Martindale on DiMaggio, 'The Politics of Persuasion: Economic Policy and Media Bias in the Modern Era'
Anthony R. DiMaggio. The Politics of Persuasion: Economic Policy and Media Bias in the Modern Era. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. 390 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4384-6345-2.
Reviewed by Michelle Martindale (Purdue University)
Published on Jhistory (June, 2019)
Commissioned by Robert A. Rabe
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=52213
With this new work, The Politics of Persuasion: Economic Policy and Media Bias in the Modern Era, Lehigh University professor Anthony R. DiMaggio adds to his study of the effects of media bias on the American public. He claims that the news media promotes a pro-government bias among their audiences by relying on “official sources, repeating messages emanating from political elites and conveying them to the general public” (p. 7). This argument places him in direct opposition to scholars who advance the notion that journalists carry a “bad news” bias, which suggests that the media too heavily criticizes the government by only showing party conflict. Moreover, DiMaggio finds that this pro-government bias works in tandem with a pro-business bias, which more often than not relies on corporate representatives or pro-business ideas to support varying arguments on a subject.
To support his claims, DiMaggio measures the media bias of cable and broadcast news, local news, and national newspapers through two lenses across multiple stories. Using LexisNexis searches to identify news stories and employing up to four supplemental coders, DiMaggio’s methodology appears solid and focused for such a large and potentially unwieldy project. The first analytical lens DiMaggio deploys examines news stories' favorability toward business and governmental perspectives over regular citizens or organizations that challenge pro-corporate policy or rhetoric. Secondly, DiMaggio considers who is on the receiving end of positive coverage. In other words, did journalists favor one side of a conflict over another, regarding political party and/or pro-business sentiment? DiMaggio offers an analysis of the effectiveness of these biases on the American public for his last three chapters.
DiMaggio divides The Politics of Persuasion into four sections. The first contains chapter 1 and offers an extensive literature review of media bias studies. In the second part, DiMaggio examines the power of political unity on the media. Chapters 2 through 4 respectively consider the effect of split governments, unified Republicans, and unified Democratic governments on news coverage of economic issues. In part 3, containing chapter 5, DiMaggio explicitly examines whether the local and national news project a “bad news” bias—a challenging determination to make because bad news does occur often. Here he explains that it is difficult for journalists to create bad news, although he acknowledges that they can emphasize it. Through a truncated examination of the 2009 Congressional Report, DiMaggio rejects the “strategic bias” thesis of Matthew Baum and Timothy Groeling to instead posit the idea that journalists do not actively work to create public cynicism toward the government, but that journalists suppress political negativity by underreporting cross-party conflict. Though DiMaggio’s evidence is compelling, it is supported by just one example. With the current state of American politics and the media's coverage of the 2016 presidential race, readers are left to wonder if DiMaggio’s rejection of a media bad news bias would continue to hold up in today’s political climate.
DiMaggio does offer a mountain of evidence in chapters 2 through 4 that strongly supports assertions of both pro-government and pro-business bias throughout the book’s sixteen case studies pulled from news reports on politically divisive topics from 1996 through 2014. By systematically searching news reports for left- or right-wing bias, DiMaggio discovered that political pundits were most readily cited, leaving public opinion outside of political polls relatively unheard. This allowed political parties to utilize the independent press to propagandize their platforms. DiMaggio claims that, concerning debates in 1996 and 2007 that addressed raising the federal minimum wage, “journalists artificially limited democratic deliberation by truncating debates” that privileged the opinions of experts (p. 39). In doing so journalists have legitimized right-wing drift and pro-business arguments by devaluing the opinions of workers.
A piece that is difficult to tease out of this particular study is the consistency with which the media’s pro-business and pro-government bias influences the American citizenry. Though DiMaggio looks to the pro-business bias to explain public support for George W. Bush’s tax cuts, he quickly reverses course when talking about health care. Throughout DiMaggio’s numerous examples, it is noticeable that the US public has not been swayed as easily as some journalists and pundits might hope. In his final chapter, which details DiMaggio’s own experiments testing the effects of media bias on public opinion, he demonstrates that while the media has a pro-government and pro-business bias, “Americans are not simply passive recipients of official propaganda or biased media content. Rather, they make use of their own opinions and experiences, while also being influenced by bias in the news” (p. 256). This was especially clear in each of the new healthcare proposals submitted by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. DiMaggio suggests that despite a pro-government media bias that favored the dominant political party, Americans were susceptible to negative language that criticized these initiatives. This suggests that even though Americans acknowledged that the present healthcare system was broken, they were less willing to explore new, untried plans, especially regarding Medicare.
One issue that DiMaggio and other media scholars will surely revisit is the influence of social media on public opinion. When detailing his methodology in the endnotes, DiMaggio claims that he was able to exclude social media from this study in part due to the infancy of attention to the subject, but also because it did ”not appear to represent a fundamental threat to the current information order” (p. 281). While DiMaggio makes a solid argument that this was true during the 2012 presidential election, an increasing number of revelations about the 2016 presidential campaign and the impact of President Trump’s tweets around the world and Facebook restrictions provide significant evidence that social media, for better or for worse, has revolutionized the political process in a number of ways. This is not so much a critique of DiMaggio’s methodology, but rather illuminates a point for further research. DiMaggio’s careful and thorough examination of multiple political sagas quells the idea that most news media share a liberal bias, and establishes strong foundations for his conclusions that journalists often reflect a hegemonic bias of political power and capitalism.
Citation:
Michelle Martindale. Review of DiMaggio, Anthony R., The Politics of Persuasion: Economic Policy and Media Bias in the Modern Era.
Jhistory, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52213
Post a Reply
Join this Network to Reply