Christopher Wlezien summarizes the findings. recent articles About the relationship between news and public opinion. A chronological analysis of three different cases of U.S. public opinion found that, contrary to prevailing assumptions, public attitudes can “cause” coverage more than they cause them.
We are increasingly choosing our media. However, long before the internet and social media, options existed. The contest provides an incentive for news organizations to assess and respond to public opinion. But there are other reasons why we expect news to be responsive. First, reporters and editors may be representative because they are a sample of the broader population. Second, even if they are different from us, they may see their role as representing what the “public” cares about and thinks.
Therefore, one might expect news to spread to the public for a variety of reasons. This may help explain why news organizations have been involved in polling, especially when their costs were high. many Greater than today. They probably spent money gathering information to guide their coverage (and editorial), both of the topics they covered and how they were covered.
But most research (and commentary) on media and the public assumes that the latter follows the former. This assumption may seem understandable given the importance of media in our lives, but is the flow only one way, from the media to the public? Or does the public also drive media coverage? Is it true? The answers to these questions are important because they are important for effective political accountability and representation.In fact, they believe that the general public Really That’s – it can be done! – Have influence over politics and policy decisions.
It is difficult to disentangle the causal relationship between media coverage and the general public. In such situations, scholars often resort to the “cross-lagged model” shown in Figure 1, and this is the approach I take in my article (see here for details on the methodology). Although this is a conservative approach because it tends to underestimate the impact of news on public opinion and the impact that the general public has on news, it is still a directional approach when positive evidence is seriously considered. impact can be evaluated to some extent.
Empirical analysis of three cases
This analysis builds on previous research to examine how news relates to public opinion in three cases: economic perceptions, candidate support, and policy preferences in the United States. These are three distinct but important events that are a regular focus of research questions in the press and public opinion polling organizations, and are also subjects that have received much academic attention.
Economic news tone and public awareness
To measure the nation's economic perceptions, I use the University of Michigan's American Consumer Survey. I rely on both the economic retrospective (assessment of the past year) and outlook (expectations for next year). For analysis I use: monthly Average starting from January 1980, when news data is available. To this end, I rely on previous research that measured the tone of government 'economic' reporting. new york times and washington post. This study identifies “positive” and “negative” words in domestic economic articles to create a basic indicator of tone.
The monthly correlation was found to be 0.42 for retrospective and 0.38 for prospective. Does this mean that the public is following or leading the news? Statistical analysis following a cross-lagged approach shows that both are at work, but that public reporting , is more consistently reported than those that follow. This can be seen in Figure 2, which simulates the effect of a “shock” in media tone on perception and vice versa. The left column shows the small effect of news content on reflection and perspective, and the right column shows the large effect of both economic reflection and perspective on news. The differences are clear, especially when retrospective, and it is interesting to note that even in the UK the results are surprisingly similar.
Figure 2: Impulse response functions related to economic perception and news tone.
Candidate news and election support
Analyzing news coverage and voter preferences during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign reveals a similar pattern. The preference timeline is based on hundreds of national polls that record how respondents would vote “if the election were held today.” To measure media coverage, I rely on a measure that captures the tone of “Clinton” and “Trump” related news in nine major newspapers. Figure 3 shows the simulated interaction effects of news and preferences based on cross-lagged analysis. Similar to what we saw with economic perceptions, the public leads the news rather than follows it (albeit with considerable variation across campaigns).
Figure 3: Impulse response function, poll share and newsstone, past 200 days, 2016
Spending on reporting and public preferences
Finally, we assess the relationship between news about government spending and the public's budget preferences on defense, welfare, and health (see also my article with Stuart Soroka). The preference measure is based on data from the General Social Survey (GSS). The GSS regularly asks Americans about their support for “more” or “less” spending. The measure of media coverage differs from his first two cases in that it is based on the content of the coverage rather than the tone. 17 Uses newspaper content.
Figure 4: Impulse response function from news to preferences.
Figure 5: Impulse response function from preferences to news.
Figures 4 and 5 highlight the differences in the impact of news and public opinion in the three areas. While Figure 4 does not show the actual influence of coverage on preferences, Figure 5 shows the positive influence of the public on news content in all three areas, with a significantly greater than zero influence on health and well-being. It has become. It appears that the public is once again in control of the news about spending.
What are we to make of this? In each of the three cases considered here, public opinion seems to “cause” news reporting, but the reverse is less often and always to a lesser extent true. Perhaps the media's influence on the public occurs more quickly and therefore may not be as obvious as the public's influence on the media using the cross-lagged model. This highlights the limitations of such an analysis. They only get us so far. It is noteworthy that the results are fairly consistent across the three different cases, highlighting the role that the public can play in reporting, which should always be entertained and not resolved by assumptions. Masu.
Written by Christopher Regen, Hogg Professor of Government at the University of Texas.