Book Review: The People’s News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of Capitalism, by Joseph E. Uscinski

Abstract

The People's News: Media, Politics, and Demands of CapitalismJoseph Uscinski, an assistant professor of political science at University of Miami, has taken a giant step forward with his examination of what he refers to as the people's news. Although his subtitle makes reference to demands of capitalism, his focus within text is on what economists refer to as consumer demands. This conflict between constructions is something to which we will return after I take due note of great many things that Uscinski makes perfectly clear.This is a book about information and democracy, and Uscinski suggests we have reason to be concerned about character and quality of information being supplied by nation's news media. Among many shortcomings that are identified within introduction, we are reminded of many ways that negativity can degrade quality of citizen engagement in democratic process. Framed as a externality rather than a journalistic goal, we are told that overly pronounced negative news can us to avoid activities that might otherwise lead to enlightened citizenship.The nature of these media effects are explored more fully in second chapter, where Uscinski explores many of claims and challenges that have been made with regard to agenda-setting hypothesis. While making it clear that controlled experiments provide considerable support for claims that media coverage can set audience agenda, Uscinski describes an innovative approach for assessing extent to which audiences can also be said to set media agenda. After presenting five arguments for why a study of television network news provides a fair test of audience influence, Uscinski describes his use of abstracts from Vanderbilt News Archives from 1968 to 2010 to identify extent of news coverage of various issues over this forty-two-year period. Among many interesting things he notes about this coverage is extent to which networks agree with themselves, as well as New York Times, about which issues are worthy of our attention. He makes use of Gallup's Most Important Problem as a measure of public's interest in these issues.The challenge, of course, is to determine direction of influence, or dare we say the direction of statistical causation between news issue coverage and public opinion. For this, Uscinski relies upon Granger analysis to assess this directionality at different time lags. Not surprisingly, there is no simple answer to question being set here. While audience opinion is said to drive media coverage with regard to seven issues, media drive opinion in four, and there is no significant relationship for ten remaining issue areas. Uscinski this evidence of audience influence over news media to introduce another perspective on media effects into discussion.Uscinski provides a political scientist's slant on some of insights derived from communications scholars' periodic engagement with media uses and gratifications. Audiences are said to derive important gratifications from exposure to media content that is consistent with their ideology and political partisanship. Because these are believed to be relatively stable attributes of an individual's identity, it is likely that neither is much changed by exposure to news media content. It is here that change in nature of media environment becomes particularly relevant. …