Michael Schudson, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego, and Professor, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University.

At meetings I have attended that bring together journalists and social scientists, the scholars insist that news is a social construction, that journalists and the organizations they work for make news. The journalists, horrified by what they take to be a slander, insist that, no, they just report what they see. For a long time I thought the journalists were na ve. Now I have come to think it is the scholars who are naïve.

Of course, news is socially constructed. In this the scholars are correct. Journalists make news. But they do not make it up. News is socially constructed, but it is constructed out of Something, not out of whole cloth. And the Somethings that journalists are most sensitive to and responsive to and that scholarship has barely begun to think about are what we call events. Journalists respond to events that they often have not anticipated and do not understand. Their task is to fit those events into comprehensible categories and to narrate them in comprehensible ways, to tame them, to socially reconstruct them, if you will.

But they fail. Events are too cunning for journalists or for any of us. That is why they remain interesting, remarkable, newsworthy. Media critics often urge journalists to be more attuned to long-term social forces and less obsessed with the events of the past 24 hours. I admire long-form journalism, the analytical piece that takes a deeper look, but at the same time I believe the event-centered-ness of American journalism is one of its saving graces: events are one of the things that prevent both states and markets from taming and controlling the news. A fundamental truth about journalism that all journalists recognize but almost no social scientists: things happen. Not only do things happen but, as a familiar U.S. automobile bumper sticker says, shit happens. That is what provides a supply of occurrences for journalists to work with. Shit even happens to the rich and powerful and it makes for a great story when it does. Shit happens to Bill Clinton. Shit happens to George W. Bush and it turns up on the front page.

Because shit happens, journalists gain some freedom from official opinion, professional routines, and conventional wisdom. Journalism, as an event-centered discourse, is more responsive to accidents and explosions in the external world than to fashions in ideas among cultural elites. The journalists sense of themselves as street-smart adventurers in places where people don't want them has an element of truth to it and it is very much linked to event-centeredness.[1]

Journalists make their own stories but not from materials they have personally selected. Materials are thrust upon them. A preoccupation with unpredictable events keeps something uncontrollable at the forefront of journalism. The archetypal news story, the kind that makes a career, the sort every reporter longs for, is unroutinized and unrehearsed. This gives journalism its recurrent anarchic potential. And it is built into the very bloodstream of news organizations, it is the circulatory system that keeps the enterprise oxygenated.

All of us want to tame the anarchy of events. The entire insurance industry rests on this desire. So does the legal institution of contract, the long-term fixed-interest home mortgage, the rules of protocol in diplomacy, the practice of etiquette in formal and informal social behavior, the elaborate coaching and training it takes to produce a concert violinist, an actor on a stage, or a professional athlete.  Presidents and prime ministers practice answering questions before news conferences. We live by these institutions and conventions, endure this schooling and coaching, steel ourselves for performance, all to make our lives more predictable and more controlled.

People outsource some of this event-taming activity to journalists. How do journalists tame the raw material that confronts them on a daily basis, the anarchy of events in the world, the daily renewal of accidents, events, dramas, and incidents that yesterday could not have been predicted? True, we all knew yesterday that today would bring homicides, house breakings, and natural disasters, but we could not predict who or where or any of the details. Sports reporters know ahead of time that a horse race will produce one story of triumph and eight or nine of disappointment and defeat, but they cannot say which horse will be the subject of which narrative.

So how do journalists handle the anarchy of events? There are two kinds of answers to this question. The first answer is that journalists organize their work lives to manage events. They do this in a variety of well recognized ways, most notably by establishing on-going relations with politicians and public bureaucracies, from the police department to the coroner's office to the public information officers and press secretaries at city hall, the leading hospitals and universities, and so on. News-gathering on a daily basis means maintaining contact with the organizations that most reliably produce useable items of news and cultivating relations with those sources that are closest to and most knowledgeable about the regular news-makers. The telephone, even in the age of the Internet, is the indispensable tool.[2]

The second answer is that journalists handle the anarchy of events by depending on available cultural resources, the treasurehouse of tropes, narrative forms, resonant mythic forms and frames of their culture. They assimilate the new, apparently novel, unique, unprecedented event to the familiar old ways of understanding the world. A car is a horseless carriage. The Internet is a digital town hall meeting or an information superhighway or an electronic frontier.

Efforts to fit the news to an old literary or journalistic trope, critics routinely argue, are inappropriate. They simplify. They force us to communicate through stereotypes. They prematurely fit the actors on the scene into white hats and black hats. This is the argument, for instance, advanced in Elisabeth Anker's Journal of Communication paper on the melodramatic reporting of September 11 on Fox News. Anker offers a lucid account of what melodrama is and then shows by a close analysis of one hour of Fox News that Fox presented Al Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington melodramatically, fostering a Manichean view of the world in which Islamic terrorists represent evil and the World Trade Towers represent America's innocence and victimhood. Anker objects to this. For her, it oversimplifies. It prevents thoughtfulness. For Anker, we must begin to question the seductions of this national self-understanding that feeds on an attachment to victimization and generates vengeful heroism. [3]

Anker chooses not to criticize the seductions of radical Islam s self-understanding that fed on an attachment to victimization and generated vengeful heroism. She treats Al Qaeda's attack as an entirely neutral or ambiguous event that Fox News prematurely turned to melodrama, reflecting and reinforcing a dangerous American self-understanding.  But the attack on 9/11 was not an earthquake or tsunami. It was a human act, painstakingly planned over a period of years. It was generated by a profoundly Manichean world-view. Osama bin Laden takes the gold medal as the contemporary world's most successful purveyor and performer of melodrama. The event suggested melodrama more than the availability of melodrama among our cultural categories froze the event into the form in which it is  routinely narrated.

Anker implies that melodrama is how the American media see and inappropriately see the world. But journalists tell non-Manichean stories all the time. Is Ariel Sharon good or bad? Hero or villain? Vladimir Putin? Tony Blair? Jacques Chirac? Hosni Mubarak? The U.S. news media do not present any of them in melodramatic terms. Sports reporting has heroes but rarely enemies. Human interest stories often draw our attention to ironies and oddities and phenomena that betray our expectations, but they, too, rarely offer up enemies.

Reporting immediately after 9/11 did tend to what I have called a journalism of solidarity rather than a journalism of detachment.[4]  It did tend to divide the world into us and them. Fox was not alone in its melodramatic imagination. In leading news organizations, however, this was not a permanent or even a long-term condition. The New York Times, for instance, was back to reporting as usual before the end of September, 2001. On Sept. 28 the Times reported that Democrats and Republicans were arguing with each other in Congress about what measures were appropriate for fighting terrorism; a columnist attacked the new national hero, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, for his plan to remain as mayor for three months past the end of his term; the lead editorial condemned the mayor for this terrible idea; a story reported that downtown Manhattan residents were moaning to city bureaucrats about delays in restoring them to their homes and offices; a front-page story pulled together the scattered but scary cases where dissenters had been criticized or in a few instances had lost their jobs amidst patriotic fervor; another story told how Japanese-Americans in San Francisco, remembering the internment camps of World War II, spoke out on attacks against Arab-Americans; and still another story reported on other Americans devising charity scams to exploit the post-9/11 generosity of their fellow citizens. All of this in a single day s paper! Conflict, back-biting, back-stabbing, power-grabbing, all the low-down of politics, the selfish, struggling, thieving ignorance of our fellow citizens, with the occasional heroes among them it was wonderful to have all this again breaking through the surface of patriotic unity. It is not possible to read this one issue of the nation's most influential newspaper and still believe that the American media are drenched in a nationalistic, self-justifying melodramatic imagination.

Why did Fox News select melodrama as its cultural resource on the evening of September 11, 2001? Other news stories draw on other cultural resources. What other cultural categories or frames lie on the shelf, ready for use? Irony is one familiar narrative device in the news. Media scholar James Ettema recounts the ironic framework used throughout the mainstream American media in covering the 1992 killing of Yoshihiro Hattori.[5]  Hattori was a sixteen year old Japanese exchange student in Louisiana who, on Halloween, wearing a Halloween costume, walked up to the wrong house, and unintentionally scared the woman who answered the door. She screamed for her husband, he charged out with a .44 Magnum and shouted Freeze! Hattori, not understanding that this meant he should stand still and submit to further instructions, walked forward and the man shot him to death.

As Ettema shows, this senseless killing was presented as irony. As it was told and retold, it became the set-piece for a critique of American gun culture with the horrified Japanese responses from across the Pacific regularly and favorably included as part of the ongoing tale. Irony became the platform for American moral self-criticism. With 9/11, as the story was told and retold, occasional self-critical doubts arose (Why do they hate us so much?) stories but generally the melodrama remained overpowering.

Neither melodrama nor irony stands in for all American news. Why was 9/11 framed as melodrama and Hattori's murder as irony? Could it have been reversed? Could the media have played up the irony that devastation was wreaked upon the United States under the guidance of a man that the United States supported when he worked to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan? Could Hattori's story have been a melodrama of America protecting itself from invading hordes of Asian students? Or could it  more plausibly have been a melodrama of a sick American culture of violence victimizing innocent youths? There were, in fact, elements of the latter in the news coverage, but the remorse of Hattori's killer made it difficult. The killing may have ultimately been related to a gun culture but immediately it was related to a misunderstanding, and misunderstandings are always ironic. It is not easy to picture the Hattori story as melodrama or 9/11 as irony. Journalists did not have an unhindered choice to root among their cultural resources and select whichever one suited them. I think they naturally, without much thought, responded with the narrative frame that they believed fit the circumstances of the event before them.

The anxiety of journalistic storytelling is double. It is not only an anxiety to identify what the story is but to do so in a way that does not lose the audience. This is not a matter of ratings or market research. It is a matter of tacit knowledge and tacit learning, shared human sympathies as they exist in a given society at a given time. Consider the remarks of AP veteran Walter Mears, commenting on media criticism of 2004 campaign coverage. He writes, There are too many excursions into trivia, too much play for the public opinion polls, too many words about who's ahead and who's behind. There's a reason. That is what people want to know. I have never been asked at a cocktail party to describe the positions of the candidates on the balance of payments problem. I am always asked which candidate is going to win the election at hand. For Mears, the horse race story does not get in the way of policy discussion but is the one feature of elections that makes policy discussion possible and appealing. It seemed to me, he writes, that the competition between candidates every fourth year the horse race, if you want to use that terminology provided an opportunity to report on the competition between their ideas. Write about issues in the abstract and you have position papers that will go widely unread. Write about the race between rival candidates and rival issues, and you have copy that will draw readers. [6]  Elections are always attempts to simplify. They take persistent policy discussions, with no clear beginning and no clear end and many shades of gray and many variables and they bring it all down to a simple binary choice in two-party systems. (Multi-party elections also simplify, but not so completely.) It is not, in the end, a choice about policy but about leaders with a relationship to a set of issues. Democracy itself, not just news accounts of it, urge upon us stories of fateful rivalry.

I have written as if events are one thing out there in the world and telling about them in the media is a separate order of reality. This cuts against the grain of contemporary scholarship. And it is ultimately wrong because human perceptions and framings of the world do shape the world that then appears, by optical illusion to act independently upon us. Still, for most practical purposes, it is reasonable to believe that there are events in the world we can shape, distort, reinterpret, but not fundamentally change. President Kennedy was killed by an assassin. There are lots of ways to read this fact but none of them restore John F. Kennedy to life. He really died.

Almost all media criticism and much media scholarship is fueled in part by an indignation about the gap between reality as the author conceives it and the representation or reduction of reality in the media. Anker objects to the moral import of a news frame that is inconsistent with her moral and political preferences. Ettema judges as benign or perhaps even beneficial the moralization of a story consistent with his own moral preferences. He understands, as Anker does not, that news is a multi-genre cultural form that draws on various conflicting and disparate cultural resources, and that these resources enable journalists sometimes to shed a critical light on American institutions. Smug and self-aggrandizing coverage is not foreordained.

American journalists write melodramatically here, ironically there, comically somewhere else, reverently or piously in some other contexts. They make choices from a variety of narrative forms and conventions. The next task is to understand how they make these choices, to understand why melodrama seems to be almost inevitable here and irony almost irresistible there. I do not have the answer to this question. I only suggest that the answer will not be wholly independent of features that inhere in the reported events themselves.