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The heavenly chorus: interest group voices on TV news

American Journal of Political Science [November 1994]

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Abstract: The work of E. E. Schattschneider (1960) and others suggests that there may be systematic biases or unrepresentativeness in the voices that interest groups contribute to public deliberation about policy. Evidence from hundreds of TV news stories concerning 80 diverse policy issues from the 1969-82 period indicates that corporations and business groups predominated (especially on economic issues), with 36.5% of all interest group mentions, contrasted with only 13.2% for labor. Professional and agricultural interests were rarely heard from. Citizen action groups had 32% of all interest group stories, but these often concerned unpopular protest activity. Such imbalances, apparently resulting from differential command of money and other resources, seem to violate norms of equal access, representativeness, balance, and diversity in the marketplace of ideas.

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Publication Year:1994
Type of Material:Article
Language English
Published in: American Journal of Political Science
Publication Info:Volume 38 Number 04
Issue:November 1994
Page(s):1056-1078
Notes:See p. 1061: For each of the 80 issues, the Vanderbilt Television News Index and Abstract summaries of one randomly chosen network news broadcast each day were analyzed for a period beginning two months before the first opinion survey on a give issue and ending at the time of the second survey. Each news story relevant to the issue at hand was divided into separate “source stories” (i.e., segments of the story based on different source types.) All of the resulting 7,747 source stories were coded on a number of variables, including the type of news source whose statement or action was reported…
Subject: Vanderbilt Television News Archive -- Research Use
Record Number:10152
Last Update:2025-07-04 17:50:00
Date Created:0000-00-00 00:00:00
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