Extensions Winter 2014

A Journal of the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center

Winter 2014

The Media in Our Partisan Era

The Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center Established in 1979 by the Oklahoma Regents for Higher Education and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center is a nonpartisan institution devoted to instruction and scholarship related to the United States Congress. The mission of the Center is defined broadly in terms of academic inquiry into the history, structure, process, personnel, and policies of the Congress, and the relationship between the Congress and other agencies and actors in the American political system. In the most general sense, the Center is concerned with the problems of modern representative democracy, as exemplified by the Congress.

In pursuit of this goal, the Carl Albert Center performs four principal functions. The first is the development of academic programs in congressional studies at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, which are sponsored in cooperation with the University of Oklahoma’s Department of Political Science. At the graduate level the Center offers a four-year, specialized fellowship program leading toward the doctoral degree. Each Fellow receives a fully financed program of study. At the undergraduate level the Center sponsors a research fellowship program designed to foster collaborative research between faculty and undergraduates.

Second, believing that professional research is the foundation upon which its academic programs rest, the Center promotes original research by faculty members and students into various aspects of politics and the Congress. The Center encourages

publication and provides its faculty and students with institutional and financial support to travel for research purposes and to present research findings at professional conferences.

The third function of the Center is the development of resource materials related to the Congress. The Center’s Congressional Archives, which are among the largest in the country, include the papers of more than fifty former members of Congress.

Such prominent Oklahomans as Speaker Albert, Dewey F. Bartlett, Page Belcher, Mickey Edwards, Glenn English, Robert S. Kerr, Sr., Fred Harris, Steve Largent, Dave McCurdy, Mike Monroney, Tom Steed, Mike Synar, and J. C. Watts have donated their papers to the Center along with such distinguished non-Oklahomans as Dick Armey, Helen Gahagan Douglas, and Carl Hatch.

Fourth, the Center actively strives to promote a wider understanding and appreciation of the Congress through various civic education programs. The Center sponsors conferences, speakers, television appearances, and the biennial Julian J. Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture in Representative Government. The Center also publishes Extensions, a journal which focuses on issues related to the Congress.

Taken together, these diverse aspects of the Carl Albert Center constitute a unique resource for scholarship and research related to the United States Congress.

Winter 2014

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A Journal of the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center

Winter 2014

Contents

Director and Curator Cindy Simon Rosenthal

Editor’s Introduction

Associate Director Glen S. Krutz Regents’ Professor Ronald M. Peters, Jr. Managing Editor and Assistant to the Director LaDonna Sullivan Assistant Director for N.E.W. Leadership Lauren Schueler Archivist Robert Lay Bailey Hoffner National Advisory Board David Albert Richard A. Baker David L. Boren John Brademas Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Joseph S. Foote Jess Hay Joel Jankowsky Thomas J. Kenan Dave McCurdy Frank H. Mackaman Thomas E. Mann Chuck Neal Michael L. Reed Catherine E. Rudder James C. Wright, Jr.

The Media in Our Partisan Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Ronald M. Peters, Jr.

Special Orders Niche News, Selective Exposure, and Political Partisanship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Natalie Stroud In an Age of Choice, News Media More Diverse, More Partisan, Less Influential . . . . . . . 11 Kevin Arceneaux Martin Johnson

‘It’s Just a Joke!’… Or is it?: The Promise and Pitfalls of Political Humor in an Age of Polarized Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Jody C. Baumgartner Jonathan S. Morris

ON THE COVER: Clockwise from top left are Fox News talk show host Sean Hannity and guest Sarah Palin; Comedy Central late night host Jon Stewart of The Daily Show; MSNBC talk show hosts Rachel Maddow, Larry O’Donnell, and Chris Matthews; and Comedy Central political satirist Stephen Colbert with Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly. (All images from Associated Press) Extensions is a copyrighted publication of the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center. It is published twice each year and distributed free of charge. To receive copies of Extensions, or to obtain permission to reprint, please contact the managing editor, LaDonna Sullivan, at (405) 325-6372 or e-mail to ljsullivan@ou.edu.

Extensions may also be viewed on the Center’s web site at www.ou.edu/ carlalbertcenter.

For the Record Tom Patterson Delivers Rothbaum Lecture . . . . 21 News from the Center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

LaDonna Sullivan

Hon. Tom Cole 4th District, Oklahoma ex officio

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Editor’s Introduction

The Media in Our Partisan Era Ronald M. Peters, Jr. One day in the early 1970s, when I was a graduate student at Indiana University, I dropped by to visit with one of my favorite professors, Charles McCall, to discuss with him an item that I had noticed in the news. The article described the nascent cable television industry and its potential for growth. It was possible, the article said, that cable television subscribers might one day be able to receive over 80 different channels! I recall saying to McCall that this seemed to me to open up a new horizon for democracy. Citizens would no longer be held hostage to the major television networks.

Multiple sources of information would proliferate.

And so it has happened. Our cable package offers hundreds of channels. With the advent of the Internet and the rise of social media, the fragmentation of the media environment has become for more extensive than anything that might have been imagined at the dawn of the cable television era. But the effect has been hardly as salubrious as I then imagined. The national networks have been marginalized. Great newspapers have been brought low.

Resources devoted to professional reporting have diminished.

Liberal and conservative ideologues reside in media bubbles.

Younger Americans now appear to get their news from social media. Our media environment now mirrors the fragmentation in our politics and culture. And, at the same time, our political system appears increasingly dysfunctional. Is there a connection?

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ur media environment now mirrors

the fragmentation in our politics and culture. And, at the same time, our political system appears increasingly

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dysfunctional. Is there a connection?

This issue of Extensions addresses the effects of the contemporary media environment on American politics, and in particular on the extent of partisan polarization that we all observe. Its occasion is the Carl Albert Center’s 2013 Julian J. Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture in Representative

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Government, offered last October by Thomas E. Patterson, Bradley Chair of Government in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Patterson’s lectures set the historical context of the current role of the media in our politics. Through most of the nineteenth century, the main sources of news were local newspapers, which were numerous and highly partisan. The advent of the telegraph in mid-century enabled rapid, cross-country communication.

Western Union was the result. In the early part of the twentieth century, new technologies enabled the transmission and printing of larger quantities of type, leading to the national distribution of news stories.

The Associated Press and United Press International were the results. Then, the radio developed as a national network, followed after World War II by television.

NBC, ABC, and CBS were the results.

What effects did these technological advances bring?

According to Patterson, a national market for news was created, superseding the domination of local newspapers. The major vendors in this national market became the primary conduits of information to the public. The concentration of media sources offered incentives for the wire services and major broadcast networks to cater to the broadest possible audience. The result was the emergence of “objective” news as the new norm of a professionalized journalism cadre. This norm was reinforced, if not created, by the business models of the major media outlets.

They needed to draw as many viewers as possible, and so sought to avoid alienating potential consumers of news. Partisanship was subordinated to information, and the attention of the nation was fixed upon a relatively small number of media outlets offering convergent news stories. Americans may not have agreed on matters of politics and policy, but they had the same information.

Is it coincidental that the trend toward objective news roughly parallels the emergence of a less polarized political system? Patterson cites a wide variety of research that documents a decline in partisanship extending from the first two decades until the last two decades of the twentieth century.

Partisanship began to re-emerge from this extended hiatus in the 1980s, and today has reached heights not seen since the close of the nineteenth century. He also provides evidence documenting the decline in partisan news outlets and the rise in independent and more neutral platforms. This trend began early in the twentieth century and continued until the rise of

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the more fragmented media market after the widespread advent of cable television in the 1980s. Is it merely a coincidence that the trends in partisan and media polarization appear to go hand-in-hand?

From the perspective of the consumer, it was a seller’s market nonetheless.

Smaller local newspapers relied on the wire service articles; thus, readers in different places received the same news.

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s it coincidental that the trend toward objective news

roughly parallels the emergence of a less polarized political system?

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This is the core question that Patterson seeks to answer. There appear to be three possible answers. Assuming a causal relationship, then either the rise on partisan polarization drives polarization in the media, or the rise in a more partisan media drives partisan polarization. But the relationship may be more complicated, giving rise to a third possibility. The trends in partisan and media polarization may have discrete causes, but reinforcing effects. This is Patterson’s conclusion. He titled his lectures “Fueling the Fire,” reflecting his theory that the transformation in the media environment has exacerbated other trends that have led to a more polarized environment today.

How has this occurred? The factors that shaped the media environment of the mid-twentieth century were technological and economic rather than political. Technology created national media markets that became dominated by major organizations: the major broadcast networks, the wire services, and the major metropolitan newspapers.

The audience for these companies was national in scope, and there was a limited number of them. To capture market share, the companies sought to attract (or at least not repel) potential consumers of news.

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Local network affiliates received their feeds from the parent broadcasting companies. Readers and viewers had little choice in sources of information.

There was a national audience for the major broadcast networks, and Americans shared the experience of watching Walter Cronkite or Huntley/ Brinkley over dinner.

Today, Patterson argued, we have a buyer’s market for information. This began with the rise of cable television (that had so impressed me) and is now extended in the digital age and the rise of social media. Consumers can now choose their sources of information, and those who are not interested in the news (or are turned off by what they learn) have entertainment alternatives to amuse them. These alternatives threaten market share for the major media companies. Their response is to either cater to particular consumers (giving rise to slanted programing) or to leaven the news with entertainment values (infotainment). These trends have undermined the ethics of professional journalism that had arisen during the twentieth century.

The three articles that appear in this issue of Extensions offer evidence bearing upon Patterson’s thesis. In “Niche News, Selective Exposure, and Political

Partisanship,” Nathalie Stroud reports research that examines the niche news market on television and on the Internet.

Her results add further confirmation that people tend to select into news and information sources that confirm their political biases. The diversity in options made available by cable and satellite television is dwarfed by the cornucopia of niches found on line in the form of media web sites, blogs, and social media.

Within this avalanche of information, consumers are able to find sources congenial to their political views. Does this cause polarization? Stroud suggests that it does. She relies on a range of research findings that report increased levels of partisanship among consumers of congenial, as opposed to conflicting, sources of news. The cornerstone of this research is that people self-select into programming that confirms their underlying political predispositions. So in this sense, selective exposure does not cause the initial partisan tendency; it assumes it. But the evidence seems strong that nesting in a congenial information environment reinforces the underlying dispositions and hence exacerbates partisanship. It causes partisans to become more stubbornly partisan.

In “In an Age of Choice, News Media More Diverse, More Partisan, Less Influential,” Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson assess the impact of the more fragmented media environment. Accepting the greater range of choice available to consumers and the increasing partisanship, what difference do these trends make? In Patterson’s buyer’s market, what will consumers choose to buy? And how might their choices affect their political views? To answer these questions, Arceneaux and Johnson constructed a series of interesting experiments, in which participants were allowed to surf among a set of viewing options that included partisan programs on both sides

he factors that shaped the media environment of the mid-twentieth century were

technological and economic rather than political.

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of the political spectrum, and a set of non-political entertainment programs.

They found that viewers who dwelled on either likeminded or oppositional programming had their political views reinforced, whereas viewers who chose entertainment programming found their political views mitigated. It would thus appear that, even though partisan news programming has become more partisan, the availability of entertainment alternatives reduces the polarizing potential. The partisan news is buried beneath a mountain of reality television, and tends to reach only those viewers whose partisan views are essentially fixed.

Arceneaux’s and Johnson’s experimental finding that the availability of entertainment programming blunts the effects of partisan programming suggests an interesting question: what is the effect of entertainment programming that focuses explicitly on politics? Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan Morris have investigated this question. In their article “‘It’s Just a Joke!’… Or is it?: The Promise and Pitfalls of Political Humor in an Age of Polarized Politics,” they consider the role of television comedians in our political discourse. Given Arceneaux’s and Johnson’s finding that laboratory participants opted for entertainment in order to avoid partisan confrontation, one might think that the late-night comedians might leaven politics with the saving grace of good humor.

Baumgartner and Morris find evidence to support this hypothesis, but the story they tell is more complicated.

The comedians, after all, work for major corporations whose primary interest is in making money. Media entities do not want to lose market share; they cannot afford to alienate viewers. Therefore, most late night shows, including Saturday Night Live and the week-night variety shows, are equal opportunity mockers of the political establishment. Parody gets laughs, and politicians in general are fair game. What self-respecting comedian could resist Anthony Weiner or Rob Ford? If there is bias in these programs, Baumgartner and Morris argue, it aims at incumbents, especially U.S presidents, due to their prominence rather than their political affiliation.

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ost late night shows, including Saturday Night Live

and the week-night variety shows, are equal opportunity mockers of the political establishment.

So much for Leno, Letterman, Kimmel, and the SNL cast. But what about those paragons of comedy, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert? While both Stewart and Colbert will seize the opportunity to parody politicians of any stripe in order to get a laugh, Stewart’s humor is identifiably liberal. Colbert, of course, parodies a Bill O’Reilly-like conservative. The data suggest that Stewart’s humor reinforces his mostly left-leaning audience, having a political effect absent on Leno and Letterman.

Perhaps surprisingly, Colbert appears to get a rise on the right. Conservatives are more attracted to The Colbert Report in spite of the fact that Colbert’s politics are known to be liberal and his caricature of O’Reilly an evident parody.

Conservatives appear to find their biases confirmed even under parody. If true, this seems quite interesting. Partisan psychology may be so deeply rooted that it pushes past the context to settle on the overt message, however sardonically it may be intended.

In his initial lecture, Tom Patterson cited experimental results that demonstrate that partisanship is today a more powerful shaper of attitudes than either race or gender. The patterns of partisanship reflected in public opinion surveys and in congressional voting behavior reflect or confirm this finding. It is reasonable to suppose that co-partisans are likely to seek each other out, and there is evidence to confirm that even residential living patterns are being shaped by partisan proclivities.

The emergence of the fragmented media environment in the digital age obviously plays to this tendency. The effect is not only to reinforce partisan dispositions, but to distort reality.

Is there a way out? It is important to keep in mind, as Patterson noted, that the niche news markets are precisely that: niches. Fox News is the most profitable of the cable news networks, but its audience is still quite small when

”

compared to the population of the country or the audiences attracted by entertainment programming. American Idol’s audience dwarfs that of The O’Reilly Report. MSNBC’s audience is smaller than Fox. Talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh has a much larger audience than any of the cable news shows, but even he reaches only a small percentage of the population. So it is not as if these more partisan news outlets are very effective in reaching a large audience, or proselytizing voters. They play to the base.

But in today’s politics, the base matters, and it may be all that matters.

Patterson links the patterns of party polarization, the media environment, and the structure of our politics in which the strongest partisans exert influence disproportionate to their numbers. Most Americans do not dwell in the partisan cocoons or spend their time watching cable news or talk shows. If they watch television at all, they seek entertainment and an escape from the partisan wars that rage within the relatively narrow confines of news and talk programming.

The solution to our problems then, if there is one, may reside in the restructuring of our politics to shift the balance of force toward the center, rather than to seek to reform the battle that rages on at the extremes.

The three-part Rothbaum Lecture

by Thomas E. Patterson can be downloaded from the Internet, free of charge, at https://itunes.apple.com/ us/podcast/2013-routhbaum-lectureseries/id464334773.

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Niche News, Selective Exposure, and Political Partisanship Natalie Stroud University of Texas

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s the federal government shut down in October 2013, citizens got a front row seat to partisan bickering in Congress as Republicans and Democrats traded barbs about who was to blame and how to end the stalemate. Partisan disagreement didn’t stop in the halls of Congress, however. It was transmitted to citizens across the country via the media. Partisan media made the case to their loyal audiences that the shutdown illustrated why those across the political aisle made a terrible call.

As an example, let me offer a brief description of how partisan news outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC talked about the shutdown.

On Fox News host Sean Hannity’s blog, his assessments were bleak.

“Not much has been done in the way of work by Democrats,” he wrote. “House Republicans have continued to pass a series of bills to fund various parts of the government such as furloughed federal workers, FEMA and WIC, but Democrats in the Senate haven’t taken up a vote since last Tuesday.” He continued, making it clear that the media are to blame, “Yet the media continues to report this exactly as the administration desires: This is the Republican or ‘Tea Party shutdown.’”

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s blog, however, presented a completely different take on the events. The blog critiqued Republicans, particularly Representative Scott Garrett (R., N.J.).

Garrett, a blog reader would have learned, was “prepared to crash the economy on purpose, even if Democrats make enormous concessions in exchange for nothing.” Republican leaders expressed “faux outrage over President Obama’s refusal to discuss how big a ransom he’ll pay Republicans.” And “unhinged GOP lawmakers haven’t ‘fought so hard’ for anything except the value of their own temper tantrum – which really isn’t worth much of anything outside their fever swamp.” The differences could not be more stark.

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Natalie Jomini Stroud is an associate professor of communication studies and the assistant director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life at the University of Texas at Austin.

Her recent book, Niche News: The Politics of News Choice (Oxford University Press) received the International Communication Association’s 2012 Outstanding Book Award.

Stroud directs the grant-funded Engaging News Project, which examines commercially viable and democratically beneficial ways of improving online news coverage.

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Selective Exposure Ample data suggest that people are drawn to information matching what they believe. In Niche News, I review the cross-platform evidence that people are more likely to report using news programs and outlets that are consistent with their political beliefs than to report using news outlets that express divergent political perspectives.

The National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES) asked respondents to

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The media is the primary source for citizens to learn about what transpires in the political arena. Citizens who tuned to partisan coverage would have very different impressions of the shutdown. Slanted information can affect what citizens think and how they behave. Anecdotal evidence suggests that citizens were motivated by the shutdown to write letters to the editor, to comment on online articles, to give Congress record low ratings when responding to polls, and to tweet their dismay. Citizen reaction, while certainly questioning the ability of Congress to do business at large, also echoed the partisan polarization evident in Congress. One side shouldered the majority of the blame for the shutdown, but who it was depended on who offered the critique. Was it #GOPshutdown or #HarryReidShutdown, for instance?

How can we make sense of these divergent political perspectives? In the following sections, I discuss the concept of selective exposure – the selection of partisan media content matching one’s beliefs and the avoidance of content disagreeing with one’s beliefs.

Democrats habitually turning to MSNBC and Republicans to Fox News for their news, for example, illustrate a pattern of selective exposure. In addition to discussing evidence that selective exposure does take place, I also describe why it occurs, its democratic consequences, and some ideas about counter-acting troubling consequences of the behavior. Although I outline the argument briefly below, far more details can be found in my book Niche News: The Politics of News Choice.1 The final section covers some more recent research on countering partisan bias in reasoning.

The Rush Limbaugh Show, featuring conservative political commentary by Rush Limbaugh, is regarded by many as the most influential talk-radio program in the United States. report which newspapers they read, the radio programs to which they listened, their most watched cable news network, and the Internet sites that they accessed. I categorized these newspapers, radio programs, cable news networks, and Internet sites into liberal and conservative categories on the basis of their news content, drawing heavily from prior research, content analyses, and how programs selfcategorized as liberal or conservative.

Across these various media forms, those reporting use of liberal-leaning media were more likely to identify as liberals and Democrats than as conservatives and Republicans, and vice versa for conservative-leaning media. Other measures of selective exposure add more evidence. Observational studies where people’s media choices are observed in more natural settings also provide evidence of selective exposure.

In one study, participants’ magazine choices were unobtrusively observed in a waiting room. The participants’ political identities were related to which magazines they selected.

Now this is not to say that people always avoid information that runs counter to their beliefs; this is not what selective exposure suggests. As I argue in Niche News, if selective exposure meant that people only encounter likeminded information, the concept would be a straw man because nearly everyone, at one point or another, encounters discrepant information.

Rather, selective exposure suggests that people display a preference for congenial over contradictory messages. With this clarification, Nielsen data also can be brought to bear to analyze whether people look for likeminded information.

The data are supportive. First, although those watching CNN/MSNBC also tend to watch Fox News from time to time, many display a preference by watching one outlet more than the other. Second, television ratings from the national party conventions during 2012 are consistent with the idea of selective exposure.

MSNBC was the ratings winner during the Democratic National Convention while Fox News bested the other news outlets during the Republican National

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he evidence to date strongly suggests that people do, in fact, prefer media that match

their political identities.

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Convention. The data are at best secondrate, however, as Nielsen does not keep track of viewers’ political or partisan beliefs. Further, the data are somewhat ambiguous. How much time should count as a viewer? One minute? Six? These decisions affect assessments of how often selective exposure occurs, a topic to which I turn next.

Some questions have arisen about how frequently selective exposure occurs – is this the behavior of a tiny segment of the population, or a tendency of most Americans? It’s a tricky question to answer because selective exposure is not constant. News consumption varies over time, with some events and moments inspiring far more news use than others. Similarly, selective exposure patterns vary over time. As the 2004 election approached, for instance, more Democrats and liberals reported watching CNN and MSNBC, and more Republicans and conservatives reported watching Fox News.2 Further, it is difficult to get a handle on how much

date strongly suggests that people do, in fact, prefer media that match their political identities.

Causes of Selective Exposure Why would people tend to use media matching their partisan identities and avoid contradictory information?

Numerous possibilities have been proposed, but one that I find quite compelling has to do with how we detect media biases. Research on the hostile media phenomenon proposes that neutral media is seen as having a hostile bias by partisans on both sides of an issue. The original study, conducted by Vallone, Ross, and Lepper, evaluated what proArab and pro-Israeli students thought about media coverage of the 1982 Beirut massacre.3 The results showed that both the pro-Arab and the pro-Israeli students detected a bias in the coverage, but they disagreed over the nature of the bias.

Pro-Arab viewers detected a bias that favored the Israeli perspective on the

Table 1. Partisan Media Use by Political Leanings Conservative Republican

Liberal Democrat

Used at least 1 conservative media source

64%

26%

Used at least 1 liberal media source

43%

76%

Source of data: Stroud, 2008

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n general, partisans

exposure people have to partisan media across the many different genres of news – from newspapers to cable news to radio programming to Internet exposure. Based on self-report data from the 2004 NAES, I found a consistent selective exposure pattern at the aggregate level; the results are shown in Table 1.

Although it is not possible to give an estimate of the amount of selective exposure that would hold across various political circumstances, the evidence to

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people make sense of bias when they encounter media coverage that actually has a political slant.4 In general, partisans differ in their assessments of bias with both sides quick to detect biases that favor the opposition and less likely to evaluate biases in their favor. For some partisan media, the political opposition will detect a bias, but those sharing the slant of the media outlet will find the coverage to be trustworthy, unbiased, and objective. This provides a potential explanation for partisan selective exposure. Those sharing the slant of the media see far less bias, and may even see a neutral media product, while those opposed to the media’s perspective detect appreciable bias. Given extensive news options in today’s media environment, citizens must choose what warrants their attention. If citizens make their news media selections on the basis of finding the highest quality news outlet, with the least biased content, and the most trustworthy information, they may end up selecting likeminded news. They won’t make the choice because they sought likeminded news; instead, they will make the choice because likeminded news seemed unbiased compared to the alternatives.

In a forthcoming study, my co-authors and I analyze how people perceive bias

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massacre. Pro-Israeli viewers detected an anti-Israeli bias present in the coverage.

Both sides saw a hostile bias in putatively neutral media coverage.

This early study of mainstream news coverage may seem, at first blush, to offer little insight into why people would use partisan media. After all, partisan media do have a political bias, while the coverage used by Vallone, Ross, and Lepper arguably did not. The relative hostile media phenomenon captures how

differ in their assessments of bias with both sides quick to detect biases that favor the opposition and less likely to evaluate biases in their favor.

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in different media outlets.5 Consistent with the explanation offered here, citizens found great variability in the biases of media outlets and programs matching their partisan identities.

Outlets and programs articulating a different political bias, however, were seen as strikingly uniform in their bias.

To liberals and Democrats, there are important differences in the partisan biases of outlets like MSNBC, National Public Radio, and the New York Times.

To conservatives and Republicans, there are far fewer differences in the biases of these left-leaning outlets. Instead, conservatives and Republicans find more differences in the political biases of outlets like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the Wall Street Journal than do liberals and Democrats. This study supports the idea that partisans view media biases very differently, and that the differences hold for partisans on both sides of the political spectrum.

persuasive political arguments. Just as other members of a group can provide us with additional arguments to support our political perspective, so too can the media. The second explanation for polarization in groups is that people want to be perceived well by their fellow group members. Although there isn’t a direct correlate when discussing media consumption, several intriguing possibilities present themselves. Perhaps those using partisan media also have more homogeneous social networks, and are expected to be more versed in arguments for a particular partisan point of view. To the extent that this occurs, groups may motivate partisan media use. As another explanation, people may develop parasocial relationships with partisan media hosts and react to them in ways resembling their polarized reactions in face-to-face contexts.

Yet another explanation may be that people believe that partisan media have

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erhaps those using partisan media also have more

homogeneous social networks, and are expected to be more versed in arguments for a particular partisan point-of-view.

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Consequences of Selective Exposure The consequences of the selection of likeminded political information are multiple. In this brief essay, I review only a few key findings, but note that research on the consequences is ongoing.

Selective exposure gives rise to political polarization. The basic idea, that polarization can result from exposure to viewpoints matching one’s own, first was investigated in scholarship demonstrating the polarizing effects of homogeneous groups of citizens conversing about politics. Two reasons were proposed for the polarizing effects of groups, each of which can be translated to what happens when we use likeminded media. The first reason is that we polarize more when we increase our repertoire of

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an effect on other people watching the media and may adjust their own beliefs and actions to take into account their perception of what they believe others will do based on exposure to partisan media. Regardless of the precise mechanism, which requires more research, there are strong theoretical reasons to anticipate that partisan media have a polarizing effect.

The empirical evidence is supportive.

Both survey-based and experimental work illustrate a relationship between using likeminded media and developing more polarized attitudes toward politics.

Using the NAES panel data and time series data, I found evidence that increases in the consumption of partisan media related to increases in polarized political attitudes.6 Those using media matching what they believe become

more favorable toward their own political perspective and less favorable toward the other point of view. As before, these survey data are cross-platform, including use of newspaper, radio, cable news, and Internet use.

Jamieson and Cappella argue in their book Echo Chamber that partisan media attract likeminded audiences and then rhetorically reinforce people’s beliefs – and their propensity to keep using the same source.7 Their empirical results confirm that partisan media affect citizens’ beliefs and attitudes.

In a series of recent experiments performed by Matt Levendusky, citizens were exposed to likeminded media and then their policy attitudes were assessed afterward. He too found that likeminded partisan media had polarizing effects.8 One critique of experimental work is that it forces people to watch programming that they wouldn’t choose outside of the confines of the study.

Levendusky included a question where he asked citizens which sort of programming they would choose if they had a choice.

Interestingly, the polarizing effects of likeminded media were even stronger among those who would have chosen likeminded media.

Selective exposure also is connected to fragmenting beliefs about the world.

When partisan media highlight different issues as important, those using left- and right-leaning media also begin to develop different impressions of which issues are most important.9 This is consistent with agenda-setting research, whereby those issues highlighted most frequently in the media become the issues named by the public as most important. In 2004, for instance, conservative-leaning outlets covered terrorism as a more important issue than Iraq while left-leaning outlets covered Iraq as a more important issue than terrorism. Consistent with these patterns of coverage, citizens viewing these outlets then developed divergent impressions of whether Iraq or terrorism was more pressing. Differences across outlets in their coverage of the Iraq War also connected with citizens’ beliefs about whether Iraq was progressing well or poorly in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election.10 Overall, evidence is suggestive that partisan

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artisan media

messages are engaging and can enhance partisans’ motivation and ability to engage with politics.

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Countering Selective Exposure One of the most common suggestions for countering some of the detrimental consequences of selective exposure, such as political polarization and

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media contribute to the fragmentation of political beliefs.

Finally, selective exposure is related to political participation.

Several studies suggest that the use of likeminded partisan media corresponds with heightened levels of political participation, including voter turnout and other participatory acts, such as volunteering for a political candidate.11 Partisan media messages are engaging and can enhance partisans’ motivation and ability to engage with politics.

From a motivational perspective, media messages arguing that one point of view is accurate and the other wholly misguided can inspire people to take action. Participation seems a requirement to prevent the misleading claims of the other side from further ruining the country. From an ability perspective, partisan media can make it easy to get involved by providing links to donate money, for instance, or by giving people guidance on what to do in order to get involved.

Overall, partisan selective exposure can be consequential in terms of people’s political attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

Although we may welcome increased political participation, it comes at the cost of polarization and fragmentation.

As the latter two consequences do not square with many conceptions of an ideal democratic citizenry, efforts have begun to evaluate ways to counteract these effects.

Rachel Maddow, left, is host of The Rachel Maddow Show, a nightly news commentary that was launched on MSNBC in 2008. Lawrence O’Donnell, former chief of staff on the Senate Finance Committee, now hosts The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, a weeknight political opinion and news program on MSNBC. intolerance for views unlike one’s own, is to encourage people to look at information that runs contrary to their beliefs. If only Fox News viewers would spend some time with Rachel Maddow and MSNBC viewers would tune in to hear what Bill O’Reilly has to say. Although exposure to different viewpoints is a cornerstone of many conceptions of deliberative democracy, it’s not clear that mere exposure would have the desired effect of reducing polarization and increasing appreciation for different political perspectives. Those looking at information contradicting their beliefs may display precisely the opposite effect. Instead of moderating their opinions and finding the other side’s views to be reasonable and worthy of some consideration, partisans exposed to counter-attitudinal media sometimes become even more polarized in the direction of their original belief.12 Exposure to the other side, therefore, is not enough. Rather, we have to understand the messages and orientations required to encourage charitable engagement with diverse perspectives.

From a content perspective, a recent study analyzed whether comedic news portrayals affected selective exposure.13 Previous work suggested that, in general,

people avoid counter-arguing comedic content. One reason why this may take place is because people don’t want to reduce their enjoyment of a comedic portrayal by counter-arguing. If people are less likely to counter-argue comedic content once exposed, perhaps they also are less likely to avoid counter-attitudinal comedic content when deciding what content to view. We tested this out experimentally by asking people to browse either a comedic website or a hard news website. Unfortunately, the results failed to substantiate our suspicions. If anything, comedic news encouraged less exposure to counter-attitudinal political viewpoints in comparison to hard news.

Although this effort was unsuccessful in countering partisan selective exposure, it was successful in demonstrating that selective exposure patterns do vary on the basis of different media content.

From an orientation perspective, citizen motivations can influence their willingness to engage with different political viewpoints and how they process divergent political perspectives.

Emotional responses, such as anxiety, can encourage exposure to diverse political viewpoints.14 Motivational states, such as a motivation to be accurate in one’s judgments, also can

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prompt more balanced exposure to political information in comparison to a directional motivation, which prompts citizens to seek and process information in ways that support their preconceptions.15 Research on selfaffirmation finds that when people feel a strong sense of self-worth and pride about treasured values, they are more likely to engage with different views and to interpret others’ perspectives charitably, even with respect to truly controversial political topics such as abortion.16 Work on how orientations can affect the processing of discrepant political views is only beginning, and requires considerably more research attention.

Related to an orientation perspective is the question of whether education can assist with overcoming selective exposure. Caution is warranted in this pursuit, however, given several troubling findings. First, increasing general political education, such as the information one may gain from a government course, may not have the desired effect. Several studies demonstrate that political knowledge positively correlates with more, rather than less, selective exposure and biased processing.17 The politically knowledgeable are more likely to see hostile biases in the media and to report using likeminded media sources. Second, instructions on processing bias in the media require careful thought. One tenet of critical thinking and media literacy is to be on the lookout for signs of bias. Perhaps reminding people to look for signs of bias in the media would lead Democrats and Republicans to come closer in their bias assessments.

I designed a study where some were instructed to look for bias in a news article and others were not. There was little difference between the groups; if anything, reminding people to look for signs of bias amplified the different impressions of bias between Democrats and Republicans. These findings illustrate that the educational puzzle to encouraging diverse exposure and charitable interpretations of discrepant views is not as easy as it may seem.

Providing grade school children with better education in how to debate and take a stand may be a more promising starting point.

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Conclusion This essay hopefully has provided some context for the role of partisan media in the contemporary United States. It is interesting to recall that the contemporary media environment is nothing new for our country. Partisan media were the norm in the early days of the nation. Today, they have resurged.

And citizens are making partisan media choices. According to the Pew Research Center, cable news was the number one source named by survey respondents as a source of campaign information in the 2012 election. Considering that the top cable news outlets have partisan reputations, this trend should raise eyebrows. Evidence suggests that not only are people drawn to likeminded partisan outlets, but that it also has important democratic consequences. The challenge now is to find productive ways of addressing the challenges posed by patterns of partisan media consumption.

Notes 1. Nathalie J. Stroud, Niche News: The Politics of News Choice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

2. Nathalie J. Stroud, “Media Use and Political Predispositions: Revisiting the Concept of Selective Exposure,” Political Behavior 30 (2008): 341-366.

3. Robert P. Vallone, Lee Ross, and Mark R. Lepper, “The Hostile Media Phenomenon: Biased Perception and Perceptions of Media Bias in Coverage of the Beirut Massacre,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49 (1985): 577-585.

4. Lauren Feldman, “Partisan Differences in Opinionated News Perceptions: A Test of the Hostile Media Effect,” Political Behavior 33 (2011): 407-432.

5. Nathalie J. Stroud, Ashley Muddiman, and J. K. Lee, “Seeing Media as Out-group Members: An Evaluation of Bias Perceptions,” Journal of Communication (forthcoming).

6. Nathalie J. Stroud, “Polarization and Partisan Selective Exposure,” Journal of Communication 60 (Sept. 2010): 556-576.

7. Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative

Media Establishment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

8. Matthew Levendusky, How Partisan Media Polarize America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

9. Nathalie J. Stroud, 2011.

10. Ashley Muddiman, Nathalie J. Stroud, and M. McCombs, “News Media Fragmentation, Attribute Agenda Setting, and Political Beliefs about Iraq,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (forthcoming).

11. Susanna Dilliplane, “All the News You Want to Hear: The Impact of Partisan News Exposure on Political Participation,” Public Opinion Quarterly 75 (2011): 287-316. Also see Stroud, 2011.

12. Charles S. Taber and Milton Lodge, “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs,” American Journal of Political Science 50 (July 2006): 755-769.

13. Nathalie J. Stroud and Ashley Muddiman, “Selective Exposure, Tolerance, and Comedic News,” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 25 (2013): 271-290.

14. Michael MacKuen, Jennifer Wolak, Luke Keele, and George E. Marcus, “Civic Engagements: Resolute Partisanship or Reflective Deliberation,” American Journal of Political Science 54 (April 2010): 440–458.

15. Young Mie Kim, “How Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations Interact in Selectivity: Investigating the Moderating Effects of Situational Information Processing Goals in Issue Publics’ Web Behavior.” Communication Research 34 (April 2007): 185-211.

16. Geoffrey L. Cohen, David K. Sherman, Anthony Bastardi, Lillian Hsu, Michelle McGoey, and Lee Ross, “Bridging the Partisan Divide: Self-affirmation Reduces Ideological Closed-mindedness and Inflexibility in Negotiation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 93 (Sept.

2007): 415-430.

17. See Stroud, 2011; Feldman, 2011; and Taber and Lodge, 2006.

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In an Age of Choice, News Media More Diverse, More Partisan, Less Influential Kevin Arceneaux, Temple University Martin Johnson, University of California, Riverside

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he government shutdown during October 2013 illustrated well the fragmented nature of contemporary political news coverage. Different television news networks seemed to cover the story in quite different ways.

Mainstream broadcast newscasts like the CBS Evening News gravitated toward stories about high-level political conflict among Democrats led by President Barack Obama and Republicans led by House Speaker John Boehner. Coverage on MSNBC often focused on the effects of stalling specific social programs as well as the rift between Boehner and the more conservative members of his majority caucus in the House.

Fox News, on the other hand, minimized the story, referring to it as a “partial” shutdown, or even avoided the term altogether to frame the story as budget negotiations. Humorists like Jon Stewart made fun of it all, with particular criticism directed at Fox News.

News coverage of the federal government shutdown is just a recent example. Across a variety of issues and events – climate change, immigration, health care, electoral campaigns – both casual observers and careful social scientists identify significant differences in the coverage offered by mainstream and partisan news sources.1

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Kevin Arceneaux (left) is an associate professor of political science and director of the Behavioral Foundations Lab at Temple University.

His research focuses on political attitude formation, particularly the interaction between political messages and people’s political predispositions.

Arceneaux’s work appears in influential journals, including American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Communication, Political Psychology, and Sociological Methods Research. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, CIRCLE, and the JEHT Foundation. In 2012, he was the recipient of the Emerging Scholar Award for the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior section of the American Political Science Association.

Martin Johnson (right) is a professor of political science and the director of the Media & Communication Research Lab at the University of California, Riverside. His research has also appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, and Political Communication, among other journals. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation. Johnson and Arceneaux received the 2011 Paul Lazarfeld Award from the Political Communication Section of the American Political Science Association and the 2011 Pi Sigma Alpha award from the Southwestern Political Science Association.

Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson are co-authors of a new book, Changing Minds or Changing Channels? Partisan News in an Age of Choice (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

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Most people push this to a seemingly logical conclusion: the fragmented news environment is tearing the country apart, deepening ideological divisions among voters, and rendering impossible the kind of common conversation necessary to address the most important concerns facing the nation. Further, many thoughtful observers, including President Obama, suggest that the answer lies in paying attention to political media that takes a different perspective from one’s own ideological commitments. Conservatives should watch MSNBC, for instance, and liberals should switch to Fox News. By hearing the other side, partisan extremists might be brought together, so the story goes.

Our research suggests that the relationships among the public, their elected representatives, and the increasingly fragmented mass media is not that simple. In our recent book, Changing Minds or Changing Channels?

Partisan News in an Age of Choice (University of Chicago Press, 2013), we report the results of several years’ worth of laboratory-based experiments that demonstrate partisan news is not nearly as influential as many observers expect it to be.

Channels and Choices Abound Partisan news has a diminished persuasive punch because the folks who choose to watch Fox News start out so very different politically from those who choose to watch MSNBC. It is not just that Fox News viewers tend to be more conservative and MSNBC viewers more liberal than your average voter; it is that cable news viewers care more about politics and, above all, see politics through their partisan lens. In this way, the audiences for Fox News and MSNBC are strikingly similar.

Both are dramatically different from the people who just want to be entertained and watch a reality show instead of any kind of news.

Moreover, we cannot fully understand the implications of partisan news media without considering their place in the increasingly diverse set of entertainment options available on television. Since the introduction of cable television in the late 1940s, the technology used to provide subscription television

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steadily improved – from the cable lines themselves to increasingly sophisticated home tuning devices – expanding the feasible number of channels cable providers could transmit.

But, technology is only part of the story. After all, what good are channels with no content for viewers to see?

The number of programming options on full-fledged channels provided by

production, and consumer demand, the average number of channels in U.S. households has grown from 3 in the mid1960s to more than 130 channels by the end of 2010. As the figure below shows, television channels expanded at a moreor-less exponential rate during the first decade of the millennium.

These changes have brought a variety of news options, including partisan

Figure 1 Growth in Channels per Household

Source: Reprinted Figure 2.2 in Arceneaux and Johnson (2013, 30).

cable systems did not take off until the mid-1990s, when federal legislation required cable providers to compensate broadcasters for retransmitting their signals.2 Rather than seek monetary payment for retransmission, most broadcasting companies chose to exploit the opportunity to create new cable channels they would own. For example, Fox Broadcasting Corporation negotiated the launch of the fX channel in 1994.

NBC created a short-lived news network, America’s Talking. Today, many cable channels are owned by the major broadcast networks or their corporate parents. ABC and ESPN are owned by The Walt Disney Company; the CBS Corporation owns Showtime Networks; Fox Entertainment Group owns regional sports networks in addition to its eponymous news channel; NBCUniversal owns Bravo as well as MSNBC. This represents a fraction of the horizontal integration of cable television.

Between the improved technology, regulatory changes, consolidated media

ones like the Fox News Channel, which joined cable lineups in the late 1990s, and MSNBC, which originally showcased a breadth of political perspectives including a conservative legal correspondent named Ann Coulter as well as Lawrence O’Donnell, a liberal news analyst fresh from Capitol Hill.

Of course in the mid-2000s, particularly in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, MSNBC took a decidedly left turn.

As important as these changes are, they often distract political communication researchers from the increased availability of entertainment options. After all, fX preceded Fox News by a few years. In fact, the presence of so many fascinating diversions on cable – stories of swamp people, residents of the Jersey shore, and the tragic Stark family of Westeros, to name a few – pulls viewers away from the news, partisan or otherwise.

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artisan news shows cannot directly influence the

vast majority of Americans who do not watch them.

Choice Blunts the Effects of Partisan Media The expansion of choices limits and blunts the effects of partisan news media in two important ways. First, partisan news shows cannot directly influence the vast majority of Americans who do not watch them. Second, people must actively choose to watch partisan news programming and the sort of persons who want to watch caustic partisan shows not only possess strong opinions on politics already, but are also less likely to be swayed by the content they view on these shows.

The central premise underlying our research is the notion that people are not blank slates, at least not by the time they are adult consumers of information. When a viewer picks up a remote control, she has preferences for what she wants to watch and political views already formed. Her political views might have a partisan bent, but that does not mean she relishes televised partisan combat. In fact, she may not even care much about politics beyond a handful of issues and high-profile election campaigns. When she turns on the television and starts to look for something to watch, she acts on at least two motivations: her enjoyment of news versus entertainment, and her desire to express and experience partisanship.

People who want to watch news, especially those who want to watch partisan news, already have strong political opinions.3 They are likely already to be regular consumers of political information. Hotel lobbies and the homes of in-laws notwithstanding, we anticipate that few people accidentally or unintentionally find themselves watching Fox News or MSNBC. They choose to watch it as a function of their already formed sense of political engagement and partisanship.

People who prefer to avoid news in favor of entertainment programming are likely to have less well-formed political

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orientations. They might have expertlevel knowledge of duck hunting or home improvement techniques, but they are more likely to be political novices.

By allowing politically disengaged television viewers to screen out news and the politically engaged to sort into ideological niches, the fragmented media environment diminishes the overall influence of news media. For those who do choose to watch partisan news, it mostly becomes preaching to the choir.

Sean Hannity and Lawrence O’Donnell are not so much changing minds, as they are attracting audiences of partisans who already have strong opinions.

People with underdeveloped political views – the ones whom partisan news shows might persuade – are watching something curious on The Food Network or Animal Planet.

So, at best, partisan news shows have an unrealized potential for massive influence on the mass public. But, even that is an overstatement. People who lack a keen sense of politics, which by many accounts is most Americans, still possess bedrock values that guide how they form political attitudes and some inkling of partisan allegiance.4 They might not be as politically sophisticated and hidebound as most partisan news junkies, but they have enough presence of mind to know what they like and dislike. Partisan news shows make it easy, to boot. Likeminded news shows spoonfeed congenial “facts,” while oppositional news shows (in the process of serving up their own set of congenial facts) make outlandish claims, clearly hostile to the other side.

As such, we suspect that, while likeminded news shows have the potential to persuade entertainment seekers, oppositional news shows should have the opposite effect. We are not the first to reach this conclusion either. At the advent of radio, political observers fretted about propaganda duping an easily swayed population.5 Yet early political communication researchers

found little evidence of massive media effects.6 Maybe Abraham Lincoln was on to something: notwithstanding the existence of a few perennially gullible souls, “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Concerns about an easily persuaded populace are based on the assumption that people are powerless to resist the arguments they encounter in the mass media. We certainly would not argue that the average American is a paragon of political sophistication, but a little knowledge can go a long way. For the most part, it appears that Americans are capable of forming political judgments that are consistent with their underlying predispositions most of the time (even if not all of the time).7

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ean Hannity and

Lawrence O’Donnell are not so much changing minds, as they are attracting audiences of partisans who already have strong opinions.

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The Evidence In order to test our expectations about how viewing preferences shape the influence of partisan news media, we conducted a series of novel experiments that afforded some participants more choice than the vast majority of previous political communication experiments.

Traditional political communication experiments are extraordinarily valuable and teach us about the effects of content of various types conditioned on exposure to that content. People enter a laboratory and are assigned at random to stimuli they are, in a sense, forced to watch, read, or hear. Our experiments replicate important aspects of these traditional experimental designs, but incorporate other design elements to get at the effects of self-selection.

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llowing people to opt out of partisan news

audiences into entertainment audiences diminishes the polarizing effects of partisan news shows.

Second, we find that the availability of choice blunts the effects of the news.

For example, people forced to watch either likeminded or oppositional news shows become more polarized in their judgments of presidential job performance than people allowed to choose among likeminded news or oppositional news or diverting entertainment shows. In short, allowing people to opt out of partisan news audiences into entertainment audiences diminishes the polarizing effects of partisan news shows.

A complementary experimental design, the Participant Preference Experiment, allows us to disentangle these effects further. In these studies, we ask people which of a set of programs they would prefer to watch (i.e., brands of partisan news or entertainment shows) and randomly assign them to view news or entertainment. In these studies, we learn that people who prefer news are subject to less influence from partisan news

Satirist Bill Maher, host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, appears to be scolding Ann Coulter, well-known author and conservative political commentator.

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shows than people who prefer to watch entertainment. This finding underscores our contention that people who like to watch partisan news shows already possess strong and extreme opinions and are not easy to move in any direction.

If Partisan News Shows Aren’t to Blame, Why Are We So Polarized?

Associated Press

We conducted a series of what we call Selective Exposure Experiments. In this protocol, research subjects enter the lab and are assigned at random to two groups. Individuals in one group watch a conservative political talk show, a liberal show, and one of two entertainment options devoid of political content (such as a show about a dog trainer).

Individuals in the second group are assigned to a choice condition wherein they are each allowed to use a remote control to surf continuously among all four options, watching as much or as little of each as they like during the duration of the viewing period.

We learn two important lessons from these studies. First, both likeminded and oppositional news shows lead people to adopt more polarized opinions. Just as we suspected, people find a likeminded news show persuasive because it conforms with their preexisting views, not because they are easily swayed. When faced with an oppositional news show, they have no problem rejecting it. In some ways, that is a good thing. People are not dupes.

Yet in another way, it undermines one easy solution to the polarizing effects of likeminded news consumption – the oft-repeated admonition that we should listen to the other side. Unfortunately, were the public to do so, it would only deepen the political divide even more.

It is an open debate whether the mass population is actually polarized.8 Political elites are certainly polarized9 and the electorate has become more partisan and ideologically consistent,10 but not necessarily more ideologically extreme.11 Whatever the case, our contention is that if the public has become more polarized, partisan media are not directly responsible. The reach of partisan media is too limited and circumscribed to be capable of generating such a massive shift in the American electorate.

That is not to say that we think partisan news media are inconsequential.

On the contrary, in another one of our studies we find that the mere presence of Fox News and MSNBC together on the dial affects the perception of mass polarization among those who are exposed to the choice among them and entertainment. In fact, we believe that this may be why so many people involved in public life are convinced that the partisan news media are rending the social fabric of the country. The shows on partisan cable networks seem designed to persuade rather than merely inform. How can they not be a polarizing force? Our point here is that the very people who make these arguments are at the high end of news consumption in the population and highly aware of their options. Activists, pundits, politicians, and scholars pay attention to their news options and are likely more aware of the choice over partisan and mainstream news than the average viewer who

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is looking for a sport score and the weather report.

Moreover, recent work by us and our colleagues René Lindstädt and Ryan Vander Wielen demonstrates that partisan news media have influenced members of Congress.12 We are able to track a shift in pro-Republican votes in Congress as Fox News expanded across the nation in the late 1990s. We speculate that this may be so because of two factors: political elites are high-end consumers of news media and interpret the news content as synonymous with public opinion13, and there is an indirect influence of partisan news programming in which engaged citizens make more partisan demands on their elected representatives.14 Exciting times lie ahead for political communication researchers. The days of the large (and largely captive) news audience are gone, along with the cathode ray tube. People have far more news and entertainment choices today than ever before in human history.

The task now is not only to update our theories about media effects and our methods studying them, but also to refashion them anew.

Notes 1. For a careful content analysis of mainstream and partisan news coverage see Natalie J. Stroud, Niche News: The Politics of News Choice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Tim Groseclose and Jeffrey Milyo, “A Measure of Media Bias,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 120 (Nov. 2005): 1191–1237.

2. The 1992 Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act gave local broadcasters a choice of either requiring their local cable service provider to retransmit their signal to cable subscribers or requiring their local cable service provider to compensate the broadcaster for its use.

3. Markus Prior, Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

4. Paul Goren, “Party Identification and Core Political Values,” American Journal of Political Science 49 (Oct. 2005): 881–96. Kevin B. Smith, Douglas R. Oxley, Matthew V. Hibbing, John R. Alford, and John R. Hibbing, “Linking Genetics and Political Attitudes: Reconceptualizing Political Ideology,” Political Psychology 32 (June 2011): 369-97.

5. Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Techniques in the World War (New York: Garland Publishing, 1927 and 1971). Walter Lippman, Liberty and the News, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920).

6. Joseph Klapper, The Effects of Mass Media (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960).

7. Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk, “Voting Correctly,” American Political Science Review 91 (Sept.

1997): 585–98. Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk, “Advantages and Disadvantages of Cognitive Heuristics in Political Decision Making,” American Journal of Political Science 45 (Oct. 2001): 951–71.

8. Alan I. Abramowitz and Kyle L. Saunders, “Is Polarization a Myth?”

Journal of Politics 70 (April 2008): 542– 55. Morris P. Fiorina, Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, 2nd ed.

(New York: Pearson Longman, 2006).

9. Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

10. Matthew S. Levendusky, The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

11. Delia Baldassarri and Andrew Gelman, “Partisans without Constraint: Political Polarization and Trends in American Public Opinion,” American Journal of Sociology 114 (Sept. 2008): 408–46. Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes, “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization,” Public Opinion Quarterly 76 (Fall 2012): 405–431.

12. Kevin Arceneaux, Martin Johnson, René Lindstädt, and Ryan J. Vander Wielen, “Democratic Representation and the Emergence of Partisan News Media: Investigating Dynamic Partisanship in Congress” unpublished working paper, Social Science Research Network, 2013, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers. cfm?abstract_id=2324786.

13. Susan Herbst, Reading Public Opinion: How Political Actors View the Democratic Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

14. Matthew S. Levendusky, Partisan News Polarizes America (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Useful Links Arceneaux and Johnson book Changing Minds or Changing Channels http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo15731464.html

Difficulties in assessing mass polarization http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2013/10/03/political-polarization-of-the-american-public-continues-to-rise-or-does-it/

Cable news and elite partisanship http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2013/10/30/how-fox-news-made-republicans-more-republican-and-democrats-morerepublican-too/

The pervasive existence of motivated reasoning http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2012/12/5/wsmd-ja-episode-3-it-turns-out-that-independents-are-as-just.html

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‘It’s Just a Joke!’… Or is it? The Promise and Pitfalls of Political Humor in an Age of Polarized Politics Jody C. Baumgartner, East Carolina University Jonathan S. Morris, East Carolina University

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ncreased elite polarization, particularly in Washington, is accepted as fact in political science. Evidence of this phenomenon is in no short supply, and on the face of it the government shutdown of 2013 is just one more example. This state of political polarization in Washington is not without its critics. Congressional approval ratings, for example, have hovered in the low-to-mid teens throughout the past few years, illustrating public disdain for that institution. Even in today’s fragmented news media environment where different outlets offer starkly distinct partisan interpretations of current affairs (e.g., Fox News versus MSNBC), the general agreement is that our leaders’ inability to find common ground is a major problem. On television, for example, journalists, pundits, and talking heads all are quick to agree that both parties are to blame for the inability to craft meaningful compromise. Of course they are then quicker to make the case that the other side is more to blame.

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Jody Baumgartner (left) is an associate professor of political science at East Carolina University. He has several books to his credit, including Laughing Matters: Humor and American Politics in the Media Age (Routledge, 2007), co-edited with Jonathan Morris, and a forthcoming book from Westview Press titled Politics is a Joke!, with Jonathan Morris and S. Robert Lichter about late-night political humor. He has also written or collaborated on over three dozen articles and book chapters on political humor, the vice presidency, and other subjects.

Jonathan Morris (right) is an associate professor of political science at East Carolina University. His published work on the role of humor and politics has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Political Behavior, American Politics Research, and Public Opinion Quarterly. Morris was co-editor of Laughing Matters: Humor and American Politics in the Media Age (Routledge, 2007), and has a forthcoming book from Westview Press titled Politics is a Joke! with Jody Baumgartner and S. Robert Lichter. Morris has also published research on the role of cable news and partisan news in journals such as Political Research Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, and The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics.

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Associated Press

Entering into the partisan fray of late is an unlikely source of information: political comics. Political humorists have made hay of the foibles of public officials and institutions for centuries. Consider Will Rogers’ declaration that, “I am not a member of any organized party – I am a Democrat,” or Mark Twain’s hypothetical situation posed to readers which asked, “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.” With discord and dysfunction in Washington in modern times, comics have an abundance of political material to exploit for laughs.

This is especially the case on late night television, where any foolish statement or political misstep is spotlighted for the television-watching world to see.

The role of late night televised humor in American politics has been examined fairly extensively in the past decade. Our goal here is to situate current knowledge about the effects of political humor in context of political polarization in America. How do comics address polarization in Washington (aka, “gridlock”)? Are they agents of moderation, or critics of polarization?

Or is it possible that they further contribute to polarization? We finish with a brief discussion of the promise and pitfalls of political humor in an age of polarized politics.

Stephen Colbert’s “March to Keep Fear Alive” joined forces with Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Washington” in October 2010. Each of these political satirists hosts his own late night talk show on the Comedy Central network – The Colbert Report and The Daily Show. on the National Mall, the event was designed to allow the “70-80 percent of Americans who try to solve the country’s problems rationally . . . [to] be heard above the more vocal and highly visual 15-20 percent who control the conversation.” While this “15-20 percent” were understood to be those on the far extremes of the ideological spectrum, the overall idea was that common sense,

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he late night comic presents an image of someone

who, as a rational non-partisan observer, can shine a spotlight on the silliness of contemporary politics.

Late Night Comics as Critics of Polarization There are many varieties of political humor available in several media. Our focus here is on late night television, the most common and popular form.

Interestingly, most late night comics seem to be, at least implicitly, opposed to polarized politics in Washington, D.C. For example, Comedy Central’s late night comic Jon Stewart hosted “The Rally to Restore Sanity” on October 30, 2010, in Washington, D.C. Held

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compromise, and shared American values should be allowed to prevail over the extremists.

At the time Stewart was promoting his rally, Comedy Central’s other noted comic, Stephen Colbert, promoted his own event, “The March to Keep Fear Alive.” On his The Colbert Report Colbert portrays a rigid, ego-obsessed, poorly informed right-wing television commentator, based loosely on Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly. The purpose of the program is to make us laugh at extremism on the right side of

the political spectrum. Colbert’s “March” was scheduled for the same time and place (the National Mall) as Stewart’s “Rally,” and his description of the event highlighted its satirical nature: America, the Greatest Country God ever gave Man, was built on three bedrock principles: Freedom.

Liberty. And Fear – that someone might take our Freedom and Liberty. But now, there are dark, optimistic forces trying to take away our Fear – forces with salt and pepper hair and way more Emmys than they need [Stewart].

They want to replace our Fear with reason. But never forget – ‘Reason’ is just one letter away from ‘Treason.’ Coincidence? Reasonable people would say it is, but America can’t afford to take that chance.

Late night comics generally portray themselves as rational, non-partisan observers of the political world. In this they must appear to be above the fray of extreme partisan politics. One did not, after all, associate the court jester with any particular group or faction, but rather as a voice of reason who pointed out absurdities that others were unable or unwilling to identify. In a similar way the late night comic presents an image of

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hile SNL [Saturday Night Live] has been roasting

presidents, presidential candidates, and other politicians since its second season, it shows little by way of a partisan bias.

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Late Night Comics as Agents of Polarization Does late night comedy polarize?

To answer this question, two separate questions must be answered in the affirmative. First, is the content of late night comedy partisan or ideological in one direction or the other? And if it is, are viewers persuaded to move toward that particular partisan or ideological position as the result of viewing?

Research examining the political content of televised late night talk shows on the major broadcast networks, primarily The Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, reveal a few major findings. First, the plurality of political jokes focus on the president in power.1 In this regard, then, there is an anti-administration bias to this humor, but no systemic partisan or ideological bias. Moreover, the jokes these comics tell during the monologue segments of their programs (essentially

Associated Press

someone who, as a rational non-partisan observer, can shine a spotlight on the silliness of contemporary politics. This often involves lambasting what they see as a climate of hyper-partisanship in Washington.

From a practical perspective late night comics would seem to have little incentive to lambast only one side of the political spectrum. Late night political humor is intended first and foremost to entertain – to generate laughs – and a partisan approach would risk alienating half of their potential audience. This is likely why most late night comics have fashioned themselves as equal opportunity offenders when it comes to politics. And it is in this sense that we can consider political humor a potential force for moderation in the media. Extreme positions and extreme statements from extreme political personalities are put on display by humorists and duly criticized for a lack of common sense and rationality.

NBC late night comedian Jay Leno hosted presidential candidate George W. Bush in 2000 on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

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stand-up comedy) are largely devoid of political content as such, focusing more on the personal foibles, perceived shortcomings, and so on, of the president.2 This style of political humor may move attitudes, but not consistently in any particular partisan or ideological direction.

Partial exceptions to this statement exist. First, impressionistic evidence suggests that David Letterman has been moving to the left in the past half-decade. However, to our knowledge there has been no empirical research demonstrating this, and Letterman is one of only several late night hosts on broadcast television. Second, it has been shown that during presidential election campaigns since 1992 there is a decidedly anti-Republican bias in late night “coverage” of these campaigns.3 This too might seem like a serious push to the left, but presidential campaigns occur only one out of every four years. Our belief is that these can be considered exceptions to the rule that there is no systemic bias on late night talk shows on the broadcast networks.

The same can probably be said of another popular source of late night political humor, Saturday Night Live (SNL). While SNL has been roasting presidents, presidential candidates, and other politicians since its second season, it shows little by way of a partisan bias. In 2008 Tina Fey’s brilliant impersonation of Sarah Palin drew unprecedented amounts of attention to the program. Some research suggests that these skits had some effect on how viewers evaluated Palin and the Republican ticket, moving viewers to the left.4 But while Fey herself has admitted that part of her motivation for the skits resulted from her distaste of Palin, SNL has over the years proven to be an equal opportunity offender in terms of its partisan leanings. Darrell Hammond’s portrayal of Bill Clinton is a case in point. Verdict? Very little if any polarizing content.

This leaves us with one more category: the late night offerings of Comedy Central, in particular, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (TDS) and The Colbert Report (TCR). There are several differences between these programs and their late night talk counterparts on

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broadcast networks that extend beyond the obvious format differences (e.g., 30 minute vs. 60 minutes in length). First, while the comedy on other late night talk shows is topically oriented, the content – including the humor – on TDS and TCR is almost exclusively political.

Second, the political humor of these shows is more political, meaning that while personal flaws and shortcomings of individual politicians are often targeted, institutions, policy, and political processes are lampooned as well. In other words, these shows have more explicitly political content.

Jon Stewart began hosting The Daily Show in 1999 and brought more of a current-events focus to the program than his predecessor, Craig Kilborn. Initially Stewart’s humor was fairly even-handed, particularly in handling the events of the Clinton impeachment trial and the election of 2000 – aptly titled “Indecision 2000.” However, as the Bush years went on, Stewart’s humor began to drift to the left. While not consistently supportive of those on the left, he began to display a distinct anti-right bias. Some of this change reflects the anti-establishment nature of political humor (and more specifically, satire), but research has shown clear partisan tendencies in the content of TDS.5 Stephen Colbert’s program also has partisan leanings, though in which direction might be subject to debate. His straight-faced parody of a self-indulged, unthinking right-wing extremist leads right-leaning viewers to believe he is a conservative, while left-leaning viewers believe he is liberal. This said, in spite of the fact that it is intended as satire, the explicit message of TCR, or the message expounded by Colbert’s character, is clearly conservative. Accordingly, this is how some viewers interpret his message.6 Indeed, Colbert has been seen by right-leaning politicians over the years as friendly to their cause. For example, his satirical support for Mike Huckabee in the 2008 Republican presidential

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primary campaign was welcomed by the candidate, and Colbert was invited to speak at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner under the belief that he was a rightward-leaning political comic. Colbert was even invited to testify before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law in 2010; he shocked many representatives when he testified in character. This confusion regarding Colbert’s satire may be surprising to some, especially to those who are politically interested and aware. However, one has only to assign Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and ask people to interpret the “message” to discover how powerfully deceptive heavy satire can be.

Thus we see that the overall message or frame of TDS leans to the left while TCR’s overt message is perceived to be clearly conservative. Do these programs affect viewers’ opinions? Experimental research in the past decade has consistently shown that viewing political humor has a message consistent effect on viewers’ attitudes.7 In particular, because the message of political humor is almost universally negative,8 it lowers evaluations of, or attitudes toward, its target(s). Research shows that exposure to TDS may either lower evaluations of Republicans, raise evaluations of Democrats, or both.9 Jon Stewart’s left leaning content has been found to move viewers to the left.

Similarly, Colbert’s satirical presentation of right-wing attacks against liberals has been found to raise evaluations of Republicans and lower those of Democrats.10 This “Colbert Effect” is similar to an “Archie Bunker Effect” found in the 1970s, where the bigoted fictional Bunker was perceived as holding legitimate points of view, especially by like-minded viewers.11 This was the exact opposite effect than the show’s creator (Norman Lear) had hoped for. It should also be noted that potential

exists for TCR to move Democrats further to the left and Republicans further to the right, given that these groups tend to see Colbert’s commentary through their own political lenses.12

The Promise and Pitfalls of Political Humor in an Age of Polarized Politics Does late night political humor polarize citizens? Although there may be practical incentive for humorists to be equal opportunity critics of politics, this does not necessarily dictate evenhandedness. The answer to our question actually depends on which late night political humor we are discussing. Late night talk shows on broadcast network television have some political content, but most of it is aimed at the president in power and is focused more on personal foibles, scandal, and other non-political attributes. None of these programs, in other words, specifically target one side of the political spectrum or the other, and, on the whole, these programs do not seem to move viewers in any consistently specific direction in terms of the ideological or partisan spectrum.

Comedy Central programming is a different matter altogether. Jon Stewart is not the moderate observer that he would have us believe that he is, and Stephen Colbert’s character leaves many believing he is serious (perhaps a testament to how well it is done). More importantly, these programs have a polarizing effect on the opinions of viewers, moving people to the left in Stewart’s case and to the right in the case of Colbert. The potential for polarization is even higher when biased messages interact with biased information processing on the part of the individual viewing these programs.13 Does it matter? Maybe not. Despite the fact that TDS and TCR are heavily entrenched in popular culture, the Comedy Central audience pales in comparison to that of the late night talk shows on the broadcast networks.

hese programs have a polarizing effect on the opinions of viewers, moving people to the

left in Stewart’s case and to the right in the case of Colbert.

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On the other hand, surveys show increasing numbers of people reporting that they are getting at least some of their political information from TDS and TCR. Perhaps as importantly, the shows attract younger viewers, whose political ideas are relatively malleable.14 We know that humorous messages are better at holding viewers’ attention, and the delivery of a humorous message tends to increase the likability of the source of the humor.15 Moreover, the persuasive power of humor has been well documented. Psychology research has also found that political humor is also less likely than non-political humor to be met with counterarguments, thus increasing the persuasive power of a message entrenched in humor.16 While the traditional news media continues to erode, the new fragmented political information environment continues to evolve. In this new environment political humor is used as a source of news and information by an increasing number of Americans.

Whether late night television comics like it or not, they are recognized by many observers as legitimate news providers and commentators. It will be interesting to see how they handle this responsibility in the future, particularly as it relates to the issue of partisan or ideological polarization. While late night television comics are in a position to help moderate extreme partisan or ideological views, it seems clear that some do not always do so.

Notes 1. David Niven, S. Robert Lichter, and Daniel Amundon, “Our First Cartoon President: Bill Clinton and the Politics of Late Night Comedy,” in Laughing Matters: Humor and American Politics in the Media Age, eds. Jody C. Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris (New York: Routledge, 2008), 151-70; David Niven, S. Robert Lichter, and Daniel Amundson, “The Political Content of Late Night Comedy,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 8 (2003): 118-33.

2. See S. Robert Lichter, Jody C. Baumgartner, and Jonathan Morris, Politics Is a Joke!: How TV Comedians Are Remaking Political Life (Boulder, CO: Westview, forthcoming); Russell L. Peterson, Strange Bedfellows: How Late-

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Night Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2008).

3. See various election year issues of Media Monitor published by the Center for Media and Public Affairs; see also Lichter, Baumgartner, and Morris, Politics Is a Joke! (forthcoming).

4. Jody C. Baumgartner, Jonathan S. Morris, and Natasha L. Walth, “The Fey Effect: Young Adults, Political Humor, and Perceptions of Sarah Palin in the 2008 Presidential Election Campaign,” Public Opinion Quarterly 76 (2012): 95-104.

5. Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell, “Journalism, Satire, or Just Laughs: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Examined,” Pew Research Center, 2008; Jonathan S. Morris, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Audience Attitude Change During the 2004 Party Conventions,” Political Behavior 31 (2009): 79-102.

6. Heather L. LaMarre, Kristen D. Landreville, and Michael A. Beam, “The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in the Colbert Report,” The International Journal of Press/Politics 14 (2009): 212-31.

7. Besides other studies cited here, see Jody C. Baumgartner, “Humor on the Next Frontier: Youth, Online Political Humor, and the JibJab Effect,” Social Science Computer Review 29 (2007): 319-38; Jody C. Baumgartner, “Editorial Cartoons 2.0: The Effects of Digital Political Satire on Presidential Candidate Evaluations,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 38 (2008): 735-58; Morris, “‘The Daily Show’ and Audience Attitude Change during the 2004 Party Conventions”; Baumgartner, Morris and Walth, “The Fey Effect.”

8. Niven, Lichter, and Amundson, “The Political Content of Late Night Comedy.”

9. Jody C. Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris, “The Daily Show Effect: Candidate Evaluations, Efficacy, and the American Youth,” American Politics Research 34 (2006): 341-67; Morris, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Audience Attitude Change During the 2004 Party Conventions”; Jody C. Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris, “Research Note: The 2008 Presidential Primaries and Differential Effects of ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Colbert Report’ on

Young Adults,” Midsouth Political Science Review 12 (2012): 87-102.

10. Jody C. Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris, “One ‘Nation,’ under Stephen?

The Effects of the Colbert Report on American Youth,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 52 (2008): 622-43; Baumgartner and Morris, “Research Note: The 2008 Presidential Primaries and Differential Effects of ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Colbert Report’ on Young Adults.”

11. Neil Vidmar and Milton Rokeach, “Archie Bunker’s Bigotry: A Study in Selective Perception and Exposure,” Journal of Communication 24 (1974): 36-47.

12. LaMarre, Landreville, and Beam, 2009, “The Irony of Satire.”

13. ibid.

14. David O. Sears, “College Sophomores in the Laboratory: Influences of a Narrow Data Base on Social Psychology’s View of Human Nature,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51 (1986): 515-30.

15. Stephen R. Schmidt, “Effects of Humor on Sentence Memory,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20 (1994): 953-67; Brian Sternthal and C. Samuel Craig, “Humor in Advertising,” The Journal of Marketing 37 (1973): 12-18.

16. Robert A. Osterhouse and Timothy C. Brock, “Distraction Increases Yielding to Propaganda by Inhibiting Counterarguing,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 15 (1970): 344-58; Dannagal G. Young, “The Counterargument-Disruption Model of Political Humor (CADIMO): An Experimental Exploration of the Effects of Late-night Political Jokes on Cognitive Elaboration and the Conditional Effects of Partisanship,” paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, September 2-6, 2004.

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for the record

Tom Patterson Delivers 2013 Rothbaum Lecture

Hugh Scott

Feeding the Fire: The Media’s Role in Party Polarization in political communication of the last decade. The book moved further into the national spotlight when President Bill Clinton said every politician and journalist should be required to read it.

The Unseeing Eye (1976), Patterson’s first book, was named by the American Association for Public Opinion Research as one of the 50 most influential books on public opinion in the past half-century.

Tom Patterson is also an award-winning teacher. In 2013, he received from the Kennedy School both the teacher of the year award and the advisor of the year award, becoming one of the first faculty members to be given both honors.

As the sixteenth Rothbaum Lecturer, Professor Patterson upheld the lectureship’s standard of excellent scholarship by exploring the role the media plays in party polarization. (For a detailed account of the lectures, please see Editor Ron Peters’s comments on page two.)

As Professor Patterson revises and extends his Rothbaum Lecture for publication by The University of Oklahoma Press, we anticipate an important contribution to the study of the media’s role in party polarization.

Hugh Scott

Rothbaum Lecturer Thomas E. Patterson

Professor Thomas E. Patterson, the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, delivered the 2013 Julian J. Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture in Representative Government on October 22, 23, and 24.

The biennial Rothbaum Lecture series was endowed in 1981 by family members Irene Rothbaum and Joel Jankowsky in honor of Julian J. Rothbaum (19132003), who was a successful businessman, civic leader, loyal supporter of the university, and lifelong friend of Speaker Carl Albert.

Professor Patterson has devoted his career to understanding the effects of mass media on the American political system.

His most recent book, Informing the News: The Need for KnowledgeBased Journalism (2013), examines the declining quality of public information, the consequences for what people know and only think they know, and what can be done to fix the problem.

For his earlier book on the news media’s domination of the political process, Out of Order (1993), Patterson garnered the American Political Science Association’s Graber Award for best book

The Carl Albert Center partnered with Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication in hosting the 2013 Rothbaum Lecture.

Professor Patterson’s lectures were delivered in Gaylord Hall’s Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Auditorium. The audience included students, faculty, members of the media, and other local citizens. extensions

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for the record

Robert H. Taylor

Hugh Scott

From the left are Carl Albert Center Director and Curator Cindy Simon Rosenthal, Rothbaum family member Joel Jankowsky, OU President David L. Boren who welcomed the audience to the lecture, Rothbaum Lecturer Tom Patterson, and Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication Dean Joe Foote. In the background is the Carl Albert Center’s two-panel exhibit celebrating the life of Julian J. Rothbaum.

Professor Patterson had numerous meetings with students and faculty during his visit to campus. Here he enjoyed an informal lunch with graduate students from the Carl Albert Center, Political Science, Political Communications, and Journalism and Mass Communication. He was particularly interested in hearing about each student’s research interests.

Robert H. Taylor

The podium at the Rothbaum dinner was shared among (from the left) Carl Albert Center Director and Curator Cindy Simon Rosenthal, Rothbaum Lecturer Thomas E. Patterson, Rothbaum family member and donor Joel Jankowsky, and OU Senior Vice Provost Kyle Harper.

About 150 students, faculty, and other guests gathered on October 23 in the Sandy Bell Gallery of Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art for a ceremonial dinner in honor of Rothbaum Lecturer Thomas E. Patterson. During the dinner program, Professor Patterson spoke briefly at the podium and then answered questions posed by guests.

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for the record

News from the Center LaDonna Sullivan Managing Editor Professors Cindy Simon Rosenthal and Shad Satterthwaite collaborated in teaching a special, one-day course September 25, 2013 for members of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at OU. The course, which focused on the relationship between Congress and the media, was titled “Making Laws and Making News: The Messy Business of Sausage.”

Alumni Associate Professor Walter C. Wilson, a Carl Albert Graduate Fellowship alumnus who completed his doctoral degree in 2008, has been granted tenure at University of Texas – San Antonio.

Alumnus Kenneth Cosgrove, Associate Professor of Government at Suffolk University, is co-editor of Political Marketing in the United States (Routledge, May 2014). He is also the author of Branded Conservatives: How the Brand Brought the Right from the Fringes to the Center of American Politics (Peter Lang International Academic Publishers , 2007). In 2011, Ken was the Fulbright Research Chair in North American Integration Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada for a semester and is now on a Fulbright Regional Peer Review Panel. In the past, Ken has also served as a Mellon Foundation Fellow, a Fulbright Hays Scholar (Brazil), a Salzburg Seminar Fellow (Austria), and a visiting professor at Tamkang University Institute of American Studies (Taiwan).

Archives The Carl Albert Center co-hosted one session of a workshop on Encoded Archival Description (EAD) for archivists and archives students in the university library on November 8. The workshop was organized by the Ballet Russes Archives at the University of Oklahoma. Carl Albert Center Archivist Bailey Hoffner attended the

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workshop to gain an understanding of the coding language that helps to make our congressional finding aids available online in a standardized format.

The Center’s archivists also hosted a meeting of the Central Oklahoma Archivists’ League (COAL) at the Carl Albert Center on December 11 where Bailey Hoffner gave a presentation on the processing of the James R. Jones collection. This presentation is being developed into a paper for the annual meeting of the Society of Southwest Archivists in May 2014.

Archivist Robert Lay is finalizing a narrative report on the processing of the Jones collection as the grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission concluded on January 31. Notable accomplishments include a complete EAD finding aid for Jones’s congressional and ambassadorial papers, the launch of a new archival database for the Center (which can be found here: https://cacarchives.ou.edu/),

and the beginning stages of the Center’s photo-digitization project. Stay tuned for more information as this project progresses.

Dr. Kurt Hohenstein, who received a visiting scholar grant from the Carl Albert Center in 2013, has launched an online exhibit utilizing material from the Carl Albert Center Archives’ collections of Mickey Edwards, Tom Steed, and Dick Armey. The exhibit, entitled “The Mechanics of Legislation: Congress, the SEC and Financial Regulation,” is displayed on the website of the Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society at http://www.sechistorical.org/ museum/galleries/mec/.

The archives recently hosted scholar Patrick Sandman of Oxford University, recipient of a Carl Albert Center Visiting Scholar grant. Sandman applied for the grant in August 2013 to support research at the Center for his doctoral thesis, Bringing Congress Back In: Watergate and the Politics of Institutional Change.

Community Scholars During the fall 2013 semester, six undergraduate students participated in the Community Scholars program, a public service learning opportunity for a cohort of undergraduates who experience first-hand the dynamics of working within community-based organizations. The internship experience is enriched through weekly seminars and briefings with leaders from the nonprofit sector. Community Scholars work 20 hours per week in their designated internship where they develop professional experience and skills, gain insights into the dynamics of community organizations, and learn how nonprofit organizations function and interact within their broader communities.

Community Scholar

Placement

Katy Goodrich

Oklahoma Academy for State Goals

Connor Cox

City of Norman Finance Department

Sara Wiesman

Girl Scouts of Western Oklahoma

Layne Ferguson

City of Norman Development Coordinator’s Office

Jaclyn O’Neil

Association of Central Oklahoma Governments

KatieBeth Gardner

Variety Care/Health for Friends

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for the record Utilizing resources from the Carl Albert Collection and the Helen Gahagan Douglas Collection, Sandman searched for evidence of the changing relationship between Congress and the President leading up to Watergate, positing that “the seeds of Watergate were firmly rooted long before anyone had ever heard of reporters Bob Woodward or Karl Bernstein.” Sandman’s fresh perspective on the topic of Watergate made him an ideal candidate for this program.

Community Coffee Klatch The Coffee Klatch group met at the Carl Albert Center on October 15 to hear a presentation by Gregory S. Weiner, a well-known teacher of constitutional law and civil liberties from Assumption College in Massachusetts.

Professor Weiner talked about “Congress’s Constitutional Capitulation” during the coffee klatch luncheon and at a public forum on campus later in the day.

On November 21, Carl Albert Center Archivist Bailey Hoffner and Associate Director Glen Krutz met with the Community Coffee Klatch to discuss “The A-Files: History’s Window on Contemporary Events.” The session provided a look into our congressional past as a way of illuminating the complexity of the budget process, past and present. There was lively discussion about the ways in which documents in the Carl Albert Center Archives can inform our understanding of politics today. The group also took a sneakpeak at some interesting materials in the congressional papers of James R. Jones, who chaired the powerful Budget Committee during four separate government shutdowns, and has long been recognized as a leading expert on the U.S. economy.

Papers Presented Carl Albert Graduate Fellow Tyler Hughes presented his paper “I hear You Loud and Clear: Measuring Partisan Attention to Policy Issues in the House of Representatives, 2005-2012” at the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association in January.

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Politics and Pizza The Carl Albert Center, the Political Science Club, and Pi Sigma Alpha (National Political Science Honor Society) co-sponsored a “Politics and Pizza” session for OU students on November 11. The discussion focused on “Obamacare in Oklahoma: Exploring How the Affordable Care Act is Playing Out in the Sooner State.”

Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI) Carl Albert Center Director Cindy Simon Rosenthal, Assistant Director Lauren Schueler, and Graduate Assistant Bailey Perkins conducted a one-day Pipeline to Politics training seminar on January 11 for a class of fourteen participants interested in increasing their involvement in politics and public service. In order to address

At the American Political Science Association annual meeting in Chicago on August 30, 2013, Nicholas Carnes (left) received the Carl Albert Dissertation Award for “By the Upper Class, For the Upper Class? Representational Inequality and Economic Policymaking in the United States," which he completed at Princeton University. Award committee member James Curry (right), who presented the award, is a previous winner for his own dissertation, “Information Control: Leadership Power in the U.S. House of Representatives.” This annual award, presented by the Legislative Studies Section of APSA, is sponsored by the Carl Albert Center.

the historic under-representation of women in politics and public life, the Pipeline Project is designed primarily for women who are beyond college and already in the workforce.

This nonpartisan program informs participants about political and other leadership opportunities, educates them about the issues involved in putting together a winning campaign, and encourages them to run for office, work on a campaign, or become civically involved in other ways. Professional consultants, experts in specific fields, and elected officials from both sides of the political aisle were on hand to lead interactive discussions and help participants find “all the right pieces” for a successful campaign.

Eight N.E.W. Leadership graduates participated in the twentieth Midwestern Regional Conference of Women in Government, a national, non-partisan organization that provides networking and leadership opportunities for women serving in state legislatures. The conference was held in Oklahoma City in September. Oklahoma State Senator Susan Paddack and Representative Lee Denny co-chaired the host committee for the event. The N.E.W. Leadership graduates participated in the conference’s Pathways to Power program for promising college women who have interest in public service. Participants were paired with legislators and lobbyists as mentors.

The Journal Record, a daily general business and legal publication, once again recognized the Women’s Leadership Initiative as a “program making a difference.” The award was presented at the annual Woman of the Year dinner on October 3 in Oklahoma City.

To learn more about the Women’s Leadership Initiative, please visit our website at www.ou.edu/wli.

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Non-Profit Organization U.S. Postage

The Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center 630 Parrington Oval, Room 101 Norman, Oklahoma 73019-4031 (405) 325-6372 http://www.ou.edu/carlalbertcenter

PAID University of Oklahoma

Visiting Scholars Program The Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center at the University of Oklahoma seeks applicants for its Visiting Scholars Program, which provides financial assistance to researchers working at the Center’s archives.

Awards of $500-$1000 are normally granted as reimbursement for travel and lodging.

The Center’s holdings include the papers of many former members of Congress, such as Speaker Carl Albert, Robert S. Kerr, and Fred Harris of Oklahoma, Helen Gahagan Douglas and Jeffery Cohelan of California, and Neil Gallagher of New Jersey. Besides the history of Congress, congressional leadership, national and Oklahoma politics, and election campaigns, the collections also document government policy affecting agriculture, Native Americans, energy, foreign affairs, the environment, and the economy.

Topics that can be studied include the Great Depression, flood control, soil conservation, and tribal affairs. At least one collection provides insight on women in American politics. Most materials date from the 1920s to the 1990s, although there is one nineteenth-century collection. The Center’s collections are described on the World Wide Web at http://www.ou.edu/carlalbertcenter and in the publication titled A Guide to the Carl Albert Center Congressional Archives (Norman, Okla.: The Carl Albert Center, 1995) by Judy Day, et al., available at many U. S. academic libraries.

Additional information can be obtained from the Center.

The Visiting Scholars Program is open to any applicant. Emphasis is given to those pursuing postdoctoral research in history, political science, and other fields. Graduate students involved in research for publication, thesis, or dissertation are encouraged to apply. Professional writers and researchers are also invited to apply. The Center evaluates each research proposal based upon its merits, and funding for a variety of topics is expected.

No standardized form is needed for application. Instead, a series of documents should be sent to the Center, including: (1) a description of the research proposal in fewer than 1000 words; (2) a personal vita; (3) an explanation of how the Center’s resources will assist the researcher; (4) a budget proposal; and (5) a letter of reference from an established scholar in the discipline attesting to the significance of the research. Applications are accepted at any time.

For more information, please contact: Archivist, Carl Albert Center, 630 Parrington Oval, Room 101, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019. Telephone: (405) 325-5835. FAX: (405) 325-6419. E-mail: cacarchives@ou.edu The University of Oklahoma is an Equal Opportunity Institution

Extensions is a copyrighted publication of the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center. It is distributed free of charge twice a year. All Rights Reserved.

Extensions and the Carl Albert Center symbol are trademarks of the Carl Albert Center. Copyright Carl Albert Center, The University of Oklahoma, 1985.

Statements contained herein do not necessarily reflect the views of the Carl Albert Center or the regents of The University of Oklahoma.

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