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Congressional representatives have a harder time attracting media attention for their policies. House and Senate members who use the media well, either to help their party or to show expertise in an area, may increase their power within Congress, which helps them bargain for fellow legislators’ votes. Senators and high-ranking House members may also be invited to appear on cable news programs as guests, where they may gain some media support for their policies. Yet, overall, because there are so many members of Congress, and therefore so many agendas, it is harder for individual representatives to draw media coverage.
Gary Lee Malecha and Daniel J. Reagan. 2011.
The Public Congress: Congressional Deliberation in a New Media Age . New York: Routledge.
It is less clear, however, whether media coverage of an issue leads Congress to make policy, or whether congressional policymaking leads the media to cover policy. In the 1970s, Congress investigated ways to stem the number of drug-induced deaths and crimes. As congressional meetings dramatically increased, the press was slow to cover the topic. The number of hearings was at its highest from 1970 to 1982, yet media coverage did not rise to the same level until 1984.
Frank R. Baumgartner, Bryan D. Jones, and Beth L. Leech. 1997. “Media Attention and Congressional Agendas,” In
Do The Media Govern? Politicians, Voters, and Reporters in America , eds. Shanto Iyengar and Richard Reeves. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Subsequent hearings and coverage led to national policies like DARE and First Lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign (
[link] ).
Later studies of the media’s effect on both the president and Congress report that the media has a stronger agenda-setting effect on the president than on Congress. What the media choose to cover affects what the president thinks is important to voters, and these issues were often of national importance. The media’s effect on Congress was limited, however, and mostly extended to local issues like education or child and elder abuse.
George Edwards and Dan Wood. 1999. “Who Influences Whom? The President, Congress, and the Media,”
American Political Science Review 93, No 2: 327–344; Yue Tan and David Weaver. 2007. “Agenda-Setting Effects Among the Media, the Public, and Congress, 1946–2004,”
Journalism&Mass Communication Quarterly 84, No. 4: 729–745. If the media are discussing a topic, chances are a member of Congress has already submitted a relevant bill, and it is waiting in committee.
The media choose what they want to discuss. This agenda setting creates a reality for voters and politicians that affects the way people think, act, and vote. Even if the crime rate is going down, for instance, citizens accustomed to reading stories about assault and other offenses still perceive crime to be an issue.
Ally Fogg, “Crime Is Falling. Now Let’s Reduce Fear of Crime,”
Guardian , 24 April 24 2013. Studies have also found that the media’s portrayal of race is flawed, especially in coverage of crime and poverty. One study revealed that local news shows were more likely to show pictures of criminals when they were African American, so they overrepresented blacks as perpetrators and whites as victims.
Travis L. Dixon. 2008. “Crime News and Racialized Beliefs: Understanding the Relationship between Local News Viewing and Perceptions of African Americans and Crime,”
Journal of Communication 58, No. 1: 106–125. A second study found a similar pattern in which Latinos were underrepresented as victims of crime and as police officers, while whites were overrepresented as both.
Travis Dixon. 2015. “Good Guys Are Still Always in White? Positive Change and Continued Misrepresentation of Race and Crime on Local Television News,”
Communication Research , doi:10.1177/0093650215579223. Voters were thus more likely to assume that most criminals are black and most victims and police officers are white, even though the numbers do not support those assumptions.
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