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Articles by Herbert J. Gans

Herbert Gans is a professor emeritus in sociology at Columbia University. He is the author of, among other books, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (1979), one of the most important sociological accounts of how journalists do their work.
Sociologist Herbert Gans says the news media should do a better job noting that “polls are answers to questions rather than opinions,” and that not all opinions have the same intensity — or the same impact.
“Journalists have to consider how American politics has changed since modern journalism first formulated the conventions and norms for covering politics.”
Sociologist Herbert Gans argues it’s time for political reporting to stop focusing solely on the elites and experiment with new models for bottom-up journalism.