it. Who suffers from the biased and political ways gatekeepers decide what information people see? We do.

    The implications of the biased ways media are presented to society are profound. The idea of a gatekeeper was to present us with the truth without us having to do all the research ourselves. However, if both sides are presenting different versions of the truth then we have no idea who to believe. It opens us up to propaganda from whoever we are listening to at the moment. It helps further the political divide we are facing as a nation. The people who watch MSNBC are going to continue believing that all Trump supporters are racists because all the information they see about his supporters paints them in a negative light. Viewers of Fox News will think all Biden supporters are woke, snowflakes because of the stories Fox News shows them. If the country continues to have gatekeepers with their own agendas, the political divide will continue to grow. Different populations are impacted by biased gatekeepers. The rich will think that the poor do nothing but complain about them, while the poor will say that the rich do not pay their fair share of taxes. 

    Old people will continue to get their information from television. They might not think or realize they are being manipulated by the content they are allowed to see. An older person might believe everything they see in the news because they never considered could be being lied to. Younger people might think like Hillary Clinton, that we need more gatekeeping. Young people seem to be on board with wanting more censorship, so they might appreciate gatekeepers cracking down even more on dissenting speech. Gay people might consume media that tells them they are hated by large parts of the country, while some straight people could consume media calling gay people the worst people on earth. Minorities can be inundated with the idea that they are oppressed and that all white people in the country are racist and are trying to harm them. Caucasians can consume news that paints minorities as bad people who are being given opportunities they do not deserve because of the color of their skin. Agenda-driven gatekeeping affects me, my friends and family, and society as a whole because of the division it causes. Conflict is good for businesses and politicians. It can be aruged that they want us fighting. It gives them more power to create a narrative where there are good people and bad people. I do not know how we combat the issue of biased gatekeeping. Most people simply do not have the time to research different issues from multiple perspectives to find the truth. Our best option to stop us from being torn apart as a society is to have people who are willing to call out both sides when they lie to us. This way we might know if we are being deceived by the media. It might not work but it is the best way to hold gatekeepers accountable to do the job they were hired to do, filter out unimportant information to keep us informed on what is going on in the world.