Making the News

Making the News PDF Author: Amber E. Boydstun
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022606560X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Media attention can play a profound role in whether or not officials act on a policy issue, but how policy issues make the news in the first place has remained a puzzle. Why do some issues go viral and then just as quickly fall off the radar? How is it that the media can sustain public interest for months in a complex story like negotiations over Obamacare while ignoring other important issues in favor of stories on “balloon boy?” With Making the News, Amber Boydstun offers an eye-opening look at the explosive patterns of media attention that determine which issues are brought before the public. At the heart of her argument is the observation that the media have two modes: an “alarm mode” for breaking stories and a “patrol mode” for covering them in greater depth. While institutional incentives often initiate alarm mode around a story, they also propel news outlets into the watchdog-like patrol mode around its policy implications until the next big news item breaks. What results from this pattern of fixation followed by rapid change is skewed coverage of policy issues, with a few receiving the majority of media attention while others receive none at all. Boydstun documents this systemic explosiveness and skew through analysis of media coverage across policy issues, including in-depth looks at the waxing and waning of coverage around two issues: capital punishment and the “war on terror.” Making the News shows how the seemingly unpredictable day-to-day decisions of the newsroom produce distinct patterns of operation with implications—good and bad—for national politics.

Making the News

Making the News PDF Author: Amber E. Boydstun
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022606560X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book Here

Book Description
Media attention can play a profound role in whether or not officials act on a policy issue, but how policy issues make the news in the first place has remained a puzzle. Why do some issues go viral and then just as quickly fall off the radar? How is it that the media can sustain public interest for months in a complex story like negotiations over Obamacare while ignoring other important issues in favor of stories on “balloon boy?” With Making the News, Amber Boydstun offers an eye-opening look at the explosive patterns of media attention that determine which issues are brought before the public. At the heart of her argument is the observation that the media have two modes: an “alarm mode” for breaking stories and a “patrol mode” for covering them in greater depth. While institutional incentives often initiate alarm mode around a story, they also propel news outlets into the watchdog-like patrol mode around its policy implications until the next big news item breaks. What results from this pattern of fixation followed by rapid change is skewed coverage of policy issues, with a few receiving the majority of media attention while others receive none at all. Boydstun documents this systemic explosiveness and skew through analysis of media coverage across policy issues, including in-depth looks at the waxing and waning of coverage around two issues: capital punishment and the “war on terror.” Making the News shows how the seemingly unpredictable day-to-day decisions of the newsroom produce distinct patterns of operation with implications—good and bad—for national politics.

Apprehending Politics

Apprehending Politics PDF Author: Marco Calavita
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791462805
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Using penetrating, in-depth interviews, examines the individual political development of young adults in post-1960s America, and the roles that news media play in that development.

News

News PDF Author: W. Lance Bennett
Publisher: Longman Publishing Group
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description


Fox News and American Politics

Fox News and American Politics PDF Author: Dan Cassino
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317479998
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
In recent years, scholars have argued that the ability of people to choose which channel they want to watch means that television news is just preaching to the choir, and doesn’t change any minds. However, this book shows that the media still has an enormous direct impact on American society and politics. While past research has emphasized the indirect effects of media content on attitudes – through priming or framing, for instance – Dan Cassino argues that past data on both the public opinion and the media side wasn’t detailed enough to uncover it. Using a combination of original national surveys, large scale content analysis of news coverage along with data sets as disparate as FBI gun background checks and campaign contribution records, Cassino discusses why it’s important to treat different media sources separately, estimating levels of ideological bias for television media sources as well as the differences in the topics that the various media sources cover. Taking this into account proves that exposure to some media sources can serve to actually make Americans less knowledgeable about current affairs, and more likely to buy into conspiracy theories. Even in an era of declining viewership, the media – especially Fox News – are shaping our society and our politics. This book documents how this is happening, and shows the consequences for Americans. The quality of journalism is more than an academic question: when coverage focuses on questionable topics, or political bias, there are consequences.

Niche News

Niche News PDF Author: Natalie Jomini Stroud
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0199755507
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Fox News, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Rush Limbaugh Show, National Public Radio - with so many options, where do people turn for news? This book examines the extent to which our political leanings guide our news selections and whether likeminded news use is democratically consequential.

The Politics of News

The Politics of News PDF Author: Doris A. Graber
Publisher: CQ Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Books on journalists typically focus on the dynamics of the newsmaking process. The Politics of News: The News of Politics extends this examination to explore the struggle between journalists, political actors, and the public for control of the news in democratic countries. The book shows how the news media function as an intermediary between governments and citizens, as well as between political actors (such as parties and interest groups) and the public. Essays present a diversity of views and are written by a distinguished group of authors that includes such luminaries as Jim Lehrer, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Robert Picard, and Andrew Kohut. The Politics of News is policy-oriented. By diagnosing problems faced by those whose influence affects newsmaking in both existing and emerging democracies, authors generate ideas about possible reforms. Several chapters offer comparative analysis that offer students insight into the impact of cultural factors on newsmaking. Accessible yet sophisticated, this anticipated second edition covers significant issues surrounding political news, ranging from the limits of press freedom during times of war and the implications of media concentration for democratic participation, to the ingenious ways that governments and interest groups draw attention to their concerns.

News That Matters

News That Matters PDF Author: Shanto Iyengar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226388603
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Almost twenty-five years ago, Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder first documented a series of sophisticated and innovative experiments that unobtrusively altered the order and emphasis of news stories in selected television broadcasts. Their resulting book News That Matters, now hailed as a classic by scholars of political science and public opinion alike, is here updated for the twenty-first century, with a new preface and epilogue by the authors. Backed by careful analysis of public opinion surveys, the authors show how, despite changing American politics, those issues that receive extended coverage in the national news become more important to viewers, while those that are ignored lose credibility. Moreover, those issues that are prominent in the news stream continue to loom more heavily as criteria for evaluating the president and for choosing between political candidates. “News That Matters does matter, because it demonstrates conclusively that television newscasts powerfully affect opinion. . . . All that follows, whether it supports, modifies, or challenges their conclusions, will have to begin here.”—The Public Interest

Common Knowledge

Common Knowledge PDF Author: W. Russell Neuman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226574400
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Photo opportunities, ten-second sound bites, talking heads and celebrity anchors: so the world is explained daily to millions of Americans. The result, according to the experts, is an ignorant public, helpless targets of a one-way flow of carefully filtered and orchestrated communication. Common Knowledge shatters this pervasive myth. Reporting on a ground-breaking study, the authors reveal that our shared knowledge and evolving political beliefs are determined largely by how we actively reinterpret the images, fragments, and signals we find in the mass media. For their study, the authors analyzed coverage of 150 television and newspaper stories on five prominent issues—drugs, AIDS, South African apartheid, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the stock market crash of October 1987. They tested audience responses of more than 1,600 people, and conducted in-depth interviews with a select sample. What emerges is a surprisingly complex picture of people actively and critically interpreting the news, making sense of even the most abstract issues in terms of their own lives, and finding political meaning in a sophisticated interplay of message, medium, and firsthand experience. At every turn, Common Knowledge refutes conventional wisdom. It shows that television is far more effective at raising the saliency of issues and promoting learning than is generally assumed; it also undermines the assumed causal connection between newspaper reading and higher levels of political knowledge. Finally, this book gives a deeply responsible and thoroughly fascinating account of how the news is conveyed to us, and how we in turn convey it to others, making meaning of at once so much and so little. For anyone who makes the news—or tries to make anything of it—Common Knowledge promises uncommon wisdom.

Governing with the News

Governing with the News PDF Author: Timothy E. Cook
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226115009
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
From the opening decades of the republic when political parties sponsored newspapers to current governmental practices that actively subsidize the collection and dissemination of the news, the press and the government have been far from independent. Unlike those earlier days, however, the news is no longer produced by a diverse range of individual outlets but is instead the result of a collective institution that exercises collective power. In explaining how the news media of today operate as an intermediary political institution, akin to the party system and interest group system, Cook demonstrates how the differing media strategies used by governmental agencies and branches respond to the constitutional and structural weaknesses inherent in a separation-of-powers system. Cook examines the news media's capacity to perform the political tasks that they have inherited and points the way to a debate on policy solutions in order to hold the news media accountable without treading upon the freedom of the press.

When the Press Fails

When the Press Fails PDF Author: W. Lance Bennett
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226042863
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
A sobering look at the intimate relationship between political power and the news media, When the Press Fails argues the dependence of reporters on official sources disastrously thwarts coverage of dissenting voices from outside the Beltway. The result is both an indictment of official spin and an urgent call to action that questions why the mainstream press failed to challenge the Bush administration’s arguments for an invasion of Iraq or to illuminate administration policies underlying the Abu Ghraib controversy. Drawing on revealing interviews with Washington insiders and analysis of content from major news outlets, the authors illustrate the media’s unilateral surrender to White House spin whenever oppositional voices elsewhere in government fall silent. Contrasting these grave failures with the refreshingly critical reporting on Hurricane Katrina—a rare event that caught officials off guard, enabling journalists to enter a no-spin zone—When the Press Fails concludes by proposing new practices to reduce reporters’ dependence on power. “The hand-in-glove relationship of the U.S. media with the White House is mercilessly exposed in this determined and disheartening study that repeatedly reveals how the press has toed the official line at those moments when its independence was most needed.”—George Pendle, Financial Times “Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston are indisputably right about the news media’s dereliction in covering the administration’s campaign to take the nation to war against Iraq.”—Don Wycliff, Chicago Tribune “[This] analysis of the weaknesses of Washington journalism deserves close attention.”—Russell Baker, New York Review of Books