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In the course of the past fifty years, gatekeeping has emerged as one of the most influential communication theories. Kurt Lewin (1947) was the first to use the term, and subsequent scholars based their work on his assertions in the context of different professional and academic environments. These scholars describe gatekeepers as individuals or organizations/institutions determining the volume and the type of information that can be consumed by an audience. David Manning White (1950) is credited with a seminal work in the field of media studies. White observed that the individual had significant authority in deciding what information should become public. Other researchers have scrutinized the role of individuals in deciding what information should pass the “gates” (Snider, 1967; Peterson, 1981; Singer, 1997; Hollifield et al., 2001; Cohen, 2002; Plaisance & Skewes, 2003; Dimitrova et al., 2003; Wanta & Craft, 2004).
Over the past sixty years, researchers have argued about the complexity of the gatekeeping process. Certainly, gatekeeping should be analyzed beyond the role of individuals/ gatekeepers. According to Dimitrova et al. (2003),
“Some practices that reduce uncertainty in making news decisions include: accepting the news definition of opinion leaders within a newsroom or on a particular beat; adopting of a group consensus through daily professional interaction; keying on output of a reference institution, such as the AP or The New York Times; accepting key sources’ definition of news; and using attitudes and values of reference groups other than those in the newsroom” (2003, p. 402).
Scholars have also turned their attention toward institutional environments and cultural settings and therefore toward macro analyses, rather than simply micro/individual analyses. For example, while explaining the development of the media sociology field, Reese and Ballinger (2001) argued that European researchers tended to favour macro analysis – institutions, societies, ideologies – in opposition to their American colleagues who routinely scrutinized individuals, and professional practices (2001, p. 641). The authors recommend a holistic research endeavour deriving different data – both qualitative and quantitative – at different levels, from individuals to societies/ ideologies.
In this context, one of the milestone studies, which observed individual/ gatekeepers within their work environments is Breed’s (1955) work “Social Control in the Newsroom.” Breed did not limit his observations to individual behaviours but rather investigated a process of professional socialization – how a journalist adapts to the organizational environment. Breed’s study is deemed significant conceptually as it reached profound conclusions on how a news organization acculturates its employees on what constitutes accepted and unaccepted professional behaviour. The study discovered that reporters were “sensing policy” and conformed to the cultural standards of the organization. These early gatekeeping projects were conducted in newspaper environments, but soon researchers turned their attention toward television (Berkowitz, 1990; Carroll, 1985) and then to the internet (Singer, 1998; Dimitrova et al., 2003).