Gatekeeping

Overview

Gatekeeping is the way in which access to a field, set of ideas, or information is controlled. This occurs in person, through online applications, and sometimes through electronic programs that run a check on an individual's credentials before granting access. Some gatekeeping is absolute, meaning that information will never be provided to the general public. Other gatekeeping is more fluid, meaning that some information is released, but with restrictions, or by being framed in a specific way. For example, parents and teachers often act as gatekeepers for children, giving access to more information as the child ages (Ule, Živoder, Lunabba & du Bois-Reymond, 2016). Sometimes this framing takes the form of propaganda. Other times, these restrictions are in place because there is too much information available and it would be cost- or space-prohibitive to make it all available at once. Gatekeepers, those that make decisions about who can and cannot access information, typically defend their actions as keeping sensitive information safe, limiting access to information that might cause confusion, and keeping decision-making restricted to selected experts or authorities. Opponents to gatekeepers sometimes question why information is being kept secret. Others challenge the privilege of some individuals to have access to information while others are blocked.

Communications scholars are concerned with gatekeeping because it is a way in which information is distributed, filtered, and sometimes kept secret. The process of gatekeeping has occurred since pre-history. The academic field of communications and the study of gatekeeping is often traced back to Kurt Lewin's 1943 research regarding the ways that Midwestern women controlled access to food in a family. Lewin's study was revolutionary because it questioned the presumed gender dynamics in Midwestern families that assumed that men were in charge of all household decisions. Lewin proved that women worked as gatekeepers for many aspects of food decision-making, ranging from what was purchased, how much was paid, and which family members had access to which foods. Lewin's study continues to serve as a hallmark for how to study gatekeeping even as scholars move from studying family dynamics to online behavior.

Scholars of mass communication are interested in the ways that gatekeepers build and maintain their gates. Or, put another way, the ways in which gatekeepers interpret and understand their role and power in a communications network. Scholars ask how and why these gatekeepers choose to withhold or release information. They ask how biases, especially unconscious biases, affect these decisions. When asking these questions, they apply the gatekeeping principles presented by Lewin. These are:

• Information moves through channels. There is not a set number of channels, instead, the number changes with each set of information.
• Channels are full of steps, each with a gate and gatekeeper who determines if information should be allowed to pass through, and if so, who should have access to that information.
• Communication channels are not always popular. There is often resistance to gatekeeping from individuals who would like to have access to information that the gatekeeper will not let through.
• It is possible to have multiple channels that are all transferring the same information. This means that even if an individual cannot get information from one channel's gatekeeper, they might have success getting information from another channel. For example, a child might ask one parent a question, and if he or she does not get the desired information they might ask their other parent the same question.
• Gatekeepers change. This change might happen throughout the day as shifts change, or it might happen over time as gatekeepers get new jobs, retire, or otherwise change their access and control over information. Oftentimes, the installment of a new gatekeeper means significant changes in access to information.

Further Insights

Gatekeeping affects information access in many different settings, from the most private spheres to the most public. Couples often act as gatekeepers and determine how much information about their relationship to share with friends, family, and the general public. Elected representatives, from a school board member to the president of the United States, also act as gatekeepers, receiving detailed information and then deciding how the information will be released to the public. In each of these instances, gatekeepers are able to set their own rules, and have a varying degree of freedom regarding when and how they can break through the gates that they have created.

Scholars of interpersonal communication have studied the ways that romantic partners serve as gatekeepers for intimate information and the ways that access to mass media have disrupted norms of what information can be shared with the public. For example, Fox, Osborn, and Warber (2014) examined the ways that information shared on Facebook can break through a couple's shared understanding of what is to be shared and what is to be kept private (Di Salvo, 2016). The appearance of this information can cause couples to have productive conversations regarding their future behaviors, but it is often too late to get back any information that has been let through the gate. As more couples rely on social media platforms, they will have to specify how they plan to act as gatekeepers and what risks they are willing to take in regard to the posting of their personal information to social media platforms.

Social media has also forced parents and educational institutions to reconsider the ways that they serve as gatekeepers for their student's information. Dias et al. (2016) examined the ways that families in Belgium, Germany, Latvia, and Portugal served as gatekeepers for children between 6 and 7 years old. These researchers were specifically interested in the ways and reasons that parents allowed their children to access digital educational tools. They found that parents were often working hard to act as gatekeepers, but were sometimes ineffective, thinking that they had blocked their children from viewing online content when in fact their children had found ways around their parent's gatekeeping methods.

Journalists are also deeply concerned with gatekeeping and the changes that the Internet proposes to their role in protecting sources (Brown, 2018). Historically, journalists have sworn to protect their sources, this encourages informants to speak directly and disclose information that they might not otherwise be willing to provide. Journalists are then tasked with checking out the informant's story and ensuring that everything that they have been told is true. Because journalists have personally met with the informant, and double checked the facts, they feel comfortable publishing a story, even when they cannot directly name the person or group who provided the original information. In this way, the journalist serves as a gatekeeper, determining who should and should not know the identify of the informant. When the informant has provided information about a topic such as a political problem, corruption, environmental catastrophe, and/or a crime, this protection of the informant is very important and journalists work hard to maintain their reputations as trusted gatekeepers. This work is difficult and sometimes comes with great personal risk, especially when those whose misdeeds and crimes are brought to light seek to suppress the information provided by the informant.

Hermida, Lewis, and Zamith's (2014) study of Twitter use during the Arab Spring examines the limitations to this form of gatekeeping. Their paper examines the ways that news was created and the definition of journalism expanded. This expanded definition of who can and cannot be a journalist is an example of how gatekeeping changes. Traditionally, journalists would need to earn a degree in journalism and then be employed by a newspaper, television station, or other mass media source. However, as Hermida, Lewis, and Zamith (2014) demonstrate, there are many people reporting in the same ways that a journalist would, but without the credentials of a traditional journalist. From this example, we could say that the traditional gatekeepers who determined who gets to become a journalist, such as the admissions board to a journalism school and the hiring manager for a newspaper, no longer have as much power or authority as gatekeepers. Writing in what Hermida, Lewis, and Zamith (2014) call "non-elite sources," these new journalists provided a new and critical insight into Middle Eastern politics during the Arab Spring. These journalists found perspectives that might have been overlooked by traditional journalists who had been selected by gatekeepers. These new journalists often come from different economic classes, communities, and perspectives than traditional journalists and are able to look at the subjects on which they are reporting in a new and informative way.

The gatekeeping that affects journalists is also common in other academic subjects. This gatekeeping occurs in many stages of education, but is perhaps most noticeable when a student is accepted to a school and when a teacher is hired (Posselt, 2016). While some schools put great emphasis on hiring a diverse body of teachers, they are at times constrained in doing so because schools do not admit a diverse body of students, or do not encourage a diverse body of students to graduate. This inclusion of diverse faculty is important because each faculty member brings his or her own assumptions into the classroom. It is difficult to require that a professor have no assumptions or preferences, but it is possible to balance assumptions and preferences by employing faculty who do not all share similar backgrounds, life experience, and opinions.

Yet, despite the advantages of having a diverse faculty, the experience of being the diverse faculty can be difficult. For example, Shay (2016) writes about her experience as an Aboriginal Australian researching and teaching about rural community issues. Among the difficulties that Shay faced are the history of Australia's treatment of Aboriginal communities. Historically, there have been many gatekeeping measures put into place to ensure that Aboriginal peoples could not attend university, let alone work as a professor and researcher. Although those policies have been revoked, the mindsets on which they were built are still prevalent, producing a type of gatekeeping that Shay has had to overcome. This is a particularly difficult form of gatekeeping to overcome because it is not explicitly stated in policy or law. Indeed there are laws indicating that it is illegal to discriminate against Aboriginal Australians. However, some people continue to do so, using an unspoken set of parameters that ensure that few Aboriginal Australians will have a chance to work in a university.

Issues

The Internet has radically disrupted the process of gatekeeping. Projects such as Wikileaks have made a practice of releasing information that was previously protected by a solid gate. This determination to break through gates and gatekeepers is demonstrated by the actions of activists such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Communications scholars are concerned with the many ways that Wikileaks, in particular, has affected communications networks. These concerns include how the public finds and assesses information to which they previously had no access, whether individuals seek to ensure the information is legitimate, and to what ends that information may be used. Additionally, they ask how the release of this information affects the future production of information. Many sources and reports published in Wikileaks were produced with the expectation that they would never become public. Now that such confidentiality cannot be ensured, intelligence sources and informants, for example, may be less candid about what they know and less likely to reveal important information.

Communications scholars are also concerned with the combination of individual selection and the ways that algorithms are used to determine what information individuals have access to. This change, from human to digital gatekeepers, is happening quickly and even though algorithms are programmed to behave in a way similar to human gatekeepers, they do not act identically to human gatekeepers (Wallace, 2017). This means that humans will continue to have a role as gatekeepers for a long time. However, it also means that computers have the ability to serve as gatekeepers in some situations. For example, when a social media platform asks a user's age, that is a form of gatekeeping designed to keep children off a web page, or at least reduce the legal liability of a website, an issue that arose with underage children exploring the Internet and its abundance of tantalizing sales pitches, chat rooms, and pornography sites. Additionally, software developers have worked on ways to ensure that people, not robots are entering information into online forms, sometimes by simply asking the user to verify that they are not a robot. These gatekeeping activities are all fascinating to communication researchers because they illustrate the full range of possibilities for gatekeeping, the desire to disrupt gatekeeping, and the ways that a disappearance of gatekeeping could help or hinder society.

Some observers have noted that gatekeeping has emerged in a new way in media in modern times. Researchers have examined the effects of paywalls that restrict access of all, most, or some information that is made available to subscribers. For example, in many communities local newspapers provide most or all coverage of local government actions and politics. When stories are not available to all, some segments of the community, including those who are unable to afford subscriptions, will not have access to valuable information.

Bibliography

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DeIuliis, D. (2015). Gatekeeping theory from social fields to social networks. Communication Research Trends, 34(1), 4.

Dias, P., Brito, R., Ribbens, W., Daniela, L., Rubene, Z., Dreier, M., Gemo, M.,…Chaudron, S. (2016). The role of parents in the engagement of young children with digital technologies: Exploring tensions between rights of access and protection, from "gatekeepers" to "scaffolders." Global Studies of Childhood, 6(4), 414–427.

Di Salvo, P. (2016). Strategies of circulation restriction in whistleblowing: The Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks and Snowden cases. TECNOSCIENZA: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 7(1), 67–86.

Fox, J., Osborn, J. L., & Warber, K. M. (2014). Relational dialectics and social networking sites: The role of Facebook in romantic relationship escalation, maintenance, conflict, and dissolution. Computers in Human Behavior, 35, 527–534.

Hermida, A., Lewis, S. C., & Zamith, R. (2014). Sourcing the Arab Spring: A case study of Andy Carvin's sources on Twitter during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(3), 479–499.

Posselt, J. R. (2016). Inside graduate admissions: Merit, diversity, and faculty gatekeeping. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Shay, M. (2016). Seeking new paradigms in Aboriginal education research: methodological opportunities, challenges and aspirations. Social and Education History, 5(3).

Salonen, M. et al. (2023). Conversational gatekeeping--social interactional practives of post-publication gatekeeping on newspapers' Facebook pages. Journalism Practice, 17(9), doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2022.2034520

Tóth, T., Goyanes, M., Demeter, M., Campos-Freire, F. (2022). Social Implications of Paywalls in a Polarized Society: Representations, Inequalities, and Effects of Citizens’ Political Knowledge. In Vázquez-Herrero, J., Silva-Rodríguez, A., Negreira-Rey, MC., Toural-Bran, C., López-García, X. (Eds), Total Journalism: Studies in Big Data (pp. 169-179). Springer Cham. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-88028-6‗13

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Wallace, J. (2017). Modeling contemporary gatekeeping: The rise of individuals, algorithms and platforms in digital news dissemination. Digital Journalism, 6(3), 274–293. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1343648