What is important? What is news? One of the tasks of journalism is to choose what is news and what is not. ("Man bites dog" is a classic example, and that particular story does occur in the news once in a while.) News should give the audience a reference point, create a common knowledge, because people want to keep up with events and know enough to be critical of what they hear. That is actually a good criterion for what is news, or to measure news value: that many other people know about it (Löfgren 1995: 7, 16). An alternative is that many people ought to know; this is the basis for investigative reporting.
   Paul Grosswiler makes an important point on the selection of news: "By failing to portray blacks regularly and in the context of U.S. society, the news media contributed to racial disorder. Minorities are not covered except in times of crisis and are associated with problems of crime, drugs, and school dropouts." (Grosswiler 1995: 111) What we choose to present can affect our view of society in the same way as how we choose to present it (i.e. the language aspect, above). According to van Ginneken, the very first definition of a news event also tends to define much of the subsequent coverage (van Ginneken 1998: 113-114). This is related to the sensitizing process that Wallis and Baran described (above), and it shows the need for journalists to look for other angles--something which non-journalists may be less likely to do.
   Foreign news is particularly vulnerable to twists in journalism. "The media, in other words, can mould reality. We propose that the tendency to do this is greater with foreign than with domestic news events, since a) immediate response to inaccuracies is less common--foreign authorities trying to redress inaccuracies are less likely to have an impact than domestic authorities--and b) collecting correct information is often harder in a foreign country than at home." (Wallis & Baran 1990: 231) It would not be less so without journalists.
   Journalism has to deal with several problems that would definitely be just as big if people were supposed to find their information for themselves. "Groups and collective categories without titular leaders, such as 'the people' of El Salvador, are generally either missing from the news or represented by these same elites." (Pedelty 1995: 180)
   To many non-journalists, news is what is in the media--and because it is in the media, it is important. "Förenklat förefaller resonemanget vara att nyheter är sådant som står i tidningen, och sådant som står i tidningen är viktigt." (Löfgren 1995: 26) But to journalists, things that for some reason seem important are judged to be news and end up in the media. One crucial aspect of journalism is thus to find things that are important and that people should get to hear, since people do not (have the time to) do this for themselves. That coverage infers that an event is important can actually be considered one of the problems of journalism.
   Helena Löfgren's interviews show that the audience is sometimes not completely aware of what journalism is. Even CNN's ad agency produced an example of that, in an advertisement about the coverage of operation Desert Storm and the recent Gulf crisis: "In the end it became clear that CNN was the mouthpiece of no-one. It offered no interpretation of events." (CNN International 1998) That is not true and it would not be a good thing if it were. Offering an interpretation of events is the most important part of journalism, the very reason for journalism. Simply by putting together a news item about what is happening and why, the journalist is interpreting the event for the audience so that the event can be understood in the short time (or, in newspapers, small space) of the item.
   Levy wondered: "Had television news, and especially CNN, 'won' the journalistic war but lost forever its ability and desire to interpose editorial judgment between event and audiences?" (quoted in Bardoel 1996: 284) Now CNN seems to have answered that, even though "Ed Turner of CNN" had said: "We are chroniclers of events. It is our responsibility, first and above all, to try to explain to our viewers what happened today, why it happened, and what maybe it will mean for tomorrow." (quoted in Hume 1996)
   Elihu Katz has objections to the CNN version of live television news. "Rather than collecting information and trying to make sense of it in time for the evening news broadcast, the CNN ideal is to do simultaneous, almost-live editing, or better yet, no editing at all." (quoted in Bardoel 1996: 284) My view on live news in general is that there is a point in showing what is happening live. There is a possibility that something sensational happens right in front of the camera, as the fire in Waco or the siege of the parliament in Moscow. Those images are now part of journalistic history, not because they were live on TV when it happened but because the events themselves were significant. When we see any news pictures, they were all taken while events were unfolding and then saved for later use. Some will live forever. Whether or not they were also broadcast at the time of the event is of course less important.
   Live television is also less likely to be manipulated, even though there are many "events" that are staged, directed and very much commercialized, and even though there has to be a certain amount of producing to get it on the air. In spite of the problems, there is a point in showing not only the "first draft of history"--as journalism has been called--but also history in the making. That alone is a good argument for treating live events as if they were important. Without journalism, there would only be staged events of rather dubious significance. Even journalism runs the risk of getting stuck in pre-planned calendar reporting which makes reporters quite dependent on the people in power.
   The audience can affect the selection of news more actively by switching channels or by flipping past pages in a newspaper. Electronically it is even easier. However, Sparks claims that "the dream of individualised news resources delivered through electronic means is unrealisable. [...] The simple economies of news means that it must necessarily have an audience with a 'mass' character. The best that the 'Daily Me' will ever produce is a personalised selection from news material produced for much larger audiences." (Sparks 1996: 48) I have to object to that. These news resources exist already. And it is nothing economic about the reasons for news being directed towards a mass market. A "selection from news material produced for larger audiences" matches the concept of "news" exactly, whichever way you see it: recent events that others know of too. But all this news is produced by real, living, non-virtual journalists, no matter how electronically it is then distributed.