Local Media and Experts: Sources of Environmental Policy Initiation?

Research on the process of policy change often involves a direct or indirect analysis of the roles of policy entrepreneurs and the mass media. In Colorado, beginning in 1998, twelve communities decided to obtain water rights for recreational in-channel purposes such as kayaking and whitewater rafting. These water rights stirred political controversy within some communities in Colorado related to spending public money, appropriate uses of water, and the role of recreation in local economies. Using a comparative case study research method, this research analyzes the role that policy entrepreneurs and local media coverage of recreational water rights played in initiating policy change in local communities. The most critical finding from this study is that in communities where citizens acted as policy entrepreneurs there was more controversy, less positive media coverage, and more media coverage early in the process. This case contradicts the assumption that local media coverage helps to highlight policy problems within communities. It supports the idea that experts wield higher levels of influence than citizens in promoting policy agendas.     

Putting on the Brakes or Pressing on the Gas? Media Attention and the Speed of Policymaking

Media attention is fundamental to the policy process and policy change in punctuated equilibrium theory. In this literature, media attention is usually conceptualized as fomenting or contributing to shifts in attention, positive feedback, and large‐scale policy change. This article extends how we understand the role of the media and punctuated equilibrium by arguing that media coverage can also contribute to negative feedback and stability in the political system. Media attention should also slow down the speed of policymaking and the momentum for policy change as new policy participants and problem definitions enter the debate. Using event history analysis, this article tests the effects of media coverage on the length of time it takes legislation, once introduced, to become law for public laws from the 109th U.S. Congress (2005–06). Findings provide support for media attention “putting the brakes” on policymaking. Controlling for other factors, the speed of bill passage slows down as media attention increases. This effect decays over time for high levels of media coverage.     

From Blind Spot to Media Spotlight: Propaganda Policy,Media Activism and the Emergence of Protest Events in the Chinese Public Sphere

Abstract

In recent years, popular protest in China has emerged from a state of near-invisibility. Drawing on a diachronic analysis of news media coverage, this paper traces how a number of major protest events gradually entered the Chinese media’s spotlight and came to be portrayed in an increasingly protester-sympathising fashion over the course of the Hu-Wen administration. It argues that these changes were triggered by structural transformations of the Chinese public sphere, but underlines that deliberate policy choices by the political leadership served as a crucial agent of change. Facing proliferating unrest and an increasingly unimpeded flow of information, the central authorities have gradually shifted propaganda policy from a suppressive to a more proactive approach. They have thereby created critical opportunities for Internet users and investigative journalists to push the envelope further towards protester-sympathising accounts. The development is significant as there are good reasons to surmise that increased media coverage has exacerbated the dynamics of popular contention. Theoretically, it deserves to be noted that non-inevitable choices by an authoritarian leadership have led to an outcome in which media coverage of citizens who challenge the state on the streets has become substantially more frequent and positive than before.     

Digital not diversity? Changing Aboriginal media policy at the National Film Board of Canada

Using Canada’s National Film Board (NFB) as a case study, this paper highlights a paradigm shift in media policy away from supporting diverse content in favor of new digital formats. Historically the NFB has supported Aboriginal media production as a hallmark of the institution’s founding commitment to representing Canada’s people and culture. However, in recent years the institution has shifted its focus to digital technologies and interactive productions. This research is rooted in both a quantitative and qualitative examination of NFB official reports and related press coverage. The examination demonstrates a decrease in emphasis on Aboriginal production and an increase in attention to new technologies.     

A news flow analysis of the sale of a public asset

As the marketplace approach to economic regulation swept through New Zealand in the late 1980s and early 1990s many new business opportunities were created. The deregulation of the electricity industry resulted in Utilicorp, a United States‐based utility holding company, entering into a joint venture with Waikato Electric Corporation in Hamilton, New Zealand. The public felt betrayed by the sale of a former public asset and a media crisis event was born. This study examines the crisis event from its historical origins and conducts a content analysis of the media coverage of the crisis. Waikato Electric and Utilicorp both underestimated the potential for public backlash to what appears on its face to be an excellent business opportunity. The Waikato Times assumed an adversarial role in this public controversy and sustained the coverage of this community crisis to effect change in the proposed merger.     

Are All Policy Decisions Equal? Explaining the Variation in Media Coverage of the UK Budget

A country's budget is one of the most important public policy instruments, as it establishes the government's policy priorities and has the potential to determine winners and losers. The budget, however, is a mixture of different components and these get varying degrees of attention in the media. Drawing on sociology of news research, this paper seeks to explain this heterogeneous coverage of a budget's policy decisions. To do so, it uses a unique data set of over 5,000 articles of press coverage of six UK budgets (2008–2012). These articles are coded for the presence/absence of each of the budget's policy decision, via automated content analysis. On the basis of a multivariate negative binomial model, we find that the salience of a policy decision in the coverage is determined by its cost, whether it is negative (i.e., tax hikes and spending cuts) or positive, the income group that is the most affected by it, and the level of attention given to it by the government.     

Challenging a Terrorist Tag in the Media: Framing the Politics of Resistance and an Iranian Opposition Group

Scholars have shown that media framing has a powerful effect on citizen perception and policy debates. Research has provided less insight into the ability of marginalized actors to promote their preferred frames in the media in a dynamic political context. The efforts of an exiled Iranian opposition group to get its name removed from official terror lists in the United States, United Kingdom, and EU provides a valuable platform to examine this problem. Using content analysis, I explore how the group promoted its frames in the opinion sections of major world news publications over nine years (2003–2012). I then examine the extent to which journalists aligned to its frames, as opposed to rival official frames, over time in the larger arena of news. The results support research showing that by nurturing small opportunities, marginalized political actors can expand media capacity and influence, but these effects are mediated at least in part by critical or focusing events that make rival frames less salient. The study sheds light on the complex relationship between activists, the government, and the media. It has implications for the ability of marginalized political actors to get their frames into public discourse. It also has implications for terror tagging and media coverage of other controversial issues.     

Capturing Curiosity: Using Internet Search Trends to Measure Public Attentiveness

While scholars have made great strides in formulating theories and measuring public attention, “most important problem” and media‐based indicators are less than ideal measures. In order to address this shortcoming, this article borrows from health‐care epidemiology to measure public attention based on Internet search trends. In doing so, it reviews the innovative ways in which scientists have used search activity to track the spread of infectious disease, discusses the ease and flexibility with which search data can be gathered, and then subjects a Google‐based search measure to a series of validity tests. In particular, the analysis subjects the proposed measure to a battery of visual and statistical tests for convergent validity by comparing it with the most commonly used media‐based measure of public attention—issue coverage in the New York Times. Across a range of policy issues (health care, global warming, and terrorism), the proposed measure demonstrates convergent validity. The article concludes by posing a series of important questions that the new measure will allow researchers to address.     

Framing the Poor: Media Coverage and U.S. Poverty Policy, 1960–2008

Public policy toward the poor has shifted from an initial optimism during the War on Poverty to an ever‐increasing pessimism. Media discussion of poverty has shifted from arguments that focus on the structural causes of poverty or the social costs of having large numbers of poor to portrayals of the poor as cheaters and chiselers and of welfare programs doing more harm than good. As the frames have shifted, policies have followed. We demonstrate these trends with new indicators of the depth of poverty, the generosity of the government response, and media framing of the poor for the period of 1960–2008. We present a simple statistical model that explains poverty spending by the severity of the problem, gross domestic product, and media coverage. We then create a new measure of the relative generosity of U.S. government policy toward the poor and show that it is highly related to the content of newspaper stories. The portrayal of the poor as either deserving or lazy drives public policy.     

Assessing Presidential Agenda-Setting Capacity: Dynamic Comparisons of Presidential,Mass Media,and Public Attention to Economic Issues

Research on presidential agenda setting has rarely attempted to simultaneously assess the ability of the president to influence the policy agendas of the mass media and the public. This is primarily due to the lack of time-refined measures of public issue attention. With advances in technology, information about Internet search engine behavior can provide an indication of the level of interest the public has over time about specific issues. Using Google Trends weekly data about public search interest levels, this project contrasts dynamic attention to several economic issues: unemployment, recession, and inflation. The vector autoregression analyses performed suggest the president does not have the capacity to directly guide public attention, nor does the president have the capacity to indirectly guide public attention through the media. There is some indication that the president can indirectly guide public attention by influencing actual economic conditions, and that the president is responsive to attention from the mass media and the public. The moving-average representation analyses indicate that an increase in presidential attention has the potential to produce a small contemporaneous increase in either mass media or public attention to some economic issues. The duration of these positive shifts in mass media or public attention are all very brief, indicating the president has a limited capacity through either direct or indirect leadership to sustain the attention other actors in the political system place on the specific issues studied. Strong evidence in all three of the issue areas studied supports that mass media attention and public attention are closely related.     

Legitimacy and Public Policy: Seeing Beyond Effectiveness,Efficiency, and Performance

Studies of failure typically assess public policies through the lenses of effectiveness, efficiency, and performance. Here I wish to propose a further dimension to the evaluation and assessment of policy failure—legitimacy. The substantive elements of public policies and the procedural steps taken by authoritative decision makers during the policy cycle affect the perception of policy legitimacy held by both stakeholders and the public. In substantive terms, policy content should align with the dominant attitudes of the affected policy community and, ideally, the broader public. Procedurally, factors such as policy incubation, the emotive appeals deployed to gain support for an initiative, and the processes of stakeholder engagement shape the legitimacy of public policies and the governments who promote them. This argument is based on a comparison of education reform in two Canadian provinces during the 1990s. Governments in Alberta and Ontario pursued common agendas of education reform, but while Alberta achieved success, the Ontario government experienced a series of setbacks and lost the support of education stakeholders and the public. The root of Ontario's failures lies in the realm of legitimacy. These findings highlight the fact that the strategies used for enacting policy change may fail to bring about the necessary consensus among societal actors to sustain a new policy direction and calls attention to our need to better understand how governments can achieve meaningful public participation while still achieving legislative success in an efficient fashion.     

Public Problem Characterization,Policy Solution Generation,and Intra‐Agenda Connectivity

While policy agenda studies have extensively examined the interplays of various venues, one under‐explored area is the internal dynamics within an agenda venue. In this study, we focus on one of the important venues—news media—and investigate the inherent connections between how a public problem is characterized and how problem solutions are generated in media agenda setting. Drawing on agenda‐setting theories, we develop a typology to theorize the relationships between problem characterization and solution advocacy, and use a news dataset on climate change to empirically assess how issue characterization affects issue solution generation. Our logistic regressions demonstrate that the likelihoods of climate change policy solutions being proposed in the news are significantly influenced by how the media stories characterize the issue along four key attribute dimensions: issue image, scope, linkage, and narrative style. Key implications are discussed in the conclusion.     

News Photographs and Environmental Agenda Setting

Who and what influences the issues that policymakers attend to is central to the question of how power is exercised in politics. This study builds upon research by Soroka that proposes an expanded model of agenda setting as a means to examine how the media influences issue salience for the public and policymakers. It expands on Soroka's model by investigating the hypothesis that photographic attention to environmental issues in the news media influences issue salience for the mass public and governmental decision makers. There is little research that substantiates the idea, but it is widely believed that photographs have influence on the policy agenda. I use a dynamic, multidirectional model to estimate whether the volume of news photographs, in addition to news stories, influences issue salience among the mass public and policymakers. Data are longitudinal and measures of attention are operationalized as the number of congressional committee meetings, concern for the environment as a “most important problem” in public opinion polls, environmental news stories in The New York Times, and environmental news photographs in Time magazine. Results suggest that photographic attention does influence environmental policy agenda dynamics in some counterintuitive ways that are distinct from the effects of the news stories. While news stories appear to increase public attention toward the environment, they have little influence on policymaker attention. News photographs, on the other hand, appear to drive congressional committee attention but elicit an ambivalent public response.     

Peace Protest and Policy

The tremendous fluctuations in public mobilization against United States nuclear weapons policy, a relatively stable policy over four decades, present a difficult riddle to social scientists. Since the dawn of the nuclear age small groups of activists have consistently protested both the content of United States national security policy and the process by which it is made. Only occasionally, however, has this protest spread beyond a handful of relatively marginal groups, generated substantial public support, and reached mainstream political institutions. This article examines the political cycles of peace movement engagement and quiescence, and their relation to external political context, particularly public policy. I begin with a brief review of the relevant literature on the origins of the movements, noting parallels in the study of interest groups. Building on recent literature on political opportunity structure. I suggest a theoretical framework which emphasizes the interaction between activists choices and political context. I then describe the cycles of peace movement activism and quiescence on nuclear weapons issues in the United States using mass media sources to delineate periods of mobilization. I outline a number of policy variables which may help explain protest mobilization. My conclusions address the importance of policy and political context in explaining movement cycles and the potential influence of protest movements on policy.     

Giving Girls a Shot: An Examination of Mandatory Vaccination Legislation

On June 8, 2006, the Food and Drug Administration approved Merck & Co.'s vaccine Gardasil, which protects women from the human papillomavirus (HPV). Twenty‐four states began entertaining initiatives that would make the vaccine mandatory for all fifth‐ and sixth‐grade girls in public schools. However, as the vaccine gained traction in the media, the dominant issue frame put forth by Merck & Co. was undermined by several competing morality concerns raised by citizens in newspaper opinion pieces. Using an analysis of selected media coverage and a logit analysis modeling the influence of competing morality, economic, and public‐health determinants on states' decision making, we investigate the ascent of issue salience surrounding the HPV vaccine, and the policy consideration process. The results from the analysis indicate that citizen‐initiated opposition increased the salience of the topic and changed the issue framing in which the mandatory vaccine legislation was being considered. State policy consideration was influenced by a mix of morality and public‐health determinants. Moreover, Merck's attempts to influence state policy failed to increase the likelihood of policy consideration.     

Elections,Policy and the Media: Tasmania's Forests and the 2004 Federal Election

Much of the academic literature holds the media responsible for the proliferation of the game frame as a way of reporting on elections. This paper challenges that view through an examination of media coverage of forest policy in the 2004 federal election. The study of articles published in three major broadsheets finds that the majority of stories were set within the game frame, which depicts elections as sporting contests, and that far fewer articles focused on the issue. The lack of interest in policy is characteristic of election reporting but, in this case, can be attributed to the way in which the major parties managed their campaigns. Not only did they drive the game frame but, as policy makers, they also determined the frame within which the limited media consideration of policy substance was set. The article concludes that political actors must take at least some responsibility for the domination of the game frame in election reporting.     

European Union External Trade Policy: Multilevel Principal–Agent Relationships

This article examines the potential political influences on European Union (EU) external trade policymaking. Given the EU's volume of international trade and its extensive involvement in bilateral and multilateral trade arrangements, a better understanding of how the EU makes external trade policy is increasingly important. It is an extremely complex process—involving the EU public, the 25 member states' parliaments and governments, and the institutions of the EU, including the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, and the European Commission. It is a system of multilevel governance with overlapping jurisdictions with numerous potential access points for societal interests to influence European external trade policy. In this article, we evaluate the probable political channels that societal interests could use to influence EU external trade policy. We employ the principal–agent (P–A) framework to examine five of the more important P–A relationships that are likely to influence EU external trade policymaking. We conclude that EU policymaking as it pertains to external trade is quite insulated from general public pressures. The primary institutions involved in external trade policymaking are the EU Council of Ministers and the Commission—both of which are largely insulated from the public. Future empirical work should focus on this relationship between the Council of Ministers and the Commission.     

Slanted Newspaper Coverage of Immigration: The Importance of Economics and Geography

When compared to studies of media effects, relatively few studies of the media focus on factors that influence the behavior of media organizations. Specifically, there are few empirical studies of the attributes and incentives of news organizations that might lead to slanted coverage of particular policy issues. In this study, we identify factors that lead to negatively slanted coverage of a specific policy issue: immigration. Using content analysis, geographic information systems (GIS) data, and contextual data, we find that newspaper ownership and proximity to the U.S.–Mexico border are related to slant in news articles and opinion pieces regarding immigration.     

Where are the women? Evaluating visibility of Nigerian female politicians in news media space

This study examines the spatial representation of Nigerian women politicians in the news media of Africa’s most populous country. Through a content analysis of newspaper coverage of four high-profile women politicians during the 2015 electoral cycle, the study investigates the visibility of the women in three national newspapers. The analysis shows that women do not only occupy limited space in the news media but are also marginalised in political news despite decades of advocacy for gender equality. Although women have become more active politically since the end of military dictatorship in 1999, their participation and engagement in politics is not reflected in media coverage. The study argues that the degree of visibility of women in political news entrenches marginalisation and reinforces assumptions that ‘only men do politics.’ From this standpoint, the study illustrates how newspapers reinforce patriarchal understanding of politics and consequently highlights the manifest and latent obstacles that women encounter in the political arena. It comes to the conclusion that the relative absence of women in media spaces is emblematic of public perception of their political status.