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"In an ideal world, journalists act selflessly and in the public interest regardless of the financial consequences. However, in reality, news outlets no longer provide the most important and consequential stories to audiences; instead, news producers adjust news content in response to ratings, audience demographics, and opinion polls. While such criticisms of the news media are widely shared, few can agree on the causes of poor news quality. The People's News argues that the incentives in the American free market drive news outlets to report news that meets audience demands, rather than democratic ideals. In short, audiences' opinions drive the content that so often passes off as "the news." The People's News looks at news not as a type of media but instead as a commodity bought and sold on the market, comparing unique measures of news content to survey data from a wide variety of sources. Joseph Uscinski's rigorous analysis shows news firms report certain issues over others - not because audiences need to know them, but rather, because of market demands. Uscinski also demonstrates that the influence of market demands also affects the business of news, prohibiting journalists from exercising independent judgment and determining the structure of entire news markets as well as firm branding. Ultimately, the results of this book indicate profit-motives often trump journalistic and democratic values. The findings also suggest that the media actively responds to audiences, thus giving the public control over their own information environment. Uniting the study of media effects and media content, The People's News presents a powerful challenge to our ideas of how free market media outlets meet our standards for impartiality and public service. Joseph Uscinski is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami"--

In the years since 9/11, conspiracy theories have regained prominence in much of the American public's imagination. But why do many so readily embrace certain conspiracy theories, often in the face of a profound lack of evidence? Joseph E. Uscinski argues that in order for a person to believe in a conspiracy theory, that person must first have a worldview that encompasses conspiratorial thinking, and second, the theory must be in accord with their other predispositions.

Objective. The agenda‐setting literature has demonstrated the media's ability to set the issue agenda for the public. One byproduct of this work is that researchers have produced some evidence suggesting that the audience will, on occasion, set the issue agenda for the media. Given disparate sets of findings, researchers do not have a framework to better understand on which issues the media will set the agenda for the public and on which issues the public will set the agenda for the media. It is the goal of this article to provide empirical support for a framework suggesting that the events comprising issue areas predetermine the direction of influence between the media's and the public's issue agendas.Methods. I construct a historical data set comprised of 35,000 stories from the nightly network news and responses to Gallup's Most Important Problem question. I look for evidence of causal influence between news issue content and public issue concerns using Granger analysis and vector autoregression.Results. Issue areas comprised of spectacular events, such as defense, will be reported by the media and subsequently affect the salience the audience assigns to those issues. In issues not normally comprised of spectacular and singular events, such as energy and environment, public issue concerns appear to drive issue coverage in the news. Issues such as transportation and education, which comprise few spectacular events and little public concern, will receive sparse coverage in the media.Conclusion. The findings provide support for a framework based on events; the types of events that typically comprise issue areas will affect the likelihood of those issues coming on the news agenda. This then affects the direction of influence between the public and the media. The framework supported here allows for the integration of the media effects and media content literatures. This has implications for understanding how the news agenda is constructed and how the commercial media meets democratic ideals.

Objective.Researchers have examined the social meaning of political cinema; however, little research places film into its contemporary political and economic context. Therefore, I examine the timing of the production and release of presidential cinema.Methods.The data are comprised of major motion picture releases from the years 1953–2004 that include a U.S. president as a character. Regression analysis is used to determine how the temporal release of movies featuring a president corresponds to social realities.Results.I find that the release of presidential cinema is correlated with the party that controls the actual White House and with the number of consecutive terms that the same party has been in the White House. More films with presidents are released during Democratic administrations than during Republican administrations and more films with presidents are released during first rather than second terms. This appears more acute during presidential election years. The state of the national economy affects the release of presidential cinema as well. Strong economies lead to the release of more films with presidents.Conclusions.This suggests that popular film content is affected not only by filmmaker whim and creativity, but also by measurable contemporary political and economic conditions. Future studies investigating film content should account for how national trends affect popular entertainment.

Objective. Previous research has found that early election‐night projections can have a depressing effect on turnout in presidential elections. Although this effect has been found to be small in the past, it may be enough to sway state outcomes and, potentially, the final outcomes of close presidential and other elections. Therefore, this article analyzes the election‐night presidential projections of the three major cable news networks in 2000 and 2004 to examine the forces that lead to the timing of election‐night calls.Method. I collect the on‐air projection times of the cable news networks from videotapes, transcripts, and network documents. I apply duration analysis, specifically Cox models, to examine the forces that lead networks to make projections when they do.Results. Results of duration analysis indicate that while the cable networks timed their state‐by‐state projections primarily on the competitiveness of the state presidential races, network competition appears to drive projections at the beginning of election night. Furthermore, I find that early in the night in 2000, the cable networks appeared to call states sooner for Al Gore than for George W. Bush when controlling for the competitiveness of the state presidential races.Conclusions. This article provides support for Republican allegations of biased election‐night projections in 2000. However, it appears that because the networks amended their election‐night procedures, there were no miscalls or differences in how cable networks called states for the two presidential candidates in 2004.

Even though climate scientists are nearly unanimous that climate change is real and manmade, about 40% of Americans reject the scientific consensus. Why? The largest contributing factor is partisanship; however, recent studies argue that underlying conspiracy thinking exerts a positive, linear effect on climate change denial. In this article, we reexamine the effect of conspiracy thinking on climate change attitudes by accounting for the various pathways that conspiracy thinking could drive denialism in a politically polarized environment. We find the effects of conspiracy thinking on climate change denial are not only larger than previously suggested, but also non-monotonic and conditional on individuals' party identification. Moreover, we find evidence suggesting conspiracy thinking affects independents' positions, and even their partisan leanings. These findings further explain why people reject the scientific consensus on climate change, and suggest that climate change denial is not merely the product of partisan polarization.

AbstractIn May 2012, political scientists learned of efforts by representative Jeff Flake (R-AZ) to eliminate political science funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) budget. The American Political Science Association (APSA) was caught off-guard, and concerned political scientists scrambled to contact their representatives and urge the amendment's defeat. Flake's initial effort to cut funds overall from the NSF was defeated, but a second measure, specifically to keep the NSF from funding political science, passed only hours later. This was the second time in three years that legislators targeted the NSF Political Science Program. Although these measures have been sponsored and widely supported by Republicans, some Democrats have supported these measures as well. This article examines the vote on the Flake Amendment to understand why individual representatives voted for or against cutting NSF funding for political science research.