Making the News: Politics, the Media, and Agenda Setting

by Amber E. Boydstun

Media attention can play a profound role in whether or not officials act on a policy issue, but how policy issues make the news in the first place has remained a puzzle. Why do some issues go viral and then just as quickly fall off the radar? How is it that the media can sustain public interest for months in a complex story like negotiations over Obamacare while ignoring other important issues in favor of stories on “balloon boy?”

           
With Making the News , Amber Boydstun offers an eye-opening look at the explosive patterns of media attention that determine which issues are brought before the public. At the heart of her argument is the observation that the media have two an “alarm mode” for breaking stories and a “patrol mode” for covering them in greater depth. While institutional incentives often initiate alarm mode around a story, they also propel news outlets into the watchdog-like patrol mode around its policy implications until the next big news item breaks. What results from this pattern of fixation followed by rapid change is skewed coverage of policy issues, with a few receiving the majority of media attention while others receive none at all. Boydstun documents this systemic explosiveness and skew through analysis of media coverage across policy issues, including in-depth looks at the waxing and waning of coverage around two capital punishment and the “war on terror.”

           
Making the News shows how the seemingly unpredictable day-to-day decisions of the newsroom produce distinct patterns of operation with implications—good and bad—for national politics.

260 pages, Paperback

First published August 23, 2013

Reviews

[Manny]

I arrive for the yearly conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Berlin. The very first talk, by the author of this interesting-looking book, starts with a quotation from Lyin' Crooked Donald Trump. A little later, she uses the picture I put in this review.

Aaargh! It's like the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, you can't get away from him!

[Sreerupa Sanyal Mazumdar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, I quite liked the book. A caution first, the book is only not-fiction but academic non-fiction, so one has to approach it that way.

Therefore, if you do not read academic papers, or regularly, a lot of this book will be difficult to comprehend. However, if you are interested in how news is created and especially if you want to observe how media has been behaving post 2016-Trump victory, you need to read this book. Bodystun talks of a model of media activity that she calls the alarm/patrol model. Alarm and patrol model has been part of media studies and political communication studies for sometime, however according to the author only seeing alarm model and patrol model in isolation to each other does not do justice to media environment, hence this new plea to see them as one hybrid process.

What is this alarm/patrol model? If I give that away, would you even read the book?

[Tom Ransohoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I definitely learned a few things about how the media works, this book reads more like a graduate thesis than a book. The more interesting elements of the book were descriptions of the factors driving coverage of topics in the news, the potential impact of the internet on the "skew and explosiveness" of news coverage, and interviews/comments from Boydstun's sources who work in newsrooms of major papers. Unfortunately, far more space was devoted to details of the statistical analysis methods and assumptions used, which is of less interest to the general reader. This book is probably better suited to those with deep interest in analysis methods for predicting trends in media coverage.

[Dee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having never taken a political science class, I was concerned that I might have to do a lot of researching of specific terms common to poli sci folk in order to keep up with the book. That wasn't the case at all. Boydstun's writing is so concise and carefully worded, that, though the book is full of concepts that were new to me, and dense with ideas, it was also surprisingly accessible. And even witty at times. Which was refreshing considering there were some very grim media stories that were used as examples.

Perhaps most impressively, the author managed to make me feel caught up to speed with political science concepts well enough to feel engaged in the arguments that were being presented in the book. It can be such a delicate balancing act to write to a wide audience without watering down concepts or sounding condescending, but she succeeded brilliantly. Even with an admirable, subtle humor at moments, which kept me wanting to read more. That's a step above!