Linear presentation has necessary effects on questions of priority between news items. The mosaic newspaper page has its own techniques of catching attention and indicating relative importance, but these are to a certain extent subject to the reader’s capacity to find own way through. The broadcast news bulletin thus tends to retain more apparent editorial control of priority and attention. It is impossible to estimate the effects of this without looking at what had happened to priorities in different kinds of newspaper. In Britain, for example, a comparison of lead stories… showed marked variations of priorities in different kinds of paper. A further comparison with broadcast bulletins showed that broadcasting priorities were, on the whole, those of minority press. In the United States the press situation is different, but the general point still holds. The world-view indicated by the selection and relative priority of news items is very similar as between broadcast bulletins and those minority newspapers which are written by and for the relatively highly educated. The distribution of interests in the more popular press, which supposedly follows the interests of its characteristic readers, is hardly to be found anywhere in the broadcast news, although very similar definitions of what is popular and interesting tend to predominate in the non-news programming.
