Media and Social Inequality

Innovations in Community Structure Research

John Pollock

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317981015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is among the first to systematically explore the impact of community inequality on reporting political and social change. Although most journalism scholars are still fascinated by the impact of media on society, Media and Social Inequality explores the reverse perspective: the impact of society on media. Using a 'community structure' approach, and rejecting the perspective that studies of media and audiences can be reduced to the individual level of psychological phenomena, all contributions examine connections between community-level 'macro' characteristics and variations in the coverage of critical issues. This innovative book differs from previous community structure volumes in two ways. First, contributions explore a far wider range of community characteristics by employing creative methodologies, modern archives, and databases that facilitate larger, more diverse samples; multilevel and longitudinal analyses; composite measures of both 'content' and editorial judgment; new technologies; and social network analysis. Second, a traditional emphasis on media as instruments of political and social 'control' is replaced by media as potential mirrors of social 'change, ' exploring 'bottom-up' measures of 'vulnerability', 'concentrated disadvantage', and 'ethnic diversity/pluralism'. The volume contains two original chapters: one on nationwide US coverage of the "Occupy" movement in the expanded introduction, and another on nationwide US coverage of universal health care.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Mass Communication and Society.

Introduction: Social Inequality and Media

John C. Pollock

Department of Communication Studies
The College of New Jersey

The “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement has galvanized attention in the United States ever since it burst onto media, policy, and public agendas in fall, 2011. Although experts may differ over the clarity of purpose, quality of leadership, and choice of strategies and tactics, almost anyone who has heard about the movement is familiar with its central message: Ninety-nine percent versus one percent, or the ninety-nine percent less privileged against the highly, highly privileged one percent. That message of imbalance and social/economic/political conflict has proved enormously resonant in media, public, and policy agendas, illustrating the cascading influence of organizers who choose a clear message and obvious targets to attract ongoing media coverage, reinforce public discontent, and ignite powerful reactions from policy makers and political leaders, in particular in the Democratic Party in a presidential election year, 2012. [For excellent scholarship on the modern crisis of inequality, see in particular books by two Nobel Prize winners, Krugman (2012) and Stiglitz (2012), as well as volumes by Gitlin (2012), Hayes (2012), and Noah (2012).]

That ninety-nine percent public theme or trope was emerging as the original five articles in this collection were delivered for publication in “Mass Communication and Society” (MCS) (14:6, November/December, 2011), the journal of the Mass Communication and Society Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. The ongoing public debate about social inequality and its role in the November, 2012, elections offers a public policy backdrop for new discussions about modern scholarship in the community structure tradition. This introduction represents the elaboration of a special perspective: Community structure research can illuminate links between social inequality and media coverage. In effect, community structure research is not simply an academic exercise solely of interest to a particular group of scholars. It is also a perspective that throws a spotlight on multiple dimensions of social structure and demographics that are associated with variations in coverage of critical public issues. In sum, modern community structure research can offer insight into the formation of public policy.

The chapters in this edited collection on “Media and Social Inequality: Innovations in Community Structure Scholarship,” were carefully selected to represent a variety of different perspectives in community structure research. Five of the seven articles were originally chosen for the special community structure issue in “Mass Communication and Society” (14:6, November/December, 2011). Although not part of the original collection, a sixth chapter on community structure was published in the same issue, and a seventh chapter, on nationwide US coverage of universal healthcare, is an original contribution to the book.

AN EMERGING REALIGNMENT

We seldom witness the realignment of a field, but articles selected for this special community structure issue represent a major readjustment. Although different scholars refer to the structural perspective as “structural pluralism”, “community structure,” or even “community structural pluralism,” all share the conviction that, contrary to a prevailing mass media/journalism fascination with the impact of media on society, it is important to explore the reverse perspective: the impact of society on media The founding work of University of Minnesota pioneers Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien focused on the impact of community structure, particularly city size, on media coverage by reinforcing and perpetuating existing social norms, arrangements, and prevailing power distributions. [For a quick overview of the community structure model, see International Encyclopedia of Communication (Pollock, 2008).] More recent scholarship, exemplified in this special collection, gives far greater weight to community structure as measured by more fluid indicators of social characteristics, as well as by a shift from a traditional emphasis on political power and social control to social change.

Media’s Social Function: From Social Control to Social Change

Founding structural scholars in the late 20th century sometimes referred to media as “guard dogs,” monitoring the social and political environment for challenges to the status quo (See Olien, Donohue, & Tichenor, 1995). Recently, however, greater attention has been paid to community structure as enabling or accommodating social change. Nah and Armstrong launch a comprehensive review of the most recent literature on “indicators” of community structure, mapping a wide range of indicators of social change, but also advocating the “reintegration” of the original structural pluralism “power” dimension into ongoing interest in social change. Yamamoto explores the role of social structure, not in suppressing but rather in enabling social change by distributing information that promotes participation in formal and informal associations, helping to identify common problems, and fostering the mobilization of collective action for common purposes. Hindman and Yamamoto make connections between community structure and a special dependant variable, “social trust,” by defining community structure in terms of “social capital”—political participation and youth participation—and by focusing on community structure as a co-independent or “intervening” variable mediating the impact of media on social trust. Watson and Riffe challenge the classic definition of structural pluralism itself, arguing that a new “community stressor” model can be posited as an “alternative” to the traditional structural pluralism (“city size”) model, focusing less on social control and more on coping with and ameliorating community problems, manifest in increased public affairs blogging (see also Yuan, 2012). In a related chapter, Kiernicki, Pollock, and Lavery explore the association between multiple demographics and nationwide metropolitan coverage of proposals for universal healthcare, documenting a clear relationship between “stakeholders” (such as Hispanics) or “marginal” or “vulnerable” population segments, on the one hand, and favorable coverage of universal healthcare on the other.

The last two chapters reveal recommendations for focusing on particular levels of analysis. Jeffres, et al. explore different levels of community identity, focusing in particular on neighborhoods, as important in measuring the impact of community heterogeneity on differences in social capital. Finally, in a highly original contribution, McCombs and Funk suggest an architecture for exploring the intersection of two theories, national inter-media agenda setting and local community structure, in order to examine empirically the role of each set of phenomena (and each theory) in accounting for variations in local reporting on social and political change.

An Explosion of Innovative Methodologies, Indicators and Indices

Most of the contributors to this special issue suggest creative methodologies and indicators to measure community structure. Modern archives and databases facilitate larger, more diverse samples. Innovation ranges from Hindman and Yamamoto’s multilevel analysis—systematically comparing macro with individual-level data using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM)—to Nah and Armstrong’s rich cornucopia of methodologies and indicators, advocating longitudinal analyses, within-community analyses, quasi-experimental designs, composite media measures of both “content” and editorial judgment (or article “prominence”) yielding what one scholar calls a “Media Vector,” and embracing new technologies and social network analysis generally, including emails, blogs, discussion forums, and websites. Nah and Armstrong also recommend wide-ranging bottom-up indicators, sensitive especially to “empowering” dimensions of media, including: measures of “vulnerability” or “concentrated disadvantage” (combining such characteristics as poverty and unemployment levels, percent on public assistance, etc.); “ethnic diversity” or “ethnic pluralism”; “diversity pluralism”; “leadership pluralism”; and indicators of access to healthcare and a “gay market index.” The ongoing search for better indicators that “mirror” social segmentation is one of the most energizing dimensions of community structure research.

Key Questions

Despite inherent interest in the capacity of community structure studies to illuminate social change, despite the explosion of multiple methodologies, and indicators, key questions arise in any effort to explore the potential contribution of community structure studies to understanding social change and public policy. What is the relation of community structure studies to the communication studies literature on inequality and vulnerability? What is the relation of community structure studies to the communication literature on protest movements? If the answer to both questions is that community structure approaches have rarely informed communication studies research on inequality or protest movements, what can an original, multi-city comparison reveal about associations between community structure theory and protest movements? In particular, what can an empirical community structure study of links between city characteristics and coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement reveal about the uses of community structure approaches for theoretical enrichment and policy implications? Finally, how do these literature reviews and an empirical study illuminate the value of the individual chapters collected in this volume?

It is unusual for an introduction to an edited book to contain an empirical study. Yet the literature connecting community structure with communication studies on inequality and protest movements is so uneven that an empirical study can add substantial value in illuminating the potential contribution of community structure approaches to modern critical issues and policy making. After the reviews and empirical presentations, the discussion will turn to connections between findings in communication studies on inequality, protest and Occupy Wall Street research and the chapters selected for this collection. Through this process, an introduction to a collection of serious scholarship can be transformed into a narrative that connects “community structure” scholars and research with significant public policy issues, in particular, the contested nature of “inequality” in the public sphere.

COMMUNICATION STUDIES LITERATURE ILLUMINATES MEDIA “MISHANDLING” OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY

The vast majority of the communication studies literature on social inequality focuses on inaccurate patterns, specifically the “mishandling” of vulnerability by media systems in many nations throughout the world, documenting: US misrepresentations of poverty; minimal coverage of poverty throughout the world; disregard for the poor as “audiences”; identifying “disconnects” between prominent public issues and groups, on the one hand, and lagging coverage on the other; and blaming “victims” for their own conditions rather than illuminating structural constraints. Yet the literature on coverage of inequality seldom refers to explicit connections between “community structure” measures of inequality and variations in coverage reflecting that inequality.

Several studies document ways US media systems fail to serve the poor by misrepresenting and stereotyping them. In a study of news magazine coverage of issues pertaining to poverty between 1993 and 1998, Clawson and Trice (2000) found that African-Americans were overrepresented in stories less likely to evoke public sympathy, such as the cycle of dependency, minimizing themes of initiative and responsibility. The photographs accompanying news stories portrayed poverty inaccurately, instead furthering “a stereotypical and inaccurate picture of poverty which results in negative beliefs about the poor, antipathy toward blacks, and a lack of support for welfare programs” (Clawson & Trice, 2000, p. 63). Gilens (1996) documented network television news and weekly newsmagazine misleading portrayals of poverty. African-Americans were again overrepresented, as were unemployed adults of working age, sometimes considered the least sympathetic sector of the poor. Conversely, the elderly and working poor, the most sympathetic sectors of the poor, were underrepresented. Similarly, Clawson and Kegler (2000) encountered evidence that American government college textbooks furthered stereotypes inaccurately depicting poverty as a problem affecting mostly African-Americans.

Consistently, studies of global or comparative mass media systems have also charged media with ignoring or forgetting either poverty or the poor. Aram (2008) discussed the meager attention paid to poverty in Indian media systems, urging that poverty was essentially forgotten due to India’s entrance into an era of globalization. Kumar (2008) argued that because Indian media systems depend on various forms of advertising to generate revenue, the poor “remain ‘invisible’ in the nation’s mass media” despite being “highly visible almost everywhere in urban and rural India” (pp. 22–23). Gould, Stern, and Adams (1981) found that US television networks almost completely eschewed poverty during primetime broadcasts. Mohr (2008) argued that a tremendous disparity exists between the realities faced by the poor and media content in countries with large proportions affected by poverty. Dagron (2004) outlined the mistrust of Latin American mass media systems, while Banda (2008) discussed how South Africa’s Dispatch Online disembodied poverty by sanitizing the issue and utilizing clinical terminology. In South Africa overall, Berger (2009) found that journalists inadequately covered a debate over rising poverty levels.

In addition to misrepresenting or neglecting the poor in media content, mass media systems have also been found to disregard the poor as media audiences. Nielsen (2008) stated that while Montreal newspapers supported the concerns of the poor in their coverage of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Social Inequality and Media
• 2 Structural Pluralism in Journalism and Media Studies: A Concept Explication and Theory Construction
• 3 Mass Media as a Macrolevel Source of Social Control: A New Direction in the Community Structure Model
• 4 Social Capital in a Community Context: A Multilevel Analysis of Individual- and Community-Level Predictors of Social Trust
• 5 Structural Determinants of Local Public Affairs Place Blogging: Structural Pluralism and Community Stress
• 6 Nationwide Newspaper Coverage of Universal Healthcare: A Community Structure Approach
• 7 Structural Pluralism and the Community Context: How and When Does the Environment Matter?
• 8 Shaping the Agenda of Local Daily Newspapers: A Methodology Merging the Agenda Setting and Community Structure Perspectives
• Index