Civic Osmosis: The Social Impact of Media

We swim in a vast sea of news and information, a gestalt of communication channels where the whole is indeed much greater than the sum of its parts. In this process of learning about the world around us through a continuous process of civic osmosis, the Internet and a growing host of electronic devices add dynamic and major channels to this gestalt. However, in the scholarly examination of communication effects, there is a tendency to emphasize individual media more than the communication media collectively as a system. To mix metaphors – to analyze the trees, but not to admire the forest. Individual media, especially the growing array of new channels in the communication landscape, are intriguing and important. But that is not all the story. The impact of individual media on individuals and society often are highly situational. For example, this particularly can be the case in elections where the mix of candidates and concerns of the day create a vastly different political communication culture from election to election. To cite two American examples from the early days of agenda setting research, in the Charlotte study of the 1972 U.S. presidential election, newspapers demonstrated stronger agenda setting effects than television news . However, in the 1976 U.S. presidential election study of three cities, television was the dominant agenda setter . Sometimes a particular medium holds center stage. More often, the media collectively share center stage. If we were to construct a web site for agenda-setting theory and research, a prominent FAQ – to use the contemporary jargon of the Internet – would be whether newspapers or television are the stronger agenda-setter. And the answer to this question is telling. About half the time, there is no discernible difference in the agenda-setting influence of newspapers and television news. The other half of the time newspapers have the edge by a ratio of roughly two to one. Sometimes a particular medium holds center stage. More frequently, the communication media collectively hold center stage. The perspective and approach to agenda-setting research outlined here, civic osmosis, emphasizes the collective role of the communication media. And the proliferation of new media adds a rich variety of dynamic channels to this communication gestalt. Increasingly, we swim in a vast sea of diversity, and we need to understand the currents in this sea, both those that enhance communication across our communities and nations and those currents that pollute the sea. But above all, we need to understand the sea as whole and how it changes and shifts over time

Communication, Public Opinion, and Democracy: New Challenges

This essay addresses the relationship between communication, public opinion, and democracy, which is evident in Athenian democracy. It briefly considers the complexity of the concept of public opinion, and how it was understood as a political phenomenon accepted in general thinking and political action, as a consequence of the democratic dynamism originated by the printing press. After briefly considering some of the most relevant ideas about this relationship throughout the 19th century, this essay discusses the main attitudes that emerged in the face of public opinion after the First World War, from which the most relevant theories about the effects of media on opinion, behaviours, and action begun to be developed. The study takes into account the development of an empirical science of public opinion, linked to scientific opinion surveys. It summarises how the investigation of the effects of the media goes through a stage in which they are considered irrelevant, until some studies – especially the theories of agenda setting and the spiral of silence– recovered the idea of the powerful effects of the media. Finally, the essay addresses the new challenges posed by the disenchantment with democracy, the loss of credibility of the media, and the way of understanding communication, at a time in which digital technology has facilitated the creation of social media, causing a situation described as the post-truth era, in which the global need for information becomes more evident. The new challenges affect the political science, research on public opinion, and the science of communication, which requires a foundation of greater consistency than the current one

The limits of corporate social responsibility : Techniques of neutralization, stakeholder management and political CSR

Since scholarly interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has primarily focused on the synergies between social and economic performance, our understanding of how (and the conditions under which) companies use CSR to produce policy outcomes that work against public welfare has remained comparatively underdeveloped. In particular, little is known about how corporate decision-makers privately reconcile the conflicts between public and private interests, even though this is likely to be relevant to understanding the limitations of CSR as a means of aligning business activity with the broader public interest. This study addresses this issue using internal tobacco industry documents to explore British-American Tobacco’s (BAT) thinking on CSR and its effects on the company’s CSR Programme. The article presents a three-stage model of CSR development, based on Sykes and Matza’s theory of techniques of neutralization, which links together: how BAT managers made sense of the company’s declining political authority in the mid-1990s; how they subsequently justified the use of CSR as a tool of stakeholder management aimed at diffusing the political impact of public health advocates by breaking up political constituencies working towards evidence-based tobacco regulation; and how CSR works ideologically to shape stakeholders’ perceptions of the relative merits of competing approaches to tobacco control. Our analysis has three implications for research and practice. First, it underlines the importance of approaching corporate managers’ public comments on CSR critically and situating them in their economic, political and historical contexts. Second, it illustrates the importance of focusing on the political aims and effects of CSR. Third, by showing how CSR practices are used to stymie evidence-based government regulation, the article underlines the importance of highlighting and developing matrices to assess the negative social impacts of CSR

Personal Agenda-Public Agenda Congruency: A Contingent Condition for Agenda-setting Effects

This paper focuses on the concept of the impact area as the intersection between the common issues of the personal agenda and the public agenda. Expanding the concept of agenda-setting effects, which focuses mainly on the relation between the public and media agendas, we have examined the congruity of the public agenda and the personal agenda as a contingent condition for the strength of these effects. The concept also distinguishes between the top-priority issues of the public and personal agendas, setting out that the general public’s search for information about these top-priority issues highlights the need for orientation. We used data from Spain to focus on the national elections (2011, 2015 and 2019), plus the beginning of the pandemic (2020). The study includes a content analysis of the El País daily newspaper for the four periods and a variety of surveys and representative electoral barometers. To those data we have added an analysis of the main search topics on Google Trends for each of the four years. The results reveal that variations in the relationship between the public and personal agendas are linked to the strength of the agenda-setting effect between the media and public agendas

Communication, Public Opinion, and Democracy: New Challenges

This essay addresses the relationship between communication, public opinion, and democracy, which is evident in Athenian democracy. It briefly considers the complexity of the concept of public opinion, and how it was understood as a political phenomenon accepted in general thinking and political action, as a consequence of the democratic dynamism originated by the printing press. After briefly considering some of the most relevant ideas about this relationship throughout the 19th century, this essay discusses the main attitudes that emerged in the face of public opinion after the First World War, from which the most relevant theories about the effects of media on opinion, behaviours, and action begun to be developed. The study takes into account the development of an empirical science of public opinion, linked to scientific opinion surveys. It summarises how the investigation of the effects of the media goes through a stage in which they are considered irrelevant, until some studies – especially the theories of agenda setting and the spiral of silence– recovered the idea of the powerful effects of the media. Finally, the essay addresses the new challenges posed by the disenchantment with democracy, the loss of credibility of the media, and the way of understanding communication, at a time in which digital technology has facilitated the creation of social media, causing a situation described as the post-truth era, in which the global need for information becomes more evident. The new challenges affect the political science, research on public opinion, and the science of communication, which requires a foundation of greater consistency than the current one