23/07: The President and the Media
Category: American History and Politics
Posted by: an okie gardener
This summer I have been teaching an American Government course for the first time in my life. The book, ordered by the university for all adjunct classes, is Government in America: People, Politics, and Policy, brief 8th edition, by Edwards, Wattenberg, Lineberry, published by Pearson Longman. By and large I think it is a good text.
Every so often the authors will write something that surprises me. That is, it surprises me to find it in an academic textbook. Take these two paragraphs from the chapter on the presidency.
We learned in Chapter 6 that the news is fundamentally superficial, oversimplified, and often overblown, all of which provides the public with a distorted view of, among other things, presidential activities, statements, policies, and options. We have also seen that the press prefers to frame the news in themes, which both simplifies complex issues and events and provides continuity of persons, institutions, and issues. Once these themes are established, the press tends to maintain them in subsequent stories. Of necessity, themes emphasize some information at the expense of other data, often determining what information is most relevant to news coverage and the context in which it is presented.
. . .
News coverage of the presidency often tends to emphasize the negative (even if the negative stories are presented in a seemingly neutral manner), a trend that has increased over the past 20 years. In the 1980 election campaign, the press portrayed President Carter as mean and Ronald Reagan as imprecise rather than Carter as precise and Reagan as pleasant. The emphasis, in other words, was on the candidates' negative qualities. George Bush received extraordinarily negative press coverage during the 1992 election campaign, and the television networks' portrayal of the economy, for which Bush was blamed, got worse as the economy actually improved to a robust rate of growth!
So, the next time you are arguing media bias with liberal friends, you need not quote Rush. Instead quote these political scientists.
Every so often the authors will write something that surprises me. That is, it surprises me to find it in an academic textbook. Take these two paragraphs from the chapter on the presidency.
We learned in Chapter 6 that the news is fundamentally superficial, oversimplified, and often overblown, all of which provides the public with a distorted view of, among other things, presidential activities, statements, policies, and options. We have also seen that the press prefers to frame the news in themes, which both simplifies complex issues and events and provides continuity of persons, institutions, and issues. Once these themes are established, the press tends to maintain them in subsequent stories. Of necessity, themes emphasize some information at the expense of other data, often determining what information is most relevant to news coverage and the context in which it is presented.
. . .
News coverage of the presidency often tends to emphasize the negative (even if the negative stories are presented in a seemingly neutral manner), a trend that has increased over the past 20 years. In the 1980 election campaign, the press portrayed President Carter as mean and Ronald Reagan as imprecise rather than Carter as precise and Reagan as pleasant. The emphasis, in other words, was on the candidates' negative qualities. George Bush received extraordinarily negative press coverage during the 1992 election campaign, and the television networks' portrayal of the economy, for which Bush was blamed, got worse as the economy actually improved to a robust rate of growth!
So, the next time you are arguing media bias with liberal friends, you need not quote Rush. Instead quote these political scientists.
A Waco Farmer wrote:
I think those passages fit in with the systemic biases toward conflict, scandal and crisis inherent within the mainstream media (which we have talked about here in the past).
However, our conservative friends are most likely to complain about the liberal bias of the MSM. Any good excerpts on that?