Questioning News Values: Disabled Persons’ News in Mainstream Newspapers

Abstract

Defining news values, universality of their characteristics or measurement etc. has always been an essential field for journalism studies. This article assumes that news values are not something universal, constant or inherent within news but historically changing, dynamic (universal but also local), have properties ascribed by actos of journalistic field. Within the framework of this assumption, it is based on qualitative and quantitative analysis of all elements (including column writings, adds etc.) of daily, mainstream, national, best selling 15 newspapers in Turkey (437 pages, 728.072 cm²) on December 3 International Day of Persons With Disability in 2015 to expose essential characteristics of news values. This article aims to question current characteristics of news values in mainstream newspapers by comparing all elements of newspapers with disabled persons’ news, using quantitative and qualitative data in a holistic approach. The findings demonstrate that these newspapers can give so limited place to news as most of pages are full of adds. The distribution of news in this limited space is problematic in terms of public interest and representation. Newspapers prefer to give place to people/subjects with debated news values (432 pages) instead of disabled persons (only 5 pages/one percent) even when they are expected to be the subject of the most news. Findings also show that content of these 39 news covered in 5 pages are also problematic according to “news values” as disabled persons are not seen as ordinary members of society, covered as victims, isolated, singular and their problems (sometimes their success) are presented as personal without all their social dimensions.