Abstract
Joseph Uscinski, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Miami, has taken a giant step forward with his examination of what he refers to as “the people’s news.” Although his subtitle makes reference to the “demands of capitalism,” his focus within the text is on what economists refer to as “consumer demands.” This conflict between constructions is something to which we will return after I take due note of the great many things that Uscinski makes perfectly clear.
This is a book about information and democracy, and Uscinski suggests we have reason to be concerned about the character and quality of the information being supplied by the nation’s news media. Among the many shortcomings that are identified within the introduction, we are reminded of the many ways that “media negativity” can degrade the quality of citizen engagement in the democratic process. Framed as a “negative externality” rather than a journalistic goal, we are told that “overly pronounced negative news coverage” can lead us to avoid activities that might otherwise “lead to enlightened citizenship.”
The nature of these media effects are explored more fully in the second chapter, where Uscinski explores many of the claims and challenges that have been made with regard to the agenda-setting hypothesis. While making it clear that controlled experiments provide considerable support for claims that media coverage can set the audience agenda, Uscinski describes an innovative approach for assessing the extent to which audiences can also be said to set the media agenda. After presenting five arguments for why a study of television network news provides a “fair test” of audience influence, Uscinski describes his use of abstracts from the Vanderbilt News Archives from 1968 to 2010 to identify the extent of news coverage of various issues over this forty-two-year period. Among the many interesting things he notes about this coverage is the extent to which the networks agree with themselves, as well as the New York Times, about which issues are worthy of our attention. He makes use of “Gallup’s Most Important Problem question” as a measure of the public’s interest in these issues.
The challenge, of course, is to determine the direction of influence, or dare we say “the direction of statistical causation between news issue coverage and public opinion.” For this, Uscinski relies upon Granger analysis to assess this directionality at different time lags. Not surprisingly, there is no simple answer to the question being set here. While audience opinion is said to drive media coverage with regard to seven issues, the media drive opinion in four, and there is no significant relationship for the ten remaining issue areas. Uscinski uses this evidence of audience influence over the news media to introduce another perspective on media effects into the discussion.
Uscinski provides a political scientist’s slant on some of the insights derived from communications scholars’ periodic engagement with media “uses and gratifications.” Audiences are said to derive important gratifications from exposure to media content that is consistent with their ideology and political partisanship. Because these are believed to be relatively stable attributes of an individual’s identity, it is likely that neither is much changed by exposure to news media content. It is here that change in the nature of the media environment becomes particularly relevant. The growth in the cable television audience, along with cable’s deregulation are said to have led to an increase in the ideological diversity within the supply of television news.
In addition to describing the role played by CNN, Uscinski describes the entry of Rupert Murdock’s Fox News Channel as an “outlet reporting news that was less liberal, and perhaps even overtly conservative.” The cable news market by 2012 is said to provide audiences with clear options through which to seek gratification of their need for ideological and partisan validation and reinforcement. As in the previous chapter, Uscinski uses a sophisticated statistical technique to examine the media’s coverage of issues that are associated primarily with Democratic or Republican partisans. By characterizing the status of public support for either party in terms of “micropartisanship,” Uscinski is able to track changes in news media coverage of stories about particular issues, and then conclude that shifts in mass partisanship are reflected in shifts in broadcast news reporting of “party-owned issues.”
In the next chapter, Uscinski examines the variety of ways through which the news media have come to know more and more about audience tastes and preferences. He uses a somewhat less rigorous approach in assessing the direction of influence from audience to “news” content providers, but his examples from Fox’s The O’Reilly Factor make it clear that our democracy is at risk as a result. This is because in his view, “the news no longer functions as news—it serves only to gratify audiences’ political disposition by telling audiences what makes them feel good.”
In his final chapter, Uscinski indicates what he thinks might be a way out of the quicksand in which we find ourselves. As the number and variety of news sources or channels increase, and as the ability of these providers to identify and divide the audience into even more homogeneous slices improves, political polarization seems bound to expand, leading to “policy deadlock” or “extremist policy.” He offers a number of ways by which news organizations might act to improve the quality of their news “while still drawing in audiences.” A great many of his suggestions show promise if only media organizations and the journalists they employ could be motivated to act in the public interest voluntarily, rather than in response to regulations or incentives that seem most unlikely to emerge.
In the end, though, Uscinski turns toward what I see as an all too familiar exercise in blaming the victim. Despite noting that the so-called “demand” that is expressed by audiences is quite different from the demand that might be expressed in markets in which consumers exchange dollars against goods and services, Uscinski consistently refers to audience or consumer “demand” as the dominant force shaping the supply of content. The role of advertisers and the myriad ways through which they express their effective demand for particular audience segments is woefully underexplored. If we had believed, as Uscinski apparently does, that “the audience is more to blame than the producers,” then we never would have responded to the crises in the nation’s health that are associated with the marketing and consumption of tobacco, alcohol, drugs, fats, and sodium; we would have just sunk deeper into the muck.