Contemporary Public Opinion

Issues and the News

Maxwell McCombs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351226721
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book discusses the public opinion process with a focus on the role that the news media play in shaping public opinion. Although heavily influenced by the agenda-setting perspective -- the view that the news media define the important issues of the day and determine how these issues are presented -- the authors neither support nor refute this claim. They present instead a variety of contemporary scholarship integrated into a coherent picture of public opinion for a general audience.

PART ONE
Introduction

CHAPTER ONE
Communication and Public Opinion

Things are not what they once were. But then they never were! In the realm of public affairs, classical democratic theory assumes universal knowledge. To the extent that the public affairs to be guided by informed public opinion are local affairs, the assumption has some plausibility. Popular wisdom has it that in the small villages and towns of colonial America—and even the small communities that were the stereotypical portrait of the United States well into the current century—everyone knew the public business of the community, and even a great deal of the private affairs.

In a world of primarily local affairs, coupled with no more than a modicum of technical complexity and with widespread knowledge of community feelings and interests, it is reasonable to expect that community leadership and government actions will be in harmony with public opinion. After all, public opinion is concerned with that array of topics, interests, and behaviors where the concerns of many different individuals in a community are dependent on mutual action, cooperation or, at a minimum, tacit consent for the fulfillment of specific goals.

This classical view of grassroots democracy and leadership assumes that most, if not all, of the problems to be engaged by public opinion and its expression through government are obtrusive in nature. By an obtrusive problem we mean that the major outlines of the topic are well known— primarily through direct experience—to all members of the community. To some extent, classical expressions of democratic theory view the origins of issue obtrusiveness as inherent in each individual as if knowledge and awareness came to be there by divine revelation. A more realistic view of the social psychology of public knowledge attributes these perceptions of public issues to direct experience.

In a small community one can have direct experience of many public topics. Peer review takes on a very specific meaning under circumstances where numerous citizens can, in the words of the lawyers, testify of their own personal knowledge. Even in our time there are obtrusive national issues. Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, in part, because of his persuasive arguments that he could deal with inflation, a problem then highly obtrusive to almost all Americans. Everyday experiences in the grocery stores, shopping malls, and on their jobs had informed voters in detail about the erosion of the dollar.

However, it is doubtful that a majority of the public questions of the day have ever been fully obtrusive to the general public. Even in the idealized and romanticized days of the 18th and 19th centuries, local obtrusive issues did not fully dominate the public agenda. Foreign affairs, which are the best example of an unobtrusive issue, received considerable attention from the colonial leadership of America. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and many others in the political elite of the American colonies spent considerable time in France and other foreign locales in order to inform themselves and to influence the direction of events critical to the survival of the new republic. Even at home it is doubtful that anything approaching universal knowledge existed on most questions of the day.¹ Setting a goal of universal literacy was a step in that direction, but that step did not come until the United States of America was in its adolescence. In short, there never have been all that many truly obtrusive issues!

If the number of obtrusive issues to be dealt with by public opinion was limited even in the 18th and early 19th centuries, consider the change in the public agenda as the focus of government action shifted from the town hall and county courthouse to Washington. Once, as the Census Bureau has documented in its decennial portraits of America, the vast majority of us did reside in small communities or on farms. Even those who lived in cities resided in urban communities that were small by today's standard. Now the majority of Americans reside in urban areas, either the central cities or the considerable suburbs of our major metropolitan areas. Although the change in our physical environment has been considerable, the change in our psychological environment has been enormous. The issues that engage the minds of the attentive public now are far more likely to be national and international in scope than local.

A few years ago, there was considerable public concern and Congressional activity regarding President Reagan's sale of weapons to Iran and the apparent diversion of millions of dollars in profits from these sales to the Contras in Nicaragua. Here was an issue on the public agenda that was simultaneously national and international.

The initial impact on public opinion of these revelations about White House dealings with Iran and Nicaragua was significant. Poll questions about public satisfaction with the President's overall performance in office as well as specific queries about dealings with Iran and the Contras provided precise statistics on public concern and dismay.

This is a contemporary, historically fleeting, example of public opinion about an unobtrusive issue. By an unobtrusive issue we mean, of course, one that is not amenable to the direct experience of most Americans. Of course, the extensive television coverage of the Congressional hearings focused considerable public attention on Oliver North—remember him?— and the administration's dealings with Iran and the Contras, but that was still second-hand, mediated experience. Today, most of the issues on the public agenda, most of the issues around which public opinion is formed, are unobtrusive in nature.

Walter Lippmann eloquently summarized this point in his 1922 classic, Public Opinion:

The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined. Man is no Aristotelian god contemplating all existence at one glance.

(p. 29)²

A Division of Labor

This observation by Lippmann also outlines the division of intellectual labor in the formation of public opinion about a largely remote, unobtrusive world. It is a division of labor between individual citizens and the news media, which Lippmann took up in the opening pages of Public Opinion. The first chapter in his book is titled, "The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads." It is Lippmann's thesis that the news media, primarily newspapers in his day, are the principal conduit between the world outside and the images we hold in our minds of that world. Lippmann was not the first to express that idea, nor the first to note the limitations of journalism in fulfilling this social function for a democracy. But he did it more eloquently and succinctly than most. Three verbs in the middle of the passage just quoted—"explored, reported, and imagined"—parsimoniously capture the roles of the news media and public that are elaborated in subsequent chapters of this book.

Democratic theory long has assigned the news media a major role in exploring the political happenings of the world, both those public events that are part of everyday government as well as those private events that governing officials often go to great lengths to conceal. But there is a great deal more to review here than the traditional roles of the news media as conveyors of public knowledge or as watchdogs over the excesses of government. Journalism is an institution in its own right, increasingly a professionalized one with its own peculiar practices, traditions, and values that determine what is reported and how it is reported.³ This is not a statement, even indirectly, about traditional concerns over political bias. Rather it is a statement about journalism as a genre of communication, and how the characteristics of this genre shape the news media's daily exploration and reporting of the world.

Whereas reporting usually is considered the province of the news media, full consideration of the task of news reporting quickly will bring the realization that reporting—the transmission of information about the world outside—is a transaction between two partners, the news media and the public. The most accurate, complete, and beautifully presented news report is worthless if no one pays any attention. Part of the skill of the journalist, both individual reporters and their editors, is to capture and hold the attention of citizens who typically invest a half hour or less per day in the news.⁴ Reporting as a communication act involves both the efforts of the journalist to explore and write the news and the efforts of individual citizens to pay sufficient attention to this news to acquire its principal information.

But the work of the citizen does not end there. The world outside has to be shaped into a picture in the mind. It needs to be imagined, rather than left as a clutter of stray facts gleaned from the daily news. At least that is necessary if public opinion is to be based on meaningful perspectives. Informed public opinion requires an active imagination.⁵

Although a complete social psychology of public opinion would accord equal treatment to the partners in these daily transactions, citizens, and the news media, the tilt here is toward the news media and citizens' use of these sources. This is not to say that other aspects of political psychology are ignored. It simply is to say that citizen interaction with the news media and crucial aspects of the news media that influence the nature of public opinion are emphasized. Otherwise, this book would run considerably longer than it does, and, at least for many readers, be far too encyclopedic in tone.

Media Influence

Reference was made earlier to the question of political bias in the news. Of all the popular questions involving political communication and public opinion, this is by far the dominant one. But on balance, there is little evidence over the past 40 years of any systematic partisan bias in the major television and newspaper coverage of campaigns.⁶ In recent years, attention has shifted away from partisan bias and direct media influence on people's attitudes and opinions. There is far less concern with partisan bias in news coverage or direct persuasive influence by editorial and opinion pages in the newspaper. This is not to say that newspapers do not influence their readers, or that newspapers' editorial endorsements have no influence on the outcome of elections. They do! But the once massive influences ascribed to the news media, influences enshrined in such labels as the "bullet theory" or "hypodermic theory" of mass communication, have been replaced with more moderate views of mass media impact. One of these newer perspectives, which guides this discussion of public opinion, is the agenda-setting role of mass communication.⁷ The difference between this view and other, older views of powerful media effects is summed up in political scientist Bernard Cohen's remark that the media may not tell us what to think, but they tell us what to think about.⁸

Through their day-by-day selection of news stories and decisions about how to display those stories, the editors of our newspapers and the producers of our local and national television news programs provide us with significant cues about what are the important issues of the day. This agenda-setting influence of the news media results from the necessity to choose some topics for the daily news report and to reject others, to select some stories for prominent headlines, display on the front page or the lead of a newscast, and to bury others deep in the news report. In any event, issues prominent on the news agenda are perceived by the public to be important, and, over time, frequently become the priority issues on the public agenda.

This agenda-setting influence results from what an early student of mass communication, sociologist and former journalist Robert Park, called the "signal function" of the news. Stories and reports in the news signal the public that the life of an individual or some situation involving a number of individuals has departed from normal paths of behavior.⁹ Usually the measure of departure from the normal is the fact that some aspect of this situation has entered the jurisdiction of a gov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• PART ONE INTRODUCTION
• PART TWO EXPLORING THE NEWS
• PART THREE REPORTING THE NEWS
• PART FOUR IMAGINING THE NEWS
• PART FIVE CREATING PUBLIC OPINION
• Author Index
• Subject Index