The People's News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of Capitalism by Joseph E. Uscinski

Author:Joseph E. Uscinski [Uscinski, Joseph E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Media Studies, Social Science, Political Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780814764886
Google: IhIUCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17918191
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2014-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

Table 3.1 displays the results (for the purpose of readability, the coefficients of our control variables are withheld but the full model is available upon request). Each dependent variable is listed in the columns at the top, and each independent variable is listed in the first column going downward. Coefficients with a star indicate statistical significance; the standard error is in parentheses below. Positive coefficients indicate a positive relationship while a negative coefficient indicates a negative one. I include three main endogenous or dependent variables in the model. The first is the time-series of party-owned issue coverage; I operationalize this as the percentage of Democratic-owned stories divided by the percent of Republican-owned stories aired each quarter. This is the variable I most want to explain—whether it is affected by macropartisanship, and how. Macropartisanship and the public’s issue concerns are also included as dependent variables at the top. The variables representing real-world conditions, and the actions and discourse of government are treated as exogenous in the VAR model and are listed on the left.

With regard to the upper-most left coefficient, the lagged measure of macropartisanship significantly and positively affects the reporting of issues in the hypothesized direction. As the public becomes more Democratic, firms report more Democratic-owned issues in relation to Republican-owned issues, and as the public becomes more Republican, the news outlets report more Republican-owned issues in relation to Democratic-owned issues. More specifically, a one percentage point positive change in macropartisanship (the country turns more Democratic than Republican) leads to the reporting of four more Democratic-owned issues per quarter. This is a minor change. However, a ten-point Democratic shift in macropartisanship leads to an additional Democratic-owned story every other weekday; a twenty point shift leads to an additional story every weekday.

This represents an important effect given that (1) these results speak only to the top two stories each night, (2) these are the most influential stories in the broadcasts, and (3) traditional conceptions of journalism would not lead us to expect news firms to alter issue coverage in response to macropartisanship at all. This finding suggests rather strongly that news firms, even those considered to be stalwarts of traditional journalism, are not immune to the winds of public sentiment.

This effect is robust across model specification; models with different combinations of control variables, or no control variables, show similar effects. Not only does macropartisanship affect issue reporting at a one-quarter lag, as hypothesized, but it also has a lasting, albeit diminishing, effect. The model indicates that a one-unit change in macropartisanship significantly affects party-owned issue coverage in the news over three quarters. Mass partisanship appears to have a far-ranging impact on news content.5

Events, conditions, policy, and elite rhetoric also provide some, though not much, explanation for the reporting of party-owned issues in the news. Events do affect news coverage, i.e., the terror attacks of 9/11 were not reported until they actually happened. But studies have generally found a loose connection between the two. For example, reporters recently frenzied over the 2011 Casey Anthony murder trial—Ms.

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