Race and the News

Refugee and Asylum News Coverage in UK Print and Online Media

“…When compared to print media, online media had higher percentages and significant chi-square results for each topic included in the coding. As noted, the soft/hard news dichotomy can be problematic because stories outside the hegemonic status quo (Shoemaker and Reese 2014) are often neglected or less emphasised because they are considered to be less of a priority as "soft" news (Marchi 2008;North 2016;Topic 2018;Voinche, Davie, and Dinu 2010). Certainly, all news topics included in this sample are important and some may argue shouldn't be divided by soft or hard.…”

“…The soft/hard news dichotomy can be problematic in that it is often divided by gender, race, class, abilities, and so forth (Marchi 2008;North 2016;Topic 2018;Voinché, Davie, and Dinu 2010), which highlights the ongoing quandary of how or why to distinguish between soft and hard news. Mott (1952, 58) found journalists defining hard news as "interesting to human beings" and soft news as "interesting because it deals with the life of human beings"-a definition as Tuchman (1973) explains in her key work on the sociology of news rooms, as "difficult, if not impossible" to distinguish between the overlap, despite journalists' insistence that they were different concepts (113).…”