Mass Media and Politics

1
Mass Media and Politics

• News That Matters
• Political Science 317
• Mark Stephan

2
Last Class and Todays Class

• Freedom of the Press
• Freedom worldwide
• News that Matters
• Innovative research methods
• Agenda-setting

3
Freedom of the Press Worldwide

• Freedom Houses methods
• Italy
• United States
• Iraq
• Kenya and Sierra Leone

4
News that Matters

• Standard view before Iyengar and Kinder
• Their broad argument
• Still relevant
• Walter Lippmanns views the Phantom Public

5
Methods

• How do the authors go about answering their
  questions?
• Power of their methods?
• Types of experiments
• Subjects, realistic newscasts (?)
• Demand characteristics
• Methodological pluralism

6
Agenda Setting

• Whos agenda is being set?
• What do the authors find? How strong are the
  results?
• Persistence
• Backing-up the experiments time series analyses
• Why?

7
News Flash!!

• Your ideas!!
• Journalists do jail time
• Governmental security and media/citizen access
  conservative and liberal agreement?

8
Preview of Next Class

• Reading the rest of News that Matters
• Mon Chapters 4-7 (7)
• Wed Chapters 8-11
• Mon Chapter 12 (12)

9
If Time..

• Processing the news
• Shortcuts
• What do we really need to know, in your opinion?
• A few minutes for your group to meet.