Fluent Essays

Reading from a journal article and answering questions (40%) Read attached article “Corporate Ownership and News Bias Revisited: Newspaper Coverage of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United Ruling” and answer the following questions: a) Upon reading the findings of the article/research, do you think how media corporations benefited from the changes in campaign finance law influenced their news outlets’ coverage of the Citizens United decision? b) What is news bias? What are the components that support news to become bias?   c) Briefly outline the research method applied for this research (just a paragraph)  d) What are the key findings? Just in points e) Please suggest -how could the government control the financial interests of the news media corporations which they use with their power to influence how their news outlets cover issues? Please recommend just based on your own opinion and observation.  Answer in complete; no word limit is set but I would go upto 1.5-2 pages at least.  Citation style: APA 7th edition Corporate Ownership and News Bias Revisited: Newspaper Coverage of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United Ruling CATIE SNOW BAILARD The clear financial benefits accrued to owners of television stations as a result of the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (FEC) decision opens the door to an important question: Did the degree to which media corporations benefited from the changes in campaign finance law influence their news outlets’ coverage of the Citizens United decision? In other words, is it possible to identify variation in how media outlets covered the Supreme Court decision that correlates with the degree to which those outlets’ parent companies profited from the resulting increase in campaign spending? Answering this question will provide an important and much-too-uncommon opportu- nity to systematically test for bias in news coverage. Replicating the method used by Gilens and Hertzman (2000) in their own test of coverage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, this analysis reveals that newspapers belonging to media corporations that own more television stations covered the Citizens United ruling systematically differently—and more favorably—than those with few or no television stations. This has important implications for the degree to which the news produced by increasingly conglomerated and corporatized media companies may eschew neutral or balanced coverage in favor of news frames that promote their own financial interests. Keywords campaigns, Citizens United v. FEC, elections, media bias, news, political advertising “I think Thomas Jefferson would have said, ‘The more speech, the better.’ That’s what the First Amendment is all about, so long as the people know where the speech is coming from.… You can’t separate the speech from the money that facilitates the speech.” “What the Supreme Court did in Citizens United is to say to these same billionaires: ‘You own and control the economy, you own Wall Street, you own the coal companies, you own the oil companies. Now, for a very small percentage of your wealth, we’re going to give you the opportunity to own the United States government.’” In Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010), the Supreme Court ruled by a 5–4 decision that independent political expenditures by corporations and Catie Snow Bailard is Assistant Professor, School of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University. Address correspondence to Catie Snow Bailard, Assistant Professor, George Washington University, School of Media and Public Affairs, 805 21st Street NW, Suite #400, Washington, DC 20052. E-mail: [email protected] Political Communication, 33:583–604, 2016 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1058-4609 print / 1091-7675 online DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2016.1142489 583 mailto:[email protected] unions qualified as protected speech under the First Amendment, effectively opening the door to unlimited campaign spending by these groups. Under the new law, any indivi- dual or group could now donate any sum of money to a super political action committee (i.e., Super PAC), who could spend that money as they saw fit to attack or support any candidate or proposition up until Election Day—so long as this spending was indepen- dent of the national parties and the candidates’ own campaigns. This overturned previous restrictions on electioneering put in place by McCain and Feingold’s Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which had limited what could be said and when in advertisements sponsored by these groups. In addition, while current law still requires public disclosure of the identities of contributors to Super PACs, nonprofit corporations and local employee associations that qualify as “social welfare groups,” according to the Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(4), are exempt from disclosure requirements in the wake of the Citizens United ruling. In the years following this ruling, political spending in elections has mushroomed. The total cost of the 2012 elections topped out at $6.3 billion—an increase of more than 50% over the $4.15 billion price tag of the 2004 elections (Center for Responsive Politics, 2012). A substantial portion of this increase is a result of independent political spending by the outside groups that were empowered by the Citizens United ruling, many of whom did not disclose their donors. Specifically, outside spending in 2012 surpassed $1.3 billion dollars—whereas more than $600 million of this came from Super PACs who are required to disclose the source of their funds, more than $300 million was also spent by the non-disclosing social welfare groups (Center for Responsive Politics, 2012). As the quotes presented earlier illustrate, Citizens United is a flashpoint for heated debate. While it has drawn scorn from citizens and politicians alike—including a memorable public remonstration of the Supreme Court members by President Barack Obama during a State of the Union address—the ruling also has many strong propo- nents. Supporters of the decision include the National Rifle Association, the United States Chamber of Commerce, analysts with the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation, and the American Civil Liberties Union. In response to critics’ protests that the ruling would increase government corruption, for example, Cato Institute analysts John Samples and Ilya Shapiro (2010) argued that, although the decision may lead to costlier campaigns, it is important to remember “that none of this money will go directly to candidates for office. It will go instead to broadcasting or otherwise communicating speech about candidates and issues. Such increases in spending should be welcome because studies have shown that more spending—more political communication—leads to better-informed voters.” Another perspective in the debate regarding the consequences of Citizens United suggests that, whether or not more money in politics is a good thing in theory, the deluge of spending that followed this ruling may not make all that much difference in practice. In this vein, the Sunlight Foundation calculated the “returns on investment” that outside groups received for their 2012 general election spending. They found that, “After outside groups spent more than $1.3 billion in independent expenditures to influence the outcome of the election, we now get to see just what all that money bought them—or didn’t. Turns out some of the smart money wasn’t so smart after all when it came to making political bets” (Young, 2012). For example, of the more than $100 million spent by American Crossroads, only 1.29% of the races that received a portion of their funds ended in the desired result, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce only faring marginally better at 6.9% (Young, 2012). 584 Catie Snow Bailard Whatever the consequences for the candidates, policy groups, citizens, and the American democratic process prove to be, there is one group that has indisputably benefited from the Citizens United ruling—anyone working in a field associated with the campaign industry. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, nearly $500 million of the $1.3 billion dollars spent by outside groups in the 2012 election was funneled through just six media companies, who typically used the money to produce ads or to purchase the slots where the ads ultimately aired (Dooling, 2012). Other undeniable winners in the deluge of political spending post-Citizens United are the television stations that air these political advertisements. Specifically, in 2012 political groups spent nearly $3.4 billion on television advertising—with $2.8 billion going to local television stations, $104 million spent on national networks, and $467 million spent at cable networks (Lieberman, 2012). According to McChesney and Nichols (2012), “Back in the 1960s and ’70s TV candidate advertising constituted an almost imperceptible part of total TV advertising revenues”; however, in 2012 “political advertising will account for over 20% of TV station ad revenues.” In the words of industry insider Eric Greenburg, “Political advertising and elections are to TV what Christmas is to retail” (quoted in McChesney & Nichols, 2012). Thus, it is not surprising that in the wake of the Citizens United ruling, “Every media channel and media outlet, from local stations to the networks, is licking their lips over this feast of spending.” (Kip Cassino, quoted in Dexheimer, 2012) The clear financial benefits accrued to owners of television stations as a result of the Citizens United decision opens the door to an important question: Did the degree to which media companies benefited from the changes in campaign finance law influence their news outlets’ coverage of the Citizens United decision? In other words, is it possible to identify variation in how news outlets covered this Supreme Court decision that correlates with the degree to which those outlets’ parent companies profited from the resulting increase in campaign spending? Answering this question will provide an important and far-too-uncommon opportunity to systematically test for bias in news coverage. In an era when cries of media bias abound, the opportunities to systematically and empirically test for biased coverage remain elusive. Nevertheless, as media consolidation continues apace, whether the interests belonging to the handful of corporations that own the majority of America’s media outlets seep into the news coverage that their outlets produce has clear import in a political system founded on the ideals of robust and informed political deliberation, a marketplace of ideas, and a watchdog press that is vigilant on behalf of citizens. The problem in testing for bias, however, remains formidable. There simply is no objective and absolute standard of what unbiased coverage would look like with which to compare the news coverage that does exist. This is, in part, because what constitutes biased coverage very much depends upon whom you ask. It is for this reason, according to Gilens and Hertzman (2000), that “the more general arguments often heard about whether the press has a conservative or a liberal bias are almost by their nature irresolvable…. Being unable to agree on what ‘impartial’ or ‘unbiased’ coverage would look like, it is hardly surprising that we disagree about whether actual coverage is biased, and if so, in what direction” (p. 371). However, rather than abandon the scientific pursuit entirely, Gilens and Hertzman (2000) offer a compelling alternative: “In the absence of an ‘objective standard’ against which media bias could be identified, the most promising approach is to focus on issues for which different media owners have different interests, asking whether news content differs in accord with those differing interests” (p. 371). In this vein, Gilens and Hertzman tested whether the degree to which various media corporations stood to benefit from the Corporate Ownership and News Bias Revisited 585 loosening of TV station ownership restrictions, a key component of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, predicted variation in how that act was covered by the news- paper outlets that belonged to those corporations. Their analysis revealed that companies that stood to gain more financially from the loosening of ownership restrictions covered the 1996 Telecommunications Act significantly differently from those that did not stand to benefit. “In short, very different pictures of the likely effects of this legislation were being painted by the different newspapers examined, pictures that served to further the interests of the newspapers’ corporate owners rather than the interests of their readers in fair and complete coverage of an important public policy issue” (2012, p. 383). This analysis provided compelling insight into the capacity for corporate owners’ interests to slant the content of news produced by their respective outlets. Unfortunately, there have been relatively few opportunities since to continue and expand this line of analysis. This is largely due to the fact that the majority of outlets are owned by a shrinking number of corporations (Bagdikian, 2004). As a result, it is rare when the interests belonging to this handful of corporations vary from one another in clear, systematic, and measurable ways. Quite simply, in most cases, regulatory policies, judicial decisions, and tax laws tend to advantage or disadvantage these large corporations to relatively commensurate degrees. It is for this reason that the Citizens United ruling provides a compelling opportunity to empirically investigate the degree to which the financial interests of media corporations may shape the news that Americans receive about pertinent policies and issues. Since the majority of the financial windfall precipitated by the deluge of political spending in the wake of the Citizens United ruling was spent on political advertising on television, this provides a clear case in which media corporations’ interests vary from one another in systematic and measurable ways. Media corporations with a greater number of television stations have benefited directly from this ruling and they have benefited to a greater degree than corporations with fewer or no television stations. And, the reason for this is self- evident: the more television stations a media corporation owns, the more airtime they have available to sell to political advertisers. Accordingly, this variation offers a rare and important opportunity to systematically test for the influence of corporate owners’ interests on the content produced by their news outlets. In the following sections, I briefly review the current state of research on media bias. I then replicate and expand the method employed by Gilens and Hertzman to analyze the content of newspaper coverage of the Citizens United ruling. The findings of this analysis reveal measurable differences in the content of the coverage, which vary according to the degree to which the corporate owners of the newspapers benefited from the ruling. Mirroring Gilens and Hertzman’s findings in their own analysis of coverage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, newspapers belonging to media corporations that own more television stations covered the Citizens United ruling systematically differently from—and more favorably than—those with few or no television stations. As an additional test of the robustness of these findings, I conduct a second analysis of the content of coverage published by this same set of newspapers regarding another recent, high-profile, and controversial Supreme Court decision: Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. This additional analysis addresses important omitted-variable bias concerns that, rather than financial interests, there may be alternative, confounding variables that are actually driving the slant of the Citizens United coverage, such as the ideological compo- sition of the newsrooms or their targeted audiences or other constraints related to adver- tising or circulation demands. 586 Catie Snow Bailard Hobby Lobby is an ideal case for a comparative content analysis, since both cases deal with corporate personhood and abut with prominent civil liberties issues (freedom of speech and freedom of religion, respectively). However, unlike Citizens United, the Hobby Lobby decision does not have clear financial implications for the corporate owners. Therefore, if there is another factor driving the content of coverage, we should expect to see similar slants in the coverage of these two different decisions. Instead, the findings reveal that, whereas the coverage of Citizens United was clearly correlated with the financial interests of the parent corporations, the Hobby Lobby coverage did not follow a similar trajectory. The results of this additional test assuage omitted-variable bias concerns and support the conclusion that the parent corporations’ financial interests did seep into their newspaper outlets’ coverage of the Citizens United decision. Literature Gilens and Hertzman outlined three categories that comprised the body of extant media bias literature at the time they published their study in 2000. The first includes case studies in which media owners’ interests clearly influenced the news content produced by their outlets (Bagdikian, 1997). While illustrative, this anecdotal approach lacks a systematic mechanism to uncover and test the full universe of bias that is potentially driven by the interests of media owners. The second set of research examines bias that the news media as a whole exhibits in covering specific issues, often in terms of whether media generally favors a liberal or conservative tilt (Bennett, 1988; Bozell & Baker, 1990; Cohen & Solomon, 1993; Herman & Chomsky, 2002; Lichter, Rothman, & Lichter, 1986; Parenti, 1986; Soderlund & Schmitt, 1986). While instructive, this approach is somewhat handi- capped by the absence of an objective standard of unbiased news with which to make a credible empirical comparison. The final category represents the handful of studies that follow the approach recommended by Gilens and Hertzman, which identify a specific area where media corporation owners’ interests diverge from one another in clear and measur- able directions and then compare the coverage produced by the news outlets belonging to these corporations accordingly (Burriss & Williams, 1979; Pratt & Whiting, 1986; Snider & Page, 1997) One additional category of research on media bias overlooked in this summary is the consideration of how journalistic norms and specific economic features of media compa- nies and their markets may shape which stories are told and how. Within this vein, Fico and Cote (1999) demonstrate how the news-gathering practices of journalists and news- room norms may contribute to a surfeit of one-sided or structurally imbalanced news stories about campaigns. An earlier analysis of local newspaper coverage of controversies (Fico, Lacy, & Simon, 1989) found that the size of journalists’ workload increased imbalance in these news stories. In addition, this study found that group ownership decreased fairness in how these stories were reported, but intercity competition had the reverse effect of increasing fairness in these news stories. Since the publication of Gilens and Hertzman’s study, partisan media has experienced a resurgence in the United States—primarily thanks to the growth of cable television and the Internet blogosphere (Baum & Groeling, 2008). Accordingly, the literature has wit- nessed a sizable increase in the number of studies that fall into the second category of literature characterized by Gilens and Hertzman. These studies include analyses that operationalize and measure partisan or ideological bias in the media generally (Entman, 2007; Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2010; Groseclose & Milyo, 2005), in regard to presidential elections (D’Alessio & Allen, 2000), as well as in regard to specific policy areas, such as Corporate Ownership and News Bias Revisited 587 the economy (Larcinese, Puglisi, & Snyder, 2011), immigration (Branton & Dunaway, 2009), or the environment (Dispensa & Brulle, 2003). A related set of literature tests the effect of profits and corporate ownership on dimensions of news coverage other than bias. Since these papers do not test for bias specifically, they do not fall squarely into Gilens and Hertzman’s third category. However, these studies do offer important insight into the potential for corporate ownership and market pressures to shape news content. For example, Dunaway (2008) finds that corpo- rate ownership (as opposed to private ownership) and higher levels of market competition are associated with a decrease in issue coverage in campaign news produced both by newspapers as well as television stations. Another set of studies consider the effect of profit motivation on the substantive content of the news produced by outlets (Hamilton, 2011; Zaller, 1999), as well as the effect of profit motivation on the quality of journalistic output (Klinenberg, 2005; McManus, 1995). More broadly, classic studies employing sociological and organizational theory argue that news production is not simply an act of journalists mirroring reality, but rather a product of the interaction between the organizational structures, market and financial pressures, and professional norms that characterize the media industry. For example, seminal work by Epstein (1974) found that “the pictures of society which are shown on television as national news are largely—though not entirely—formed and shaped by organizational considerations,” of which economic considerations figure heavily (p. 258). In another foundational study, Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, and Sasson (1992) argue, “Media empires are not simply a result of the market system; they also serve as cheerleaders for it. Bottom-line pressure to turn a profit plus the need to protect the image of corporations as good citizens will continue to put pressure on journalists to create media content that is politically safe” (p. 379). Finally, McManus (1995) employs market theory to highlight the intersections where market norms are likely to trump journalistic norms, “for mass-mediated news supported by advertising, achieving the greatest return requires a subordination of most journalism norms to market norms…. High-minded owners-inves- tors could direct that sometimes market norms give way to journalism norms. But under most market conditions, they would have to be willing to accept less return” (pp. 327–328). In All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information Into News, Hamilton (2011) delves further into the financial motives and market structures that shape the news that audiences receive. Although much of the discussion focuses on cost-benefit calculus made by journalists in crafting news that will attract the largest possible audience, Hamilton also considers the economic motives of ownership. First, he explores and substantiates the assumption that the primary motive of owners is profit maximization, particularly in light of the growth of publicly held media corporations with boards accountable to shareholders in recent decades. The implication of this for the present analysis is that profit-maximizing owners are likely to be aware of and favorable to legislation and judicial decisions that promise to increase the profitability of their corpora- tion, such as the Citizens United decision. However, the question remains, through what mechanisms might owners’ preferences trickle down and shape the coverage produced by their news outlets? Hamilton offers a simple answer: Journalists have incentives to produce coverage that does not harm the interests of their corporate owners. “News workers may be reluctant to provide unfavor- able news coverage of the parent company. Allegations of this nature have been made about ABC’s treatment of stories about Disney World and NBC’s handling of information about the nuclear power industry, a sector important to its parent company General 588 Catie Snow Bailard Electric” (p. 25). Moreover, Hamilton stipulates that journalists do not have to consciously weigh the variety of profit-maximizing considerations each time they write a story; instead, “A journalist will not explicitly consider each of these economic questions in crafting a story. The stories, reporters, firms, and media that survive in the marketplace, however, will depend on the answers to these questions…” (p. 7). In Media, Markets, and Democracy, Baker (2001) suggests another avenue through which the preferences of profit-maximizing media owners might shape the news produced by their outlets: the need to appease their advertisers. “As the media’s dominant paymaster, advertisers influence media enterprises to give audiences editorial content that advertisers want them to receive…. Advertisers also influence media… to avoid content that dis- parages the advertisers’ products or political agenda” (p. 25). Accordingly, Baker asserts that there are instances when the desires of advertisers will supersede the interests of the audience in the production of news. This provides another avenue through which the preferences of profit-maximizing owners might shape the content of the news produced by their outlets, since media corporations that own more TV stations are likely to have more developed relationships with political advertisers than those that do not own TV stations. Thus, media companies that have more established and reciprocally dependent relation- ships with political advertisers (who have long paid hefty sums to these corporations to advertise on their TV channels) are likely to have incentives to produce favorable coverage of Citizens United (which serves the interests of those political advertisers), shaping their news coverage of the decision accordingly. In summary, the incentives to create coverage that is favorable to the interests of the media owners is likely a result of journalists’ incentives to weigh the preferences of their profit-maximizing owners (both explicitly and implicitly) as well as the preferences of their advertisers. This body of research provides a solid foundation for understanding and testing the effect of corporate ownership on news content. The present study contributes to this field by testing whether the different degree to which media corporations financially benefited from the Citizens United ruling influenced the content of news coverage about the ruling produced by those corporations’ newspaper outlets. The findings of this analysis provide suggestive evidence of the degree to which media owners’ interests may seep into and slant news coverage more generally and regularly. Analysis In this section, I replicate and expand upon the methodology employed by Gilens and Hertzman in their analysis of coverage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act in order to test whether media corporations that benefited differently from the large increase in political spending precipitated by the Citizens United ruling produced newspaper coverage that varied accordingly. This begins by identifying the 100 largest media companies in terms of media-derived revenue (Johnson, 2010). Next, following Gilens and Hertzman’s model, I categorized the companies included in this list into three sets—those with no television stations, those with limited television stations (i.e., between 1 and 18 stations), and those with a substantial number of television stations (i.e., 19 or more stations) (Columbia Journalism Review, 2013).1 Next, I identify which of these companies owned at least one daily newspaper (The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2013) with full text archived in either the LexisNexis or ProQuest databases. This rendered a list of 12 media companies with 33 newspapers. (Please see Table 8 in the supplemental Appendix for a full list.) Corporate Ownership and News Bias Revisited 589 I then compiled all articles referencing the Citizens United ruling from these news- papers via LexisNexis and ProQuest searches of the phrase “Citizens United” between the dates of March 1, 2009, and February 28, 2011. This two-year time frame is necessary due to the multiple stages of this case and its implications for political spending, which was first argued March 24, 2009, then reargued September 9, 2009, then decided on January 1, 2010, with the tangible consequences of which first becoming manifest in the fall 2010 election. Editorials and opinion pieces were excluded from the analysis in order to ensure a more difficult and appropriate test for slanted coverage. Whereas, as dictated by their nature, editorials advocate particular perspectives or positions, the expectation of straight news is that of balance and objectivity. Therefore, if an analysis of non-editorial content reveals skewed coverage, this will provide a much more compelling empirical demonstra- tion of the potential for the financial interests of media corporations to distort the range of perspectives made available to the public through their news outlets. This is not to suggest that an analysis of editorial content would not provide another valuable opportunity to test for systematic variance in coverage that reflects corporate owners’ self-interest; however, this is not the focus of the present analysis. Accordingly, this search yielded 439 non- editorial and non-opinion news pieces for analysis that mentioned the Supreme Court case directly. Next, two graduate student coders read a sample of newspaper articles referencing the Citizens United ruling from newspapers that were not included in this analysis in order to identify positive and negative consequences and implications of the ruling that were mentioned in news coverage. Based on this analysis, we constructed a comprehensive list of potential positive and negative ramifications associated with the decision, which are listed in Tables 1 and 2.2 After establishing …