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Martin Johnson |
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Professor, Department of Political Science |
2222 Watkins Hall Tel 951.827.4612, Fax 951.827.3933 e-mail: martin.johnson@ucr.edu |
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Media Politics
Democratic Representation and the Emergence of Partisan News Media: Investigating Dynamic Partisanship in Congress (with Kevin Arceneaux, René Lindstädt, & Ryan J. Vander Wielen) Technological innovations over the past decade have expanded the number of news and entertainment options available to consumers, leading to the emergence of partisan news media. We contend that the emergence of partisan media should have decisive effects on the strategic calculations of elected representatives who are chronic consumers of news media. Moreover, we theorize that partisan news media's influence on legislative behavior will be most apparent when elections are near. Exploiting the incremental roll-out of the conservative Fox News Channel in the late 1990s, we find that the emergence of Fox News caused U.S. House members to alter their levels of party support dynamically, responding both to the proximity of elections and changes in the media environment in their district. Fox News caused both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to increase support for the Republican Party on divisive votes in the waning months of the election cycle. Politics and the Press Corps: Reporters, State Legislative Institutions, and Context (with Christopher Cooper, 2006) How do differences in institutional and social contexts affect press-government relations and political journalism in the U.S.? Despite a widespread recognition that journalists and the stories they write affect the public agenda, policy options, and the frames through which people understand public policy, we know precious little about how political reporters do their jobs or patterns of press/government relations. Even with recent interest in press relations in Congress, little research has compared political reporters’ behavior across institutional and social contexts. In this paper, we examine the practice of American statehouse journalism. We focus on the presence or absence of term limits for lawmakers, the level of professionalization of state legislative bodies, and the overall size of the press corps. Using the comparative method, we carefully selected four state capitals: Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis, Indiana; Lansing, Michigan; and Springfield, Illinois. We find that the attributes of legislative and press corps organization influence how journalists cover the story of government. Newsgathering and Role Orientations among American Statehouse Reporters (with Christopher Cooper, 2005) Reporters are a primary link between citizens and government. Despite increasing scholarly attention to the national press corps on the one hand and increased attention to state politics and policy on the other, we know precious little about how U.S. statehouse reporters contribute to the policy process, how they view their role in the political system, how they collect information, or what factors cause these roles and habits to vary. We examine the roles and values of statehouse reporters to discover not only what values they hold, but to gain some insight into what factors affect these values. Because so little is known about statehouse reporters, we also describe their basic characteristics. We further investigate the distribution of statehouse journalists by their role identities, and the predictors of one particular role (being an adversary toward government). |
Last updated September 10, 2013.