Herbert Gans's Deciding What's News is a classic study of the values embedded in American journalism. Gans, a sociologist at Columbia, spent a decade observing CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time, examining what stories they covered and how they framed them. He identifies persistent values in news coverage: ethnocentrism, altruistic democracy, responsible capitalism, small-town pastoralism, individualism, and moderatism. Gans shows how these values are not openly articulated but structure coverage implicitly, shaping what counts as newsworthy and how events are interpreted. He traces how organizational factors, professional routines, and source relationships interact to produce relatively uniform coverage across ostensibly competitive outlets. Deciding What's News is attentive to the sociology of newsrooms, examining the pressures journalists face and how they cope with demands for objectivity while exercising necessary judgment. Gans writes accessibly while engaging with theoretical debates about ideology and media power. Though the outlets he studied have changed dramatically since the book's 1979 publication, his analytical framework remains relevant. Essential reading for anyone interested in how journalism works and what assumptions underlie claims to neutrality.