content analysis

I was catching up on back episodes of the great radio show On The Media (OTM to insiders) this weekend.  In this special episode on investigative reporting, long time 60 Minutes producer, Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino’s character in The Insider) made the intuitatively reasonable sounding claim that as money for investigative journalism drys up, most Pulitzers are increasingly going to a small number of elite newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times).

But is this empirically true?  A quick perusal of recent Pulitzer winners suggests the following:
1. It’s not that elite newspapers win most of the prizes.  It’s just that the Washington Post wins all of them.
2. Beyond the Post, most of the winners are newspapers with a circulation above 250,000, perhaps unsurprisingly.
3. Though the majority of the awards are won by big papers, small newspapers do win things with some regularity.  And it’s not just the same few small papers over and over again.

I wonder if a longer term analysis would show consolidation of Pulitzer prizes by elite newspapers in recent times.  Contrary to Bergman’s claim, I actually suspect that while the names shift over time, Pulitzer has always been dominated by a small number of elite newspapers.  Perhaps the competition was just tighter in the past.  Has anybody done research on this?

I was sent a link to this fascinating site by a friend.  It visually depicts how news stories in various outlets are geographically distributed.  To the right is the map for The New York Times.  Apparently, it was created as part of a dissertation in media economics by Nicolas Kayser-Bril.

Unsurprisingly, every periodical is most interested in their own country.  Also predictable is the fact that the U.S. is a celebrity the world around.  Because of the window of the study, Iraq also tends to be big (depending on how upscale the newspaper is).  What is most fascinating to me though is the size of China.  It’s clear that China is a big deal.  But I wonder what kind of coverage is responsible for that bulge?  Environmental, political, financial, Olympics?  Or is it just the whole package?

I love politics. If my cable provider offered a Politics All-League Pass, I’d surely be the first to sign up. The amount of time I can spend watching Chris Matthews, Wolf Blizter, and the rest of the mindless media gang, while reading endless blogs and articles about politics far surpasses that of any of my friends or families. Given this interest, it has been difficult not to mention politics here, but I don’t see this blog as being about whether I like Obama or Hillary. So, I’ve been avoiding it.

However, there is an genuinely sociological issue raised by the campaign that I’d like to discuss. In the past several weeks, the Clinton campaign has been very successful in selling the storyline that the press has been harder on her and, perhaps, even want to see Obama win. Though this idea has gained substantial currency (thanks a lot, SNL), I’m not buying it for two seconds. Here’s why: plenty of research has shown that the American press corps is a highly professionalized group committed to the idea of objectivity, something that is heavily emphasized in J-schools (see Michael Schudson on the American objectivity norm). As Schudson writes in “The objectivity norm in American journalism,”

Journalists grew self-conscious about the manipulability of information in the propaganda age. They felt a need to close ranks and assert their collective integrity in the face of their close encounter with the publicity agents’ unembarrassed effort to use information (or misinformation) to promote special interests.

Many sociologists and former journalists, among them Herb Gans, Mark Fishman, and Leon Sigal, have documented journalists’ almost ideological commitment to objectivity and “common sense” thinking. No insult is greater in a newsroom than to insinuate that a journalist has a political preference. As NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams often says with great pride, “I don’t do opinions.”

That said, journalists are under great pressure to produce new “news pegs.” For example, when one has a primary race where nothing new is happening for weeks at a time, the slightest development can be overblown into a major event. Thus, during a spell in the campaign when little was happening, the Clinton campaign (masters of media manipulation, see The War Room (1993)) was able to provide reporters with a new and interesting storyline: that the press is in love with Obama. The story also offered the added bonus of being able to engage in self-criticism (as anyone who reads The Times‘ public editor’s column knows the press loves to do).

In the past week, the press has fancied the idea that Clinton’s negative attacks against Obama have won her some much-needed momentum (whatever that means). And while it seems likely that he came out of last night’s Ohio-Texas Two-Step with more delegates, the storyline that Obama is winning has grown stale. So, the press will begin to run with the classic Clinton “comeback kid” story.

It’s just important to remember that these stories have far less to do with reality and far more with the nature of news routines.