Press Bias and PoliticsHow the Media Frame Controversial Issues By Jim Kuypers |
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Book Review Outside of Academia, a harsh and seemingly ever-growing debate has appeared, concerning how the mass media is distorting the political agenda. More specifically, the intensified nature of this debate has been built up during the last decade. It was fuelled by an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on February 15, 1996, when Bernard Goldberg, an experienced CBS news reporter who had worked at the network for 23 years, stepped forward. Goldberg argued that the media bias was clearly visible and used an example from his own network to prove his case: During the primary elections Steve Forbes’ flat tax proposal was being the subject of ridicule rather than fair treatment when CBS aired a story by Goldberg’s colleague Eric Engberg. Three tax experts where being interviewed by Engberg. None of them had anything good to say about the flat tax. Engberg concluded that if Forbes was so keen on introducing the flat tax in the U.S. he should at least try it out somewhere safe first, for example in Albania. Engberg’s story could have been nothing more than bad and unbalanced news reporting. If so, we could all leave it at that and declare any further discussion of no interest. But in accordance with Goldberg’s argument as well as the theory of media bias, Engberg’s coverage of the flat tax was just one example of how a certain pattern of political correctness influences the ways in which news are being portrayed. Goldberg’s charges about a consequent liberal bias in the elite media became apparent when he five years later published his book Bias, written as an overview of his own experiences from the field of journalism. It released an array of criticism against the major broadcasting networks and, most of all, the CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather. The debate over the soundness of Goldberg’s argument soon followed. A number of books where being released on the subject at the same time, some more substantial – Coloring the News by William McGowan – and some less so – David Brock’s Blinded by the right? and Ann Coulter’s Slander: liberal lies about the American right. A recent contribution to the less serious part of the spectrum has been Al Franken’s bestseller LIES And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. At least one thing is clear – the media industry and its potential to mislead and persuade is a given bestseller recipe for seemingly any author. However, whistle-blowers aren’t appreciated by their peers. And the stigma that appears in the wake of Goldberg’s and other journalists’ charges only seem to make it even harder to abridge the differences they focus on. It is therefore of great value when scientists try to outline the critique and use it to establish a more thorough examination of the way a media society acts. Scientific evaluations have to start off where the public debate over political leanings in the elite media ends. This is also the purpose of Jim A. Kuypers’ book. The pivotal problem at hand is two-fold: it delivers both a democratic dilemma as well as a predicament of journalist ethics. The very foundation for deliberative democratic processes – the mass media – pose an imminent threat to the way in which politics is being played out. However, the task of trying to pursue evaluations about media bias is not an easy one. Anyone who wants to make use of bias examples as tools for reasoning within the discipline of media theory has to face the fact that the structuralist paradigm already besieges the field. Ever since Walter Lippmann first analyzed the media society and its streamlined manufacture of consent (Lippmann, 1922), media theories have been dominated by structural theory. The established liberal principle, the freedom of the press, has become questioned by those who stress that the media industry only focuses on fabricated stories. The term “pseudo-events”, coined by Daniel Boorstin (Boorstin, 1962) is nowadays more or less a catch-phrase among media critics. The most important part of the Lippmann tradition is the ever-present economic reasoning. Edward Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent – still an undisputed classic in its field – make use of economic theory to explain the mechanisms which make mainstream media mainstream. Their structural view and conclusions are apparently easy to understand. Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda model unravel the forces which govern the media’s reporting, including the importance of profit and the concentration of ownership, the influence of the advertisers, the alliances with political interests and dichotomisation for the purpose of selling news (Herman and Chomsky 1988). A mutual dependence between the elites in society is created in this way. This research approach is congruent with a number of well established media critics, for example Robert McChesney and Ben Badgikian. They too, argue that our main concern must be the understanding of how strong media conglomerates are able to use their power to influence the political agenda (McChesney, 1999; Bagdikian, 2000). But such a perspective lacks one important thing – the ability to provide casual explanations. The media filters and economic incentives in these kinds of theories can’t be confirmed to have any real connection with the empirical material they analyze. They might, for all we know, just deal with a number of deviant cases. Pierre Bourdieu points to the doubt inherent in the structural perspective (Bourdieu 1998): “What happens on TF1 cannot be explained simply by the fact that it is owned by the Bouygues holding company. […] This half-baked version of materialism, associated with Marxism, condemns without shedding light anywhere and ultimately explains nothing.” Whether these so-called media critical theories are in fact providing a critical assessment is highly debateable, since they all charge structural determinism. If structures can’t be altered in any way it is questionable whether their theory can be said to be a part of a critical analysis. It seems as if they are more empirically oriented but tend to fall into the naturalist fallacy of Hume’s fork. To the extent that we want to find strong casual examinations, it is reasonable to argue that the structuralist view is at least anything but flawless. It is in this scientific field, where theories like the structural views have a vast reputation, that we have to relate a theory of media bias – mainly because it to some extent shares some traits from the structural perspective. Media bias can be said to exist because of two different processes. First of all, it can be the product of economic and institutional constraints from the process of efficiently delivering news to a broad audience. The second cause of a media bias can be derived from political partisanship among the media collective – journalists and media industry executives. Obviously, this opens up for a more diversified theoretical challenge, where an actor-structure-agency model in many cases becomes the ontological foundation for the scope of analysis. The introduction of actors in bias theory makes the analysis to a large degree more plausible, at least if we want to pursue micro-macro relations and actually provide evidence for how certain stories are being portrayed. The micro-macro relation is therefore a key part in such an analysis. In much the same manner as the manufacturing consent theory Jim A. Kyupers notes, referring to studies made by Irving Kristol, that there is an important symbiosis between the national press and the political elite. However, far from the Chomskyan perspective, Kuypers raises important arguments about how we may have to limit the implications of such a relationship between established political elites. Kuypers states that even though a vast majority of journalists in the United States declare to be pro-Democrats, this doesn’t imply that they can’t take part in fair and balanced news reporting. Nevertheless, Kuypers concludes that he is working out of a hypothesis that there exists a norm of liberal bias in the media. Press Bias and Politics is written as a case study where Kuypers thoroughly examines the media’s (mostly the press) attention concerning controversial issues about race and homosexuality in the United States. The author also provides earnest discussions about motives and implications. The first chapter serves as an introduction to the field of agenda-setting and research about public opinion and media manipulation. Kuypers starts off his argument about the general importance of political communication research by claiming that communication is intimately connected with persuasion. Citizens who want to be informed about society matters are ultimately subjects to a debate over controversial issues – and the media serves as our main information outlet. Since the political debate over morally intricate questions may provoke a more heated debate Kuypers hopes to find more illustrative empirical examples to evaluate in accordance with a premise of a biased media. Media bias is to a large extent a distinct section of the general agenda-setting literature. This becomes evident when Kuypers discusses his empirical examples. The agenda-setting theory has highlighted the fact that mass media deals with two distinct features – priming and framing. The media power is not so much about telling people what to think (framing), but rather to tell people what to think about (priming) (McCombs and Shaw 1972). In the long run, when a certain political issue already is confirmed as a top notch priority, the effects of framing are nevertheless of utmost importance. To Kuypers, like so many others concerned with media bias, the selection of the issues which become publicly debated is of less importance than how the nature of the debate about the issues on the political agenda actually turns out. Such a narrow approach makes the bias perspective a target for a number of methodological remarks. As many scientists have noted, when journalists frame political events strategically, they activate existing beliefs and understandings; they do not need to create them (Capella and Jamieson 1997). The empirical part of Press Bias and Politics starts off with an examination of the Alabama Senator Charles Davison’s speech in May 9, 1996 about the The Confederate battle flag, a speech which was unanimously scrutinized by the press. With the analytical tools from framing theory and discourse analysis Kuypers presents the case. It is an unusually clarifying report where Kuypers lets the reader see the difference between news articles, opinion essays and editorials, and how they all blend into one congruent ideological frame. He goes on by contrasting this form of media attention with the case of President Clinton’s Initiative on Race, on June 14, 1997 where the press subscribed to Clinton’s line of reasoning in their news reports. The following chapters analyze public speeches on race and homosexuality made by Louis Farrakhan and Reggie White and how they in their turn were being positioned on the political arena by the media. The final chapters with empirical examples deal with Senator Trent Lott’s and President Clinton’s perception of homosexuality and their way of being able to deal with the attention from the press on these issues. Every empirical chapter stands for itself and after every descriptive part Kuypers asks questions about how the politician in question framed the issue and how this frame was able to co-exist with the media’s ideological frame. The general idea is that President Clinton’s framing of political issues went well together with the journalists who reported on the matter whereas Conservative politicians faced a much harder test. In the final chapter, Kuypers presents a general view together with some concluding remarks about how to better understand the findings of bias in the media. Although the agenda-setting discussions which Kuypers refers to are of great importance, a bias discussion can’t afford to avoid the significance of a much wider, democratic theory perspective: What is the purpose of the press and the broadcasting networks, and why does the news collective have to act in a certain way? Many studies about media bias barely raise important distinctions about these normative matters, and this is unfortunately also the case in Press Bias and Politics. Theories which analyze questions about public opinion ultimately have to be concerned with some form of democratic theory. Since the examinations in Press Bias and Politics handle strong normative aspects of how to analyze public opinion they too would benefit from a more eclectic theoretical view. Some assumptions are left to their own devices when Kuypers focuses on the construction of political frames, text analysis and discourse analysis. The contextual part of the evaluation seems to lack some of the political implications a study like this might be able to present: Political speeches aren’t being held in a societal vacuum. They are a part of a more complex political context where different actors have to be able to fit in. And maybe even more important – political agendas change over time. The selected cases, as illustrating as they are, would therefore gain a lot if they were accompanied by a more general evaluation of the political context in which politicians can be hailed or scrutinized by the press. We need to be aware of the fact that bad reviews don’t necessarily demote a political candidate, nor does a more general negative trend in the reporting of an issue appear to indicate that the electors might be misled (Norris 2000). Such an analysis is altogether too simplistic. Negative news about political representatives, for example the focus on President Clinton’s extra-marital affairs, may even have increased electoral support for him (Norris 2000). Even though the public debate today face a much stronger impact from the news media, what is described in terms of mediation, it seems as if we also have entered a meta-discursive phase, in which coverage of political scandals is inseparable from that of policy-substance (McNair 2000). It would be reasonable to conclude that this, in effect, has as much to do with the framing of an issue as the real news reporting itself at any given time. To the methodological evaluation of Press Bias and Politics the illustrative cases quite naturally become the most important part. Like any qualitative case-based research, it is hard to draw a more generalized conclusion from the findings in a few scenarios. It is possible that inconsistencies in the news make us focus on deviant cases rather than universal tendencies and even though Kuypers opens up for such explanations he eventually limits his scope to general discussions about how the press may frame a political statement. Regardless of what might be beneficial supplementary chapters to a study of this kind, Press Bias and Politics has the analytical strength which many discourse analysis or agenda-setting studies often lack. Because of this, it is an important publication for the study of contemporary media bias and ought to be mandatory reading for anyone who is interested in the field of political communicaton. It is a well-written and informative examination of how the media collective itself has become a powerful political actor and how it, every day, shapes politics as we know it. Summary References: |
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