Book Reviews I 134

Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality.

By Gaye Tuchman. New York: Free Press, 1978. 244 pp. $12.95.
Reviewers: JOHN P. ROBINSON, University of Maryland, and
State University

HALUK SAHIN, Cleveland

This is an ambitious work. It is ambitious both in scope and in the intellectual

resources it utilizes. In examining news as a way of constructing reality, Tuchman
draws on her own empirical observations of the dynamics of news organizations,
on certain findings of American researchers, on the methods of "interpretive"
sociologists such as Schutz and Goffman, and on various insights from the critical
news theory being developed by Marxian scholars in Britain.
She selectively borrows concepts and ideas from these divergent approaches
and makes a valiant effort to integrate them into a cohesive analysis of news as
organizational work, social knowledge, and ideology. Her own extensive
participant-observation in four separate news media organizations in the New York
City area provides the descriptive background. Making News becomes not "only an
empirical study in the sociologies of mass communication, organizations, and
occupations and professions, but also an applied study in the sociology of
knowledge."
The book begins with Tuchinan's description of news as a frame through
which the public learns of its relation to the outside world. We find out, by means of
concrete examples, that this important function is usually a by-product of organizational needs and requirements rather than resulting from an abstract conception of
public's right to know. The spatial and temporal arrangements by which newsworkers are able to routinize the unexpected are spelled out more fully and clearly than
in her previous work on the topic. She vividly illustrates how apparently disparate
stories can be covered by common narrative devices and reliance on official sources
to validate the omnipresence and omniscience of existing sociopolitical institutions.
Tuchman thus makes a forceful and convincing case for news being a
reproducer (in the Althusserian sense) of the status quo. She explains how the news
organizations cast a "news net" that closely parallels the distribution of power in
society, catching only certain kinds of "fish" at points where the activities of
legitimated institutions and the organizational needs of newswork intersect. She

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militancy and radicalism in the New Left, satisfying the media's hunger for novelty
and drama in return for access was a major one. In the end, the New Left, Mayor
Daley, the Johnson and Nixon administrations, authorities and public alike accepted the media image of the movement as a serious revolutionary force.
Gitlin does not maintain that the mass media were responsible for the
destruction of the movement. The New Left had too narrow a social base; its goals
were too ambitious. He does think that the New Left paid a high price in the
movement-media dance: it was the weaker partner forced to play by the media's
rules, yet that was its choice. Nevertheless, even had it shunned the limelight at the
center stage of the anti-war movement in favor of long term grassroots organizing
among the poor, minorities, and working people, I for one think the New Left
would have been of little consequence.

1342 / Social Forces Volume 59:4, June 1981

From Agriculture to Services: The Transformation of Industrial Employment.

By Joachim Singelmann. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1978.176 pp. Cloth, $18.00; paper, $8.95.
Reviewer: ALVIN L. BERTRAND, Louisiana State University

The focal theme of this book is economic and social development as reflected by
differential growth of industry and consequent changes in the occupational
structure. The setting is seven major capitalist countries (or economies): the United
States, Canada, Great Britain, West Germany, France, Italy, and Japan, all of which
began their industrialization before the turn of the century. The conclusion is that,
despite some individual deviation in patterns of change, two trends are
unmistakablethe steady decline of agricultural employment and the steady
increase in employment in the service industries.
Six chapters explicate the author's approach and analyses of the author.
Chapter 1 is primarily concerned with the methodological steps in the gathering
and processing of 50 years of data for each of the seven countries. The author
defends his concentration on information about labor rather than capital "... because human factors are more appropriate measures of social development." He
explains that noncapitalist countries were excluded from the study because of lack
of information and the many additional aspects which would have had to be added
to the discussion.
In Chapter 2 the author is concerned with the conditions of industrialization

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then shows how the definitions and "facts" gleaned from these sources in a crudely
empirical manner are processed within a self-validating "web of facticity," and how
they are presented in historically evolved and formalized news narratives that draw
from and feed into the same "web." Perceptive examples from the reporting of the
women's movement are used to illustrate these principles.
The result is an admirably close-knit argument, depicting news as an
ideology that distorts and obfuscates the socioeconomic structure of American
society and becomes "a means not to know." Yet, the density of Tuchman's
argumentative "net" constitutes its main flaw: it is too perfectly meshed. It lacks
any sense of contradictions. It leaves virtually no room for the challenge and
conflict in news organizations that other observers have documentedArgyris in
Behind the Front Page, Gans in Deciding What's News, and Crouse in The Boys on the
Bus. Does the self-validating and self-perpetuating system of newswork Tuchman
describes allow no real dispute from within or without? If news is only "a means
not to know," from where do those "who know" get what they know especially if
the situationally determined nature of knowledge (in its Mannheimian or Marxist
variations) is rejected? The danger in such a finely woven, all-embracing net is that
it can be taken as an invitation to defeatism and despair.
. On the whole, however, News making is an important contribution to the
sociology of mass communication. It powerfully demonstrates the ideological
nature and inadequacies of the "mirror" image of the news media still tenaciously
held by many professionals. It charts the conceptual development of current
scholarship in the construction of a theory of news. It also reconfirms Tuchman's
place as one of the major pioneers in that effort.