Corporate Ownership and News Bias Revisited: Newspaper Coverage of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United Ruling

The clear financial benefits accrued to owners of television stations as a result of the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (FEC) decision opens the door to an important question: Did the degree to which media corporations benefited from the changes in campaign finance law influence their news outlets’ coverage of the Citizens United decision? In other words, is it possible to identify variation in how media outlets covered the Supreme Court decision that correlates with the degree to which those outlets’ parent companies profited from the resulting increase in campaign spending? Answering this question will provide an important and much-too-uncommon opportunity to systematically test for bias in news coverage. Replicating the method used by Gilens and Hertzman (2000) in their own test of coverage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, this analysis reveals that newspapers belonging to media corporations that own more television stations covered the Citizens United ruling systematically differently—and more favorably—than those with few or no television stations. This has important implications for the degree to which the news produced by increasingly conglomerated and corporatized media companies may eschew neutral or balanced coverage in favor of news frames that promote their own financial interests.     

From Accountability to Decision-Making? Budgeting with Mandated Performance Measures

Government agencies in many nations, including local school districts in the United States, are under pressure to shift to an outcome-based approach to accountability. While the implications of such systems are widely debated, the use of performance measures within local school districts for budgetary decision-making has received relatively little attention. This study of school business officials finds that mandated performance measures, specifically standardized test scores, are important factors in budgetary decision-making but less influential than other factors. Variables that help explain the influence of mandated performance measures include district performance, socio-economic status, and the importance of community involvement in decision-making.     

Electronic Monitoring of Offenders

This article discusses what the electronic monitoring of offenders involves and the use that is now being made of electronic monitoring within the criminal justice system in England and Wales.     

Assessing the effect of batterer program completion on reassault using propensity scores

Recent experimental evaluations have suggested little or no effect of batterer programs on reassault but are compromised by methodological and analytical issues. This study assesses program effect using propensity score analysis with a quasi-experimental sample in an attempt to address these issues. The sample consisted of 633 batterers and their partners from three geographically dispersed batterer programs and a 15-month follow-up with their female partners. Subclassification on propensity scores was used to balance program completers and program dropouts. The propensity score was estimated as the probability of completing the batterer program conditional on observable characteristics. Direct adjustment indicates that program completion reduced the probability of reassault during the 15-month follow-up by 33% for the full sample, and by nearly 50% for the court-ordered men.     

Andrew Carnegie’s gospel of wealth

He is president of the Snow Foundation and the Snow Memorial Fund. He has written widely on European history. Currently he is teaching an upper division course on “Philanthropy: Past and Present.”     

Cannabis policy diffusion in Ontario and New Brunswick: Coercion,learning, and replication

This article integrates Hall’s (1993) social learning framework, as well as more recent contributions, into the literature on policy diffusion to better identify the goals, instruments, and precise settings for recreational cannabis policy in New Brunswick and Ontario. We analyze committee hearings, Hansard debates, and government reports and find that policy diffused via three mechanisms: coercion due to the federal criminal law power, learning from Washington and Colorado, and replication of analogous provincial policies concerning tobacco and alcohol. We also find the non‐binding federal Task Force on Cannabis Legalization and Regulation had a considerable effect on the diffusion of goals, instruments, and settings.