constructing the news

1. Political Science PS 475
Mark Peffley

2. The impossibility of the “mirror” standard.

3. Questions for us:

5.  News content is potentially infinite and print
and broadcast news outlets are limited, so
reporters and editors must be selective.
 “News slant” vs. “political bias” in traditional
news media.
 Question:What is one of the most important
developments in the production of the news
in the last part of the 20th century?

6.  A cautionary tale: Public misperception
ofWMD in the Iraq war.
 Why did/do substantial numbers of
Americans think the invading forces
actually foundWMD?
▪ Content analysis of news coverage:
▪ Fox News reported moreWMD discoveries than any
other network and downplayed the failure to findWMD
more than any other network.
▪ Fox News reported fewer dissenting opinions about the
war.
▪ Fox viewers were most likely to be mistaken about the
discovery ofWMDs.
 Footnote: American service members were exposed
to aging chemicals abandoned years earlier, but
these weapons were not part of an active arsenal.
They were remnants from Iraq’s arms program in the
1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.This report has been
misused to claim WMD were found.
Poll (Jan. 2015):
Half of all Republicans
still believe WMDs
found in Iraq
One third of
Democrats and 46% of
Independents
answered similarly.

7.  NewYorkTimes:
 The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s
Abandoned ChemicalWeapons
 MoreThan 600 Reported
Chemical Exposure in Iraq,
Pentagon Acknowledges
 NPR :
 Pentagon Reportedly Hushed
Up ChemicalWeapons Finds In
Iraq
 Washington Post:
 The real question about
chemical weapons in Iraq: Did
the U.S. take care of its troops
who were exposed?

8.  Iraq war supporters think
they were just vindicated
on Saddam'sWMDs.
They're wrong. (Vox)
 The stories, while
important, are being widely
misrepresented by Iraq war
advocates — including Karl
Rove himself — seeking to
exonerate Bush.
 Think about how much
more easy it is to spread
misinformation in the
post-broadcast era.

9.  Decline in the quality of the news
 Control over the news agenda, news content
and news distribution is passing from
professional journalists and news
organizations to amateurs, citizens, partisans
and social network computing.

10. News
Economic
marketplace
Governmental ,
political
pressures
Personal biases
of journalists,
editors,
owners??
Organizational
processes
Political reality

11. Warning! Explicit language.

12. Influences on what gets reported (Iyengar)

14.  Timely and novel*
 Proximity*
 Conflict*
 Impact
 Familiarity

15.  1. How traditional journalists define
fair and neutral reporting
▪ a) Sources make the news & sources must
be credible, usually official political sources
inWashington
▪ b) Fair and neutral reporting: there are two
(usually conflicting) sides to every story.

16. (Lance Bennett, News:The Politics of Illusion):

17.  Bennett: “Stories invite dramatization—
crises over continuity, present over the past
or future, conflicts, personalities, scandals at
the expense of complex policy information,
the workings of government institutions, and
sustained analysis of persistent problems of
our time, such as inequality, hunger, resource
depletion, etc. “

18. Analytical coverage is
separate from more
descriptive coverage.

19. “Every news story should display the
attributes of fiction, of drama. It should have
structure and content, problem and
denouement, rising and falling action, a
beginning, middle and end. These are not
only the essentials of drama; they are the
essentials of narrative.”

24.  White, middle class reporters & editors and news audiences
 Accessibility of urban street crime
 versus suburban, rural or white collar crime
 Episodic coverage focusing on individual perpetrators of violent crime
 versus crime influenced by broader forces or the consequences of punitive responses to fear
of crime (e.g., mass incarceration).
 News frames emphasizing “social control” versus “therapeutic” frames:
 The “war on drugs.”Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic.
 Presented from the perspective of “officials sources”: police, prosecutors.
 If it bleeds, it leads
 Reality-based police programs list of images video editors should be looking for:
▪ Death
▪ Stab
▪ Shoot
▪ Strangulation
▪ Club
▪ Suicide
 Racial & ethnic bias in crime coverage:
 a tendency to exaggerate rates of black and Latino offending and white victimization and to
depict black suspects in a less favorable light than whites
 journalists gravitated to unusual cases when selecting victims (white women) and to typical
cases when selecting perpetrators (black men)

27. News Public
Public
Opinion
Question 1: Given what we know about
the news, what are some of the limitations
of public opinion likely to be?

29.  The public’s attention is directed to dramatic stories
and elements instead of problems and causes that
are just as important but do not fit journalistic
definitions of what’s news.
 Public opinion is often as fragmented,
compartmentalized and a-historical as the news on
which it is based.
 The public doesn’t understand political institutions,
the checks and balances of the U.S. system because
these aren’t conveyed in the news.
 Unrealistic expectations for presidents.