Changing the Face of Advocacy? Explaining Interest Organizations’ Use of Social Media Strategies

Social media have increasingly been recognized as an important and effective tool for advocacy. A growing body of research examines the use of social media in grassroots and social movements as well as issues related to civic engagement, social capital, and voter turnout. The extent to which organized interest groups have adopted social media as an advocacy tool, however, has been relatively ignored. This article examines the determinants of the use of social media tools by a broad range of interest organizations. We argue that social media use needs to be understood as part of an interest organization’s larger set of news media lobbying strategies. We explain social media use as a function of two factors: first, the importance organizations place on trying to shape lobbying debates through the news media; second, the importance they place on shaping their public image via the news media. We test this argument using a unique data set of interest group advocacy in the European Union. Controlling for a host of competing explanations, regression results provide evidence supporting our central argument.     

The Nonlinear Effect of Information on Political Attention: Media Storms and U.S. Congressional Hearings

Agenda-setting scholars have claimed that the typical punctuated pattern of governmental attention is a consequence of disproportionate information processing. Yet these claims remain unsubstantiated. We tackle this challenge by considering mass media coverage as a source of information for political actors and by examining the relationship between preceding media information and subsequent governmental attention. Employing data capturing U.S. media attention and congressional hearings (1996–2006), we find that the effects of media attention on congressional attention are conditioned by the presence of “media storms”—sudden and large surges in media attention to a given topic. A one-story increase in media attention has a greater effect on congressional attention in the context of a media storm, since media storms surpass a key threshold for catching policymakers’ attention. We find evidence that the influence of media attention on political attention is nonlinear; agenda-setting operates differently when the media are in storm mode.     

Do National Economic and Political Conditions Affect Ideological Media Slant?

Political scientists are interested in the influence of the news media on politics. However, relatively few studies investigate whether or not ideological slant in news coverage changes systematically over time. If it changes systematically, what factors explain the changes? This study argues that external conditions, such as national political and economic situations, influence ideological media slant at the aggregate level. To examine this argument, “macro media bias” is measured quarterly by gauging the relative size of liberal and conservative news stories regarding domestic issues from 1958 through 2004. Utilizing ARIMA models, this study reveals that the news media tend to negatively react to government spending. Also, economic conditions, such as unemployment and inflation, significantly explain changes in the relative number of liberal and conservative news stories.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): the coding keywords, detailed coding rules, and alternative regression results.]     

F.H. (Terry) Terblanche (17 June 1939 – 30 April 2014)

ABSTRACT

Research shows that there is a perception that gender equity in the South African news media has reached maturation and that the power female journalists hold in the newsroom equals that of their male counterparts. these perceptions might be attributed to the fact that South african news media have reached near gender parity in terms of the workforce. However, the question is whether this translates into women having equal power to influence news agendas and to extend the broader public discourse.

Through interviews with journalists from a cross-section of the South african english- and afrikaans-language media, the study shows that despite improved gender equity in the workforce, female journalists do not think they have the same power to alter news agendas as their male counterparts. Furthermore, the study shows that despite women and men often covering similar beats and stories, they emphasise different story angles and also articulate their role in society differently.     

Terrorism and the media: Problems,solutions, and counterproblems

This article is divided into two main parts. The first part frames the problem of “terrorism and the media” in terms of a complex interaction involving three kinds of relationships. The first is the relationship between terrorists and governments; the second is the relationship between terrorists and the media; and the third is the relationship between government and the media. The second part examines the specific roles of the media in covering terrorism and the impact of such coverage. Four kinds of solutions to the problems deriving from this impact are examined in turn: the use of media guidelines, the use of legislation and legal sanctions, media‐government cooperation, and training and education. Finally, the practicality of these solutions is examined by highlighting the kinds of problems or “counterproblems” that are inherent in each solution.     

The Mix of Media Use Matters: Investigating the Effects of Individual News Repertoires on Offline and Online Political Participation

In contemporary high-choice media environments, people increasingly mix and combine their use of various news media into personal news repertoires. Despite this, there is still limited research on how people compose their individual news repertoires and the effects of these news repertoires. To address this and further our understanding of how media use influences political participation, this study investigates (a) how people combine the use of offline and online media into personal news repertoires and (b) the effects of different news repertoires on both offline and online political participation. Based on a two-wave panel study covering the 2014 Swedish national election, this study identifies five news repertoires, labeled minimalists, public news consumers, local news consumers, social media news consumers, and popular online news consumers. Among other things, the results show that social media news consumers are more likely to participate in politics both offline and online.     

Analyzing the Multidirectional Relationships Between the President,News Media,and the Public: Who Affects Whom?

In order to study presidential leadership and responsiveness, this research focuses on the role of the news media and examines the multidirectional relationships between the president, the news media, and the public. One of the purposes of this study is to examine competing theoretical expectations about the causal direction between the three actors by focusing on their issue stances. The potentially reciprocal influences between the three actors are estimated by using vector autoregression and moving average representation simulations. According to the statistical results, the news media significantly interact with the public and the president. In contrast, the direct relationship between the president and the public is weak or insignificant.     

A Matter of Context: A Comparative Study of Media Environments and News Consumption Gaps in Europe

Research has shown that individual-level characteristics such as socioeconomic status and political interest are becoming more important as predictors of news consumption in a rapidly changing media environment. Despite this general trend, this article argues that the importance of individual-level predictors of news consumption varies between national media environments. We use extensive survey data from 16 European countries and multilevel modeling in order to investigate both contextual-level and cross-level effects on news consumption. The results show that media environment characteristics have additional effects on news consumption beyond the effects of individual-level characteristics such as education and political interest, but also moderating impacts on these individual-level predictors of news consumption. More specifically, national media environments characterized by higher levels of newspaper-centrism are related to smaller gaps in newspaper reading between those with high and low levels of education and political interest. Lower degrees of newspaper-centrism are, on the other hand, related to a weaker “lower-class bias” of television news and larger gaps in news consumption between those with and without high political interest. These findings are discussed in light of previous research on news consumption, knowledge, and participation gaps as well as cross-national comparative research.     

Understanding the media/terrorism relationship: An analysis of ideology and the news in time magazine

Conservative terrorism scholars have made the claim that the media have become a propaganda tool for terrorists and sympathetically portray terrorist activities. This article provides quantitative and qualitative data from Time magazine in 1986 suggesting that this view is mistaken. News production is treated as a social process that both informs and obscures, rather than as a neutral process that simply provides ‘objective’ facts. The results of the investigation reveal seven ways in which ideology is manifested in the terrorism news: semantics, language, headlines, social and historical context, treatment of objectives, trivialization, and amplification of violence. The ideological uniformity and lack of diversity apparent in terrorism news suggests that this kind of treatment results in a lack of understanding of the media/terrorism relationship and serves to support conservative views about the nature of terrorism and appropriate responses to it.     

Milton's army: The white house press corps

White House reporters follow a path constructed by presidential advisers that they hope will lead them to fulfill goals set by their news organizations. White House officials ration them facilities for work, access to newsworthy people, and reportable information in amounts that depend on the importance to the President of the type of media they work in, the status of their particular news organization, and the staff's respect for the influence and competence of a particular individual. In this context, several constraints that affect White House reporting are discussed here: those placed on reporters by their organizations; by the way their type of media covers the White House; by their relations with each other; and by their concepts of what they are required to do. The framework for this discussion and analysis is a classification by type of media and news organizations that assign journalists to the White House. Of the resulting six categories, the first three have the most structural and organizational influence and are given the most attention. The special status, unique history, and influence of photographers at the White House require that they be treated separately.     

Greasing the squeaky wheel: News media coverage and us development aid, 1977–1992

This study explores the role that news media coverage plays in influencing US foreign policy in general, and foreign aid policy in particular. It is expected that foreign policy officials will be responsive to the content of the domestic news media and will attempt to align their actions with what they expect is the public's perception of the importance of a particular issue. In this study, it is hypothesized that that higher levels of news coverage of a potential recipient country will lead to higher aid commitments. The analysis examines the levels of US aid commitments to those it provided aid during the period 1977–1992. Even with an admittedly simple measure of news media coverage, the empirical findings are clear. The level of news coverage is a statistically significant factor in the levels of aid offered by the US. Thus a domestic political motive may be considered to be operative along with more widely studied determinants of aid based upon humanitarian motives and national self‐interests.     

How Accurate Are Survey Responses on Social Media and Politics?

How accurate are survey-based measures of social media use, in particular about political topics? We answer this question by linking original survey data collected during the U.S. 2016 election campaign with respondents’ observed social media activity. We use supervised machine learning to classify whether these Twitter and Facebook account data are content related to politics. We then benchmark our survey measures on frequency of posting about politics and the number of political figures followed. We find that, on average, our self-reported survey measures tend to correlate with observed social media activity. At the same time, we also find a worrying amount of individual-level discrepancy and problems related to extreme outliers. Our recommendations are twofold. The first is for survey questions about social media use to provide respondents with options covering a wider range of activity, especially in the long tail. The second is for survey questions to include specific content and anchors defining what it means for a post to be “about politics.”