United States. Environmental Protection Agency

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.