The Future of Media Politics

What is happening to the American news media system and its role in politics? The signs of change are everywhere. Newspapers, especially large urban dailies, are slowly spiraling downward—with declining revenues, declining circulation, and reductions in news staff. Even though Knight Ridder was one of the largest and oldest news chains in the United States, it has been dismantled, with its newspapers sold off to various suitors. Television network news divisions face similar trends: their budgets slashed, staffs cut, foreign bureaus closed, and viewership declining and skewing toward an ever-older demographic.¹ Young people in particular seem to have abandoned the news.² As a now famous Pew survey from 2004 shows, more young people aged 18–24 are getting their news from The Daily Show than from mainstream news outlets.³ This has happened at a time when political elites are more aggressive than ever in their management of the news, as in the Bush administration's view that the Washington press corps is "just another interest group," to be managed like any other.⁴ And it has happened at a time when, in the form of citizen journalism, citizens who have not entirely abandoned the news insist on producing it themselves.⁵

Any one of these developments is of interest. Together they imply that something basic about the news, and its relationship to politics, is changing. What that change portends—for reporters, politicians, and citizens—is a subject of great fascination these days (I know of at least six conferences held in the last two years alone on the issue). However one comes down on the issue, the discussion generally assumes that a fundamental change is under way.

Four recently published books invite us to reconsider this assumption. Written on diverse subjects—from blogging to media framing to the performative aspects of political rhetoric—they suggest a degree of stability in the midst of change: political elites still drive mainstream news coverage; mainstream media still exercise inordinate influence in setting and framing public agendas; aggregate public opinion is still largely shaped by the negotiations of newsworthiness undertaken by political and media elites. A fifth volume, The Media Were American—Jeremy Tunstall's revision of an earlier text, The Media Are American (1977)—argues that at least on the global front the American news media no longer loom so large. Even here, however, the evidence is not so clear. American news media may not dominate as they once did, but by most measures they still straddle the globe like no other national media system in the world. The news from these volumes is not all old, of course. All of the texts examine new trends; some, like Tunstall's, make broader arguments for fundamental change. However, together these books do more to confirm than dispel the standard account of media politics that has developed over the past three decades.

As I say, Tunstall's book is a revision of an earlier work. From the change in title (The Media Are to The Media Were), one might expect a dramatic alteration in emphasis from the former to the latter. In fact, however, the structure of the two texts is remarkably similar. In both works, Tunstall begins by documenting the extent of American dominance of international media exports. In the earlier text, that dominance was significant. Tunstall shows, for instance, that at mid-century two of the three largest international news agencies were American: the Associated Press and United Press (the other...