Does the Political System Determine Media Visibility of Politicians? A Comparative Analysis of Political Functions in the News in Sixteen Countries

News coverage of politicians is very unequally distributed: a few powerful politicians receive the bulk of media attention, while the large majority hardly gets into the news. However, case studies show that news outlets in some countries give more attention to ordinary politicians compared to other democracies. This study examines and explains the variation in media visibility of politicians with different institutional functions across Western democracies. We employ a large-scale content analysis of television news, newspapers and online news in sixteen countries to analyze whether a political system logic determines the distribution of political functions appearing in the news. This logic suggests that journalists follow the political hierarchy of the country when covering politicians. We also check for an additional media logic that would push journalists to focus on a limited number of high-standing politicians. The results confirm that both logics matter, but that mainly the structural characteristics of the political system have an impact on the distribution of news coverage of politicians. In countries where political power is more equally distributed across politicians, a broader range of (elite) politicians makes it into the news. Our results suggest that the media logic is nested in the broader political context and in some cases even strengthens the logic of the political system.     

Interactions of News Frames and Incivility in the Political Blogosphere: Examining Perceptual Outcomes

The anonymity and flexibility of the online world allows the free expression of views. This same anonymity and unconstrained expression can initiate uncivil debate. The political blogosphere is thus replete with uncivil discussions and becomes an apt context to examine the influence of incivility on news frames. Moreover, although there is an increasingly growing literature on framing, few have examined framing effects in the contemporary media landscape. Thus, the present study brings in literature from incivility and framing effects to examine the influence of incivility on news frames for perceptual outcomes. The study uses an experiment embedded in a Web survey. Findings show that incivility increases the credibility of a news article while decreasing political trust and political efficacy. Further, results demonstrate the interactions of incivility and news frames. For instance, news credibility is increased only in the value framed condition. And a combination of strategic frames and incivility results in the least political trust and external efficacy. Implications are discussed.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): stimulus material for the experiment.]     

Blessing or Curse for Advocacy? How News Media Attention Helps Advocacy Groups to Achieve Their Policy Goals

This article asks whether and under what circumstances a presence in news media debates helps advocacy groups to achieve their policy goals in European Union (EU) legislative politics. Common wisdom holds that lobbyists eschew the public spotlight and prefer to influence policymaking from behind the scenes. This perception contrasts with the literature on media and interest groups, which typically conceives of media attention as a crucial commodity for interest groups to influence policy decisions. This article unites these seemingly contrasting stances by arguing that media attention can be both a blessing and a curse for advocacy. The central argument posited is that media attention may improve or reduce advocacy groups’ chances of preference attainment depending on how advocacy groups frame their message in the news. The analyses draw from interviews with more than 200 policy practitioners and content analysis of 3,557 media statements connected to a sample of 125 EU policy proposals. The findings demonstrate that an advocacy group’s media presence may improve preference attainment, but only when the advocacy group manages to frame its objectives in the news as aligned with the public interest.     

Values,Communication Behavior,and Political Participation

This article examines how communication patterns mediate the influences of values on political participation. We find that the positive effects of postmaterial values on participation are mediated through reading public affairs content in newspapers. In contrast, materialist values negatively affect participation through watching television entertainment. Interpersonal discussion in which disagreement occurs mediates both the positive effect of reading public affairs and the negative effect of materialism on political participation. We also provide what may be a better explanation of the influence of communication patterns on political participation by going beyond acquisition of factual political knowledge. We show that individuals' efforts to think about news and search for additional information and perspectives modify what people "get from" media. Reflecting about news and integrating information from various sources promote better understanding of the political world and may provide a stronger cognitive base for political participation than factual political knowledge.     

Investigating Journalist Influences on Political Issue Agendas at Westminster

This piece investigates the role of news media and journalists in setting political agendas. It presents evidence to challenge the agenda-setting paradigm most often adopted in such research. Instead it argues for greater employment of methods and perspectives more usually employed in media sociology. It then presents findings from research on Members of Parliament (MPs) in Britain. The findings, based mostly on semistructured interviews with 40 MPs, offer some interesting perspectives on the relationship between political journalism and the political process at Westminster. The overall conclusion is that intense media attention on issues can shift political agendas and policy development, but not according to the simple stimulus-response model of agenda-setting commonly employed. More often, news content and journalists play a significant role in setting agendas because politicians use them, in a variety of ways, to promote or negotiate agendas and policy options among themselves. In other words, journalism and journalists have a significant social and cultural role in helping MPs, consciously or unconsciously, to reach agreed agendas and positions.     

Elite Polarization and Public Opinion: How Polarization Is Communicated and Its Effects

Elite polarization has reshaped American politics and is an increasingly salient aspect of news coverage within the United States. As a consequence, a burgeoning body of research attempts to unravel the effects of elite polarization on the mass public. However, we know very little about how polarization is communicated to the public by news media. We report the results of one of the first content analyses to delve into the nature of news coverage of elite polarization. We show that such coverage is predominantly critical of polarization. Moreover, we show that unlike coverage of politics focused on individual politicians, coverage of elite polarization principally frames partisan divisions as rooted in the values of the parties rather than strategic concerns. We build on these novel findings with two survey experiments exploring the influence of these features of polarization news coverage on public attitudes. In our first study, we show that criticism of polarization leads partisans to more positively evaluate the argument offered by their non-preferred party, increases support for bi-partisanship, but ultimately does not change the extent to which partisans follow their party’s policy endorsements. In our second study, we show that Independents report significantly less political interest, trust, and efficacy when polarization is made salient and this is particularly evident when a cause of polarization is mentioned. These studies have important implications for our understanding of the consequences of elite polarization—and how polarization is communicated—for public opinion and political behavior in democratic politics.     

When News Norms Collide,Follow the Lead: New Evidence for Press Independence

The literature on media independence shows that the public statements of government officials can simultaneously stimulate news coverage and regulate the discursive parameters of that coverage. This study investigates two sources of uncertainty in that literature which have limited the ability of researchers to draw firm conclusions about the nature of media independence: how critical the news actually is, and how journalists put the indexing norm into practice. I examine policy discourse appearing in evening news broadcasts during the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf crisis, and find that sources outside the institutions of American government produced far more discourse critical of American involvement in the Gulf crisis than was produced by the "official" debate among domestic political leaders. Moreover, changes in the amount of governmental criticism coming from official circles did not tend to produce parallel changes in the amount of critical news coverage. This suggests that criticism of government in evening news discourse was not triggered by or closely tied to patterns of gatekeeping among elected officials. Television news coverage did not merely toe the "line in the sand" drawn by the Bush administration. Instead, the evidence from this case suggests that journalists exercised considerable discretion in locating and airing oppositional voices.     

Public Information and Field Theory

The unsolved question of whether the media affect political agendas is tackled with an innovative research method: a survey among politicians and journalists in Belgium. This article shows that this new approach can complement existing knowledge and yield new insights. Results largely support the contention that media matter for politics; politicians and journalists state that the media are important agenda setters, even compared to more established political actors such as political parties and interest groups. Though not all issues are equally conducive to media agenda-setting, media always seem to matter to some extent. Some politicians more than others evaluate the media's agenda impact to be high. The actual parliamentary action of some MPs is affected more by prior mass media coverage than others. I account for these differences and show that it is mainly their political role (government or opposition), the negativity of their evaluation of media power, and their perception of the impact of public opinion on politics that determine politicians' perceptions and behavior regarding political agenda-setting.     

Bridging Gaps in Cross-Cutting Media Exposure: The Role of Public Service Broadcasting

Previous studies show that individual political interest is an antecedent of news media exposure, particularly of exposure to differing views. Nevertheless, little is known about this effect from a comparative perspective: How do media institutions affect the relationship between political interest and exposure to cross-cutting viewpoints? One institutional feature that varies between countries is the ownership of broadcast media. This study investigates the extent to which the relative dominance of public service broadcasting alters the relationship between political interest and non-like-minded, or cross-cutting, news media exposure across 27 European Union countries. The analyses employ survey data from 27,079 individuals and media content from 48,983 news stories. The results confirm that the extent to which political interest contributes to cross-cutting exposure is contingent on the strength of public service broadcasting. The stronger the broadcaster, the smaller the gaps between the most and least politically engaged individuals.     

Balanced or Biased? Interest Groups and Legislative Lobbying in the European News Media

This article examines the coverage of legislative lobbying in European news media. The starting point thereby is that lobbying in the crowded European Union (EU)-level interest community is not only a struggle for direct access to policymakers, but that in order to realize policy goals many interest groups rely on political attention generated by the media. Our main research question is how media attention is skewed toward particular interests and which factors explain these varying levels of prominence. Our empirical analysis is based on a set of 125 legislative proposals adopted by the European Commission between 2008 and 2010. For all these cases we identified 379 interest organizations that made public statements, we coded the amount of media attention these organized interests gained, the type of statements they made as well as some key organizational features. While the aggregate levels of attention look pretty balanced, our evidence shows that media prominence is skewed toward particular types of interests; in particular that organized interests which oppose a proposed policy gain significantly higher levels of media attention.     

Global Television News and Foreign Policy: Debating the CNN Effect

This study investigates the origins and development of the cable news network (CNN) effect hypothesis. It reveals an ongoing debate among politicians, officials, and journalists who are involved in the political processes that this hypothesis attempts to explain, and also among scholars who have been studying it. Debates have been conducted both within and among these groups on the meaning and validity of the CNN effect, but none has contributed significantly to resolving the issue. On the contrary, these debates have presented contradicting statements that have only created confusion and misunderstanding. This study presents lessons from the decade-long effort to explore the CNN effect and projects a new agenda for more useful approaches towards different effects of global communication, apart from those covered by the present controversial hypothesis.     

Civic Engagement in the Era of Big Stories

Most scholars agree that news coverage of politics is the product of complicated interaction between journalists and politicians. Yet, we know little about how the interaction affects the coverage. Our analysis examines U.S. senators' press events and subsequent national network coverage from 1980–1996. Our evidence suggests that all senators can increase journalists' interest in their press events by carefully choosing the type of event and which politicians attend. In turn, such interest often translates into actual news stories, although that coverage is not guaranteed. Thus, senators can structure press events in order to increase the likelihood of coverage, but reporters understandably resist their attempts to do so. As a result, the most newsworthy press events require senators to give up control over content, creating more potential for revealing unexpected information.     

Advances and Opportunities in the Study of Political Communication,Foreign Policy,and Public Opinion

We review contemporary research at the intersection of political communication and foreign policy, highlighting four themes: 1) new, more realistic and psychologically-nuanced approaches that account for limited information and issue framing; 2) the question of whether the flow of communication between the state and the public is best conceived as a closed system, or one that is open to outside influences such as foreign elites; 3) how variations in political or governmental structures, patterns of media access or ownership, and other institutional factors can alter the relationships between foreign policy and communication processes; and 4) whether or not it is useful to distinguish between foreign and domestic policymaking when analyzing the role of political communication. We also suggest avenues for further research in each section and conclude by summarizing these opportunities for continued theoretical development.     

Should Science Class Be Fair? Frames and Values in the Evolution Debate

Communicators try to shape public opinion to their advantage by invoking social values. We examine a vivid example of this value framing in the debate over teaching evolution in the public schools. Supporters of intelligent design (ID) theory have pressed for greater acceptance in public schools by framing the issue as a question of fairness. A survey experiment revealed overwhelming agreement that including ID in science class is fairer than excluding it. This belief had a greater impact on tolerance for ID when the issue was framed with respect to fairness. A second study showed similar effects from a pro-ID documentary film. A final study showed that training in scientific reasoning counteracts the impact of the fairness value, thereby decreasing tolerance for ID. Combined, these studies show how political debate can be understood as a contest over which values deserve greatest consideration or emphasis.     

Evaluating Measures of Campaign Tone

Research on framing effects has demonstrated how elites can influence public opinion by the way they present and interpret political issues. However, these findings overwhelmingly stem from experimental settings that differ from how issues are typically discussed in real-world political situations. This study takes framing research to more realistic contexts by exploiting a natural experiment to examine the neglected role of political parties in framing effects. Examining the effects on public opinion of a sudden shift in how a major political party frames a salient issue, I demonstrate that parties can be powerful in shaping the policy preferences among their supporters. Yet, even strong partisans do not follow the party line uncritically. Rather, they judge the party frame according to their own beliefs about the problems surrounding the issue. Thus, party elites face the challenge of developing frames that resonate with their voters' preexisting beliefs if they want to shape policy preferences, even among their otherwise most loyal supporters. These dynamics have important implications for understanding interactions between political elites and the public.     

Excavating Concealed Tradeoffs: How Russians Watch the News

Citizens in democracies are expected to make better decisions if they understand policy tradeoffs. However, politicians rarely have incentives to communicate them; citizens are uncomfortable choosing among valued outcomes; and devising a common metric is difficult. It is not surprising that in the United States the environment provides relatively little cuing or priming of tradeoffs in television news. Russian citizens, on the other hand, face a media environment in which tradeoff cuing is intentionally suppressed by owners' agendas, yet viewers detect concealed tradeoffs even in the absence of tradeoff priming and viewpoint diversity. Analysis of discourse among ordinary Russians in 16 focus groups convened in four cities, differentiated by political reform and media market environments, showed that when watching news in which tradeoffs are thoroughly concealed, viewers challenge stories by offering a broad spectrum of uncued tradeoffs. Tradeoffs come from diverse policy domains and represent a range of cognitive strategies, some of which are considerably more abstract than others and link elements of their observations and assumptions (together with what they can extract from the stories) into complex reasoning outcomes.     

Grabbing attention: An experimental investigation of headlines during campaigns

In this article, we review two research programs that could benefit from a more extensive dialogue: media and policy studies of agenda setting. We focus on three key distinctions that divide these two robust research programs: the agenda(s) under investigation (public versus policymaking), the typical level of analysis (individual versus systemic), and framing effects (individual versus macro level). We map out these differences and their impacts on understanding the policy process. There is often a policy disconnect in the agenda-setting studies that emanate from the media tradition. Though interested in the effects of political communication, scholars from this tradition often fail to link the media to policy outcomes, policy change, or agenda change. Policy process scholars have increasingly rejected simple linear models in favor of models emphasizing complex feedback effects. This suggests a different role for the media—one of highlighting attributes in a multifaceted political reality and involvement in positive feedback cycles. Yet, political communication scholars have for the most part been insensitive to these potentials. We advocate a shared agenda centering on the role of the media in the political system from an information processing framework, emphasizing the reciprocal effects of each on the other.     

Exposure to the Newer Media in a Presidential Primary Campaign

Cable television news channels and online news sites appear to offer interested voters the ability to follow presidential election campaigns more closely than ever before. However, survey research looking at the extent to which Americans are taking advantage of these newer media is incomplete. Rarely is new media use adequately assessed in surveys, and no extant study has simultaneously examined exposure to contemporary news channels over the course of several weeks. The present study uses an aggregate-level analysis of naturally occurring news consumption behavior to determine whether public selection of broadcast news programs, cable news channels, and online news outlets follows the primary election schedule and fluctuations in voter interest in the election. The results suggest that people turn to cable news and online political content during key political events (i.e., the Super Tuesday primary period) but less so when the political stakes are much lower. In addition, the data reveal that news reading at local news sites during key events takes on a more local character than does reading at other times. In sum, the study demonstrates that aggregate-level use of the newer media is responsive to changes in the political environment. Audiences seem willing to take advantage of a growing number of options for finding information about politics.