help understand language choices. In order to make up and shape the segments of messages into a complete information by gatekeeping, it always involves the choice of words. Other communication theories that can also gain benefit from gatekeeping includes framing (Breed, 1955) etc.
Limitations and Challenges of Gatekeeping Theory
Like many other communication theories have weakness, the gatekeeping theory also has its certain limitations. First of all gatekeeping theory is just a descriptive theory, it is mostly used to describe the gatekeeping process or the gatekeeping phenomenon that 's happening around us. So it offers very little predictive power. Though the gatekeeping theory keeps changing according to the changing occasions, the chief value of it is to summarize the existing fact of how people make decisions and the forces that influence these decision-making process. It offers the researchers a framework of how news or information gets through the gates to reach the channels, but nothing else. This explains the reason why Shoemaker noted O’Sullivan’s objection in 1983 who said gatekeeping theory was “oversimplified and of little utility.” (O’Sullivan, 1983)
Since the gatekeeping theory is one of the oldest of mass communication research, it is facing many challenges when
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Its model contains many aspects like channels, messages, internal and external forces, individual and group gatekeepers and the feedback. Some of the researches focus on the messages and the information sources while some focus on the results. It is a fundamental theory that may not meet the favor of everyone. However it is such an easily acceptable theory that anyone can tolerate it. It changes accordingly as time passes and is specially useful when applied to some certain circumstances, like the analysis of political information and under the environment of countries that have strong censorship