American Newspaper Publishers: A National Study of Ideological Management and Class Bias in the News

University Of Houston, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

SES-9912186 Frederick Schiff The study examines the relationship between the ideology of newspaper publishers and the ideology embedded in new stories. That is, what are the most important factors that influence the collection and selection of information and the preparation and presentation of the news about events and issues? The research seeks to answer several questions-(1) Do publishers share a taken-for-granted ideology that reflects their upper class experiences and corporate interest? (2) Do publishers establish and maintain the newsroom norms that reflect their taken-for-granted ideologies? (3) Does news content contain the taken-for-granted orientations of publishers? (4) Do individual newspapers and newspaper groups differ in the underlying ideology of their publishers and in the underlying ideology in their news content? (5) Is there an inner circle of chains and their affiliated newspapers that are much closer to a class-wide taken-for granted ideology than the rest of the newspaper industry? Data will be analyzed from in depth structured interviews with a nationally representative sample of newspaper publishers and the most senior operational executives at 119 daily newspapers. In addition, the content of issues of each newspaper for two reconstituted weeks (plus two election days) in 1998. In total more than 550 hours of interviews and approximately 2,000 newspapers will be coded and analyzed. Specialized computer applications will be used to analyzed the conversational materials and generate categories and to determine whether the publishers have an ideology; whether a newsroom ideology exists that distinguishes newspapers, and whether there may be a corporate culture within the chain as a whole.