Book Review: The People’s News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of Capitalism, by Joseph E. Uscinski

The People's News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of CapitalismJoseph Uscinski, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Miami, has taken a giant step forward with his examination of what he refers to as "the people's news." Although his subtitle makes reference to the "demands of capitalism," his focus within the text is on what economists refer to as "consumer demands." This conflict between constructions is something to which we will return after I take due note of the great many things that Uscinski makes perfectly clear.This is a book about information and democracy, and Uscinski suggests we have reason to be concerned about the character and quality of the information being supplied by the nation's news media. Among the many shortcomings that are identified within the introduction, we are reminded of the many ways that "media negativity" can degrade the quality of citizen engagement in the democratic process. Framed as a "negative externality" rather than a journalistic goal, we are told that "overly pronounced negative news coverage" can lead us to avoid activities that might otherwise "lead to enlightened citizenship."The nature of these media effects are explored more fully in the second chapter, where Uscinski explores many of the claims and challenges that have been made with regard to the agenda-setting hypothesis. While making it clear that controlled experiments provide considerable support for claims that media coverage can set the audience agenda, Uscinski describes an innovative approach for assessing the extent to which audiences can also be said to set the media agenda. After presenting five arguments for why a study of television network news provides a "fair test" of audience influence, Uscinski describes his use of abstracts from the Vanderbilt News Archives from 1968 to 2010 to identify the extent of news coverage of various issues over this forty-two-year period. Among the many interesting things he notes about this coverage is the extent to which the networks agree with themselves, as well as the New York Times, about which issues are worthy of our attention. He makes use of "Gallup's Most Important Problem question" as a measure of the public's interest in these issues.The challenge, of course, is to determine the direction of influence, or dare we say "the direction of statistical causation between news issue coverage and public opinion." For this, Uscinski relies upon Granger analysis to assess this directionality at different time lags. Not surprisingly, there is no simple answer to the question being set here. While audience opinion is said to drive media coverage with regard to seven issues, the media drive opinion in four, and there is no significant relationship for the ten remaining issue areas. Uscinski uses this evidence of audience influence over the news media to introduce another perspective on media effects into the discussion.Uscinski provides a political scientist's slant on some of the insights derived from communications scholars' periodic engagement with media "uses and gratifications." Audiences are said to derive important gratifications from exposure to media content that is consistent with their ideology and political partisanship. Because these are believed to be relatively stable attributes of an individual's identity, it is likely that neither is much changed by exposure to news media content. It is here that change in the nature of the media environment becomes particularly relevant. …