An economic theory of political journalism

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 82, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 247-263

  Niven, David ^a  

^a OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

MASS MEDIA;

EID: 24044436188     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900508200202     Document Type: Article

References (81)

1. W. Lance Bennett, "Toward a Theory of Press-State Relations," Journal of Communication 40 (June 1990): 103-125.
2. W. Lance Bennett, Lynne Gressett, and William Haltom, "Repairing the News: A Case Study of the News Paradigm," Journal of Communication 35 (June 1985): 50-68;
3. Leon Sigal, Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of Newsmaking (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1973);
4. Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978).
5. Timothy Cook, "Afterword: Political Values and Production Values." Political Communication 13 (October 1996): 469.
6. Bennett, "Toward a Theory," 103.
7. Bennett, "Toward a Theory," 125
8. Daniel C. Hallin, We Keep America on Top of the World (New York: Routledge, 1994);
9. Daniel C. Hallin, The "Uncensored War": The Media and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
10. Hallin, The "Uncensored War," 10.
11. Hallin, The "Uncensored War," 10.
12. Robert Entman, "Framing U.S. Coverage of International News: Contrasts in Narratives of the KAL and Iran Air Incidents," Journal of Communication 41 (December 1991): 6-27.
13. Sandra Dickson, "Press and U.S. Policy Toward Nicaragua, 1983-1987: A Study of the New York Times and Washington Post," Journalism Quarterly 69 (autumn 1992): 562-71.
14. Chin-Chuan Lee, Zhongdang Pan, Joseph Man Chan, and Clement So, "Through the Eyes of U.S. Media: Banging the Democracy Drum in Hong Kong," Journal of Communication 51 (June 2001): 345-65.
15. Sung Tae Kim, "Making a Difference: U.S. Press Coverage of the Kwangju and Tiananmen Pro-Democracy Movements," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 77 (wiinter 2000): 22-36.
16. Mikhail Alexseev and W. Lance Bennett, "For Whom the Gates Open: News Reporting and Government Source Patterns in the United States, Great Britain, and Russia," Political Communication 12 (October 1995): 395-412.
17. W. Lance Bennett and John Klockner, "The Psychology of Mass Mediated Politics," in The Psychology of Political Communication, ed. Ann Crigler (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).
18. Scott Althaus, Jill Edy, Robert Entman, and Patricia Phalen, "Revising the Indexing Hypothesis: Officials, Media, and the Libya Crisis," Political Communication 13 (October 1996): 407-421.
19. Kuang-Kuo Chang, "Auto Trade Policy and the Press: Auto Elite as a Source of the Media Agenda," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 76 (spring 1999): 312-24.
20. Regina Lawrence, "Accidents, Icons, and Idexing: The Dynamics of News Coverage of Police Use of Force," Political Communication 13 (October 1996): 437-54.
21. Benjamin Page, "Speedy Deliberation: Rejecting '1960s Programs' as Causes of the Los Angeles Riots," Political Communication 12 (July 1995): 245-61.
22. Jonathan Mermin, "Conflict in the Sphere of Consensus? Critical Reporting on the Panama Invasion and the Gulf War," Political Communication 13 (April 1996): 181-94;
23. see also Limor Peer and Beatrice Chestnut, "Deciphering Media Independence: The Gulf War Debate in Television and Newspaper News," Political Communication 12 (January 1995): 81-95.
24. David Altheide, Creating Reality: How TV News Distorts Events (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1976);
25. Edwin Diamond, Behind the Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
26. Herbert Gans, Deciding What's News (New York: Vintage, 1980);
27. John McManus, Market-Driven Journalism (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1994).
28. David Stromberg, "Mass Media and Public Policy," European Economic Review 45 (May 2001): 652-63.
29. Tuchman, Making News.
30. Gans, Deciding What's News.
31. Mark Fishman, Manufacturing the News (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980).
32. Sigal, Reporters and Officials.
33. Gaye Tuchman, "Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsman's Notion of Objectivity," American Journal of Sociology 77 (January 1972): 660-79.
34. Tuchman writes of the hierarchy of editors who criticize work they do not like, passing the complaint from the top editor back down to the original writer. Each person, beginning with the writer, therefore has an incentive not to allow objectionable copy to proceed above themselves. Thus, reporters' efforts are not only shaped by the occasional rebuke but by the ongoing anticipatory effort to avoid negative feedback (Tuchman, "Objectivity as Strategic").
35. Tuchman, "Objectivity as Strategic," 660.
36. For example, Tuchman writes of a reporter who was a covert liberal: "Had his sympathies been perceived, he would not have been sent to future demonstrations. Furthermore, his stories would have been substantially altered, and they were not. Indeed, among themselves, the editors praised this reporter's work. In sum, the reporter manipulated his superiors, interjecting his own views, by following a procedure they associated with objectivity" (Tuchman, "Objectivity as Strategic," 669).
37. Jeremy Zilber and David Niven, Racialized Coverage of Congress: The News in Black and White (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000).
38. As Fishman colorfully quotes a newspaper editor discussing the material available for his political reporter to cover, "It's a bottomless pit. City government, county government are both a bottomless pit. He never has enough time to write everything he might write" (Fishman, Manufacturing the News, 35).
39. Gaye Tuchman, "Making News by Doing Work: Routinizing the Unexpected," American Journal of Sociology 79 (July 1974): 110-31.
40. Tuchman, "Making News by Doing," 128. Gans argues that journalists would protest the label of efficiency as it characterizes their work in the language of an assembly line. However, the existence of deadlines and easily available government sources nevertheless produce an effect hardly distinguishable from attempting to assemble more widgets in a factory (Gans, Deciding What's News).
41. Gans argues that journalists would protest the label of efficiency as it characterizes their work in the language of an assembly line. However, the existence of deadlines and easily available government sources nevertheless produce an effect hardly distinguishable from attempting to assemble more widgets in a factory (Gans, Deciding What's News).
42. Susan Miller, "News Coverage of Congress: The Search for the Ultimate Spokesman," Journalism Quarterly 54 (autumn 1977): 459-65.
43. Fishman, Manufacturing the News.
44. Fishman, Manufacturing the News, 58.
45. Fishman, Manufacturing the News, 41.
46. Timothy Cook, Making Laws and Making News (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1989).
47. Thomas Patterson and Wolfgang Donsbach, "News Decisions: Journalists as Partisan Actors," Political Communication 13 (October 1996): 455-68.
48. Karen Callaghan and Frauke Schnel, "Assessing the Democratic Debate: How the News Media Frame Elite Policy Discourse," Political Communication 18 (April 2001): 183-212.
49. Callaghan and Schnel, "Assessing the Democratic," 197.
50. Robert Sahr, "Credentialing the Experts: The Climate of Opinion and Journalist Selection of Sources in Domestic and Foreign Policy," in Media and Public Policy, ed. Robert Spitzer (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993);
51. Edward Epstein, News from Nowhere: Television and the News (New York: Random House, 1973);
52. but see Richard Sobel, "Portraying American Public Opinion Toward the Bosnia Crisis," Harvard International Journal of Press/ Politics 3 (spring 1998): 16-33.
53. Gans, Deciding What's News.
54. Cook, Making Laws.
55. Congressional Record, 14 June 1978.
56. Gregory Nokes, "Libya: A Government Story," in The Media and Foreign Policy, ed. Simon Sefarty (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990);
57. Tuchman, Making News;
58. Alexseev and Bennett, "For Whom the Gates."
59. Robert Entman, Democracy Without Citizens: Media and the Decay of American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 18.
60. Althaus et al., "Revising the Indexing."
61. Althaus et al., "Revising the Indexing," 413.
62. Piers Robinson, "The Policy-Media Interaction Model: Measuring Media Power During Humanitarian Crisis," Journal of Peace Research 37 (September 2000): 613-33;
63. Piers Robinson, "Theorizing the Influence of Media on World Politics," European Journal of Communication 16 (December 2001): 523-44.
64. Todd Schaefer, "Persuading the Persuaders: Presidential Speeches and Editorial Opinion," Political Communication 14 (January 1997): 97-111.
65. Sigal, Reporters and Officials, 56.
66. Polls taken near the time of these congressional votes showed strong support for the war effort and the economic stimulus plan, while the Medicare bill and the tax cuts drew only mixed support. For example, over 90% of Americans supported a military response to 9/11 (Mary Leonard, "Support for Retaliation," Boston Globe, 18 September 2001 sec. A, p. 10), while support for the tax cuts bounced around conflicting majority positions depending on precise question wording (Adam Clymer, "Don't Attack Bush on Taxes Yet Democrats' Leader Tells Party," New York Times, 19 January 2002, sec. A, p. 15). An interesting next step for this theoretical approach would be to examine coverage of issues when the elite consesus and the popular consensus cleary diverge.
67. (Adam Clymer, "Don't Attack Bush on Taxes Yet Democrats' Leader Tells Party," New York Times, 19 January 2002, sec. A, p. 15). An interesting next step for this theoretical approach would be to examine coverage of issues when the elite consesus and the popular consensus cleary diverge.
68. Kevin Diaz, "Economic Stimulus Bill Clears House," Minneapolis Star Tribune, 8 March 2002, sec. A, p. 1.
69. Sara Fritz, "Tax Cut Getting Top Priority Over Drug Benefit for Seniors," St. Petersburg Times, 22 April 2002, sec. A, p. 3.
70. Susan Milligan, "Seniors' Drug Bill Survives in House," Boston Globe, 23 November 2003, sec. A, p. 1.
71. For example, Ronald Macaulay, "Extremely Interesting, Very Interesting, or Only Quite Interesting? Adverbs and Social Class," Journal of Sociolinguistics 6 (August 2002): 398-417.
72. E-mail addresses were frequently available in the text of the article. Where they were not, they were sought from the Web sites of the publications, and from Internet searches.
73. The precise question wording: "Relative to what is spent by the federal government today, should more resources or fewer resources be dedicated to Medicare? 1=fewer, 2, 3, 4, 5=more"; "Relative to what is collected by the federal government today, should more resources or fewer resources be sought through the federal tariffs on imports? 1=fewer, 2, 3, 4, 5=more"; "Relative to what is spent by the federal government today, should more resources or fewer resources be dedicated to stimulating the economy and offering benefits to the jobless? 1=fewer, 2, 3, 4, 5=more"; "Relative to what is spent by the federal government today, should more resources or fewer resources be dedicated to the war against terrorism in Afghanistan? 1=fewer, 2, 3, 4, 5=more"; "Relative to what is collected by the federal government today, should more resources or fewer resources be sought through the federal income tax? 1=fewer, 2, 3, 4, 5=more"; "Relative to what is spent by the federal government today, should more resources or fewer resources be dedicated to price supports and other aid to farmers? 1=fewer, 2, 3, 4, 5=more."
74. Using a free e-mail service, separate e-mail addresses were created for each potential respondent to allow responses to be tracked.
75. Craig Gilbert, "House Backs Permanent Tax Cut in Mostly Party-Line Vote," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 8 March 2002, sec. A, p. 4.
76. John Lancaster and Helen Dewar, "Congress Clears Use of Force," Washington Post, 20 September 2001, sec. A, p. 4.
77. Hallin, The "Uncensored" War.
78. Glenn Kessler and Juliet Eilperin, "House Vote Sets Up Battle on Extending Bush Tax Cut," Washington Post, 19 April 2002, sec. A, p. 7.
79. The analysis reported includes articles with multiple authors. The results do not change demonstrably if multiple author articles are excluded from the analysis.
80. New York Times, "The Times and Iraq," 26 May 2004, p. 10.
81. Gans, Deciding What's News, 284.