For whom the gates open: News reporting and government source patterns in the United States, Great Britain, and Russia

Abstract

This study investigates whether political content cues in the news in both established and emerging democracies can be explained by implicit normative relations between journalists and representatives of government institutions. In particular, what patterns of press‐government relations dominate news coverage in a given polity? These questions are explored in a comparative study of parallel national security issues in the news in three nations at the end of the Cold War: the United States, Great Britain, and Russia. In all three cases policy coverage was driven overwhelmingly by government elites. However, coverage in the United States was indexed more to institutional decision points, while the British case followed the course of party debate. The Russian press system reflected the state of a disintegrating communist polity; coverage was keyed to remnants of the old order as well as a growing volume of chaotic elite debate in which citizens received few reliable cues about the policy implications of the ...