Title: Indirect Media Effects: The Unknown Quantity in Policy Making | People, Spaces, Deliberation
Headings: Indirect Media Effects: The Unknown Quantity in Policy Making
Indirect Media Effects: The Unknown Quantity in Policy Making
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Content: But then - the electorate is not considered to be all that influential either. Public opinion ranks way behind the President, Capitol Hill, and interest groups in their importance for policy making in the 1970s in the U.S. Moreover: since, as Kingdon argues, the media mostly report on what the government does, it's actually the government that influences public opinion via media coverage, which then feeds back to the government, leaving the government as the key player in the end. Kingdon agrees that the administration pays more attention to issues that are covered in the press. He also shows that policy decision makers base their decisions on what they perceive as the "mood of the nation." Their perception of that mood is shaped by, among other sources, newspaper editorials and issue coverage in general and specialized media. His conclusion: the media shape and structure issues that someone else brought up, but they can't create them. Directly rebutting the latter statement, we have evidence from all over the world how investigative journalism brought up issues that subsequently became a priority on the policy agenda and led to substantial political changes, without the government initiating any of it. At the Harvard-World Bank Workshop on The Role of the News Media in the Governance Agenda, Sheila Coronel told us about the Second People Power Revolution in the Philippines, where the media helped bring down a corrupt president by making his excesses public.