Tracking the Coverage of Public Policy in Mass Media

Abstract

The average citizen often does not experience government policy directly, but learns about it from the mass media. The nature of media coverage of public policy is thus of real importance, for both public opinion and policy itself. It nevertheless is the case that scholars of public policy and political communication have invested rather little time in developing methods to track public policy coverage in media content. The lack of attention is all the more striking in an era in which media coverage is readily available in digital form. This paper offers a proposal for tracking coverage of the actual direction of policy change in mass media. It begins with some methodological considerations, and then draws on an expository case—defense spending in the United States—to assess the effectiveness of our automated content‐analytic methods. Results speak to the quantity and quality in media coverage of policy issues, and the potential role of mass media—to both inform and mislead—in modern representative democracy.

Varieties of Policy Feedback Research: Looking Backward, Moving Forward

“…The issue concludes with an article by Soroka and Wleizen () who develop and apply a methodology that measures “the extent to which cues about policy direction are available in media content” (p. 2). This represents an initial step in empirically identifying the causal mechanisms linking public opinion with public policy as developed in the thermostatic model (Wlezien, ).…”

“…Substantively, they focus on changes in defense spending (increases or decreases) as reported in media reports. “We compare the ‘signal’ provided by these cues to trends in government spending; and consider this a preliminary examination of the possibility that the negative feedback that characterizes thermostatic responsiveness is facilitated by media content” (Soroka & Wleizen, , p. 3). After carefully spelling out the methods they developed and applied (layered dictionaries), the authors compare changes in U.S. defense spending with media reports (10 newspapers over several decades) of changes in defense spending.…”

“…After carefully spelling out the methods they developed and applied (layered dictionaries), the authors compare changes in U.S. defense spending with media reports (10 newspapers over several decades) of changes in defense spending. Correlations between changes in spending and media reports of changes range from 0.55 to 0.80 (Soroka & Wleizen, , p. 14). As the authors conclude, “results here help explain how the American public has been found to respond thermostatically to change in defense spending” (p. 17).…”

Environmental hazards, rigid institutions, and transformative change: How drought affects the consideration of water and climate impacts in infrastructure management

“…If drought, for instance, begins to figure more prominently in water project planning, we assume that this is potentially indicative of drought-induced changes in infrastructure planning and operations at a larger scale. Scholars have similarly used content analysis to assess institutional change via congressional speeches (Nowlin 2016), local government budget documents (Anastasopoulos, Moldogaziev, and Scott 2017), and media coverage (Soroka and Wlezien 2019).…”

Media influence on public policy in Kenya

“…Jordan and Maloney go further and argue that “opening up of decision-making processes to a wider, diverse and larger number of groups is seen as contributing to democratic representativeness” (Jordan & Maloney 2007: 8). However, democracy requires a public that is both attentive and informed (Soroka & Wlezian 2019), which is especially important in Africa at the time of writing, since it appears that democracy is retreating and autocracy is growing (Cheeseman & Smith 2019). This poses further questions about the role of the media as an institutional actor and about how the media decides which issues are important enough to cover (Russell et al .…”