How the News Media Fail American Voters: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies (review)

120 Rhetoric & Public Affairs How the News Media Fail American Voters: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies. By Kenneth Dautrich and Thomas H. Hartley. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999; pp. ix + 204. $49.50 cloth; $19.50 paper. Scholars and media critics, it seems, are not alone in their contention that election news faUs to provide voters with the information they need to participate intelligently in the electoral process. Citizens themselves report widespread dissatisfaction with the content of political news, stating in large numbers that the news they get is neither the news they need nor the news they want to have, even as they continue to rely on the media to satisfy their information-gathering needs. This is the key finding of How the News Media Fail American Voters: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies. Kenneth Dautrich and Thomas H. Hartley employ panel data gathered at four points during the 1996 presidential election to assess how voters use and respond to media coverage of the campaign, and how their attitudes toward political news evolved over the course of the year. Their thorough data-gathering efforts yielded a wealth of information on everything from what media people use, to how frequently they use it, to how sufficiently informed they feel. Their findings wiU not surprise readers famUiar with academic critiques of the press. Concerned voters, for instance, wiU seek political information through the mass media, although politics does not rank as high as local concerns as a topic of widespread interest. Respondents say they want more information on candidate issue positions and how the election wiU affect them, and less information on political strategy and personalities of the candidates. They distinguish between the professional conduct of reporters, which they largely decry, and the news product itself, about which they are somewhat more favorable. There is an aggregate tendency to find a liberal bias in the news, although most of this derives from Republicans who perceive favoritism toward Democrats and from conservative talk radio listeners. Despite these criticisms, media usage did not decline over the course of the election year, an observation Dautrich and Hartley find problematic. They argue that public dissatisfaction with the media's performance could force improvements in political reporting if it translated into a rejection of the news product. However, with viewers attuned to favorite news sources as a function of habit, the authors find little reason to believe that dissatisfied citizens wül vote with their feet and abandon mainstream media sources in large enough numbers to force those organizations to rethink their coverage. Besides, criticism of news coverage taüed off toward the end of the election year, presumably as respondents satisfied their basic information-gathering needs. If viewers are not abandoning the media as a result of coverage of a specific campaign , there is nonetheless evidence of changing media use over time, such as the marked decline in the network television audience over the past several years and the increase in "niche" news programming. The authors recognize these trends, but Book Reviews 121 are unable to evaluate them in the context of a one-year panel study. Consequently, they can only speculate about the possible impact of long-term changes in coverage. In the prominent case of network television, their data indicate the news media faüed to satisfy the need for inteUigent fare in 1996 among the loyal segment of the news audience that remained throughout the election year. One can only wonder about the reasons for the drop-off of one-time viewers who gave up on the networks long before the panel study began. What is certain is that their departure did not precipitate movement away from the personalized horserace news panel members found objectionable. So when the authors suggest that mainstream outlets experiment with issue-centered coverage in an effort to improve customer satisfaction, it is with the realization that they have not done so in the past despite a long-term decline in their audience and widespread criticism of their product. Apparently, producers and political reporters do not regard declining audiences as a vote against horserace-heavy, personality-centered election news. The authors may be correct in their assertion that substantive changes...