Bartholomew H. Sparrow

A Research Agenda for an Institutional Media

This article presents a new institutionalism theory of news rooted in the open-systems approach developed in organizational theory. It argues that news media develop standard routines and practices—institutions—in response to three kinds of uncertainty: whether or how they will make a profit, establish their legitimacy, and find timely information. These routines and practices become taken-for-granted assumptions about how to produce news that span across news organizations to compose an institutional regime of news. It is argued that this regime constrains journalists working within major mainstream media organizations to produce extraordinarily homogeneous kinds of news. Directions for future research are suggested.

From the Inner Ring Out: News Congruence, Cue-Taking, and Campaign Coverage

Studies of the organizational and behavioral characteristics of the American news media, as well as studies of media effects, often presume a basic institutional unity among news organizations. These studies typically analyze a small set of prestige media, and then make or infer conclusions with respect to the non-prestige media or the news media in general. The intention here is to verify empirically the extent to which the non-prestige ”outer ring” media in fact take cues from the prestige ”inner ring” news organizations. Using content analyses of forty-one daily newspapers from the 1992 presidential election campaign, we find that the outer ring newspapers sometimes replicate the issue agenda of the inner ring newspapers, but that they exercise significant discretion with respect to the favorability of their coverage of the presidential candidates and specific issues.

Going Beyond the State

Timothy Mitchells article “The Limits of the State” in the March 1991 issue of this Review stimulated an unusual variety of interested comments. John Bendix, Bartholomew Sparrow, and Bertell Ollman offer critiques and suggestions from quite different points of view. In response, Mitchell clarifies further the distinctiveness of his own approach and its implications.

Access to the National Archives

The condition of the National Archives concerns all political scientists.* Many political scientists use Archival records for research on American government or on international relations. The National Archives currently holds 800,000 cubic feet of federal records in its main building, and stores another 500,000 cubic feet of records in other buildings in the Washington, D.C. area. These records constitute a rich resource for understanding political history, developing hypotheses and testing theories.