Blogswarms and press norms: New coverage of The Downing Street Memo controversy

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 83, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 494-510

  Schiffer, Adam J ^a  

^a TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

INTERNET; MASS MEDIA; TELEVISION;

EID: 33846083361     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900608300302     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. Even the beleaguered network evening newscasts run circles around the most popular blogs (see blog readership numbers in note 21). According to Nielsen Media Research, from September 20, 2004, through July 29, 2005, the NBC Nightly News averaged 9.7 million viewers daily, World News Tonight (ABC) averaged 9.1 million, and the CBS Evening News averaged 7.1 (Stuart Elliott, "The Persistence of the News-and-Cocktail Hour," New York Times, August 10, 2005, sec. C).
2. The preferred moniker among many of the activists pushing the issue is "Downing Street Minutes," reflecting the fact that they are the official, approved minutes of a meeting, rather than just someone's thoughts expressed in a memo. However, this study uses the name that stuck, to the exclusion of any other name, within the mainstream press: "memo."
3. "The Secret Downing Street Memo," Baltimore Sun, June 15, 2005, sec. A.
4. The assertion that Conyers discovered the issue by reading Daily Kos has been made repeatedly on the site. This was not confirmable, however, as his earliest diaries were no longer accessible by search engine as of mid-August. The first Kos diary on the Times of London story was by contributor "smintheus," titled "Iraq: The Fix was On in July, 2002," on April 30, 2005.
5. Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 75.
6. Rosen, What Are Journalists For?, 75.
7. Jay Rosen, "Top Ten Ideas of '04: News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation," in PressThink, http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/ weblogs/pressthink/2004/12/29/tp04P_lctr.html.
8. Leon V. Sigal, Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of Newsmaking (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1973).
9. For more empirical documentation of this pattern, see Herbert Gans, Deciding What's News (New York: Random House, 1979), 9-13;
10. Jane Delano Brown, Carl R. Bybee, Stanley T. Wearden, and Dulcie Murdock Straughan, "Invisible Power: Newspaper News Sources and the Limits of Diversity," Journalism Quarterly 64 (spring 1987): 45-54;
11. John Soloski, "Sources and Channels of Local News," Journalism Quarterly 66 (winter 1989): 864-70;
12. Dan Berkowitz, "TV News Sources and News Channels: A Study in Agenda-Building," Journalism Quarterly 64 (summer-autumn 1987): 508-13.
13. Timothy E. Cook, Governing with the News (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 92.
14. Steven Livingston and W. Lance Bennett, "Gatekeeping, Indexing, and Live-Event News: Is Technology Altering the Construction of News?" Political Communication 20 (October-December 2003): 363-80.
15. Lance W. Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion, 7th ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006), 6.
16. The indexing hypothesis was introduced in Lance W. Bennett, "Toward a Theory of Press-State Relations in the U.S.," Journal of Communication 40 (spring 1990): 103-25. A large literature has refined and critiqued it.
17. See Scott L. Althaus, "When News Norms Collide, Follow the Lead: New Evidence for Press Independence," Political Communication 20 (October-December 2003): 381-414;
18. Scott L. Althaus, Jill A. Edy, Robert M. Entman, and Patricia Phalen, "Revising the Indexing Hypothesis: Officials, Media, and the Libya Crisis," Political Communication 13 (October-December 1996): 407-21.
19. The idea that the press will not exercise skepticism in the realm of consensus comes from Daniel C. Hallin, The "Uncensored War": The Media and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
20. See also John Zaller and Dennis Chiu, "Government's Little Helper: U.S. Press Coverage of Foreign Policy Crises, 1945-1991," Political Communication 13 (October-December 1996): 385-405.
21. Shanto Iyengar, Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
22. Kate Parry, "Downing Street Memo's Route to Paper," Star Tribune, June 12, 2005, sec. AA.
23. Cook, Governing with the News, 91-92.
24. See "Journalism as a Public Forum" (chapter 7) from Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001).
25. The Times story was dated May 1, 2005, but appeared on the paper's Web site on April 30, United States time.
26. For traffic rankings: http://www.truthlaidbear.com/TrafficRanking.php, and for link rankings: http://www.truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.php. There were a few caveats to the selection of blogs. First, Eschaton's (http:// atrios.blogspot.com) style of vague, link-dependent posts would have made analysis prohibitively cumbersome.
27. Also, Joshua Marshall's highly regarded Talking Points Memo, http:// www.talkingpointsmemo.com, was included, even though he chooses not to participate in the traffic rankings, because it is the third most linked-to liberal blog.
28. Daily Kos, http://www.dailykos.com;
29. AMERICABlog, http://www.americablog.com;
30. TalkLeft, http://www.talkleft.com;
31. Crooks and Liars, http://www.crooksandliars.com.
32. Instapundit.com, http://www.instapundit.com;
33. Michelle Malkin http://www.michellemalkin.com;
34. Power Line, http://www.powerlineblog.com;
35. Little Green Footballs, http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog;
36. Captain's Quarters, http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt.
37. According to The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem traffic ranking, as of August 10, 2005, the Daily Kos averaged 538, 162 visits per day, far eclipsing the next highest-trafficked political blog (the conservative Instupundit.com) which averaged 131,878 visits per day. The next highest-trafficked liberal blog was Eschaton, with 119, 014 visits. Site Meter, http://www.sitemeter.com, the source for The Truth Laid Bear rankings, defines a "visit" as "a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes in between page views."
38. No attempt was made to code the tone of the stories. Many policy domains have two clearly delineated sides vying to push their spin into public discourse. An issue such as the DSM is asymmetric, however, meaning only one side believes it to be worthy of discussion. The other side's "spin" is to ignore it. For a media agenda-setting study of an asymmetric issue, the tone of coverage need not be assessed. After all, while "all publicity is good publicity" might be an exaggeration, Bush supporters, apparently lacking a solid refutation of the DSM's substance, clearly preferred the story to go away. Thus any coverage not pegged to discrete events or official action should be evidence of the blogswarm's effect, whereas official source bias would manifest if news coverage came only with official action.
39. VAR was popularized in economics by Christopher A. Sims, "Macroeconomics and Reality" Econometrica 48 (January 1980):1-48.
40. For recent or high-profile applications in political science, see Jeffrey S. Peake, "Presidential Agenda Setting in Foreign Policy," Political Research Quarterly 54 (March 2001): 69-86;
41. Michael B. MacKuen, Robert S. Erikson, and James A. Stimson, "Peasants or Bankers? The American Electorate and the U.S. Economy," American Political Science Review 86 (September 1992): 597-611;
42. Joshua S. Goldstein and John R. Freeman, "U.S.-Soviet-Chinese Relations: Routine, Reciprocity, or Rational Expectations?" American Political Science Review 85 (March 1991): 17-35.
43. The term "Granger cause" implies causality only in the narrow statistical sense of previous values of one variable being correlated with values of another variable.
44. "Four lags are used" means that four variables are used for each variable block: the variable at lag-1, lag-2, lag-3, and lag-4. Granger tests are highly sensitive to the number of lags of each variable included, so lag length must be chosen with an eye toward balancing parsimony and explanatory power. Cross-correlations between each variable at 0 to 21 lags (not reported) showed that a vast majority of the correlations were at the first lag or zero lags. Still, some correlations were found as far out as the fourth lag. Thus the VARs use four lags of each variable. The analyses were replicated using two lags (not reported), and the results were substantially similar.
45. Many of CNN's segments were duplicates. For example, Bill Schneider's coverage of the Conyers hearing aired on five different news shows.
46. MSNBC was not analyzed.
47. Several stories in local papers failed to appear in the database, but were found incidentally through cross-references in other stories. The total tally of stories in the smaller papers is thus incomplete. However, as the omissions should be distributed evenly across the period of analysis, they do not undermine the task of charting variation in daily coverage.
48. The two papers to do full stories the first week were the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Times. Both only discussed the U.K. context with no U.S. implications.
49. To correct for the autoregressive nature of the TV news variable, a lagged TV news variable was included in the regression. The adjusted R-squared was .42, but .21 of that is attributable to the lagged TV variable, as determined by a regression with only the lagged variable. The unstandardized coefficient for administration mentions is 2.38, with a standard error of .54. This is a conservative estimate, as the lagged variable wipes out considerable variance that might be attributable to administration mentions.
50. Kim Hart, "Web Special: A Story at Last," American Journalism Review (June/July 2005), http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3907.