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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226065601 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 260 |
| Sales rank: | 949,983 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Making the News
Politics, the Media, and Agenda Setting
By AMBER E. BOYDSTUN
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-06557-1
CHAPTER 1
Patterns in the News and Why They Matter
The media matters—to politics, to citizens, to democracy. Thus, how media attention gets distributed across issues and how it changes over time matters, too. Yet, despite its importance, we know relatively little about the forces that drive media attention and the patterns that result. At the core of this book is a deceptively simple yet powerful observation about the news: it does not ebb and flow; rather, it fixates and explodes. In turn, the explosive nature of media dynamics exacerbates the degree of skew in news coverage across policy issues, such that a few issues receive the lion's share of coverage while most issues go unnoticed. These patterns—explosiveness and skew—are endemic to the media as an institution, and they have far-reaching implications for politics and society.
Readers may call to mind ready examples of media explosions: perhaps the BP oil spill or the Chilean miners' rescue in 2010, the Anthony Weiner "sexting" scandal of 2011, or the school shooting that killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. In some cases, media explosions seem "proportional" to events, such as the media explosions following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Enron scandal in 2001. In other cases, media explosions seem to center on events that are similar to previous incidents that received very little, if any, media attention; such media explosions include the immigration dispute surrounding Elian Gonzalez in 2000, Elizabeth Smart's kidnapping in 2002, the Terri Schiavo case of 2005, and Trayvon Martin's shooting in 2012. In still other cases, a media explosion erupts when news coverage shines light on a string of events that have gone unattended for years, such as repeated child sexual abuses committed by Catholic priests, Boy Scout leaders, or Jerry Sandusky. In all these cases, when a media explosion occupies the news there is a dearth of attention paid to other important issues: genocide, sexual trafficking, homelessness, and Alzheimer's are just a few. The phenomena of media explosions point to a media system that changes in fits and starts over time and, as a result, produces skewed degrees of attention to events and their related policy problems. Understanding the explosive and skewed nature of the news matters not only for understanding the news industry, but for understanding how media signals shape citizen and policymaker awareness of and response to policy issues.
The Case of Terri Schiavo
Let us investigate one media explosion in more detail. Theresa "Terri" Schiavo died from dehydration on March 31, 2005, days after a Florida Circuit Court judge ordered the removal of the feeding tube that had been keeping her alive for fifteen years. Those fifteen years were long ones, fraught with conflict between her husband and her parents about the appropriate nature and extent of her medical care. Their battle hinged, in large part, on the fact that Schiavo did not have a living will. United States federal legislation, state legislation (in fifty states plus the District of Columbia), and key judicial rulings all support a citizen's legal right to execute a binding living will, or advanced health care directive. In essence, living wills help guide family members and doctors charged with weighing the balance between a person's life and the quality of that life.
While the presence or absence of living wills can make enormous differences in the cases of people who are suddenly incapacitated, such as Terri Schiavo, living will policy affects a much larger portion of the American population, specifically through the all-too-frequent cases of families needing to make end-of-life decisions for loved ones suffering from dementia. In short, for people who want all possible life-sustaining measures employed, for those who want none employed, and for everyone in between, living will policy offers citizens powerful agency in determining their own medical treatments. And on a strictly financial note, the policy option of living wills can also save families—and taxpayers—a lot of money when those citizens who would prefer not to have extended or invasive life-sustaining measures employed use living wills to dictate their wishes ahead of time. Susan Jacoby of the New York Times reports that an estimated one-third of the U.S. Medicare budget is spent supporting people in the last year of life, and a third of that amount is spent on care in the final month (2012).
Yet despite the many potential benefits of existing living will policy, historically most Americans have not made use of this policy—or have even been aware of it. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 1990, only 41% of Americans had heard of living wills, and only 12% reported having them. By 2005, however, much had changed. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in November 2005 found that 95% of Americans had heard of living wills, and 29% reported having them.
Part of the dramatic increase in awareness and application of living will policy between 1990 and 2005 can be attributed to the Patient Self-Determination Act, passed by Congress in 1990, which requires most hospitals and long-term care facilities to provide patients with information on living wills. Yet, by most accounts, the effect of this Act of Congress paled in comparison to the impact of the single case of Terri Schiavo, which raised Americans' awareness of end-of-life medical and living will options to unprecedented levels.
One measure of the political impact of the Schiavo case was the subsequent increase in public demand for living wills. For instance, a major nonprofit group, Aging with Dignity, distributed an average of 1 million living will documents annually in the years prior to 2005. In 2005, however, the year Terri Schiavo died, this number doubled to 2 million; by 2006 the surge in requests had barely declined. Similarly, the number of visits to the U.S. Living Will Registry website, which averaged about 500 per day before the Schiavo case, rose fivefold to 2,500 per day in the year following Schiavo's death—and an astounding 50,000 visits per day during the center of the Schiavo controversy in March 2005. Furthermore, 40,000 people applied the policy option by registering living will documents with this online registry in 2006, up fourfold from 10,000 in 2005 (Stacy 2006).
These aggregate numbers reflect the behaviors of individuals across the country as citizens learned of Terri Schiavo and began to consider living will policy in their own lives. For example, in the month following Schiavo's death, researchers of an ongoing hospital study found that 92% of participants (N = 117) had heard of Schiavo. Of those who had heard of her, 61% reported that the Schiavo case specifically prompted them to clarify their own goals of long-term care, and 66% reported talking to their friends and/or families about what they would want if they were in Schiavo's position (Sudore et al. 2008).
Schiavo's case was unfortunate, but far from unique. In the United States, an estimated 15,000 people live in persistent vegetative states, and an unmeasured proportion of these cases involve family disputes about whether or not to remove the patients' feeding tubes (Hirsch 2005). Out of all the cases of heart-wrenching family disputes about whether or not to remove the feeding tube of a loved one, Terri Schiavo's case alone prompted a dramatic shift in citizens' understanding and application of existing living will policy. Why? What did the Schiavo case have that no other similar case—or the related 1990 Act of Congress—shared?
The answer is perplexingly simple: news coverage. The Terri Schiavo case got a lot of news coverage and, what's more, a lot of news coverage of a particular kind: a sudden surge in coverage about the Schiavo case itself combined with in-depth follow-up coverage examining the related policy issues at stake. In other words, Terri Schiavo was at the center of a sustained media explosion that occurred in the month leading up to her death. In that month alone (March 2005), the New York Times ran sixteen front-page stories about the case (up from zero front-page stories in February). That's sixteen stories in a month—an average of just over one every other day—on the front page of the New York Times. The Times front page is prime real estate indeed, and in March 2005 the Schiavo case captured nearly 8% of its agenda space. The Times was not unusual. A search of thirteen major television and newspaper outlets reveals that they produced a total of 1,135 news stories on Schiavo in March 2005, up from a total of 62 in February.
Why so much coverage, so suddenly, and lasting for nearly four weeks (an eternity in the news business)? Certainly, the Schiavo case was a compelling one, with many sensational attributes that lent it strong news value. Still, why so much coverage of this single case, when so many other similar cases had previously gone unnoticed? And why so much extended coverage in March 2005, when the Schiavo case was, in fact, not new news? Media outlets had picked up on the Schiavo case as a newsworthy storyline a year and a half before Schiavo's death, when a Florida court ordered the removal of her feeding tube (not for the first time) in October 2003. The Florida legislature responded by passing "Terri's Law," which authorized Governor Jeb Bush to reverse the court-ordered decision; Schiavo's tube was reinserted (Goodnough 2003). During this earlier period of public discussion, the U.S. media gave limited coverage to the case and surrounding events, with the aforementioned thirteen news outlets producing 188 stories in October 2003, including three front-page New York Times stories. By March 2005 little had changed in the underlying facts and arguments of the case. Multiple battles and court rulings had passed, including a judicial turning point in the case: the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal in January 2005 to hear a challenge to the Florida State Supreme Court's ruling striking down Terri's Law (Newman 2005). But as for the basic evidence and arguments, the case was hardly different in 2005 than it had been in 2003.
Yet, in March 2005, news coverage of the Schiavo case exploded, and with it public awareness and application of living will policy. The media explosion surrounding the Schiavo case lasted about a month. Its effects on public awareness and policy application appear to have lasted much longer.
The Story of This Book in a Nutshell
This book offers a refined way of thinking about news coverage, the institutional forces that shape it, and the media explosions that result. Over the course of the book, I present a lot of data and consider many examples, but the main story of the book is this: due to the strong role that momentum plays in the news-generation process, the media agenda is hard-wired to be highly skewed across policy issues and highly explosive in how it changes over time. These systemic patterns in the news have wide-ranging implications for understanding the limited media access that most policy problems have, as well as the manner in which citizens and policymakers receive and react to political cues in the news.
The book is premised on the significance of the media as a political institution. Media attention has been shown, empirically and repeatedly, to influence both citizen attitudes and government responses toward policy issues. But how do policy issues make the news in the first place? Because the media is a central body in the political system, understanding the forces that drive media attention is a goal central to political science as well as communication studies.
Within and across the fields of political science and communications, scholars have offered different approaches to understanding the news-generation process—that is, the process through which stories are selected and developed into the news. This book offers a unifying model of the news-generation process within three overlapping frameworks:
1. The media employs an organizational process in which journalists and news outlets assemble the news from each day's events based on news values as well as several other institutional incentives, such as incentives to attend to elite opinions and consumer demands.
2. The media is a marketplace, where competition creates additional incentives that shape the operations of news outlets, such as incentives to mimic other outlets' coverage and to distribute scarce resources efficiently (e.g., through the beat system of reporting).
3. Political agendas, including the media agenda, are disproportionate information-processing systems, meaning that agendas do not process real-world events in real time or in proportion to the "size" of those events; instead, agendas lurch from one hot event (and its related policy issue) to the next at the exclusion of many other important issues.
Overarching these three approaches, I stress the importance of dynamics. Momentum is key in driving the news-generation process and the patterns of skew and explosiveness that result.
At the normative root of the three interwoven approaches are questions regarding the role the media plays in the political system: specifically, the idealized notion of a watchdog press. As scholars have long noted, the news media does not—indeed, cannot—operate as an ideal watchdog, constantly surveying the landscape for potential problems. Rather, the media is a political institution and, as such, is incapable of perfect surveillance. Past studies suggest that, rather than operating as a watchdog "patrol" system, the media operates instead as an "alarm" system, attending only to those events/issues that trigger the social or political equivalent of an alarm (usually by nature of the size and type of event at hand). Zaller (2003) explains that, in its best form, this alarm model would mean that journalists and news outlets should not even try to monitor politics and society for all important information to convey to the public. Not only is doing so infeasible, he says, but also the public does not require such detailed information on so many issues. Instead, "as with a real burglar alarm, the idea is to call attention to matters requiring urgent attention, and to do so in excited and noisy tones" (122). Thus, the reigning alarm model of news generation implies that the media's institutional incentives simply do not—perhaps should not—support patrol-style surveillance journalism. This book, however, challenges the alarm model as a complete account of the news-generation process.
Of additional normative importance, past work suggests that an alarm system of news generation produces a strong prevalence of "soft" news (more sensational and entertainment-driven; see Patterson 2000), as opposed to "hard" news (more substantive). Zaller suggests that the increased pace of alarm-based coverage in the modern media marketplace is largely responsible for the increased prevalence of soft news that scholars have observed, noting potential benefits of this result, such as enhanced citizen engagement with political issues via soft news as a more engaging vehicle (2003; see also Baum 2002, 2003; Baum and Groeling 2008; for conflicting evidence see Prior 2003). Bennett confirms that the alarm model is a largely accurate depiction of the current media system, but he also identifies several normative problems that the alarm model raises. Bennett notes that despite the strong incentives to operate strictly in alarm mode, many journalists and news outlets continue to exhibit some adherence to the "full news" standard of good journalism, producing a healthy amount of hard news as a result (2003). In this book, I touch only theoretically and briefly on the important distinction between hard and soft news. Nevertheless, the soft-news implications of the model presented in this book are important to bear in mind throughout.
Building on this past research, I argue that while news outlets certainly do not operate strictly as patrol watchdogs, neither do they operate strictly under an alarm system of news generation. Rather, we can best understand the news-generation process using a hybrid of these two models, what I call the alarm/patrol hybrid model. This model explains how and why news outlets lurch attention (selectively) to alarms that are sounded in key policy or geographic "neighborhoods," namely by dispatching journalists and other resources to report on those alarms. But once these scarce resources are deployed, under the right conditions news outlets can then be driven—by news values and other institutional incentives—to stay locked on the hot news item. The dispatched journalists thus shift quickly into patrol mode, scanning the surrounding policy/ geographic neighborhoods for additional stories, often pursuing these stories through more in-depth, investigative reporting. It is this conjunction that sometimes occurs between the alarm and patrol modes of journalism that turns what would have been a brief alarm-driven spike in attention (a "momentary media explosion") into a more robust, and often more politically meaningful, "sustained media explosion." ("Timed media explosions," a third category, are born of patrol-driven coverage surrounding an anticipated event like an election or the Olympics.)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Making the News by AMBER E. BOYDSTUN. Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsChapter 1. Patterns in the News and Why They Matter
Chapter 2. The Forces that Drive the News
Chapter 3. The Alarm/Patrol Hybrid Model of News Generation
Chapter 4. Content and Change on the New York Times Front Page
Chapter 5. Explaining Front-Page Attention
Chapter 6. The Rise and Fall of the War on Terror and the Death Penalty in the News
Chapter 7. How Institutional Mechanisms Lead to Media Skew and Explosiveness
Chapter 8. Skew and Explosiveness in the Shifting Media Landscape
Chapter 9. Implications for Politics and Society
Appendix
Notes
References
Index