Knowns and Unknowns (with Brian Williams)

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In his book Deciding What's News, Herbert J. Gans describes the different types of people that populate news stories, stating that the two most prominent types “could be well-known people, whom I call Knowns; or they could be Unknowns, ordinary people prototypical of the groups or aggregates that make up the nation” (8). I found this segment from Nightly News with Brian Williams interesting because it combines these two types of people, using “Known” Mark Zuckerberg as a launching pad for a story that focuses more heavily on several Unknowns.

Gans describes Knowns as “a combination of people […] assumed by journalists to be familiar names among the audience” (9). Because of this familiarity, they occupy a great deal of news coverage – anywhere between 70-85%, according to Gans. Unknowns, on the other hand, are “ordinary people [who] obtain about a fifth of the available time or space” (13) in the news. One of the things I found most interesting about this Nightly News segment was that its inclusion of Knowns was minimal—they were only represented briefly, at the beginning—but still apparent. Perhaps this is one reason why Gans argues that Knowns are so widely featured across the entire news spectrum: they make appearances in stories even when they don’t play a large role.

Before taking this class, I never would have questioned the existence of this segment or the role that Zuckerberg played in it. But after reading Gans and becoming more attuned to the lopsided tilt towards the use of Knowns in the news, I had to ask myself whether this story would have ever been produced and aired had the $100 million not come from Zuckerberg. And the answer that I keep coming up with is “no”.

Now, $100 million is certainly a lot of money, and any donation in that amount is bound to be the subject of a press report on some scale, somewhere. But had the money not come from Zuckerberg, a name recognizable to any tech-savvy American (and certainly to the millions who have Facebook accounts), I doubt that this story would have been featured on the Nightly News. The teachers and parents who were interviewed in this segment were featured because they were the recipients of Zuckerberg’s donation; in other terms, the Unknowns only made it into the news through the actions of a Known.

Gans believes that “the news ought to be about individuals rather than groups or social processes” (8), and, in this way, the Nightly News segment succeeds. But I know that I will now approach the news with a more diligent eye, questioning the roles that each source plays in a story and remaining conscious about the balance between Knowns and Unknowns in the stories presented to me.

Works Cited
Gans, Herbert J. Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. 25th Anniversary Edition. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004.