Talk radio: Predictors of use and effects on attitudes about government

Journalism and Mass Communication Quaterly

Volumn 73, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 102-113

  Hollander, Barry A ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0001198598     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769909607300110     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. Frederick R. Lynch, "Whose Diversity? Whose Consensus?" Society 30 (July/August 1993): 39.
2. Tom Lewis, "Triumph of the Idol - Rush Limbaugh and a Hot Medium," Media Studies Journal 7 (summer 1993): 61.
3. C. Richard Hofstetter, Mark C. Donovan, Melville R. Klauber, Alexandra Cole, Carolyn J. Huie, and Toshiyuki Yuasa, "Political Talk Radio: A Stereotype Reconsidered," Political Research Quarterly 47 (June 1994): 467-79.
4. Robert K. Avery, Donald G. Ellis, and Thomas W. Glover, "Patterns of Communication on Talk Radio," Journal of Broadcasting 22 (winter 1978): 16. See also Robert K. Avery and Donald G. Ellis, "Talk Radio as an Interpersonal Phenomenon," in Inter/Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World, ed. Gary Gumpert and Robert Catheart (NY: Oxford University Press, 1979), 108-15; and Jeffrey Bierig and John Dimmick, "The Late Night Radio Talk Show as Interpersonal Communication," Journalism Quarterly 56 (spring 1979): 92-96.
5. Robert K. Avery, Donald G. Ellis, and Thomas W. Glover, "Patterns of Communication on Talk Radio," Journal of Broadcasting 22 (winter 1978): 16. See also Robert K. Avery and Donald G. Ellis, "Talk Radio as an Interpersonal Phenomenon," in Inter/Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World, ed. Gary Gumpert and Robert Catheart (NY: Oxford University Press, 1979), 108-15; and Jeffrey Bierig and John Dimmick, "The Late Night Radio Talk Show as Interpersonal Communication," Journalism Quarterly 56 (spring 1979): 92-96.
6. Robert K. Avery, Donald G. Ellis, and Thomas W. Glover, "Patterns of Communication on Talk Radio," Journal of Broadcasting 22 (winter 1978): 16. See also Robert K. Avery and Donald G. Ellis, "Talk Radio as an Interpersonal Phenomenon," in Inter/Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World, ed. Gary Gumpert and Robert Catheart (NY: Oxford University Press, 1979), 108-15; and Jeffrey Bierig and John Dimmick, "The Late Night Radio Talk Show as Interpersonal Communication," Journalism Quarterly 56 (spring 1979): 92-96.
7. Joseph Turow, "Talk Show Radio as Interpersonal Communication," Journal of Broadcasting 18 (spring 1974): 171-79.
8. Cameron B. Armstrong and Alan M. Rubin, "Talk Radio as Interpersonal Communication," Journal of Communication 39 (spring 1989): 84-94; Bierig and Dimmick, "The Late Night Radio"; and Turow, "Talk Show Radio."
9. Cameron B. Armstrong and Alan M. Rubin, "Talk Radio as Interpersonal Communication," Journal of Communication 39 (spring 1989): 84-94; Bierig and Dimmick, "The Late Night Radio"; and Turow, "Talk Show Radio."
10. Cameron B. Armstrong and Alan M. Rubin, "Talk Radio as Interpersonal Communication," Journal of Communication 39 (spring 1989): 84-94; Bierig and Dimmick, "The Late Night Radio"; and Turow, "Talk Show Radio."
11. Armstrong and Rubin, "Talk Radio."
12. Stuart Surlin, "Uses of Jamaican Talk Radio," Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 30 (spring 1986): 459-66.
13. Turow, "Talk Show Radio"; Armstrong and Rubin, "Talk Radio"; Bierig and Dimmick, "The Late Night Radio."
14. Turow, "Talk Show Radio"; Armstrong and Rubin, "Talk Radio"; Bierig and Dimmick, "The Late Night Radio."
15. Turow, "Talk Show Radio"; Armstrong and Rubin, "Talk Radio"; Bierig and Dimmick, "The Late Night Radio."
16. Harriet Tramer and Leo W. Jeffres, "Talk Radio - Forum and Companion," Journal of Broadcasting 27 (summer 1983): 297-300.
17. John Crittenden, "Democratic functions of the open mike radio forum," Public Opinion Quarterly 35 (spring 1971): 200-10.
18. Murray B. Levin, Talk Radio and the American Dream (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987), 16.
19. Barry A. Hollander, "The New News and the 1992 Presidential Campaign: Perceived vs. Actual Campaign Knowledge," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 72 (winter 1995): 786-98.
20. Hofstetter et al., "Political Talk Radio."
21. Hofstetter et al., "Political Talk Radio," 477.
22. For one discussion on this topic, see Jeffrey L. Katz, "The Power of Talk," Governing 4 (March 1991): 38-42.
23. Michael J. Robinson, "Public Affairs Television and the Growth of Political Malaise: The Case of 'The Selling of the Pentagon'" American Political Science Review 70 (June 1976): 409-32.
24. Avery, Ellis, and Glover, "Talk Radio."
25. James Lemert, Does Mass Communication Change Public Opinion after All? (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981).
26. Hofstetter et al., "Political Talk Radio."
27. Eugenia Zerbinos, "Talk Radio: Motivation or Titillation?" (paper presented at the annual meeting of AEJMC, 1993).
28. Hollander, "The New News."
29. John E. Newhagen, "Media Use and Political Efficacy: The Suburbanization of Race and Class," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 45 (July 1994): 386-94.
30. William A. Gamson, Power and Discontent (Homewood, IL: Dorsey, 1968), 48. While Gamson used "political efficacy" in his discussion, it appears his conceptualization most closely resembles internal political efficacy.
31. The sample includes an oversampling of talk radio "callers" to aid in analysis. The survey itself was a random digit sample of telephone numbers from exchanges in the continental United States, with exchanges selected with probabilities proportional to their size. Additional methodological details are available in a report by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, "The Vocal Minority In American Politics," on 16 July 1993. This report included basic frequencies and some cross-tabulations of the data. I gratefully acknowledge The Times Mirror Center for use of this data for secondary analysis. The Center bears no responsibility for the analysis and interpretations presented here.
32. For a recent discussion of political efficacy and participation in politics, see Stephen C. Craig, The Malevolent Leaders: Popular Discontent in America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993).
33. Craig, The Malevolent Leaders.
34. The issues used were: abortion, prayer in public schools, increasing environmental controls, increasing the income tax to reduce the deficit, restricting handgun sales, allowing gays in the military, an active U.S. role in Bosnia, and term limits for members of Congress.
35. The participation items asked respondents whether they had in the past twelve months: (1) written a letter to any elected official; (2) written a letter to the editor of a newspaper; (3) contributed money to a political action group or committee, sponsored by a union, business or other issue group that supported a candidate in an election; (4) attended a public hearing; (5) dialed an 800 or 900 number to register their opinion or views on some issue of public concern; (6) contributed money to a candidate running for public office; (7) joined an organization in support of a particular cause; (8) called in or sent in a response to a question or issue put up for discussion by a newspaper or TV station; (9) called or sent a letter to the White House; (10) called or sent a letter to their Congressman; (11) called a television station or a cable company with some complaint about a program; (12) participated in an opinion poll sent to them by some interest group or group you are a member of; (13) participated in a town meeting or public affairs discussion group; and (14) attended a city or town council meeting in the community where they live. The Times Mirror Center tested both the "past twelve month" and "ever" question format on participation as part of a follow-up survey, finding that the "past twelve month" wording could result in higher participation scores due to social desirability. However, this question is used here since it was conducted at the same time as the talk radio measures and other variables. For a discussion, see the methodological note in the report by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, "The Vocal Minority in American Politics," 25.
36. The Hofstetter article, for example, uses analysis of variance and treats such demographic variables as age and income as dependent variables rather than independent variables to test for significant differences. In addition, these demographic variables were not used as controls when exploring whether talk radio nonlisteners, listeners, and callers differed in alienation, participation, and other dependent variables.
37. While use of discriminant analysis in some instances here may violate the traditional hierarchy of scaling (i.e., optimism and cynicism), as Traylor notes, ordinal data can "be treated as interval data without a great loss of accuracy and with a great gain in interpretability." Mark Traylor, "Ordinal and Interval Scaling," Journal of the Market Research Society 25 (October 1983): 302.
38. Hofstetter et al., "Political Talk Radio."
39. Of the 1,507 respondents, 1,147 were used in the discriminant analysis while the remaining were dropped from analysis due to missing data.
40. Variables were entered in four "blocks," with demographic variables entered first, followed by political variables, media variables, and the dependent variables. In conducting a discriminant analysis, the researcher faces a number of difficult choices, the first being how to enter the variables. Two alternative choices are the simultaneous entry of all variables or a stepwise procedure, both of which can be misleading in the variables selected first for entry in analysis. See Carl J. Huberty, Applied Discriminant Analysis (NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1994).
41. While the results are similar to what may result from a stepwise procedure, there are important differences. First, from a theoretical stand-point, it makes sense to first enter the covariates and then the dependent variables. In addition, the stepwise procedure may first select a powerful dependent variable whose variance is best explained by a combination of other demographic or political variables. The data here were analyzed a number of ways and the results appeared stable across various entry methods. An F-to-remove p-level of .30 was used in the elimination process as suggested in A. A. Afifi and Virginia Clark, Computer-Aided Multivariate Analysis (NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1984).
42. Variables entered and then removed were (in order of least significance first) income, social class, network television news exposure, residence (metropolitan to rural), how often respondents vote, and newspaper exposure. Forced inclusion of these variables does not alter the canonical coefficient results. The canonical correlations for each function, the degree of association between the discriminant scores and the groups, were .38 and .18, respectively.
43. Dummy coded variables include gender (1=male) and race (1=white).
44. High values on the 7-point ideology scale (very liberal to very conservative) and the 7-point party identification scale (strong Democrat to strong Republican) represent more conservative or greater attachment to the Republican party, respectively.
45. Afifi and Clark, Computer-Aided, 275.
46. Other significant factors include ideology (.40), education (.31), participation (-.31), and age (-.31).
47. The F-statistics between the pairs are: Nonlistener and listener, F = 5.0; nonlistener and caller, F = 17.1; and listener and caller, F = 11.6, all p<.0001.
48. Hofstetter et al, "Political Talk Radio."
49. Gamson, Power and Discontent, 48