Gatekeeping

A classic piece of research published more than a half century ago contributed the concept of “gate-keeping” to the understanding of decision making in journalism. For news communication, a gatekeeper is anyone who makes editorial decisions on what news should be published or broadcast to the public. There are usually multiple gatekeepers in all but the smallest news organizations. Gatekeeping decisions help determine the news agenda and thus play a role in agenda setting for news consumers.

The term gatekeeping appears to have first been used by social psychologist Kurt Lewin in 1947 research that determined that wives or mothers ...