The National Media and American Politics

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The National Media and American Politics
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The Media of Yesteryear

• The first American newspapers (printed in the
  1690s) were often controlled by the government
  supporters and political parties. They were
  rarely independent.
• Battles over the rights of newspapers to publish
  served as the basis for our 1st Amendment right
  to Freedom of the Press.
  

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John Peter Zenger NY Weekly Journal(in Court,
1735-1736)
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Yellow Journalism

• By the 1890s 'yellow journalism' sold millions of
  newspapers.
  
• Throughout the 19th century, payoffs to the press
  were common.
  
• Yellow journalism today.

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Pulitzer vs. Hearst
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Technological Advances

• Newspapers became cheaper and easier to produce
  and distribute. The telegraph and telephone made
  reporting simpler and faster.
  
• Radio became widely available in the 1920s.
• Television was introduced in the late 1940s.
• Cable Television was invented in the 1970s, (CNN
  was founded in 1980.)
  
• The Internet became easily accessible in the late
  1990s.

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The Contemporary Newspaper

• A number of newspapers have a national
  audience and are considered quite influential
  
• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• USA Today
• The Christian Science Monitor
• The Washington Post
• The Los Angeles Times

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Television News

• The Networks
• ABC (Charles Gibson)
• CBS (Katie Couric)
• NBC (Brian Williams)
• Cable TV
• PBS
• CNN
• FOX

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Interactivity Citizens As Journalists

• The new technologies break the journalist's
  monopoly, making some of the new news an
  unmediated collaboration between the sources and
  the audience.
• Citizens can program their computers to retrieve
  their own "news."

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Reporting the News

• Real (Six OClock) News
• In Depth Reporting Analysis (60 Minutes,
  Nightline)
  
• Info-tainment aka Going Tabloid
• Where is the dividing line?

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Television Network Programming

• A full transcript of the typical nightly network
  news broadcasts foreign and domestic would
  not fill half of the front page of an average
  daily newspaper.
• Yet ¾ of the American people routinely depend on
  this source for most of their foreign affairs
  information.

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Characteristics of the News

• Superficial describes most news coverage today
• Sound Bites Short video clips

• Sound Bites keep getting shorter
• 1968/43 seconds
• 2000/7 seconds

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The Pace of the News

• The increasing rapid pace of electronic news and
  televisions global coverage shortens the time
  frame for policy responses.
  
• In 1961, when the Berlin Wall went up, President
  Kennedy had 8 days to respond to the provocative
  action.
  
• In 1989, when the wall came down, President Bush
  (41) was forced to respond overnight.

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Finding the Political News

• Beats Specific locations from which news
  frequently emanates, such as Congress or the
  White House.
  
• Trial Balloons An intentional news leak for the
  purpose of assessing the political reaction.
  
• Interdependency Reporters and their sources
  depend on each other- one for stories, the other
  to get them out.

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Media Events
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How Politicians Use the Media

• Politicians and government officials often stage
  media events (to get free media coverage).
  
• Candidates and politicians try to control or
  'spin' media focus on campaign and policy
  issues.
  
• Candidates and politicians may 'leak' a story to
  the press in order to get their story out
  (without being the focus of that story).

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The 1st Reporter

• Press Secretaries announce Presidential policies
  and Presidential reactions to news. It is their
  role to put the news in perspective favorable to
  the incumbent administration.

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The Media and Politicians

• Politicians are also media consumers.
• Research indicates that roughly 2/3s of officials
  in policy making positions reported that the
  media was their most rapid source of
  information.
• Over 4/5s indicated that the media were an
  important source of information.

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New York Times

• Ive said many times that I never learned from a
  classified document anything I couldnt get
  earlier or later from the New York Times.
  
• -- John Kenneth Galbraith

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An Alternative View of Reporters
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Reporting the News

• Is there bias in the News?
• Many people believe the news favors one point of
  view over another.
  
• ASNE Survey 78 of Americans believe the news
  is biased

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• Liberal vs Conservative Papers (The Denver Post
  vs the Rocky Mt. News?)
  
• Political Ads
• Types
• Role of Money
• Examples

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Denver Post 2002
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Questioning Political Editorials

• Should newspapers or any media endorse political
  candidates? (Is this evidence of their bias, an
  indicator that they have a preference and a right
  to express it, or an indication of a positive
  force media can play in elections?)
• Newspapers favor the status quo.
• Newspapers are hesitant to oppose incumbents
• (Evidence of the strange bedfellows effect?)
• Even in open seat races there are common
  tendencies to suppose party holding the seat now.

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Types of Biases

• Generally not very biased along liberal /
  conservative lines.
  
• But, generally are biased towards what will draw
  the largest audience.
  

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Media Self-Identification
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On these issues journalists appear to be
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Common Biases

• White
• Male
• Elite
• Nationalistic

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Imperviousness of Beliefs Why it may not matter
if media is biased

• Generally neither reading nor watching the news
  alters what people think.
  
• Selective perception is a pervasive human
  tendency.
  
• People search for comfortable information that
  fits with preexisting beliefs.
  
• People screen out or reject information with
  which they disagree.

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Agenda Setting

• The mass media may not be successful in telling
  people what to think, but they are stunningly
  successful in telling their audience what to
  think about.
• This power is greatest among those who are
  neither interested nor involved in politics and
  hence lack political sophistication.

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The Medias Role

• The mass media perform a mediating role, i.e.,
  it helps to shape political attitudes and
  choices but does not determine them.

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Government Regulation of the Electronic Media

• Print media are exempt from most governmental
  regulation. Electronic media are not.
  
• Airwaves are considered public property and are
  leased to networks and private broadcasters by
  the government.
  
• Government also allocates the use of frequencies
  and channels so that radio and TV do not overlap
  and jam each others' signals. And so certain
  segments of the airways are available for defense.

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Summary - A Complex Relationship

• The relationship between the media and
  policymakers is both subtle and complex.
  
• Television has quickened the pace of the news but
  it by no means determines American public
  policy.
  
• However, it is also clear that the media is a
  powerful institution that affects multiple facets
  of American political life.

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The Inadvertent Audience

• Television provides the mass of American people
  with an infusion of policy information that most
  neither like nor want.
  
• There are three consequences of this forced
  media
  
• Television may explain the decline of confidence
  in the nations leadership.
  
• Being uninterested, Americans are unlikely to
  have strong convictions about issues as do those
  who regularly follow political affairs.
  
• Policy ideas must fit into one-liners that will
  fit into 30, 60, or 90 second slots on the
  evening news.