Common Knowledge: News and the Construction of Political Meaning (American Politics and Political Economy Series) - Softcover

Neuman, W. Russell; Just, Marion R.; Crigler, Ann N.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226574407 ISBN 13: 9780226574400

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 1992

Inhaltsangabe

Photo opportunities, ten-second sound bites, talking heads and celebrity anchors: so the world is explained daily to millions of Americans. The result, according to the experts, is an ignorant public, helpless targets of a one-way flow of carefully filtered and orchestrated communication. Common Knowledge shatters this pervasive myth. Reporting on a ground-breaking study, the authors reveal that our shared knowledge and evolving political beliefs are determined largely by how we actively reinterpret the images, fragments, and signals we find in the mass media.

For their study, the authors analyzed coverage of 150 television and newspaper stories on five prominent issues—drugs, AIDS, South African apartheid, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the stock market crash of October 1987. They tested audience responses of more than 1,600 people, and conducted in-depth interviews with a select sample. What emerges is a surprisingly complex picture of people actively and critically interpreting the news, making sense of even the most abstract issues in terms of their own lives, and finding political meaning in a sophisticated interplay of message, medium, and firsthand experience.

At every turn, Common Knowledge refutes conventional wisdom. It shows that television is far more effective at raising the saliency of issues and promoting learning than is generally assumed; it also undermines the assumed causal connection between newspaper reading and higher levels of political knowledge. Finally, this book gives a deeply responsible and thoroughly fascinating account of how the news is conveyed to us, and how we in turn convey it to others, making meaning of at once so much and so little. For anyone who makes the news—or tries to make anything of it—Common Knowledge promises uncommon wisdom.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

W. Russell Neuman is the John Derby Evans Professor of Media Technology in Communication Studies in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

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Common Knowledge

News and the Construction of Political Meaning

By W. Russell Neuman, Marion R. Just, Ann N. Crigler, Benjamin I. Page

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 1992 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-57440-0

Contents

List of Figures, 
List of Tables, 
Preface, 
One. Knowledge in Common, 
Two. The Study Design, 
Three. Five Issues, Three News Media, 
Four. Making Sense of the News, 
Five. Media Matter, 
Six. Learning from the News, 
Seven. Constructing Meaning, 
An Appendix on Method, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Knowledge in Common

In this book we examine how citizens in a democracy come to make sense of the political world around them. The study combines several research techniques, not ordinarily used together, to explore the fragile connection between public and private life that Walter Lippmann characterized as "the world outside and the pictures in our heads."

Lippmann's Public Opinion, from which that phrase is drawn, was first published in 1922. The book is still widely read and cited, because the questions he raised about the role of public communication in mass democracy are so fundamental. Lippmann argued that the citizen's political world is, by necessity, a pseudo-environment, created for the most part by the mass media who gather, organize, and filter the events of the day because

the real environment is altogether too big, too complex and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it. (Lippmann, 1965 [1922], p. 11)

Lippmann recognized that reconfiguring the political world into a manageable shape is not a deterministic one-way process of media information and persuasion. On the contrary, the creation of the pictures in our heads is an interaction between the extraordinarily diverse "habits, tastes, capacities, comforts and hopes" of each private citizen and the formal traditions of public and media discourse. This interaction between media messages and what the individual already knows and believes about the world is the focus of our study.

In the 1920s Lippmann's attention centered on how the press and the public confronted the First World War. He examined how the war was reported in the newspapers of the day and wondered what a typical American citizen could be expected to learn from those reports about the complex political, economic, and military events in Europe. Sharing Lippmann's concern for the role of communications in the democratic process, we turn in the 1990s to an expanded media environment and a fresh set of issues. We are concerned with what Americans think about the problems they confront in the last decades of the twentieth century — the threat of nuclear arms, race politics in South Africa, the impact of the stock exchange on the national economy, the scourge of drug addiction, or the epidemic of AIDS. Our study asks what people know about these critical policy debates and how well each of the media — television, newsmagazines, and newspapers — can help them to understand the political "world outside."

We are challenged by a stream of research which finds that what people learn from the news media is so dismally disappointing that the United States has become a "nation at risk." This research tradition follows a familiar pattern that we identify as the facts-and-figures fallacy. The analyst selects a few items routinely reported in the news media which have a certain self-evident importance and proceeds to demonstrate just how few survey respondents are actually familiar with the information. Recently, for example, the Markle Commission on the Media and the Electorate expressed concern about voter competence based in part on the inability of many survey respondents to volunteer the name of the Democratic vice-presidential nominee even in the midst of the campaign. The gloomy conclusion was that such findings signal "a widespread, glacial indifference, given the near-saturation media coverage of the Democratic convention" and "frontpage attention" to the candidates (Markle Commission, 1989).

Other kinds of evidence about what people learn from their news encounters is sketchy and conflicting. We know, for example, that the average viewer of the evening news can recall without prompting only about one out of the nineteen news stories covered in a typical newscast, but when the viewer is presented with a list of topics, news recall rises to 50 percent (Neuman, 1976). Studies show that self-reported newspaper reading correlates about .35 with a variety of political information indices, while reported TV news viewing correlates only .08 on average, or in some data, negatively (Robinson and Davis, 1990). In a 1990 national survey, only 14 percent of a sample could identify the democratic Czechoslovakian leader Vaclav Havel, but 70 percent knew how Nicolae Ceausescu died, and 82 percent knew where General Manuel Noriega took refuge during the American invasion of Panama (Times Mirror, 1990a). Clearly learning is not a simple function of exposure. Why Ceausescu and not Havel? In our view, the vagaries of name recognition, even of prominent politicians, is a poor measure of the health of a democracy or even the health of its system of political communication.

The Construction of Common Knowledge

Ours is a different concern. We take as our starting point, what people do know about public affairs — the common knowledge of mass politics. Much past research in political communication has focused on opinions: people's preferences and predilections about political candidates or controversial issues. Common knowledge, however, refers more broadly to what people think and how they structure their ideas, feelings, and beliefs about political issues. Drawing upon a mixture of survey research, content analysis, in-depth interviews, and experiments on learning, we attempt to provide a methodologically integrated and theoretically coherent picture of what constitutes political common knowledge and how the mass media and the public interact to construct common understandings of "the world outside."

In exploring how citizens learn from the news, we start from the premise that the communication task of journalism is indeed a most difficult enterprise. Political communication does not take place in a classroom. There are no study guides, no grades at the end of the term to motivate attention. People pay attention to whatever catches their interest and actively ignore, reorganize, and interpret the news that comes their way (Zukin and Snyder, 1984; Jensen, 1986; Robinson and Levy, 1986; Gunter, 1987; Swanson, 1987; Dahlgren, 1988; Petty, 1988; Bogart, 1989; Langer, 1989).

Just as the mass audience lacks the motivations and discipline of attentive students, news professionals lack the situational advantages of the classroom teacher. Journalists communicate with an audience they cannot see or hear. It is a one-way conversation. They operate in a professional world inhabited mainly by news sources, public-relations specialists, and other journalists. Their social world is also dominated by social and economic elites (Sigal, 1973; Hess, 1981). It is what Gamson calls the world of "public discourse" (1992). Even a brief opportunity to talk with members of the mass...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1992
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226574407
• ISBN 13: 9780226574400
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 190
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar