News media and citizens

Jamieson and Waldman, The Press Effect.
Pew Report “News Interest and Knowledge” http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1356
Baumgartner, Jody, and Jonathan Morris. 2006. “The Daily Show Effect
American Politics Research, Vol. 34, No. 3, 341-367 (2006)

The first reading focuses on what key news audiences are, and how much the key audiences know. The truth is that the studies have been surprisingly consistent: Education and socio-economic status (in this report they are referred to as “Those with higher annual incomes”) are the two most important determinants of a person’s knowledge level about politics, both national and international. The second most important characteristic is gender, although this study (and the others) seem to indicate that gender is more about where someone gets their news from than whether they get news at all. Overall, there was nothing surprising in this report. It simply confirmed the prior readings that indicate better educated people with higher socio-economic status follow news, and are more knowledgeable about politics.
In light of the fact that people get their news from the news media – the press – The Press Effect’s conclusions are a little disturbing. The point of the book is to show how the press frames political events, and sometimes ignore the truth and ignores facts in order to “frame” the events in a manner that is consistent with the need to provide coherence to the stories that are being presented. In order to show how the press ignores facts, the authors have analyzed specific news media coverage, and shown how the press has ignored facts in order to provide coherence to a story. One of the instances cited in this book is when the young woman testified that she had seen young babies throw from incubators by Iraqi soldiers – when in fact this never happened. The story was adopted by the President who used it to symbolize the human rights needs of invading Iraq. However, the incident was later proven never to have happened, and the press ignored the falsehood in order to give coherence to the human rights story. The authors of The Press Effect see the main task of journalists as being the watchers of facts, not the reporters of stories. The authors conclude their book with a list of things that journalists should do to return to being fact-based, instead of story based. Is this distinction important for the average news viewer? There is no research about how the viewers and readers react to retractions and corrections in the news. It is possible that once the news reports a story, and it enters into the person’s mind, that something else will not correct it – even if the initial story is false. This type of fact rejection has been shown to be the case in the Kuklinski study where he shows that misinformed people, even when exposed to the facts, don’t change their opinion. Therefore, it would seem, if we are a society that values truth, that the authors of The Press Effect are correct – that the facts need to be presented the first time around, and that the press (since they are the people who give the news to others) need to be more conscious of the facts, and less conscious of telling a story.
However, there has been substantial research done that presentation of the facts in written form leads only to further the information gap between the socio-economic classes. Jerit et al showed that television increases all people’s levels of knowledge, while written information (which tends to be more fact heavy) only increases the knowledge of those with education and higher socio-economic status to begin with. Does this mean that television doesn’t relate facts, or that facts aren’t an effective communication tool across all classes? I hope not. That would be a sad state of commentary on the citizens: That only information in story form is acceptable to all classes, rather than facts. However, it is something to consider when focusing on the drive for facts balanced against the need to tell a story.
The article on The Daily Show seemed to show that, among young college students, watching The Daily Show increased cynicism and that increased cynicism leads to reduced political participation. The authors do not explicitly state the “therefore” of their argument: That watching The Daily Show decreases political participation, but it is a logical conclusion to their research. However, they measured cynicism by asking the participants if “I trust all the news media to cover political events fairly and accurately.” This seems to be too broad of a question, both for the definition of news media and because there is an emphasis on “all.” No one is going to answer yes to this question. This is the question that was used to measure cynicism, and it simply seems like too broad of a question to base an assumption on.

Legislators, Initiatives and Representation

There was an article entitled, “Legislators, Initiatives, and Representation,” written by E. Gerber which we read in preparation for this class. This article looked at the differences between direct legislation and legislation developed through the legislative process. Specifically this article analyzed the effects of the how people respond to measures versus how the legislative body responds to measures.
This article used two different test cases to illustrate the differences between direct legislation and the legislative process. One case was the cigarette tax in Proposition 99, and the other was the transportation bond defeating in Proposition 74.
These two cases were good illustrations of what the difference is. The Proposition 74 case was stronger because the wording of the Proposition and the legislation was the same. Additionally, the vote in the Legislature and the vote by the people occurred relatively close together.
This article made me think of various other measures which have been, or might be, developed by direct legislation and through the legislative process. Two instances which immediately come to mind are the bond packages of 2006 and Proposition 200 (marriage is only between a man and a woman). In both cases legislation was passed – either through the legislative process (the bonds) or through direct legislation (Proposition 200). Then the opposite body was presented with the problem and tried to create a solution.
The solution in the bonds was that the voters agreed and passed them. This presents a situation where both the legislative process and the direct legislation presented the same outcome. This would, according to the article, mean that there were certain factors in alignment. In the legislative process, party leadership, committee membership, lobbyists, and campaign funding would have to align with the votes. However, I worked in the Legislature at this time and know what did and didn’t align. The reason that party leadership aligned was that Asm. Plesica, the minority leader before Villines, gave in to the Democrats. He had stated that the republicans wanted 36 hours to look over the bond proposal – they were given less than 1 hour. Then Plesica came out in support of the bonds, and provided cover for any Republicans who wanted to vote for them. Some did, and some did not. However, this provided enough cover that the bonds passed from the Legislature. Additionally, in the direct legislation process, there was little to no opposition to the bonds. The majority of the opposition was written in the press and based on the amount that these bonds would cost us in the long term. However, people are not interested in that. Therefore, the direct legislation passed without a lot of opposition as well. So it is possible that this series of events is not indicative of the differences or similarities between the legislative process and direct legislation because there were several deviations from the norm in the system.
Proposition 200 is an illustration of where the differences between the legislative process and direct legislation are reaffirmed. If the sole indicator of a legislators vote was the manner in which the majority of his/her district’s constituents voted – then there would not be the difference between Proposition 200 and the legislative process. However, the theory in this article states that there are other things at work in the legislative process. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the Proposition 200 argument.
Proposition 200 was a proposition which was passed to “defend marriage,” or state that marriage is between a man and a woman only. The majority of the citizens of California voted for this. Therefore, since the legislative process routinely delivers something different then what the majority of voters want, there must be other factors at play in the legislative process. The Legislature routinely votes for bills which would allow same-sex marriage. This is because there is strong party leadership among the Democrats – who are the majority needed to pass these bills – as well as a strong and vocal lobby of minority citizens who want this.
However, like the example of the cigarette tax, there are problems with this example. The direct legislation and the legislative process do not turn out bills worded the same – in fact they are opposites. There has also been a significant amount of time between the passage of the two items.
However, the fact that I can take 2 other situations and apply this theory to them, means that there is some truth to the theory. Although the theory may not take into account all factors, it does do a basic job of explaining the differences in outcome among the two manners of legislation.

Welcome to Political Science Article and Book Reviews

This blog is mainly for students of political science, or professors, or anyone who is interested.

Here, we will focus on reviewing books and articles that deal with various aspects of political science from international relations, to religion. Some of the postings will be shorter, some in essay format, and some are simply outlines of arguments or articles in order to help students understand more.

I don't mind people using this blog as a resource - that is what it is intended for. But please don't copy directly from this blog without attributing the source. That would be plagiarism.

Enjoy.