Abstract
Today, most Americans dislike the news media as an institution. This has led to considerable debate about why people dislike the media and how their public standing could be improved. This paper contributes to this literature by using a survey experiment to test the effect of several different considerations on evaluations of the media. It finds, consistent with the broader literature on political persuasion, that elite partisan opinion leadership can powerfully shape these attitudes. Additionally, it finds that tabloid coverage creates antipathy toward the press regardless of predispositions and that horserace coverage has a negative effect on opinions among politically aware citizens on both sides of the political spectrum. Contrary to some claims in the literature, this study finds no detectable effect of news negativity.
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Notes
Since 1973, Democrats have almost always had significantly higher confidence levels than Republicans in the GSS. However, this gap has consistently been small in magnitude, much smaller than the decline in confidence among both groups (as well as independents) over these years. See Cook et al. (2000), Cook and Gronke (2001), and Gronke and Cook (2007) for more detailed analyses of the GSS data.
Rather than a change in the overall level of media consumption, it appears that changes in the media landscape have caused some people to increase, and others to decrease, their news consumption (Prior 2007). Because the hostile media phenomenon affects those with strong views on issues, it is possible that increasing opinion polarization among the mass public over the past 40 years (along with an increase in news exposure among the politically interested, as documented by Prior (2007)) caused the hostile media phenomenon to affect more people, reducing aggregate support for the press. However, there is disagreement among scholars over whether mass opinion has become more polarized, with some arguing that it has (Bartels 2000; Hetherington 2001) and some claiming that only political elites have become more extreme (Fiorina et al. 2005). If the former view is correct, the hostile media phenomenon may be an important source of the aggregate increase in negative attitudes toward the news media. Yet if the latter view is correct, the hostile media phenomenon is probably not a source of this trend.
Specifically, observed and unobserved covariates are balanced between treatment and control groups in expectation.
In another study of these three campaigns, Domke et al. (1999) find that charges of liberal media bias were more likely to appear in campaign coverage when journalists were covering Republican candidates relatively favorably and giving them more opportunities to get their message out, a result the authors argue indicates that claims of bias are a Republican political strategy, rather than a response to biased coverage.
Jones (2004) finds that talk radio is only associated with media distrust among conservatives.
Cappella and Jamieson (1997, pp. 139–159, 214–215) find that cynicism about politics is correlated with cynicism about the media. They also use an experiment to test the effect of cynical news coverage on an index of political cynicism. However, they did not experimentally test the effect of cynical coverage on attitudes toward the news media.
Findings that televised incivility does not reduce media evaluations are particularly striking because some of the same (or very similar) experiments find that incivility does reduce trust in Congress, politicians, and the entire system of government (Mutz and Reeves 2005), while increasing general arousal and decreasing thermometer ratings of the least liked person in the debate (Mutz 2007).
Even if sensationalist coverage may be as good (or better) at informing the public (Baum 2002, 2003, 2006; Zaller 2003), consuming this type of news may, at the same time, reduce consumers’ respect for the news media. In her in-depth interviews with a small group of citizens over the course of a presidential campaign, Graber (1984) finds a tendency among her subjects to complain about the simplification and triviality of news, while still choosing to consume that type of news rather than seeking more substantive media outlets. Tsfati and Cappella (2005) examine this tendency to watch news programs one reports disliking and find it be concentrated among those high in “need for cognition.”
Some work offers more complicated models of the “cognitive architecture” without necessarily being inconsistent with this simple description. For a review, see Taber (2003, pp. 439–446).
This is consistent with the conventional psychological definitions of an attitude as “a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor” (Eagly and Chaiken 1993, p. 1) or “an evaluative integration of cognitions and affects experienced in relation to an object” Crano and Prislin (2006, p. 347).
It is important to differentiate clearly between attitudes toward any political institution and attitudes toward its constituent parts, as illustrated by the often wide difference between people’s opinion toward their own member of Congress and toward the institution itself (Fenno 1975). Furthermore, my review of major academic surveys and the archives of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu) finds no survey question asking for a simple evaluation of a specific news outlet that has been asked over a number of years comparable to the GSS’s confidence question. Consequently, it is less clear how opinions about specific outlets have changed over time, making the question of what might cause those changes somewhat less interesting.
As Tsfati (2002, p. 38) puts it, “people have some mental schema for what ‘the media’ are” and thus “[m]edia skepticism is targeted toward the mainstream media in general.”
Following Zaller (1992), here I use the term political “awareness” interchangeably with similar terms like “sophistication” or “engagement.” Though, in theory, these terms could denote different attributes, in the literature they are often treated synonymously because they are so highly correlated in the mass public.
For more details on Knowledge Networks sampling techniques, see their website at http://www.knowledgenetworks.com/ganp/index.htm.
Complete question wordings are provided in the Appendix.
This example was chosen out of a desire to use a contemporary and well known tabloid story. There had recently been a “feeding frenzy” of coverage of the death of Ms. Smith, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year and reality television star. The story was covered extensively on cable news channels and network newscasts. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism (2007), between her death on February 10 and her burial on March 2, 2007, Anna Nicole Smith’s passing was the third most covered story in the American news media as a whole, making up 8% of all coverage, behind only “a crucial House vote against the President’s surge policy” (2) and the 2008 presidential race, which each took up 9% of coverage. On cable news channels, 32% of Fox News Channel’s programming, 20% of MSNBC’s programming and 14% of CNN’s programming focused on the Smith story, making it “far and away the biggest cable news story in that period.” On major network morning news shows, it took up 20% of the first half hour of airtime on CBS, 17% on NBC, and 10% on ABC.
The education variable has four categories: “less than high school,” “high school,” “some college,” and “a bachelor’s degree or higher.” While others have used asked a series of political knowledge questions to measure political engagement (e.g. Zaller 1992), education has also been used successfully for this purpose (e.g. Berinsky 2009; Zaller 1994).
I separate respondents by party and ideological self-identification in Columns 2 through 4 as a way of exploring the data prior to estimating a full model. Achen (2002) recommends careful data exploration and consultation of existing theory prior to estimating definitive parametric models, as a method of avoiding misspecification and thus improving the robustness of findings. As they should be if data exploration is done correctly, the results from Tables 1 and 2 are very similar.
In an auxiliary data analysis, I tested whether it is necessary to divide respondents by partisanship, ideology, and education, or if the conditioning effects are produced by only one or two of these. When either dividing the sample into subgroups (as in Table 1) or using a pooled model with interaction terms (as in Table 2), I find that, for horserace coverage, Democratic elite criticism, and Republican elite criticism, the effects depend on all three conditional variables.
Strength of party identification and strength of ideology are simply a “folding over” of the party identification and ideology variables. Higher values indicate strong identification with either of the parties and strong liberalism or conservatism, respectively, and lower values indicate independence and moderate ideology, respectively.
Standard errors on marginal effects that combine the coefficients on two or more interaction terms are calculated by the delta method (Green 1999, p. 118).
This heterogeneity is evident in the large and significant negative coefficients on the two-way interaction between Democratic elite criticism and party identification and the four-way interaction between Democratic elite criticism, party identification, ideology, and education.
This heterogeneity is driven by the combination of the large negative coefficients on the three-way interaction between Republican elite criticism, party identification and ideology and on the four-way interaction between Republican elite criticism, party identification, ideology and education. While these two coefficients are not individually significant, they are jointly significant (f = 4.23, p = .015). However, as Brambor et al. (2006) and Kam and Franzese (2007) note, the quantities whose significance are of primary importance are the estimated effects presented in Fig. 1.
This heterogeneity is largely driven by the large and significant negative coefficient on the four-way interaction between horserace coverage, strength of party identification, strength of ideology, and education.
While the results in Table 1 indicate some variation in the effect of tabloid coverage, tests using interaction terms indicate that these variations are not statistically significant.
It is important to clarify that elite messages in the political world may be simply pointing out negativity, horserace, tabloid coverage or other pathologies in news content. Theorizing that attitudes toward the press are shaped by opinion leadership does not deny flaws in media coverage. However, when flaws in media behavior are noticed only when elite opinion leaders point them out, the causal mechanism is opinion leadership.
However, some people may consume little media coverage directly, but hear about prominent news stories from friends. For these individuals, the treatments may be a realistic recreation of their typical exposure to news.
These phenomena could possibly lead to either an underestimate as an overestimate of the effects. On the one hand, merely being reminded of a type of news report is a weaker treatment (in other words, a smaller dosage) than consuming such a report directly, possibly leading to downwardly biased treatment effects. On the other hand, if effects fade somewhat over time, this could lead to upward bias.
Lichter and Noyes (1996, pp. 274–280) make a similar argument, while placing special emphasis on the need for campaign coverage that allows the public to interact more directly with candidates and their campaigns.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Doris Graber, Gabriel Lenz, and participants in the Georgetown Political Economy Faculty Seminar for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper and Georgetown University for financial support. All remaining errors are my own.
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Appendix: Question Wordings
Appendix: Question Wordings
Question 1. (Respondents are randomly assigned to receive one of six different versions of Question 1)
Version A: “We are interested in how well the news media gets information out to the public. There are so many news stories these days that most people have trouble following them all. We want to ask about some stories the news media has reported to see if you happened to hear about them. Recently, the media has reported stories that criticize both President Bush and the Democrats in Congress. Have you heard these stories?”
Version B: “We are interested in how well the news media gets information out to the public. There are so many news stories these days that most people have trouble following them all. We want to ask about some stories the news media has reported to see if you happened to hear about them. Recently, the media has reported on President Bush’s standing in opinion polls, especially when his popularity has increased and decreased. Have you heard these stories?”
Version C: “We are interested in how well the news media gets information out to the public. There are so many news stories these days that most people have trouble following them all. We want to ask about a story the news media has reported to see if you happened to hear about it. Recently, the media has reported on the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Have you heard this story?”
Version D: “We are interested in how well the news media gets information out to the public. There are so many news stories these days that most people have trouble following them all. We want to ask about a story the news media has reported to see if you happened to hear about it. Recently, Republican politicians have criticized the media for being overly critical of President Bush. Have you heard this story?”
Version E: “We are interested in how well the news media gets information out to the public. There are so many news stories these days that most people have trouble following them all. We want to ask about a story the news media has reported to see if you happened to hear about it. Recently, Democratic politicians have criticized the media for being too friendly with President Bush. Have you heard this story?”
Version F: “We are interested in how well the news media gets information out to the public. There are so many news stories these days that most people have trouble following them all. Have you been following stories in the news media recently?”
Answers:
Yes
No
Question 2. (Respondents are shown a number box with range 0-100)
“We’d like you to rate the news media on a scale we call a ‘feeling thermometer.’ It runs from 0 to 100 degrees. Ratings between 50 degrees and 100 degrees mean that you feel favorable toward the news media. Ratings between 0 degrees and 50 degrees mean that you feel unfavorable toward the news media. If you don’t feel particularly favorable or unfavorable toward the news media, you would rate them at the 50 degree mark. How would you rate the news media on this scale? You can use any number between 0 and 100 to indicate how favorable or unfavorable you feel.”
Answers:
0–100
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Ladd, J.M. The Neglected Power of Elite Opinion Leadership to Produce Antipathy Toward the News Media: Evidence from a Survey Experiment. Polit Behav 32, 29–50 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-009-9097-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-009-9097-x