The Representation of Public Opinion in Routine U.S. Network News

ABSTRACT

Against a backdrop of increasing opinion polarization and distrust in mainstream news media, we investigate when and how U.S. evening newscasts represent citizen opinions. This paper focuses on the different public opinion displays presented in the news and the viewpoints they portray. Using a content analysis of 1,577 items from CBS, ABC, and NBC evening news, we find that public opinion is represented relatively more often in foreign and political news. Broad inferences to public opinion are most common in news coverage, followed by protests and vox pops. Lastly, we find that public opinion representation does not present notable viewpoint diversity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The days included in the sample from calendar year 2019 are: 1/4, 1/11, 1/18, 2/5, 2/18, 2/22, 2/28, 3/5, 3/11, 3/27, 4/3, 4/17, 4/30, 5/7, 5/9, 5/15, 5/29, 5/31, 6/7, 6/11, 6/12, 6/24, 7/15, 7/18, 7/26, 7/30, 8/9, 8/12, 8/15, 8/21, 9/2, 9/3, 9/13, 9/25, 10/7, 10/21, 10/23, 11/7, 11/15, 11/21, 11/29, 12/6, 12/10, 12/11, and 12/23.

² Reliability scores for key variables at the level of the news item: Krippendorff’s alpha for public opinion display topic = 0.86 (see Table 1); Krippendorff’s alpha for the topic of political news, in particular = 0.85 (see Table 1); Krippendorff’s alpha for origin of public-opinion display = 0.81 (see Table 2); Reliability score for identifying individual public opinion displays, constituting measure of viewpoint diversity: 0.78..

Table 1. Topics portraying public opinion.

Table 2. Binary logistic regression with the presence of one or more public opinion displays in a news item as dependent variable.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the FWO under Grant number 12Q2919N. The work of Kathleen Beckers was supported by a fellowship by the Belgian American Educational Foundation (B.A.E.F.).

Notes on contributors

Kathleen Beckers

Kathleen Beckers (Ph.D., University of Antwerp) is a postdoctoral researcher and member of the research group Media, Movements and Politics (M²P) at the Department of Political Science at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her research interests include journalism studies and public opinion research.

Meagan E. Doll

Meagan E. Doll is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. Her research interests include perceptions of news, media trust, and conflict reporting.