Does public journalism really matter? A comparative analysis for effects from newspaper campaign narrative.

Abstract

One of the major questions in political science and mass communications over the last decade has been the nature of press coverage as a negative influence on the public's attitudes toward the media, government, and civic participation. Two investigative methods, experiment and content analysis, were used to empirically assess the nature and effect of public journalism during the 2000 general election. The results indicated that respondents evaluated the public journalism narratives more favorably for quality of reporting and affect. Individuals who read strategic/cynical narratives reported significantly lower scores on feeling thermometers for the media and Congress. Individuals who read public journalism narratives reported significantly more issue, civic, and positive responses. The strategic narrative produced significantly more cynical, reporting, candidate/partisan, and negative responses. The results for participation intentions indicated that the strategic frame produced more intentions to participate, but few of the differences were statistically significant. There were no statistically significant differences for information gain between narrative conditions. The content analysis extended previous work by showing a strong association between intent to practice public journalism and information for making informed voting decisions. Intent to practice public journalism was also associated with less horserace, negative, or dramatic narrative. Results for other public journalism practices, citizen opinions, empowerment, and information for being active in the campaign were mixed. The strength of the public journalism signal was confounded by the placement of narrative themes in the newspaper. Themes accenting horserace, drama, and negativity are more likely to be on the front page or in the front section. Public journalism themes are more common further back in the newspaper. The overall results indicated that public journalism narratives do affect readers in theoretically meaningful and normative ways at the point of exposure, but have yet to impact long held attitudes or behavior patterns. In addition, not all public journalism narratives are uniform in their effects. In practice, public journalism newspapers have added much more issue content to their stories while trimming horserace, dramatic, and negative themes from their reporting, but have yet to make a consistent commitment to content concerning citizen voices and empowerment.