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Political Behavior
Published in: Political Behavior 1/2021

14-06-2019 | Original Paper

Not Dead Yet: Political Learning from Newspapers in a Changing Media Landscape

Author: Erik Peterson

Published in: Political Behavior | Issue 1/2021

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Abstract

Shrinking audiences and political coverage cutbacks threaten newspapers’ ability to inform the public about politics. Despite substantial theorizing and widespread concern, it remains unclear how much the public can learn from these struggling news sources. I link measures of the newspaper-produced information environment with large-scale surveys that capture the public’s awareness of their member of Congress. This shows the contemporary effects of newspapers on representative-specific awareness are one-half to one-third estimates from earlier eras. Despite this decline newspapers remain an important contributor to political awareness in a changing media landscape, even for those with limited political interest. These results establish broader scope conditions under which the public can learn from the media environment.
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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
Supplementary Appendix A contains additional detail about the data sources for each set of comparisons.
 
2
Figs. A1–A4 in Supplementary Appendix A show annual trends in these variables, which continue to decline throughout the more recent 2006–2017 time window.
 
3
This includes newspapers in the Audit Bureau of Circulations and non-ABC newspapers, mirroring the circulation sources from Snyder and Strömberg (2010).
 
4
Supplementary Appendix A contains summary statistics on these measures.
 
5
Berinsky (2004) raises the concern that respondents provide DK responses even in situations where they do have an opinion. Several factors limits the implications of this concern here. First, the regression models employed throughout condition on variables, such as education, that are systematically related to using survey measures in this way. Second, while this tendency may contribute to the overall levels of DK responses throughout a survey, the research design used here focuses on shifts in DK responses that are linked to the within congressional district media environment. This differences out any fundamental tendency to use survey measures in this way that is shared across all respondents.
 
6
I focus on this specification because it allows for year-by-year comparisons of the effects of congruence and passes a set of placebo tests described later in the text. All main results are similar when using a specification that instead uses variation in county-congressional district congruence from redistricting. See Supplementary Appendix D.
 
7
See Supplementary Appendix D for a full list of these other covariates. This specification closely follows Snyder and Strömberg (2010) to enable a comparison with their findings.
 
8
Similar results are produced when separately interacting each category of the political interest variable with congruence. See Supplementary Appendix D.
 
9
Because the political interest question is unavailable in some surveys, the sample sizes here differ for some outcomes relative to the previous section.
 
10
However, given that newspaper coverage does not increase knowledge gaps, these results are more similar to the findings regarding television in Jerit et al. (2006).
 
11
See Supplementary Appendix E for detail on the ANES/CCES items used for this over time comparison.
 
12
There is a similar pattern using other specifications based on variation in congruence due to redistricting or after controlling for covariates. Across these approaches there are decreases in the coefficient on congruence between these two time periods, but many differences do not reach statistical significance due to substantial uncertainty in the 1982–2004 estimates. See Supplementary Appendix E for these alternative specifications.
 
13
See Supplementary Appendix A for demonstration of recent declines in newspaper reach and coverage.
 
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Metadata
Title
Not Dead Yet: Political Learning from Newspapers in a Changing Media Landscape
Author
Erik Peterson
Publication date
14-06-2019
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Political Behavior / Issue 1/2021
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09556-7

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