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Local News Coverage in a Social Capital Capital: Election 2000 on Minnesota's Local News Stations
Political Communication
Abstract
This article examines local news coverage of an election in one of the nation's “social capital capitals,” Minnesota. In Minnesota, according to theorized connections between civic involvement and news media use, we might expect the orientation of local news to be local and the quality of coverage of local campaigns to be high. Content analysis of all evening newscasts on all four non-cable channels in the Minneapolis market (the 13th largest television market in the United States) for the 12 weeks leading to the day of the election yielded striking evidence on the amount and nature of local television news coverage. The predominant news emphasis was on the presidential race, with considerably less attention to the close U.S. Senate contest, and very little or nothing on any other race; local television news was mostly not local. As with previous studies, this analysis showed prime emphasis on strategy and game, while the far fewer “issue” stories tended to be thin. These local television news shows also offered very little airtime with candidates speaking directly. In addition, seven focus groups were conducted in Minnesota, in which subjects were asked about local television news coverage. Subjects expressed frustration with the brevity and superficiality of election news stories and with the stations' claims of providing in-depth coverage. Judging by our data, levels of civic and political involvement in Minnesota may remain high despite, rather than because of, political coverage by local television news.
... Although this general consensus about media influence has recently been contested by those who believe that party leaders are beginning to regain control over presidential nominations (Cohen, Karol, Noel, and Zaller 2001), the notion that reporters are still a power to be dealt with holds tremendous sway in political circles. For one thing, scholars have spent the past 40 years justifying their research on press and politics by consistently paying homage to the power of American journalism in the electoral system (see Benoit, Stein and Hansen 2004;Graber 1971;Kahn 1995;Steele and Barnhurst 1996;Stevens, Alger, Allen, and Sullivan 2006;West 1994). Even in the age of the Internet, USA Today's Peter Johnson (2007) recently reported, presidential candidates find it difficult to bypass the traditional news media when trying to reach large segments of the electorate-a contention that has been supported by several studies finding that conventional news organizations are the dominant force for political news on the Web (Margolis and Resnick 2000;Pew Research Center 2000;Resnick 1998;Singer 2000). ...
... The importance of the press in American elections is reflected in the wide range of academic studies designed to identify and explain the patterns of political news coverage in the American media. For example, scholarship has compared the campaign coverage of television and print journalism (Johnson 1993;Robinson and Sheehan 1983); examined coverage of gubernatorial and senatorial campaigns by both newspapers and local TV stations (Kahn 1991;Kahn 1995;Ostroff 1980;Ostroff and Sandell 1989;Stevens, Alger, Allen, and Sullivan 2006); analyzed the decreasing length of candidate sound bites on the national news (Bucy and Grabe 2007;Hallin 1992;Kendall 1993;Steele and Barnhurst 1996;Stevens et al. 2006); and documented the often negative-but sometimes positive-tone of political coverage in the news media (Benoit, Stein, and Hansen 2004;Flowers, Haynes, Crespin 2003;Lichter 2001;Reber and Benoit 2001;Robinson 1976;Robinson and Sheehan 1983). Still other studies have looked at the themes used by national and regional newspapers in their election coverage (Graber 1971;Rozell 1991;Shaw and Sparrow 1999); the influence of the civic journalism movement on newspaper reporting practices (Kennamer and South 2002); reporters' reliance on official government sources for political information (Dunn 1969;Sigal 1973); the differences in how the press frames gubernatorial candidates based on race and gender (Banwart, Bystrom and Robertson 2003;Devitt 2002;Jeffries 2002); and the ageold debate over media bias (Beniger 2001;D'Alessio and Allen 2000;Edwards and Cromwell 2006;Efron 1971;Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter 1986;Morris 2007;Rusher 1988;and Stevenson et al. 1973). ...
... The importance of the press in American elections is reflected in the wide range of academic studies designed to identify and explain the patterns of political news coverage in the American media. For example, scholarship has compared the campaign coverage of television and print journalism (Johnson 1993;Robinson and Sheehan 1983); examined coverage of gubernatorial and senatorial campaigns by both newspapers and local TV stations (Kahn 1991;Kahn 1995;Ostroff 1980;Ostroff and Sandell 1989;Stevens, Alger, Allen, and Sullivan 2006); analyzed the decreasing length of candidate sound bites on the national news (Bucy and Grabe 2007;Hallin 1992;Kendall 1993;Steele and Barnhurst 1996;Stevens et al. 2006); and documented the often negative-but sometimes positive-tone of political coverage in the news media (Benoit, Stein, and Hansen 2004;Flowers, Haynes, Crespin 2003;Lichter 2001;Reber and Benoit 2001;Robinson 1976;Robinson and Sheehan 1983). Still other studies have looked at the themes used by national and regional newspapers in their election coverage (Graber 1971;Rozell 1991;Shaw and Sparrow 1999); the influence of the civic journalism movement on newspaper reporting practices (Kennamer and South 2002); reporters' reliance on official government sources for political information (Dunn 1969;Sigal 1973); the differences in how the press frames gubernatorial candidates based on race and gender (Banwart, Bystrom and Robertson 2003;Devitt 2002;Jeffries 2002); and the ageold debate over media bias (Beniger 2001;D'Alessio and Allen 2000;Edwards and Cromwell 2006;Efron 1971;Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter 1986;Morris 2007;Rusher 1988;and Stevenson et al. 1973). ...
... In doing so, thematic framing serves as a wider lens that highlights connections between events and broader societal, systemic issues, helps in holding officials accountable, and implies a need for societal-level solutions (Hook and Pu 2006), which can thus influence audience's perceptions of whom to blame on racially charged events (Holt, Ellithorpe, and Ralston 2017). Quite generally, American news tends to be more episodic and focused on human interest stories (Dorfman et al. 1997;Iyengar 1990;Lee et al. 2014;Metzgar and Su 2017;Stevens et al. 2006;Wendorf Muhamad and Yang 2017), with newspapers being more likely to offer thematic reporting compared to other sectors (Holt and Major 2010;Lee and Basnyat 2013). This study introduces framing as a third criterion of journalism quality and further investigates such news framing patterns in the context of Colorado. ...
Local journalism is a pillar of democratic societies, and its role becomes more critical during crises. But despite its critical importance, local news has faced immense challenges that jeopardize its sustainability in the U.S. This study examines the Colorado media ecology by comparing local news sources across four different counties during Summer 2020 and exploring the factors behind similarities and differences in coverage. Building on Napoli et al.’s (2017) framework to assessing the health of local news, the study uses content analysis to examine original, local reporting and coverage of critical information needs as well as type of framing in over 600 online stories appearing on the home pages of all news sources in the four counties. The findings reveal that the Colorado journalism ecosystem post-Covid outpaces U.S. local news in quality in the pre-Covid era yet aligns with disturbing trends pointing to inequities and disparities. In other words, rural, poorer, and more racially and ethnically diverse Colorado communities tend to have weaker news ecosystems and are more likely to become news deserts. The study also introduces thematic coverage as a necessary dimension to add to journalism quality assessment frameworks and discusses several approaches to salvage local news.
... This thesis examines the way news media tend to represent electoral politics as a kind of game. A large quantity of media scholarship has already identified this tendency (Cappella and Jamieson 1997;Patterson 1993;Trimble and Sampert 2004;Rosenstiel 2005;Patterson 2005;Entman 1989;Sigelman and Bullock 1991;De Vreese and Elenbaas 2008;Gan, Teo, and Detenber 2005;Miljan 2011;Andrew 2007;Farnsworth, Lichter, and Schatz 2009;Belt, Just, and Crigler 2012;Haynes 1998;Stevens 2006;Nadeau, Petry, and Belanger 2010;Aalberg, Stromback, and de Vreese 2012;Brookes 2004); however few analyses have delved below the surface appearance of election news coverage to examine the underlying social processes that produce this form of reportage. ...
To what degree does instrumental reason influence election news coverage? Using Habermas's understanding of system/life-world as a heuristic, I map the rationalization process of political communication. This illuminates the institutional logics at play in the field of politics and the field of journalism, and the way the social dynamics between them enable the framing of political life as a strategic game. This understanding is then contextualized within an analysis of the media frames that informed the Canadian federal election of 2011. I find that news coverage does tend to focus on political strategy; but this is not wholly at the expense of issue coverage, rather news frequently represents issues as strategic resources deployed by party leaders to create political advantage within public opinion. Ultimately, this thesis provides a critique of the formal organization of electoral politics around the imperatives of news production.
... Bu bağlamda, sosyal sermaye yaklaşımının önde gelen isimlerinden Putnam (2000), kitle iletişiminin (özellikle televizyon izleme) boş zaman etkinliklerini doldurmasıyla sivil katılımdaki azalma arasında önemli bir ilişki kurmuştur. Ayrıca, çeşitli gazetecilik pratiklerinin sosyal sermaye üzerindeki etkileriyle ilgilenen kimi araştırmalara (Wallack, 2000;Stevens, Alger, Allen ve Sullivan, 2006;Richards, Chia ve Bowd, 2011;Richards, 2012;Mercado, 2015;Washburn ve Raynauld, 2016) rastlanabilmektedir. ...
Sosyal sermaye, bireysel ve toplumsal olmak üzere iki farklı gerçeklik düzleminde
değerlendirilebilir. Bireysel düzlemde sosyal sermaye; aktörlerin sosyal ilişkilerinden elde
ettikleri ve amaçları doğrultusunda kullandıkları bir kaynaktır. Toplumsal düzlemde ise; yaşanılan
bölgedeki komşuluk ilişkilerinden yardımlaşma düşüncesine, sivil toplum kuruluşlarından
dernekleşme faaliyetlerine kadar, bir dizi sivil katılım biçiminin toplumsal hayata sağladığı
katkıları ifade eden bir kaynak olarak değerlendirilmektedir. Dolayısıyla çalışmada, sosyal
yapılardan veya ilişkilerden elde edilen bir kaynak olan sosyal sermayeyi, gazetecilerin mesleki
pratiklerinde kullanmaları gerektiği varsayılmıştır. Bu varsayımdan hareketle, gazetecilerin
kamusal habercilik olanaklarında sosyal sermayenin rolünün incelenmesi amaçlanmıştır.
Çalışma amaçları doğrultusunda sosyal sermaye kavramsal olarak açıklanmış, gazetecilik alanıyla
sosyal sermaye yaklaşımının arasındaki ilişkileri konu alan literatüre kısaca yer verilmiştir. Saha
araştırmasında, gazetecilerin sosyal sermayeleri ve kamusal habercilik olanakları arasındaki ilişki
incelenmiş, gazetecilerin sosyal çevreleriyle yakınlıkları ve etkileşimleri açısından sosyal sermaye
ve kamusal habercilik olanaklarında oluşan farklılaşmalar araştırılmıştır. Ağırlıklı olarak İstanbul,
Ankara ve İzmir’de çalışan gazeteciler olmak üzere, toplam 384 gazeteciyle anket çalışması
gerçekleştirilmiştir. Elde edilen bulgular, araştırmaya katılan gazetecilerin sosyal sermayelerinin,
algıladıkları kamusal habercilik olanakları üzerinde istatistiksel olarak anlamlı ve pozitif yönlü
bir etkisinin bulunduğunu ortaya koymuştur. Ayrıca gazetecilerin sosyal çevreleriyle yakınlıkları
ve etkileşim sayıları arttıkça, sosyal sermaye ve kamusal habercilik olanakları ortalamalarının
arttığını gösteren bulgular tespit edilmiştir. Bu bağlamda sosyal sermayenin kamusal habercilik
pratiklerinde önemli bir rolü bulunduğu, toplumsal dayanışma ve iletişim ağlarına katılımın
toplum yanlısı gazetecilik pratiklerini kolaylaştırdığı anlaşılmıştır.
... Past research on intermedia agenda setting finds broad evidence of convergence. For example, research on television suggests that stations with smaller audiences follow the coverage of stations with larger audiences (Stevens et al., 2006). This finding would be consistent with a world in which the media compete fiercely over a diminishing number of consumers. ...
This study systematically analyzes variation in media coverage of
leaders. Drawing on theories of personalization of campaigns and intermedia agenda setting, we examine how, if at all, coverage of party
leaders flows between different types of media—newspapers, television, and radio—and between media that is partisan, commercial, or public service. We examine the dynamics of intermedia agenda setting in terms of the volume and sentiment of coverage devoted to leaders in the context of the 2015 British general election, focusing on the media environment as the source of leader-centered campaigns, but also assessing which media are the drivers of personalization. In order to do so, we inspect a wide range of traditional news sources, using text analytic tools to examine a large corpus of media content data and applying time series methods to explore the dynamic relationships between different outlets.
... Past research on intermedia agenda setting finds broad evidence of convergence. For example, research on television suggests that stations with smaller audiences follow the coverage of stations with larger audiences (Stevens et al., 2006). This finding would be consistent with a world in which the media compete fiercely over a diminishing number of consumers. ...
The growing personalization of elections and the increased focus of media campaign coverage on party leaders is well-established in political science research. However, despite its importance for understanding these developments, intermedia party leader agenda setting has received little academic attention. Using extensive news media content data from the 2015 UK General Election, this paper examines the dynamics of intermedia agenda setting, assessing whether, and to what extent, the volume and tone of leaders’ media coverage flows between different platforms and outlets. Our analysis provides evidence of reciprocal influence between television, newspapers and radio. Their interactions, however, are complex and contingent on the characteristics and identity of both party leaders and media outlets. Altogether, our findings reveal no systematic convergence on the salience and tone of leaders’ news coverage, and cast doubts on the ability of the media to act as an independent force in personalizing electoral campaigns.
... According to results, mainstream media mostly present news about the government of the day. O' Sullivan et al. (2006) indicates that raw information is eliminated by gatekeepers to keep some information for themselves (See Table 15). This can be because of governmental affiliations. ...
Journalism ethics is important to study, and this study focuses on infringements of journalism ethics during the General Elections of 2015 in Turkey. Its aim to find out five most circulated newspapers’ which are Zaman Hürriyet, Posta, Sözcü and Sabah, infringement of journalism ethics between two General Election of June 7th and November 1st in 2015. In this study, content analysis was used without physical measurement. Only cover pages were analysed which news was relevant to political issues. A coding sheet was used to analyse, and its reliability was .97 according to Cohen’s formula. The study was conducted to answer two major questions. (1) Is there any unethical news has been published during the two elections, and (2) what changed between the two elections on cover pages news according to journalism ethics? At the end of the research, infringements of journalism ethics were remarked by all newspapers during the elections. Main conspicuous thing is that newspapers infringed journalism ethics according to being pro-government or not. Especially, most infringements have happened before the elections, and newspapers were being changed their attitudes according to election results.
... None of these studies, however, examine how local television news cover foreign events. This is surprising considering that there are more Americans who regularly watch local television news than any other singular news source -print, television or internet (Hale et al., 2007;Hamilton, 2005;Kaniss, 1991;McManus, 1994;Stevens et al., 2006). We address this by examining and comparing the local and network coverage of the war between Israel and Hezbollah during the summer of 2006. ...
While media are the primary sources of information about foreign events, we know very little about how local television news, the most frequently watched news in America, cover foreign events and how their coverage relate to public attitudes. In this paper we examine public attitudes about Israel and show that Americans who watch local news were more likely to support Israel in the 2006 Lebanon War. We suggest that this attitudinal gap can be explained by the nature of the local news coverage of foreign events. To test this, we apply Entman's framing functions to the local and network coverage of the war in Lebanon, and find that coverage of the War in the local newsrooms was significantly more supportive of the Israeli position. We propose that this difference is caused by features of local news such as economic and institutional constraints, as well as newsroom routines, which result in the tendency of the local media to comply with authorities' position.
... Examinations of the LPI content of local news are typically limited to electoral periods and have two primary issues of concern: how much LPI exists and what frame (strategy or issue-driven) is most often employed in it. Studies of local TV news conclude that it is largely composed of stories on national topics or local crime and includes very little coverage of local political topics (Klite et al., 1997;Kaplan et al., 2003;Kaplan et al., 2005;Kiolbassa, 1997;Stevens et al., 2006). Turning to newspapers, several scholars (Kaniss, 1995;Graber, 1984;Grainey et al., 1984) have found that the limited local political campaign coverage that does exist, like national political campaign news, includes only a small amount of issue-focused reporting. ...
Scholars and pundits have widely discussed the decline of print journalism, but there has been very little empirical research focused on examining online alternatives. This article utilizes a unique sample of online local political content related to the 2007 Philadelphia mayoral campaign to address this empirical void. A content analysis of this dataset explores the sources of online local political information (LPI), its qualities, and how much of it is original material. New media sources of LPI may be far from maturity, but this article finds that they do exist and are a viable resource for citizens.
... Other studies examine the predominately negative campaign coverage of the 1992 election and state of the economy (Just et al. 1996). Some even conclude that, at least for television coverage, local campaign coverage is not that local at all (Stevens et al. 2006) Aside from research that maintains that local news coverage of the presidency should be favorable (Graber 2002), only a handful of articles examine local coverage of the presidency at some length. Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake (2006) show that, at least for coverage of the president's domestic travel during his Social Security reform tour, President George W. Bush received more coverage, on average, than national newspapers. ...
Scholarly research says much about national news coverage of the presidency. But there has been little exploration into local news coverage of the presidency, with much research focusing on presidential campaigns or a small subset of presidential news, his local visits. Based on a sample of 288 stories taken from 1995 of the Bill Clinton and 2003 of the George W. Bush administrations, I answer the following questions: What explains the amount of local newspaper coverage of the presidency and what influences the likelihood that local newspapers will cover the presidency, daily? Support for the president, corporate ownership, newspaper resources, and the location of the story itself affect the amount of local newspaper coverage of the president and the likelihood that a newspaper will publish a story on the presidency.
... Studies of local TV news conclude that it is largely composed of stories on national topics or local crime and includes very little coverage of local political topics (Klite et al. 1997;Kiolbassa 1997;Kaplan et al. 2003;Kaplan et al. 2005;Stevens et al. 2006). ...
Scholars and pundits have widely discussed the decline of print journalism, but there has been very little empirical research focussed on examining online alternatives. This article utilizes a unique sample of online local political content related to the 2007 Philadelphia mayoral campaign to address this void. A content analysis of this data set has three objectives: to depict the range of sources of online local political information (LPI) available to Philadelphians; to compare the LPI provided by these various sources; and to determine the amount and provenance of the original LPI that is available on the web. New media sources of LPI may be far from maturity, but this article finds that they do exist and are a viable resource for citizens.
In recent decades, turnout in US presidential elections has soared, education levels have hit historic highs, and the internet has made information more accessible than ever. Yet over that same period, Americans have grown less engaged with local politics and elections. Drawing on detailed analysis of fifteen years of reporting in over 200 local newspapers, along with election returns, surveys, and interviews with journalists, this study shows that the demise of local journalism has played a key role in the decline of civic engagement. As struggling newspapers have slashed staff, they have dramatically cut their coverage of mayors, city halls, school boards, county commissions, and virtually every aspect of local government. In turn, fewer Americans now know who their local elected officials are, and turnout in local elections has plummeted. To reverse this trend and preserve democratic accountability in our communities, the local news industry must be reinvigorated – and soon.
In recent decades, turnout in US presidential elections has soared, education levels have hit historic highs, and the internet has made information more accessible than ever. Yet over that same period, Americans have grown less engaged with local politics and elections. Drawing on detailed analysis of fifteen years of reporting in over 200 local newspapers, along with election returns, surveys, and interviews with journalists, this study shows that the demise of local journalism has played a key role in the decline of civic engagement. As struggling newspapers have slashed staff, they have dramatically cut their coverage of mayors, city halls, school boards, county commissions, and virtually every aspect of local government. In turn, fewer Americans now know who their local elected officials are, and turnout in local elections has plummeted. To reverse this trend and preserve democratic accountability in our communities, the local news industry must be reinvigorated – and soon.
Bu çalışmanın amacı Sinop ili yerel basınındaki çevre haberlerinin sunumunu analiz etmektir. Bu çerçevede Sinop’ta dijital olarak yayınlanan toplam dokuz gazetenin 19 Mart‐18 Nisan 2018 tarihleri arasındaki sayıları nitel içerik analizi yöntemiyle incelenmiştir. Toplam 287 defa gazete sayfalarında yer alan çevre konuları Çevre Koruma, Çevreden Korunma, Çevreden Kazanma ve Çevre Güzelliği olarak dört kategori ve on alt kategori altında toplanmıştır. Bulgulara göre yunus ölümleri, fidan dikimi ve benzeri haberler okuyuculara çevrenin korunması gerektiği mesajını vermektedir. Nükleer santral, kentsel atıklar ve aşılanan köpeklere dair haberler, insanların çevre sorunlarından korunmasını vurgulamaktadır. Doğal güzelliklerin turizme kazandırılması, ormancılık faaliyetleri, balıkçılık sorunları ve tarımsal üretim konulu haberlerde de çevre, bir gelir elde etme aracı olarak sunulmaktadır. Kentin çiçeklendirilmesi, ağaçların süslenmesi, kırsal yaşamın güzellikleri konulu haber ve köşe yazılarında ise çevre, bir güzellik imgesi olarak öne çıkarılmaktadır. Sonuç olarak çevre, gerçekliğinden bağımsız bir şekilde ve insanların kullanım amaçlarına göre inşa edilmekte ve farklı bakış açılarından gazete okuyucularına sunulmaktadır. Zira aynı ağaç farklı durumlara göre korunmakta, süslenmekte veya gelir getirmektedir.
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ABSTRACT
This study aims to examine the presentation of environmental news in
local press in Sinop. Hence, nine digital newspapers, published online in Sinop between March 19 and April 18 in 2018, are examined by qualitative content analysis. Environmental issues, published 287 times in local newspapers, were gathered in four categories as Environmental Protection, Protection from Environment, Making Money from Environment, and Environmental Beauty. News reports about dolphin deaths and planting trees give the message of environmental protection. Nuclear plant, urban wastes and dog vaccine news reports imply the protection of people from environment. News reports about touristic use of natural beauties, forestry activities, problems of fisheries and agricultural production present environment as a tool for income. Planting flowers, decorating trees, beauties of rural life and similar issues show environment as symbol of beauty. As a result, environment is constructed according to human needs in newspapers apart from its reality. Hence same tree is protected, decorated or sold according to changing human needs.
Local newspapers play an important role in the democratic process but they are under threat in a rapidly changing media landscape. This study examines the locally produced Election 2014 coverage of two different newspapers in New Zealand: the Otago Daily Times, a metropolitan daily with a strong emphasis on regional coverage; and the provincial daily Manawatu Standard. Content analysis shows some similarities between the publications (broadly similar story size and authorship patterns) and some of the differences (number of stories and amount of coverage) accounted for by circulation. However, the two newspapers also enacted 'localness' in diverse ways. Nearly 80% of election stories produced by Manawatu Standard staff had a city or regional focus, a finding consistent with 2011 election data. In contrast, befitting its metropolitan status, the overwhelming bulk of Otago Daily Times' election coverage was nationally focused, produced by its Wellington-based political reporter. However, despite its long-established commitment to Otago, more local staff and bigger news-hole, it produced considerably fewer election stories with a city or regional focus than the Standard. We consider the possible impact of other influencers on local election coverage, such as the newsworthiness of electorate races and competing regional stories, but conclude that despite its purported importance, local political news continues to occupy a tenuous position in the modern newsroom.
We propose a two-stage process to explain the relationship between the local news environment and citizen engagement. Our original content analysis of newspaper coverage in every US House district during the 2010 midterms reveals that districts with uncompetitive races and those served by large-circulation outlets see significantly less, and less substantive, coverage than hotly contested districts and those served by smaller outlets. We then merge the news data with survey data from the 2010 CCES and find that a diminished news environment depresses engagement. Citizens exposed to a lower volume of coverage are less able to evaluate their member of Congress, less likely to express opinions about the House candidates in their districts, and less likely to vote. This is true for people regardless of levels of political awareness, indicating that the deleterious consequences of a decline in local coverage are widespread, not restricted to the least attentive citizens.
There is a debate in the literature on referendum voting as to whether these occasions are opportunities for voters to express issue preferences in the absence of partisan politics or whether they simply serve as referendums on the current government. In part, this latter, second order account is assumed to be driven by the amount and content of media coverage, and hence information about the referendum, that is available to voters. In this paper, we address the second order question and demonstrate that holding elections concurrently both reduces the amount of media attention to the second order contest—the AV referendum in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland where national elections were held—and moderates media priming, thereby affecting the salient cues in the decision making of voters in those contexts.
En Irak es tan decisiva la guerra como la discusión política. La polémica en torno a la legitimidad de la preemptive war y el poder de Estados Unidos para establecer su particular orden internacional, se desarrolla al mismo tiempo que la acción bélica. En esta situación, la imagen transmitida a través de los medios de comunicación, particularmente la TV, determina la credibilidad de Estados Unidos en Europa y explica el interés por analizar el contenido de los principales informativos.
What happens when a major, well publicized state-level scandal occurs? Do opinions of federal politicians improve because of relative comparisons to state politicians caught in the scandal? Do attitudes toward all politicians suffer? Little work has been done to investigate about how scandals related to one level of government affect attitudes about political actors at other levels. We investigate what happens when a major and well publicized state-level scandal occurs. Using individual-level public opinion data collected during the summer of 2006, we analyze the impact that a state-level scandal had on citizen approval of state and federal political actors, considering the mediating impact of exposure to media coverage of the scandal. Overall consumption of news coverage of state governors boosts approval of the governor relative to the president. At the same time, however, citizens exposed to negative scandalous news coverage of their governor show a decline in relative gubernatorial approval.
There is little research on the tone of local news coverage of the presidency, despite the public's preference for local rather than national news. I use theories of media politics, based primarily on the profit-seeker model of news coverage, to explore the impact of newspaper characteristics, audience preferences, and story characteristics on local newspaper coverage of the presidency. Based on a sample of 288 stories taken from the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, I demonstrate that everyday local newspaper coverage of the presidency is slightly more negative than positive and that audience support for the president, newspaper resources, and corporate ownership affect the tone of local newspaper coverage of the presidency.
As viewer numbers of national news have declined, local news has grown in importance as a source of political information. Yet prominent research into its effects concludes that its impact on political attitudes and behavior is minor. We theorize and demonstrate that the influence of local news may be indirect and subtle but nevertheless important. Using multiple methods, we show a clear relationship between perceptions of campaign rhetoric and watching local news, even when controlling for individual-level characteristics; this response, in turn, has an indirect effect on turnout. We explain this finding as a combination of the “mean social world” presented by local news, the nature of political coverage, and the perception of local news stations as simply another player in the campaign. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our results for the role of local news in politics and what might be done to make its contribution more positive.
This paper focuses on the importance of local news as the primary source of information for most Americans, emphasizing the need for additional research about local TV news content across a variety of topics and about elections and crime in particular. In addition, we present a detailed methodology of a new capture, coding, and digital archiving process that significantly advances current tools available to researchers, journalists, educators, policymakers, and that portion of the general public interested in local TV news content. Finally, the paper presents initial findings from an ongoing study of local TV coverage as an example of how researchers can capture and analyze large amounts of local TV news data in multiple media markets at a comparatively low cost, thus overcoming a reliance on single market studies with relatively small sample sizes.
Going public to gain support, especially through reliance on national addresses and the national news media, has been a central tactic for modern presidential public leadership. In Going Local: Presidential Leadership in the Post-Broadcast Age, Jeffrey E. Cohen argues that presidents have adapted their going-public activities to reflect the current realities of polarized parties and fragmented media. Going public now entails presidential targeting of their party base, interest groups, and localities. Cohen focuses on localities and offers a theory of presidential news management that is tested using several new data sets, including the first large-scale content analysis of local newspaper coverage of the president. The analysis finds that presidents can affect their local news coverage, which, in turn, affects public opinion toward the president. Although the post-broadcast age presents hurdles to presidential leadership, Going Local demonstrates the effectiveness of targeted presidential appeals and provides us with a refined understanding of the nature of presidential leadership.
This article examines the "spiral of silence" in public opinion. Derived by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann from the work of Tocqueville and others, this thesis offers an explanation of change in global public opinion. The author critiques the Noelle-Neumann view and finds that, while Tocqueville advances a similar hypothesis, unlike Noelle-Neumann, he ties his account to the structure of political relationships polity.
This article analyzes the high and sustained levels of popular support for President Bush's policies during the Gulf War using a composite model of public opinion formation drawing on the rally around the flag effect noted by political scientists, the spiral of silence hypothesis drawn from communications studies, and the concepts of priming and framing drawn from political psychology. By linking the aggregate effects noted in the rally and spiral of silence hypotheses with models of individual cognitive processes, the composite model explains, better than either the rally or the spiral hypothesis alone, the sudden shift toward supporting the use of force on January 16, 1991 and the high levels of support that persisted through July.
During the past thirty-five years many commentators have expressed concern about declining support for the American political system, noting familiar evidence of the steady erosion in electoral turnout (Stanley and Niemi 1995, 78; Teixeira 1992), falling participation in political parties (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993), plummeting levels of political trust (Lipset and Schneider 1987), and weakening civic engagement (Putnam 1995a). Evidence for declining confidence in American government is well-established. The standard National Election Study measures show that in 1954 three-quarters of the American public trusted government in Washington to do what was right ‘just about always or most of the time’. By 1994, a quarter of the public proved as trusting. Moreover how far Americans trust each other—or social trust—has also fallen by more than a third since the early sixties (Uslaner 1995; Putnam 1995a).
Not all the evidence points in the same direction, and some alternative forms of political activity may have risen over time (Verba et al. 1995, 70–71). Moreover comparative research (Klingemann and Fuchs 1995) provides no evidence for a uniform secular decline in electoral turnout and confidence in government across advanced democracies, as sometimes assumed by observers. Nevertheless it is widely believed that American democracy has been experiencing a crisis of legitimacy, with angry voters disillusioned by Washington politics as usual.
This study assessed the kinds of sources setting the story “agenda” in election news covering the 1998 governor's race in the nine largest Michigan dailies. The assertions of candidates or their partisan supporters were more likely than those of experts or other sources to dominate story leads and paragraphs. Sources included for their expertise on the “horse race” and issue aspects of the campaign were cited in only a third of the election stories, and their comments were usually placed far down in the stories. Statehouse bureau reporters were more likely than their newsroom-based and wire-service colleagues to write stories including experts. A substantial number of stories also contained unattributed “reporter leads.” Most of these leads were references to events or developments that could be verified by any reader. Other reporter leads contained interpretations that were substantiated in the stories. But about 5 percent of the stories were introduced by reporter leads that contained interpretations or conclusions that were not or could not be substantiated in stories. Statehouse bureau reporters were also more likely than wire service or newsroom reporters to write interpretative leads.
This article explores the impact of strategy-based campaign coverage on turnout and confidence in government. Recent theoretical advances suggest that variables such as sophistication and involvement frequently moderate media exposure effects. We hypothesize that the impact of strategy frames will be moderated by political involvement and sophistication. In an experiment, we precisely isolate and manipulate particular story elements that have been said to foster public cynicism: the strategic interpretation of candidate motives, the presence of polling results, and the use of war or game metaphors to describe the campaign. Relative to the issue-oriented coverage, strategy frames boost the number of strategy-based comments people offer when describing the campaign and depress issue-based commentary. As expected, framing effects on turnout, trust in government, civic duty, and the perceived meaningfulness of elections are moderated by involvement and sophistication. Nonpartisans and those with less than a college degree are significantly demobilized and alienated by strategy-based coverage, while partisans and the highly educated are mostly unaffected.
The political messages of newspapers are significantly associated with the substantive political attitudes of a national sample of their readers. Diversity of news perspectives and editorial liberalism show significant relationships to readers' support of interest groups, public policies, and politicians. The relationships vary among self-identified liberals, conservatives, and moderates in accordance with the predictions of information-processing theory. The standard assertion in most recent empirical studies is that “media affect what people think about, not what they think.” The findings here indicate the media make a significant contribution to what people think—to their political preferences and evaluations—precisely by affecting what they think about.
In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position. In reflecting what candidates are saying during a campaign, the mass media may well determine the important issues--that is, the media may set the "agenda." of the campaign.
In this study, we integrate research findings on the impact of exposure to stereotype reinforcing local crime news with theories about the impact of residential context on attitudes about race and crime. To date, there has been no research investigating whether neighborhood context mitigates or exacerbates the impact of exposure to racially stereotypic crime news. We test extensions of two competing theories. According to the social contact hypothesis, under certain circumstances whites’ residential proximity to blacks might reduce the likelihood of further negative effects via exposure to racially stereotypic media messages. On the other hand, according to the group threat hypothesis, proximity to blacks might increase whites’ sensitivity to stereotype-reinforcing crime news. We collected information about the neighborhood racial context for each respondent in an experiment. We then exposed respondents either to racially stereotypic or non-stereotypic crime stories on local news programs. Results support our prediction based on the social contact hypothesis. When exposed to racial stereotypes in the news, white respondents living in white homogeneous neighborhoods endorsed more punitive policies to address crime, expressed more negative stereotypic evaluations of blacks, and felt more distant from blacks as a group. Whites from more mixed neighborhoods were either unaffected or moved in the opposite direction: endorsing less punitive crime policies, less negative stereotypes, and feeling closer to blacks as a group as a result of exposure to the stereotypic coverage. The implication of this moderating impact of residential integration is discussed.
The conventional wisdom about negative political advertisements holds that no one likes them, but they work, that is, they have the consequences their sponsors intend. Moreover, many analysts have expressed concern over the detrimental effects of such negativism on the American political system. We examine the accuracy of the conventional wisdom and the legitimacy of the fears about the consequences for the political system via meta-analysis, a systematic, quantitative review of the literature. The data do not support either contention. Negative political ads appear to be no more effective than positive ads and do not seem to have especially detrimental effects on the political system. Eleven subsidiary hypotheses about particular circumstances in which significant effects are likely to be found are tested and rejected. Discussion focuses on why negative political advertisements have become so popular in practice when there is so little evidence that they work especially well.
This book is a major contribution to the current theory of liberalism by an eminent political theorist. It challenges the views of such theorists as Rawls, Dworkin, and Ackerman who believe that the essence of liberalism is that it should remain neutral concerning different ways of life and individual conceptions of what is good or valuable. Professor Galston argues that the modern liberal state is committed to a distinctive conception of the human good, and to that end has developed characteristic institutions and practices - representative governments, diverse societies, market economies, and zones of private action - in the pursuit of specific public purposes that give unity to the liberal state. These purposes guide liberal public policy, shape liberal justice, require the practice of liberal virtues, and rest on a liberal public culture. Consequently the diversity characteristic of liberal societies is limited by their institutional, personal, and cultural preconditions.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) came to America in 1831 to see what a great republic was like. What struck him most was the country's equality of conditions, its democracy. The book he wrote on his return to France, Democracy in America, is both the best ever written on democracy and the best ever written on America. It remains the most often quoted book about the United States, not only because it has something to interest and please everyone, but also because it has something to teach everyone.
When it was published in 2000, Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop's new translation of Democracy in America—only the third since the original two-volume work was published in 1835 and 1840—was lauded in all quarters as the finest and most definitive edition of Tocqueville's classic thus far. Mansfield and Winthrop have restored the nuances of Tocqueville's language, with the expressed goal "to convey Tocqueville's thought as he held it rather than to restate it in comparable terms of today." The result is a translation with minimal interpretation, but with impeccable annotations of unfamiliar references and a masterful introduction placing the work and its author in the broader contexts of political philosophy and statesmanship.
Theory: In terms of economic voting, voters' perceptions of economic indicators can be more important than the statistics themselves. This distinction is particularly important in understanding George Bush's defeat in 1992. Hypothesis: Relentlessly negative reporting on economic performance during the election year negatively affected voters' perceptions of the economy. These altered perceptions influenced voting behavior. Methods: Ordinary least squares regression is used to demonstrate the media's impact on economic evaluations. Logistic regression is used to demonstrate the importance of economic evaluations in vote choice. Results: Media consumption and attention to the presidential campaign through the mass media negatively shaped voters' retrospective economic assessments. These assessments were significantly related to vote choice. This suggests an explanation for why George Bush lost reelection despite an economy that had rebounded from recession well in advance of election day.
The disclosure that high officials within the Reagan administration had covertly diverted to the Nicaraguan Contras funds obtained from the secret sale of weapons to Iran provides us with a splendid opportunity to examine how the foundations of popular support shift when dramatic events occur. According to our theory of priming, the more attention media pay to a particular domain--the more the public is primed with it--the more citizens will incorporate what they know about that domain into their overall judgment of the president. Data from the 1986 National Election Study confirm that intervention in Central America loomed larger in the public's assessment of President Reagan's performance after the Iran-Contra disclosure than before. Priming was most pronounced for aspects of public opinion most directly implicated by the news coverage, more apparent in political notices' judgments than political experts', and stronger in the evaluations of Reagan's overall performance than in assessments of his character.
In many respects political scientists agree about how best to model political processes. But we disagree about how to translate our theories into structural equations; each of us seems to have our own structural equation model of the same theory. This disagreement is a serious impediment to theory building. Vector autoregression (VAR) is a means of circumventing this problem. We explain the logic of this alternative modeling strategy and examine its relative virtues. In particular, VAR and the more familiar structural equation (SEQ) approaches are compared in terms of their epistemological underpinnings, empirical power, and usefulness in policy analysis. This comparison shows that the two modeling strategies are based on different conceptions of theory and of theory building and that, for the four--six variable systems we usually study, the choice between VAR and SEQ models presents a trade-off between accuracy of causal inference and quantitative precision, respectively. In addition, VAR models have the disadvantage of being unable to incorporate multiplicative and nonlinear relationships as easily as SEQ models. But VAR models have the advantage of providing a more complete treatment of policy endogeneity than SEQ models. These and other contrasts in the two modeling strategies are illustrated in a reanalysis of Alt and Chrystal's (1983) permanent income model of government expenditure.
Television journalism can produce significant changes in opinions about basic American institutions and may also foster political malaise. Laboratory investigation revealed that the CBS documentary, “The Selling of the Pentagon,” convinced viewers that the military participated more in national politics and misled the public more about Vietnam than these viewers had previously believed. The program also caused a significant decrease in political efficacy among all our groups. This finding led to correlational research to determine if exposure to television news is also associated with lower levels of efficacy.
SRC survey data suggest that reliance upon television news programs is associated with feelings of inefficacy and political self-doubt. These data also indicate that reliance upon television news fosters political cynicism and distrust, political instability, and frustration with civil rights. Holding constant the level of education or income of these respondents does not appreciably alter these relationships.
In short, the two sets of data imply that the networks helped to create Scammon's Social Issue and that video journalism fostered public support for George Wallace.
The emergence of a new video marketplace raises questions about the commitment of local TV news organizations to the FCC localism doctrine. Local news coverage at ten Pennsylvania stations in 1992 was content analyzed and compared with 1976 data collected by Adams (1980). Results indicate that stations devoted more coverage to outlying market areas in 1992 than in 1976, but emphasized sensationalism/human interest stories at the expense of local public affairs issues.
Much of what voters learn about candidates for state office comes from local television news programs. Coverage of the 1998 governor's race in Michigan, however, averaged less than 4 percent of hard-news stories. Moreover, about a quarter of those stories focused on the “horse race” and lacked information from the candidates or supporters about substantive issue stands. Individual stories tended to be one sided and imbalanced in the attention paid to candidates. Stories packaged by reporters, however, were more likely to include both candidates than stories read by anchors. Further, balanced coverage was achieved by some stations by using packages focusing on one candidate in conjunction with packages focusing on the other. Because most stations produced only one story on a given day, viewers not following all the stories may have gotten a more negative impression of coverage balance than was merited.
This paper tests the proposition that an electorate disproportionately representative of higher-class citizens will be rewarded with public policies in favor of its economic interests and at the expense of the interests of lower-class citizens. We find a consistent negative relationship between the degree of class bias favoring the upper class and the generosity of indigenous state social welfare spending. We also find that it is the underrepresentation of the poor, rather than the overrepresentation of the wealthy, that principally explains this relationship. These findings have important implications for democratic theory generally and for present-day concern about the composition of the U.S. electorate.
Electoral research acknowledges the growing significance of the mass media in contemporary campaigns, but scholars are divided on the nature of this influence. Using a unique database that includes both media content and public opinion, we examine the flow of partisan information from newspapers to the voters and assess the press's role in electoral politics and citizen learning. We find that the American press does not present clear and singular messages about presidential elections but, rather multiple messages about the candidates and the campaign. In addition, perception of the information is shaped as much by an individual's political views as by the objective content. Despite the mixed messages, we find that a newspaper's editorial content is significantly related to candidate preferences in 1992. These results challenge the minimal effects interpretation of the media, because local newspapers can play a significant role in providing cues that influence voters' electoral calculus.
This article studies the effectiveness of influence strategies in serious dyadic disputes. Influence strategies are classified according to four types: bullying, reciprocating, appeasing, and trial-and-error. The study employs events data from twenty serious disputes occurring in the twentieth century. The findings support the central hypothesis that a reciprocating strategy is the most effective means of avoiding a diplomatic defeat without going to war, especially when it is employed against a bullying opponent. A closer look at the individual cases suggests that this is related to the face-saving properties of this approach, as well as the universal norm of reciprocity in international affairs.
Analyses of the persuasive effects of media exposure outside the laboratory have generally produced negative results. I attribute such nonfindings in part to carelessness regarding the inferential consequences of measurement error and in part to limitations of research design. In an analysis of opinion change during the 1980 presidential campaign, adjusting for measurement error produces several strong media exposure effects, especially for network television news. Adjusting for measurement error also makes preexisting opinions look much more stable, suggesting that the new information absorbed via media exposure must be about three times as distinctive as has generally been supposed in order to account for observed patterns of opinion change.
Two experiments sustain Lippmann's suspicion, advanced a half century ago, that media provide compelling descriptions of a public world that people cannot directly experience. More precisely, the experiments show that television news programs profoundly affect which problems viewers take to be important. The experiments also demonstrate that those problems promimently positioned in the evening news are accorded greater weight in viewers' evaluations of presidential performance. We note the political implications of these results, suggest their psychological foundations, and argue for a revival of experimentation in the study of political communication.
The article argues that part of the reason for vote instability during election campaigns is the media's role in priming the character of leaders. Although voters come to election campaigns with an array of opinions on candidates, issues, and parties, because candidates' personal qualities are highlighted by the media and parties are ignored, those voters more highly exposed to the media become increasingly likely to base their vote on candidate evaluations, and increasingly unlikely to base the decision on their party identification. On the other hand, this article demonstrates that interpersonal communications can act as a buffer to this tendency. Talking about politics over the course of the campaign primes issues. The argument is supported through use of a rolling cross section employed in the 1988 Canadian election.
We present an individual-level analysis of the effects of campaign advertising on vote choice in the 1996 Senate elections. Drawing on a unique data set that merges the 1996 National Election Study with detailed satellite tracking data showing when, where, and how many times every Senate campaign ad was aired in each of the nation's top media markets, we develop an alternative measure of media exposure and a different way of measuring the effect of campaign spending. We use this new approach to address long-standing questions about the effect of political advertising and the role of campaign spending in congressional elections. This cleaner measure yields results contrary to some of the conventional wisdom on the effect of campaign spending.
This paper examines the extent to which attention to television news impacted affective evaluations of presidential candidates during the last two months of the 1992 campaign. Our analyses show that attentiveness to campaign news significantly influenced evaluations in a manner consistent with the tone of news coverage for each candidate. We disaggregate the data by party and ideology, however, and discover this effect to be conditional, depending critically on the character and intensity of political predispositions. Throughout the paper we emphasize the interplay between political predispositions and the valence of network coverage, underscoring the contingent effect of media messages. We conclude with a brief discussion of our results and stress the importance of partisan reinforcement, which we found was a major consequence of news media reception during the fall 1992 campaign.
The proliferation in the use of televised political spot advertisements by presidential candidates justifies the increasing attention given to assess their value for the political system. Some controversy surrounding the value of their content concerns their reliance on image material. Yet the concept of candidate images has been ambiguous since images can refer to either graphic display of candidates or to candidates' character attributes. This study assesses candidates' character attributes in televised political commercials for 1980's American presidential primaries and finds that political spots offer useful and accurate profiles of candidates in campaigns and are helpful sources for the electorate to use in weighing the various strengths and weaknesses of presidential hopefuls.
Video-based media spaces are designed to support casual interaction between intimate collaborators. Yet transmitting video is fraught with privacy concerns. Some researchers suggest that the video stream be filtered to mask out potentially sensitive ...
The most comprehensive portrait of a presidential campaign in more than a decade, Crosstalk focuses on the 1992 U.S. presidential race and looks at how citizens use information in the media to make their voting decisions and how politicians and the media interact to shape that information. Examining political advertisements, news coverage, ad watches, and talk shows in Los Angeles, Boston, Winston-Salem, and Fargo/Moorhead, the authors chart the impact of different information environments on citizens and show how people developed images of candidates over the course of the campaign. Crosstalk presents persuasive evidence that campaigns do matter, that citizens are active participants in the campaign process, and their perceptions of a candidate's character is the central factor in the voting process. This innovative study contributes significantly to our understanding of the 1992 presidential campaign and of campaigns in general, and shows how election campaigns can play an important role in the long-term vitality of democracy.
The data just don't show erosion of America's 'social capital.' Public Per-spective
- E C Ladd
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The press effect: Politicians, journalists, and the stories that shape the political world
- K H Jamieson
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How Americans became civic Civic engage-ment in American democracy
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Sound bite democracy: network evening news presidential coverage
- K Adatto
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The media and the Gulf war
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The voters speak: Findings from the Media Studies Center's voters and media research project
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The mass media election
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