Page 145 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Global Political Communication

learn about public affairs. The wider the level of access to news from
daily papers, radio, television, and the Internet then, ceteris paribus, the
greater the potential for media impact. Access to the mass communica-
tions most commonly includes the printed press (newspapers and maga-
zines), the traditional electronic broadcast media (radio and television),
and the new technologies associated with the Internet (including e-mail
and the World Wide Web). Media access can be measured by World De-
velopment Indicators monitoring the circulation of daily newspapers,
and the distribution of radio receivers and television sets per 1,000 pop-
ulation in 135 nations, the proportion of the population online popu-
lation and the weighted distribution of Internet hosts (see Table 6.A1). 2
These indicators of media diffusion are strongly interrelated (all corre-
lations are strong and significant: R = 0.55 and above Sig.01), although
there are some societies that rely more heavily than average upon the
printed press, such as South Korea, Norway, Romania, and Israel, while
other countries are more reliant upon television in patterns of media
use, such as the United States, Portugal, and El Salvador (see Appendix
Figure 6.1). Given the strong correlations, access to all mass media were
combined into a single scale and standardized to 100-points, including
the per capita circulation of daily newspapers, the availability of radio
receivers and television sets, and the proportion of the population that
used the Internet and the distribution of Internet hosts. As the scale was
heavily skewed toward richer nations, using a logged scale normalized
the distribution.
Press freedom can be expected to influence whether the impact of the
news media promotes pluralistic voice and government accountability,
or how far it serves to reinforce the power of established interests and
state control. Press freedom is far more complex and difficult to assess in
any comprehensive fashion but the annual Freedom House Press Free-
domSurvey (2000) can be used as the standard cross-national indicator.
Press freedom is measured by how much the diversity of news content is
influencedbythestructureofthenewsindustry;legalandadministrative
decisions; the degree of political influence or control; the economic in-
fluences exerted by the government or private entrepreneurs; and actual
incidents violating press autonomy, including censorship, harassment
and physical threats to journalists. The assessment of press freedom dis-
tinguishes between the broadcast and print media, and the resulting

2
The data for daily newspapers and radios are originally derived from UNESCO, and
the information about television sets, personal computers, and Internet hosts from the
International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

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