Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Explaining the Political News Product

新闻媒体在许多学者最感兴趣的政治过程中发挥着至关重要的作用。因此，任何使用新闻内容作为独立变量或干预变量的政治学分支领域都将受益于对政治世界被过滤并浓缩为新闻产品的过程进行系统的、理论上驱动的核算。本博士论文研究项目将新闻生产过程的理论嵌入到总体政策系统分析的实证友好型研究设计中，以回答这个问题：是什么驱动了政治新闻产品在各种实质性问题领域的系统性变化？对过去20年的全国性报纸和晚间新闻节目进行了审查。在所有三项研究中，因变量-新闻内容-是通过使用独立编码器的内容分析来测量的。这些故事是从Lexis-Nexis学术宇宙和范德比尔特档案馆收集的。自变量来自各种来源，其中最重要的两个是宾夕法尼亚州立大学战争相关项目和华盛顿大学政策议程数据集。这三个独立的研究将主要研究问题应用于政治过程的三个方面：1)如何解释经济新闻随时间的变化？如何解释美国媒体分配给外国冲突的报道数量的变化？3)如何解释国会听证会报道的质量和数量的变化？对于政治新闻变化的每个模型，四类相互竞争的自变量被测试其相对解释力。首先，有人认为，通过将报道校准为现实基线，可以最有效地理解大众调解的规范含义：客观的新闻媒体被期望尽可能忠实地报道特定政治领域的有形、可衡量的方面，而对这些方面的真实报道使新闻媒体成为政治进程中的信息载体。其次，在特定背景下，精英们有意塑造新闻产品的努力取得成功的程度，就是媒体在多大程度上未能发挥其监督作用。因此，可以从评估独立变量对新闻形成的影响中学到很多东西，这些变量表明精英有意识地试图塑造新闻。此外，动态模型的使用可以对先前的公众舆论是否影响随后的新闻进行统计上的合理评估，控制新闻对意见的更传统的影响。这种影响表明，在政策制定过程中存在一个以前被忽视的民主反应因素。最后，由于符合专业新闻机构的规范和约束，政治世界中看似任意的特质的变化对新闻内容产生了强大的影响。这些变量——被称为媒体权力变量——表明新闻媒体对政治进程具有重要的非虚假影响。

The news media play a vital role in many of the political processes of most interest to scholars. Accordingly, any political science subfield that uses news content as an independent or intervening variable will benefit from a systematic, theoretically driven accounting of the process by which the political world is filtered and condensed into a news product. This Doctoral Dissertation Research project embeds theories of the news production process in the empirical-test-friendly research designs of aggregate policy system analysis, in order to answer the question: what drives systematic variation in the political news product over a variety of substantive issue areas? National newspapers and evening newscasts from the past 20 years are examined. In all three studies, the dependent variable -news content -is measured by content analyses utilizing independent coders. The stories are gathered from Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe and the Vanderbilt Archives. Independent variables come from a variety of sources, the two most important being the Pennsylvania State University Correlates of War Project, and the University of Washington Policy Agendas data set. The three separate studies apply the primary research question to three facets of the political process: I) What explains variation in economic news over time? 2) What explains variation in the quantity of coverage allotted by the American press to foreign conflicts? 3) What explains variation in the quality and quantity of coverage given to congressional hearings? F or each model of variation in political news, four competing classes of independent variables are tested for their relative explanatory power. First, it is argued that the normative implications of mass mediation are most fruitfully understood by calibrating coverage to a reality baseline: the tangible, measurable aspect of the given political domain that an objective press is expected to report as faithfully as possible, and that the veracious reporting of which renders the press mere information carriers in the political process. Next, the extent to which elites' deliberate attempts to shape the news product are successful in a given context is the extent to which the media are falling short in their watchdog role. Thus much can be learned from assessing the impact on news formation of independent variables that indicate a conscious attempt by elites to shape the news. Also, the use of dynamic models enables a statistically sound assessment of whether prior public opinion moves subsequent news, controlling for the more conventional effect of news on opinion. Such an effect suggests a previously overlooked element of democratic responsiveness in the policy process. Finally, variation in seemingly arbitrary qualities of the political world wield a powerful influence over news content on account of their conformance with the norms and constraints of professional news organizations. Such variables -known as media power variables -indicate a significant non-spurious effect of the news media on the political process.