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Martin Johnson |
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Associate Professor |
2222 Watkins Hall Tel 951.827.4612, Fax 951.827.3933 e-mail: martin.johnson@ucr.edu |
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Media Politics
Representative Reporters? Examining Journalists’ Ideology in Context (with Christopher Cooper) We investigate the ideological orientations of American statehouse journalists, asking under what conditions reporters are like-minded with their audiences. Given that readers use statehouse journalists to monitor state politics, we anticipate that they will select “representatives” with views similar to their own. Using an original survey of statehouse journalists, we examine the self-reported ideological orientations of journalists and find that reporters tend to reflect the political leanings of their audiences. We also study the variance of reporter ideology relative to the mean ideology of their readers. Considering reporters in the context of the states they serve, we find that journalists who are racially and economically dissimilar from their neighbors have less representative political predispositions than journalists who have interests similar to their readers. In the case of statehouse reporters, descriptive representation leads to substantive representation. Politics and the Press Corps: Reporters, State Legislative Institutions, and Context (with Christopher Cooper) 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. |
Last updated July 5, 2007.