Media Audience Essay 2500 words AGPS Referencing

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T H E A U D I E N C E A S C I T I Z E N :5 M E D I A , P O L I T I C S A N D D E M O C R A C Y

The production of news is characterized by systemic tensions, such as those between the commercial logic of the news organization and the professional desires of journalists, between the goal of being accurate and truthful and the drive to be first with the news, between personal political preferences and the requirements of objectivity, between the power of sources and the necessity of being critical, and so on.

(Liesbet van Zoonen 1996: 206)

Introduction

This chapter looks at the extent to which the media contribute to a knowledge- able citizenry, focusing on their agenda-setting abilities, the perspectives they allow airtime and the relationships which journalists have with politicians. It moves through a consideration of campaign reporting, including a discussion of political advertising and opinion polls. Finally, it considers the ways in which we, as citizens, can participate more fully in the democratic process, through our involvement in public access broadcasting, as members of citizens’ juries and as audiences for political discussion shows. Crucially, we look at the way in which the media can provide opportunities for the citizen audience to exercise their democratic rights in more involving ways than simply voting at the ballot box.

Ross, K, & Nightingale, V 2003, Media and Audiences, McGraw-Hill Education, Berkshire. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [5 August 2021]. Created from griffith on 2021-08-05 10:30:47.

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The cynical citizen

Successive studies with citizen audiences have demonstrated an increasing cynicism amongst the electorate, due in no small part to the ways in which the media themselves choose to characterize politicians and the political process more generally. We show our growing disillusionment by our lack of action at the ballot box — in the UK’s 2001 general election in June, the turnout was a lamentable 60 per cent, and the highly controversial US elections the year before generated less than 50 per cent. Such turnouts scarcely provide a comprehensive mandate to the incoming government. Many commentators suggest that part of citizens’ cynicism is prompted by their lack of real knowledge about how the political system actually works, as if we determinedly keep ourselves ignorant. But, as Thomas Jefferson argued:

If the public are not enlightened enough to exercise their control [over society] with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

(Jefferson 1820, cited in Buchanan, 1991: 19)

Of course, providing material with which to educate the public is only the first step (notwithstanding debates about the content of such ‘learning’), because the public also need to be interested and motivated enough to access it. Efforts to ‘educate’ Joanne and Joe Public into a ‘proper’ understanding of the political process, in its widest sense, can easily be derailed simply by virtue of cynicism and apathy. Perloff (1998) summarizes a series of studies and surveys carried out over a decade in the USA and reveals alarmingly low levels of political knowledge, for example, that in 1987, more than seven years after the Congressional debate on aid to Nicaragua, only one-third of respon- dents to a survey knew that Nicaragua is in Central America; that in a 1989 survey, less than half the respondents knew which party then had a majority in the Senate (both taken from Delli-Carpini and Keeter 1991); and that in a 1995 survey for the Washington Post, nearly half the respondents could not name the (then) Speaker of the House of Representatives — Newt Gingrich (Morin 1996). Part of the British government’s response to this lack of knowledge and understanding about the fundamentals of the political process has been to introduce ‘citizenship’ as a compulsory element of the school curriculum from 2002. It is too early to say whether such education will have an influence on the next generation of voters, but at least they will have a better understanding of the process, even if they still choose not to exercise their democratic rights.

However, some caution does need to be exercised when trying to make general (and usually negative) statements about what Popkin (1991) calls the

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‘incompetent citizen’ literature, since work which tells us what people do not know rarely gives equal exposure to those things which people do know. Lippmann’s (1922) classic work on public opinion still has considerable salience to the contemporary news scene of the early twenty-first century: political opinion is not shaped by direct experience of politics but is rather a con- sequence of the images which we are given via news accounts of politics. The obvious question to ask, then, is who decides on the content of those news accounts, especially in the over-heated and politically embattled environment of a general election?

Instead of blaming ‘the people’ for their lack of interest/knowledge, a govern- ment which really is genuinely democratic and empowering will seek to ‘educate’ its citizens through the provision of political knowledge, a concept which is absolutely right for the third millennium where talk of the ‘knowledge economy’ has become part of the new political rhetoric. If knowledge is power, then knowledge about politics should make the exercise of our basic democratic rights — the right to vote — that much more of an informed, and therefore empowering, process. But how do we get that knowledge? Whilst the answer is, for most of us, via mass news media such as television, radio and the press — although increasingly, online news services are becoming more signifi- cant players in the game — the question of whether more is actually better remains entirely open. Whilst the media’s provision of material for citizens’ consumption has grown exponentially over the past 20 years, commencing, arguably with CNN’s ground-breaking decision to broadcast news 24–7, followed by the development of cable, satellite and more recently online news and current affairs services, is this explosion about choice or more of the same? 1

Whilst most politicians are (unsurprisingly) unhappy with what they con- sider to be the increasingly tabloid turn of all news media, from a straight information stance to a more entertainment-oriented genre (see Ross 2002), many academic commentators are similarly worried about this tendency because of its impact on the public’s ability to exercise democratic judgement (see Hallin 1994; Negrine 1996; Wheeler 1997). Franklin’s coining of the term newszak (1997) provides precisely the appropriate flavour to convey what seems to be happening to the news industry, where stories of (apparent) interest to the public have largely replaced stories which are in the public interest, a subtle but important shift which is not simply semantic but deeply ideological (Keane 1991; Blumler and Gurevitch 1995).

1 For a good discussion of the implications of global media, see Allan (1999) and Barker (1999) in the same series, Issues in Cultural and Media Studies.

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The media and democratic responsibility

As Bennett (1997) questions, pertinently, the fundamental conundrum to unravel is how a news industry with competing political interests nonetheless manages to construct a political ‘world’ which is both ‘legitimate’ across the news landscape and also believable enough to form the baseline for the public’s political understanding. The question must be, who decides what the news is, what the truth is, which stories to run or discard? Can there indeed be a global consensus on the important issues of the day? In some ways, the consensus idea is considerably enhanced when the forces of global capital provide an explosion of news outlets (Barker 1999). However, the narrow ownership base means that they carry more or less the same perspective and have more or less the same bias in coverage, so what’s actually different about content? Rupert Murdoch’s News International conglomerate provides a powerful and relevant example of precisely such a global enterprise where single ownership determines the (same) political voice, despite the multiplicity of media formats.

Another part of the ‘problem’ of encouraging an informed citizenry is that the news media’s own fascination with sleaze and the horse-race elements of elections means that their potential to inform the public about the differential policy positions of the competing parties is considerably diminished. In Lichter and Noyes’ (1996) study of the 1996 presidential campaign, they found that stories about the ‘horse-race’ dominated the media coverage they monitored (ABC, CBS and NBC evening news programmes during the 1996 primary season), especially reports of candidates being negative about each other, which most research demonstrates is particularly disliked by the electorate (see also Wertheimer 1997; Ross 2002). When Lichter and Noyes went on to study the political discourse of the candidates themselves, they found that they were not unremittingly negative (as suggested by the media reports) and that instances of positive self-promotion during political commercials out- numbered negative comments against opponents by more than 6:1 (1996: 293).

If ‘the people’ are ill-informed, then the question has be asked, who is to blame? The politicians, for not disseminating their policies well enough or the media for not reporting them often enough? If democracy depends on an informed citizenry and the majority of citizens look to the news media to inform them about the local, regional, national and international context, then clearly the media play an important role in the democratic process, where they are often thought to ‘facilitate the public discourse necessary to make the system work’ (Miller 1994: 133).

However, despite the apparent lack of real information about the political process, which politicians often lament (the charge of tabloid journalism), the fact remains that most of us, albeit often a small majority, believe we have

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enough information to make an informed choice at the ballot box. This reality supports the view that even if citizens do not know the precise policy details of different parties, they are nonetheless capable of comprehending the bigger picture, of being what Yankelovich (1991) suggests is ‘wise’ about the things that matter. In any event, as a number of ‘knowledge’ studies demon- strate, individuals are notoriously poor at retaining large amounts of informa- tion, so that campaigns which focus attention on just a few key issues and explore those in depth are more likely to be remembered than campaigns which take a more scatter-gun approach (Blomquist and Zukin 1997).

It remains a moot point whether the public at large is really so disinterested in big ‘P’ politics or whether their apparent apathy is simply a response to their belief that that no one is interested in hearing their views, so why should they bother to express them? As Dunleavy et al. (2001) point out, survey data suggest that Britons (at least) were more concerned about basic human rights and abuses of government power in 2001 than they were in 1995, suggesting at least a qualification to the mantra that ‘things can only get better’ (New Labour’s campaign slogan). The global campaigns, marches and demonstra- tions against attacking Iraq in 2003 again testify to the engagement of millions of citizens worldwide who are deeply concerned with fundamental issues such as rights and justice. Such public calls, following on from similar demands for a rational rather than emotional response by the US and British governments to the tragic events of 11 September 2001 (9/11), once again remind political elites that there is considerable public commitment to and engagement with real politics and a concern about acts apparently done in ‘our’ name but without our mandate. In response to what was widely seen as overt bias and one-sided reporting of the media in the days, weeks and months immediately following 9/11, especially by the US news media, a number of alternative news sites were set up together with the widespread circulation of website addresses to enable different perspectives to be articulated and discussed (see, for example, www.fair.org; www.redpepper.org.uk; www.autonomedia.org; www.zmag.org; www.aclu.org/safeandfree/).

Media and social control

Whilst the news media are with us 24/7, their agenda-setting power becomes of crucial importance at times of crisis (see Chapter 4) but, also, importantly, during a country’s general election. It is now commonly understood that the media’s impact is less about actively changing values and beliefs (and there- fore, say, about turning around the floating voter) than about determining what issues are important for the electorate to know about (Iyengar 1987;

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Entman 1989; Ansolabehere et al. 1991; Norris et al. 1999). In particular, studies suggest that news media are seen as mostly confirming the views of citizens and reinforcing prejudices, rather than challenging assumptions and/or impacting on the election outcome. But are the media more than just framers and agenda-setters? Do they instead operate as an intrinsic part of the apparatus of government, as political actors in their own right, albeit of a non-elected and ‘intermediary’ variety, as Cook (1998) suggests? In his model, news is regarded as a ‘co-production’ between news media and government because journalists operate as key participants in the decision- and policy- making. News media as an industry operate as a central political force in government, both by way of the intimate relationship which exists between politics and media — each feeding off the other — but also because of the latter’s influence on the electorate.

The culture of the newsroom (Allan 1999) and the way in which news ‘works’ often means that the reporting and presentation of the political process is less about reportage and more about interpretation, breaking up stories and events into digestible bites and creating a plausible background against which information is provided within a complex relationship-system among politicians, publics and the media. However, our sound bite environment and tendency to switch channels or surf sites with increasing frequency, means that the complexity and background of news stories are rarely described and news instead comprises a series of sharp headlines, with some additional elaboration and explanation provided for those consumers who bother to stay with the report until the end.

But identifying who is enabled and encouraged to access the media, whose voice is heard and whose denied, who is credited as a credible source and who remains invisible, are all pertinent questions to raise in an effort to understand our political world and our potential for democratic participation. The par- tiality in the selection and presentation of stories and events, of sourcing and citation, produces a view of the world which is as constructed as a soap opera. As the politician and the journalist play out the delicate dance of the ‘fool-me- fool-you two-step’, each courts the other in an endless bid to ‘really’ tell it like it is. The inevitable casualty of their display is any kind of reality check which actually provides the public with a clear grasp of the particularity of specific political agendas. Real information about real policies and priorities often falls into the combat zone between the ‘investigative’ journalist hunting ‘the truth’ and the government spokesperson anxious to spin the public the right ‘line’ and avoid incriminating themselves or their colleagues in sins of omission or commission.

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Political advertising and the power of persuasion

Given the routine cry of ‘foul!’ against the media by political actors, especially during events such as elections, one of the few ways in which political contenders and parties can get their messages across without the constant interference of the news media is through political advertising such as party election broadcasts and other kinds of direct, to-camera, public address spots. The proportion of campaign funds dedicated to such activities has grown year on year since the very first televised political advert in 1952 ( Jacobson 1992). Advertising accounted for between 60 and 70 per cent of the total campaign budget for the 1992 elections (West 1993). Interestingly, single party election broadcasts during campaigns have experienced a decline in their impact as voters increasingly look to the allegedly more impartial form of political description offered by TV news and current affairs programming (Harrison 1992). Scammell found, for example, that given a choice, viewers vote with their remote controls, ‘. . .on average one quarter to one third of the inherited audience turns off or switches over when a party [election] broadcast comes on’ (Scammell 1990; cited in Scammell and Semetko 1995: 19).

But of course, this supposed impartiality is also a mythic ‘truth’ since journalists now routinely interpret the speech and exhortations of politicians rather than report it straight, much to the wailing disgust of politicians them- selves who continuously reprimand the lobby hack for her or his deconstructive rather than journalistic tendencies. However, the power of party election broadcasts should not be underestimated. Scammell warns that despite the turn-off factor, most people will see at least one party election broadcast during the short lifespan of a general election campaign. As such, they ‘. . . remain the only opportunities for exclusive party control of the airwaves, and they achieve a greater national audience than any other direct party publicity, such as newspaper ads or billboard posters’ (1995: 39).

The attack ad

Although research with audiences consistently shows their disapproval of attack ads (Lau et al. 1997), these artefacts are still regularly produced by political parties who seem convinced of their utility, despite considerable evidence to the contrary (Hitchon and Chang 1995). These types of political campaigning are exclusively oriented towards attacking the opposition parties rather than promoting the values that the attacking party hold important. Indeed, some researchers argue that despite public antipathy towards their content, attack ads are nonetheless highly efficient in ‘moving votes’ (Pfau et al. 1992), that is encouraging people to change their voting decision. That political

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advertising is important has become a ‘fact’ which has emerged from research on what ‘works’ in election terms and there is a growing body of evidence to support the view that adverts are an important source of voter information (Scammell 1998). It also seems that the judicious repetition of key messages in ads can have some influence on subsequent voter decisions, on the drip-drip principle (Just et al. 1996). Having relatively few key messages — for example the Labour Party’s pledge for ‘education, education, education’ in the 1997 election — seems to help promote a party’s ‘brand’ identity. The proposition that, of all forms of political advertising, it is the attack ad which wields the most influence is a little less clear cut, nor do we really know which style of negative advertising has the most impact. Apart from anything else, advertising strategies which work in one country have no guarantee of similar success elsewhere, especially if the political structures are very different, as is the case with the USA and the UK. The UK, for example, doesn’t officially allow sponsored political advertising on TV at all, other than the strictly controlled party election broadcasts, although other communication media are used to good and controversial effect, especially billboard advertising.

However, despite very profound differences in what is ‘allowed’ to be con- veyed about political candidates and parties through the media during election campaigns, the last three general elections in Britain have all witnessed an enthusiastic embrace of marketing principles and strategies. The Conservative Party has been especially enamoured of the virtues of negative (attack) adver- tising, although this latter approach has consistently worked against them as far as voter attitudes are concerned (Scammell and Semetko 1995: Sancho- Aldridge 1997). Perversely, the parties which tend to use attack ads more frequently (Republican, Conservative and other right-of-centre groups) are the very ones which are seen as being most hurt by them. In Lemert et al.’s (1996) study of the 1992 US Presidential elections, they argued that whilst many voters did not appreciate ‘attack’ ads, no matter who was attacking whom, they worked particularly disastrously for the Republican (Bush) campaign and had done so in 1992 and in the election of 1988:

Bush was the only candidate whose own attack ads seemed to hurt him and help his Democratic opponent. In contrast, Clinton’s attack ads seemed to achieve their purpose of damaging their target’s election prospects.

(Lemert et al. 1996: 271)

Political advertising and effect

The lack of real information in political advertising campaigns is one of the most serious issues to emerge from a study of this process, with complaints

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that ads are more about ‘mudslinging’ than about real policy differences being almost ubiquitous in research accounts with audiences. Kern and Just’s (1997) study looked at the way in which audiences actively ‘construct’ political candidates in response to the media’s coverage and messages about them. Amongst their findings, they suggest that women react more strongly to negative ‘attack’ advertising and tend to invert the preferred reading by attacking the author of the advert rather than supporting the message. They also found that women and men’s gendered social positioning influences the way in which they construct the political persona, and that all voters ‘draw heavily on emotional advertising, including negative advertising, in their construction of candidate images’ (1997: 111). Going further, Pinkleton et al. (1998) argue that negativity towards media coverage of political campaigns can have the effect of reducing media use amongst consumers and that, in turn, a cynical policy reduces the effectiveness of governments and thus compromises the democratic ideal.

In a study of German politicians and self-presentation, news audiences were shown a series of clips from broadcast interviews and asked to rate the inter- viewees’ performance (Schutz 1998). Aggressive behaviours in the form of interrupting questions, deflecting criticism and personal attacks on political opponents were all regarded negatively as displays of aggression and loss of control, whereas cool responses under provocation were regarded very positively. In a global context, this study is interesting since it reverses the roles of politician and interviewer, where the latter is increasingly seen as having the upper hand in what are regarded as public contests of political authority. And it is not just the political ‘attack ad’ which is largely off-putting to the voters, but the media themselves add to voter hostility by their own persistent negative framing of politics and elections. Liebes and Peri’s (1998) work explicitly shows the ways in which the media can undermine the credibility of politicians. First, by making it their business to challenge political rhetoric. Second, by undertaking extended ‘disaster marathons’ and other melodramatic strategies designed to destabilize serious political debate. Third, by degenerating debate to tabloid levels which again reduces the potency and seriousness of political messages. Barnhurst and Mutz (1997) suggest that the ‘social problem’ frame articulated via the disaster marathons described above enhances its chances of being reported on as news and enables a greater level of journalistic commen- tary outside the actual event or phenomenon being reported. For example, framing a particular incident, such as a vicious mugging, as part of a wider social problem of, say, youth delinquency. However, such a thesis means that the media are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they don’t include context and background, they are accused of having historical or social amnesia; if they do provide a context, they are accused of scare-mongering. Some kind of truth probably lies somewhere between these two extremes and

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the trick, for the savvy media consumer, is to work out where that point is, at least for them.

Journalistic self-reflection

When asked, journalists will often identify two primary responsibilities which they say they discharge as professional media workers, which are:

1. providing a channel of news dissemination to the public, delivered as quickly as possible; and

2. to investigate government claims and call politicians to account (adapted from Weaver and Wilhoit 1997).

Clearly this latter is important for our purposes, but there seems to be some equivocation about how journalists actually fulfil this responsibility. Contrary to expectations, the journalists in Weaver and Wilhoit’s (1997) study claim that they are not really interested in taking an adversarial approach to politicians. Across different media contexts, print journalists in their study were the ones who wanted to be the most aggressive. Interestingly, journalists refuted the suggestion that they are increasingly taking the role of agenda-setter, and only 4 per cent of Weaver and Wilhoit’s sample believed that such a function is very important for a journalist to perform.

Through their invitations to particular politicians and particular parties to put their points of view, the media are in an extremely powerful position to determine the relative visibility of political candidates and to rehearse par- ticular arguments of particular parties. Moreover, TV is used much more frequently as the medium of choice in statewide (regional) and national campaigns by political parties than radio or newspapers, for the very good reason of its ubiquity. Goldenberg and Traugott (1987) reported more than a decade ago that more than half of all campaign expenditure in Senate races was spent on the production and broadcasting of TV adverts. However, in countries where there is a ban on political ‘advertising’ during election campaigns, such as Britain, campaign expenditure is focused on different media. During the 1997 British general election, the Conservatives spent £11.1m (39 per cent) on ‘outdoor’ (poster) advertising compared with £0.5m (1.8 per cent) on party election broadcasts. The figures for Labour were £4.8m (18.7 per cent) and £0.9m (3.5 per cent) (Fisher 2001). In the subsequent election in 2001, Labour, now in government, concentrated an even larger proportion of the budget on posters, ‘. . .after the party’s research suggested that this was the most effective available medium. Around £1 million was spent on each poster campaign, cost- ing around £4m–£5m in total’ (Fisher 2001: 696). Whilst the actual monetary

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difference between 1997 and 2001 had scarcely changed, it should be borne in mind that in 2000, new legislation was brought in to restrict the amount of money that political parties could receive in donations and spend during campaigns.

Politics, media, public and affect

In both Britain and the USA, there is a considerable body of work which has focused on the phenomenon of the general election. Research teams have under- taken both primary research and secondary analysis on the various data sets emerging from successive elections, seeking to explore the relation between media coverage of elections and voter behaviour. In Britain, early work such as that of Butler and Stokes (1974) began a trend in trying to improve our under- standing of the electorate’s viewing habits during election campaigns. Sanders and Norris (1997) suggest that subsequent studies, whilst closely replicating the initial set of questions posed by Butler and Stokes, have added new ones over time such as attitudes towards bias in news coverage. As society moves on and develops, and as politics and policy shift, public concerns about particular issues also change and researchers must respond to a changing agenda (see, for example, Ansolabehere et al. 1997).

However, whilst researches have shown the complex and sometimes ambivalent attitudes which the public hold towards campaign coverage (Mughan 1996), they have often failed to improve our knowledge about the impact such viewing has on individual voters’ positive or negative ratings of parties or, indeed, whether their political preferences were affected in any way at all. Sanders and Norris (1997) thus set out with the specific intention of trying to map the existence (if any) of a cause-and-effect relationship between the tone of political advertising and voter perception of party in their study of campaigning in the 1997 British general election. In designing their study they made two basic assumptions:

– that television news continues to be an important information source; and – that voters will modify their political preferences and attitudes in response

to information they receive about parties.

Linked to this second point are two further working assumptions:

– that although significant shifts in political ideology are only likely to occur after sustained and prolonged exposure to media messages which challenge their beliefs, more limited exposure could produce small but important shifts in perception; and

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– some people are more likely than others to shift their position as a con- sequence of quite small but obviously persuasive doses of information, such as those who claim to be ‘undecided’ or a ‘floating voter’.

What Sanders and Norris found was that exposure to positive party coverage by the news media provoked a positive response to that party by voters: on the other hand, exposure to negative coverage provoked contradictory responses. Importantly, the study also found no evidence of what they term a ‘collateral’ effect, that is, negative coverage of one party did not encourage voters to view other parties more favourably. This suggests that, contrary to some of the previously discussed US studies which showed attack ads prompting a sympathetic reading of the party under attack, there was no similar cross-over impact for British voters.

Looking at the print media’s involvement in the same (1997) election and its impact on voter choice, Burns (1997) argues that the media’s much more overt support for the Labour Party, especially in the tabloid press (with its con- siderably bigger circulation than the more centrist or centre-left broadsheets) probably contributed to Labour’s success, again giving credence to the sugges- tion that positive coverage improves voter perception of parties. This is hardly new news but it does add further weight to the contention that news media do play a part in shaping voter attitudes and that they can materially affect a party’s standing (and ultimate success) by deliberately choosing to frame parties in positive or negative ways, by their choice of story, their slant, their perspective and so on. If, as appears to be the case, campaigns continue to be covered in ways which give the media as much power to control the message as political parties themselves, then their claim to be able to make or break politicians (and parties) is still one to take seriously. A good example of this potential is the case of the media’s coverage of women candidates. A growing body of work shows clearly that women candidates are given less exposure in the media than their male counterparts and that the ways in which women politicians in general are portrayed is different to and usually more negative than news coverage of men (see Kahn and Goldenberg 1991; Norris 1997; Lovenduski 2001; Ross 2002). There are two possible reasons for this under- representation: political parties do not volunteer women spokespeople or the media deliberately ignore their contributions when they do speak. Although it is not clear which of these two propensities exerts the greater influence, the outcome is that the public have little idea of what many women politicians stand for, which could affect their (re)election chances.

Even where individuals actively seek out political information from the media, they are persistently thwarted by the media’s insistence on covering election process issues such as competitor league tables and who is doing the

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best character assassination on whom, in preference to elaborating policy differences. In the USA, and in other countries like the UK which increasingly emulate US-style politics, the media’s persistent framing of elections as a ‘horse-race’ means that coverage is much more orientated towards the games- manship of the principal actors/parties than towards any real engagement with the particular policy or issue positions of candidates (Kiousis 2000). Not sur- prisingly, most studies of voter perceptions of election coverage produce highly negative results for precisely the reason of style over substance elaborated above (Hart 1987; Patterson 1994; Just et al. 1999). Although Patterson (1994: 28) notes, rather cynically, that the ‘United States is the only democracy that organ- izes its national election around the media’, it is not just the USA which is culpable. The veteran BBC news correspondent Nick Jones (1995: 220) makes the relation between politics and media very clear when he says that ‘the state of a governing party’s relationship with the news media has always been a useful pointer to its chances of electoral survival’.

The ways in which the media have been seen to comprise an active element in political campaigning and, specifically, their role in affecting voting behaviour, have changed over time as the methods of gauging effect have become more sophisticated (Ansolabehere et al. 1997). Initial alarm over the propagandist possibilities offered by a national medium such as television — assuming a passive polity ready to believe any message provided it was slickly packaged — was initially assuaged by early effects studies. These suggested that the media exerted minimal effect on voting behaviour, other than making voters more committed to their pre-selected candidate or party of choice (see Lazarsfeld and Kendall 1948). However, what became clear was that many surveys were insufficiently sensitive as research instruments and opinion polls were often unable to detect the effects of particular ‘advertising’ strategies. Ansolabehere et al. (1997) suggest that at least two recent theories of political campaigning ‘effect’ have better explanatory value:

– the ‘resonance’ model posits the view that voters can be persuaded by carefully constructed messages but argues that this is context-specific, depending on pre-existing political preferences and the extent to which political messages conform to voter expectations;

– the ‘competitive’ model comprises a model which acknowledges the inter-relationships between political competitors and the importance of criticism and refutation in the ‘game’ of political persuasion and vote catching.

Conventional wisdom has had it that newspapers are a superior source of in-depth information during election campaigns compared to broadcast media, especially television. The latter is regarded as providing merely superficial

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infotainment, whereas newspapers devote considerable space to political stories, including giving background and context and allowing the reader to go through the material at his or her own pace. This folk wisdom has been ‘corroborated’ by numerous studies which suggest that people who mostly rely on newspapers for information are more likely to score highly on comprehension and recall tests (relating to news content and context) than those who mainly rely on television (see, for example, Robinson and Davis 1990). But the specific medium is not the only variable here, since it may be that media consumers who mostly read newspapers are more literate and highly educated, not (just) that news- papers constitute a better information source (Bennett et al. 1996).

In any case, more recent work on the newspaper/television debate argues that television news can in fact have as much impact on voter understanding as newspapers (see Neuman et al. 1992; Zhao and Chaffee 1995). This is because it is attention as much as exposure to news which appears to be crucial. Admittedly, viewers have to be sufficiently motivated by a news item to watch it attentively and therefore to actually take in and process the information which is being given out, but that is also the case with newspapers and any other medium.

Of course, different media produce different effects, and numerous studies over the past few years have indicated that print media are more strongly associated with the acquisition and retention of political knowledge than tele- vision (Becker and Dunwoody 1982; Kennamer 1987; Miller et al. 1988), so that individuals who use ‘print media to follow politics rather than solely television or no media are more knowledgeable about politics’ (Strate et al. 1994: 168). Part of the distinction between the two media in terms of knowledge- and information-giving is to do with television as a highly visual medium, unsuited to dealing with complex debates but more likely to deal with simple concepts which can be easily represented, such as graphs showing who is doing better than whom in the horse-race. It is ironic, then, that it is television which is seen increasingly as the most important source of information about the world rather than newspapers except, apparently, when it comes to elections. Other studies find that voters’ attitudes towards news media coverage of elections were strongly influenced by their level of party identification, so that indi- viduals who were strong supporters of a(ny) party tended to believe that the media were especially biased against ‘their’ party (Mughan 1996).

Similarly, in an exploration of relations between frequency of media use, media importance, political disaffection and political efficacy, Pinkleton and Austin (2000) report an association between newspaper use and low cynicism, and news magazine use and higher cynicism. They found that the variable of cynicism itself was strongly directed both at the media and the message. Inter- estingly, their study also demonstrated that voters who believe that newspapers

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are the most important sources of political information were much more sceptical and negative about politics than frequent users of television. Overall, the researchers argue that the most significant variable in their study was satis- faction with the media, suggesting that voter dissatisfaction with the media could be a more significant inhibitor of active political participation than hostility towards negative political campaigning. But as Perloff (1998) points out, the newspapers vs. television debate is largely academic, since most people use a mix of sources to meet their information needs, not just traditional outlets such as newspapers, radio and television but also new media such as cable, satellite and the internet. Thus trying to bracket particular media with particular effects is not an especially fruitful research problematic to explore.

Although we now have many more column inches and broadcast minutes devoted to election coverage, what we get from this barrage of information is often less, not more. We are now, in the early twenty-first century, in the absurd and entirely perverse situation where the volume and sources of news material concerning election campaigns has increased exponentially, including the more recent development of 24/7 news channels which are achieving a global reach, while at the same time ‘real’ information about what candidates actually stand for becomes increasingly elusive. We are turning on its head the truism that the more we know, the less we understand: we understand very well exactly what we don’t know and we blame the media, not politicians, for the gaps in our knowledge and for our increasingly cynical approach to politics more generally (Lasorsa 1997; Cappella and Jamieson 1997).

While public confidence in politicians continues its downward trend, the situation is little better when trust in the media industry is explored, since public trust has been in serious decline for at least the past three decades (Patterson 1994; American Society of Newspaper Editors 1998), with news- papers being the focus for particular scepticism (Meyer 1989). A significant element in this public disenchantment is, arguably, the overly negative slant of news in general and political news in particular, especially during election campaigns (Owen 1997; Klotz 1998). In some ways, the persistent interpretative lens through which journalists seem determined to mediate messages from political actors, refracting their efforts to address the polity directly by their casual use of an interrogative style to suggest a hidden agenda if not a down- right lie, is part of a wider phenomenon of news as infotainment.

The tabloidizing tendencies of all media are well documented and noted by politicians and polity alike. The news media thus find themselves in rather an awkward place: on the one hand, allegedly (and self-referentially) pandering to the craven appetites of the ‘mass’ audience but, on the hand, being roundly condemned by that same audience for not providing them/us with straight- forward reporting. Is there a happy medium? In his work on what he called

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‘boomerang’ effects, whereby the number of cynical stories and the volume of stories overall are negatively correlated to public confidence in the press, Kiosis (2000) suggests that such effects do exist. However, he offers this tentatively, given the limited nature of his sample material, and argues that one way to combat poor public perceptions of news media is for the latter to change their reporting conventions.

One of the important ways in which citizens allegedly ‘contribute’ to the democratic process, particularly in an election climate, is through their par- ticipation in opinion polls, even though their utility and credibility in being able to say anything meaningful is still widely disputed. Lavrakas and Traugott (2000) argue that, in the US context, opinion polling during elections is regarded by the politicians, at least, as a powerful weapon in the elections war. For example, they suggest that anti-Clinton agitators believed that the public opinion polls which consistently supported Clinton were inaccurate, possibly even deliberately so, and much Republican rhetoric was aimed specifically at undermining their credibility and thus their potency to swing votes. Such a spoiling tactic was never likely to succeed, though, since the very public whom the Republicans were seeking to ‘educate’ was the same one responding to the pollsters. In any case, the importance of polls to the electorate (as opposed to the politicians and the media) is constantly under review (see Lewis 2001), and has been since one of the earliest evaluations of polling data on the public showed good levels of awareness and a generally positive disposition towards their utility (see Goldman 1948).

Polling and effect

But knowledge about polls is rather different to using poll data to inform one’s own voting decisions, and subsequent studies demonstrate rather more ambivalence on the part of voters towards the usefulness of poll information in informing their own decision-making process (Goyder 1986; Roper 1986; Miller 1991; Dran and Hildreth 1995; Nightingale and Ross 2003). There are broadly two hypotheses relating to opinion poll ‘effect’, namely the bandwagon and the boomerang.

– the bandwagon thesis argues that when the public see that one party is ahead of the other(s), some jump on the bandwagon of apparent success, thus ensuring a self-fulfilling prophecy, whilst supporters of the underdog party lose faith and don’t turn out;

– the boomerang effect, on the other hand, proposes the opposite tendency, that is, that supporters of the stronger party become complacent, and support for the underdog party increases.

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Obviously both theses cannot be equally accurate simultaneously and in fact there are no discernible trends which indicate that one is more right than the other (Denver 1989). In any event, there appears to be a general view amongst publics that polls are a ‘good’ thing, even if those views are not necessarily predicated on any real understanding of polling methodology and design (Traugott and Kang 2000). Instead, there appears to be a certain amount of taking on trust that poll data has been generated by fair means and that they are ‘truthful’, or perhaps the public actually care less about poll data veracity and are more interested in the fact that they purport to say something about the public’s broad assessment of the various parties as a way of forcing politicians to take account of public opinion. But Crewe (2001) argues forcefully that accuracy in polling design does matter precisely because of both bandwagon and boomerang effects. Reflecting on the persistent over-inflation of the British Labour Party support base over several elections, including the general election of 2001, he suggests that:

Assuming that the true Labour lead over the Conservatives was about 10 percentage points throughout the campaign, well-designed polls based on random samples. . .would have reported Labour leads of between 7 and 13 per cent; a probable Labour victory, but not an inevitable one; a clear Labour majority, but not a landslide; an election to play for, not a foregone conclusion.

(Crewe 2001: 664)

In other words, both Labour and Conservative supporters might have turned out in greater numbers and, if not changed the result, then certainly affected the scale of the win. Although Labour’s majority fell from 179 in 1997, to 167 in 2001, to win so commandingly in a back-to-back election was not predicted (Norris 2001a). For Crewe, part of the fundamental problem in Britain’s opinion polling organizations, with one or two exceptions, is that they con- sistently over-represent Labour supporters in their polls. There are several reasons for this quirk in polling methodology, but principal amongst them could be a greater reluctance for respondents to ‘admit’ they support the Conservatives and/or a higher refusal rate amongst Conservative supporters to participate in polls.

Whilst opinion polls are undoubtedly important in providing a sense of the electoral mood, they have been so spectacularly wrong in too many crucial calls — a good recent example being the exit poll debacle in some American cities in the 2000 Presidential election contest — to be given much predictive authority. Fletcher’s (1996) work on polling suggests that the use of polls is not necessarily helpful in the democratic enterprise as their myriad failures — to take into account the intensity of individual preferences, to give the same credence to

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informed and uninformed opinion alike, and their tendency to discuss single issues in isolation — militates against their having any real utility. Similarly, although less negatively, Herbst (1993) suggests that the use of polling data as a stand-in for public opinion produces a form of communication which is wide but not deep, that is, it can provide superficial data about many things but very little of any depth. And if politicians and candidates are unhappy with the ways in which the media frame political stories during election campaigns, opinion pollsters are equally frustrated with the casual hijacking of their data to provide the basis of some spurious story, especially where polling companies have been careful to ensure that data were as reliable and sober as possible. Broughton (1995) suggests that the news media’s insistence on simplification means that the contingent nuances of much poll data are ignored by journalists keen on putting out sensational copy and this propensity contributes to the fact that polls are seen as increasingly unreliable predictors of voting behaviour. How- ever, it is probably not just the media who are implicated in missing the polling point but the electorate itself who will not necessarily tell the truth when asked about their voting intentions in a polling interview.

Whilst the supporters of exit polls (for example, Merkle and Edelman 2000) argue that improvements in poll design will encourage greater reliability, the increasing numbers of non-respondents in successive elections makes it hard to see how their validity can be improved. Importantly, though, polls carried out by the media (as opposed to those commissioned by political parties them- selves) do provide an independent snapshot of views, albeit those which people are willing to share but which do not necessarily reflect what they intend to actually do. And at some level, they do enable the public to have a voice in political debate, to make a statement, albeit in composite form, about the larger political picture. In a recent ‘kiss and tell’ video diary, Amanda Platell, the ex-media aide to William Hague, suggested that despite the media’s insistence on an impending Labour landslide, the Tory ‘war room’ continued to be relatively positive during the campaign until the Guardian published a poll which showed a devastatingly stark endorsement of Tony Blair. Up to that point, the Guardian’s poll had always shown a more even balance between the two parties and the publication of that particular poll, very close to polling day itself, marked the beginning of the end for the campaign team (Platell 2001). However, perhaps Lavrakas and Traugott err a little on the side of generosity when they cede symbolic power to the polls, although they are careful to insist that it is only the ‘good’ poll which can articulate the mood of the people.

When the media report on methodologically sound election polls, they make perhaps their single greatest contribution to democracy. In doing

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this, they send the symbolic message that it is the will and preferences of the entire population of individual citizens that the polity exists to serve, symbolized nowhere better than by a good-quality survey’s representative sample of the public.

(2000: 4)

But of course, despite their limitations, one might argue that more is better, that more information, albeit sometimes of dubious quality is better than less, especially during election campaigns when having good information is crucial to enable the proper exercise of individual democratic rights. It could be argued that the data provided in polls can assist the political parties as well as the electorate, by gauging the acceptability of certain kinds of policy (or not) and thus the electorate can sometimes actively shape the policy agenda (Meyer 1989; Hickman 1991).

However, polls have their detractors as well as their supporters and from very early on in the career of the opinion poll, its validity as a barometer of anything meaningful has been questioned (Blumer 1948). Not least this is because of the ephemeral and contested nature of the very concept being promoted, that is, the reality of public opinion itself (see Price 1992; Herbst 1993; Huffington 1998; Salmon and Glasser 1998). A significant element of the mistrust of poll data relates to a point discussed earlier, that is, the extent to which respondents to polls really know anything about policy differences (see Delli-Carpini and Keeter 1996). Specifically, have they given spontaneous views at the time their opinions are canvassed and have they actually thought deeply about the issues on which they are now being asked to comment (Luskin 1987)?

It is precisely the lack of deliberation that most citizens give to the political process which has encouraged some commentators to seek more sensitive ways in which the public might be encouraged to think more carefully about their political choices (see Fishkin et al. 2000; and the section below on deliberative polls). Indeed, there have been consistent calls, in the UK especially, for the publication of opinion polls to be banned during an election campaign. As early as 1967, the (UK) Speaker’s Conference on Electoral Reform supported such a ban (Denver 1989), arguing that polls affect voter behaviour and trivialize elections through reducing them to a mere horse-race with only marginal attention given to the serious issues at stake. However, the British government refused to accept the proposal, as have successive governments to the present day, although in Australia, there was until quite recently specific legislation (the Broadcasting Act 1942: section 1.1.6: subsection 4) which enforced a ban on the media’s reporting of election issues and party promotion precisely because of the media’s putative power as an influential force on public opinion (Winter 1993).

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Opinion polls: the next generation

However, there have been efforts to try and mitigate some of the disadvantages of the large-scale opinion poll whilst preserving the benefits of having a means of engaging in public/political discourse. For example, the ‘choice’ question- naire was developed by a team of Dutch researchers who introduced relevant information about policies whilst ostensibly conducting an ‘ordinary’ opinion survey (Neijens 1987). The pollsters intended to better inform the public they were surveying about specific policy positions amongst the parties, although we do not know whether any bias was introduced into their statements of ‘fact’! In the 1990s, three more novel methods were devised. Citizen Juries were pioneered at the Jefferson Centre in Minnesota and imported to Britain and used by, amongst others, the Institute for Public Policy Research (Coote and Lenagham 1997). In Britain they comprised ‘ordinary’ members of the public who had responded to a nationwide invitation to participate, and who then formed juries to listen to ‘evidence’ relating to a particular issue, such as crime or education or health. The evidence was presented by individuals putting forward competing arguments and facilitated by a chair. Once all the evidence had been presented, the jury then discussed what they had heard and came to a judgement about the issue.

Televoting was created by Ted Becker and Christa Daryl Slaton, whereby they interviewed a random sample of people, asked them to take part in a follow-up interview and gave them material to read in between interviews (Slaton 1992). The purpose was to identify whether giving people ‘homework’ forced them to take a more considered and informed approach to subsequent discussion and, ultimately, personal decision-making.

However, a particularly involving model was developed at the University of Texas and attributed to James Fishkin, and this was the deliberative poll which was initially established for use in the 1996 Presidential elections (see Price 2000). On that occasion, this new polling format brought together 459 American citizens using a probability sample, to debate a specific set of issues with the aim of both enabling different opinions to be put forward but also to encourage the sharing of perspectives with a view to pushing forward solutions. This first poll was dubbed the National Issues Convention (NIC) and provided the model for successive deliberative polls both in the USA and elsewhere.

If part of the ethos of public journalism (Merritt 1995; Rosen 1996), that is, journalism for the public good as opposed to for commercial gain, is to enable different publics to know more about one another, then moves towards a greater use of deliberative polling must also be for the good. Strategies which allow smaller groups of publics to express views and ‘speak’ to each other and thence to wider publics, might be a useful addition to the more conventional large-

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scale polls, as part of a wider framework for improving functional democracy. However, the appeal of these more considered public discussions — which find their mirror in the UK with People’s Parliament, Citizens Juries and the Labour government’s development of (the much lampooned) political ‘focus group’ — needs to be tempered with an understanding of their limitations (Price 2000). Whilst the traditional large-scale poll tends to elide differences by compositing responses into a simple binary measure of ‘for’ or ‘against’, the sampling methodology of the more reliable ones does at least tend towards represen- tativeness. However, as Herbst and Beniger (1995) argue, whilst randomized sampling makes their creators’ claims for representativeness more credible, the structure and context of most polls ensures fast and usually ill-considered responses to a prescribed list of topics. The deliberative poll, with its much smaller numbers, cannot make a similar claim for representativeness. But in the end, the reliability placed on the findings of each will, as always, depend on the individual perspectives of the polls’ different readers and their desire to find resonance with and corroboration for their own views.

The active voter

In Just et al.’s work (1996) on the relationship between citizens, politicians and the media, they found that despite the various blandishments, biases and economies of truth promoted by both the politicians and the media, the citizen showed herself to be capable of rejection and (re)interpretation of media-ted messages. However, access to and interest in, different sources of information about the political process was important in making final decisions about voting, so that ‘as citizens build constructs of the candidates, their information environment makes a difference in the range of considerations they bring to bear.’ (Just et al. 1996: 233) In other words, information and knowledge- rich individuals have, or at least make use of, more resources from which to draw when making voting decisions. However, ‘more’ in this sense does not necessarily mean different, given the conglomeratization of media industries which is leading to more sources saying fewer different things. Interestingly in Just et al.’s work, they found that citizens were much more likely to make assessments of political candidates on the basis of their personal attributes than their political affiliation and these assessments are made primarily via the various forms of communication made available by the mass media.

But such apparent ambivalence is not necessarily either a problem for, or symptomatic of, the undecided voter. Some commentators (Marcus 1988; Hochschild 1993) in fact suggest that just such an open-minded citizen, capable of taking in new information, considering and evaluating it and then ‘changing’

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her mind, is precisely what is required for the proper functioning of a demo- cratic society. To ignore new data which might challenge preconceived notions simply promotes rigid thinking and inertia. In Miller’s (2000) terms, to make such informed decisions, no matter how contrary to one’s original position, is to practice the ideal of deliberative democracy. However, to be ‘open’ to new ideas is not the same as being politically ambivalent. Most voter studies, including that of Just et al. (1996), eventually admit that political partisanship remains the most stable predictor of voting behaviour, despite the millions of dollars spent on media advertising during election campaigns to persuade people out of their existing views. Even ‘established’ predictors such as gender and age — received wisdom being that older women were more likely to vote for right of centre parties — are no longer seen as useful, as the gender gap appears to be closing (Kaufmann and Petrocik 1999). Women and men seem to be shifting in opposite directions, albeit at different speeds, not least because today’s ‘older generation’ are the grown-up children of the radical 1960s.

The active audience and public access broadcasting

While most of the previous discussion has focused on the ways in which audiences consume and make sense of the media’s promotion of political messages, both those pushed by journalists and those pushed by the parties, this final section considers the ways in which audiences actively engage in media-ted public/political space.

Traditionally, the most common ways in which we, as citizens, get to partici- pate in the political process is by using our vote at elections and, as discussed above, by becoming involved in opinion poll research and other political surveys. But the increasing use by politicians of broadcast media has meant that members of the public are now more likely to meet national politicians as part of a broadcast (TV or radio) studio debate, than their own constituency MP in their own home town (see Coleman and Ross 2002). Politicians much prefer to get their messages across to a wider audience in ways which are both more immediate and ‘natural’ as well as less likely to be ‘interpreted’ by media professionals themselves. But do these public interventions in political debate really count as democratic participation in the public sphere in a way which Habermas (1989) would recognize? In some ways, the answer to the question is circumscribed by the particular structure of the programmes under discussion, by the openness of the competition for participation and the extent to which the balance of participants is not overtly loaded in favour of the elites, to the detriment of the public.

For some commentators, the reality of television programming means that

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no matter the intent, the outcome is always an infotainment show aimed at maximizing the viewers’ enjoyment rather than a ‘reasonable’ debate between reasonable people aimed at pushing the process forward. However, as Livingstone and Lunt (1994: 32) argue, an ‘apparent lack of structure and control of argumentation may signify communicative conflict rather than emotional noise.’ In other words, a non-linear set of arguments offered by a variety of individuals may not necessarily connote a communication vacuum but, on the contrary, could mean a robust exchange of equally valid views. There is no requirement, in a democracy, for consensus: what is required instead is respect for different points of view and decisions which the majority can accept. In their work on audience participation programmes, Livingstone and Lunt (1994: 179) suggest that this relatively new type of show confounds allocation to either of two associated genres which also involve the public, that is, as subjects for news or as participants in game shows. They suggest therefore that the audience participation show is ‘intergenre’, forcing a reconsideration of the relationship (and relative status) between the power elite and the citizenry.

In Coleman and Ross’ (2002) work with participants of the radio phone-in program, Election Call, which was broadcast during the British general election campaign in 2001, the great majority of callers were very pleased with their involvement in the show. More generally, they were positive about the show’s contribution to a genuine political debate which actually engaged ‘ordinary’ people for a change. Whilst women were slightly more cautious than men about the extent to which audiences are generally open to change, part of their satisfaction with their participation in the show was precisely that they were given access to air the question they wanted to ask (and be taken seriously in doing so). In addition, their status as citizen forced whichever politician sat in the chair that day to at least attempt an answer, albeit superficially in many cases. In the view of many regular voters, politicians are too often allowed to ‘get away with it’ by interviewers who are too cosy and too obsequious, although from the point of view of those who interview politicians, this is not an outcome they desire but rather what the politicians wilfully orchestrate (Williams 1980; Moyser and Wagstaffe 1987; Puwar 1997). Lang and Lang (1983) in fact argue that during the Watergate scandal, it was precisely the public outrage, encouraged by the televised proceedings and enabled by the media’s diligent investigations and subsequent public exposure, which eventually brought down the politicians involved. Similarly, the media’s dogged pursuit of the ‘truth’ of the ‘Monica Lewinsky’ scandal ten years later, and the televised exposure of Bill Clinton’s clear inability to tell a convincing story accelerated his public disgrace and departure. What is so surprising is that successive generations of politicians fail to realize that the relationships they enjoy with journalists are only ever as constant as their reputations.

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So public access broadcasting does fulfil an important function for democracy by providing a public forum in which public views and opinions can, potentially at least, have influence, if not on the decisions of politicians then perhaps on the voting decisions of the listening audience. Such a forum can be seen, pace Heller (1978), as constituting an ‘extra-political’ power base, where broadcasters ‘help’ politicians to check the pulse of the nation. The Election Call participants in Coleman and Ross’s (2002) study believed that democracy had been served by the programme because of the range and diversity of the questions and because they had ‘had their say’ and held the politicians to account. At the very least, such a programme provides an arena in which views can be exchanged and considered, albeit on a rather linear basis comprising a series of discrete one-to-one interactions and without the explicit intention of achieving consensus. Rather the goal was to encourage a dialogue between publics and politics whereby the latter at least listen to the former, fulfilling the minimum criteria of critics such as Fraser (1990) and Mouffe (1992) for interaction rather than resolution. This is probably the best outcome possible in an environment in which political elites will always dominate the debating position, but where the citizen can at least become activist rather than audience for a few moments.

Conclusion

The extent to which you believe that the media can affect public beliefs about political parties and processes will depend on other, more general beliefs about cause and effect, agency and action and the extent to which we believe that, as individuals, we can be influenced in ways which we do not readily recognize or acknowledge. As we have seen in early chapters, the effects of media messages on audiences, including those posted by government and other political players, continues to be a subject which considerably exercises researchers, that is, whether the media have any effect, and if so, what that effect is, and so on. Broadly, though, views on the specific influence of politically oriented media messages on public perceptions and voting behaviour fall into two main camps. Many political communication scholars suggest that such messages and campaigns have minimal impact on change although they do have the effect of confirming and often entrenching existing political proclivities.

The effect of political communication and communicators, then, is to perform a kind of ritualistic affirmatory performance which is more symbolic than real. Political actors articulate predictable arguments, routine antagonisms are regularly televised but many consumers are already secure in their political

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beliefs. Whilst there is obviously some shifting of position in response to new information or new policies being promoted by different parties, political belief is usually more enduring than the politicians who front political parties (Butler 1989; Butler and Kavanagh 1997; King 1997).

But politicians and their advisors, on the other hand, as well as professional pollsters, suggest a rather different effect, arguing that even at the eleventh hour, a good election campaign message can pull off a vital shift in voting beliefs and therefore behaviour, at least amongst wavering voters (Gould 1998; Holmes and Holmes 1998; Finkelstein 1998).

The actual impact of political communication on public belief probably lies somewhere along the continuum of all-nothing and will be different for each person. The relationship of political news coverage and the public is highly complex and not readily amenable to simplistic theories which frame that influence in absolute terms and at least some election studies are developing analyses which go beyond that simple binary. The growing literature on public access broadcasting and other opportunities for the public to engage with politicians also suggests that, not only are many citizens more interested in the political process than politicians and the media generally acknowledge, but that they appreciate the mediated space offered to them to more actively engage in the democratic process. Thus the media can perform a positive role in democratic societies by empowering publics to take up their rights to political participation, it’s just that they don’t seem to offer those opportunities very often.