Page 274 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Wolfgang Donsbach and Thomas Patterson

labor,andbusiness).Journalistswhowerenotinvolvedintheproduction
ofdailynewswereexcludedfromthesurvey.Forexample,journalistswho
producedtelevisionnewsdocumentariesorwhoworkedforweeklynews
magazines were not sampled. Also excluded were daily journalists who
concentrated, for example, on sports, travel, fashion, and entertainment.
In terms of the study, a journalist was defined as a person who makes
decisionsdirectlyaffectingnewscontent.Thecategorythusincludesboth
reporters and editors. In some news organizations, other roles, such as
that of owner or newsroom manager, were also included in the category.
As a consequence, the sole criterion for inclusion in the sample was
whether a journalist participated in daily news decisions about politics
and public affairs.
Each country’s sample was stratified. The stratification occurred on
two levels. Medium of communication was one of them. In each country,
50 percent of those sampled were newspaper journalists and 50 percent
were broadcast journalists. The broadcast journalists were weighted to-
ward television: in each country, seven of every ten broadcast journalists
surveyed worked in television and three of ten worked in radio. The
sample was also stratified 50/50 on a national–local basis. Although any
such classification is somewhat arbitrary, distinctions can be made. In
the United States, for example, CBS News and The New York Times are
widely regarded as nationally significant news organizations, whereas
WIXT (a television station in Syracuse, New York) and the Sioux Falls
Argus-Leader (a newspaper in South Dakota) are considered locally or
regionally important news organizations.
The procedure for random selection varied, depending on the avail-
able information. In the case of Italy, the sample was drawn from the
membership list of the National Union of Journalists to which all Italian
journalists belong. Each of the Italian journalists sampled was contacted
directly by mail. Because there is no national roster of journalists in
the other four countries, the samples were obtained through random
selections made from organizational rosters in some instances and by
news editors in others. For example, the British sample included fifteen
journalists from the (London) Daily Telegraph, a national newspaper,
and one journalist from the Kent Evening Post, a local paper. To select
the fifteen Daily Telegraph journalists, we obtained from the Telegraph
a complete roster of its journalists and randomly selected fifteen indi-
viduals from the list who were then contacted directly by mail. In the
case of the Kent Evening Post, we wrote to the news editor, who was pro-
vided instructions on how to randomly select a journalist to whom the

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