Agenda-Setting With Satire: How Political Satire Increased TTIP’s Saliency on the Public,Media, and Political Agenda

Agenda-setting has mostly been investigated as the cognitive process set in motion by the salience of political issues in the traditional news media. The question, though, remained whether political entertainment shows—political satire, specifically—can also set the agenda. The current study investigates whether two episodes of Dutch satire show Zondag met Lubach (ZML) about the European Union-United States trade agreement Transatlantic Trade Investment and Partnership (TTIP) have triggered first-level agenda-setting effects. For that purpose, three studies have been conducted to investigate the three-step agenda-setting process (i.e., learning, understanding, acting) from saliency in satire to saliency on the public agenda, but also on the media and political agenda. Study 1: A two-wave panel survey shows that consumption of the satire show positively affected knowledge acquisition about TTIP, which is the first step in the cognitive process underlying agenda-setting. Study 2: A randomized experiment demonstrated that exposure to ZML increased the perceived understanding of TTIP, which subsequently had a positive impact on the saliency of TTIP on the public agenda. Study 3: Longitudinal time-series data provide evidence that the saliency of TTIP on the public agenda—short term—and on the political agenda—long term—were positively affected by the ZML satire episodes. The study, altogether, demonstrates satire’s ability to set the agenda of both the individual and aggregate level and emphasizes the persistent relevance of agenda-setting theory in today’s high-choice media environment.     

How Political Elites Process Information From the News: The Cognitive Mechanisms Behind Behavioral Political Agenda-Setting Effects

Political agenda-setting studies have shown that political agendas are influenced by the media agenda. Researchers in the field of media and politics are now focusing on the mechanisms underlying this pattern. This article contributes to the literature by focusing not on aggregate, behavioral political attention for issues (e.g., parliamentary questions or legislation), but on Members of Parliament’s (MP) individual, cognitive attention for specific news stories. Drawing upon a survey of Belgian MPs administered shortly after exposure to news stories, the study shows that MPs are highly selective in exploiting media cues. They pay more attention to both prominent and useful news stories, but a story’s usefulness is more important for cognitive processes that are closely linked to MPs’ real behavior in parliament. In other words, aggregate political agenda-setting effects are a consequence of the way in which individual MPs process media information that matches their task-related needs.     

The irrelevance of negative campaigns to political trust: Experimental and survey results

This article examines how media and partisan mechanisms of accountability influence presidential agendas in Latin America. The authors argue that responsiveness increases in powerful presidential systems when opposition parties and free media help citizens hold presidents accountable between elections. Where presidents must contend with a cohesive, ideological opposition and effective constraints to their power, they turn to valence issues with broad appeal and over which they have greater control. A free media—one without significant economic, legal, or political constraints—pressures the president to respond to the electorate's concerns, which include crime and corruption due to the incentives that motivate news content and the media's agenda-setting powers. Analyzing more than 50 presidential terms across 18 countries, the authors show that when Latin American presidents face either free and competitive media or strong legislative oppositions, homicide rates and the level of perceived corruption tend to be lower. Thus, this study proposes that efforts to improve media or partisan environments, or both, would help address Latin America's accountability deficit and promote good governance in the region.     

Parliamentary Questions,Newspaper Coverage,and Consumer Confidence in Times of Crisis: A Cross-National Comparison

This article investigates the interactions among parliamentary questions, newspaper coverage on the economic crisis, and consumer confidence. It focuses on France, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands for the period 2005–2016. Based on insights from political agenda-setting and media effects research, we expect multidirectional relationships to be present. Parliamentary records and newspaper archives are used to analyze the monthly amount of attention for the economic crisis. Pooled time series models and vector autoregression analyses are employed to demonstrate that indeed, politicians, journalists, and citizens depend on one another, but also that remarkable cross-national and over-time differences exist. In the countries where the economy was severely damaged by the crisis (France and Spain), news coverage is less strongly affecting both parliamentarians and citizens. However, when the economic situation worsens, political agenda-setting influences get stronger,while media effects on consumer confidence becomeweaker over time.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Media Coverage of Congress in the 1990s: Scandals,Personalities, and the Prevalence of Policy and Process

In this article, we provide a comprehensive, systematic examination of media coverage of Congress in the 1990s. Specifically, we content analyze over 2,600 congressional news stories from the New York Times and CBS Evening News from 1990 through 1998. We find that the news media covered substantive policy concerns and the legislative process quite regularly and that stories focusing on individual personalities and political scandals were comparatively infrequent. We also find that legislative maneuvering is a mainstay of congressional media coverage, and the democratic process is most often framed as conflict between parties and Congress and the president.     

The Path to Political Substance: Exploring the Mediated Discourse Surrounding Controversial Media Texts

This article proceeds from the assumption that entertainment texts—particularly controversial ones—function in a broad intertextual field and that their political significance does not lie solely in their value as stand-alone texts, or in their direct influence on political knowledge, attitudes, opinions, and behaviors, but in their ability to instigate politically relevant discussions in other media venues. Focusing on the mediated discourse surrounding two controversial U.S. docudramas, The Reagans and The Path to 9/11, this study examines the political qualities of the public discourse surrounding these docudramas in the U.S. news media and investigates which factors were significant predictors of political substance in this discourse. Based on a distinction between “issue substance” and “media substance” as the two major types of political substance that emerge in the discourse surrounding controversial texts, the analysis demonstrates how these types of political substance varied across the two docudramas and across various dimensions of the discourse, among them the time in which the discussion took place. The analytical framework presented in this article is offered as a platform for future examinations of the contribution of media-centered political scandals to public discourse, the conditions under which entertainment texts spur substantive political discussions, and the complex interactions between journalism, entertainment, and politics in contemporary media environments.     

Intramedia Mediation: The Cumulative and Complementary Effects of News Media Use

This study focuses on one often overlooked political communication-based media effect, intramedia mediation, and the indirect effects that stem from relationships that exist among various forms of media use. Data from a 2000 national Annenberg election panel survey are used to assess a series of relationships between television and newspaper public affairs use and how these forms of media consumption affect citizens' knowledge of presidential campaign endorsements. The indirect effects that stem from the relationships that exist among these two forms of media use reflect the cumulative and complementary functions of mass communication consumption across time. An analysis of intramedia mediation in coordination with the study of the direct effects of public affairs media use on this study's outcome variable produces substantially larger overall effects for both forms of news use. Thus, the study of intramedia mediation contributes to a better understanding of the full range of media influences on a given outcome variable over the course of a political campaign. Ramifications of these findings are outlined and future lines of research summarized.     

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.     

The Agenda-Setting Impact of Major Presidential TV Addresses

New media dramatically increase citizens' access to information and decrease governments' ability to control the flow of communication. Although human rights nongovernmental organizations have advocated that access to independent news media will improve government respect for human rights, recent empirical studies have shown this is not always the case. We posit that media independence and the presence or absence of democratic characteristics, in particular political competition, have substantial effects on government repression because these factors determine the degree to which the government is vulnerable to public pressures. The model developed here includes three equations that encompass the impact of interaction between and among the news media, citizens, and government. The first equation specifies the influences on the news media's decision whether or not to perform a “watchdog” role regarding government repression. The second equation represents public reaction to the news media's coverage of government repression (i.e., protest). Here access to news media via traditional and new media is an important factor. The third equation represents government repression. Solutions to the system of equations are derived for four scenarios (a) Democracy and media independence are both present, (b) democracy is present but media independence is absent, (c) democracy is absent (autocracy) and media independence is present, and (d) democracy is absent (autocracy) and media independence is absent. We then consider interesting properties of the anticipated behavior from the government, media, and general public through case illustrations for the Netherlands and Myanmar/Burma.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource: two additional case illustrations (Tanzania and Brazil).]     

Media and the institutional perspective: U.S. and Canadian coverage of terrorism

Abstract

This paper reports data from a content analysis of television news coverage of terrorism. A proposed typology of terrorism and media coverage is tested with stories from network news in the United States and Canada. The typology posits that media coverage of terrorism depends on the act's relation to institutional power bases. The two types of terrorism outlined either seek out or avoid media coverage, depending on whether they challenge or reinforce institutional power. Because of media's interrelationship with the economic and political institutions, coverage of terrorism will take on the flavor of these institutions’ perspective. The data show that although media cover terrorist acts that are linked to U.S. institutional interests, the tone of such coverage casts uncritical perspective. The implications for the general message system of news, with particular regard to the media's contribution to international understanding, are explored.     

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.     

Priming Issues,Party Visibility,and Party Evaluations: The Impact on Vote Switching

Voter volatility has become a hallmark of Western democracies in the past three decades. At the same time short-term factors—such as the media’s coverage of issues, parties, and candidates during an election campaign—have become more important for voters’ decisions. While previous research did look at how campaign news in general affects electoral volatility in general, it has omitted to explicitly test the mechanisms underlying these effects. Building on theories of agenda setting, (affective) priming, and issue ownership, the current study aims to explain why certain news aspects lead voters to switch their vote choice. We theorize it is the visibility of a party, the evaluation of a party, and the attention for issues owned by a party that primes voters to switch to a certain party. We use national panel survey data (N = 765) and link this to an extensive content analysis of campaign news on television and in newspapers in the run up to the 2012 Dutch national elections. The results show that issue news leads to vote change in the direction of the party that owns the issue. Even stronger is the effect of party visibility on vote switching. Our results, however, find the strongest support for the effect of party evaluations on vote change: More favorable news about a party increases switching to that party.     

Media Matter: How Newspapers and Television News Cover Campaigns and Influence Voters

The conventional wisdom in political communications research is that the media play a dominant role in defining the agenda of elections. In Bernard Cohen's words, the media do not tell us what to think, but they tell us what to think about. The present article challenges this conclusion. We present data on media coverage of the 1992 presidential election from the first nationally representative sample of American newspapers and compare these to the issue interests of the American public. We conclude that past claims that the media control the agenda-setting process have been overstated. Candidates messages are well represented in press coverage of the campaign, and coverage is even independent of a newspaper's editorial endorsement. We argue that agenda setting is a transaction process in which elites, the media, and the public converge to a common set of salient issues that define a campaign.     

News Media Use and Political Engagement Among Adolescents: An Analysis of Virtuous Circles Using Panel Data

This study analyzes reinforcing spirals between news media use and two manifestations of political engagement: political interest and participation intention. Drawing on a three-wave panel study among adolescents, we test the Virtuous Circle Thesis (VCT) in both an online and an offline setting, by distinguishing between selection effects and media effects as key ingredients of the VCT. Overall, the findings lend mixed support to the general argument. While the relationship between specific forms of news media use and political interest appears to be driven primarily by selection effects, reciprocal relations were found mainly between television news and participation intention. The VCT assumption of reciprocal influences was supported most clearly when adolescents’ total news media use was considered. Taken together, virtuous circles appeared to operate rather similarly online and offline.     

Bringing the Sociology of Media Back In

In political communication research, news media tend to be studied more as a dependent than independent variable. That is, few studies link structural characteristics of media systems to the production of journalistic discourse about politics. One reason for this relative silence is the inadequacy of prevalent theories. Influential scholars in sociology and political communication such as Jürgen Habermas, Manuel Castells, and William Gamson provide only sketchy, institutionally underspecified accounts of media systems. Likewise, models in the sociology of news have tended to either aggregate societal level influences (chiefly political and economic) that are analytically and often empirically quite distinct or overemphasize micro-level influences (news routines, bureaucratic pressures). In between such micro- and macro-influences, the mezzo-level "journalistic field" represents an important shaping factor heretofore largely ignored. As path-dependent institutional logics, fields help ground cultural analysis; as interorganizational spatial environments varying in their level of concentration, they explain heretofore undertheorized aspects of news production. Drawing on the sociology of news and field theory (Bourdieu and American new institutionalism), this essay offers a series of hypotheses about how variable characteristics of media systems shape news discourse. Since variation at the system level is most clearly seen via cross-national comparative studies, international research is best positioned to build more generalizable theory about the production of journalistically mediated political discourse.     

Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End,by Nina Eliasoph

Extant research is not very specific about when the media matter for vote choice. In this study, we test multiple theories about the influences of the media on vote choice in 21 countries. The European Parliamentary (EP) election campaign offers a unique research context to test these influences. We rely on a two-wave panel survey conducted in 21 European Union (EU) member states, asking both vote intentions before the campaign and reported actual votes (among 14,000 voters). We link these data to media content data of campaign coverage between the two waves in these countries (37,000 coded news items). We conclude that media evaluations of the EU affect voting for Eurosceptic parties. On average, the more positive the evaluations of the EU a voter is exposed to, the less likely she or he is to cast a vote for a Eurosceptic party. In addition, our findings indicate that in countries where political parties have markedly different views on EU issues, the more a voter is exposed to framing of the EU in terms of benefits derived from membership in these countries, the less likely she or he is to cast a Eurosceptic vote. This suggests that the outcome of the 2009 EP elections was influenced by how the media covered EU-related news during the campaign.     

The Local News Story: Is Quality a Choice?

The conventional wisdom about local TV news is that quality journalism does not sell and that only by focusing on crime, disasters, and other “soft news” can newscasts get good ratings. Political scientists have decried the poor quality of TV news as a betrayal of the press's mandate to inform citizens of the important policy issues of the day so that they can hold government officials accountable. This study tests the proposition that audiences prefer low effort, tabloid journalism by looking at external measures of commercial success—the Nielsen ratings data. Utilizing data from a 5‐year study matching the content quality of 33,911 local news stories from 154 TV stations in 50 TV markets nationwide to corresponding ratings success, we show that solid reporting and a focus on significant issues actually produce better ratings than slapdash or superficial tabloid journalism. Additionally, we find that strategy-oriented coverage of political campaigns that focuses on the horserace does not build an audience. These surprising results have practical implications for democratic practice and local TV news production.