The SAGE Handbook of Political Communication

Holli A Semetko, Margaret Scammell, Holli A Semetko, Margaret Scammell

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781473971202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This authoritative and comprehensive survey of political communication draws together a team of the world?s leading scholars to provide a state-of-the-art review that sets the agenda for future study. It is divided into five sections:

Part One: explores the macro-level influences on political communication such as the media industry, new media, technology, and political systems

Part Two: takes a grassroots perspective of the influences of social networks - real and online - on political communication

Part Three: discusses methodological advances in political communication research

Part Four: focuses on power and how it is conceptualized in political communication

Part Five: provides an international, regional, and comparative understanding of political communication in its various contexts

The SAGE Handbook of Political Communication is an essential benchmark publication for advanced students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of politics, media and communication, sociology and research methods.

PART I

1

Entertainment Media and the Political Engagement of Citizens

Michael X. Delli Carpini

In 2004 Star Academy, the reality television show in which up to 20 contestants from throughout the Arab world live together ‘on-air’ for four months, showcase their musical talents in a weekly concert, and are gradually eliminated by way of audience voting through phone calls and text messaging, ‘captured the largest audience in pan-Arab television history, reaching up to 80 per cent of viewers in some countries’ (Kraidy, 2009: 2). Despite, or more accurately because of the popularity of this and similar programs, ‘Arab reality TV is so controversial that it has triggered street riots, contributed to high-level political resignations, compelled clerics to issue hostile fatwas, and fanned transnational media wars’ (Kraidy, 2009: 3).

Similar (though only rarely as dramatic) examples of ‘entertainment’ media generating public, media and/or elite political debate and controversy can be found throughout the world, ranging from the long-standing tradition of ‘telenovelas’, which are most closely associated with Latin American countries but which can be found in various forms in countries such as Germany, Indonesia, Russia, Portugal, the Philippines, Egypt, India, Kenya, Tanzania, Canada and the USA; to the popularity of ‘massive, multiplayer online games’ in countries such as Korea; to the effective mix of sports and politics used by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi; to the global riots, protests and public debates that followed the publication of controversial cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

While the sociopolitical impact of entertainment media is often subtle and/or unintended (for example, as with many online games such as World of Warcraft, movies such as Slumdog Millionaire or television shows such as the original version of the Peruvian telenovela, Simplemente Maria), increasingly the potential power of entertainment media has not been lost on those interested in influencing the opinions, attitudes and behaviors of citizens. These more conscious efforts to influence various publics through entertainment media include both government and non-governmental organization sponsorship of ‘pro-social’ programming (Singhal and Rogers, 1999), as well the use of entertainment media to reach voters/constituents by elected officials and candidates for office.

For example, when Ross Perot announced his third-party candidacy for the US president in February of 1992 on the Larry King Live cable television talk show it created something of a firestorm within the journalistic profession. Prior to this watershed moment such pronouncements (in modern times) had only occurred through the traditional format of a press conference, announced well in advance, at which the mainstream news media could question the candidate about his (or rarely her) qualifications for office. Perot’s decision was viewed by many as further evidence that he was not a ‘serious’ candidate.

Sixteen years later the appearance of candidates – as well as elected and appointed officials – on non-news media has become commonplace, as much a requirement of the rituals of campaigning and governing as the long-standing Sunday morning news shows. Indeed, in comparison to new gatekeepers such as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, Jay Leno, David Letterman or Matt Drudge, Larry King’s journalistic credentials now look rather mainstream. Adding to this changed media environment has been the apparent increase in the amount of overtly political content of prime-time entertainment television (for example, Family Guy, 24 or The West Wing), docudramas (for example, The Reagans or The Path To 9–11), fictional and non-fictional films (The Day After Tomorrow, Fahrenheit 911, Sicko, United 93, World Trade Center or An Inconvenient Truth) and the numerous blogs, websites and social networking sites that blend culture, politics, satire and/or opinion (for example, The Drudge Report, YouTube, Facebook or Meetup.org). So, too, has the more visible role played by celebrities (from Toby Keith to Al Franken to The Dixie Chicks) in political discourse, the proliferation of cable news networks’ opinionated talk and interview shows (for example, The Sean Hannity Show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The O’Reilly Factor or The Rachel Maddow Show), and the ‘softening’ of the content of traditional network news (for example, both the choice of Katie Couric to anchor the CBS Evening News, and the format and content changes that accompanied her hiring). By 2008, ‘entertainment’ media in its various forms were arguably as much a factor in politics as more traditional sources of news (consider Tina Fey’s satirical caricature of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live and the way this portrayal intersected with more mainstream news coverage and commentary, or Jon Stewart’s biting critiques of the lack of independent investigative reporting about the financial sector prior to the economic meltdown in 2009).

That the line between news and entertainment has blurred over the last few decades is now something of a truism. There remains, however, more significant disagreement regarding the extent of this change (since examples of the kinds mentioned above can be found in earlier years) and, more centrally, regarding what, if any, influence these changes are having on the political attitudes and actions of citizens. It is this second topic – the impact of potentially politically relevant entertainment media on citizens and how we attempt to study it – that is the focus of this chapter. More specifically I provide an overview, synthesis and critique of the small but growing body of quantitative research designed to gauge the effects of entertainment media on the political attitudes, opinions, knowledge and participation of the public. To do this, I first discuss examples of research that attempts to gauge the impact of entertainment media on the democratic engagement of citizens, grouping this research into three categories based on their underlying theories and assumptions. I then turn to a discussion of the collective strengths and weaknesses of this body of research. Finally, I conclude by making some tentative suggestions for how research in this area might be fruitfully expanded.

In doing this, I should note that I am giving short shrift to a much larger body of media scholarship that has long studied entertainment media, either in its own right (for example, film studies, cinema studies, even the study of print fiction) or as a social force (for example, ‘entertainment-education’ research on children and media, racial, gender and class stereotyping or health-related behaviors; or content, rhetorical and discourse analyses of the political and social messages imbedded in entertainment genres). I also focus mainly, though not exclusively, on research conducted within the USA, in large part because of the longer tradition of using quantitative analyses to study the influence of media on citizens’ political opinions, attitudes and behaviors. I believe however, that the research discussed below is collectively both of relevance to and could benefit from these other research traditions.

HOW DOES ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA AFFECT DEMOCRATIC ENGAGEMENT?

Until recently and with few exceptions, quantitative studies of the effects of media on the political attitudes, opinions, knowledge and behavior of citizens have treated entertainment as irrelevant. For example, the Handbook of Political Communication Research (Kaid, 2004) devoted no more than a few lines to the topic of entertainment. As entertainment media has become a more legitimate topic of study (because of the increased presence of politically relevant content in these genres, because of a new-found realization of this content’s potential import and/or because of the increasing dominance of entertainment over news consumption) quantitative political communication scholars have struggled to integrate these genres into existing theories and findings. Broadly speaking, these extant efforts can be broken down into three loosely chronological though overlapping and competing views: (1) those that see entertainment media as particularly effective genres for reinforcing deep-seated, semi-conscious and hegemonic values; (2) those that see such media as at best a distraction from politics and at worst a cause of disengagement and (3) those that see entertainment media as an alternative venue for many of the same processes of learning and opinion formation that occur through traditional news and public affairs genres.

Entertainment Media as Cultivator of Sociopolitical Worldviews

Some of the earliest quantitative research on the political influence of entertainment media saw their major impact as a source of deep seated, often erroneous attitudes about the state of the world in which citizens live. Most notable in this research tradition is the work of George Gerbner and his various colleagues collectively known as ‘cultivation analysis’ (Gerbner et al., 1978, 1980, 1982, 1984, 1986, 2002; see also Morgan et al., 2009). Cultivation analysis posited and provided evidence that the content of mainstream media (especially entertainment media) was largely homogeneous, that it presented a view of the world that was often at odds with reality, and that the social and political perspectives of heavy users of the media were influenced by this content. As such, it cultivated worldviews that in turn could influence more proximate opinions about political issues and public figures of the day. Implicit (though less well addressed) in this approach was that the biases contained in mainstream entertainment media were not random, but rather reflected the dominant, even hegemonic social, economic and political agendas of those in positions of power.

Despite its continued reference, cultivation theory and research was and remains something of an outlier in communication research, due in part to its polyglot nature. On the one hand, its acceptance of the sociopolitical power of entertainment and of the subtle, long-term, collective and hegemonic implications of consuming such media connect it (implicitly or explicitly) to a variety of more developed traditions within critical media studies that raise concerns over ‘mass culture’ (Adorno, 1941; 1963/1975; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1947/2002), ‘cultural imperialism’ (Schiller, 1976; Tunstall, 1977), ‘media concentration’ (Bagdikian, 1983) and ‘mass propaganda’ (Lasswell, 1927). On the other hand, its focus on how citizens’ attitudes and opinions were shaped by mediated messages, and its use of survey research and quantitative analyses, connect it with more mainstream media effects research.

While demonstrating suggestive relationships between heavy television use and a variety of political and social attitudes (see also, Besley, 2006, 2008), cultivation analysis was and remains ‘ghettoized’ from both its mainstream and critical roots. Regarding the former, the effort to use quantitative methods arguably better suited to uncovering specific, short-term effects to test theories that were based on more collective, longterm processes proved problematic, suffering from several familiar methodological shortcomings: less than optimal measures of media exposure (largely self-reports in response to fairly broad survey questions about media use), limited data (largely one-time, cross-sectional surveys) and simplistic statistical methods (largely correlation analyses with controls for possible confounding effects). As a result, it has been difficult to draw convincing conclusions regarding causality. Regarding the latter, while the notion of a largely hegemonic worldview might have been an accurate description of the media environment of the 1970s and 1980s, this is less clearly the case in the more complex and diverse mediated world of the 21st century. In addition, the growing popularity of audience response analysis and the realization that citizens are not simply empty vessels, but rather can take an active role in constructing meaning from the media they consumed, further challenged the theory underlying cultivation research.

Entertainment Media as a Distraction or a Source of Disengagement

As audiences for traditional news and public affairs media have declined over the last few decades (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2008; Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2009) several scholars have coupled this trend with the parallel decline in many indicators of democratic engagement to argue that entertainment media acts at best as a distraction from politics and at worst as a source of political disengagement. One of the strongest proponents of this view is Robert Putnam (1995a,b, 2000), who argues that time devoted to entertainment media use, especially among younger generations, is the major source of decline in ‘social capital’.

While acknowledging that it can have its ‘dark side’, Putnam persuasively argues and documents that the presence of social capital – broadly a connectedness of citizens to others in their community – results in a wide range of individual and collective benefits including better education, safer and more productive neighborhoods, economic prosperity, healthier, happier children and adults and a more vibrant, participatory democracy (Putnam, 2000: 287–363).

The relationship between social capital and democratic engagement is twofold. On the one hand, the concept of social capital includes within it many forms of civic and political engagement, including membership in civic organizations, attending public meetings, talking about political issues, volunteering and participating in elections. On the other hand, high levels of general community involvement and social interaction (which are also components of social capital) are likely to increase more explicitly civic and political engagement and so strengthen the quality and effectiveness of democracy.

Putnam’s argument and evidence regarding the positive benefits of social capital have been generally well received. More controversial, however, has been his research documenting the erosion of social capital over the past three decades and his theories regarding the sources of this decline. Of particular relevance to this chapter is his indictment of entertainment television as a major source of decreasing social capital in general and democratic engagement in particular (Putman, 1995a, 2000). Putnam’s evidence on the decline in newspaper readership, the penetration of television into the American household, the growth in the number of hours people spend watching television and of having the television on even when not watching and the dominance of television over other forms of more social leisure activity (Putnam, 2000: 216–28) is compelling and supported by other data and research (Bogart, 1989; Bowden and Offer, 1994; Comstock, 1989; Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; US Census Bureau, 2009) and various surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

His hypothesized relationship between the rise of television and the decline in social capital has been a matter of dispute, however (Norris, 1996, 1999). Putnam argues that this impact, which is especially prevalent among younger generations, results from a combination of television’s usurpation of time that could (and in the past was) otherwise used for more civic-minded activities, the psychological effects of television that inhibit social participation, and the specific content of television that undermines civic motivations (2000: 237).

One way to understand the link between entertainment media use and social capital is through the concept of ‘social trust’. Social trust (also known as ‘interpersonal trust’) is a dispositional orientation toward others in one’s community. High social trust indicates feelings of connectedness to and faith in fellow citizens, or more simply, ‘a “standing decision” to give most people – even those whom one does not know from direct experience – the benefit of the doubt’ (Rahn and Transue, 1998: 545). People scoring high on measures of social trust are significantly more likely to interact with fellow citizens informally, as well as through membership in community groups, working with them to solve a local problem, or volunteering (Borgida et al., 1997; Brehm and Rahn, 1997; Rahn and Transue, 1998; Uslaner, 1995). In short, social trust is an individual-level, psychological m...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The Expanding Field of Political Communication in the Era of Continuous Connectivity
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• PART IV
• PART V
• Name Index
• Subject Index