Creating Reality

David L. Altheide's book Creating Reality is one of several studies from the 1970s that addressed the question of how the mass media construct a reality. Many of these books used methods comparable to field studies in cultural anthropology, in the sense that researchers observed a culture unfamiliar to them—in this case the culture of news production. Altheide's book, which appeared in 1976, shares this method with other eminent works in communication from the 1970s by James D. Halloran and colleagues, by Gaye Tuchman, and by Mark Fishman, to name but a few.

Altheide conducted his fieldwork mostly in 1971 and 1972. For about a year, he spent several days a week in the newsroom and with reporters of a California network affiliate television station, observing the production of a local news show. The station also sent him to the 1972 party conventions, where he continued his observation. Altheide also relied on another researcher's field notes and visits to other broadcasting institutions.

The major subject of the book is how the conditions under which a news show is produced affect its product (the show) as it is broadcast. External conditions include the necessity to make profits, the competition, and the relationships between journalists and politicians. Internal conditions include time management, format, the availability of sources, the necessity to relate a structured narrative, and the limits of editing techniques. Illustrating these factors with many examples from his observations, Altheide depicts the news show as the consequence of decisions, many of which have a lot to do with the production process and little to do with the content that is communicated.

The book's key term is news perspective. It is the ability to encounter events with expectations that enable a person to make a structured narrative of it (and one that is suited for the medium the person works for). In positive terms, this is what young journalists have to learn in their training. Negatively speaking it is a professional deformation because no one except journalists looks at events in terms of their capacity to be narrated. News perspective (the special way journalists look at the world) has not become an established term in political communication. But it entails many aspects that were discussed under the concept of framing 20 years after Altheide had written his book.

The book also includes two case studies on the framing of two political scandals in the 1972 presidential election campaign in the United States: the news about Democratic vice presidential candidate Thomas F. Eagleton's psychiatric treatment and Watergate.