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Frame Edition: Choices of Journalists
Abstract
In this chapter, we analyze the choices of journalists. We find that they tend to balance out the messages of each camp in all three campaigns and that the frames of powerful actors are present in the debate the more they are emphasized and the more prominent the speaker is. Furthermore, journalists investigate official claims and help the reader to understand the topic, particularly in the complex issue. By comparing dialogue in the news media and in the media input, we see that political actors anticipate the media logic and increase dialogue in the media input correspondingly. In the free news media, dialogue is significantly lower than in other media types. In other campaign types (elections or public debates (especially scandals), less balanced coverage and more journalistic interpretation is likely. If journalists are less distant, less balanced news, a narrower range of views and more interpretation seems to be possible.
... Algunos factores externos que influyen en la elaboración de textos periodísticos son: los contenidos que publican otros medios de comunicación, los intereses de los anunciantes, la cultura dominante en el país o región donde el medio tiene su sede, las opiniones de los líderes sociales y la legislación sobre los medios del país en el que se trabaja. Los encuadres utilizados por actores sociales relevantes están presentes en el debate cuanto más se enfatizan en los medios y más prominente es el orador (Hänggli, 2020). ...
Este artículo muestra los resultados de una investigación académica sobre el modo en que la prensa peruana aborda el tema del aborto. Se ha realizado un análisis de contenido para detectar los encuadres, los temas y las fuentes periodísticas presentes en 160 textos publicados en el quinquenio 2015-2019 por los diarios El Comercio, Perú 21, La República, La Hora, Correo y El Tiempo. Los tres primeros forman parte de la prensa más leída en la región de Lima metropolitana, mientras que los tres últimos están entre los diarios más leídos en la región de Piura. Estas dos regiones son las más pobladas del país andino. Una de las variables del análisis de contenido son los encuadres genéricos utilizados por la prensa: provida, proaborto y neutro/ambiguo. Los resultados muestran que cinco de los seis diarios seleccionados –todos excepto El Comercio– utilizaron mayoritariamente encuadres provida, es decir, opuestos al aborto inducido. Por otra parte, los tres diarios que forman parte de la prensa más leída en la región de Piura utilizaron porcentualmente encuadres más provida que los tres diarios que forman parte de la prensa más leída en la región de Lima metropolitana. En cuanto al tipo de fuentes a las que recurrieron los periodistas para informar sobre el aborto, pertenecen mayoritariamente a los ámbitos político y religioso, mientras que las del ámbito científico quedaron relegadas a un tercer lugar.
Die Rolle der Medien in direktdemokratischen Prozessen wird – ebenso wie direkte Demokratie selbst – kontrovers diskutiert. Empirische Befunde hierzu liegen allerdings kaum vor. Die Frage, ob direktdemokratische Verfahren Einfl uss auf die Qualität der Medienberichterstattung nehmen, steht daher im Mittelpunkt dieses Beitrags. Die legislative Entwicklung des Nichtraucherschutzgesetzes in Bayern bot die Möglichkeit, die Berichterstattung im Vorfeld des Parlamentsbeschlusses im Jahr 2007 mit der Berichterstattung über den Volksentscheid im Jahr 2010 zu vergleichen. Eine Inhaltsanalyse der fünf Münchner Tageszeitungen, die die Qualitätsmerkmale Relevanz, Vielfalt, Ausgewogenheit, Transparenz und Sachlichkeit untersucht, zeigt bemerkenswerte Unterschiede zwischen der Berichterstattung über den Parlaments- und Volksentscheid. Abonnementzeitungen berichten im Vorfeld des Volksentscheids ausführlicher als über den parlamentarischen Entscheid, Boulevardzeitungen dagegen weniger intensiv. Die Vielfalt der Berichterstattung veränderte sich nur hinsichtlich der Akteure, in Bezug auf Themen und Argumente blieb sie auf gleichem Niveau. Einige Indikatoren weisen jedoch auf eine höhere Ausgewogenheit der Berichterstattung im Vorfeld des Volksentscheides hin. Darüber hinaus berichteten insbesondere die Boulevardzeitungen transparenter. Die Sachlichkeit der Berichterstattung veränderte sich in den beiden Jahren nicht. Insgesamt geben die Ergebnisse Hinweise darauf, dass mehr Beteiligung der Bürger auch zu einer ‚besseren’ Berichterstattung führt.
This study breaks new ground in investigating candidate behavior in American electoral campaigns. It centers on a question of equal importance to citizens and scholars: how can we produce better political campaigns? The project takes an innovative approach to answering this question by bringing together critical and empirical methods as well as game theory in a sophisticated yet readable text. The answer comes in four parts. First, Simon develops the idea of dialogue as a standard for evaluating political campaigns. Second, he shows that candidates' self-interest in winning leads them to avoid dialogue, that is substantive campaign discourse. Third, he demonstrates the beneficial effects produced by the little dialogue that actually occurs. Fourth, he pinpoints the forces responsible for these rare occurrences. The major lesson of this work is that campaign reform under its present guise will not bring about the more substantive campaigns that the public desires.
Many social scientists want to explain why people do what they do. A barrier to constructing such explanations used to be a lack of information on the relationship between cognition and choice. Now, recent advances in cognitive science, economics, political science, and psychology have clarified this relationship. In Elements of Reason, eighteen scholars from across the social sciences use these advances to uncover the cognitive foundations of social decision making. They answer tough questions about how people see and process information and provide new explanations of how basic human needs, the environment, and past experiences combine to affect human choices. Elements of Reason is written for a broad audience and should be read by anyone for whom 'Why do people do what they do?' is an important question. It is the rare book that transforms abstract debates about rationality and reason into empirically relevant explanations of how people choose.
In 2008 the world experienced the Great Recession, a financial and economic crisis of enormous proportions and the greatest economic downturn since the 1930s. In its wake, unemployment became a key preoccupation of West European publics and politicians. This comparative study considers the policy debates surrounding unemployment in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Denmark and Switzerland since 2008. With an over-arching focus on drawing out cross-national commonalities and differences, the authors ask whether patterns of political communication vary across countries. Their analysis draws on interviews with labour market policy-makers in the six selected countries, and paints a revealing picture. Appealing to researchers in comparative politics, political communication and welfare state research, this book will also interest practitioners involved in labour market policy.
Current and authoritative, from a top scholar in the field.Media Politics encourages students to take a critical look at the relationship between media and politics by analyzing how the media influences American politics and how politicians use the media to get elected, stay in power, and achieve policy goals. Drawing on recent research on topics students care about―including new digital and social media and the polarization of politics―and the author’s specially curated online video archive, Media Politics remains the most current text for the course.
In diesem Lehrbuch werden zunächst die unterschiedlichen theoretischen Ansätze diskutiert, mit deren Hilfe man Politische Kommunikation analysieren und verstehen kann. Danach werden mit dem politischen System der Rahmen und mit Öffentlichkeit der Raum vorgestellt, in denen politische Kommunikation stattfindet. Weitere Themen sind die Medien und Medienstrukturen als Handlungsrahmen, die beteiligten Akteure und die politischen Prozesse, sowie die systematische Darstellung der Strategien, Instrumente und Formen der politischen PR. Abschließend werden zentrale Befunde zur Politk der Medien vorgestellt und politische Medieninhalte dabei als Handlungs- und Strukturergebnis begriffen.
A widely noted and oft-decried characteristic of campaigns in the United States is the tendency of the competing sides to talk past each other-to avoid engaging with one another on the same issues. We bring a massive database on statements by the major-party presidential candidates and other campaign spokespersons in the 1960 through 2000 elections to bear on the question of issue convergence. Far from the exception, a high degree of similarity in the issue emphases of the two sides appears to have been the norm in these campaigns. This result suggests the need to rethink some influential empirical, formal, and normative perspectives on campaigns.
This article investigates the impact of the deliberative quality of online news items on argument repertoire. Participants in an online experiment (N = 557) read a news item that covers a local debate on underground CO2 storage. Two dimensions of deliberative quality are manipulated: justification, or the extent to which arguments in the news item are substantiated, and constructive debate climate, that is, the extent to which stakeholders are reported to work together toward a solution. The findings suggest that public opinion quality would be higher, if news media would better meet deliberative standards.
Building on a survey of media institutions in eighteen West European and North American democracies, Hallin and Mancini identify the principal dimensions of variation in media systems and the political variables which have shaped their evolution. They go on to identify three major models of media system development (the Polarized Pluralist, Democratic Corporatist and Liberal models) to explain why the media have played a different role in politics in each of these systems, and to explore the forces of change that are currently transforming them. It provides a key theoretical statement about the relation between media and political systems, a key statement about the methodology of comparative analysis in political communication and a clear overview of the variety of media institutions that have developed in the West, understood within their political and historical context.
As pointed out in the introduction to this volume, Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet’s (1968 [1944]: 74) The People’s Choice has already pointed to significant campaign effects in that ‘political campaigns are important primarily because they activate latent predispositions’. More recently, the idea that campaigns help voters make decisions that are in line with their pre-existing predispositions has been picked up by other scholars, who provide considerable evidence that activation effects actually do occur during the course of campaigns. According to the activation model, during the campaign the citizens’ attention becomes more generally focused on politics and on the specific political issues highlighted, and the citizens learn a lot about the choices they have to make. How the context of the voters’ choice influences the activation process is, however, still a very open question.
The criticism that ordinary voters lack the necessary competence to make policy decisions persists despite the growth, popularity and implementation of direct democratic instruments throughout the democratic world. This article presents a novel measure of voters’ levels of justification as a possible, policy-specific, conceptualization of citizen competence in direct democracy. Using a unique dataset based on thirty-four ballot decisions in Switzerland, the study analyses the levels and correlates of citizen competence. The main findings are, first, that most voters do understand arguments about policies. Secondly, the political context
as well as
individual resources are important in determining voters’ competence. Finally, with regard to individual resources, motivation is strongly associated with justification levels, while the effect of ability is smaller than expected.
Mediensysteme können mit systemtheoretischen, ökonomischen und politökonomi-schen Ansätzen analysiert werden (vgl. Blum 2001: 8–9; Haas 1990: 1). Für die Schweiz hat Ulrich Saxer den systemtheoretischen Ansatz gewählt und jeweils untersucht, welche spezifischen leistungen das Mediensystem für das Gesamtsystem erbringt (vgl. Saxer 1990a, 1990b, 1993). Florian Fleck hat den ökonomischen Ansatz verwendet und wirtschaftliche Gesetzmäßigkeiten deutlich gemacht (vgl. Fleck 1987). Und Werner Meier hat mit dem Ansatz der politischen Ökonomie die Kosten der durch Globalisierung vorangetriebenen Kommerzialisierung und Medienkonzentration aufgezeigt (vgl. Meier 1997a, 1997b). Die Erforschung des schweizerischen Mediensystems leidet vor allem darunter, dass es bislang keine kontinuierliche offizielle Medienstatistik gibt (vgl. Rathgeb 1999: 163). Erst 2001 hat das Bundesamt für Statistik einen ersten Anlauf für eine Pressestatistik unternommen (vgl. Modetta 2001). Daten beschaffen daher einerseits die Werbewirtschaft für ihre eigenen Zwecke, anderseits die Wissenschaft, die aber teilweise vor schier unüberwindlichen Hürden steht, da viele Zahlen als „geheim“gelten (vgl. Bellwald/Hätten-schwiler/Würsch 1991; Rathgeb 1999). Die Strukturmerkmale und Strukturprobleme sind indessen mehrfach erforscht und dargestellt worden (vgl. Saxer 1990b; Bonfa-delli/Meier 1994; Marr u.a. 2001: 275–286; Blum 2001: 25–68). Zunehmend wendet sich die Forschung auch Problemen der Regulierung zu.
During the waning years of the 1950s, the Soviet Union repeatedly charged that American spyplanes were overflying their country. American spokesmen, including President Eisenhower, publicly denied the charges. On May 6, 1960, President Krushchev angrily announced that an American U2 spyplane had been shot down near Sverdlosk, 1,200 miles within Soviet borders. The U.S. State Department denied ever having ordered overflights; a NASA official reported that a U2 being used for high altitude atmospheric research may have encountered an oxygen failure and drifted across the Soviet border accidentally. On the following day the Kremlin published photographs of the wrecked plane with its surveillance equipment, and the State Department admitted that the U2 “probably” had been spying. NASA found that none of their planes were missing after all. The U2 affair became a major international incident and figured prominently in the early collapse of a four-power summit conference that summer.
Firmly rooting its argument in democratic and economic theory, the book argues that a more democratic distribution of communicative power within the public sphere and a structure that provides safeguards against abuse of media power provide two of three primary arguments for ownership dispersal. It also shows that dispersal is likely to result in more owners who will reasonably pursue socially valuable journalistic or creative objectives rather than a socially dysfunctional focus on the 'bottom line'. The middle chapters answer those agents, including the Federal Communication Commission, who favor 'deregulation' and who argue that existing or foreseeable ownership concentration is not a problem. The final chapter evaluates the constitutionality and desirability of various policy responses to concentration, including strict limits on media mergers.
This chapter pinpoints the most pressing problems in research on the effect of elite rhetoric on public opinion. It discusses the empirical and theoretical issues in four particular realms, namely the elite strategies of communications, the implications of political communications research on democratic theory, the conceptualization of communication effects, and the conditions that guide elite influence. The chapter offers a personal perspective on each of these realms, as well as examples and key questions that deserve further study.
Theory: This paper develops and applies an issue ownership theory of voting that emphasizes the role of campaigns in setting the criteria for voters to choose between candidates. It expects candidates to emphasize issues on which they are advantaged and their opponents are less well regarded. It explains the structural factors and party system variables which lead candidates to differentially emphasize issues. It invokes theories of priming and framing to explain the electorate's response. Hypotheses: Issue emphases are specific to candidates; voters support candidates with a party and performance based reputation for greater competence on handling the issues about which the voter is concerned. Aggregate election outcomes and individual votes follow the problem agenda. Method: Content analysis of news reports, open-ended voter reports of important problems, and the vote are analyzed with graphic displays and logistic regression analysis for presidential elections between 1960 and 1992. Results: Candidates do have distinctive patterns of problem emphases in their campaigns; election outcomes do follow the problem concerns of voters; the individual vote is significantly influenced by these problem concerns above and beyond the effects of the standard predictors.
Scholarly evaluations of the quality of news are often negative, sometimes scathingly so. The rise of soft news and market-driven journalism in recent years has increased the intensity of this criticism. This article argues, however, that much criticism of news is based on an ideal of citizenship and a standard of quality that are neither realistic nor necessary for the functioning of democracy. The article therefore proposes a new, less demanding standard of quality and defends it as adequate to the informational needs of citizens in a democracy.
Interest groups now play a prominent role in the air war. Their collective investment in election campaigns has skyrocketed in the aftermath of Citizens United. Yet questions remain about whether interest group advertising affects the content of the specific issues being discussed. Do groups enter campaigns and engage voters on the same issues as their candidate allies? Or does the presence of more advertisers introduce competitive issue streams? This paper examines ad buys in Senate elections between 2008 and 2014 and the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012. A primary goal of the paper is to uncover the effect of high and low levels of “issue convergence” on election outcomes. Strategists often express concern that too many voices on behalf of a candidate can weaken the impact of ads. One might expect that as convergence between a candidate and his or her allies goes up (meaning the issue content of the ad buys overlaps across advertisers), the impact of ads on votes will increase. Ad effects should be weaker when a candidate’s ads discuss different issues from allied groups and party committees. The results, however, suggest that high rates of issue convergence are only weakly related to election outcomes (and not always in consistent ways).
This book, the last work of an eminent political scientist, is an innovative study of political persuasion during the 1787-88 campaign to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Employing historical and rational choice analysis to examine the rhetoric and strategic maneuvers the victorious Federalists used, William H. Riker develops new tools and approaches to advance the science of political campaigns.