The Politics of Persuasion

Economic Policy and Media Bias in the Modern Era

Anthony R. DiMaggio

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781438463445, 9781438463452
• eBook ISBN: 9781438463469
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Tracking the effects of media content on the public is a difficult endeavor, and media effects vary on a subject-to-subject basis. To address this challenge, The Politics of Persuasion employs a multifaceted, mixed method approach to studying mass media and public attitudes. Anthony R. DiMaggio analyzes more than a dozen case studies covering US domestic economic policy and examines a wide range of theories of how bias operates in mass media with regard to coverage of these issues. While some research claims that journalists are overly negative and biased against government officials, some reveals that journalists favor citizens groups. Still other studies contend there is a liberal bias in the media, a progovernment bias, or a bias in favor of advertisers and business interests. Through his analysis, DiMaggio is the first to systematically examine all of these competing interpretations. He concludes that reporters tailor stories to corporate and government interests, but argues that the ability to "manufacture consent" from the public in favor of these elite views is far from guaranteed. According to DiMaggio, citizens often make use of their own personal experiences and prior attitudes to challenge official narratives.

1

The Research on Media Bias

This chapter reviews competing theories and findings regarding media bias. Five different theories are reviewed, including the pro-government and pro-business biases, media pluralism, the liberal media bias, and the bad news bias. This review makes it clear that all the theories receive some level of support in empirical studies; hence, they must all be taken seriously when examining media bias. This chapter serves as a springboard into future chapters, familiarizing readers with the main findings of each theory.

Why Study the Media?

Media coverage of economic policy is crucial since most Americans have little direct contact with political leaders or government. Because of Americans’ lack of direct experience with the policy process, media serve a vital role by providing political information. Most Americans do not converse with their senator or representative, or with the president. As a result, journalists are expected to serve as surrogates for the public, asking tough questions of political officials, the answers to which the public needs in order to be educated about government. Political leaders utilize media to communicate the promised benefits of their policy proposals to the public, and to convey the perceived drawbacks of their political enemies’ proposals.

Perceptions of Media Bias

Public distrust of the media is rampant. In July 2013, the Pew Research Center reported that just 26 percent of Americans felt the media “get facts straight,” compared to a high of 55 percent in 1985. Sixty-seven percent said that news stories “are often inaccurate,” compared to 34 percent in 1985. Seventy-six percent felt the media “favor one side” in reporting, up from 53 percent in 1985.1 Other surveys find similar levels of public distrust. A 2011 survey from The Hill magazine found that 68 percent felt the media were biased, with respondents twice as likely to feel journalists exhibited a liberal over a conservative bias.2 Another 2011 survey by Gallup reported Americans were more than three times as likely to claim the media share a liberal over a conservative bias.3 These statistics suggest the issue of bias occupies a prominent place in the public mind.

Media Bias: What It Is and Why It Matters

In Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann argued that biases in the information-gathering process matter because they influence “the pictures” people form “in our heads.” Lippmann argued that the world

is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.4

Bias in the news is important because it speaks to the quality of the informational environment in the United States, and whether Americans are able to form coherent, meaningful opinions regarding the political system. If a political party dominates the news, its adherents enjoy an advantage over their partisan opponents in influencing what issues the media cover (known as “agenda building”), what issues the public thinks about (known as “agenda setting”), and influencing how the public thinks about political issues (known as “priming”).5 Officials’ privileged position in the news does not guarantee they will influence public attitudes, but it at least provides them with an advantage in their efforts to persuade citizens.

Competing Theories of Bias

Many scholars have addressed media bias. They often disagree, however, about precisely how media are biased. The sections below explore the topic of bias in detail.

The Pro-Government, Indexing Bias

The pro-government bias theory portrays journalists as “indexing” their coverage to fit the range of views expressed by political officialdom.6 Much of this literature is devoted to analyzing coverage of foreign policy issues. In his study of the Vietnam War, Hallin found that coverage that was critical of the war grew during times of government discord:

In situations where political consensus seems to prevail, journalists tend to act as “responsible” members of the political establishment, upholding the dominant political perspective and passing on more or less at face value the views of authorities assumed to represent the nation as a whole. In situations of political conflict, they become more detached or even adversarial, though they normally will stay well within the bounds of the debate going on within the political “establishment.”7

In Debating War and Peace, Mermin examines media coverage of eight U.S. military interventions, finding that criticisms during each conflict appeared only when criticisms had already been expressed by government officials.8 Another review of U.S. foreign policy from 2001 to 2014 concluded that journalists typically restricted their reporting to those positions taken by Democratic and Republican officials.9

Zaller and Chiu distinguish between different forms of pro-government bias.10 These forms include: “source indexing,” whereby “reporters simply make the rounds among [official government] persons familiar with issues” and write “stories that summarize what they have been told,” and “power indexing,” in which “journalists may consider information newsworthy in proportion to its capacity to foretell or affect future events.” For example, Zaller and Chiu write that reporters “paid disproportionate attention to the statements of Bush administration officials” during Senate hearings over the 1991 Gulf War “because, far more than other witnesses at the hearings, these officials were in a position to determine whether the U.S. went to war or not.”11

Bennett highlights the dangers of “politically managed” news that “provides little solid basis for critical thinking” by media consumers.12 Bennett draws attention to “increasing limits on the content of news that stem from the manufacture and sale of news as a commercial product … [news] assignments are made increasingly with costs, efficiency, and viewer or reader reactions run with fewer concerns about informing the public.”13 Bennett expresses concern with the effects of corporate media monopolization on the quality of news, but he does not express the more radical views of other scholars depicting journalists as propaganda agents of the state.14 Hallin and Bennett describe the media as “semi-independent” from government,15 while Herman, Chomsky, and McChesney depict media as the propaganda lapdogs of the government.16 Many other recent studies also claim that government officials are the main force driving news content.17

The Pro-business, Hegemonic Bias

Hegemonic theory (or “hegemony”) implicates media corporations in promoting upper-class business interests at the expense of democratic deliberation. Hegemony theory was developed by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in the early twentieth century. Gramsci defined hegemony through a division between “coercion and consent,” with economic elites exercising leadership over subordinated groups and individuals through nonviolent means. Put bluntly, hegemony is defined by the use of propaganda and pro-business messages in pursuit of elite interests. Hegemony is “rooted in an economically dominant, or potentially dominant, mode of production” in which capitalist elites seek to exercise control over the thoughts of the masses.18 The role of the “dominant fundamental group” (economic elites), however, is not to force the masses into submission through violence; quite the opposite. In a free, open society, “consent is ‘historically’ achieved through the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production”19

Mansell explains that many studies focus on the “pressures toward commodification of news media and its consequences for the way in which power is distributed through the material conditions of the capitalist system.”20 Reporters and editors are co-opted within a system that embraces capitalistic norms of economic production. Parenti and other political-communication scholars argue that media programming does not simply “reflect reality”; rather, it actively constructs reality in preference of one interpretation of the world over another.21 The “social construction” theme is elaborated upon in numerous works by Berger, Luckmann, and Tuchman, and others.22 Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, and Sasson relate social construction theory back to hegemonic theory by arguing that many economic messages are “uncontested” by reporters, editors, and owners. They are “routine, taken-for-granted structures of everyday thinking” that “contribute to a structure of dominance” by business interests.23

McChesney claims that hegemonic pressures influence the news, while faulting journalists for failing to adequately inform the public.24 He elaborates:

There are two indispensable functions that journalism must serve in a self-governing society. First, the media system must provide a rigorous accounting of people in power … in both the public and private sector. This is known as the watchdog role. Second, the media system must provide reliable information and a wide range of informed opinions on the important social and political issues of the day. No single medium can or should be expected to provide all of this; but the media system as a whole should provide easy access to this for all citizens.

“By these criteria,” McChesney argues, “the U.S. media system is an abject failure.” He points to the emergence of “the modern commercial press system” and “the severe contradiction between a privately held media system and the needs of a democratic society.” Journalism, following the rise of media “objectivity” in the twentieth century, has “three distinct biases built into it”: the overreliance on official news sources “as the basis for legitimate news,” the need for “a news hook or a news peg to justify a news story,” and the “smuggling in” of “values conducive to the commercial aims of the owners and advertisers.” McChesney contends that reporters are “oblivious to the compromises with authority they routinely make,” one example being efforts to equate the “spread of ‘free markets’ with democracy.”25

Corporate ownership creates pressure on news organizations to censor news stories that criticize advertisers. Advertisers expect a regular stream of news content for outlets they advertise with that refrains from questioning their companies, products, or business practices. Investigative stories that expose corporate malfeasance or corruption deter businesses from future advertising with a news outlet. And the threat of censorship is not idle. Previous surveys of news editors and reporters found that these pressures are ever-present. Eighty percent of editors contacted in one survey said that advertiser pressure on their organizations and reporters was common, and 45 percent knew of instances when content was altered due to advertiser pressure.26 Three-quarters of reporters surveyed knew of instances when advertisers sought to influence news content, and 44 percent were aware of instances when advertisers withdrew funding because of content they deemed objectionable. Forty percent of reporters admitted their news outlet succumbed to censorship due to advertiser pressures.27 Self-censorship is also an issue of concern. Approximately one-third of journalists and news editors admit that avoidance of views critical of advertisers happens “sometimes” or is “commonplace,” while three-quarters admit to self-censoring stor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Political Officials, the News, and Public Opinion
• 1. The Research on Media Bias
• 2. Split Party Government and Reporting on the Minimum Wage, 1996 and 2007
• 3. Unified Republican Government: Debating Tax Cuts and Social Security, 2001–2005
• 4. Unified Democratic Government: Debating the Stimulus and Executive Pay, 2009
• 5. The Attack Dog Bias? Bad News and Economic Policy, 1996–2009
• 6. Media Effects on Public Opinion
• 7. Media Coverage and Its Effects: Expanded Case Studies, 1993–2014
• 8. Experimental Evidence of Media Effects on Public Opinion
• Conclusion
• Post-Script
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover