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

在学者们最感兴趣的许多政治进程中，新闻媒体扮演着至关重要的角色。因此，任何将新闻内容作为独立变量或干预变量的政治学分支，都将受益于对政治世界被过滤和浓缩为新闻产品的过程进行系统的、理论上驱动的解释。这一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经验性检验友好的研究设计中，以回答这样一个问题：是什么推动了政治新闻产品在各种实质性问题领域的系统性差异？对过去20年的全国性报纸和晚间新闻节目进行了调查。在所有三项研究中，因变量--新闻内容--都是通过使用独立编码者的内容分析来衡量的。这些故事来自Lexis-Nexis学术宇宙和范德比尔特档案馆。独立变量来自不同的来源，其中最重要的两个是宾夕法尼亚州立大学战争相关性项目和华盛顿大学政策议程数据集。这三项独立的研究将主要研究问题应用于政治过程的三个方面：i)如何解释经济新闻随时间的变化？2)如何解释美国媒体对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？对于政治新闻中的每一种变异模型，测试了四类相互竞争的自变量的相对解释能力。首先，有人认为，最有效地理解群众调解的规范性影响的方法是，将报道内容调整到现实基线：客观媒体应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媒体在政治进程中只是信息载体。其次，精英们刻意塑造新闻产品的努力在给定的背景下取得了多大的成功，就是媒体在多大程度上未能发挥其监督作用。因此，通过评估独立变量对新闻形成的影响，可以学到很多东西，这些独立变量表明精英阶层有意识地试图塑造新闻。此外，动态模型的使用使得能够在统计上合理地评估先前的公众舆论是否会影响后续的新闻，从而控制新闻对舆论的更传统的影响。这种效果表明，在政策过程中有一种以前被忽视的民主回应因素。最后，政治世界看似武断的品质的变化对新闻内容产生了强大的影响，因为它们符合专业新闻机构的规范和约束。这种变数--也就是所谓的媒体权力变数--表明了新闻媒体对政治进程的重大非虚假影响。

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.