The DOI matches its Crossref record; 1 of the 1 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
News as Purposive Behavior: On the Strategic Use of Routine Events, Accidents, and Scandals
Abstract
The manner in which access is accomplished can vary and these variations lead to a typology of event types: routines, accidents, scandals and serendipitous events. Each type of event tends to reveal different kinds of information about the ways society is organized, and each type holds different challenges to those who have or lack power. The general implications of this schema for the study of media and power are discussed. veryone needs news. In everyday life, news tells us what we do not experience directly and thus renders otherwise remote happenings observable and meaningful. Conversely, we fill each other in with news. Although those who make their living at newswork (reporters, copy editors, publishers, typesetters, etc.) have additional needs for news, all individuals, by virtue of the ways they attend to and give accounts of what they believe to be a pregiven world, are daily newsmakers.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Plans and the structure of behavior.
Miller, G. A., Galanter, E., & Pribram, K. H. (1960) · doi:10.1037/10039-000 · Cited by 4,630
Cited by
The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power
Chadwick, A. (2017) · doi:10.1093/oso/9780190696726.001.0001 · Cited by 1,174
The Use of Newspaper Data in the Study of Collective Action
Earl, J., Martin, A., McCarthy, J. D., & Soule, S. A. (2004) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.30.012703.110603 · Cited by 1,074
Oliver, P. E., & Meyer, D. J. (1999) · American Journal of Sociology · doi:10.1086/210267 · Cited by 475
Science communication as political communication
Scheufele, D. A. (2014) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1317516111 · Cited by 313
Reporting Conventions: Journalists, Activists, and the Thorny Struggle for Political Visibility
Sobieraj, S. (2010) · Social Problems · doi:10.1525/sp.2010.57.4.505 · Cited by 73
Metadata
- Authors
- Molotch, H., & Lester, M.
- Venue
- American Sociological Review
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1974-02
- Volume
- 39
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 101
- ISSN
- 0003-1224 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2044080680
- Cited by
- 839
- References
- 1
- FWCI
- 106.26
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: News as Purposive Behavior: On the Strategic Use of Routine Events, Accidents, and Scandals. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/2094279
- The paper
- Molotch, H., & Lester, M. (1974). News as Purposive Behavior: On the Strategic Use of Routine Events, Accidents, and Scandals. American Sociological Review. https://doi.org/10.2307/2094279
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
