Page 264 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

9. POLITICAL COMMUNICATION EFFECTS 253

historical context, may nullify any beneficial effects the stories might have
had on citizens. Future research might investigate whether sustained
episodic coverage of government problems lessens interest in knowing
how government works and/or increases cynicism about politics.

Activation of Informed Participation

News media may be evaluated by how well they provide incentives for cit-
izens to learn about and become involved in politics. The news media do
not appear to pay much attention to this standard, at least to the extent there
is a lack of “mobilizing information” (Lemert, Mitzman, Seither, Cook, &
Hackett, 1977). Citizen activation may require articulation of the feelings of
less-involved citizens and transforming them into more-organized views.
Although techniques of reaching mass voting publics have become more
sophisticated, feedback from the public remains limited, indirect, and dis-
torted. The political system pays a price in loss of potential “participatory
energy the system might generate” (Gurevitch & Blumler, 1990).
The vast literature on political participation pays little attention to
media influences (Verba & Nie, 1972; Verba et al., 1995). Media effects
findings do have implications for participation, however. The failure to
see systemic consequences, limited in part by the episodic and personal-
ized media content of television news, may deter active participation.
Political activation is also a matter of media treatment of protest groups.
The social movement literature is highly relevant for evaluation of press
performance on activation.

Maintenance of Media Autonomy

Protection of the press from governmental interference is a key element of
the First Amendment. Without such protection, all other democratic stan-
dards are in jeopardy. Maintenance of media autonomy, however, is much
more than the absence of governmental restraints envisioned by the found-
ing fathers. Government growth and corporate power deserve close
scrutiny by the press, but this is made difficult because major media have
themselves become part of larger corporate conglomerates. Given the prob-
lems of media in the modern marketplace, the autonomy standard
demands a “principled resistance to the efforts of forces outside the media
to subvert their independence, integrity and ability to serve the audience”
(Gurevitch & Blumler, 1990, p. 279). In cases where such resistance has been
attempted, as in press attempts to forestall strict governmental controls in
the Gulf War, efforts to assert autonomy have failed. At worst, the result is
elite perspectives presenting a high proportion of news generated from offi-
cial bureaucratic sources. Journalists may react to covering stories domi-
nated by manipulative sources by inserting disdaining comments in the