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.     

What Makes Party Messages Fit for Reporting? An Experimental Study of Journalistic News Selection

Studies on news values have provided many insights into what gets reported in the media. In this study we use the concept of news values to examine how journalists perceive the newsworthiness of party messages. Taking an innovative approach, fictional party press releases are used to test for the influence of five important news values in the context of political news in a factorial survey experiment. This allows us to study those news values in relation to one another in a controlled experimental setting, an advantage over traditional gatekeeping studies. Political journalists in Switzerland and the Netherlands were asked to indicate whether they would consider these press releases for reporting or not. Findings show that the power status of the party, unexpectedness, and the magnitude of the political action announced influence journalists’ perception of newsworthiness. Messages from parties that were part of government were more likely to be selected for coverage in the Netherlands, whereas the party did not matter in Switzerland, where power is distributed more evenly. This shows that political system characteristics influence the work of journalists. Opposed to results from content analyses of news output, some news values (personal status, conflict) did not prove to be relevant. In the conclusion section we elaborate on potential explanations.     

‘Cashing In’ on curiosity and spectacle: the forensic patient and news media

Health and social care professionals are gatekeepers to, and custodians of, confidential service user information. In the United Kingdom (UK), police investigations have unveiled cases of payments being made to public service officials by journalists in return for service user information. The purpose of this discussion is to investigate such cases in the context of high-security forensic care. This paper provides a discussion drawing upon two UK-based case studies of prosecutions of public service workers relating to the sale of confidential information. The analysis presented here illuminates upon the salient and connected issues at work that have led to the transgression of legal obligations and professional responsibilities/principles of confidentiality. A fuller reading of the context in which these transgressions occur, and motivations that exist, may well serve to inform policy, training, guidance or vigilance in relation to the preserving of service user information in the future.     

我国农村新闻边缘化问题分析

农村新闻传播不仅是农村政治发展的推动器、农村经济发展的促进器,同时也是农村文化的转型器。在建设社会主义新农村中,加强农村新闻的传播不仅是时代的需要,也是农村社会全面和谐发展的需要。研究如何摆脱农村新闻传媒的边缘化问题,让其发挥最大的效能,具有十分重要的现实意义。     

论行政规划利害关系人的权利保障和法律救济--兼从公益与私益博弈的视角分析行政规划的法律规制

行政规划的频繁运用是现代行政的一个重要特色之一。必须防止行政规划利益配置的异化,实现公益、私益博弈的良性动态平衡。在充分保障公共利益的前提下,最大限度地保障利害关系人权利和利益的实现有着重要的现实意义,也是依法治国的重要内容。必须克服各种因制度性因素和非制度性因素造成的影响规划利害关系人权利实现的现实问题,改进权利实现路径,完善制度设计,重点是完善和加强规划确定裁决前的程序保障和确定裁决后的法律救济。     

高速公路交通事故应急处置预案研究

随着经济社会的发展,高速公路在综合运输体系中发挥着越来越重要的作用,但是随着高速公路里程日益增加,在高速公路发生的各类交通事故造成的人身伤亡和财产损失逐年增大,尽管高速公路交警部门通过长期实践在交通事故应急处置过程中取得了一定效果,但是成熟全面的交通事故处置应急预案尚未得到有效运用和推广。本文针对不同类别的高速公路交通事故分级制定应急预案,希望通过对高速公路交通事故应急预案的系统管理和运用,能有效规范高速公路交警部门交通事故应急处置工作流程,确保各类高速公路交通事故快速妥善处置,同时协调各职能部门之间关系,提高高速公路交警部门的交通管理工作管理水平。     

Attention as a Valuable Resource

Keeping up with the news and monitoring public affairs are typically considered civic obligations. Yet there is a great deal of competition for people’s limited attention. Some studies explore when people tune in to the news and what sorts of public affairs content attract our time, but these topics warrant more research. Scholars concerned with the news media’s political role must better understand what leads people to the news in the first place. The practical import of this work is pronounced in an era where news organizations struggle to make ends meet. The purpose of this essay is to categorize what we know about what motivates people to tune in to news and then to propose a research agenda for analyzing attention to public affairs content.     

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.     

The Backbone Structure of Audience Networks: A New Approach to Comparing Online News Consumption Across Countries

Measures of audience overlap between news sources give us information on the diversity of people’s media diets and the similarity of news outlets in terms of the audiences they share. This provides a way of addressing key questions like whether audiences are increasingly fragmented. In this article, we use audience overlap estimates to build networks that we then analyze to extract the backbone—that is, the overlapping ties that are statistically significant. We argue that the analysis of this backbone structure offers metrics that can be used to compare news consumption patterns across countries, between groups, and over time. Our analytical approach offers a new way of understanding audience structures that can enable more comparative research and, thus, more empirically grounded theoretical understandings of audience behavior in an increasingly digital media environment.     

试论完善公安新闻发布工作的新思路

公安新闻发布是建立在公民知情权的基础之上,是警务信息公开化的重要形式。在对公安新闻发布工作的意义、指导原则及主要形式进行阐释的基础上,分析、研究我国公安新闻发布工作已取得的成效和存在的问题,进而探寻新形势下我国公安新闻发布工作的新思路,无疑将增进媒体和公众对公安机关的理解,进一步密切警民关系。