711
Political Communication:
Making the
News, Bias in the News
I.
News Media as
Gatekeeper to Political Reality:
A.
News is
inherently selective and biased. Selection is endemic to the definition of the
news and the news production process.
Question is: what criteria do media use to decide what stories to cover
and how to report them? To what extent are these criteria influenced by
political bias, the news production process, and reality? And do these criteria help or hurt democracy?
B.
News is: What newsmakers
(e.g., pol’s) promote as timely, important, or interesting; from which news organizations select, narrate,
and package into information formats; and that people consume, at any moment in history
C.
Processes of making the news (David L. Paletz, The Media in American Politics, ch 3: “The News”): Through acquiring, converting and presenting the
news, reality becomes very distorted and slanted because newspeople make 1000’s
of decisions along the way.
1.
Acquisition
a)
Originate
b)
Receive
c)
Gather (Beats,
Sources, Strategies, Experts, Quotes, Scoops)
d)
Indexing
2.
Conversion
a)
Owners and
editors
b)
Objectivity
c)
Subtle
Techniques of “slanting” the news
(1) choose sources
(2) control prominence
(3) solicit, select, quotations
(4) choose which facts to report
(5) frame the meaning of news stories
(6) language
(7) pictures
3.
Presentation
II.
Is the News Biased?
A. Journalistic norm of objectivity
1.
The “wall of
separation between editorials and news coverage”?
2.
How do journalists
operationalize objective coverage?
a) Sources make the news. Means that official, govt.
sources are considered more credible (also cheaper and more accessible).
b) Fair and neutral reporting means there are two sides
to every story, which means sources must be balanced.
B. Major Types of Bias
1.
News slant:
coverage that is favorable or unfavorable to a group, candidate, or position.
Could reflect bias or reality.
2.
Political
bias: news slant that stems from the
political preferences of journalists, editors, owners, and the market that make
their way into the news.
3.
Structural bias:
caused by the circumstances of news production that affect decisions of what to
cover (i.e., criteria of newsworthiness) and how to report it (e.g., Bennett’s
biases in content), and so forth. Includes processes journalists follow to
acquire, convert, and present a story, professional socialization, journalistic
norms, etc. Examples include: bad news bias, temporal bias, visual bias,
anti-incumbent bias, etc.
a)
Changes in
(structural biases in) news coverage over time: Thomas Patterson on the growth
of soft news and critical news (usually seen as being due to changes in the
news industry (e.g., cable, competition), politicians’ attempts to manipulate
the news, and journalists’ reactions).
C. Problems with studying bias or slant (see Gilens and
Hertzman, Kahn and Kenny, Druckman and Parkin)
1.
Hard to define.
Bias is detected when there exists a normative standard to gauge news coverage
against objective reality. But what is objective reality? From whose
perspective?
2.
Hard to decide
whether to attribute unfavorable coverage of a person or group to structural
versus political bias or bias versus reality.
3.
Hard to measure.
Examples of 1992 and 2000 presidential elections.
a)
Simple counts of
negative and positive stories. See The Center for Media and Public Affairs
(CMPA)
4.
Hard to
generalize to all media.
5.
Hard to
generalize case studies.