Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Explaining the Political News Product

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

The news media play a vital role in many of the political processes of most interest to scholars. Accordingly, any political science subfield that uses news content as an independent or intervening variable will benefit from a systematic, theoretically driven accounting of the process by which the political world is filtered and condensed into a news product. This Doctoral Dissertation Research project embeds theories of the news production process in the empirical-test-friendly research designs of aggregate policy system analysis, in order to answer the question: what drives systematic variation in the political news product over a variety of substantive issue areas? National newspapers and evening newscasts from the past 20 years are examined. In all three studies, the dependent variable -news content -is measured by content analyses utilizing independent coders. The stories are gathered from Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe and the Vanderbilt Archives. Independent variables come from a variety of sources, the two most important being the Pennsylvania State University Correlates of War Project, and the University of Washington Policy Agendas data set. The three separate studies apply the primary research question to three facets of the political process: I) What explains variation in economic news over time? 2) What explains variation in the quantity of coverage allotted by the American press to foreign conflicts? 3) What explains variation in the quality and quantity of coverage given to congressional hearings? F or each model of variation in political news, four competing classes of independent variables are tested for their relative explanatory power. First, it is argued that the normative implications of mass mediation are most fruitfully understood by calibrating coverage to a reality baseline: the tangible, measurable aspect of the given political domain that an objective press is expected to report as faithfully as possible, and that the veracious reporting of which renders the press mere information carriers in the political process. Next, the extent to which elites' deliberate attempts to shape the news product are successful in a given context is the extent to which the media are falling short in their watchdog role. Thus much can be learned from assessing the impact on news formation of independent variables that indicate a conscious attempt by elites to shape the news. Also, the use of dynamic models enables a statistically sound assessment of whether prior public opinion moves subsequent news, controlling for the more conventional effect of news on opinion. Such an effect suggests a previously overlooked element of democratic responsiveness in the policy process. Finally, variation in seemingly arbitrary qualities of the political world wield a powerful influence over news content on account of their conformance with the norms and constraints of professional news organizations. Such variables -known as media power variables -indicate a significant non-spurious effect of the news media on the political process.