Page 177 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Local Political Communication

(Schoenbach 1978, 263). Only a small fraction of local news consisted of
frames in which locality was placed within the context of regional and
national, or even global forces. About two-thirds of all political news was
mentioned in the papers only once (Schoenbach 1978, 264), and about
50 percent of all news concerned “internal security” and “entertain-
ment” issues (Rager and Schibriani 1981, 499). While such parochialism
has changed specifically in urban settings where the effects of nonlocal
developments leave substantial imprints on the local commons day-by-
day, other features of local newspapers seem to have stayed virtually
untouched. A number of studies provide evidence that political agenda
setting was historically and still is dominated by local elites (for France,
Neveu1998,452;fortheUnitedStates,Kaniss1991,91;Graber1997,317;
for Germany, Rager and Schibrani 1981, 498; for Great Britain, Franklin
and Murphy 1991, 63–4). As Kaniss argues “while there is much in the
news and editorial columns that is critical of local officials, this criticism
is limited when compared with the amount of information that is taken
directly, and almost unquestioningly, from official bureaucratic sources”
(Kaniss 1991, 91). Journalistic independence and investigating initiative
have come to take backstage to reactive news reporting. It remains to
be seen whether such a downsized understanding of journalism is being
challenged by the reshaping of local governance structures in the 1990s,
namely by a substantial number of new actors from civic political associ-
ations entering the local public stage and becoming credible spokesper-
sons in fields such as housing, the environment, or transportation.
Anumber of studies indicate that local politicians traditionally prior-
itized local politics primarily through the print-media news flow. While
these officials now monitor local evening newscasts with similar scrutiny,
print coverage remains paramount (Kaniss 1991, 164). Politicians get
most of their contextual information about local issues from the local
print media, thus endowing the press with more power and framing
capacity than for example local radio or television (Dunn 1969; Jarren
1984; Kurp 1994, 49). The most ambiguous effect of such prioritizing
is “reification” of the very ideas that local officials deem central to their
work in the community: Local elites “take ... the local press reports as
an indicator for the social problems and processes within their city. If
they find there (in the paper) the majority of news bites that they them-
selves have generated, this will reinforce their initial – and maybe less
than adequate or even false – perceptions of the problems within their
county” (Murck 1983, 373). In the minds of consumers, the local press
still has the reputation as being the trustworthiest source of political

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