Political Role of Mass Media

1
Political Role of Mass Media

• Historical perspective
• Normative perspective
• Sociological/functional perspective
• Media effects
• Limited effects model
• Cognitive effects
• Persuasive effects

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Early history of journalism

• Early newspapers pamphlets
• Journalism as a profession emerged in 1830s
• No correspondents, foreign news provided by
  diplomats
• Wars and journalism
• Officers reports from battlefield one of the
  early forms of reporting
• Crimean War, 1854-1856
• William Howard Russell, Times correspondent
  during the Crimean war
• Invention of censorship
• Effects on public opinion and political fall-out
  Earl of Aberdeen resigned as PM because of
  handling of war
• US Civil War, 1861-65
• Early use of embedding, propaganda politicians
  and military (reluctantly) realizing power and
  potential of mass media in sustaining public
  morale
• Invention of telegraph responsible for structure
  of news inverted pyramid

3
Professional journalism

• US newspaper market in late 19th century becoming
  increasingly
• Commercialized (Yellow press)
• Concentrated (decline from an average of 10
  dailies in major cities to 2 or 3)
• Emergence of journalism schools between 1900 and
  1920
• Codes of ethics for journalists
• Professional, unbiased journalism apparently
  renders political orientations of owners
  irrelevant for editorial content
• Emphasis on professional (self-) regulation
  instead of government regulation
• In-built, inherent biases of professional
  journalism
• Reliance on official sources
• Avoidance of contextualization
• Favouring exposure of governmental rather than
  corporate wrongdoing

4
The partisan press

• Journalism as a profession emerging in
  1830s/1840s
• During 2nd half of 19th century, most newspapers
  in European countries owned by political parties
• Partisanship also emerging in US, through
  political orientation of owners, or direct party
  ownership
• E.g. 2 million subscribers to major Socialist
  newspapers in US before WWI
• During 20th century, parties retreating from
  media ownership, but continuing partisan
  affiliations
• Parallel development electoral dealignment and
  partisan dealignment of newspaper market
• Tendency to move from anonymous editorials to
  personalized commentary
• Shifts in party allegiance between elections
  (only occurring since 1990s)
• Tendency towards ambivalent party endorsements
• Trend towards overall negativity in reporting,
  replacing polarized partisanship

5
Freedom of the press

• Corollary to freedom of speech, or freedom of
  opinion and expression
• The media remain vulnerable, even in many of
  the worlds nominally democratic countries. These
  governments use of a wide variety of methods to
  intimidate the press continues to hinder the
  ability of journalists to provide independent
  scrutiny and commentary, which is critically
  important if governments are to remain
  accountable. (Freedom House 2003)
• US First Amendment combines freedom of opinion
  with freedom of the press
• In early period of US, state subsidized the
  press, for example, through below-cost postal
  delivery
• If I had to choose between government without
  newspapers and newspapers without government, I
  wouldn't hesitate to choose the latter. (Thomas
  Jefferson)
• The corporate right to freedom of the press has
  superseded the individual right to freedom of
  opinion
• US media refer to freedom of the press when
  demanding deregulation

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Media as social institution

• The news function surveillance of the
  environment
• News and news programmes could almost be called
  random reactions to random events. Again and
  again, the main reason why they turn out as they
  do is accident accident of a kind which recurs
  so haphazardly as to defeat statistical
  examination. (Reporter, quoted in a sociological
  study of newsmaking in 1973)
• Gatekeeping
• News selection
• Journalistic values impartiality, accuracy,
  fairness
• News values negativity, brevity, immediacy,
  scale, personalities, elites, etc.
• P Lazarsfeld, R Merton (1948) Mass
  communication, popular taste, and organized
  social action
• Conformity function
• Status-conferral function
• Narcotizing dysfunction

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Media effects

• Minimal effects model
• Cognitive effects
• Agenda-setting
• Framing
• Priming
• Persuasive/directional effects
• Spiral of Silence
• Media malaise
• Endorsement effects

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Limited effects model

• Early empirical (survey) research into campaign
  and media effects (e.g. Berelson, Lazarsfeld
  McPhee, The Peoples Choice, 1954)
• Finding remarkably weak informational and
  persuasive effects
• Explanation
• Avoidance of cognitive dissonance
• Selective exposure
• Selective perception
• Selective retention
• Limited effects or fugitive effects?

9
Agenda-setting

• Shift in focus
• From persuasive (directional) effects
• To cognitive effects
• Press may not be successful telling people
  what to think, but it is stunningly successful in
  telling its readers what to think about. (Cohen,
  1963)
• Two components of public opinion
• Attitude about an issue (directional)
• Importance of an issue (saliency)
• Stable attitudes
• ? small media impact?
• Unstable salience
• ? responding to media attention to an issue
• Groundbreaking publications
• McCombs Shaw (1972) The Agenda-Setting
  Function of the Mass Media
• Funkhouser (1972) The Issues of the Sixties An
  Exploratory Study in the Dynamics of Public
  Opinion

10
Framing

• Framing sometimes defined as second-level
  agenda-setting (Semetko, de Vreese)
• First level transmission of object salience
• Second level transmission of attribute salience
• Framing is indirect persuasion
• Direct persuasion concerns the altering of belief
  contents (convincing through argument that e.g. a
  policy choice will produce a positive instead of
  a negative outcome)
• Framing concerns the altering of importance that
  individuals attach to particular beliefs
  (convincing to support a certain policy by
  associating the policy measure with a particular
  value)

11
Priming

• Priming, a close relative to framing,
  reintroduces the notion of persuasive media
  effects (Iyengar and Kinder Krosnick)
• Concerned with the consequences of setting the
  public agenda
• Placing issues or values high on the public
  agenda makes these salient, i.e. important,
  problematic, easily retrievable
• Salient issues serve as criteria for evaluating
  leaders, performances, political processes
• It is difficult to change peoples preferences
  it is easier to affect the priorities or weights
  they give to subpreferences bearing on the
  central decision. A voter may assess the
  political situation from several standpoints
  from one, the Democrats appear better to him and,
  from another, the Republicans do. His decision is
  likely to follow the aspect given greater weight
  by him with no change in the substance of his
  own opinions. Thus the voters feeling about what
  is critical in the political situation enables
  him to find a way out of a potential conflict
  over the issues and hence facilitates political
  integration within the individual.
• (Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee, The Peoples
  Choice, 1954)

12
Spiral of silence

• Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann
• Public, opinion, sanction and punishment
• to the individual, not isolating himself is more
  important than his own judgment
• Indidividual observes environment to assess
  distribution of opinions
• The stronger he finds his opinion present and
  reinforced by the environment, the more confident
  and outspoken he will be
• Public opinion understood as amalgam that compels
  consent
• Role of media
• It is not the actual but the apparent, publicly
  visible strength of opinions that the individual
  assesses
• Spiral of silence a dynamic model of public
  opinion formation
• Prevalence of opinions in the media key variable
  in explaining the likelihood that an individual
  will speak his mind, be silent, or change his
  mind

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Video/media malaise

• Declining trust in institutions
• Largely uncorrelated to changing satisfaction
  with current government
• Video malaise hypothesis (Michael J. Robinson)
• Negative (critical) reporting about government,
  public officials
• Scandalisation, visualisation, conflictual
  framing of politics by commercial TV
• Resulting in increased public cynicism about
  politics

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Changing attitudes towards political parties (UK
General election 2005)
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Video/media malaise

• Declining trust in institutions
• Largely uncorrelated to changing satisfaction
  with current government
• Video malaise hypothesis (Michael J. Robinson)
• Negative (critical) reporting about government,
  public officials
• Scandalisation, visualisation, conflictual
  framing of politics by commercial TV
• Resulting in increased public cynicism about
  politics
• Critique of the theory
• Cynicism is not correlated with exposure
• Indeed trust in parties increases during election
  campaigns
• Declining trust in political institutions
  coincides with declining trust in media
• Declining social capital?

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Direct media persuasion

• Media exposure studies
• finding little effect on opinion formation
  (Lazarsfeld et al. 1944Berelson et al. 1954)
• Bartels (1993) suggest misspecifications in
  studies leading to underestimating effects
• Pure exposure effects more relevant in US context
  because of lacking media diversity
• Newspaper endorsement studies
• Gosnell (1937)
• Anti-New Deal, anti-Democrat sentiment in Chicago
  newspapers minimizes Roosevelt gains in 1936
  election
• Problem for study in US little variation with
  most papers post-New Deal supporting Republicans
  (Erikson 1976)
• Problem in UK uncertainty about direction of
  causality since readers choose papers because of
  political stance
• Repeated findings of moderate effects (Curtice
  and Semetko 1994, Curtice 1997, Newton and Brynin
  2001, Ladd and Lenz 2006)
• Effects of political commentary
• Strong effects of contents of newspaper
  endorsements in US (Dalton et al. 1996)
• Judgments about a party not only affect public
  attitudes towards that party but also, inversely,
  attitudes towards main competitor (Brandenburg
  and van Egmond 2008)