Gatekeeping
Controlling which information reaches the audience by controlling the channel it must pass through, so that what is withheld never has to be argued against.
Every channel has a gate: an editor, a license, a platform, a press office, a distributor. Whoever holds the gate decides what passes, and the audience on the far side sees only what did. The device is the use of the gate for advantage. It is quieter than censorship in its classic form, because nothing is banned; things are simply not selected, not accredited, not distributed, not answered.
David Manning White named the mechanism in 1950 by studying one wire editor, "Mr. Gates," and the reasons he gave for the stories he spiked. Later research showed that gates are institutional, not personal, and that the most effective gatekeeping produces an audience that does not know what it has not seen. Exploits Availability Heuristic and the absence of any signal that something is missing.
Historical examples
The Defense of the Realm Act of 1914 and the Press Bureau gave the government a gate on war news: correspondents were excluded from the front for the first year, dispatches were vetted, and the casualty lists that would have conveyed the scale of the Somme were managed. The public learned the shape of the war from what was let through.
Knightley, Phillip. The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004; Taylor, Philip M. Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
White's study of a Midwestern wire editor's decisions over one week found him rejecting nine-tenths of the copy he received, often on personal grounds ("propaganda," "not interesting"), and gave the field the term gatekeeper. Shoemaker and Vos later traced the gates through the whole chain from source to audience.
White, David Manning. "The 'Gate Keeper': A Case Study in the Selection of News." Journalism Quarterly 27, no. 4 (1950): 383–390; Shoemaker, Pamela J., and Tim P. Vos. Gatekeeping Theory. New York: Routledge, 2009.
In advertising and commerce
Retail chains that decide which magazines reach the checkout, app stores that decide which applications reach the phone, and platforms whose recommendation systems decide which posts reach the feed each hold a gate the audience cannot see past. Studies of platform moderation and ranking have documented decisions made for commercial or political advantage that were invisible to users as decisions.
Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
Find a story that is widely reported in another country and barely reported in yours. Who decides what gets reported here? What might their reason be?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
After a critical report, the paper's reporter was denied accreditation to the ministry's briefings; friendly outlets kept theirs.
What to notice. The channel is controlled by selecting who may pass through it; nothing is formally banned.
The chain that sells 60% of the region's magazines declined to stock the issue with the investigation.
What to notice. A distributor's gate decides what the public can find, without a word of argument against it.
"That story isn't in the public interest," said the press officer of the company the story was about.
What to notice. The interested party operates the gate and describes the gate as a public service.
Sources
- White, David Manning. "The 'Gate Keeper': A Case Study in the Selection of News." Journalism Quarterly 27, no. 4 (1950): 383–390.
- Shoemaker, Pamela J., and Tim P. Vos. Gatekeeping Theory. New York: Routledge, 2009. ISBN 978-0415981392
- Knightley, Phillip. The First Casualty. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0801880308
- Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0300173130