Source Use In a “News Disaster” Account: A Content Analysis of Voter News Service Stories

Abstract

This quantitative content analysis examines source use for an eleven-week period in a “news disaster” story. The frequency of similar stories, which explain to readers, viewers, and listeners how the media do their work, has grown in the past forty years, and media observers are unsure what the change means. In this study, source affiliations and themes are evaluated in a census of stories about errors made by the media in reporting election night returns for the 2000 presidential race. News workers and other media-affiliated sources initially dominated the stories. They commonly explained how the reporting errors occurred or related factual information about the coverage. These sources and themes effectively blocked other affiliated and unaffiliated sources from evaluating the media's performance until later.

Journal of Applied Communications vol. 93 (3-4) Full Issue

“…Source selection plays a major role in constructing media agenda and frames, with agenda-setting theorists maintaining that reporters choose their sources based on the agenda their newspapers seek to advance (Dearing & Rogers, 1996) and that sources contribute in major ways to constructing story frames (Ashlock, Cartmell & Kelemen, 2006;Irlbeck, 2009;Zoch & Turk, 1998). Additionally, agenda and frames may evolve over the course of an ongoing story, with sources changing to match that evolution as a story "matures" (Chyi & McCombs, 2004;Sumpter & Braddock, 2002;Martin, 2003). While this article does not explore news selection variables and their relationship to framing and agenda-setting per se, it does use those theoretical ideas to help select variables that should be studied.…”

Impact of Reporter Work Role Identity on News Story Source Selection: Implications for Coverage of Agricultural Crises

“…Such investigation could be fruitful. Additionally, the extensive use of "undefined" sources, for example, experts, advocates, critics, for which no representative was named, has not been explored in the literature, although some research exists dealing with sources termed part of the general public (Sumpter & Braddock, 2002). The impact of sourcing of unnamed individuals upon public understanding of complex stories and upon media credibility should be explored.…”

“…Other studies concentrating on relationships between specialty-beat reporters and their sources found that such reporters often use the same sources con-Research tinually, building strong bonds with them (Chermak, 1995;Dunwoody, 1979;Gandy, 1982;Holland, 2009;Ten Eyck, 2000) and often focusing almost exclusively on institutional representatives who may be depended upon to furnish information (Ericson, Baranek, & Chan, 1993;Sumpter & Braddock, 2002). Other researchers have called for media to concentrate to an even greater extent on scientists as sources for complex stories (Dunwoody, Brossard & Dudo, 2009;Holland, 2009;Ramsey, 1999), although they note that a reporter's ability to deal effectively with such expert sources may depend heavily upon that reporter's science training (Grantham & Irani, 2004;Vestal & Briers, 1999;Wingenbach, Rutherford, & Dunsford, 2003).…”

“…Although science-specialty-beat reporters were not found to use different types of sources than other reporters, they did use more scientists and agricultural scientists as sources. The nature of this relationship over time was not explored; for example, particular reporters were not followed over the eleven-month lifespan of the sampled event to discover whether their patterns of source use remained constant or changed due to story maturation or to source winnowing (Sumpter & Braddock, 2002). Such investigation could be fruitful.…”

“…Source selection plays a major role in constructing media agenda and frames, with agenda-setting theorists maintaining that reporters choose their sources based on the agenda their newspapers seek to advance (Dearing & Rogers, 1996) and that sources contribute in major ways to constructing story frames (Ashlock, Cartmell & Kelemen, 2006;Irlbeck, 2009;Zoch & Turk, 1998). Additionally, agenda and frames may evolve over the course of an ongoing story, with sources changing to match that evolution as a story "matures" (Chyi & McCombs, 2004;Sumpter & Braddock, 2002;Martin, 2003). While this article does not explore news selection variables and their relationship to framing and agenda-setting per se, it does use those theoretical ideas to help select variables that should be studied.…”