News media incentives, coverage of government, and the growth of government.

• Author: Sutter, Daniel

Both the form and the content of the news industry changed dramatically in the twentieth century. Americans at the end of the nineteenth century received news from newspapers that, although no longer funded by political parties, typically were openly political in their coverage. Today Americans receive news through new media--radio, television, and the Internet--and from news organizations that strive for fairness and balance in reporting, journalism today relegates political partisanship to the op-ed pages of newspapers and to commentaries and interview programs on television.

Also in the twentieth century, government grew dramatically in the United States and other industrial countries. Federal spending in the United States grew from 3 percent of gross domestic product in 1900 to more than 20 percent by the 1970s. Robert Higgs (1987) argues that the growth of the U.S. government cannot be understood without considering the ideological shift in how citizens viewed the role of government in society. Both F. A. Hayek (1967) and Ludwig von Mises (1956) noted the hostility of intellectuals as a class to capitalism. Given the media's role as intermediaries in the market for information and ideas, one cannot help but wonder about file possible role that the news media might have played in the growth of government.

Explicit liberal bias on the part of reporters or media outlet owners provides one reason why media coverage might increase the size of government. In this case, the news media directly pursue their political agenda. Liberal bias has generated a great deal of attention over the past several decades, and media watchdog groups such as Accuracy in Media and the Media Research Center attempt to document and publicize the media's alleged liberal bias. Partisan bias, however, is not the type of bias favoring large government that I consider here. Instead, I examine whether the news media or news-gathering techniques indirectly and perhaps inadvertently favor the growth of government. Journalism scholars have demonstrated how methods of news gathering affect news content (Bennett 1996; Tuchman 1978). News production decisions, such as the assignment of reporters and camera crews and the location of news bureaus, shape the content of news coverage in subtle but significant ways. I examine whether elements of reporting or general economic incentives of for-profit media lead news organizations to promote the expansion (or maintenance) of government.

The types of bias examined in this article are a by-product of profit maximization or adherence to the canons of journalism, in contrast to intentional liberal bias. Indeed, even a news organization owned and staffed by conservatives may contribute to the growth of government through one of these by-product mechanisms. Direct bias tends to reduce the audience and revenues of news organizations, giving profit-maximizing owners an incentive to check it (Sutter 2001), whereas indirect, by-product bias may well go unnoticed and unchecked.

I proceed by laying out five possible mechanisms of bias: government activity as the subject of news; government as a hero in marketable stories; government as a regulator of television and radio; effects on objectivity when government officials are used as sources; and the rise of national broadcast news organizations. I evaluate these mechanisms in the light of economic theory, examining whether they are consistent with the incentives of for-profit media. I am an economist by training, not a journalist, and thus I rely on secondary evidence concerning reporting, not personal observation. Many people blame the media for political developments they do not favor. Such arguments, however, are rarely subjected to economic analysis, much to the detriment of our understanding of the media. For example, critics on the left accuse the corporate-owned media of refusing to report harshly on business, yet such critics fail to consider the obvious collective-action problems that advertisers would face in attempting to control news content (Sutter 2002). Here I examine the coherence of the argument for each mechanism, including any relevant and additional evidence that, if available, would help us to evaluate the charge. I conclude that "government activity as the subject of news" and "broadcasting as a regulated industry" are weak mechanisms of indirect bias, but "government officials as a source of news" contributes to the growth of government, especially at times of international crisis.

Government Activity as the Subject of News

A first possible source of indirect bias is government as a subject of news coverage. News is a perishable product that news organizations must produce on a predictable basis. Each day, stories must be generated for the evening newscast and tomorrow's paper; a lack of fires or murders or avalanches on a given day leaves news organizations in a bind. Government provides a steady, predictable stream of stories--legislative votes, presidential trips, economic statistics, new studies, and congressional hearings. An expansion of government provides more agencies and more programs on which to report.

Besides supplying a predictable flow of stories, government arguably also provides a cheap source of news. Government actions occur in known, easily accessible locations, whereas breaking news often happens in small towns or out-of-the-way places, distant from the nearest news bureau. Governments typically operate under open-meeting and sunshine laws, which give the fourth estate easy access to important meetings and decisions. By contrast, companies often keep the details of their operations secret, rendering reporting difficult. Reporters and news organizations reporting on corporate scandals can face possible prosecution for illegally gaining access to corporate documents, as the Cincinnati Enquirer-Chiquita case illustrates (Ventura 2000). Warren Brookes termed the news media's incentive to support and defend large government the "statist quo": "Like it or not, that makes journalistic incentives very clear: The more government, the more power (and jobs) the news media will have .... Instead of watchdogging and containing this massive explosion of government, the press became one of its principal beneficiaries" (1991, 17). Crain and Tollison (1997) also speculate that the news media have an incentive to support big government for this reason.

In addition, efforts to expand government may be newsworthy in themselves and increase the public's demand for news. The expansion of government might create a good story for a long time, as a period of problem recognition and discussion typically precedes actual legislation to expand government. The recognition of a problem typically involves identification of a "crisis" (crime in the streets, schoolyard shootings, lack of access to medical care) that holds an audience's attention and extends into every town, allowing news organizations to do the local version of the story. After passage of legislation, a new press office will be only too glad to help generate human-interest stories about people the government program has helped. The Clinton health care plan, for example, produced a two-year story. A decade of controversy surrounded the problem of acid rain, generating substantial newspaper coverage before Congress enacted the sulfur dioxide emission-trading program in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, although coverage diminished once it became clear that Congress would act on acid rain (Anderson and McLellan 2002). To get elected, politicians try to create a perception of crises that require government action, and the news media can magnify that perception to increase their audience.

Big and expanding government as the subject of news, however, is an unpersuasive argument for the growth of government. News media coverage of government suggests that the marginal news value of most government bureaucracies is low. In fact, many news organizations have been reducing their coverage of government. By the early 1990s, CBS and NBC had reduced their ranks of Washington correspondents by half over the previous decade (Kimball 1994). The average number of network news stories on Congress fell from 124 a month in the 1970s to 42 a month in 1992 (Rowse 2000, 38). In addition, most of government receives little coverage. The Social Security Administration, which affects all Americans during their lives, received coverage in 1998 by only one full-time news reporter, and the Department of the Interior did not have a single full-time reporter (Roberts, Kunkel, and Layton 2001, 10). Newspapers had a total of only 513 full-time reporters covering the fifty state capitals in 1998 (Roberts, Kunkel, and Layton 2001, 9). Washington reporters missed two of the biggest government scandal stories of the 1980s--the Housing and Urban Development scandal and the savings-and-loan debacle (Kurtz 1993). Furthermore, it is not clear that news producers regard government as an important source of news. As one former network executive put it, "When I would travel around the country, I always got the 'Washington is a joke' speech from local news directors. These people believe that Washington is an irrelevant rat-hole where Americans send their money with no results. The credo of local news is that people don't give a damn about government--federal, state, or local--in any form" (qtd. In Kimball 1994, 12).

The type of political coverage the news media provide suggests that the news generated by the marginal government agency is low. Much political reporting focuses on the personalities of individual politicians, not on the details of policymaking and implementation. Political coverage often focuses on contests between politicians--the horse-race strategy of election campaigns and the gamesmanship between politicians--to the exclusion of policies. Much attention is focused on politicians' indiscretions and...