I reviewed the article titled, The Influence of Presumed Media Influence in Politics. Do politicians' perspectives on Media power matter? By: Jonathan Cohen, Yariv Tsfati, and Tamir Sheafer. It was published in Public Opinion Quarterly in the Summer of 2008.
The paper suggests that politicians are motivated and driven by their ability to get media coverage. While its an interesting topic I found the three hypotheses a little boring.
H1: Legislators' perceptions of media influence on the public will be associated with their media motivation and effort.
H2: Legislator's perceptions of media influence on other legislators will also be associated with such media motivation and effort.
H3: Legislators' media motivation and effort will be positively associated with the amount of coverage they receive.
H4: Legislators' media motivation and effort will be positively associated with the amount of their parliamentary activity.
I guess having covered lawmakers for many years you figure out how much they love the media and how much they can try to manipulate their message through the media. So it seemed to me these hypothesises were kind of obvious.
The researchers surveyed lawmakers in Israel about how media influenced them. They found all of the hypothesises were supported except H2. Their explanation for that is that they only asked one question on their survey regarding H2 and they felt like it wasn't focused enough for their hypothesis to be supported. It seems pretty weak to only have one question on a survey that can answer an entire hypothesis.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment