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

政治学博士论文研究：解释政治新闻产品

• 批准号: 0136850
• 负责人: Michael MacKuen
• 金额: $ 0.36万
• 依托单位: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2002
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2002-02-01 至 2003-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0136850&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Political; Science

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.

新闻媒体在许多学者最感兴趣的政治进程中发挥着至关重要的作用。因此，任何将新闻内容作为独立或干预变量的政治学子领域都将受益于对政治世界过滤和浓缩为新闻产品的过程的系统的、理论驱动的解释。本博士论文研究项目将新闻生产过程的理论嵌入到对总体政策系统分析的实验友好的研究设计中，以回答这个问题：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变化？从过去20年的全国性报纸和晚间新闻进行了检查。在所有三项研究中，因变量-新闻内容-是衡量的内容分析，利用独立的编码器。这些故事是从Lounge-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的战争相关项目和华盛顿大学的政策数据集。这三项独立的研究将主要的研究问题应用于政治过程的三个方面：I）什么解释了经济新闻随时间的变化？2)如何解释美国新闻界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，四个相互竞争的独立变量类别被测试了它们的相对解释力。首先，有人认为，最有成效地理解规范的影响，大规模调解的校准覆盖面的现实基线：有形的，可衡量的方面，一个客观的新闻界应尽可能忠实地报告，而真实的报告，使新闻界仅仅是信息载体的政治进程。其次，精英们刻意塑造新闻产品的尝试在特定背景下成功的程度，就是媒体在监督角色上的不足。因此，从评估独立变量对新闻形成的影响中可以学到很多东西，这些变量表明精英们有意识地试图塑造新闻。此外，动态模型的使用，使一个统计上合理的评估是否事先公众舆论移动随后的新闻，控制更传统的新闻舆论的影响。这种影响表明，在政策制定过程中，民主反应能力是一个以前被忽视的因素。最后，政治世界中看似任意性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。这些变量--被称为媒体权力变量--表明新闻媒体对政治进程的重大非虚假影响。