Ch2-1: Slide Index (1 of 3)

4. Cross-National Differences in Info

5. Information on Hard vs. Soft News

6. Consumers or Citizens?

7. Explaining Differences in Information

8. The American Media System in Comparative Perspective

9. Preview of Findings

10. Performance Criteria

11. Properties of Media Systems: Ownership

12. Public Broadcasting

13. License Fees

14. Revenues of Major Public Broadcasters

15. Cross-National Differences in Public Broadcaster’s Market Share

16. Ownership and Press Freedom

17. Regulatory Regimes

18. Role of Journalists

Ch2-1: Slide Index (2 of 3)

19. Strength of Political Parties

20. A Typology of Media Systems

21. Polarized-Pluralist Model

22. Democratic Corporatism

23. Convergence of Media Systems

24. Why Regulate News Media

25. The regulatory “double standard”

26. Public Broadcasters Deliver Public Goods

27. BBC Programming

28. The “Virtuous Circle”

29. BBC vs. CNN: Africa Coverage

30. First Phase of Regulatory Policy

31. Towards Deregulation

32. Limits on Ownership

33. Impact of Deregulation

Ch2-1: Slide Index (3 of 3)

34. Politically Biased Programming?

35. Biased Programming? (cont)

36. Print Monopolies

37. The demise of “equal time”

38. The European Model: Free Time

39. UK PEBS, 1980-2005

40. Summary

41. Summing Up

Cross-National Differences in Info

0102030405060708090

100

CH

CA

Comm1b

Y axis represents percent of sample answering question correctly.

Information on Hard vs Soft News

0102030405060708090

100

Hard News Soft News

Swiss

US

Comm1b

Y axis represents percent of sample answering correctly.

Consumers or Citizens?

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Brands Sports Politics

Source: Survey of Stanford Univ students; Y axis represents percent of sample answering question correctly.

Explaining Differences in Information

• Differences in media systems lead to differences in the production of “civic” information. Market-oriented media systematically under-produce “serious” news

The American Media System in Comparative Perspective

Objectives:

1. Evaluating the civic performance of American news media against the baseline of news media in other industrialized democracies

2. Mapping the relevant properties of media systems

Preview of Findings

• American media preoccupied with consumerism and audience size; reduced levels of public affairs programming and the dominance of “soft” news

• Access to the electoral forum based on ability to pay (for TV advertising)

Performance Criteria• Foster informed citizenship by delivering

information on the issues of the day and providing exposure to a wide range of political perspectives (“public sphere”)

• Permit candidates, parties and other groups opportunities to make political presentations to a mass audience (“electoral forum”)

• Monitor the actions of government officials (“watchdog function”)

Properties of Media Systems: Ownership

• Ranges from exclusively private to government ownership – most systems feature a mix of public and private

• Well-developed “public broadcaster” common to virtually all democratic societies (except US)

• Less developed and authoritarian regimes feature more extensive government ownership and control over programming

Public Broadcasting

“Public broadcasting” refers to television and radio networks funded by their government either in the form of “license” fees or general state funds. Some public broadcasters (for example, Radio Telefís Éireann, the national broadcaster in Ireland) also run commercial advertising to supplement their revenues.

License Fees

Germany €193

UK €178

France €116

Italy €94

No license fee in Spain

Revenues of Major Public Broadcasters (in millions of UK Pounds)

0500

100015002000250030003500400045005000

License Fee

Ads

Govt Funds

Cross-National Differences in Public Broadcaster’s Market Share

Ownership and Press Freedom

Regulatory Regimes

• Purely market-based with minimal state intervention (US)

• “public service” model (Europe) – active intervention by government to ensure adequate civic performance

• Intervention can be both supportive (subsidies, exemptions) and regulatory (ownership caps, programming requirements)

Role of Journalists

• Professionalized journalism in the US, with well-developed norms and codes of conduct

• Autonomy from political movements/groups; “objectivity” in the US, “commentary” in Europe where newspapers are affiliated with parties (Note: dominance of partisan press in the US, 1800-1850)

• Mediated vs. unmediated coverage of political actors – interpretive coverage in the US, descriptive reporting everywhere else

Strength of Political Parties

• American parties weak, European parties strong• Mass membership versus party identifiers• Party organizations control recruitment of elected

officials in Europe; in US, “free agent” candidates contest elections on their own with party organizations playing a minor role

• Party-based campaigns; no messages on behalf of individual candidates (Changing nature of PEBs)

A Typology of Media Systems

I. “Liberal” model (US) – mass circulation and privately owned press, dominance of commercial broadcasting, minimal regulation of media, professional journalists autonomous from political parties, but subject to subtle government influence

Italy, Spain as exemplars – press as an extension of political movements, active state intervention, dominant public broadcaster, subsidies for newspapers, lack of professional norms or codes of conduct

Polarized-Pluralist Model

Northern Europe – press freedom coupled with active state intervention (Sweden, Germany); strong political parties with affiliated newspapers; commercial media coexist with partisan outlets and the news reflects both objectivity and ideology

Democratic Corporatism

Convergence of Media Systems

• Since 1985, all three media systems are moving in the direction of expanded commercial broadcasting (increased audience share of private networks) and progressive weakening of government regulations over news programming

Why Regulate News Media• Regulations designed to ensure delivery of

civic performance – broadcasters as “trustees” granted exclusive rights over a scarce public resource in exchange for programming in the “public interest”

• Regulations designed to promote the industry -- FCC originally created as a “traffic cop” to address the problem of frequency congestion, DOD funding instrumental in development of Internet

The regulatory “double standard”

• Operation of a newspaper printing press does not interfere with any other press. Radio and television, by contrast, are broadcast through signals of a specific frequency and power. Television and radio sets receive these signals on a fixed number of channels, each of which corresponds to the frequency of the signal. The channels have to be sufficiently far apart to avoid interference among the signals. Unlike newspapers, the production of which is not exclusive, "one person's transmission is another's interference”

Public Broadcasters Deliver Public Goods

• In return for government financing, public broadcasters are required to provide sustained levels of public affairs programming, and to represent a diversity of regions, cultures and viewpoints. Thus, public broadcasters in Europe produce higher quantities of “serious” programming, a likely cause of the higher levels of political information in Europe

• BBC 1, the flagship public station in the UK, devoted 22.1% of its 2002 peak hour broadcasts to current affairs, compared to only 9% by the newest commercial British channel, Channel Five

• BBC 1 airs an average of 2.2 hours of news and public affairs programming during primetime on weekdays; NBC, CBS, and ABC average only one hour each

BBC Programming

The “Virtuous Circle”

• Public broadcasters in Germany, Britain, Sweden and other countries are market leaders, despite their emphasis on “public service” programming

• Commercial broadcasters mimic their programming, leading to an increase in “serious” content

BBC vs. CNN: Africa Coverage

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First Phase of Regulatory Policy

• Early regulations aimed at promoting competition and diversity; “one to a market” rule and ban on “cross-ownership;” no cable operator could control more than 30% of a market

• “Fairness doctrine” – required stations to air balanced treatment of controversial issues; extended to “right of reply” (Red Lion case)

Towards Deregulation

• 1987 FCC repealed the fairness doctrine on the grounds that access to the airwaves was no longer a scarce resource; cable and satellite TV, VHS tapes etc all seen as “substitutes” for basic TV. New approach, set in motion by the election of Reagan in 1980, relied on the market and “regulatory forbearance”

• Time Warner challenged the cap on cable ownership; court ruled that the cap violated TW’s First Amendment rights to reach new audiences

• Limits on cross-ownership eased (in cities with >4 TV stations a single owner can control a daily newspaper and two TV stations)

• In 1976, stations were required to air at least five percent community programming and five percent informational programming (defined as news and public affairs) for a total of ten percent non-entertainment programming. In 1984 the FCC abandoned these requirements; it was now sufficient for stations to “air some programming that meets the community’s needs”

• Local news as “public affairs” programming

Limits on Ownership

Impact of Deregulation• In radio, the top twenty companies operate

more than twenty percent of all the radio stations in the country; in local television, the ten biggest companies own 30 percent of all television stations reaching 85 percent of all television households in the United States. In network television, the owners are all giant corporations…”

• The result: homogeneity of program content

Politically Biased Programming?

Corporate owners can encourage journalists not to pursue stories that reflect poorly on their parent corporations (ABC and Disney)

Owners may impose programming in keeping with their political preferences. In 2004, the Sinclair Broadcasting Group ordered its television stations (which have a combined reach of 24% of the national audience) to pre-empt their regular programming and broadcast an anti-Kerry documentary film a few days before the 2004 presidential election.

• Sinclair had previously ordered its ABC-affiliate stations not to air an episode (which they denounced as political) of Nightline, in which Ted Koppel read the names of all American military personnel killed in Iraq.

• Disney refused to distribute Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 911,” and CBS refused to air an anti-Bush ad made by Moveon.org during the 2004 Super Bowl.

Biased Programming (cont.)

Print Monopolies• Between 1910 and 2000 the number of

dailies fell from 2,202 to 1,483. The number of cities with competing dailies dropped from 552 in 1920 to just 25 in 1987.

• The percent of total circulation attributable to the ten largest newspaper chains in the United States now stands at 51% for weekday and 56% for Sunday newspapers.

The demise of “equal time”

• The equal-time rule was designed to ensure that the public would have roughly equal exposure to the perspectives of opposing candidates. The FCC has rendered the rule meaningless by only requiring that broadcasters make available time to candidates on equal terms. Thus, candidates who cannot afford to buy the same amount of ad time as their opponent (a frequent occurrence for challengers running against congressional incumbents) are denied access to the public.

The European Model: Free Time

• In every industrialized democracy other than the United States, political parties are granted blocks of free airtime for during campaigns

• In the UK the amount of airtime is based on the number of candidates being fielded by each party, in France broadcasters are obliged to grant equal airtime to candidates irrespective of their prominence or electoral strength

• the party election broadcasts are required to be carried not just by the public channels, but also by the commercial stations

UK PEBS, 1980-2005

SummaryNews media in democratic societies are more likely to make good on their civic responsibilities when:

1 Society adopts a relatively stringent regulatory framework that requires minimal levels of public affairs programming

2. Broadcasters are given some protection from the market. Publicly funded television networks have the necessary cushion to deliver a steady flow of substantive, “hard” news;

Summing Up

• Among modern democracies, the US media system ranks as the most commercialized and unregulated

• American news organizations free to “shirk” their civic responsibilities

• Consequences include uninformed and misinformed citizens

Overview: From Party- to Media-Based Campaigns

• Reform of the nomination process, the onset of public financing of presidential campaigns, and universal access to television combined to create a new system of campaigns in which free agent candidates rely on media strategies to appeal to voters

• Mass media replaced political parties as the principal link between candidates and voters

Party-Based Politics

• Parties aggregate interests and provide popular control over policy

• Nominate candidates and mobilize citizens to vote• Reduce information costs of voting (voting for

party equivalent to voting on the issues)• Disseminate campaign messages (PEBs vs. ads)• Control candidates’ policy positions (party-line

voting in parliamentary systems)[two party versus multi-party systems; members versus identifiers]

Primaries in the Pre-Reform Era• Humphrey: “you have to be crazy to go into a primary …

worse than the torture of the rack.” • Primaries pursued by weaker or insurgent candidates

who wished to demonstrate their vote-getting ability (JFK in 1960, Kefauver in 1952)

• “Before 1968, the pursuit of a presidential nomination principally by entering primaries constituted a high risk strategy. The increasing presence of television, the decline in the influence of political parties, the success of John Kennedy… all suggested that it would prove to be more useful in the years ahead.” (Polsby, p. 16)

Prelude to Reform

• Dissatisfaction with Vietnam War among Democratic activists; emergence of Eugene McCarthy as the “anti-war” candidate

• McCarthy’s strong showing in 1968 NH primary brings RFK into the race

• Humphrey stays out of the primaries and counts on “insider” support to win the nomination

• The spectacle of the Democratic convention (”sea of blood”) and Nixon’s defeat of Humphrey send the Democrats down the path of reform

• Party caucus and delegate primary banned as methods of selecting delegates to the nominating convention

• “affirmative action” in the selection of delegates• Candidate primaries emerged as the dominant method of

nomination

Varieties of Primary Elections1. Closed Primary – limited to party registrants only;

favors “ideologically pure” candidates (case of Tom Campbell v Bruce Herschensohn for CA Senate)

2. Modified closed primary (CA) party registrants + independents

3. Open primary – any registered voter eligible; may encourage centrist candidates able to attract cross-over votes. Possibility of strategic voting

4. “Blanket” primary – both party candidates on same ballot (Proposition 198 and ensuing Supreme Court Decision)

Changes in Delegate Selection

Summary: The Impact of Reform

Weakening of party organization and elites Increased candidate autonomy-reduced entry

costs (public financing) Importance of media coverage and “momentum” Personal factions rather than broad-based

coalitions as the dominant strategy (additional problem of unrepresentativeness of primary electorate)

Professionalization of campaigns

• 1960 2004• Jan 20 Iowa• Jan 27 NH• Feb 3 AZ, DE,

NM, OK, SC• Feb 7 MI, WA, ME• Feb. 10 TN, VA• Feb 17 WI• Feb 24 UT, ID• Mar 2 “Super

Tuesday”• Mar 8 NH TX,FL,LA

• TOTAL: 1 29

• 1960 2004Mar 16 ILApril 5` WIApril 12 ILApril 19 NJApril 26 MA, PA PAMay 4 AL, OH, IN IN, NC

May 11 NE, WV WVMay 18 MD, OR AR, KY,

ORMay 25-June 7 FL, CA, NJ, MT

NY, SD

16 10

Primary Calendar – 1960 & 2004

Percentage of Delegates Selected

1968 1996

Week 1-3 2 26

Week 4-6 8 74

Week 7-9 43 74

Week 10-12 58 87

Week 13-15 100 100

TV NEWS (CBS) COVERAGE OF 1980 PRIMARIES

# of Seconds % of total Seconds per Delegate

IA 2940 14 34NH 2815 14 69IL 2000 10 7PA 1950 9 7NY 1515 7 4CA 1205 6 3

Primary Turnout: Early vs. Late Contests (Source: Mayer, “The front-loading problem”)

Date Average Turnout N of States1996 Republican

N.H. (2/20) 42%2/24-3/2 22 (5)3/5-3/26 18 (22)

2000 Republican

N.H. 522/8-2/29 26 (6)3/7 26 (11)

2000 Democratic

N.H. 403/7 17 (11)

“Big Mo”

• Morris Udall, one of the Democratic candidates in 1976 on Carter’s victory:“Carter won NH by 29% to my 24%, came in fourth in Massachusetts, and then beat Wallace by three points in Florida. In the next two weeks he shot up 25 points in the Gallup Poll… It’s like a football game in which you say to the first team that makes a first down: ‘hereafter your team has a special rule – your first downs are five yards and we’re going to let your first touchdown count 21 points. Now the rest of you bastards play catch-up under regular rules … .’

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Trends in Candidate Support Nationwide: 2004 Democratic Primaries (Princeton Survey Research Telephone Interviews with Registered Democrats and Independents)

Y axis indicates percent intending to vote for candidate

Trends in 2004 New Hampshire Polls (American Research Group Three-Day Tracking of Likely Democratic Voters)

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Y axis indicates percent intending to vote for candidate

EndorsementsAl Gore

"Howard Dean really is the only candidate who has been able to inspire at the grassroots level all over this country the kind of passion and enthusiasm fordemocracy and change and transformation of Americathat we need in this country. We need to remake theDemocratic Party; we need to remake America; we needto take it back on behalf of the people of this country. So I'm very proud and honored to endorse Howard Deanto be the next president of the United States of America."  

Endorsements (cont.)

Bill Bradley

"The Dean campaign is one of the best things to happento American democracy in decades...His campaign offersAmerica new hope. His supporters are breathing freshair into the lungs of our democracy. They're revitalizingpolitics, showing a way to escape the grip of big moneyand to confront the shame of forgetting those in need." 

“Free Agent” Candidates

• Minimal eligibility requirements (1K signatures in Vermont; 1% of the party’s registered voters in CA)

• Rise of “celebrity” candidates with minimal elective experience – Arnold in CA, Corzine in NJ; contrast with stringent membership requirements and party leader influence in Europe

Bringing the Parties back in• Soft money contributions in 2000 and

2004

• Party lists and GOTV

• Endorsements

• “Super delegates” In 2004, the super-delegates cast 798 votes at the Dem. convention, more than a third of the 2,160 required to win the nomination.