| Abstract: | Relations between the presidency and the press are often fractious. This is evident in the Nixon Administration's criticisms of the press during 1969, and the more recent charges that President Reagan has leveled at the media. In this article, we first examine three competing perspectives, termed media-subordinate, moderated-effects , and media-autonomous , that explain how the press responds to criticism from the presidency. Next, we use these perspectives to generate a set of predictions about connections between the press and the presidency. We then test the predictions with data from a random sample of 843 American daily newspapers, taken in 1970. The data demonstrate that the newspapers often did change their policies in ways desired by the Nixon Administration. Second, the data show that the more professional (and therefore presumably more autonomous) the editor of the newspaper, the more likely was the newspaper's editorial policy to change in ways desired by the Nixon Administration. These findings undercut the media-autonomous perspective. By contrast, the data provide some support for both the media-subordinate and moderated-effects perspectives. The former perspective predicted changes in newspaper policy and also a relationship between an editor's ideological leanings and changes in his newspaper's policy; the data confirmed these predictions. The latter perspective predicted that changes in newspaper policy would be intermediate in size; this prediction also was supported. In our discussion, we place our findings in the context of contemporary presidency-press relationships, and suggest ways in which the three perspectives need to be developed to account for recent changes in those relationships. |
