Jill A. Edy

Revising the indexing hypothesis: Officials, media, and the Libya crisis

This study revises the indexing hypothesis by specifying its predictions and testing them on a single event, the U.S.‐Libya crisis of 1985–1986. We consider not only whether journalists use “official debate” to guide their coverage of important policy issues, but also how they might construct and interpret this debate. Detailed content analysis of the New York Times demonstrates that, while indexing is a valuable theory in assessing media treatment of foreign policy, it needs further refinement. Different interpretations of indexing, particularly a proportional versus a parametric standard, predict very different results. Journalism norms such as objectivity and event‐centered reporting may support or counteract indexing. Journalists appear to seek out foreign sources to provide opinions contrary to the dominant policy position, and they marginalize some U.S. elite voices while overemphasizing others. This may be a sign of media autonomy, or of the relative power of sources over both policy outcomes and p...

Using Substitutes for Full-Text News Stories in Content Analysis: Which Text Is Best?

tions of full-text media content. We analyze the effects of production decisions on content and categorization in the New York Times Index, based on interviews with its senior editor. We then compare the content of three proxies with that of full-text articles by conducting a parallel content analysis of New York Times stories covering the 1986 Libya crisis and their corresponding Index entries. The study suggests that proxy data can be used to roughly estimate the broad contours of Times coverage but do not reliably represent several key aspects of New York

Using the Vanderbilt Television Abstracts to Track Broadcast News Content: Possibilities and Pitfalls

The Vanderbilt Television News Archive supplies written abstracts for its video collection of news programs. Researchers from many disciplines use the abstracts to locate stories, track specific topics, and measure the evaluative tone of news. This study examines the validity of using abstracts as substitutes for full-text transcripts. Drawing on an analysis of the abstract writing process, we highlight potential sources of error and analyze the correspondence between transcripts and abstracts. Results of a quantitative content analysis suggest abstracts can reflect important elements of news when used at high levels of aggregation but may be unreliable as substitutes for news content.

Hail to the Chief: Using Honorifics to Refer to the President in Cable News

Have cable news networks used the titles “President” and “Mr.” differently when referring to Barack Obama than when referring to George W. Bush? Content analysis of 140 cable news transcripts from the first 100 days of each presidency shows Fox News used honorifics similarly when referring to each president, but CNN was significantly more likely to use honorifics when referring to Obama than when referring to Bush. Both networks’ use of honorifics declined during the presidents first 100 days in office. Implications are discussed using literature on news coverage of African American politicians, partisan news bias, and presidential honeymoons.

Authenticating the Political

Innovative media forums like Pastor Rick Warrens 2008 interviews with the major party nominees challenge US journalisms institutional authority to mediate public political discourse. Journalists reacted to Warrens forum by re-envisioning their institutional authority as authenticating the political. Others might have public conversations with politicians, but only journalism rendered such conversations political, that is, suitable for democratic decision-making. Claiming journalisms prerogative to generate authentically political discourse, they transformed the forum into “news.” They positioned it as mere preview to the more traditionally journalistic forum of the presidential debates, transformed forum discourse grounded in evangelical concepts of testimony and redemption into a news discourse of strategy and hypocrisy, and situated themselves as necessary mediators helping citizens discern what was truly political about Warrens forum. Although journalists could not avoid Warrens public criticism of their specific practices, their claims of institutional authority to define political discourse and to discipline and rehabilitate discourse that did not meet the standard were not contested.

Book Review: Kate Kenski, Bruce W. Hardy and Kathleen Hall Jamieson The Obama Victory: How Media, Money and Message Shaped the 2008 Election New York: Oxford, 2010. 378 pp. ISBN 978 0 19 539955 4

in tone, Hamilton writes that ‘we have every reason to suppose that the press influenced the public’ (p. 101). But how? When? And to what extent? Hamilton doesn’t clearly say. And he doesn’t mention that the fin-de-siècle American press entertained a fair amount of doubt about its ability to project influence. Indeed, it is probable the United States would have gone to war with Spain in 1898, regardless of newspaper coverage. Shortcomings aside, Journalism’s Roving Eye is an important, formidable work which Hamilton closes with the passage, ‘Not the End...’. Here’s hoping that such optimism is neither misplaced nor mistaken.

Conventional Wisdom: Putting National Party Convention Ratings in Context

This paper places broadcast major party convention ratings in the broader context of the changing media environment from 1976 until 2008 in order to explore the decline in audience for the convention. Broadcast convention ratings are contrasted with convention ratings for cable news networks, ratings for broadcast entertainment programming, and ratings for “event” programming. Relative to audiences for other kinds of programming, convention audiences remain large, suggesting that profit-making criteria may have distorted representations of the convention audience and views of whether airing the convention remains worthwhile.