Sensationalist and Sober Media

Sober media?

The latest issue of Public Opinion Quarterly includes a fascinating study of how the media influences attitudes about the American court system.  All well and good, but the fascinating part comes not from the relationship between news and attitudes about the courts, but the methodological approach taken by the authors in discriminating between sensationalist and sober media.

Stay with me.  It's worth the ride.

The authors write: "Our theoretical claim is where an individual receives information about the courts will shape the way they think about the courts."

Yup, can't argue with that.  The fragmenting of the news media has led to a number of potential differences between folks who, for example, get their news from Glenn Beck versus those who get their news from The Economist.  According to the authors, sensationalist media deconstruct court rulings in such a fashion as to result in less "diffuse" and "specific" support (these are terms described elswhere in the paper). 

Sober media, according to the authors, "focus on the legalistic nature of court processes" and will reinforce views "above the political fray."

This is important and I couldn't agree more, other than to be bitter about not thinking of it first.  Where it all begins to unravel comes from -- as is often the case -- in the methodological details.

In measuring "differential media exposure," as they call it, they distinguish between sensationalist media (political talk radio and cable news) and sober media (newspapers and network news).  They measure exposure to each and use a simple formula, shown below:

Differential Media Exposure =
(talk radio + cable news) - (newspaper + network news)

While I buy that the majority of talk radio tends to fit here, I'm not certain cable news is so easily collapsed into a sensationalist category.  And there's little evidence provided by the authors, or in any content analyses I'm aware of, to immediately support such a conclusion.  It feels right in my atheoretical gut, but so does a good dark beer.

But what they've done here is broken some interesting new ground, a fancy way of saying the rest of us can now use this formula to justify our own analyses.  And one study will build upon another, but what we don't really know -- other than in our own respective atheoretical guts -- is whether this sober to sensational media dichotomy is sound and sober, or a wee bit tipsy.

Tomorrow, a bit more about the results.

Article Details
Christopher D. Johnston and Brandon L. Bartels (2010), "Sensationalism and Sobriety: Differential Media Exposure and Attitudes Toward American Courts, Public Opinion Quarterly, 74, 260-285. 

Knowing the Court

When looking at what people know, we can explore lots of areas. The usual one is public affairs, but it's also important to understand what people know about lots of other domains.

For example, the courts. In particular, the U.S. Supreme Court. The author puts it well:

Two of the findings of this research run strongly counter to existing understandings of public knowledge of law and courts. First, these respondents demonstrate relatively high levels of information about the Supreme Court. To our knowledge, few prior studies have documented this level of information about the Court. We contend that this finding is in part a function of the method by which knowledge is measured, and we are consequently critical of most earlier efforts to document what citizens know about the Supreme Court. When citizens are asked reasonable questions about what they understand about the Supreme Court, most can answer accurately.

As I've mentioned before, it's often how we measure knowledge that matters most. Previous surveys and studies done by damn smart people tend to overestimate the public's lack of knowledge because of the way we ask questions.

In conclusion, the author writes:

Certainly there is little in these data to suggest that the views of the American citizenry are too ill-informed to be worthy of any serious consideration, both from the political process and from scholars of the judiciary. It seems that the American people may know enough about law and courts to be able to perform their assigned function as constituents of the contemporary judicial system in the U.S.

I would note that the data suggest a small decline in accuracy about the Supreme Court from 2001 to 2005. About 74 percent in 2001 correctly knew justices are appointed. About 65 percent knew it in 2005. Same is true for a couple of other knowledge questions.

And the old recognition versus recall issue is seen, with recognition proving superior at tapping what people know about the Court. I won't go into the r vs r debate. See my other posts.

What's missing here, for me, is media. I'd love to see how people to watch a lot of court programs or the news differ in these results. Alas, this is not to be seen.

A summary to the study is here. Scroll down and click any option to get a pdf of the study.