Press and politics

This dissertation examines the varied ways that government action is portrayed through different newspapers across the political spectrum. Most of the existing literature about the relationship between media and government is focused on media power, fictional portrayals of government, or on specific issues or topics. While more recent studies have examined the idea that presentations of government may be vastly different from one news outlet to the next, no one has examined different portrayals of government action. Furthermore, there seems to be a belief that political bias affects how news is presented, but very little study of why or how that came to be. This dissertation fills that gap by analyzing how different newspapers portray government action (specifically EPA regulations). The findings help determine how each news outlet manipulates the stories they present and why news media behaves this way.
A Burkean Cluster Analysis was conducted on articles from three newspapers, one from the left of the political spectrum, one from the center, and one from the right, as well as on press releases from the Environmental Protection Agency. News articles about EPA regulations were read and indexed. Indexing an article allows the researcher to find relationships between EPA regulations and commonly occurring themes across a newspaper’s coverage, as well as the structures that bind those relationships together. These themes and structures act as the data for the rest of the study. An analysis of the themes and structures was conducted to find each news outlet’s most featured ratios. These were then generalized to determine a news outlet’s motive or motives, the rationale for why they choose to frame news stories about government action in specific ways.

Tabloids, often defined by the half-broadsheet size of regular newspapers, feature titillating, sensationalized stories of crime and/or scandal offered in a piquant manner. The exploratory study asks how the tabloid style was manifested in the coverage of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal of 1998 and related news, thereby fostering a hegemony in which the citizenry was distracted from more important political issues and events. The study also assesses how a critique of such tabloidization developed among journalists and scholars during the scandal. The print media analyzed are the tabloids Star magazine, The National Enquirer, and Globe , and mainstream media The New York Times and Newsweek. This study demonstrates that even the mainstream, "objective" reporting reflected sensationalism, the use of piquant and highly cliched language, and a lust for scandal, rendering it nearly indistinguishable from stories in the reviled tabloids. The related critique, led by journalists and extending to scholars who provided greater insight, precision, and elaboration, focused on the influence of the Internet and an increasingly competitive 24-hour media environment in fueling tabloidesque coverage of the scandal. The escalation of tabloid-style reporting in mainstream publications proved to be a troubling symptom of an industry already struggling under public distrust.

The media has a significant influence on any political process. In Venezuela, particularly, the media plays an important rold in defining the electorate's political opinion and attitude toward the political process. This thesis analyzed how the media's preference for conflict and individual personalities exacerbated overall societal tensions and polarization in Venezuela since 1999. I suggest a framework for a future content analysis of news coverage of the 2012 presidential election in order to quantify and qualify the evolution of bias and balance in Venezuela's mass media.