Final Project - Agenda-setting

8/2/2019 Final Project - Agenda-setting

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UNIVERSITAT POMPEU FABRA Master of Research in Political Science

Whocontrols the agenda-setting?

Content analysis of the sources in the news published by Catalan media

The news is not a mirror of social conditions,

but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself

Walter Lippmann

Marc Martnez Amat

Supervisor: Robert Fishman


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INTRODUCTION

How would it be a world without newspapers? This is a current question that

nowadays rises when the press faces a double crisis: the economical global recession

that have damaged most of the companies in the planet in the recent months, and a

structural crisis due to the gradual drops in readers in the recent years. It is within this

dark scenario when the existential question marks hang over. This was also the initial

question posed, a few weeks ago, in a master class conducted by the university

professor Albert Saez, who has managed several Catalan media such as the papers

Avui and El Peridico, as well as the public group that includes Catalunya Radio and

TV3. In his answer to this question he highlighted that the functions by which the press

was conceived were to democratize knowledge, to share information among a society

and to advertise products. Saez quoted Alexis de Tocqueville, who in the XIX Century

claimed that without newspapers, there is no chance for a representative democracy;

and without democracy, newspapers are worthless.

No doubt democracy expect from the press to represent the voice of the people and to

challenge the political power, considering that the citizens only cast a vote every four

years. Media is supposed to favor a marketplace of ideas to debate, to raise public

concerns and to point out deficits in the system. The American system of checks and

balances constitutes the clearest declaration of intentions: with the First Amendment

of the Constitution, the press emerges as the fourth branch of the government to

check the other three in what has been called the watchdog role.

This noble mission entrusted to journalist chases with the reality: the administration,

parties, companies and even the social organizations have developed strategists to

provide biased information, prepared stories ready to be published and willing to

dominate the public agenda. In a metaphorical sense, public and private institutions

deliver every day tasty fast-food to journalists in order to prevent them to prepare

their own healthy dishes. So who controls the diet? Is it balanced?


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The struggle between journalists and officials to control the public opinion has two

rounds: the agenda-setting and the framing (what to be explained and how to explain

it). This paper focuses on the former.

In this context, journalists also face the handicap of working close to the same voices

that they have to check. They are supposed to critically interpret the performance of

individuals who, at the same time, are the gatekeepers of concealed information that

the professionals will seek. The adversarial role of press merges into the interaction

(and sometimes cooperation) between political actors and newsmakers.

Following the indexing hypothesis by Lance Bennett about the media dependence on

official sources, the aim of this paper is to provide an empirical instrument to

determine whether the political actors or the journalists have more say in the agenda-

setting process. It will also take into account to what extend media include unofficial

voices in the news to enrich their information with more sources than the official

version. The research is based on the stories published by the main Catalan

newspapers, radio stations and television.

In the next pages, firstly a theoretical framework on the journalists role and

boundaries and on the agenda-setting function will be exposed. Afterwards, there are

the methodology of the research and its findings of the content analysis. And finally,

some conclusions are drawn.


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THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Agenda setting is conceived to be one of the main functions of the press in a

democratic state, as well as becoming a platform for the popular voice to gain visibility

and be a messenger of social concerns between the folks and the power institutions.

Regarding the expectations that democracy has on the media, Michael Gurevitch and

Jay G. Blumler suggest some principles:

1. Surveillance of the sociopolitical environment, reporting developments likely to

impinge, positively or negatively, on the welfare of the citizens.

2. Meaningful agenda-setting, identifying the key issues of the day, including the

forces that have formed and may resolve them.

3. Platforms for an intelligible and illuminating advocacy by politicians and

spokespersons of other causes and interests groups.

4. Dialogue across a diverse range of views, as well as between power holders

(actual and prospective) and mass publics.

5. Mechanisms for holding officials to account for how they have exercised

power.

6. Incentives for citizens to learn, choose, and become involved, rather than

merely to follow and kibitz over the political process.

7. A principled resistance to the efforts of forces outside the media to subvert

their independence, integrity, and ability to serve the audience.

8. A sense of respect for the audience member, as potentially concerned and able

to make sense of his or her political environment.


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However, the scholars also admit that the objective is not easy and several obstacles

hinter it, such as the conflict among democratic values, the distance of the political

communicators from the ordinary people and the heterogeneous audiences.

Models of journalism

Doris A. Graber adapted the interpretation of the classical two press philosophies: the

libertarian and the social responsible (Siebert, Peterson and Schramm 1956). According

to him, from a libertarian approach, news could be anything that seems important or

interesting to the media audiences, and should be reported without any attempt to

convey a particular point of view. Libertarians believe -he holds- that teaching is not

the medias chef task nor is their responsibility to question the truth, accuracy or

merits of the information supplied by their sources (it is left to news audience).

On the other hand, those in favor of the social responsibility philosophy defend that

newsmakers should be participants in the political process, not merely reporters of the

passing scene. They should foster political action when necessary by publicizing social

evils, and deny exposure to undesirable viewpoints and questionable accusations. They

should try to discover and publicize information that the suspect the government is

hiding. The critics of the social responsibility model highlights that journalists do not

have the mandate to act as arbiters of social values and policies, which legitimacy

comes only from being elected by the people or appointed by elected officials.

Graber goes further and describe five visions of news making, none of which excludes

the others but completes them:

- The mirror model: news is a reflection of the reality, and journalists do not

make news but just report it. They impartially report all significant happenings

that come to their attention. Its critics points out that this vision is unrealistic,

due to the inevitable task of the journalist to determine the relative

newsworthiness of events to report it.


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- The professional model: news making is an endeavor of highly skilled

professionals who put together a balanced and collage of events selected for

importance and attractiveness to specific media audiences. There is no

pretense that the end product mirrors the world.

- The organizational model: also called bargaining model, believes that the

pressures inherent in organizational processes and goals determine which

items will be published. These pressures spring from interpersonal relations

among journalists and between them and their information sources, from

professional norms, constraints from technical processes, cost-benefit

considerations and legal regulations.

- The political model: assumes that all the news reflects the ideological biases of

individual newspeople as well as the pressures of the political environment in

which the news organization operates. The media covers high-status people

and approved institutions; everything remoted from the centers of power are

generally ignored or pictured as bad guys, in opposition to good guys, who are

the supporters of the prevailing system.

- Civic journalism: or public journalism, became popular in 1990 from the

distrust from media and government and the concern that average citizen

participate in public affairs. It believes that press can discover citizens concern

and then write stories that help audiences play and active role in public life.

Journalists must explain public policies in an understandable language and

facilitate a public dialogue open to the diverse views.


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Attitudes of the press

Two views of journalism are opposed when it comes to evaluate its attitude towards

the news sources and the selection of voices. Thomas E. Patterson distinguishesbetween the passive and the active role of the journalists as regard for his autonomy

as political actors. According to him, the passive journalist is one who acts as the

instrument of actors outside the news system, such as government officials, party

leaders, and interest group advocates. The journalist takes his cues from these actors,

rather than operating independently. In contrast, the active journalist is one who is

more fully a participant in his or her own right, actively shaping, interpreting or

investigating political subjects.

A second dimension that Patterson identifies is the neutral-advocate axis. He defines

the neutral journalist as that who does not take sides in political debate, except for a

preference for good (clean, honest) government as opposed to bad (corrupt,

incompetent) government. The neutral journalist does not routinely and consistently

take sides in partisan or policy disputes. In contrast, the advocate journalist takes sides

in a consistent and substantial way. The sides do not have to correspond necessarily to

opposing political parties, but it could be the same than a particular ideology or group.

After applying these two dimensions to his study on five nations journalists, the

scholar concluded that they are largely independent one from the other, and there is

virtually no correlation. An advocate role conception is not associated to an active role

conception; despite it might be assumed initially. He came to the conclusion that there

are four combinations that include nearly all the role conceptions of the journalists:

passive-neutral (neutral reporter, mirror, common carrier, disseminator, broker,

messenger); passive-advocate (hack reporter, partisan press); active-neutral (critic,

adversary, watchdog, Fourth Estate, progressive reporter); and active-advocate

(ideologue, missionary).


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Newsmakers boundaries

A realistic approach is that taken by Walter Lippmann, who claims that there is a very

direct relationship between the certainty of news and the system of record. In hisopinion, the hypothesis that seems more fertile is that the news and the truth are not

the same thing: the function of the former is to signalize events and that of the latter is

to bring to light the hidden facts. The press can fight for the extension of reportable

truth but it is not constituted to furnish every day the amount of knowledge that the

democratic theory of the public opinion demand. The scholar judges as false the

theory that the press can itself record the governing forces, because it can normally

record only what has been recorded for it by the working of institutions.

Daniel J. Boorstin uses the concept pseudo-event to describe the happenings

organized by sources to become news. According to his description, a pseudo-event

has 4 characteristics:

1. It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned,

planted or incited it. It could not be an earthquake but an interview.

2. It is planted primarily (but not always exclusively) for the intermediate

purpose of being reported or reproduced. Its occurrence is arranged for the

convenience of media, and its success is measured by how widely it is

reported. If is valued by its newsworthiness rather than its reality.

3. Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous. Without

some of this ambiguity, a pseudo-event cannot be very interesting.

4. Usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Boorstin states that in the last times a larger proportion of what we read and see and

hear has come to consist of pseudo-events, which flood our consciousness.


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Connected to pseudo-events, there is also a genre of news which is based on officials

declarations. These sentences have the virtue that they are not nonsensical and yet

they are neither true, nor false. J. L. Austin classifies them asperformative utterances,

and those who pronounce them would be said that are doing something rather thanjust saying something. The first rule for the effectiveness of performative language is

that conventional procedures must exist and be accepted. And the second one is that

the circumstances in which it is invoked must be the appropriate.

Media provide these conventional procedures required to this kind of utterances to be

effective. According to Timothy E. Cook, performative language is handy both for

officials and reporters. For journalists, it allows them to produce an account without

laborious, time-consuming fact-checking. And for officials, doing something through

words has the satisfaction of accomplishing something quickly and directly.

In a very crude analysis, Jarol B. Manheim highlights the gap between the myths of

journalism (the view of news as natural events and a form of inquiry, and the

conception of journalists as deep-earth miners who find the truth) and the reality

(journalists are truly vulnerable due to their genuine and predictable internal

pressures, their regularities and their dependence on the most superficial forms of

information gathering). He believes that the commercial nature of the media

organizations lead to seek for predictability to reduce risks, and it implies that

daybooks, rolodexes, and new routines are far more important in shaping news

coverage than are investigation and original discovery.

Coalition journalism

The traditional view of media-policy relationship is the muckraking model: the

investigative journalist discovers the evidence of a problem and publishes it, which

mobilizes public opinion, which leads to public initiative and finally has a policy

consequence. In opposition to this paradigm, Harvey L. Molotch, David L. Protess and

Margaret T. Gordon contrast another connection between journalists and politicalactors through an ecological orientation, which they label the coalition journalism.


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According to them, outside manipulations of the information are the rule and not the

exception, as the routine of many people working as public relations professionals,

savvy politicians or dutiful bureaucrats is to structure media exposure possibilities. The

policy actors goal is to foster an image of responsiveness to head off potentiallydamaging implications of inefficiency, corruption or incompetence; so they find their

interest better served by joining in a journalistic investigation. The result of this is a

logrolling process between journalists and political actors. Participation of policy actors

in building stories can become a fully conscious effort in which both types of actors

form concrete coalitions.

Doris A. Graber, Denis McQuail and Pippa Norris frame the role of the journalist to gain

access to information as part of an evolving ecology of games, in which every actor

(journalists and their sources) continuously try to anticipate each others moves and

whose activities are mutually constituted. As it happens in these gaming situations, the

payoffs for each group vary from game to game, but zero-sum games are rare.

Compromises in the struggle to control news are easy to make as different actors

share interests, as well as they also conflict. They are interdependent despite they

could survive without each other.

These scholars also believe that journalists rely heavily on political actors as sources.

They use information controlled by the executive and the legislative branches, by

administrative personnel, and from experts by official and semi-official organizations.

They claim that it is difficult to dig out some of this information by the investigative

journalists without the aid of insiders. At the same time, political actors need

journalists to disseminate their messages to large audiences and to other elites. But

they also require some control over the flow of messages about them that find their

way into the news. Eventually, policy advocates devote more energy to keeping news

away from media than on gaining access to them. The result of this mutual

interdependence is the necessity to bargain, and each part receives and grants

concessions in return for influence over the news product.


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Political and economical constraints

Doris A. Graber assumes that media have the marks of political and economical

pressures. The later conditions the product, which have to be appealing to the largerpotential public. And due to the former, news makers depend on political leaders for

information and thus they become vulnerable to their manipulation. Self-serving

stories from powerful elites are hard to resist; and intensive, frequent contacts

between journalists and leaders and a desire of cordiality may lead to cozy

relationships which runs in the opposite direction of any detachment. Wooing

reporters to have favorable media coverage is a common resource of the astute

politician, and journalists often succumb to the blandishments of politicians for fear of

alienating powerful news sources.

Timothy E. Cook provides some examples of the ways in which government try to

control the media. The author suggests, from the studies carried out in 1950s and

1960s, that there is a disjunctive between officials pursuit of secrecy to preserve

maximum leeway and reporters devotion to publicity to write new stories. According

to him, the risk of derailing an initiative through their negative coverage is higher than

the probability to assure its success by favorable coverage. Nonetheless, this risk is

taken by the officials because making news can also be making policy though words,

they can call attention to their preferred issues and can persuade others to adopt their

position.

All the public institutions have personnel to deal with media and guide their coverage

in an optimal direction for their own policy interests (governing with the news, Cook

states). As for the presidents influence in media, they do not have to seek out for

opportunities, they have news to come to them. So they can dictate the terms of

access due to their near-automatic news value. Reporters are dependent on

presidents cooperation, and they are prisoners in a hermetic press room, which makes

news management easier for his office. A reporter could be in last term sanctioned

withfreezing out, but it is rarely used. Instead, presidents gear their media operationstoward serving reporters anticipating questions in news conferences, designing


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prescheduled events and providing frequent access to the president. He has the

monopoly over good information and the ability to regulate access to the key

newsmaker.

As regards the parliament, Cook highlights that some MPs are media entrepreneurs,

who make the conscious decision to court the media attention (which not just

happens but it must be solicited). Their success depends on becoming a credible

spokesperson in a policy arena. Their pursuit is not only gaining news coverage but

influencing policy, which do not depend on the amount of attention.

Criticism on media

A demolishing analysis of the media power to frame the news is done by Thomas E.

Patterson, who highlights the tendency of journalists to make a negative coverage of

politicians. He sentences that the press sends the wrong message and journalists are

the problem. According to him, its claim that candidates make promises in order to win

votes is true, but that is only part of the truth, as they make them but also work to

keep them. And he thinks that journalists fail to take into account the constraints to

these commitments. Patterson attributes this anti-political bias of journalists (the

muckraking influence) to Progressive movement, the reform which took place in

United States in the turn of the 20th

Century and reduced the power of political parties

in favor of a more divided government and a more participative society. His conclusion

is that US cannot have a sensible campaign as long as is built around the news media.

In the same direction, Pippa Norris analyses the media malaise concept, used in the

1960s to describe the negative impact of the press and the party campaigns in the civic

engagement. She distinguishes between cultural accounts, related to the lessons the

American journalism took from Watergate and Vietnam cases which lead to an

adversarial role versus power; and campaign accounts, referring to the growth of

political marketing. According to the political scientist, the European literature on

media malaise stresses the blame on the rise of the political marketing for growingpublic cynicism about political leaders and institutions, whose credibility would be


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undermined by the techniques of spin, selling, and persuasion of catch-all parties

adopting whatever slogan.

Agenda-setting theories

As we saw, in terms of Gurevitch and Blumler, agenda-setting is conceived to be one of

the main functions of journalism. Walter Lippmann is supposed to be the precursor to

theorize the concept in his essay Public Opinion (1922), in which explained how

indirectly we know our environment, that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we

treat as if it were the environment itself. According to him, what each men does is

based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given

to him.

Later on, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw proved a correspondence between

what media inform on and what people concerns about. It was during the 1968 US

presidential campaign. The surveys they carried out reflected a perfect

correspondence between the ranking of the major issues on the press and the public

agendas, and they used the term agenda setting to describe it.

An example of this in Catalonia can be found in list of main worries of the citizens in

the surveys carried out by the Centre dEstudis dOpini (CEO), a public organism

depending in the Generalitat. Recent surveys indicated that concerns on an issue, such

as the relationship between Catalonia and Spain or the situation of the infrastructures,

appear and rise when the topic is notorious in the public agenda due to tensions

between both governments or the sum of incidents (reported by the media) in the

railway services. A clear example of that happened in April of 2008, when the political

and media debate on the drought boosted the worries about the issue to be the main

problem for the 43% of the citizens. They were alarmed even considering that few

restrictions on water consume were being applied. This concern had never before

been on the top list of worries up to that moment and later on, in the next surveys of

the CEO, move down to insignificant positions and disappeared.


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The indexing hypothesis

Lance Bennett did an important contribution to the theories on the agenda-setting role

of the media when he claimed the indexing hypothesis in 1990. Their starting point isthat mass media in United States look to government officials as the main source of

most of the mainly news the report. He states that journalists tend to index the

range of voices and viewpoints in news according to the range of views expressed in

mainstream government debate about a given topic. And unofficial voices are included

when express opinions already emerging in official circles. In short, the scholar

concludes that media have assumed a comfortable role as keeper of the official

record while abdicating its traditional mandate to be an independent voice of the

people.

Bennett establishes three possible causes to this phenomenon: the will of the media to

safeguard the business climate by providing a virtual news monopoly to the public

officials; the consequence of the transactional or symbiotic relations between

journalists and officials; and the result of a democratic responsible fashion which

advocates favoring the views of public officials, as they are representatives of the

people. The as evidences he presents to prove his hypothesis are the correspondence

between the political discussion about given international affairs, such as the war in El

Salvador in 1982, and the news highlight on these conflicts only while the national

debate lasts.

A redefinition of Bennetts hypothesis by Scott L. Althaus, Jill A. Edy et al. claims that

the normative worry is whether the media discourse is so constrained by the

boundaries of debate among political elites that the public remains poorly informed,

its voice silent or reduced to granting manipulated consent. Its consequences would be

that official debate sets the parameters of media debate and establishes the agenda of

public discussion on one hand; and that the proportions of pro and anti administration

commentary and others positions reflected in the news closely reflect the distribution

of views expressed among officials on the other hand.


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This concept has been used as an indicator in empirical researches such as the

comparative study between the French and the American press carried out by Rodney

Benson and Daniel C. Hallin in 2007. After analyzing the political information in LeMonde, Le Figaro and The New York Times in 1960s and 1990s, they concluded that

there is slightly less indexing to the viewpoints of political elites in the French press

than in the American one; and that the reliance on political elite sources increased in

both between 60s and 90s. The results were that political elites make up 52,3% of all

viewpoints presented in the French press versus 63% for the US press during the 60s,

and the 63,7% versus the 696% respectively in the 90s. Civil society actors, especially

trade unions, are more visible in French press than in the American one. And

academics are better represented in France, too. The comparative research also

included content analysis at the level of the story: dominant schema, tone and topic.

Another referent for this study has been carried out by the Project for Excellence in

Journalism in the city of Baltimore. It examined the all the outlets that produced local

news in the city and tracked every piece of content these outlets produced for three

days during a week. The findings indicated that local TV newsrooms produced more

content than any other sector, followed closely by newspapers.

On local television, fully 23% of stories studied were about crime, twice as many as

other subject. In newspapers (online and print) coverage of crime was almost matched

by that of government and closely followed by business and education. On radio in

Baltimore, by contrast, government was the No. 1 topic. New media was most often

focused on government.

According to the study, government initiated most of the news. In the detailed

examination of six major storylines, 63% of the stories were initiated by government

officials, led first of all by the police. Another 14% came from the press. Interest group

made up most of the rest.


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METHODOLOGY

The precursor scholar on the agenda-setting empiricism, Maxwell McCombs, stated:

Reviewing the front pages of a newspaper over a period of time will reveal that

newspapers agenda. Additional information about the position of issues in the

newspaper agenda is provided by such cues as the size of headlines for individual

articles, the length of articles, and the page numbers on which articles appear. There

are similar patterns of coverage in television news program and other mass media.

This exercise is the observation that inspires this research.

The object of the paper is to quantify the weight of the official sources (those coming

from the political power) in the agenda of the media. The research hypothesis is that

most of the news in the Catalan public agenda is based on official versions, similarly to

what is proved in the Baltimore study and the French-American press comparative

research.

The independent variables of the research are the pieces of news, the stories,

published in the main conventional media in Catalonia during a period of time. The

Baltimore study took into account the stories produced by media during three days of

a week. This paper has selected the stories of two days: Monday the 31st

of May and

Tuesday the 1st

of June of 2010.

The research only included in the analysis hard news, that is those contained in

politics, economy or society sections, or the same issues published in audiovisual

media. We excluded soft news, and also international and culture sections, as I

consider that they are based in other kind of news sources that could deserve a further

research.

For the analysis, I selected the four newspapers with mainly the same edition in the

whole land of Catalonia which have at least 100.000 readers of average (source:

Fundacc). They are El Peridico, La Vanguardia, Avui and El Pas. The latter only

dedicate few pages to the Catalan information (the section Catalunya), so we will


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only include this information to the analysis just as the other hard news edited in

Barcelona.

We also included the three largest radio stations in Catalonia: RAC1, Catalunya Rdioand Cadena SER, whose audiences are between 400.000 and 500.000 listeners, far

above from any other (source: EGM). In the former two, I analyzed the information

provided in the prime time hour (from 7 to 8am), while in SER the selection of stories

studied were those in 7pm, as it is the only hour exclusively dedicated to Catalan

information.

In the case of the television, only TV3 has been analyzed, as it is the unique channel

with news programs dedicated to Catalan information or exclusively edited in

Catalonia. In this case, I studied the TN Migdia, on of the two news program with

more viewers in Catalonia during the day (source: Sofres).

The amount of stories collected from these 8 outlets is 337, distributed as it follows:

Table 1. Stories collected for the study by media, outlet and day

Monday Tuesday Total

Total 142 195 337

Newspapers 96 148 244

Radio 35 29 64media

TV 11 18 29

Avui 29 39 68

Catalunya Rdio 13 11 24

El Pas 10 15 25

El Peridico 32 47 79

La Vanguardia 25 47 72

RAC1 13 8 21

SER 9 10 19

outlet

TV3 11 18 29

The main criteria to process the news information are the number of stories. This

introduces a bias, since the analysis is not centered in the length or the position of the

information. However, data regarding the size of the articles, the attachment of


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pictures and whether they are on the front page or in the summaries of news

programs have been included.

The stories from the media have been coded according to the following dependentvariables:

- Main source: Identification of the source that has triggered each story or, at

least, its headline. Sources have been coded, similarly than in the French-

American press study, into the following categories: executive

branch/administration (include the governments, the officials of the

administration, the public agencies, the police officials... ); legislative

branch/parties (the parliaments, the lawmakers, the party leaders and

spokespersons...); judicial sources (courts, indictments... ); business (the

companies, the employers... ); social organizations (NGOs, trade unions,

universities, ...); individual citizens; foreign sources (international organizations

and institutions from abroad) and media (self-elaborated information).

- Inclusion of unofficial voices: Whether the story contains sources unrelated to

the political power (executive, legislative or judicial branch).

- Publication of new information: Whether the story reveal information on an

issue unrevealed up to the date.

- Publication of a new story: Whether the story comes up with an issue never

published up to the date.

Despite other variables have been coded, I finally left aside other data such as the

localization of the stories (whether in Barcelona-Catalonia or Madrid-Spain) or other

concerning the framing of news (whether their headlines were interpretative,

performative or fact-centered; and their positive/negative/neutral tone), which could

be worth material for a further research.


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FINDINGS

Once concluded the fieldwork, the results showed a notable difference of the variables

observed depending on the media. The main variable was the distribution of sources in

general, from the 337 pieces of news analyzed:

Graph 1. Distribution of the main sources of news in all media observed

1,19%

5,93%

1,48%

13,95%

18,99%

7,12%16,62%

34,72%

Media

Foreign sources

Individual citizens

Socialorganizations

Business

Judicial branch

Legislative branch/ parties

Executive branch /administration

Main source

The distribution reflects a huge attention of media to the power to explain hard news.

Almost the 50 per cent of the stories had the executive or the legislative branches as

the basic source of the news. This includes mainly politicians (from the government

and from the parties) but also officials from the administration (police, technicians ...).

So they are almost the exclusive source in politics information, but also in economical

and social sections. Police reports are raw material for social reporters, but also in

items such as the World Smokefree Day the studies provided by the public


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administration reach the society pages of newspapers and the news programs on TV

and radio.

The third branch of the power, the information from courts and from judicialdocuments, is included in all the sections (712%). On the other side, separated from

the power, business sources become relevant (1899%), especially in newspapers as

we will see-, which dedicate exclusive pages to the economic activity (alliances,

nominations, results...). They predominate over social organizations information,

which do not have fix spaces. Both contribute to a third of the news.

Even leaving apart the international sections, foreign sources have also a say in stories

classified by papers as social or economic issues (593%). The clear example in the

analyzed period is the spilling of oil in the Mexican Gulf, which was included in the

society sections. Aside from the organizations, individual citizens constitute a little slice

of the information (148%), with stories that can denounce unfair situations, such as

the neighbor who is still waiting for the compensation from the government for the

blackout of the winter. Media source includes self-elaborated information that outlets

generate from surveys or information of themselves (119%).

Obviously, not all the stories are dedicated the same space or time in the media.

Taking exclusively into consideration those which appeared in the front page of the

newspapers and were explained in the initial summaries of the TV and radio news

program, we observe that the importance of the executive branch is higher (4833%),

and also the legislative sources (20%). Judicial sources remain stable (667%). On the

other hand, companies (833%) and social organizations (1333%) drop in the first

headlines of the media. The other sort of sources accounts for less than 5% of the top

stories (334%).

If we focus exclusively on the newspapers to analyze the distribution of the main

sources of the stories, we realize that there is also a predominant dependence on

official versions from the executive and legislative powers, and that the most

distinguishing feature is a huge salience of business sources:


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20

Graph 2. Distribution of the main sources of news in newspapers

Media

Foreignsources

Individualcitizens

Socialorganizations

Business

Judicialbranch

Legislativebranch/parties

Executivebranch/Administration

main source

30

20

10

0

Percent

1,64% 0,82%

6,15%13,52%

24,18%

7,79%

14,75%

31,15%

Essentially, business sources are found in the section of economy, in which

newspapers dedicate bites to the information related to companies activities.

However, the sources of power are also present in the section, for instance,

concerning the negotiation of the government with the social agents for the labor

reform. An evidence of this claiming is the analysis of the main sources of the

newspapers by sections (which excludes El Pas, as it uses a different classification in

sections for the information):

Table 2. Distribution of the main sources of news in newspapers by sections

Mean(3 papers)

Economy Politics Society

Executive branch / Administration 30,5% 23,3% 30,0% 38,8%

Legislative branch / parties 13,6% 2,2% 46,0% 6,3%

Judicial branch 7,3% 5,6% 6,0% 10,0%

Business 25,9% 60,0% 3,8%

Social organizations 13,6% 4,4% 14,0% 23,8%

Individual citizens 1,8% 4,0% 2,5%

Foreign sources 6,8% 4,4% 13,8%

Media 0,5% 1,3%


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The weight of the executive branch is considerable in all the three sections (between

20 and 40%). Meanwhile in Politics the legislative branch is the elemental source for

nearly most of the stories and the same happens with business in Economy; in

Society the government is the main source (even in a strongest position than in

Politics). Companies trigger about two thirds of the information in Economy, but

they have little influence in the other two sections.

Displaying the analysis by outlet, we realize that there is no homogeneity but slightly

differences among them:

Table 3. Distribution of the main sources of news in newspapers by outlet

Avui El Pas El Peridico La Vanguardia

Executive branch / Administration 23,5% 36,0% 32,9% 34,7%

Legislative branch / parties 17,6% 24,0% 17,7% 5,6%

Judicial branch 7,4% 12,0% 8,9% 5,6%

Business 23,5% 12,0% 17,7% 36,1%

Social organizations 20,6% 12,0% 10,1% 11,1%

Individual citizens 3,8% 1,4%

Foreign sources 7,4% 7,6% 5,6%

Media 4,0% 1,3%

In all the cases the executive and legislative branches together dominate the news

sources, whose presence oscillate between 60% in El Pas and 40% in La Vanguardia.

Only inAvuiand in La Vanguardia the weight of the economical information (between

20% and 40%) is as high that the sum of social organizations and business sources,

which led to a superiority of the socioeconomic over the official voices. In both

newspapers, business world provide the main sources for the same or more news than

the government. However, as we saw, from this result could not be extracted the

conclusion that companies influence the framing of the whole reality in these outlets,

but that the business world has more visibility in their economical pages than any

other institution.


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These figures remain similar even if we exclude the brief bites of information and we

focus only on the big issues leading the pages of the newspapers. On the other hand,

in El Pas and El Peridico the higher presence of information concerning the

parliaments and the parties and the lower attention to business inverts the tendencyof the other two papers. Social organizations only trigger about the 10% of the stories

in El Peridico, La Vanguardia and El Pas, and the 20% in Avui. Other sorts of sources

are more irrelevant (under the 10%).

Anyhow we should not forget that the analysis ofEl Pais only includes the information

from the section Catalunya and any other political, social or economical story edited

from Barcelona in the newspaper. This could mislead any conclusion applied to the

whole newspaper.

The predominance of political voices in the Catalan radio stations is even higher:

Graph 3. Distribution of the main sources of news on the radio

Foreignsources

Media

Socialorganizations

Business

Judicialbranch



main source

50

40

30

20

10

0

Percent

4,69%3,12%9,38%

6,25%

6,25%21,88%

48,44%


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About two thirds of the information in the prime time of the radio is triggered by

official sources (mainly the executive, which constitutes about a half). Any other sort ofsources reaches the 10% of the stories. The other distinctive feature of the information

in this media is that in the socioeconomic environment, the salience of social

organizations is higher than the business sources.

The patters are similar in the three main radio stations of the country:

Table 4. Distribution of the main sources of news on the radio by outlet

CatalunyaRdio

RAC1 SER

Executive branch / Administration 45,8% 42,9% 57,9%

Legislative branch / parties 25,0% 23,8% 15,8%

Judicial branch 4,2% 9,5% 5,3%

Business 4,2% 4,8% 10,5%

Social organizations 12,5% 4,8% 10,5%

Foreign sources 8,3% 4,8%

Media 9,5%

Between the 65 and the 75% of the stories on the radio are based mainly in official

information coming from the administration or the lawmakers. Companies and social

organizations constitute only around 10 and 15% of the sources and they are balanced,

except in the public station, where business has a little weigh. Apart from these

general tendencies, few other conclusions could be reached as we only have 64 cases

and the differences among.

In the public Catalan television, the distribution presents a high salience of social

organizations:


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Graph 4. Distribution of the main sources of news in TV3

Foreignsources

Individualcitizens

Socialorganizations

Business

Judicialbranch



main source

40

30

20

10

0

Percent

6,9%

3,45%

27,59%

3,45%3,45%

20,69%

34,48%

Social organizations are by far the main socioeconomic source and have a similar

relevance than the government and higher than the parties and the parliaments. As it

happened with the radio analysis, again these patterns are based on few cases, so the

inferences could have an important variation depending on the news of the day.

However, these cases still work if we use them to compare TV with the other media.

Another important variable observed in the research is how many stories contain

voices unrelated directly to the power, independently of which is their main source. A

423% of the stories include unofficial sources whereas a 577% does not. In a majority

of cases we see that stories only include official versions of the reality. When we detail

these data by media and outlet we see that the results are congruent with the main

sources of news we saw:


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Graph 5 and table 5. Use of unofficial sources in the stories by media and outlet

So the media in which socioeconomic sources triggered a strongest amount of stories

(La Vanguardia and Avui in business information, and TV3 with the social

organizations) are, as well, those in which unofficial voices have more a say. Radio

stations are in the queue when it comes to include unofficial voices, as they are also

the media with a higher salience of official sources.

Finally, with regard to the two last variables, we realize that newspapers are the

leaders when it comes to reveal new information or come out new stories:

Table 6. Publication of new information and new stories by media and outlet

Publicationof new

information

Publicationof newstories

Newspapers 193% 12,7%

Radio 94%media

TV 103% 3,4%

Avui 14,7% 13,2%

El Pais 12,0% 4,0%

El Peridico 25,3% 13,9%

La Vanguardia 19,4% 13,9%

Catalunya Rdio

RAC1 14,3%

SER 15,8%

outlet

TV3 10,3% 3,4%

La Vanguardia 52,8%

Avui 45,6%

TV3 42,3%

El Peridico 41,8%

RAC1 38,9%

El Pas 36,0%

SER 31,6%

Catalunya Rdio 20,8%

Mean 423%

No

Yes

Media

0,0%

25,0%

50,0%

75,0%

100,0%

Use

ofnono

fficialsource

s

New spapers Radio TV


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Newspapers account for the double of new information revealed to the public than the

audiovisual media. This implies that, in relative terms, 2 out of 10 stories in the

newspapers report new data while only 1 out of 10 stories on the radio and in the TV

do the same. In absolute terms, considering that the 4 newspapers analyzed published26 times more stories than the audiovisual media in the research period, they

generate the 8393% of the new information (versus the 1071% of the radio stations

and the 536% of the TV channel).

Two thirds of this new information was included in the Monday edition (6607%). And

about 1 out of 6 new stories (8438%) were also published this day. So a minority were

reported on Tuesday.


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CONCLUSIONS

Once finished the analysis of the variables, some conclusions can be drawn:

o The agenda of the Catalan media presents a clear dependence on the official

voices according to the results, as the 5846% of the stories analyzed have the

executive, the legislative or the judicial power as the main source. This

validates the research hypothesis, and situates the media system of Catalonia

in the same level as the American and French ones according to the studies by

Rodney Benson and Daniel C. Hallin and by the Project for Excellence in

Journalism. Political sources manage to put issues in the agenda not only in

politics section, but also in economy and society. As Lance Bennett suggests in

his indexing hypothesis, this limits the range of voices buffered by media.

However, as all the analyzed media adopt the same praxis, there is no other

pattern of behavior that challenges the mainstream.

o The only alternative to the salience of political power to set the agenda is the

economical power. This is what happens in the newspapers, which inform with

detailed news bites about companies activity (2418%) but not in the same

proportion about the civil society activity. This focus on the business activity

could respond to an economical strategy rather than an editorial orientation.

o Their dependence on the sound, on easy access and familiar voices, could be

the reason why the 3 radio stations analyzed heavily rely on official branches to

select their stories (7657%). On the other hand, the need for visual stories and

their public character could explain why the TV is the media in which social

organizations and individual stories have more salience (3104%). They are the

only platform for these institutions, which seems to be a lack of public space

for them according to the democratic functions of media claimed by Gurevitch

and Jay G. Blumler.


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o During the analyzed period, very few new stories were reported by the media

(95%). The large majority of the information published came from organized

events and programmed information gathered by political, social or economical

institutions, with little investigative effort. However, newspapers put these newstories on their front page to take advantage of them. As Manheim states,

news do not naturally happen and an evidence of this is that none of the stories

collected in the two days had a natural origin. In accordance to Lippmann, the

media just follow the record of officials in a great deal of the information

accounted.

o The everyday activity during the workweek, with pseudo-events organized by

institutions (in terms of Daniel J. Boorstin) and performative utterances used by

politicians and officials (in terms of John L. Austin) fill the stories and take up

the time of journalists. The contrast between the new information published by

media on Monday (so after the holiday) and that provided in Tuesday proves it.

This little development of the agenda-setting function puts the press closer to

the passive role described by Thomas Patterson rather than to the active.

o This project has been carried out with a little sample of the news produced in

Catalonia every day. However, it constitutes an instrument that could be

applied to a biggest flow of information and for comparative studies among the

media of different countries. An extension of this research could be a

comparative study between the agenda of the Barcelona press versus that of

the Madrid press.

o Apart from amplifying the research in extension, it could be also extended by

focusing also in the shaping of the news. Some variables concerning the

framing of the news such as the tone and the orientation of the headlines

(following up the French-American press comparative study). There is a lack of

empirical research on the topic in Catalonia.


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Documents

Final Project - Agenda-setting