Why is man bites dog news, while dog bites man is not?
News prizes the unusual. An ordinary event rarely qualifies, but a reversal of the expected does, which is the point of the old newsroom saying about men biting dogs. Across cultures people crave the same ingredients in a story: big impact, conflict, closeness, famous names and a break from routine.
The English word developed in the fourteenth century as a special use of the plural of new, much like French nouvelles. Slavic and Celtic languages built their terms the same way, from Russian novosti to Welsh newyddion. The phrase current events is credited to Jessica Garretson Finch, who taught at Barnard College in the 1890s.
Newness shapes how news tells stories. Historians treat events as linked expressions of deeper processes; news reports tend to present them one at a time, in the present or recent past, stripped of connections. An ongoing situation needs a peg, some fresh moment, to break into coverage. As faster technologies take over breaking stories, slower media drift toward analysis. Sensationalism is a persistent companion, reflected in the grim maxim that violent stories lead the bulletin, and news shares roots with ordinary gossip about people of mutual interest.
Humans have always hunted for it. Anthropologists found Zulus, Mongolians, Polynesians and people of the American South questioning travellers for news as a matter of priority. It spread in Greek forums, Roman baths, mosques and, from England onward, coffeehouses. Rulers used couriers as far back as Egypt in 2400 BC, Julius Caesar advertised his exploits in Gaul, and officially sanctioned messengers appear from Vietnam to the Zulu kingdom's runners and West African griots. Those carriers usually served the powerful.
Commercial theories treat news as whatever the industry sells, with agencies supplying it wholesale and publishers packaging it for retail. Most outlets claim to value impartiality, yet the historian Michael Schudson argues that before the First World War and the rise of propaganda, journalists were barely aware of bias as an idea, let alone trying to correct it. The link between news and truth remains elusive.
Source: News
