Although part of Dr. Bregha's paper related specifically to my own area of interest, where he discussed 'ineffective media coverage' as a barrier to information transmission, I want to deal initially with Prof. Nelson's distinction between synoptic and pluralist. I found, on reading this paper, that it was inadvertently but strikingly relevant to news media.
As Prof. Nelson states at the outset of his paper, the synoptic or rational approach to the problem under discussion implies that 'institutional arrangements can be rather readily divided into those that are barriers and those that are favorable to a better flow of information.' He opposes this to a pluralist perspective where 'institutional arrangements are not viewed as machinery or technology' but as 'learned behaviour, much of which is ultimately beyond accurate technical analysis and portrayal and so precise understanding and design.'
It occurred to me, as I read this, that news media, in their structure and working methods, often provide striking examples of the synoptic approach. This is not to say that the pluralist approach is not present at all in news media but it exists as a kind of subversive underground movement at war with the dominant synoptics, if I can use that term to describe media owners and a majority of senior news personnel.
To those who have worked in them, or to the rare individuals who have studied them objectively [1], among the most apparent characteristics of news media are their hierarchical structure and authoritative management style. This is particularly true of North American newspapers. The image of the tough editor remains powerful in newspaper journalism. In 1986, an American media scholar wrote that 'few values are as strong in American journalism as toughness' [2]. From the moment they enter a newsroom, young journalists are fitted into a system that rewards obedience, conformity and productivity.
Journalists take their cue from salaried editors and publishers who conform to the dictates of media owners. How little room for independent manoeuvre is allowed even to the editor of a major daily newspaper is evident in the recent memoirs of Senator Richard J. Doyle, editor of The Globe and Mail for 20 yr before his retirement in the early 1980s [3]. When push comes to shove, the pages of a newspaper belong to its owner. Doyle appeared to see his primary role on the Globe as being not a leader but a mediator between various publishers and his staff of journalists.