The Not-So-Special Interests: Interest Groups, Public Representation, and American Governance by Matt Grossmann

Author:Matt Grossmann [Grossmann, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Science, General, Civics & Citizenship
ISBN: 9780804781343
Google: YxTJG5SBUL8C
Goodreads: 35191666
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

5

The Supply Side of Media Bias

One of the primary goals of political organizations is generating media attention for their activities and then speaking through the media to gain public and elite support for their positions. The media, in turn, are dependent on advocacy organizations for informed comment on policy issues and often look to organizational leaders as spokespeople for important political perspectives. Advocacy organizations and the media rely on one another to set the political agenda and engage in debate over major public issues. This codependence has engendered criticism from all sides of the political spectrum; we all seem to believe that our perspective is underrepresented because the media turn too often to our opponents. Critics also bemoan the “he said, she said” structure of news coverage, which often lacks close examination of either side’s claims.

Advocacy organizations are major actors in the contemporary highly mediated public deliberation over policy issues. Rather than interview random members of the public, reporters rely on spokespeople for perspectives. Berry (1999) finds that advocacy organizations are the dominant actors in political debate in the news media, outpacing the prominence of corporations and trade associations. He reports, for example, that public advocates account for more than half of group interviews on television news. In a finding that hits close to home for political scientists, he also reveals that advocacy-group research is featured more often than any academic scholarship. Advocacy-group prominence in the news media is likely to have important implications for the way that political issues are framed and whose concerns are recognized as important and valid by the public and by policymakers (Corrigan 2000; Callaghan and Schnell 2001). Given this influential position in the media debate, just who are these talking heads and quoted experts?

Media scholars attempt to provide an empirical basis for concerns over the role of media in politics by analyzing the constraints that the media face and the process by which they select topics and present the multiple sides of political disagreements. They argue that reporters face constraints that promote reliance on interested advocates; that is why these experts are chosen. As a result of research on the media, scholars have learned a great deal about why journalists search for subjective voices on political issues and the way they go about describing political debates. In other words, scholars know much about the demand side of expert sourcing, that is, why reporters demand spokespeople.

This scholarship, however, underestimates the importance of the supply side. The character of the organizations that mobilize to enter the political debate should affect the structure of media political discourse. This chapter takes the supply side seriously by examining the population of advocacy organizations that seek to affect political discussions in the media. It asks whose voice is heard within this population and why some groups succeed where others fail. Prior attempts to answer these questions have been framed as a discussion of ideological bias; scholars have asked whether the media amplify some voices at the expense of others. Rather

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.