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"New Media and Political Participation: Technology, Time, and Space "
by William P. Eveland, Jr.
Much of my research into how news media affect political participation centers on “non-traditional” forms of news media (i.e., beyond television news and newspapers), often with consideration for how they work in conjunction with other forms of communication to produce participation. For instance, the popularization of the Internet as a source of information regarding news and politics led Dhavan Shah and me to gather data for a national three-wave panel study surrounding the 2000 presidential election. Our goal was to test causal hypotheses regarding the role of traditional media and new communication technologies in the development of social capital. In one study (Shah, Cho, Eveland, & Kwak, 2005), we found that traditional and online news use can stimulate various forms of political discussion—both online and face-to-face—which in turn appears to produce civic participation. Thus, the effects of news media use on engagement seem to be mostly mediated through political discussion. This finding of a linkage between traditional and “new” forms of media, and between mediated and interpersonal communication, stimulated my recent work on the influence of political blogs on participation.
In a chapter in Mark Tremayne’s Blogging, Citizenship, and the Future of Media, OSU MA student Ivan Dylko and I described our research examining the synergistic role of online news use, online discussion of politics, and political blog use in producing political participation (Eveland & Dylko, 2007). From our perspective, blog use may be prompted by use of online and print news, which have begun to cover blogs as important sources of political information and opinion. But, political blog use may also stimulate use of news media through hyperlinking to online news in blog postings. This synergistic relationship between blogs and online news outlets appears to facilitate participation in political activities, either directly via blog use or indirectly through the news use and political discussions blogs appear to provoke. Currently Ivan is testing these causal hypotheses for his thesis using three-wave panel data we (with Andrew Hayes, Jerry Kosicki, and Herb Weisberg) gathered during the 2006 Ohio Governor’s and U.S. Senate race.
But, there is more to non-traditional media than just online resources. In a recent paper (Eveland, 2006), I used data from a 2004 Ohio survey and the 2004 ANES to examine the relationship of talk radio, cable news, and late night political comedy use to political participation. That study found that these non-traditional sources of political information made contributions of roughly equivalent size and direction relative to traditional news media—all while controlling for use of those traditional media.
Despite the important potential of these various non-traditional sources of political information, more study is also needed of traditional news media. Harkening back to my 1993 MA thesis on community structure, news use, and political participation, I believe most research in this area has overlooked the important consideration of “time” and “space” as potential moderators of the relationship between news use and participation. Many of the longitudinal news content analyses have demonstrated considerable variation in the amount of campaign coverage, the length of sound bites, and the proportions of horse race news and negative depictions of candidates during different presidential election campaigns. Moreover, there are clear differences in the amount and quality of local and national political coverage for readers of the local papers in New York City (e.g., New York Times) versus, for instance, Chillicothe, Ohio (Chillicothe Gazette).
Despite these content differences, survey researchers studying different election years or samples from different communities—with different patterns of coverage—tend to offer identical predictions of positive relationships between news use and participation, as if these content variations were inconsequential for effects. My work with OSU graduate students has employed multi-level modeling techniques to uncover temporal and geographic (media markets) patterns of variation in news media effects on participation based on naturally-occurring content differences. Perhaps surprisingly, so far we have found no evidence to support this hypothesis for either “time” or “space” variations in media content (Eveland & Dylko, 2006; Eveland & Liu, 2005). This may be in part due to limitations in the survey data we have employed (the 1960-2000 ANES and a 2004 survey of Ohio residents), which do not link respondents to a specific media source (we just use New York Times coverage), or because we only assumed content differences in the absence of content analyses (“high” vs. “low” quality newspapers across Ohio). Therefore, we are now analyzing data from a multi-media (print newspapers and local TV news) content analysis and a 2006 three-wave panel study of Ohio residents. Using these data, we can connect respondents to the local newspapers and newscasts they report using, and we can provide corresponding content analyses of these sources to link to the panel data. If support fails to materialize from these more fine-grained data—suggesting undifferentiated effects of news use regardless of content variations—it may imply that “effects” on participation may be effects of the form of media or process of media use, independent of content…or mere selection effects.
Once we’ve finished this study, it’s off to identify some other interesting aspect of the relationship between news media and political participation that’s ripe for study…
William P. Eveland is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Department of Political Science, The Ohio State University.
REFERENCES
Eveland, W. P., Jr. (2006, August). The benchwarmers hit a home run: Non-traditional political communication effects in 2004. Paper presented to the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, San Francisco, CA.
Eveland, W. P., Jr., & Dylko, I. (2006, November). Questioning the assumption of uniform effects of the news media: The moderating role of community and newspaper characteristics. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research, Chicago, IL.
Eveland, W. P., Jr., & Dylko, I. (2007). Reading political blogs during the 2004 election campaign: Correlates and consequences. In M. Tremayne (Ed.), Blogging, citizenship and the future of media (pp. 105-126). New York: Routledge.
Eveland, W. P., Jr., & Liu, Y.-I. (2005, August). Multilevel models of the impact of news use and news content characteristics on political knowledge and participation. Paper presented to the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, San Antonio, TX.
Shah, D. V., Cho, J., Eveland, W. P., Jr., & Kwak, N. (2005). Information and expression in a digital age: Modeling Internet effects on civic participation. Communication Research, 32, 531-565.
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