IDEOLOGY AND THE CHANGING REPRESENTATIONS OF PERSONS IN U.S. JOURNALISM Kevin G. Barnhurst Introduction An element in popular understanding of the past quarter century has be en that U.S. media are placing greater emphasis on people. Magazines such as People Weekly and Us appeared in the 1970s, and other media outlets fol- lowed suit by expanding human-interest features. For example, U.S. televi- sion networks expanded the prime-time news magazine, a genre oriented to people stories. 1 News cannot happen without people, and journalists and critics assume that daily journalism also increased attention in the news col- umns to people, going along with the rest of the media. That is not what happened. The belief that such coverage expanded, extending beyond celeb- rities and the personal lives of politicians to events in the lives of ordinary persons, reveals the hidden workings of ideological processes. To explore persons in the news, this essay gathers the results of a series of studies, by the author and others, that measured the who of news. I first describe com- parisons of individuals to groups in the news, and then look at the sorts of individuals - officials and experts - who have supplanted ordinary persons. Finally, I describe studies of journalists themselves to help make sense of the changes. Ideology and Disappearing Persons Ideology is a set of shared ideas that organise group life, by invoking, justi- fying, and guiding power. 2 Notions involving power- who should wield it and how- have a particularly tortuous existence: they often involve open or covert conflicts and illusions as groups seek to downplay or even ignore their own power relations. 3 Ideological processes thus have two key mark- 1 Committee of Concerned Journalists, Changing Definitions of News. 2 Larrain, The Concept of Ideology. 3 Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction.