Visualizing America's drug problems: an ethnographic content analysis of illegal drug stories on the nightly news

In 1986 President Ronald Reagan declared a national "War on Drugs. " Three years later, President George Bush renewed the call to arms. The national media gave the War on Drugs their official blessing. On television, in news magazines and in newspapers, the media accepted and amplified the government's claim that illegal drug use was approaching epidemic proportions (Orcutt and Turner, 1993; Gitlin, 1989). Over the years from 1986 to 1992, U.S. citizens were treated to a barrage of news stories about illegal drugs. In 1992 drugs began to fade from the American agenda; by 1993 the federal government was moving to consolidate or eliminate the special agencies created or enhanced in 1986 to wage the drug war. From 1986 to 1993 changes in actual drug use in America were fairly small. Between 1988 and 1990, the year under scrutiny in this paper, according to the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, illegal drug use actually fell, as did use of cocaine. Crack use remained flat (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1989, 1991). Others have argued that there never really was a drug crisis, at least in terms of an epidemic of illegal drug use (Reinarman and Levine, 1989; Orcutt and Turner, 1993; Mosher and Yanagisako, 1991). And the War on Drugs actually had little impact on the use of illegal drugs. Meanwhile, use of the two most deadly drugs, alcohol and tobacco, either remained flat or dropped slightly. There is a substantial body of literature offering explanations of why, although drug use in the U.S. was declining in the late 1980s and early 1990s, "drug war" rhetoric and punitive solutions to the "problem" ran rampant. A number of these works have attested to the importance of the news media in that process. Orcutt and Turner (1993) demonstrate how the news media distorted statistics to support the view that the problem was growing. Sharp (1992) shows how Presidential access to the media in this as in other historical periods enables political leaders to promote or demote drug issues in the media and hence in the public agenda. Jensen, Gerber and Babcock (1991) use surveys of newspaper and magazine coverage to demonstrate how initiatives by politicians preceded the formation of grassroots mobilization around illegal drugs, while Beckett (1994) employs OLS regression to show that television and print coverage, as well as public concern, were actually both functions of elite "state initiative," moves by political leaders to place illegal drugs on the public agenda. Iyengar (1991) establishes a link between media coverage and public support for punitive solutions by combining content analysis with audience reaction studies. Several of these authors use content analysis in their analyses. Yet all use written sources-news scripts or abstractsas the source of the raw data that they analyze. Television is a visual medium. Although political leaders may drive the basic content of the news, news organizations themselves mediate that content, turning it into narratives with beginnings and endings, good characters and bad characters, and pictures that illustrate everything. The research described here attempts to go further than earlier studies in analyzing the visual as well as the textual content of television news stories about illegal drugs. Looking at a sample of stories aired in 1990, one of the high points of media coverage of illegal drugs, we aim to provide "thick description" of the mediated content, as well as the themes and patterns that lie within that coverage. The importance of television news Television news has become the chief source of information and analysis of major social problems for the overwhelming majority of Americans (Roper Organization, 1991). Cohen pointed out in the early 1960s, and later research has confirmed, that the news may not tell people what to think, but it definitely tells them what to think about (Cohen, 1963; Rogers and Dearing, 1988). This "agenda-setting" function of the mass media helps to explain why the War on Drugs became a national obsession in the late 1980s and early 1990s. …