Westly MacLean Model of Mass Communication
X1
X2 A >>>>> C >>>>>B
X 3 <fca<< << fbc<
In this model, the C stands for Channel roles, B represents the "behavioral system roles" or audience members, and A stands for advocacy roles, or those people, institutions, or organizations that have something to say, and the X's represent all the events, topics or ideas that Advocates might want to want to make a message about.
The C in the middle is called a gatekeeper, because they open the gates for some advocates to talk about some ideas, and close the gates for the same advocate on other ideas. There are, after all, only so many pages in a newspaper, only so many minutes of time available for a television story, only so much space available on a website. So the real job of the complex organization of the mass media is to decide what it should include and what it should not include. To be successful as a mass media, you need to attract a large audience. They have to be pleased enough with what they got from you that they will return to get more information or entertainment in the future. So, the gatekeeper in the mass media thinks of themselves as an extension of the needs of their audiences as they know them. And the media spend lots of time and effort in trying to understand how the "behavioral system roles" behave. The media will exist, of course, only to the degree that they do extend the environment of the audience in ways the audience thinks they need. If not, the audience will go off and find another channel that makes gatekeeping decisions more in keeping with their perceived needs.
There are two other important elements of this model and they have to do with feedback. Notice that there is a feedback loop between the C and the B -- between the gatekeeper and the audience (fbc). This represents the ways in which the audience tells the media what they think, what they do, and how they want to be informed or entertained.
There is also another kind of feedback (fca) that is very important in complex organizations like the mass media. The direction and evaluation that a gatekeeper tells to an advocate (feedback from C to A) is needed for helping the person who wants to have access to the audience, what it is they have to do to make it past the gates of C. This is another major theme of Mass ComOnline. How do the media decide what to program and cover, and what to avoid or ignore. What events are trivial and what are newsworthy? This kind of feedback represents the kinds of socialization processes that go on in and among the media industries. The Gatekeepers at NBC Nightly news, for example have been deciding what to broadcast every night for nearly 50 years. If you are a reporter working for NBC, it is your job to be finding stories (the X's in the Westley MacLean Model) that will be passed on through the gates of the channel role -- Tom Brokaw and the show's producers. If you are a reporter and don't find out what your editor or producer think that the audience wants and what they don't want, you probably won't work for NBC very long.
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