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Module
10 |
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Coverage
of Political Issues
and Campaigns |
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Consistent with Noam Chomsky’s analysis in Manufacturing
Consent, one of the major criticisms of television news is
that it presents only the perspective of those in power, excluding
alternative, dissident voices. |
In her essay, “On
party, gender, race and class, TV news looks to the most powerful
groups,” (Power Sources, May/June, 2002), Ina Howard reports
on an analysis of the sources used on the big three networks’
evening news shows in 2001: |
Instead of a liberal bias, the study found, source
selection favored the elite interests that the corporate owners
of these shows depend on for advertising revenue, regulatory support
and access to information. Network news demonstrated a clear tendency
to showcase the opinions of the most powerful political and economic
actors, while giving limited access to those voices that would be
most likely to challenge them. |
On the partisan level, the news programs provided
a generous platform for sources from the Republican Party —
the party in power in the White House for almost the entire year
— while giving much less access to the opposition Democrats,
and virtually no time to third party or independent politicians.
Based on the criterion of who got to speak, the broadcast networks
functioned much more as venues for the claims and opinions of the
powerful than as democratic forums for public discussion or education.
|
In 2001, the voices of Washington’s elite
politicians were the dominant sources of opinion on the network
evening news, making up one in three Americans (and more than one
in four of all sources) who were quoted on all topics throughout
the year. Of sources who had an identifiable partisan affiliation,
75 percent were Republican and only 24 percent Democrats. A mere
1 percent were third-party representatives or independents. |
The three networks varied only slightly in their
selection of partisan sources. CBS had the most Republicans and
the fewest Democrats (76 percent vs. 23 percent); NBC (75 percent
vs. 25 percent) and ABC (73 percent vs. 27 percent) were marginally
less imbalanced. CBS had the most independents (1.2 percent), followed
by ABC (0.7 percent) and NBC (an almost invisible 0.2 percent). |
Howard also reports that the study found that women were under-represented
in terms of sources quoted: |
While women made up only 15 percent of total sources,
they represented more than double that share — 40 percent
— of the ordinary citizens in the news. This reflects a tendency
to quote men as the vast majority of authoritative voices while
presenting women as non-experts; women made up only 9 percent of
the professional and political voices that were presented. More
than half of the women (52 percent) who appeared on the news were
presented as average citizens, whereas only 14 percent of male sources
were. |
| Howard also notes that people of color rarely served as sources:
|
Among U.S. sources for whom race was determinable,
whites made up 92 percent of the total, blacks 7 percent, Latinos
and Arab-Americans 0.6 percent each, and Asian-Americans 0.2 percent.
(According to the 2000 census, the U.S. population is 69 percent
non-Hispanic white, 13 percent Hispanic, 12 percent black and 4
percent Asian.) A single source who appeared on NBC (7/26/01) was
the only Native American identified as appearing on the nightly
news in 2001 — 0.008 percent of total sources. |
Howard’s report demonstrates that those in
power are given far more access and air time than those out of power.
Moreover, ordinary people, labor unions, working-class people, and
women/minorities are largely excluded.
|
Local television news often provide little or no coverage of
political races, in contrast to coverage by newspapers. A study
of 122 stations in the top 50 markets in October and November, 2002,
by the Lear
Center for Local News at the University of Wisconsin found that
there were four times as many political ads as there was coverage
of candidates. In each broadcast, there was an average of 39 seconds
of political coverage compared to an average of 1 minute of political
ads. To some degree, given the lack of coverage, candidates may
need to rely on advertising to convey their messages, providing
a lucrative revenue source for stations during political campaigns.
(Attempts to include a measure that would have forced local stations
to provide free advertising time to candidates was removed from
the Campaign Finance Law passed in 2002 due to strong lobbying by
the industry.) |
Click here for a history of campaign ads produced by the American
Museum of the Moving Image. |
The study also found that, of the little political coverage that
did occur, most of the focus was on strategy and the horserace aspects
of a campaign, as opposed to coverage of issues. 40% of the exposure
to candidates consisted of sound bites, which averaged 11.2 seconds
— suggesting largely superficial information about a candidate’s
stand on issues. Races for Congress were given little attention.
Only one in five campaign stories were devoted to Senate races and
one in ten, to House races, while 28% of ads were for House races.
|
Click here for a Newseum
interactive site on news coverage of political campaigns. |
Under-representation of women and minorities in television
news |
As with print news, critics have also examined the under-representation
of women and minorities in the television news industry. For example,
during the filming of the Local News documentary, a veteran
African-American female reporter loses her job, for reasons
that are not made explicit in the documentary. |
One
analysis of news anchors in the top National Public Radio stations
found that 73 out of 83 were non-Latino whites (88 percent). Fifty-seven
of the daytime hosts and anchors were male (69 percent).
|
Six of the hosts were African-American, two were
Asian-American and two were Arab-American. (Hosts who appeared on
multiple stations were counted once for each station.) Just one
Latino host appeared during any station’s daytime broadcasts,
while no Native American hosts showed up in the survey. |
While the stations reached a population that was,
on average, 19 percent African-American, their daytime hosts and
anchors averaged just 7 percent African-American. More strikingly,
the cities served by the radio stations studied were on average
25 percent Latino, but only 1 percent of the hosts and anchors at
the stations studied were Latino. |
The stations reached a population that averaged
9 percent Asian-American, but only 2 percent of their daytime hosts
and anchors were Asian-American. |
Sixty-eight percent of hosts and anchors were male,
serving areas that were, on average, 49 percent male. |
Lots of sites on demographics of news people:
|
Television
and Radio News Research
Journalism.org
|
Click here for an interview with Ed
Bradley of 60 Minutes about his journalism career. |
For further reading:
|
Torres, S. (2003). Black, white, and in color:
Television and black civil rights. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press. |
News coverage of wars |
In conducting critical analyses of the news, students could examine
the role of the press in covering wars, particularly given instances
of coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Students could
go onto the Newseum
site on the “War in Iraq,” and examine some of the
issues associated with the news coverage of that war, for example,
the issue of the Pentagon’s approved use of “embedded
reporters.” They could also go the Newseum
site on “War Stories.”
|
One of the limitations of coverage of the Iraq War was that,
according to Susan Moeller (2004) is that reporters were highly
controlled in terms of the sites to which they had access as “embedded”
reporters: |
In contrast to coverage during the Clinton era, when many reporters
made careful distinctions between acts of terrorism and the acquisition
and use of WMD, in 2002 and 2003 many stories stenographically
reported the administration's perspective and gave too little
critical examination of the way officials framed events, issues,
threats and policy options. The media tended to report uncritically
the Bush administration's conflation of all "weapons of mass
destruction" into a single category of threat - a conflation
that equates the destructive power of, say, chemical weapons with
that of nuclear weapons.
|
In the period before the Iraq war, pressure to respond to crises
patriotically - and the lack of much congressional opposition
- limited the assessment of White House policy and the consideration
of other policy options. According to recent books by Bob Woodward,
Richard Clarke and Ron Suskind (with former Treasury Secretary
Paul H. O'Neill), several top officials entered office in 2001
determined to make war.
|
A Project LookSharp publication, Media Construction of War, contains
49 full-color covers and photographs from over 40 years of wars
starting with World War II from Newsweek Magazine (available from
the
Center for Media) |
And, in the PBS program Media
Matters, the issues of coverage of the war in Afghanistan is
explored in terms of the tight government control of information
provided to reporters. |
And, an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, “Being
There: Suddenly the Pentagon Grants Access to the Action, But the
Devil’s in the Details,” by Andrew Bushell and Brent
Cunningham argue that the use of “embedded reporters”
in the Iraq War was highly problematic. |
BBC
teaching activity on reporting on war
|
News
reports on the Iraq War from the Newseum site
|
Articles
on war coverage [ FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting)
] |
Channel One news broadcasts |
Many school districts provide students with daily 12-minute broadcasts
of Channel
One news broadcasts that are beamed via satellite to 12,000
schools. In return, schools receive free video equipment, which
they often need given budget-cutbacks. |
The
Commercialism in Education Research Unit at the Arizona State
University reports that commercialism in schools has increased as
much as four times in the past decade, often due to the lack of
funding.
|
In an analysis of the news content, Mark Miller (“How
to be Stupid: The Lessons of Channel One,” EXTRA! May
1997) found that the “news” content is just as superficial
as local television news, consisting of headline summaries of factual
information that serves as “content” for commercials:
|
Its real function is not journalistic but commercial,
for it is meant primarily to get us ready for the ads. What this
means is that the news must, on the one hand, keep us sitting there
and watching, as an M.C. has to keep his audience mildly entertained
between the acts; but it must also constantly efface itself, must
keep itself from saying anything too powerful or even interesting,
must never cut too deep or raise any really troubling questions,
because it can never be permitted to detract in any way from the
commercials. Its aim must be, in short, to keep our eyes wide open
and our minds asleep, so that the commercial will look good to us,
sound true to us, and thereby work on us. |
If the news on Channel One often seems
perplexingly abstract, offering no clear impression from those many
sudden, pointless names and numbers, that perplexity enhances the
effect of the commercials. So brightly focused and so dazzlingly
insistent, each stands out luminous and sharp in the bewildering
murk of factoids like a high-tech lighthouse in a blinding fog.
The routine horror of the news on Channel One also indirectly
bolsters the commercials, which proffer their young viewers a fantastic
antidote to all those tragic woes and bloody dangers. Skeletal and
nearly bald, a real teenager with leukemia suffers through the agonies
of chemotherapy — just after a fictitious teenaged girl (full-bodied,
and with all her hair) finds happiness by using Clearasil. Buildings
explode and people mourn in Bosnia (with its “brutal and complex
story of ethnic hatreds and violent nationalism”) —
and then we see the Buffalo Bills, locked up and deprived of lunch
by their demanding coach, chomp with furtive relish on their Snickers
bars (“Hungry? Why wait?”). And so on. |
Surely all the mass advertising on the TV news thus
benefits from such delicious contrast with the uglier images of
telejournalism (as long as those other images are not too ugly).
The ads on Channel One would seem to be especially powerful,
however, because they thrive by contrast not just with the news
before and after them, but with the whole boring, regimented context
of the school itself. |
Imagine, or remember, what it’s like to have
to sit there at your desk, listening to your teacher droning on,
with hours to go until you can get out of there, your mind rebelling
and your hormones raging. It must be a relief when Channel One
takes over, so you can lose yourself in its really cool graphics
and its tantalizing bursts of rock music — and in the advertisers’
mind-blowing little fantasies of power: power through Pepsi, Taco
Bell, McDonald’s, Fruit-A-Burst and/or Gatorade (“Life
Is a Sport. Drink It Up!”), power through Head ’n’
Shoulders, Oxy-10 and/or Pantene Pro-V Mousse (“. . . a stronger
sense of style!”), power through Donkey Kong and/or Killer
Instinct (“PLAY IT LOUD!”) and/or power through Reebok
(“This is my planet!”). |
Students could view examples
of Channel One, as well as teacher lesson plans, and
examine the quality and nature of the stories. |
They could also examine criticisms
by a coalition of conservative and progressive groups who object
to the intrusion of messages and images into the school.
|
The
PBS NOW broadcast on the topic of Channel One identified
the following pros and cons related to use of Channel One: |
Pros
-
Exclusive contracts, signing bonuses, and incentive programs
can bring up to six- and seven-figure sums to school districts.
-
Local and national businesses become invested in the educational
system.
-
Schools receive free educational media. (Channel One
reaches eight million teenagers and provides free satellite
dishes and use of equipment in exchange for a promise to show
their programming on 90 percent of school days in 80 percent
of classrooms. Similarly, DirecTV hopes to bring educational
programming to 50,000 schools and provide equipment to 2000
low-income schools in 2002.)
-
Advertising is already ubiquitous, so schoolchildren are
seeing nothing new.
-
Incentive programs and corporate-sponsored contests provide
a great way to reward educational achievement.
|
Cons
-
Schools are taxpayer-funded and shouldn’t promote
a particular company or product.
-
Students are required by law to attend school; thus,
they provide a captive audience for advertisers, and critics
question the ethics and advisability of advertising to
young people.
-
There are health issues related to snack and soft drink
sales in a population that is increasingly overweight
and unfit.
-
Schools are put in the position of advocating products
to fulfill contract agreements.
-
Incentive programs that reward educational achievement
with prizes are really attempting to encourage brand loyalty.
|
They also reported the following financial information:
|
-
Average expenditure per pupil in the United State, 2000:
$6,911
-
Percentage of school budget spent on instruction, 2000:
61.7%
-
Percentage of school funding from local sources, 2000:
42.9%
-
Percentage of school funding from state sources, 2000:
49.5%
-
Percentage of school districts with soft drink contracts,
2000: 49.9%
-
Percentage of high schools with vending machines, 2000:
98.2%
-
Percentage of all schools offering soft drinks in vending
machines, 2000: 76.3%
-
Percentage of all schools offering 100% fruit of vegetable
juice in vending machines, 2000: 55.6%
|
For further reading:
McChesney, R. (2003). The problem
of the media: U.S. communications politics in the 21st
Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.
|
Spring, J. (2003). Educating the Consumer
Citizen: A History of the Marriage of Schools, Advertising,
and Media. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. |
| |
