NEWS CONTENT AND DELIVERY CHANGES

News Content and Delivery Changes

News Content and Delivery Changes

Discovering whether the personal political biases of reporters shape news reports requires examining the content of news stories. For several decades, political communication scholars have been doing just that; they have been systematically scrutinizing news stories in an effort to uncover partisan bias. In these systematic examinations, researchers have primarily relied upon a research method known as “content analysis.” This method involves coding and counting segments of text, such as paragraphs in newspaper articles or news segments on broadcast news programs (Mifflin, 2006).

Until the last two decades of the 20th century, the content of news stories was dominated by several topics, among them governmental issues, disasters, crime, and sports. Undeniably, many news stories still originate from courts, city halls, capital buildings, and arenas. Such stories are often classified as “hard” news; they will be covered regularly by journalists because of their inherent values (Hough, 2008). Yet there has been an “explosion of subject matter” as Americans have begun demanding information on a wider range of topics, many relevant to the individual. Many stories about individual interests (entertainment and travel, new product introductions, and decorating, for example) are classified as “soft news”—that is, they do not necessarily conform to traditional news values, but they are still of interest to news consumers. This shift in content has greatly increased the opportunities for public relations practitioners to contribute news stories.

One of the largest topical areas evidencing this expanding content is health. Whether there is a new cancer treatment, an outbreak of the West Nile virus along the Gulf Coast, or a promising drug for preventing baldness, American news consumers want the information (Brooks, 2007). In the 21st century, the range of subject matter for news stories is greater than it has ever been. Each story must still conform to one or more of the basic criteria, but the way newsrooms look at content itself is far more broad than it was even 20 years ago. At times the distinction between “hard news” and “soft news” blurs on some of these topics (Mifflin, 2006).

Regardless of the specific subject, content of the news story is traditionally identified as a series of answers to six simple one-word questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how? Although there are several ways to structure the story, a news story can always be written on the basis of the answers to the following questions: Who is involved? What happened? When did it happen? Where did it happen? Whey did it happen? How did it happen?

In their attempts to code and classify news content as biased or unbiased, researchers have struggled to find a workable definition for media bias (i.e., a definition that is clear enough to use in coding content). What appears as biased reporting to one individual may very well appear to be a factual, objective news report to someone else. For example, consider a campaign involving two candidates (Candidate A and Candidate ...