Political speeches and debates play an important role in shaping the images of politicians, and the public often relies on media outlets to select bits of political communication from a large pool of utterances. It is an important research question to understand what factors impact this selection process. To quantitatively explore the selection process, we build a three-decade dataset of presidential debate transcripts and post-debate coverage. We first examine the effect of wording and propose a binary classification framework that controls for both the speaker and the debate situations. We find that crowdworkers can only achieve an accuracy of 60 in this task, indicating that media choices are not entirely obvious. Our classifiers outperform crowdworkers on average, mainly in primary debates. We also compare important factors from crowdworkers’ free responses with those from data-driven methods and find interesting differences. Few crowdworkers mentioned that “context matters”, whereas our data show that well-quoted sentences are more distinct from the previous utterance by the same speaker than less-quoted sentences. Finally, we examine the aggregate effect of media preferences towards different wordings to understand the extent of fragmentation among media outlets. By analyzing a bipartite graph built from quoting behavior in our data, we observe a decreasing trend in bipartisan coverage.
Influences between the media and politicians. Although our work focuses on media selection of highlights, politicians often behave based on their beliefs about media preferences, which suggests complex dynamics between the media and politicians @cite_33 @cite_43 @cite_28 @cite_22 @cite_19 . For instance, discuss politicians' increasing adaptation to different news values and formats in the presence of media abundance. Also relevant is research on the influence of politicians on the media, including agenda-setting, rhetorical positioning, and framing @cite_3 @cite_7 @cite_4 @cite_13 @cite_5 .
@cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_33 @cite_7 @cite_28 @cite_3 @cite_43 @cite_19 @cite_5 @cite_13
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For over a generation, social scientists have tried to categorize the relationship between journalists and politicians. Which side holds power and influence over the other? Some scholars propose “active” theories: journalists have preferences and the power to impose them on anyone seeking media attention. Other scholars argue journalists are essentially “reactive,” dutifully writing down what politicians say with little ability to add alternate perspectives. In this dissertation, I propose both camps are extremes based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how journalists can apply their preferences on news content. Politicians and other sources provide information to reporters, bloggers and other new media writers. Each writer then chooses how to respond to this information. Journalistic power – whether we are discussing traditional media outlets or newer partisan media organizations – is best understood as a set of if : then propositions.The empirical sections of the dissertation consist of three separate studies, each of which focuses on one set of inputs and the output from a particular set of news organizations. The first study focuses on how presidents schedule press conferences at particular times and places. I find scheduling influences how much attention journalists give a conference, which in turn influences the balance of opinion found in stories. The second study shows how journalists resist but may ultimately give in to evasive responses, by examining quotations on a statement-by-statement basis. The third study examines some of the most popular phrases from the 2008 election, comparing how a wide range of media organizations responded to the same set of political and non-political ideas. Put together, these studies offer a common theoretical framework for comparing traditional and new media organizations, allowing for commonalities as well as differences. Political speeches and debates play an important role in shaping the images of politicians, and the public often relies on media outlets to select bits of political communication from a large pool of utterances. It is an important research question to understand what factors impact this selection process. To quantitatively explore the selection process, we build a three-decade dataset of presidential debate transcripts and post-debate coverage. We first examine the effect of wording and propose a binary classification framework that controls for both the speaker and the debate situations. We find that crowdworkers can only achieve an accuracy of 60 in this task, indicating that media choices are not entirely obvious. Our classifiers outperform crowdworkers on average, mainly in primary debates. We also compare important factors from crowdworkers’ free responses with those from data-driven methods and find interesting differences. Few crowdworkers mentioned that “context matters”, whereas our data show that well-quoted sentences are more distinct from the previous utterance by the same speaker than less-quoted sentences. Finally, we examine the aggregate effect of media preferences towards different wordings to understand the extent of fragmentation among media outlets. By analyzing a bipartite graph built from quoting behavior in our data, we observe a decreasing trend in bipartisan coverage. We hypothesize that in the real world, as opposed to the lab, the norm is for people to experience friendly media that favor their political predispositions when political favoritism is perceived at all. For this reason, media are generally limited in their ability to create cross-cutting exposure. We test this hypothesis using representative survey data drawn from 11 different countries with varying media systems. We further hypothesize that television will contribute more to cross-cutting exposure than newspapers. Finally, and most importantly, we test the hypothesis that the more the structure of a country's media system parallels that of its political parties, the more that country's population will be dominated by exposure to like-minded views via mass media. We find confirmation for all 3 of these hypotheses and discuss their implications for the role of mass media in providing exposure to cross-cutting political perspectives. In a news media environment characterized by abundant choice, it is becoming increasingly easy for Americans to choose news sources slanted toward their own political views rather than sources providing more diverse perspectives. This development poses a challenge to ideals of deliberative democracy if people who consume politically like-minded news disproportionately populate the electoral process, while those presumably reaping the benefits of exposure to more diverse views in the news (e.g., more informed, tolerant attitudes) withdraw from politics. Using panel data collected during the 2008 presidential campaign, this study investigates the proposition that exposure to news slanted toward one's own partisan views increases political participation, while exposure to news with the opposite partisan slant depresses participation. The results suggest that, while exposure to partisan news does not alter the strongly habitual decision to turn out, the hypothesized energizing and enervating effects of exposure do appear for other behavior during the campaign; the partisan hue of the news sources citizens choose to consume affects both when voters decide and their levels of participation over time.