Media-generated shortcuts: The supply and demand of political information.

摘要

Are headlines microcosms of a bigger picture? Do they differ in systematic ways from the stories they lead? This dissertation considers how headlines about politics represent the more comprehensive supply of political information available to citizens. Headlines are presented as the media equivalent of cognitive heuristics. They are widely assumed to encapsulate the news of the day, and thus provide citizens a media-generated shortcut for keeping informed of public affairs. They also draw attention to what follows them and signal the news that editors deem most important. With these functions in mind, hypotheses are developed about the relationship between headlines and stories.;Results indicate news content in headlines and stories strongly correlate. Headlines appear to report a similar volume of horserace versus issue-oriented coverage. The issues people see and hear about in headlines closely resemble what they would get by paying closer attention. Yet, results also identify systematic ways in which headlines distort the news they represent. Headlines are leader-focused in Canada, and party politics gets considerably less attention than coverage in stories would predict. They also tend to exaggerate how well (or badly) parties and candidates are performing. In addition to aggregate-level comparisons between headlines and stories, this study develops a unique multilevel analysis of the relationship between a headline and its story. While newspaper headlines generally prove to be least consistent representatives of stories, television headlines tend to be close proxies of what follows. The implications of headlines as media-generated shortcuts are discussed for democratic politics.;This relationship is assessed based on a typology of essential political information. Party, candidate, viability, ideology, and endorsement cues are defined as essential for processing electoral politics in modern liberal democracies. Five hypotheses address how these types of information cues, as depicted in stories, are represented through the lens of headlines. All election headlines and corresponding stories during the 2006 Canadian election campaign that were published, broadcast, and posted by leading dailies, television newscasts, radio news programs, and internet news websites are included in the analysis (N=11,002). The empirical study is complemented by in-depth interviews with six prominent news editors and journalists.