Book Reviews I 134

militancy and radicalism in the New Left, satisfying the media's hunger for noveltyand drama in return for access was a major one. In the end, the New Left, MayorDaley, the Johnson and Nixon administrations, authorities and public alike ac-cepted the media image of the movement as a serious revolutionary force.

Gitlin does not maintain that the mass media were responsible for thedestruction of the movement. The New Left had too narrow a social base; its goalswere too ambitious. He does think that the New Left paid a high price in themovement-media dance: it was the weaker partner forced to play by the media'srules, yet that was its choice. Nevertheless, even had it shunned the limelight at thecenter stage of the anti-war movement in favor of long term grassroots organizingamong the poor, minorities, and working people, I for one think the New Leftwould have been of little consequence.

Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality.By Gaye Tuchman. New York: Free Press, 1978. 244 pp. $12.95.

Reviewers: JOHN P. ROBINSON, University of Maryland, and HALUK SAHIN, ClevelandState University

This is an ambitious work. It is ambitious both in scope and in the intellectualresources it utilizes. In examining news as a way of constructing reality, Tuchmandraws on her own empirical observations of the dynamics of news organizations,on certain findings of American researchers, on the methods of "interpretive"sociologists such as Schutz and Goffman, and on various insights from the criticalnews theory being developed by Marxian scholars in Britain.

She selectively borrows concepts and ideas from these divergent approachesand makes a valiant effort to integrate them into a cohesive analysis of news asorganizational work, social knowledge, and ideology. Her own extensiveparticipant-observation in four separate news media organizations in the New YorkCity area provides the descriptive background. Making News becomes not "only anempirical study in the sociologies of mass communication, organizations, andoccupations and professions, but also an applied study in the sociology ofknowledge."

The book begins with Tuchinan's description of news as a frame throughwhich the public learns of its relation to the outside world. We find out, by means ofconcrete examples, that this important function is usually a by-product of organiza-tional needs and requirements rather than resulting from an abstract conception ofpublic's right to know. The spatial and temporal arrangements by which newswor-kers are able to routinize the unexpected are spelled out more fully and clearly thanin her previous work on the topic. She vividly illustrates how apparently disparatestories can be covered by common narrative devices and reliance on official sourcesto validate the omnipresence and omniscience of existing sociopolitical institutions.

Tuchman thus makes a forceful and convincing case for news being areproducer (in the Althusserian sense) of the status quo. She explains how the newsorganizations cast a "news net" that closely parallels the distribution of power insociety, catching only certain kinds of "fish" at points where the activities oflegitimated institutions and the organizational needs of newswork intersect. She

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then shows how the definitions and "facts" gleaned from these sources in a crudelyempirical manner are processed within a self-validating "web of facticity," and howthey are presented in historically evolved and formalized news narratives that drawfrom and feed into the same "web." Perceptive examples from the reporting of thewomen's movement are used to illustrate these principles.

The result is an admirably close-knit argument, depicting news as anideology that distorts and obfuscates the socioeconomic structure of Americansociety and becomes "a means not to know." Yet, the density of Tuchman'sargumentative "net" constitutes its main flaw: it is too perfectly meshed. It lacksany sense of contradictions. It leaves virtually no room for the challenge andconflict in news organizations that other observers have documentedArgyris inBehind the Front Page, Gans in Deciding What's News, and Crouse in The Boys on theBus. Does the self-validating and self-perpetuating system of newswork Tuchmandescribes allow no real dispute from within or without? If news is only "a meansnot to know," from where do those "who know" get what they knowespecially ifthe situationally determined nature of knowledge (in its Mannheimian or Marxistvariations) is rejected? The danger in such a finely woven, all-embracing net is thatit can be taken as an invitation to defeatism and despair.

. On the whole, however, News making is an important contribution to thesociology of mass communication. It powerfully demonstrates the ideologicalnature and inadequacies of the "mirror" image of the news media still tenaciouslyheld by many professionals. It charts the conceptual development of currentscholarship in the construction of a theory of news. It also reconfirms Tuchman'splace as one of the major pioneers in that effort.

From Agriculture to Services: The Transformation of Industrial Employment.By Joachim Singelmann. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1978.176 pp. Cloth, $18.00; paper, $8.95.Reviewer: ALVIN L. BERTRAND, Louisiana State University

The focal theme of this book is economic and social development as reflected bydifferential growth of industry and consequent changes in the occupationalstructure. The setting is seven major capitalist countries (or economies): the UnitedStates, Canada, Great Britain, West Germany, France, Italy, and Japan, all of whichbegan their industrialization before the turn of the century. The conclusion is that,despite some individual deviation in patterns of change, two trends areunmistakablethe steady decline of agricultural employment and the steadyincrease in employment in the service industries.

Six chapters explicate the author's approach and analyses of the author.Chapter 1 is primarily concerned with the methodological steps in the gatheringand processing of 50 years of data for each of the seven countries. The authordefends his concentration on information about labor rather than capital "... be-cause human factors are more appropriate measures of social development." Heexplains that noncapitalist countries were excluded from the study because of lackof information and the many additional aspects which would have had to be addedto the discussion.

In Chapter 2 the author is concerned with the conditions of industrialization

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