A Critical Analysis of Australian Television Coverage of Election Opinion Polls

Much recent attention has focused on the nature and possibleeffects of media coverage of opinion polls. Accordingly, thisarticle reports the results of a detailed critical analysisof Victorian television news coverage of election opinion pollsduring the 1980 Australian federal election campaign. Five aspectsof the coverage were analyzed: its extent, focus, completeness,accuracy, and critical balance. The results of the study indicatethat the coverage was seriously, perhaps irredeemably, flawed     

FEAR IN THE NEWS

Fear pervades popular culture and the news media. Whether used as a noun, verb, adverb, or adjective, an ongoing study finds that the word "fear'pervades news reports across all sections of newspapers, and is shown to move or "travel'from one topic to another. The use of fear and the thematic emphases spawned by entertainment formats are consistent with a "discourse of fear,'or the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of the effective environment. A qualitative content analysis of a decade of news coverage in The Arizona Republic and several other major American news media (e.g., the Los Angeles Times , and ABC News) reveals that the word "fear'appears more often than it did several years ago, particularly in headlines, where its use has more than doubled. Comparative materials obtained through the Lexis/Nexis information base also reveals that certain themes are associated with a shifting focus of fear over the years (e.g., violence, drugs, AIDS), with the most recent increases associated with reports about children. Analysis suggests that this use of fear is consistent with popular culture oriented to pursuing a "problem frame'and entertainment formats, which also have social implications for social policy and reliance on formal agents of social control.     

Casting the 2000 U.S. Presidential Primaries

This article examines the 2000 U.S. presidential primaries as a case study in "casting" by early journalistic and polling choices. Casting is a strong series of candidate expectations expressed by news organizations early in campaigns. Often casting choices are based significantly on early polls (and campaign cash), and sometimes they can become self-fulfilling prophecies as campaign coverage and elections move forward.

The author argues that casting occurs in regularly scheduled and significant news stories. The news choices fulfill both organizational needs and the routines of dramatic storytelling. The researcher examined polls and news coverage in the primary season from January 1 until March 14, 2000. News coverage was determined by daily keyword searches on Lexis-Nexis for each of nine candidates. The researcher tracked not only overall news coverage, but also news attention per polling point. Casting was clear: Al Gore and George W. Bush as extensively-covered front runners, a "serious candidates" field covered more extensively than their initial poll numbers would seem to justify, and nearly invisible "immediate also-rans."     

THE SHORT-TERM EFFECT OF ELECTION POLLS ON FOREIGN EXCHANGE RATES: THE 1988 CANCDIAN FEDERAL ELECTION

Polls do not simply measure public opinion; they also providevital information that the public can use to form opinions andto make decisions. Using multiple regression analysis, the authorsfound that published polls had a powerful impact on the valueof the Canadian dollar during the 1988 Canadian federal election.This appears to have been due to the unprecedented importanceof economic issues in the federal campaign, the distinctivepositions taken by the major political parties with respectto the U.S.-Canadian Free Trade Agreement, and to the proliferationof "horse-race" polls in the media. These results have implicationsfor understanding the behavior of other elite groups, such asfinancial contributors and volunteer campaign workers, who mayalso use published horse-race polls to handicap election outcomes.     

Reporting "The Polls" in 2004

Media reports of polls indicate how well public opinion pollshave been integrated into campaign coverage. This article examineshow polls were used in 2004. Although there were relativelylimited methodological changes in how polls were conducted in2004, there were changes in how the polls were treated in themedia. Americans in 2004 were subjected to intense debates aboutpolls and to as much reporting about "the polls" as there wasof the polls themselves. The discussion of "the polls" in 2004included claims of electability during the Democratic nominatingprocess, increased reporting about methodological issues, andheightened political criticisms of "the polls." The articleconcludes with a discussion of the current state and the futureof news polling.     

Drug Peddlers: How Four Presidents Attempted to Influence Media and Public Concern on the Drug Issue

This agenda-building study examined the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush to determine to what degree they influenced media and public concern for the drug issue. This study found a complex reciprocal relation between the president, the public, and the press, with results differing depending what president and newspapers were studied. However, when the data are examined across the various presidents rather than on individual leaders, the agenda-setting process is especially powerful with 8 of the 9 predicted paths proving significant. This study discovered that the president plays an equal or greater role than the media in the agenda-building process. The path between presidential statements and public approval was higher than the one between the media and the public. Although public approval polls drove both media coverage and presidential statements, the polls had a greater effect on the media. Finally, the path from presidential statements to subsequent media coverage was just as strong as the one from media coverage to subsequent presidential statements. Agenda-setting researchers, then, should not ignore the effects of the president and other officials on the agenda-setting process.     

News Framing and Cueing of Issue Regimes: Explaining Clinton's Public Approval in Spite of Scandal

During the period of exceedingly critical news coverage surroundingthe Monica Lewinsky debacle, President Bill Clinton's job approvalratings were at some of the highest levels they reached duringhis tenure in office. Given this public response, many pollsters,pundits, and scholars argued that news coverage of the scandalmust have been largely irrelevant to the public. Our view countersthese claims by advancing a theory that recognizes that citizens'political preferences are influenced substantially by framesand cues provided by news media. To test our ideas, we drawupon three types of data, all from January 1993 to March 1999:(a) a longitudinal content analysis of major news media, (b)a time-trend of opinion polls on presidential job approval,and (c) monthly estimates of real disposable personal income,seasonally adjusted. Analyses reveal that news media emphasisupon and framing of certain issue regimes—to the framingof the scandal in terms of the strategic motives of conservativeelites.     

Pre-election polling and third party candidates

I analyze voters’ incentives in responding to pre-election polls with a third party candidate. Third party supporters normally have an incentive to vote strategically in the election by voting for one of the major candidates. But these voters would vote third party if the third party candidate is doing surprisingly well in the polls. Because voters are more likely to vote third party if the third party candidate is doing well in polls, voters who like the third party candidate best have an incentive to claim they will vote third party in the polls so that more voters will ultimately vote third party in the election. The differing incentives faced during polls and elections accounts for why third party candidates do better in polls than in elections.     

Formation of a region: Source strategies and media images of the Sweden–Danish Öresund Region

The research applies media discourse analysis and late modernity theory to the social construction of the trans-national Öresund Region between the South of Sweden and East of Denmark. Based on interviews with PR sources and journalists, analysis of newspaper texts and opinion polls, the study found that despite trans-national aims the region is mainly constructed through Swedish or Danish national perspectives. It was also found that as a news management strategy, the factual strategy, emphasizing logical arguments and the production of reports, surveys, analysis, books and seminars aimed towards opinion elites, has been most successful. The communicated region is dominated by a national growth discourse where regional political-economical elites support local and national growth prior to other values. The media formation of the Öresund Region is dominated by elite actors and has an auto-communicative character.     

"THE NEWS MEDIA, THE PROBLEM FRAME, AND THE PRODUCTION OF FEAR"

The role of the news media in promoting a public discourse of fear is examined. A conceptual model is offered that is based on recent developments in communication formats and frames. The emphasis is on the impact of media forms and frames for guiding the selection and presentation of reports emphasizing fear (e.g., crime, drugs, violence). A "problem frame' compatible with format and entertainment needs is used by the news media as a secular version of a morality play. This promotes messages that resonate fear. The role of the problem frame is described as part of the process for promoting widespread messages stressing fear and danger. Materials from a qualitative content analysis approach, "tracking discourse,' of selected news media illustrate how the focus and content of "fear' shifts over a period of time. Conceptual and methodological implications of this approach are discussed.
The sociological imagination…consists of the capacity to shift from one perspective to another, and in the process to build up an adequate view of a total society and its components.
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination .     

Effects of 360° video on attitudes toward disaster communication: Mediating and moderating roles of spatial presence and prior disaster media involvement

Visual media technologies such as 360° video, augmented reality, and virtual reality are on the rise for immersive storytelling in a variety of public relations contexts. Yet there is a profound lack of scholarly research in public relations, crisis communication, and disaster communication to explore the effects of content displayed using these delivery formats on publics’ responses. To begin addressing the knowledge gap, this work reports results from a laboratory experiment investigating effects of media modality (traditional unidirectional video content vs. 360° omnidirectional video content) on attitudes toward the disaster communication content. Results demonstrate that 360° video featuring the aftermath of a natural disaster yields enhanced attitudes toward the helpful impact of the content. Importantly, mediation analyses show that (1) a sense of spatial presence underlies these effects, and (2) the mediating effects of spatial presence are attenuated by involvement with similar disaster media coverage (indirect experience).     

INFORMATION RIGIDITIES,INFLATION PERCEPTIONS,AND THE MEDIA: LESSONS FROM THE EURO CASH CHANGEOVER

The objective of theoretical models of information rigidities is to capture the fact that people are constrained in their ability to acquire and process all available information. Given that most people obtain their information about the economy from the media, press coverage of the economy may exert an influence on peoples' attitudes. This paper tests for this influence by examining consumers' inflation perceptions in the aftermath of the euro cash changeover, which serves as a natural experiment. Using a new data set, that quantifies the intensity and tone of media reports, we document that media reporting has had a statistically significant and economically meaningful impact on inflation perceptions and contributed to their sharp rise in the aftermath of the euro cash changeover and to the divergence between inflation perceptions and actual inflation rates. (JEL E53, D83)     

Of Polls, Mountains: U.S. Journalists and Their Use of Election Surveys

Polls are a prominent feature of U.S. election news coverage.Although polls are used to explain voter opinion, they are employedmostly to fuel horse-race coverage and to craft images consistentwith the candidates’ positions in the race. Moreover,U.S. journalists sometimes misinterpret polls by slighting thepossibility that changes in candidate preference are the resultof survey error rather than real change. On balance, U.S. journalists’dependence on polls adversely affects the quality of Americanelection coverage.     

Friend or foe: the media’s power to inform and shape societal attitudes towards people with acquired brain injury

Media representations play an integral role in modern society, informing the public about a range of issues affecting their communities. Using qualitative content analysis, this article reports on the study of a sample of Australian media coverage, spanning 30 years, covering issues associated with acquired brain injury (ABI) and related cognitive disabilities. The analysis explores how the media both portray and actively shape public perceptions about people living with ABI, the lived experience of the condition, and its broader social implications. The authors identify a range of themes arising in the sample that communicate specific ideas about ABI, disability, and deviance. Importantly, they identify how these themes are able to either construct or reinforce dominant understandings of disability and deviance through both their content and structure.     

THE THRESHOLD OF PUBLIC ATTENTION

The analysis reviews time series data for the period 1945 to1980 on media coverage and corresponding public attention toa set of ten political issues including poverty, racial problems,Watergate, and Vietnam. The study focuses on the early stagesof public awareness and the need for a "critical mass" or thresholdto move a matter from the status of private concern to a public,political issue. The pattern of evolving public awareness variesdramatically for different types of issues. In some cases, thepublic appears to have a much steeper "response function" inreacting to real-world cues than the media; in other cases,the media seem to be more responsive. Modeling the growth ofattention to public issues with the logistic curve met withmodest success. The article concludes with a call for much closercoordination between agenda-setting research and the study ofpolitical cognition.     

An experiment on coordination in multi-candidate elections: The importance of polls and election histories

Do polls simply measure intended voter behavior or can they affect it and, thus, change election outcomes? Do candidate ballot positions or the results of previous elections affect voter behavior? We conduct several series of experimental, three-candidate elections and use the data to provide answers to these questions. In these elections, we pay subjects conditionally on election outcomes to create electorates with publicly known preferences. A majority (but less than two-thirds) of the voters are split in their preferences between two similar candidates, while a minority (but plurality) favor a third, dissimilar candidate. If all voters voted sincerely, the third candidate — a Condorcet loser — would win the elections. We find that pre-election polls significantly reduce the frequency with which the Condorcet loser wins. Further, the winning candidate is usually the majority candidate who is listed first on the poll and election ballots. The evidence also shows that a shared history enables majority voters to coordinate on one of their favored candidates in sequences of identical elections. With polls, majority-preferred candidates often alternate as election winners.     

Pollsters Under Attack: 2004 Election Incivility and Its Consequences

The 2004 election was remarkable for a number of reasons, includingthe harsh, personal attacks from all parts of the politicalspectrum on a number of media pollsters. The idea of "killingthe messenger" has been around long enough for the phenomenonto have its own name, but it appears to have intensified muchmore than in the past. The article details the experiences oftwo polls and their pollsters, one national and one statewide.These attacks are part of a growing practice of trying to mitigateperceived damage by any message in the political marketplace.The article suggests that while there are positive effects fromthese developments, including heightened awareness among votersof polling methods, negative effects can damage the credibilityof specific polls and their sponsors, as well as the professionin general, including market and other public opinion research.The article ends with a call for researchers to be more openwith their methods and measures, and to strongly defend properlydone research against critics; for journalists to be more discerningin evaluating poll criticisms before publishing them; and forprofessional organizations to help the public better understandpolling, market research, and other public opinion researchand their benefits to society.     

Media reputation in initial public offerings: A study of financial news coverage in Hong Kong

This study investigated media reputation in initial public offerings (IPOs) by proposing eight attributes of substantive media reputation from environmental and product-resource perspectives. A content analysis on financial news coverage (2281 newspaper articles from 2004 to 2010) in Hong Kong was conducted to examine how print media reported financial and nonfinancial information on 38 IPO firms in the sectors of financial, properties and construction, and consumer goods. Results from partial least squares analysis showed that, although substantive media reputation and recency of news coverage together only explained a small proportion of changes in IPO share price, substantive media reputation has a significant positive effect on changes in IPO share price. Apart from the significant positive effect from the presentation tone of environmental attributes, the tone of social attributes had a significant negative effect on substantive media reputation. With the increasing concern on measuring media reputation attributes in financial news coverage across different contexts, this study contributes to the applicability of environmental and product-resource attributes in the specific context of IPOs.     

Some Epidemiological Characteristics of Perpetrators and Victims of Incest in Contemporary Ghana: Analysis of Media Reports

ABSTRACT

In Ghana, incest is considered sinful, taboo, and illegal. However, recent media reports show that incest has become a daily reality in Ghana. This study is a situational analysis of the pattern of incest in Ghana as reported in the media from January 2008 through July 2015. Qualitative content analysis was conducted on 48 incest news reports in Ghana. The findings showed that father–daughter incest was most frequent across the study period. Forty-seven females aged 3 to 25 years and a male aged 3 years were identified as victims. Generally, the incest lasted between 1 day and 13 years before disclosure. Perpetrators employed psychological and/or physical methods to coerce their victims. Marital difficulties, diabolical control, and seduction by victim featured prominently as alleged motives behind the abuse. The study observes that the recent increase in father–daughter incest warrants an immediate shift of research attention onto men’s mental health in Ghana.