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.     

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.     

Holding the state at bay: understanding media freedoms in Africa

Focused on democratic and hybrid regimes in sub-Saharan Africa, this article explores the factors and conditions that dissuade or restrain governments from clamping down on press freedoms. We suggest that governments might hesitate to interfere with the media for three reasons: they may face excessive political or legal costs for such interference; they might have limited options available to them to curtail media freedoms, and, finally, under some circumstances, governments may obtain a limited payoff from efforts to clamp down on the media. Consistent with anecdotal evidence that motivates some of our hypotheses, our findings suggest that strong media sectors within civil society encourage government respect for media freedoms. We also find that the rule of law is associated with more favourable climates for the media. This likely reflects the protection free media receive from independent judiciaries.     

Does Media Coverage of Partisan Polarization Affect Political Attitudes?

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in the partisan polarization of the American electorate. Scholarly investigation of this topic has coincided with the media’s portrayal of a polity deeply divided along partisan lines. Yet little research so far has considered the consequences of the media’s coverage of political polarization. We show that media coverage of polarization increases citizens’ beliefs that the electorate is polarized. Furthermore, the media’s depiction of a polarized electorate causes voters to moderate their own issue positions but increases their dislike of the opposing party. These empirical patterns are consistent with our theoretical argument that polarized exemplars in journalistic coverage serve as anti-cues to media consumers. Our findings have important implications for understanding current and future trends in political polarization.     

Western Media Exposure and Chinese Immigrants’ Political Perceptions

Using evidence from an original survey experiment among 3,032 Chinese student immigrants in the United States, I examine how exposure to Western media changes their evaluations of the Chinese government’s performance and their trust in official discourse. My findings suggest that reading Western reports on China shifts immigrants’ perceptions of government performance in different directions, depending on how similar reports are censored in Chinese media. On issues that are strictly censored, immigrants exposed to Western reports became more critical of their home government’s performance and decreased their trust in official discourse. Conversely, on issues that are relatively open to independent reporting, immigrants did not become more critical of government performance, and their trust in official discourse maintained after being exposed to Western information.     

Presence to Press: How Campaigns EarnLocal Media

Today’s campaigns have ample resources with which to influence the media, while plummeting revenue, readership, and reporting staffs make local newspapers more vulnerable than ever. This imbalance raises an important question: if a campaign invests more resources in an area, can it earn positive media coverage? In this article, I propose a strategic relationship between campaigns and local media. Newspapers offer campaigns credibility and exposure, while campaigns offer local newspapers easy-to-report stories that will appeal to their readers. Campaign messages are more impactful when communicated through the local press, so campaigns will try to influence local news coverage (when they have the resources to do so) by establishing a local presence. When newspapers are vulnerable, they should be more likely to accept campaign prompting and provide campaigns with positive earned media. I employ an original data set of newspaper content and campaign investment from the 2004 and 2008 elections. I utilize a within-state matched-pairs design of newspapers from the state of Florida and a detailed content analysis of stories from 21 randomly selected days from each election cycle. I find that regional campaign presence generates positive earned media, but only in smaller newspapers. This article contributes to the fields of campaign and media effects by demonstrating how campaigns’ calculated decisions influence the construction of local political news. It is the first study to describe the connection between the voter contact and campaigns’ earned local media strategy.     

The Tech Industry Meets Presidential Politics: Explaining the Democratic Party’s Technological Advantage in Electoral Campaigning, 2004–2012

Drawing on theories in organizational sociology that argue that transpositions of people,/ skills, and knowledge across domains give rise to innovations and organizational foundings that institutionalize them, we conducted a mixed-methods study of the employment biographies of staffers working in technology, digital, data, and analytics on American presidential campaigns, and the rates of organizational founding by these staffers, from the 2004 through the 2012 electoral cycles. Using Federal Election Commission and LinkedIn data, we trace the professional biographies of staffers (N = 629) working in technology, digital, data, or analytics on primary and general election presidential campaigns during this period. We found uneven professionalization in these areas, defined in terms of staffers moving from campaign to campaign or from political organizations to campaigns, with high rates of new entrants to the field. Democrats had considerably greater numbers of staffers in the areas of technology, digital, data, and analytics and from the technology industry, and much higher rates of organizational founding. We present qualitative data drawn from interviews with approximately 60 practitioners to explain how the institutional histories of the two parties and their extended networks since 2004 shaped the presidential campaigns during the 2012 cycle and their differential uptake of technology, digital, data, and analytics.     

The Prediction of Young Homicide and Violent Offenders

Aim was to investigate a range of potentially modifiable risk factors for boys in late childhood for later violence and homicide convictions. Boys from the Pittsburgh Youth Study (N = 1,517) were measured through self-reports and official records in late childhood (ages 11–13) on a large number of potentially modifiable risk factors, and were followed up in juvenile and adult criminal records in terms of violence and homicide. Predictors of conviction for homicide largely overlapped with predictors of conviction for violence. Twenty three out of 28 possible risk factors significantly predicted later violence convictions. Regression analysis identified four significant modifiable risk factors in late childhood for any violent offenders: physical abuse, parental stress, bad friends and low school motivation. The higher the number of early risk factors, the higher the probability of later conviction for violent offenses including homicide. The discussion focus on single-, and multi-modal interventions in late childhood to reduce later violence and possibly homicide.     

广东地区汉族人群VEGF基因5′端SNP位点遗传多态性

目的调查广东地区汉族人群VEGF基因5′端SNP位点的遗传多态性,为法医学应用及群体遗传学研究提供基础数据。方法 DNA微测序技术SNaPshot分析184例广东地区无关个体VEGF基因5′端4个SNP位点(rs699947、rs1570360、rs833061、rs2010963)的遗传多态性。应用PowerMarker v3.25软件进行统计分析。结果 184例广东地区汉族无关个体VEGF基因5′端4个SNP位点基因分布均符合Hardy-Weinberg平衡(P0.05),每个位点均检出3种基因型。rs833061和rs699947位点紧密连锁。共检出6种单倍型,其中C-G-T-C、C-G-T-G、A-A-C-G、A-G-C-G频率均10%,为主要单倍型。rs699947、rs833061、rs2010963位点的个人识别率为0.583~0.634,非父排除率为0.133~0.144;4个SNP构成单倍型的个人识别率为0.868,非父排除率为0.438。结论广东地区汉族人群VEGF基因5′端序列呈现出高度遗传多态性,可作为个人识别和亲权鉴定的遗传学指标,同时可用于相关疾病关联分析。     

‘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.