Media, Impact, and Politics: Easy Allies in the Early Days
Newspapers in the United States were not founded on the principle of existing as an unbiased fourth estate to keep government in check. Instead, during the majority of the eighteenth century, newspapers were largely (directly or indirectly) supported by political parties.15 16 17 Their raison d’etre was influence.
Party papers often suppressed stories that were damaging to their party and/or politicians, failed to publish facts about events when stories were not suppressed, and printed stories with significant spin.18 Newspapers were produced with the express goal of supporting the party and ensuring that the party’s candidates were elected.
In the 1870s, the number of independent papers began to increase in the United States’ urban areas. Economist James T. Hamilton and others have made compelling economics-based arguments for the growth of independent presses from 1870 through 1920 (a foreshadowing of the current era’s economic upheaval in media economics). First, technological advances in the steam cylinder printing press, wood-pulp paper, and the telegraph lowered the cost per unit of a paper, even if they increased the up-front cost of production. Second, urban growth meant more consumers in a geographic area, providing opportunity for new papers to enter the market. Independent papers were able to attract a heterogeneous audience, and thus were more profitable than party papers aimed only at attracting a homogenous audience. Third, the growth in audience brought increased advertising revenue. Advertising revenue, paired with increased subscription revenue, meant that party support was no longer the most profitable option for newspapers.19
While “independent” did not necessarily equate to “unbiased,” independent papers were not affiliated with political parties, suppressed fewer relevant news stories, had less (at least obvious) bias in their stories, and provided more facts.20 However, these new independent newspapers were not without a mission. In fact, the owners and editors of independent papers worked to expose corruption in politicians, parties, and government institutions. Whether or not the independent press resulted in better informed or less partisan voters is difficult to prove. However, in the words of Gentzkow et al., “While we cannot prove that a more informative press helped diminish corruption, it does appear that campaigns against corruption succeeded when they were supported by news coverage.”21
So, while impact might not have been a media industry buzzword in 1890, the media was undoubtedly working to effect political change in the United States. With a change in the market size and an increased economy of scale, independent newspapers between 1870 and 1920 grew in popularity (and profitability) based upon the premise that independent news was credible news. It seemed consumers agreed with them, and by 1900 independent papers accounted for more than forty-seven percent of all dailies and more than fifty-five percent of circulation.22
Professionalization and (the myth of) neutrality
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, literacy in the United States became more widespread, the population expanded, new cities formed, and journalism and media products multiplied to serve these populations. The changing operating environment for news businesses swung their explicit identities and goals even further away from influencing a populace on behalf of their owners or funders. While Michael Schudson and Chris Anderson urge us to avoid the pitfall of looking for a genesis moment for the journalism profession, they agree with other journalism scholars that the rise of the neutrality norm coincides with the field’s professionalization.23 For many authors, “Objectivity continues to be the sine qua non of journalistic professionalization: explain the reasons behind the emergence of objectivity as an occupational practice, fix a date at which it first emerged, and you have gone a long way towards uncovering the “secret” of professional journalism.”24.
If, then, journalists were not explicitly aiming to have impact or influence, researchers have looked for the field’s alternative value and role in society. What was it that justified audiences paying money, workers providing their labor, and owners their capital? (Owners’ profit and workers’ wages could only be produced if the enterprise provided value to readers, perceived or real.)iRetrospectively, scholars of journalism identified the concept of “newsworthiness,” an idea that the subjects of the news have within them elements which make them worthy of being a media product, and thusly deserving the attention around which a business model could be built. At the heart of the idea of newsworthiness is an implicit belief that what journalists are covering is worthy of the audience’s time and attention.
Those scholars have spent much time studying, documenting, and critiquing news values. In 1965, Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge put forth what they hypothesized to be the top twelve factors of newsworthiness: frequency, threshold, unambiguity, meaningfulness, consonance, unexpectedness, continuity, composition, reference to elite nations, reference to elite people, reference to persons, and reference to something negative. They, and those who follow in their tradition, focus on the supply side of the media equation. That is, while they hypothesize that these factors have “certain effects among the audience,” the effects of journalistic news values are not the social phenomena under consideration.25
While researchers and practitioners alike have used Galtung and Ruge’s study as a starting point to delve deeper into supposed news values,26 27 others have critiqued the endeavor by arguing that it ignores the ideological underpinnings of news values.
One early critic of media as an instrument of ideological power was Antonio Gramsci. Writing in Fascist Italy, he argued that the regime exerted indirect power over civil institutions such as schools, the legal profession, trade unions, and the print media in order to control and incorporate the proletariat into its ideology.28 This interpretation is strongly associated with the concept of “hegemony.” However, the media’s ideology was not generated in a vacuum. Kellner explains:
The hegemony model of culture and the media reveals dominant ideological formations and discourses as a shifting terrain of consensus, struggle, and compromise, rather than as an instrument of a monolithic, unidimensional ideology that is forced on the underlying population from above by a unified ruling class . . The hegemony approach analyzes television as part of a process of economic, political, social, and cultural struggle. According to this approach, different classes, sectors of capital, and social groups compete for social dominance and attempt to impose their visions, interests, and agendas on society as a whole. Hegemony is thus a shifting, complex, and open phenomenon, always subject to contestation and upheaval.29
Writing specifically about U.S. media of the twentieth century, Gamson et al. argue that the frames journalists use, which are constructed through “routine, taken-for-granted structures of everyday thinking contribute to a structure of dominance.”30 As with Gramsci’s dialectic, they acknowledge that the audience has agency in interpreting these frames.31 But ultimately, the imbalance in power means the common sense, or “gut feeling” of the journalist (and the editor, company, and industry) is perhaps the strongest contributor to their readers’ perceived reality.32 For current readers considering journalistic impact, these theorists provide an argument that, despite journalists’ claims to objectivity and the intrinsic newsworthiness of their stories, societal power-holders use the media to exert their control and influence audiences’ views.
Nonetheless, since at least the mid-1900s, journalists have claimed objectivity and neutrality as a core tenet of the profession, and cited these factors as justification for their position of power in creating our shared reality through broadcast and print media. In the words of Schudson and Anderson:
U.S. journalism’s claim to objectivity—i.e., the particular method by which this information is collected, processed, and presented—gives it its unique jurisdictional focus by claiming to possess a certain form of expertise of intellectual discipline. Establishing jurisdiction over the ability to objectively parse reality is a claim to a special kind of authority. In sum, journalistic objectivity operates as both an occupational norm and as object of struggle within the larger struggle over professional jurisdiction.33
But what of the audience? Gamson et al. assert that the social constructions disseminated through media are likely to be both unconscious on the part of the journalists and unrecognized as such by the reader.34 “News is both a permanent social structure and a means of social reflexivity and contestation; a product as well as a productive process.”35 But the question begs to be asked: What do citizens believe to be newsworthy? What do they want more of? And, perhaps most importantly, why?
Ida Schultz dances around these questions when she writes: “Where most of the classical newsroom studies used titles such as ‘making,’ ‘creating,’ ‘manufacturing,’ or ‘constructing’ the news, the best title verb describing journalistic practice within the analytical framework of reflexive sociology would be positioning the news.”36 Following Bourdieu, Schultz recognizes that journalists and media companies are part of the journalistic field, and as such they interact with other producers of culture and knowledge. Thus, rather than constructing a news story with an unintentional but powerful frame, she posits that journalists position their work internally to get their stories green-lit. Furthermore, media organizations actively work to externally position their content in such a way as to maximize its appeal to audience members.37 Now, not only had “news values” been identified, but critics had articulated a tension between journalists’ claim to being a neutral filter for the news and their self-interest in amplifying or, at least, emphasizing newsworthy elements. If their work could be seen as consequential, it was more important and more valuable.
Mainstream media in the United States has been loath to acknowledge the power inherent in its industry, the ends that result from their means of communication, and the news values of its audience(s). Note Schudson and Anderson: “Journalism seems to simultaneously make a grandiose knowledge claim (that it possesses the ability to isolate, transmit, and interpret the most publicly relevant aspects of social reality) and an incredibly modest one (that really, most journalists are not experts at all but are simply question-asking generalists).”38
The evidence base for journalistic evidence
Researchers have long worked to identify and quantify the influence of the news media on individuals, society, and politics alike. Particularly relevant to our study, in 1972 Max McCombs and Donald Shaw put forth their theory of Agenda Setting, which aimed to develop an empirical basis for how the media affected what the public paid attention to. Comparing the issues that the media emphasized in its coverage of the U.S. presidential election campaign and the issues that survey respondents recalled, the researchers found that the more the media covered an issue, the more audiences considered that issue to be important.39
The theory was extended to how the media influences audiences’ perceptions of facts within an issue, such as the positive and negative attributes of people and organizations in the news.40 Researchers investigated the ways in which agenda setting worked in non-political subjects, including business reputations, sports, and religion (generally speaking, the principles held true). They also started to find that the recency and volume of individuals’ exposure had a significant influence on how much they retained the information in memory, (i.e., when issues drop out of the media agenda, most people mostly forget the details).41
In the mid- and late 2000s, the growing prominence of digital media, and in particular the early social media technologies (blogs, comment boards and the like), prompted researchers to extend their understanding of a changing environment that allowed, as never before, individuals to participate in fragmented, conversational groups and clusters (and for the conversations to be studied on a mass scale).42 The framework of “agenda melding” was one result; the idea that individuals join groups and partially assimilate the group’s opinions of what’s important, or maybe stay silent.43 Mostly, after joining a broadly like-minded group they do not seek to change the group’s dominant views to align with their own outlier views on minor matters.
A study of 2012 U.S. election-time Twitter also observed differences between how people with different political affiliations absorbed salience: The researchers, using the relatively new term “network agenda setting,” concluded that supporters of the Republican nominee Mitt Romney appeared to absorb their online network’s views on salient topics and facts more than did Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s supporters.44
While the foci of agenda setting studies have varied across time, platforms, and individuals’ characteristics, the field of research has provided a range of empirical bases from which to understand the way news media can and has influenced public perceptions of events, individuals, and organizations.
Rediscovering an impact mission
In recent years, media organizations have been motivated to explicitly embrace the reality that they are, in fact, influential social forces. Having lost their dominance over channels of communication, and as consumers of news look to new and unconventional sources for information, legacy companies are coming to grips with the fact that evolution is now necessary for their survival. They have started to attend to what happens post-publication: Audience engagement, especially via social media, is an accepted practice in newsrooms, and engagement editors are common in media companies across the United States. The proliferation of nonprofit media has allowed for a wave of experimentation in the co-creation of news, and deep audience and community engagement by media.
An increasing number of both nonprofit and commercial media organizations are betting that impact—that is, any change in the status quo as a result of an intervention on their part (content, engagement, etc.)—is key to their long-term sustainability.45 While this trend started in the nonprofit news space and was largely pushed by philanthropic foundations with a history of program evaluation around the NGOs they support, many commercial media outlets are taking it as a given that to show real, positive change as a result of their reporting will build a deeper relationship between their brand and their audience. The logic goes something like this: The more impact a news organization has, the more people will trust that brand and the greater affinity they will feel for it; thus, they’ll return more regularly to the organization’s website/broadcast program/newspaper, ultimately generating more revenue for the organization.
However, impact is still not the most important metric for the vast majority of media organizations. For example, again in Caitlin Petre’s ethnographic research report, “The Traffic Factories,” she finds that traditional media metrics rule newsrooms, and that these metrics have an effect on journalism. Especially relevant is her finding that traffic-based rankings can “drown out” other forms of evaluation, thereby engendering a range of emotions in journalists such as “excitement, anxiety, self-doubt, triumph, competition, and demoralization.”46