final project - agenda-setting
TRANSCRIPT
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UNIVERSITAT POMPEU FABRA Master of Research in Political Science
Whocontrols the agenda-setting?
Content analysis of the sources in the news published by Catalan media
The news is not a mirror of social conditions,
but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself
Walter Lippmann
Marc Martnez Amat
Supervisor: Robert Fishman
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INTRODUCTION
How would it be a world without newspapers? This is a current question that
nowadays rises when the press faces a double crisis: the economical global recession
that have damaged most of the companies in the planet in the recent months, and a
structural crisis due to the gradual drops in readers in the recent years. It is within this
dark scenario when the existential question marks hang over. This was also the initial
question posed, a few weeks ago, in a master class conducted by the university
professor Albert Saez, who has managed several Catalan media such as the papers
Avui and El Peridico, as well as the public group that includes Catalunya Radio and
TV3. In his answer to this question he highlighted that the functions by which the press
was conceived were to democratize knowledge, to share information among a society
and to advertise products. Saez quoted Alexis de Tocqueville, who in the XIX Century
claimed that without newspapers, there is no chance for a representative democracy;
and without democracy, newspapers are worthless.
No doubt democracy expect from the press to represent the voice of the people and to
challenge the political power, considering that the citizens only cast a vote every four
years. Media is supposed to favor a marketplace of ideas to debate, to raise public
concerns and to point out deficits in the system. The American system of checks and
balances constitutes the clearest declaration of intentions: with the First Amendment
of the Constitution, the press emerges as the fourth branch of the government to
check the other three in what has been called the watchdog role.
This noble mission entrusted to journalist chases with the reality: the administration,
parties, companies and even the social organizations have developed strategists to
provide biased information, prepared stories ready to be published and willing to
dominate the public agenda. In a metaphorical sense, public and private institutions
deliver every day tasty fast-food to journalists in order to prevent them to prepare
their own healthy dishes. So who controls the diet? Is it balanced?
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The struggle between journalists and officials to control the public opinion has two
rounds: the agenda-setting and the framing (what to be explained and how to explain
it). This paper focuses on the former.
In this context, journalists also face the handicap of working close to the same voices
that they have to check. They are supposed to critically interpret the performance of
individuals who, at the same time, are the gatekeepers of concealed information that
the professionals will seek. The adversarial role of press merges into the interaction
(and sometimes cooperation) between political actors and newsmakers.
Following the indexing hypothesis by Lance Bennett about the media dependence on
official sources, the aim of this paper is to provide an empirical instrument to
determine whether the political actors or the journalists have more say in the agenda-
setting process. It will also take into account to what extend media include unofficial
voices in the news to enrich their information with more sources than the official
version. The research is based on the stories published by the main Catalan
newspapers, radio stations and television.
In the next pages, firstly a theoretical framework on the journalists role and
boundaries and on the agenda-setting function will be exposed. Afterwards, there are
the methodology of the research and its findings of the content analysis. And finally,
some conclusions are drawn.
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THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Agenda setting is conceived to be one of the main functions of the press in a
democratic state, as well as becoming a platform for the popular voice to gain visibility
and be a messenger of social concerns between the folks and the power institutions.
Regarding the expectations that democracy has on the media, Michael Gurevitch and
Jay G. Blumler suggest some principles:
1. Surveillance of the sociopolitical environment, reporting developments likely to
impinge, positively or negatively, on the welfare of the citizens.
2. Meaningful agenda-setting, identifying the key issues of the day, including the
forces that have formed and may resolve them.
3. Platforms for an intelligible and illuminating advocacy by politicians and
spokespersons of other causes and interests groups.
4. Dialogue across a diverse range of views, as well as between power holders
(actual and prospective) and mass publics.
5. Mechanisms for holding officials to account for how they have exercised
power.
6. Incentives for citizens to learn, choose, and become involved, rather than
merely to follow and kibitz over the political process.
7. A principled resistance to the efforts of forces outside the media to subvert
their independence, integrity, and ability to serve the audience.
8. A sense of respect for the audience member, as potentially concerned and able
to make sense of his or her political environment.
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However, the scholars also admit that the objective is not easy and several obstacles
hinter it, such as the conflict among democratic values, the distance of the political
communicators from the ordinary people and the heterogeneous audiences.
Models of journalism
Doris A. Graber adapted the interpretation of the classical two press philosophies: the
libertarian and the social responsible (Siebert, Peterson and Schramm 1956). According
to him, from a libertarian approach, news could be anything that seems important or
interesting to the media audiences, and should be reported without any attempt to
convey a particular point of view. Libertarians believe -he holds- that teaching is not
the medias chef task nor is their responsibility to question the truth, accuracy or
merits of the information supplied by their sources (it is left to news audience).
On the other hand, those in favor of the social responsibility philosophy defend that
newsmakers should be participants in the political process, not merely reporters of the
passing scene. They should foster political action when necessary by publicizing social
evils, and deny exposure to undesirable viewpoints and questionable accusations. They
should try to discover and publicize information that the suspect the government is
hiding. The critics of the social responsibility model highlights that journalists do not
have the mandate to act as arbiters of social values and policies, which legitimacy
comes only from being elected by the people or appointed by elected officials.
Graber goes further and describe five visions of news making, none of which excludes
the others but completes them:
- The mirror model: news is a reflection of the reality, and journalists do not
make news but just report it. They impartially report all significant happenings
that come to their attention. Its critics points out that this vision is unrealistic,
due to the inevitable task of the journalist to determine the relative
newsworthiness of events to report it.
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- The professional model: news making is an endeavor of highly skilled
professionals who put together a balanced and collage of events selected for
importance and attractiveness to specific media audiences. There is no
pretense that the end product mirrors the world.
- The organizational model: also called bargaining model, believes that the
pressures inherent in organizational processes and goals determine which
items will be published. These pressures spring from interpersonal relations
among journalists and between them and their information sources, from
professional norms, constraints from technical processes, cost-benefit
considerations and legal regulations.
- The political model: assumes that all the news reflects the ideological biases of
individual newspeople as well as the pressures of the political environment in
which the news organization operates. The media covers high-status people
and approved institutions; everything remoted from the centers of power are
generally ignored or pictured as bad guys, in opposition to good guys, who are
the supporters of the prevailing system.
- Civic journalism: or public journalism, became popular in 1990 from the
distrust from media and government and the concern that average citizen
participate in public affairs. It believes that press can discover citizens concern
and then write stories that help audiences play and active role in public life.
Journalists must explain public policies in an understandable language and
facilitate a public dialogue open to the diverse views.
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Attitudes of the press
Two views of journalism are opposed when it comes to evaluate its attitude towards
the news sources and the selection of voices. Thomas E. Patterson distinguishesbetween the passive and the active role of the journalists as regard for his autonomy
as political actors. According to him, the passive journalist is one who acts as the
instrument of actors outside the news system, such as government officials, party
leaders, and interest group advocates. The journalist takes his cues from these actors,
rather than operating independently. In contrast, the active journalist is one who is
more fully a participant in his or her own right, actively shaping, interpreting or
investigating political subjects.
A second dimension that Patterson identifies is the neutral-advocate axis. He defines
the neutral journalist as that who does not take sides in political debate, except for a
preference for good (clean, honest) government as opposed to bad (corrupt,
incompetent) government. The neutral journalist does not routinely and consistently
take sides in partisan or policy disputes. In contrast, the advocate journalist takes sides
in a consistent and substantial way. The sides do not have to correspond necessarily to
opposing political parties, but it could be the same than a particular ideology or group.
After applying these two dimensions to his study on five nations journalists, the
scholar concluded that they are largely independent one from the other, and there is
virtually no correlation. An advocate role conception is not associated to an active role
conception; despite it might be assumed initially. He came to the conclusion that there
are four combinations that include nearly all the role conceptions of the journalists:
passive-neutral (neutral reporter, mirror, common carrier, disseminator, broker,
messenger); passive-advocate (hack reporter, partisan press); active-neutral (critic,
adversary, watchdog, Fourth Estate, progressive reporter); and active-advocate
(ideologue, missionary).
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Newsmakers boundaries
A realistic approach is that taken by Walter Lippmann, who claims that there is a very
direct relationship between the certainty of news and the system of record. In hisopinion, the hypothesis that seems more fertile is that the news and the truth are not
the same thing: the function of the former is to signalize events and that of the latter is
to bring to light the hidden facts. The press can fight for the extension of reportable
truth but it is not constituted to furnish every day the amount of knowledge that the
democratic theory of the public opinion demand. The scholar judges as false the
theory that the press can itself record the governing forces, because it can normally
record only what has been recorded for it by the working of institutions.
Daniel J. Boorstin uses the concept pseudo-event to describe the happenings
organized by sources to become news. According to his description, a pseudo-event
has 4 characteristics:
1. It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned,
planted or incited it. It could not be an earthquake but an interview.
2. It is planted primarily (but not always exclusively) for the intermediate
purpose of being reported or reproduced. Its occurrence is arranged for the
convenience of media, and its success is measured by how widely it is
reported. If is valued by its newsworthiness rather than its reality.
3. Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous. Without
some of this ambiguity, a pseudo-event cannot be very interesting.
4. Usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Boorstin states that in the last times a larger proportion of what we read and see and
hear has come to consist of pseudo-events, which flood our consciousness.
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Connected to pseudo-events, there is also a genre of news which is based on officials
declarations. These sentences have the virtue that they are not nonsensical and yet
they are neither true, nor false. J. L. Austin classifies them asperformative utterances,
and those who pronounce them would be said that are doing something rather thanjust saying something. The first rule for the effectiveness of performative language is
that conventional procedures must exist and be accepted. And the second one is that
the circumstances in which it is invoked must be the appropriate.
Media provide these conventional procedures required to this kind of utterances to be
effective. According to Timothy E. Cook, performative language is handy both for
officials and reporters. For journalists, it allows them to produce an account without
laborious, time-consuming fact-checking. And for officials, doing something through
words has the satisfaction of accomplishing something quickly and directly.
In a very crude analysis, Jarol B. Manheim highlights the gap between the myths of
journalism (the view of news as natural events and a form of inquiry, and the
conception of journalists as deep-earth miners who find the truth) and the reality
(journalists are truly vulnerable due to their genuine and predictable internal
pressures, their regularities and their dependence on the most superficial forms of
information gathering). He believes that the commercial nature of the media
organizations lead to seek for predictability to reduce risks, and it implies that
daybooks, rolodexes, and new routines are far more important in shaping news
coverage than are investigation and original discovery.
Coalition journalism
The traditional view of media-policy relationship is the muckraking model: the
investigative journalist discovers the evidence of a problem and publishes it, which
mobilizes public opinion, which leads to public initiative and finally has a policy
consequence. In opposition to this paradigm, Harvey L. Molotch, David L. Protess and
Margaret T. Gordon contrast another connection between journalists and politicalactors through an ecological orientation, which they label the coalition journalism.
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According to them, outside manipulations of the information are the rule and not the
exception, as the routine of many people working as public relations professionals,
savvy politicians or dutiful bureaucrats is to structure media exposure possibilities. The
policy actors goal is to foster an image of responsiveness to head off potentiallydamaging implications of inefficiency, corruption or incompetence; so they find their
interest better served by joining in a journalistic investigation. The result of this is a
logrolling process between journalists and political actors. Participation of policy actors
in building stories can become a fully conscious effort in which both types of actors
form concrete coalitions.
Doris A. Graber, Denis McQuail and Pippa Norris frame the role of the journalist to gain
access to information as part of an evolving ecology of games, in which every actor
(journalists and their sources) continuously try to anticipate each others moves and
whose activities are mutually constituted. As it happens in these gaming situations, the
payoffs for each group vary from game to game, but zero-sum games are rare.
Compromises in the struggle to control news are easy to make as different actors
share interests, as well as they also conflict. They are interdependent despite they
could survive without each other.
These scholars also believe that journalists rely heavily on political actors as sources.
They use information controlled by the executive and the legislative branches, by
administrative personnel, and from experts by official and semi-official organizations.
They claim that it is difficult to dig out some of this information by the investigative
journalists without the aid of insiders. At the same time, political actors need
journalists to disseminate their messages to large audiences and to other elites. But
they also require some control over the flow of messages about them that find their
way into the news. Eventually, policy advocates devote more energy to keeping news
away from media than on gaining access to them. The result of this mutual
interdependence is the necessity to bargain, and each part receives and grants
concessions in return for influence over the news product.
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Political and economical constraints
Doris A. Graber assumes that media have the marks of political and economical
pressures. The later conditions the product, which have to be appealing to the largerpotential public. And due to the former, news makers depend on political leaders for
information and thus they become vulnerable to their manipulation. Self-serving
stories from powerful elites are hard to resist; and intensive, frequent contacts
between journalists and leaders and a desire of cordiality may lead to cozy
relationships which runs in the opposite direction of any detachment. Wooing
reporters to have favorable media coverage is a common resource of the astute
politician, and journalists often succumb to the blandishments of politicians for fear of
alienating powerful news sources.
Timothy E. Cook provides some examples of the ways in which government try to
control the media. The author suggests, from the studies carried out in 1950s and
1960s, that there is a disjunctive between officials pursuit of secrecy to preserve
maximum leeway and reporters devotion to publicity to write new stories. According
to him, the risk of derailing an initiative through their negative coverage is higher than
the probability to assure its success by favorable coverage. Nonetheless, this risk is
taken by the officials because making news can also be making policy though words,
they can call attention to their preferred issues and can persuade others to adopt their
position.
All the public institutions have personnel to deal with media and guide their coverage
in an optimal direction for their own policy interests (governing with the news, Cook
states). As for the presidents influence in media, they do not have to seek out for
opportunities, they have news to come to them. So they can dictate the terms of
access due to their near-automatic news value. Reporters are dependent on
presidents cooperation, and they are prisoners in a hermetic press room, which makes
news management easier for his office. A reporter could be in last term sanctioned
withfreezing out, but it is rarely used. Instead, presidents gear their media operationstoward serving reporters anticipating questions in news conferences, designing
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prescheduled events and providing frequent access to the president. He has the
monopoly over good information and the ability to regulate access to the key
newsmaker.
As regards the parliament, Cook highlights that some MPs are media entrepreneurs,
who make the conscious decision to court the media attention (which not just
happens but it must be solicited). Their success depends on becoming a credible
spokesperson in a policy arena. Their pursuit is not only gaining news coverage but
influencing policy, which do not depend on the amount of attention.
Criticism on media
A demolishing analysis of the media power to frame the news is done by Thomas E.
Patterson, who highlights the tendency of journalists to make a negative coverage of
politicians. He sentences that the press sends the wrong message and journalists are
the problem. According to him, its claim that candidates make promises in order to win
votes is true, but that is only part of the truth, as they make them but also work to
keep them. And he thinks that journalists fail to take into account the constraints to
these commitments. Patterson attributes this anti-political bias of journalists (the
muckraking influence) to Progressive movement, the reform which took place in
United States in the turn of the 20th
Century and reduced the power of political parties
in favor of a more divided government and a more participative society. His conclusion
is that US cannot have a sensible campaign as long as is built around the news media.
In the same direction, Pippa Norris analyses the media malaise concept, used in the
1960s to describe the negative impact of the press and the party campaigns in the civic
engagement. She distinguishes between cultural accounts, related to the lessons the
American journalism took from Watergate and Vietnam cases which lead to an
adversarial role versus power; and campaign accounts, referring to the growth of
political marketing. According to the political scientist, the European literature on
media malaise stresses the blame on the rise of the political marketing for growingpublic cynicism about political leaders and institutions, whose credibility would be
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undermined by the techniques of spin, selling, and persuasion of catch-all parties
adopting whatever slogan.
Agenda-setting theories
As we saw, in terms of Gurevitch and Blumler, agenda-setting is conceived to be one of
the main functions of journalism. Walter Lippmann is supposed to be the precursor to
theorize the concept in his essay Public Opinion (1922), in which explained how
indirectly we know our environment, that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we
treat as if it were the environment itself. According to him, what each men does is
based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given
to him.
Later on, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw proved a correspondence between
what media inform on and what people concerns about. It was during the 1968 US
presidential campaign. The surveys they carried out reflected a perfect
correspondence between the ranking of the major issues on the press and the public
agendas, and they used the term agenda setting to describe it.
An example of this in Catalonia can be found in list of main worries of the citizens in
the surveys carried out by the Centre dEstudis dOpini (CEO), a public organism
depending in the Generalitat. Recent surveys indicated that concerns on an issue, such
as the relationship between Catalonia and Spain or the situation of the infrastructures,
appear and rise when the topic is notorious in the public agenda due to tensions
between both governments or the sum of incidents (reported by the media) in the
railway services. A clear example of that happened in April of 2008, when the political
and media debate on the drought boosted the worries about the issue to be the main
problem for the 43% of the citizens. They were alarmed even considering that few
restrictions on water consume were being applied. This concern had never before
been on the top list of worries up to that moment and later on, in the next surveys of
the CEO, move down to insignificant positions and disappeared.
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The indexing hypothesis
Lance Bennett did an important contribution to the theories on the agenda-setting role
of the media when he claimed the indexing hypothesis in 1990. Their starting point isthat mass media in United States look to government officials as the main source of
most of the mainly news the report. He states that journalists tend to index the
range of voices and viewpoints in news according to the range of views expressed in
mainstream government debate about a given topic. And unofficial voices are included
when express opinions already emerging in official circles. In short, the scholar
concludes that media have assumed a comfortable role as keeper of the official
record while abdicating its traditional mandate to be an independent voice of the
people.
Bennett establishes three possible causes to this phenomenon: the will of the media to
safeguard the business climate by providing a virtual news monopoly to the public
officials; the consequence of the transactional or symbiotic relations between
journalists and officials; and the result of a democratic responsible fashion which
advocates favoring the views of public officials, as they are representatives of the
people. The as evidences he presents to prove his hypothesis are the correspondence
between the political discussion about given international affairs, such as the war in El
Salvador in 1982, and the news highlight on these conflicts only while the national
debate lasts.
A redefinition of Bennetts hypothesis by Scott L. Althaus, Jill A. Edy et al. claims that
the normative worry is whether the media discourse is so constrained by the
boundaries of debate among political elites that the public remains poorly informed,
its voice silent or reduced to granting manipulated consent. Its consequences would be
that official debate sets the parameters of media debate and establishes the agenda of
public discussion on one hand; and that the proportions of pro and anti administration
commentary and others positions reflected in the news closely reflect the distribution
of views expressed among officials on the other hand.
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This concept has been used as an indicator in empirical researches such as the
comparative study between the French and the American press carried out by Rodney
Benson and Daniel C. Hallin in 2007. After analyzing the political information in LeMonde, Le Figaro and The New York Times in 1960s and 1990s, they concluded that
there is slightly less indexing to the viewpoints of political elites in the French press
than in the American one; and that the reliance on political elite sources increased in
both between 60s and 90s. The results were that political elites make up 52,3% of all
viewpoints presented in the French press versus 63% for the US press during the 60s,
and the 63,7% versus the 696% respectively in the 90s. Civil society actors, especially
trade unions, are more visible in French press than in the American one. And
academics are better represented in France, too. The comparative research also
included content analysis at the level of the story: dominant schema, tone and topic.
Another referent for this study has been carried out by the Project for Excellence in
Journalism in the city of Baltimore. It examined the all the outlets that produced local
news in the city and tracked every piece of content these outlets produced for three
days during a week. The findings indicated that local TV newsrooms produced more
content than any other sector, followed closely by newspapers.
On local television, fully 23% of stories studied were about crime, twice as many as
other subject. In newspapers (online and print) coverage of crime was almost matched
by that of government and closely followed by business and education. On radio in
Baltimore, by contrast, government was the No. 1 topic. New media was most often
focused on government.
According to the study, government initiated most of the news. In the detailed
examination of six major storylines, 63% of the stories were initiated by government
officials, led first of all by the police. Another 14% came from the press. Interest group
made up most of the rest.
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METHODOLOGY
The precursor scholar on the agenda-setting empiricism, Maxwell McCombs, stated:
Reviewing the front pages of a newspaper over a period of time will reveal that
newspapers agenda. Additional information about the position of issues in the
newspaper agenda is provided by such cues as the size of headlines for individual
articles, the length of articles, and the page numbers on which articles appear. There
are similar patterns of coverage in television news program and other mass media.
This exercise is the observation that inspires this research.
The object of the paper is to quantify the weight of the official sources (those coming
from the political power) in the agenda of the media. The research hypothesis is that
most of the news in the Catalan public agenda is based on official versions, similarly to
what is proved in the Baltimore study and the French-American press comparative
research.
The independent variables of the research are the pieces of news, the stories,
published in the main conventional media in Catalonia during a period of time. The
Baltimore study took into account the stories produced by media during three days of
a week. This paper has selected the stories of two days: Monday the 31st
of May and
Tuesday the 1st
of June of 2010.
The research only included in the analysis hard news, that is those contained in
politics, economy or society sections, or the same issues published in audiovisual
media. We excluded soft news, and also international and culture sections, as I
consider that they are based in other kind of news sources that could deserve a further
research.
For the analysis, I selected the four newspapers with mainly the same edition in the
whole land of Catalonia which have at least 100.000 readers of average (source:
Fundacc). They are El Peridico, La Vanguardia, Avui and El Pas. The latter only
dedicate few pages to the Catalan information (the section Catalunya), so we will
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only include this information to the analysis just as the other hard news edited in
Barcelona.
We also included the three largest radio stations in Catalonia: RAC1, Catalunya Rdioand Cadena SER, whose audiences are between 400.000 and 500.000 listeners, far
above from any other (source: EGM). In the former two, I analyzed the information
provided in the prime time hour (from 7 to 8am), while in SER the selection of stories
studied were those in 7pm, as it is the only hour exclusively dedicated to Catalan
information.
In the case of the television, only TV3 has been analyzed, as it is the unique channel
with news programs dedicated to Catalan information or exclusively edited in
Catalonia. In this case, I studied the TN Migdia, on of the two news program with
more viewers in Catalonia during the day (source: Sofres).
The amount of stories collected from these 8 outlets is 337, distributed as it follows:
Table 1. Stories collected for the study by media, outlet and day
Monday Tuesday Total
Total 142 195 337
Newspapers 96 148 244
Radio 35 29 64media
TV 11 18 29
Avui 29 39 68
Catalunya Rdio 13 11 24
El Pas 10 15 25
El Peridico 32 47 79
La Vanguardia 25 47 72
RAC1 13 8 21
SER 9 10 19
outlet
TV3 11 18 29
The main criteria to process the news information are the number of stories. This
introduces a bias, since the analysis is not centered in the length or the position of the
information. However, data regarding the size of the articles, the attachment of
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pictures and whether they are on the front page or in the summaries of news
programs have been included.
The stories from the media have been coded according to the following dependentvariables:
- Main source: Identification of the source that has triggered each story or, at
least, its headline. Sources have been coded, similarly than in the French-
American press study, into the following categories: executive
branch/administration (include the governments, the officials of the
administration, the public agencies, the police officials... ); legislative
branch/parties (the parliaments, the lawmakers, the party leaders and
spokespersons...); judicial sources (courts, indictments... ); business (the
companies, the employers... ); social organizations (NGOs, trade unions,
universities, ...); individual citizens; foreign sources (international organizations
and institutions from abroad) and media (self-elaborated information).
- Inclusion of unofficial voices: Whether the story contains sources unrelated to
the political power (executive, legislative or judicial branch).
- Publication of new information: Whether the story reveal information on an
issue unrevealed up to the date.
- Publication of a new story: Whether the story comes up with an issue never
published up to the date.
Despite other variables have been coded, I finally left aside other data such as the
localization of the stories (whether in Barcelona-Catalonia or Madrid-Spain) or other
concerning the framing of news (whether their headlines were interpretative,
performative or fact-centered; and their positive/negative/neutral tone), which could
be worth material for a further research.
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FINDINGS
Once concluded the fieldwork, the results showed a notable difference of the variables
observed depending on the media. The main variable was the distribution of sources in
general, from the 337 pieces of news analyzed:
Graph 1. Distribution of the main sources of news in all media observed
1,19%
5,93%
1,48%
13,95%
18,99%
7,12%16,62%
34,72%
Media
Foreign sources
Individual citizens
Socialorganizations
Business
Judicial branch
Legislative branch/ parties
Executive branch /administration
Main source
The distribution reflects a huge attention of media to the power to explain hard news.
Almost the 50 per cent of the stories had the executive or the legislative branches as
the basic source of the news. This includes mainly politicians (from the government
and from the parties) but also officials from the administration (police, technicians ...).
So they are almost the exclusive source in politics information, but also in economical
and social sections. Police reports are raw material for social reporters, but also in
items such as the World Smokefree Day the studies provided by the public
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administration reach the society pages of newspapers and the news programs on TV
and radio.
The third branch of the power, the information from courts and from judicialdocuments, is included in all the sections (712%). On the other side, separated from
the power, business sources become relevant (1899%), especially in newspapers as
we will see-, which dedicate exclusive pages to the economic activity (alliances,
nominations, results...). They predominate over social organizations information,
which do not have fix spaces. Both contribute to a third of the news.
Even leaving apart the international sections, foreign sources have also a say in stories
classified by papers as social or economic issues (593%). The clear example in the
analyzed period is the spilling of oil in the Mexican Gulf, which was included in the
society sections. Aside from the organizations, individual citizens constitute a little slice
of the information (148%), with stories that can denounce unfair situations, such as
the neighbor who is still waiting for the compensation from the government for the
blackout of the winter. Media source includes self-elaborated information that outlets
generate from surveys or information of themselves (119%).
Obviously, not all the stories are dedicated the same space or time in the media.
Taking exclusively into consideration those which appeared in the front page of the
newspapers and were explained in the initial summaries of the TV and radio news
program, we observe that the importance of the executive branch is higher (4833%),
and also the legislative sources (20%). Judicial sources remain stable (667%). On the
other hand, companies (833%) and social organizations (1333%) drop in the first
headlines of the media. The other sort of sources accounts for less than 5% of the top
stories (334%).
If we focus exclusively on the newspapers to analyze the distribution of the main
sources of the stories, we realize that there is also a predominant dependence on
official versions from the executive and legislative powers, and that the most
distinguishing feature is a huge salience of business sources:
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Graph 2. Distribution of the main sources of news in newspapers
Media
Foreignsources
Individualcitizens
Socialorganizations
Business
Judicialbranch
Legislativebranch/parties
Executivebranch/Administration
main source
30
20
10
0
Percent
1,64% 0,82%
6,15%13,52%
24,18%
7,79%
14,75%
31,15%
Essentially, business sources are found in the section of economy, in which
newspapers dedicate bites to the information related to companies activities.
However, the sources of power are also present in the section, for instance,
concerning the negotiation of the government with the social agents for the labor
reform. An evidence of this claiming is the analysis of the main sources of the
newspapers by sections (which excludes El Pas, as it uses a different classification in
sections for the information):
Table 2. Distribution of the main sources of news in newspapers by sections
Mean(3 papers)
Economy Politics Society
Executive branch / Administration 30,5% 23,3% 30,0% 38,8%
Legislative branch / parties 13,6% 2,2% 46,0% 6,3%
Judicial branch 7,3% 5,6% 6,0% 10,0%
Business 25,9% 60,0% 3,8%
Social organizations 13,6% 4,4% 14,0% 23,8%
Individual citizens 1,8% 4,0% 2,5%
Foreign sources 6,8% 4,4% 13,8%
Media 0,5% 1,3%
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The weight of the executive branch is considerable in all the three sections (between
20 and 40%). Meanwhile in Politics the legislative branch is the elemental source for
nearly most of the stories and the same happens with business in Economy; in
Society the government is the main source (even in a strongest position than in
Politics). Companies trigger about two thirds of the information in Economy, but
they have little influence in the other two sections.
Displaying the analysis by outlet, we realize that there is no homogeneity but slightly
differences among them:
Table 3. Distribution of the main sources of news in newspapers by outlet
Avui El Pas El Peridico La Vanguardia
Executive branch / Administration 23,5% 36,0% 32,9% 34,7%
Legislative branch / parties 17,6% 24,0% 17,7% 5,6%
Judicial branch 7,4% 12,0% 8,9% 5,6%
Business 23,5% 12,0% 17,7% 36,1%
Social organizations 20,6% 12,0% 10,1% 11,1%
Individual citizens 3,8% 1,4%
Foreign sources 7,4% 7,6% 5,6%
Media 4,0% 1,3%
In all the cases the executive and legislative branches together dominate the news
sources, whose presence oscillate between 60% in El Pas and 40% in La Vanguardia.
Only inAvuiand in La Vanguardia the weight of the economical information (between
20% and 40%) is as high that the sum of social organizations and business sources,
which led to a superiority of the socioeconomic over the official voices. In both
newspapers, business world provide the main sources for the same or more news than
the government. However, as we saw, from this result could not be extracted the
conclusion that companies influence the framing of the whole reality in these outlets,
but that the business world has more visibility in their economical pages than any
other institution.
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These figures remain similar even if we exclude the brief bites of information and we
focus only on the big issues leading the pages of the newspapers. On the other hand,
in El Pas and El Peridico the higher presence of information concerning the
parliaments and the parties and the lower attention to business inverts the tendencyof the other two papers. Social organizations only trigger about the 10% of the stories
in El Peridico, La Vanguardia and El Pas, and the 20% in Avui. Other sorts of sources
are more irrelevant (under the 10%).
Anyhow we should not forget that the analysis ofEl Pais only includes the information
from the section Catalunya and any other political, social or economical story edited
from Barcelona in the newspaper. This could mislead any conclusion applied to the
whole newspaper.
The predominance of political voices in the Catalan radio stations is even higher:
Graph 3. Distribution of the main sources of news on the radio
Foreignsources
Media
Socialorganizations
Business
Judicialbranch
Legislativebranch/parties
Executivebranch/Administration
main source
50
40
30
20
10
0
Percent
4,69%3,12%9,38%
6,25%
6,25%21,88%
48,44%
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About two thirds of the information in the prime time of the radio is triggered by
official sources (mainly the executive, which constitutes about a half). Any other sort ofsources reaches the 10% of the stories. The other distinctive feature of the information
in this media is that in the socioeconomic environment, the salience of social
organizations is higher than the business sources.
The patters are similar in the three main radio stations of the country:
Table 4. Distribution of the main sources of news on the radio by outlet
CatalunyaRdio
RAC1 SER
Executive branch / Administration 45,8% 42,9% 57,9%
Legislative branch / parties 25,0% 23,8% 15,8%
Judicial branch 4,2% 9,5% 5,3%
Business 4,2% 4,8% 10,5%
Social organizations 12,5% 4,8% 10,5%
Foreign sources 8,3% 4,8%
Media 9,5%
Between the 65 and the 75% of the stories on the radio are based mainly in official
information coming from the administration or the lawmakers. Companies and social
organizations constitute only around 10 and 15% of the sources and they are balanced,
except in the public station, where business has a little weigh. Apart from these
general tendencies, few other conclusions could be reached as we only have 64 cases
and the differences among.
In the public Catalan television, the distribution presents a high salience of social
organizations:
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Graph 4. Distribution of the main sources of news in TV3
Foreignsources
Individualcitizens
Socialorganizations
Business
Judicialbranch
Legislativebranch/parties
Executivebranch/Administration
main source
40
30
20
10
0
Percent
6,9%
3,45%
27,59%
3,45%3,45%
20,69%
34,48%
Social organizations are by far the main socioeconomic source and have a similar
relevance than the government and higher than the parties and the parliaments. As it
happened with the radio analysis, again these patterns are based on few cases, so the
inferences could have an important variation depending on the news of the day.
However, these cases still work if we use them to compare TV with the other media.
Another important variable observed in the research is how many stories contain
voices unrelated directly to the power, independently of which is their main source. A
423% of the stories include unofficial sources whereas a 577% does not. In a majority
of cases we see that stories only include official versions of the reality. When we detail
these data by media and outlet we see that the results are congruent with the main
sources of news we saw:
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Graph 5 and table 5. Use of unofficial sources in the stories by media and outlet
So the media in which socioeconomic sources triggered a strongest amount of stories
(La Vanguardia and Avui in business information, and TV3 with the social
organizations) are, as well, those in which unofficial voices have more a say. Radio
stations are in the queue when it comes to include unofficial voices, as they are also
the media with a higher salience of official sources.
Finally, with regard to the two last variables, we realize that newspapers are the
leaders when it comes to reveal new information or come out new stories:
Table 6. Publication of new information and new stories by media and outlet
Publicationof new
information
Publicationof newstories
Newspapers 193% 12,7%
Radio 94%media
TV 103% 3,4%
Avui 14,7% 13,2%
El Pais 12,0% 4,0%
El Peridico 25,3% 13,9%
La Vanguardia 19,4% 13,9%
Catalunya Rdio
RAC1 14,3%
SER 15,8%
outlet
TV3 10,3% 3,4%
La Vanguardia 52,8%
Avui 45,6%
TV3 42,3%
El Peridico 41,8%
RAC1 38,9%
El Pas 36,0%
SER 31,6%
Catalunya Rdio 20,8%
Mean 423%
No
Yes
Media
0,0%
25,0%
50,0%
75,0%
100,0%
Use
ofnono
fficialsource
s
New spapers Radio TV
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Newspapers account for the double of new information revealed to the public than the
audiovisual media. This implies that, in relative terms, 2 out of 10 stories in the
newspapers report new data while only 1 out of 10 stories on the radio and in the TV
do the same. In absolute terms, considering that the 4 newspapers analyzed published26 times more stories than the audiovisual media in the research period, they
generate the 8393% of the new information (versus the 1071% of the radio stations
and the 536% of the TV channel).
Two thirds of this new information was included in the Monday edition (6607%). And
about 1 out of 6 new stories (8438%) were also published this day. So a minority were
reported on Tuesday.
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CONCLUSIONS
Once finished the analysis of the variables, some conclusions can be drawn:
o The agenda of the Catalan media presents a clear dependence on the official
voices according to the results, as the 5846% of the stories analyzed have the
executive, the legislative or the judicial power as the main source. This
validates the research hypothesis, and situates the media system of Catalonia
in the same level as the American and French ones according to the studies by
Rodney Benson and Daniel C. Hallin and by the Project for Excellence in
Journalism. Political sources manage to put issues in the agenda not only in
politics section, but also in economy and society. As Lance Bennett suggests in
his indexing hypothesis, this limits the range of voices buffered by media.
However, as all the analyzed media adopt the same praxis, there is no other
pattern of behavior that challenges the mainstream.
o The only alternative to the salience of political power to set the agenda is the
economical power. This is what happens in the newspapers, which inform with
detailed news bites about companies activity (2418%) but not in the same
proportion about the civil society activity. This focus on the business activity
could respond to an economical strategy rather than an editorial orientation.
o Their dependence on the sound, on easy access and familiar voices, could be
the reason why the 3 radio stations analyzed heavily rely on official branches to
select their stories (7657%). On the other hand, the need for visual stories and
their public character could explain why the TV is the media in which social
organizations and individual stories have more salience (3104%). They are the
only platform for these institutions, which seems to be a lack of public space
for them according to the democratic functions of media claimed by Gurevitch
and Jay G. Blumler.
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o During the analyzed period, very few new stories were reported by the media
(95%). The large majority of the information published came from organized
events and programmed information gathered by political, social or economical
institutions, with little investigative effort. However, newspapers put these newstories on their front page to take advantage of them. As Manheim states,
news do not naturally happen and an evidence of this is that none of the stories
collected in the two days had a natural origin. In accordance to Lippmann, the
media just follow the record of officials in a great deal of the information
accounted.
o The everyday activity during the workweek, with pseudo-events organized by
institutions (in terms of Daniel J. Boorstin) and performative utterances used by
politicians and officials (in terms of John L. Austin) fill the stories and take up
the time of journalists. The contrast between the new information published by
media on Monday (so after the holiday) and that provided in Tuesday proves it.
This little development of the agenda-setting function puts the press closer to
the passive role described by Thomas Patterson rather than to the active.
o This project has been carried out with a little sample of the news produced in
Catalonia every day. However, it constitutes an instrument that could be
applied to a biggest flow of information and for comparative studies among the
media of different countries. An extension of this research could be a
comparative study between the agenda of the Barcelona press versus that of
the Madrid press.
o Apart from amplifying the research in extension, it could be also extended by
focusing also in the shaping of the news. Some variables concerning the
framing of the news such as the tone and the orientation of the headlines
(following up the French-American press comparative study). There is a lack of
empirical research on the topic in Catalonia.
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