“No One Wants to Change the System as Much as Those Who Are Trapped by the System”

2019 ◽  
pp. 98-143
Author(s):  
Matt Guardino
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Media System ◽  
System P ◽  
Neoliberal Policies ◽  
Rightward Movement

This chapter analyzes media content, elite discourse, and public opinion on welfare reform in the mid-1990s. It demonstrates that major television and newspaper coverage of this historic neoliberal policy change significantly favored neoliberal views and downplayed elite and nongovernmental criticism. The chapter also demonstrates dwindling substance in news coverage of neoliberal policies since the early 1980s. Corporate imperatives in the increasingly consolidated media system and rightward movement in the Democratic Party during this historical period are connected to patterns in welfare news. Survey data suggest that media coverage shaped public opinion to support this paradigmatic neoliberal social policy.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Matt Guardino
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
Institutional Factors ◽  
Unintended Effects ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
News Content ◽  
Media System ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
The Media

This chapter introduces the argument and analyses. It explains the broader political importance of media coverage and public opinion during policy debates. The chapter also discusses how structural and institutional factors in the media system can contribute to often unforeseen or unintended effects on news content, and can ultimately shape the ideological direction of public opinion. It summarizes the book’s data and key claims about corporate news media’s role in rising economic inequality across the neoliberal era, and discusses the broader implications of the book’s argument and evidence for American democracy. The chapter ends by previewing the structure of the book.

The evidence of compelling arguments in agenda building

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyejoon Rim ◽  
Jin Hong Ha ◽  
Spiro Kiousis
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Agenda Building ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
Health Authorities ◽  
Information Subsidies

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the links among health authorities’ public relations efforts, news media coverage, and public perceptions of risk during the H1N1 pandemic outbreak. Design/methodology/approach – This study used a triangulation of research methods by comparing public relations materials, media coverage, and public opinion. The data were collected from a federal government web site, national newspapers, and national polls. Findings – The data revealed a positive relationship between information subsidy attention and media attention to the H1N1 disease as well as the severity attribute. The salience of the severity attribute in information subsidies was linked with increased H1N1 salience in media coverage, extending the testing of the compelling-arguments hypothesis to an agenda-building context. However, there was no association between salience of the severity attribute and public risk perceptions. Research limitations/implications – The study provides evidence for public relations effectiveness. However, the limited influence of the severity frame on the public's risk perception suggests a gap between news coverage and the public's view. Framing that effectively empowers the public to engage in desired behavior should be further studied for the success of a public health campaign. The study is limited to examining the severity attribute. A future study should pay more attention to different issue attributes or other frames. The media sample was limited to newspapers and thus lacks generalizability. Originality/value – The study contributes to public relations scholarship by demonstrating how information subsidies influence media agendas and public opinion in a health communication context. The public health authorities’ role in influencing media agenda should be stressed.

scholarly journals Undifferentiated optimism and scandalized accidents: the media coverage of autonomous driving in Germany

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (04) ◽  
pp. A02
Author(s):  
Lena Jelinski ◽  
Katrin Etzrodt ◽  
Sven Engesser
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Social Acceptance ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Autonomous Vehicle ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Autonomous Driving ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Mass Media

When, to what extent and under what conditions autonomous driving will become common practice depends not only on the level of technical development but also on social acceptance. Therefore, the rapid development of autonomous driving systems raises the question of how the public perceives this technology. As the mass media are regarded as the main source of information for the lay audience, the news coverage is assumed to affect public opinion. The mass media are also frequently criticized for their inaccurate and biased news coverage. Against this backdrop, we conducted a content analysis of the news coverage of autonomous driving in five leading German newspapers. Findings show that media reporting on autonomous driving is not very detailed. They also indicate a slight positive bias in the balance of arguments and tonality. However, as soon as an accident involving an autonomous vehicle occurs, the frequency of reporting, as well as the extent of negativity and detail increase. We conclude that well-informed public opinion requires more differentiated reporting — irrespective of accidents.

scholarly journals Close to Beijing: Geographic Biases in People’s Daily

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 59-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morley J. Weston ◽  
Adrian Rauchfleisch
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Spatial Analysis ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Topic Modeling ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Foreign Countries ◽  
People’S Daily ◽  
Geographic Diversity ◽  
People's Daily ◽  
Automated Methods

Inequities in China are reflected within state-run media coverage due to its specific role “guiding public opinion,” and with our study we contribute to the geographic turn in the Chinese context with regard to media and journalism. As a subject of a spatial study, China is unique due to several factors: geographic diversity, authoritarian control, and centralized media. By analyzing text from 53,000 articles published in <em>People’s Daily</em> (rénmín rìbào, 人民日報) from January 2016 to August 2020, we examine how the amount of news coverage varies by region within China, how topics and sentiments manifest in different places, and how coverage varies with regard to foreign countries. Automated methods were used to detect place names from the articles and geoparse them to specific locations, combining spatial analysis, topic modeling and sentiment analysis to identify geographic biases in news coverage in an authoritarian context. We found remarkably uniform and positive coverage domestically, but substantial differences towards coverage of different foreign countries.

“Gipper Sweeps Congress”

2019 ◽  
pp. 50-97
Author(s):  
Matt Guardino
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Newspaper Coverage ◽  
Economic Plan ◽  
Media System ◽  
Regressive Tax ◽  
The Media

This chapter analyzes media content, elite discourse, and public opinion surrounding Ronald Reagan’s 1981 economic plan. It demonstrates that major television and newspaper coverage of this early neoliberal policy significantly favored free-market perspectives that justified economic inequality. It also shows that media outlets marginalized elite and nongovernmental criticism of the Reagan plan. Commercial tendencies of the media system in that historical context are connected to these patterns in the news. Survey data suggest that such media coverage shaped public opinion to support this influential model of regressive tax policy.

scholarly journals A Public Transformed? Welfare Reform as Policy Feedback

2007 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOE SOSS ◽  
SANFORD F. SCHRAM
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Policy Feedback ◽  
Feedback Effects ◽  
New Policies ◽  
Mass Opinion ◽  
Quantitative Case Study ◽  
Shed Light

This article analyzes the strategic use of public policy as a tool for reshaping public opinion. In the 1990s, “progressive revisionists” argued that, by reforming welfare, liberals could free the Democratic Party of a significant electoral liability, reduce the race-coding of poverty politics, and produce a public more willing to invest in anti-poverty efforts. Connecting this argument to recent scholarship on policy feedback, we pursue a quantitative case study of the potential for new policies to move public opinion. Our analysis reveals that welfare reform in the 1990s produced few changes in mass opinion. To explain this result, we propose a general framework for the analysis of mass feedback effects. After locating welfare as a “distant-visible” case in this framework, we advance four general propositions that shed light on our case-specific findings as well as the general conditions under which mass feedback effects should be viewed as more or less likely.

Fight Clubs: Media Coverage of Party (Dis)unity and Citizens’ Selective Exposure to It

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
John V. Kane
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Behavioral Change ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
News Stories

News media play a key role in communicating information about political parties to the American public. However, our understanding of how media depict relations between elites and the broader party coalitions remains limited. Moreover, while research suggests that forced exposure to such information can affect political attitudes, it remains unclear whether citizens are willing to selectively expose themselves to such communications. To address these two interrelated questions, this study first employs a content analysis to explore patterns in news coverage of inter- and intra-party relations throughout the Obama presidency. Next, two survey experiments investigate the degree to which such relations affect citizens’ self-exposure to such information. Taken together, the analyses uncover two important asymmetries. First, throughout Obama’s presidency, mass media depicted a Republican coalition virtually always against the president, yet substantial discord within the Democratic Party. Second, though partisans show no propensity to consume news depicting inparty unity (vs. disunity), both Republicans and Democrats exhibit a strong tendency to consume news stories depicting disunity in the outparty. Insofar as partisans’ self-exposure to such information is a necessary precondition for attitudinal and behavioral change, these findings have notable implications for how mass media stand to shape partisanship in the United States.

The Capture of the Democratic Party and the Clinton Victory

2018 ◽  
pp. 96-122
Author(s):  
Jeremiah J. Garretson
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Gay Rights ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Bill Clinton ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
Lesbian And Gay Rights ◽  
Act Up ◽  
The Military

This chapter examines how the LGBTQ movement effectively moved the Democratic Party from opposition to LGBTQ rights to ardent supporters. Immediately after the development of LGBTQ urban enclaves discussed in the last chapter, liberal candidates for office began to support gay rights in order to secure votes and activist support for their campaigns. The liberal and urban wings of the party slowly embraced gay rights, but little change occurred among suburban and rural Democratic office holders until ACT-UP hit its peak years and broad media coverage of LGBTQ issues began in the early 1990s. One rural Democrat to support lesbian and gay rights in exchange for votes and campaign resources was Bill Clinton. Clinton’s 1992 campaign and the 1993 gay-in-the-military debate caused news coverage of LGBTQ issues to peak. Although most academics consider this to be when the Democratic party became supportive of gay rights, data analysis in this chapter shows that the party did not become uniformly supportive until after the mass public shifted more liberal on lesbian and gay rights in the later half of the 1990s.

Framing Inequality

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Guardino
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Media Policy ◽  
News Content ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
Policy Attitudes ◽  
Political Economic

This book examines how major news media have influenced the politics of economic inequality by shaping U.S. public opinion toward key policies since the early 1980s. The book describes the substance and ideological texture of news coverage during economic and social welfare policy debates across the neoliberal era. It also compares this news content to patterns of official and nongovernmental discourse. The book argues that the media’s structural position as a corporately organized and commercially driven institution helps to explain politically significant discrepancies between news coverage and broader policy discussions. The book also shows how framing patterns in the news produced through these political-economic processes may influence concrete policy attitudes. Its experimental analysis demonstrates that news coverage can shape public opinion to favor neoliberal policies, including among key segments of the American public that otherwise would not express support. The book contends that structural and institutional shifts which mark the rise of neoliberalism as a governing framework for media policy and practices have reinforced patterns of superficial and narrow news content during policy debates. Ultimately, the book argues that media coverage has fostered political climates conducive to neoliberal domestic policies at important historical moments. It suggests that changing media technologies have done little to arrest these trends in corporate news media, and that significant shifts in public policy coverage would require changes in media policy.

News Media, Candidates and Issues, and Public Opinion in the 1996 Presidential Campaign

1997 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 718-737 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Domke ◽  
David P. Fan ◽  
Michael Fibison ◽  
Dhavan V. Shah ◽  
Steven S. Smith ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
News Media ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Bill Clinton ◽  
Presidential Campaign ◽  
Principal Candidates ◽  
Negative News ◽  
Bob Dole

There are two primary goals with this research. First, we examine whether news media were biased in coverage of the candidates or issues during the 1996 U.S. presidential campaign, as Republican Party candidate Bob Dole and others claimed. Second, we use an ideodynamic model of media effects to examine whether the quantity of positive and negative news coverage of the candidates was related to the public's preference of either Bill Clinton or Dole. The model posits that a candidate's level of support at any time is a function of the level of previous support (as measured in recent polls) plus changes in voters' preferences due to media coverage in the interim. This model allows exploration of whether news media coverage, alone, could predict the public's presidential preference in 1996. Using a computer content analysis program, 12,215 randomly sampled newspaper stories and television transcripts were examined from forty-three major media outlets from 10 March to 6 November 1996. Findings reveal both remarkably balanced media coverage of the two principal candidates, Clinton and Dole, and a powerful relationship between media coverage and public opinion.

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