How Media Decides Which Stories Are News, How to Tell Them, and What That Means for the 330 Million People Whose Political Reality Is Shaped by Those Decisions
How Media Decides Which Stories Are News, How to Tell Them, and What That Means for the 330 Million People Whose Political Reality Is Shaped by Those Decisions
The Press: Democracy’s Immune System, Currently Under Stress
The free press holds a unique position in American democracy: it is the only private institution explicitly protected by the Constitution. The First Amendment’s press clause was not an accident. The founders understood that an informed citizenry required information, that government would prefer to provide only flattering information, and that an independent press was necessary to provide the rest. They were right. The free press has exposed government corruption, military failures, corporate fraud, police misconduct, and political scandals that the relevant institutions had strong incentives to conceal. Watergate was broken by journalists. The Pentagon Papers were published by newspapers. Abu Ghraib was exposed by reporters. The surveillance programs revealed by Snowden were published by major newspapers after careful editorial deliberation. The press, at its best, is genuinely the fourth estate – an unofficial check on official power that the constitutional design acknowledged without incorporating.
The press, at its worst, is a commercial enterprise optimized for audience retention in a fragmented media environment, producing content calibrated to emotional engagement rather than informational value, covering politics as a sport (who’s winning, who’s losing, who made a gaffe) rather than as a policy process (what are they proposing, what would it do, who would benefit). The distance between the best and the worst of American journalism is vast, and both exist simultaneously, often in the same publication, occasionally on the same page. The press is not a monolith. It is a very large collection of very different organizations with very different incentives, quality standards, editorial cultures, and relationships to the truth. Treating it as a single institution – either heroically defending democracy or conspiratorially undermining it – is itself a misunderstanding that some portion of the press has helped produce by presenting itself in both of those terms at different times.
Agenda-Setting: The Power to Decide What Counts as News
Media scholars in the 1960s and 1970s developed the theory of agenda-setting: the press may not tell people what to think, but it is strikingly successful at telling people what to think about. The stories that receive prominent coverage become the issues voters consider most important. The issues that receive no coverage do not become salient, regardless of their actual importance. This power – to determine which problems exist in the public consciousness and which do not – is exercised every day by editorial decisions that are made by a relatively small number of people in a relatively small number of newsrooms, with consequences that ripple through the entire political system.
The agenda-setting power is not exercised neutrally. News organizations cover what is new, dramatic, conflictual, and involving recognizable names and faces. This means that politics is covered heavily (conflictual, involves recognizable names), governance is covered lightly (procedural, involves anonymous bureaucrats), and policy consequences – the actual effects of laws on actual people – are covered least of all, because consequences are diffuse, slow, and difficult to attribute to specific decisions in ways that make compelling television. A president signing a bill is news. The bill’s effects on healthcare outcomes three years later is a policy wonk’s interest and a network television producer’s nightmare. The result is a press corps that is excellent at covering politics and variable at covering government, which produces voters who know a great deal about who is winning and relatively little about what is being done.
Framing: It’s Not Just What You Cover, It’s How
Beyond agenda-setting, media scholars have documented the power of framing: the way a story is presented shapes how audiences interpret it. Immigration can be framed as an economic issue (immigrants contribute to GDP, fill labor shortages, start businesses), a security issue (border enforcement, criminal activity, national sovereignty), a humanitarian issue (asylum seekers fleeing violence, family separation, human rights), or a cultural issue (demographic change, language, social cohesion). Each frame is factually defensible. Each activates different values and produces different policy preferences. The frame chosen by a media organization reflects, and reinforces, a particular understanding of what the issue is fundamentally about.
Framing effects are powerful and persistent. Experimental studies consistently find that the same policy produces different levels of support depending on how it is described. Tax cuts framed as “”relief for hard-working Americans”” produce higher support than the same cuts framed as “”benefits for the wealthy.”” Crime policy framed in terms of public safety produces different responses than the same policy framed in terms of racial justice. Campaigns understand this and invest heavily in establishing favorable frames before opponents can establish unfavorable ones. Media organizations, consciously or not, adopt frames that reflect their editorial cultures, their audience expectations, and the sources they rely on most heavily, which are frequently official sources – government officials, credentialed experts, established institutions – whose own framing preferences thereby shape media coverage more than any overt editorial decision. The press is independent of government in its institutional structure. It is less fully independent of government’s framing power than the First Amendment’s authors might have hoped.
The Business Model Problem: Why Good Journalism Is Hard to Fund
Quality journalism is expensive. Investigative reporting requires time – months or years – before producing publishable results. Foreign correspondents cost money. Data analysis, document review, and source development require resources. These costs were historically cross-subsidized by classified advertising, which provided newspapers with revenue streams that had nothing to do with journalism quality. The internet eliminated classified advertising. Craigslist, Zillow, and LinkedIn did to newspaper classified sections what the meteorite did to the dinosaurs: quickly, completely, and without apparent remorse.
The resulting business model crisis has produced a collapse in local journalism – the sector that most directly covers the government decisions most affecting daily life – and a concentration of surviving journalism in national outlets competing for national audiences with national political content. Local government corruption, school board decisions, municipal budget crises, zoning disputes, police department management – the stories that affect most people most directly – receive diminishing coverage as local newsrooms shrink or close. National political coverage expands to fill the attention space. The result is a public that knows more about national politics, which it can influence only marginally through individual votes, and less about local governance, which it could influence substantially through local engagement but increasingly cannot because the information infrastructure for that engagement has been defunded by the structural economics of digital media. The free press is constitutionally protected. It is not economically protected. The Constitution’s authors, who were themselves journalists and pamphlet publishers, could not have anticipated the advertising model, its destruction, or the consequences for the democratic function they were protecting. They were smart men. They had their limits.
SOURCE: The London Prat