Political Communication, 23:159171, 2006

Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1058-4609 print / 1091-7675 online
DOI: 10.1080/10584600600629711

The News Media as a Political Institution: Looking

1091-7675
1058-4609
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Political Communication
Communication, Vol. 23, No. 02, March 2006: pp. 00

Backward and Looking Forward

TIMOTHY E. COOK
The NewsE.Media
Timothy Cook as a Political Institution

This article presents a new institutionalism approach to news grounded in sociological

and historical approaches to new institutionalism and argues that this approach to
news production has several advantages. Among them are that it encourages analysts
to see the news as an outcome of interaction between journalists and other political
actors, that it allows for variance in news coverage around a general tendency toward
homogeneity in the news, and, finally, that it encourages scholars to examine the full
range of news outlets in the media universe rather than to concentrate their attention
on the narrow world of mainstream elite media. This approach is compared and con-
trasted with that offered by Sparrow elsewhere in this issue, and future directions for
research are offered.

Keywords journalism, new institutionalism, political communication

One of the great burdens, and great joys, of studying American politics is how current
events and conditions provide new tests for old models. It is a joy not simply because it is
easy to gather new data points but because our students, and hopefully our readers, go out
to the world and return saying It is exactly as you said it would be.
It is also a great burden. About the time scholars think they have figured something
out, it can morph into something else entirely. In this symposium, one possible example of
catch-up ball is considered. The news media are ensconced as a distinct, legitimate
object of inquiry in political science. Introductory American government texts routinely
reserve a chapter for the mass media. We have numerous theoretical and empirical studies
attesting to the news medias status as a political institution. For instance, pathbreaking
comparative research by Hallin and Mancini (2004) demonstrates that a countrys media
system emerges in ways explained by its political culture and political system. Historical
work, such as that of Kaplan (2002), depicts the shifts in news that result from trans-
formed political presumptions. And scholarship on contemporary news coverage in the
United States points ever more clearly toward a semi-independent press (Bennett &
Livingston, 2003) influenced by but also helping to shape political power. The media are a
product of politics and feed back in to influence politics as well.

Timothy E. Cook is Professor of Mass Communication and Political Science and holds the
Kevin P. Reilly, Sr., Chair in Political Communication, Manship School of Mass Communication,
Louisiana State University.
An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Political
Science Association, January 2004, New Orleans, Louisiana. Thanks to my fellow panelists for their
comments and suggestions.
Address correspondence to Timothy E. Cook, 209 Johnston Hall, Manship School of Mass
Communication, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803. E-mail: tec@lsu.edu.

159
160 Timothy E. Cook

But amid all of these advances, the news media are being dramatically transformed,
and transforming themselves. In particular, the mass media have been downsized to the
point that we can no longer talk about them in the same terms we used, say, in the 1970s
and 1980s. Can we then still talk about the news media as a distinct political institution, in
the ways that Bartholomew Sparrow (1999) or I (Cook, 1998) outlined?
Drawing on the literature since 1998 when my book appeared, I look forward, re-
evaluating the benefits and costs of an institutional approach to the news media. I have
written elsewhere (Cook, 2001) how the framework of the institutional media has survived
two key challenges that I did not adequately consider in Governing with the News: the rise
of a fragmented universe of narrowcast media and clear evidence of the publics lack of
confidence in and relatively low approval of the news media. In brief, my argument was
twofold. First, the fragmentation of the mass media has actually resulted in increased (and
more overt) collaboration across news outlets and a smaller variety of big stories that all
news media zero in on. The public has certainly expressed a lack of confidence in the
news media; indeed, the drop in confidence from 1973 to 2000 is greatest for the news
media of any of the institutions studied (Cook & Gronke, 2001). But the public and offi-
cials alike still rely upon the news media for the central function of communication within
the political system.
In this essay, I step back further to more broadly assess the institutional framework.
Inevitably harkening once again to Cater, I outline what the institutional approach should
not push us to say. The dilemma I explore draws on two relatedand, on the surface,
contradictorythemes in Governing with the News.
On one hand, the institutional approach to the news media suggests that the news
media are sufficiently independent of other political actors that we should think of them as
distinct. I argued that, over time, the news media became more similar to one another as
they increasingly sought to differentiate themselves from their political environment.
Sparrow gave even stronger emphasis to the distinctiveness and homogeneity: The news
media (or press) can be considered a single, separate actor (1999, p. 8). In that light, an
institutional approach to the news media tends to emphasize walls isolating them from
other political forces as well as common activities that newsworkers perform within that
institution.
But another theme, also borrowed from Cater, is the ever-closer linkage of newsmak-
ing and policymaking to the point that they are all but indistinguishable. Newsworkers and
governmental officials are not only now doing each others jobs, they begin to make up a
coterie of what Page (1996) nicely called professional communicators where differenti-
ations between them in theory and practice are ever fuzzier.
Thinking of the news media as a political institution, I fear, emphasizes the image of
walls too much and downplays the portrait of interpenetrating journalistic and governmen-
tal realms too much. Such a development is unfortunate because it segregates the work of
political communication scholars from the rest of political science in particular and
obscures the value added of a political science (versus sociological, historical, eco-
nomic, etc.) approach to the news media.
To address both walls and interpenetration requires dexterity. But it should not be
hard for students of American politics to do so. Caters fourth branch analogy reminds
us of the complexity of the American political system. For each branch of government, the
Constitution establishes discrete powers, responsibilities, and relationships to the public.
But the Constitution specifies that each branch is involved in the workings of the others
so much that, with rare exceptions (e.g., congressional impeachment, the presidential
pardon), each requires at least the passive consent of the others to get its work done. Thus,
 The News Media as a Political Institution 161

the legislative process encompasses executive and judicial branches. But it also includes
players not envisioned by the Constitution: notably political parties and interest groups
and the news media (Cook, 1989). In turn, the newsmaking process includes governmental
actors as central participants in the crafting of its product, the news.
I argue here that we need to approach the news media with attention to the institu-
tional walls surrounding them and the ways the newsmaking process includes actors on
both sides of that wall. The ironic result of an institutional focus is then to step back from
looking at the separate political institution of the news media as our object of focus and
take a broader perspective on the entire process of political communication.
I suggest we examine newsmaking as one part of the overall process by which
officials and other political actors communicate. Communication is at the core of, if not
synonymous with, all understandings of politics. Political communication, while a distinct
subfield, must heed scholars who have ended up studying this process from their concern
with other institutions outside the news media. In the congressional field, for example, I
think of the work of Barbara Sinclair (1995), Patrick Sellers (2000), and Douglas Arnold
(2004). Such scholars remind us that we need to look at the news media as a political
institution from the perspective of the officials who seek out and help shape the news. This
broader approachto the institutional qualities of the news media and how political
actors are engaged in the overall processes of newsmakingwill integrate more deeply
into political science an understanding of the news media and their practices as integral to
the political system as a whole.

The Institutional Approach

For both Sparrow and myself, an institutional approach naturally followed the literature
from the 1970s that saw the news as the result of organizational, even bureaucratic
routines and formulas (for a valuable recent assessment, see Schudson, 2003). Yet, these
organizational explanations of the news could not explain why, despite considerable
variation in audiences and formats, the news is similar from one news outlet to the next.
To grasp this similarity requires a transorganizational understanding of the news that
sees the news media as a collective institution in terms of what goes into the news and its
political effects.
Sparrows (1999) new institutionalism drew from history and economics. In his
model, the news media qualified as an institution, first in the sense that they channel or
structure national politics and, second, in the sense that they rely on set standard practices
to produce political news (p. 10). In effect, Sparrow argued that an institution arises as an
effective division of labornot because news organizations are pieces of a preordained
institutional puzzle, but because, in evolutionary terms, they struggle to find niches to
prosper, and often by complementing other news organizations. Hence, Sparrows book
set forth striking analogies: military aircraft flying in formation . . . . united by training
and socialization, and reacting similarly to changes in their environment or institutions . . . .
existing on different, mutually compatible levels, like the Russian wooden dolls
(pp. 132133).
While Sparrow saw the news media becoming an institution due to economic effi-
ciency, I stressed a sociological basis where in agreement arises on the best way to
supervise a sector in society, even (or perhaps especially) in the absence of empirical evi-
dence that such an approach works to attain the end being sought. I defined institutions as
social patterns of behavior identifiable across the organizations that are generally seen
within a society to preside over a particular social sphere (p. 70). That definition
162 Timothy E. Cook

produced three questions (all answered affirmatively): First, can we conclude that the
news media create the news based on distinctive roles, routines, rules, and procedures? Sec-
ond, have these practices evolved and endured over time and do they extend across news
organizations? And finally, are the news media viewed by newspersons themselves, as well as
those who are not, as together presiding over a given part of social and political life? (p. 71).
The news media as an institution occurs as consensus arises across organizations on
the definition of news and on processes to make it, but in ways that may defy efficiency.
For instance, efficiency would provoke media producers to differentiate their products to
capture market share. Instead, newsworkers rely on similar means to routinely crank out a
defensible daily product. The similarity emerges under several conditions: tight deadlines,
high uncertainty about what is important and interesting enough to be called news, and the
desire to limit outside interference by laying claim to professional norms. But, as Ryfes
essay astutely points out, procedures of news, even when conscientiously implemented,
are so flexible that there is variationover time and across news outletsaround the
central tendency of the news.
Sparrow and I also disagreed on why the news media should be deemed a political
institution. Sparrow (1999) began from a normative ideal of the news media as guardians
of a democratic political system capable of standing for a public good beyond the often
parochial concerns of Congress, the narrow objectives of . . . bureaus of the federal gov-
ernment, the particular visions of individual U.S. presidents, and the limited interests of
the separate states (p. xv). This standard is not met, he went on, because political and
economic uncertainty pushes newsworkers to be so reliant on political authority they
cannot and do not serve as autonomous guardians.
My starting point was less normative than empirical: the ever-growing preoccupation
with seeking publicity and dealing with the news media at all levels and in all branches of
government, which I had first noticed in my work on Capitol Hill (Cook, 1989). Sparrow
is right that newsworkers depend on powerful officials for pithy quotes, vivid media
events, and reliable information. But the news never mirrors exactly what officials say or
do, even under the most favorable conditions. Newsworkers reserve for themselves the
final control over the news, which draws on journalistic definitions of news values at least
as much as officials preferences for optimal communication.
This article focuses on the two key disagreements between Sparrows and my
approaches to the news media as a political institution. First, I weigh the continued perti-
nence of an institutional approach in the face of the news media that is rapidly moving
away from the mass media mode, and the challenges of researching such an institution.
We need to grasp how institutional walls exist yet how institutional processes can and do
integrally include players on both sides of those walls. I am even more sensitive than I was
in 1998 to the possibility that the strongest analogies to the news media are not the legisla-
tive, executive, and judicial branches but instead the loose systems made up of multiple
political parties and multiple interest groups. As we develop institutional models of the
news media and of the production of news (and politics), we should not allow these
models to obscure the fact that we are talking about a varied and potentially permeable
system of organizations (what sociologists would call an institution) rather than a struc-
tured, instituted organization (which, alas, is the tendency still with political scientists
who wield the tools of new institutionalism).
Second, I address ways to productively address the news media outside their institu-
tional walls and talk about officials, and other political actors, as coauthors of the news. I
suggest we take a cue from political scientists who examine processes that involve multi-
ple institutions, and in ways that get us past a won-lost boxscore. Take the presidential
 The News Media as a Political Institution 163

veto. What seems on the surface a power wielded by the president against Congress is
actually a vital part, not the dead-end, of an overall legislative process of veto bargain-
ing (Cameron, 2000). Congress can, of course, get its way by means of the override but
only by mustering extraordinary majorities. In more typical times, enacting a law must
involve the president and Congress in a mix of cooperation, conflict, and, in between,
bargaining. Much the same process occurs when making news. To understand its power,
we must examine the connections of newsmaking and policymaking from the perspective
of officials and other political actors more thoroughlyand in the context of all of the
forms of political communication they perform.

Inside the Institutional Walls

A central argument in Governing with the News is that if there were as much diversity in
viewpoints and coverage as there were media outlets, we would not have to worry much
about the power of the news media. If the news media simply reflect a wide range of
diverse political realities, they cannot have much of an independent effect. The news
media influence political outcomes in direct proportion to the existence of a media
answer, a given way that the news media approach political actors or issues that one can
identify across a variety of outlets.
Scholarship has largely confirmed a homogeneity hypothesis: News outlets, even
across modalities, tend to focus on particular political actors for particular reasons with
particular stories in mind. Several factors push newsworkers toward similar news: profes-
sional consensus, comparable routines of making news, the need under deadline to reduce
high uncertainty about what is news, the reliance on standard definers of reality (e.g.,
CNN or the New York Times), and, not least, how public policies and government officials
accommodate (and regulate) newsworkers as a distinct group.
If the news media tend to gravitate toward a particular understanding of news,
officials and other political actors who wish to use publicity must modify their activities
and priorities to anticipate what they perceive will obtain them the best coverage overall in
the news. If they cannot pick and choose among different news outlets in the hope that one
outlet will cover their concerns more positively than another, politicians have little choice
but to adapt to the media answer or shun the resources provided by the news media
altogether.
Recent scholarship buttresses this conclusion. Take the case of U.S. foreign policy, a
realm where the American news media are most likely to rely uncritically upon the
indexing provided by official sources (e.g., Bennett, 1990; Bennett & Paletz, 1994;
Hallin, 1986; Zaller & Chiu, 1996). Even if they do not question the ends officials seek,
reporters are not so deferential when assessing the means officials use to gain those ends
(Althaus, 2003; Entman, 2004; Mermin, 1996, 1999). New technologies favoring fast-
breaking stories increasingly force officials to respond to the news after the fact rather
than stage it beforehand (Lawrence, 2000; Livingston & Bennett, 2003). But since official
actors and processes are crucial to respond to events and give a story legs, Bennett and
Livingston (2003) aptly suggest that the news media may best be viewed as semi-
independent, neither dominant over nor subordinate to officials.
But we should be cautious about pushing a homogeneity hypothesis too far. Similar is
not identical. Even at the height of the mass media, convergence on given stories, issues, and
newsmakers did not prevent divergent interpretive frames (see, e.g., Nimmo & Combs,
1985). And confirmation of homogeneity, such as in the campaign setting, is clearly greater
with the subject matter of the news than with the angle or the spin (e.g., Just et al., 1996;
164 Timothy E. Cook

Shaw & Sparrow, 1999). Even if there is consensus on the definitions and rules for news,
their looseness, as Ryfe incisively argues, can lead to great variety in application.
I fear the homogeneity hypothesis is too often treated as a matter of faith rather than a
starting point for empirical analysis. Most studiesincluding some I have doneassume
a bit too blithely that we can judge media coverage from the prestige press or from outlets
with the largest audiences.
The erosion of the mass medias dominance of the audience and the rise of narrowcast
news have made this approach even more problematic. The first studies of news on the
Web and other new media tended to suggest they provided nothing more than old wine
in new bottles (e.g., Davis & Owen, 1998; Davis, 1999). More recent investigations
present a more complex picture, as citizen news producers have the technological
smarts to present more idiosyncratic information and interpretations about politics that are
now added to the media mix (Bennett, 2005; Owen, 2005). The revival of something like
the partisan press for a mass audience, such as Fox News for conservatives, raises addi-
tional challenges to the presumption of homogeneity.
Yet, this attention to the forms of political communication permitted by new technol-
ogies reminds us that media outlets aimed at more specialized audiences, if not constituen-
cies (Eliasoph, 1988), are far from new. Old technologies allowed the emergence of such
narrowcast print outlets as the Black press, womens magazines and the gay press.
While these outlets built on the news already disseminated by large news organizations,
they added new information and reinterpreted the mainstream news for their target groups,
often with political intervention in mind (see, e.g., Herbst, 1994, chap. 3; R. Jacobs, 2000).
Moreover, while there has been much journalistic hand-wringing over the collapse of rival
metropolitan daily newspapers, such would-be monopolies in fact compete with suburban
dailies, flourishing local weeklies, and alternative newspapers. The coexistence of outlets
aimed at a mass audience and more targeted media is far from a phenomenon caused by
new technology alone.
Scholarship provides some challenges to the homogeneity hypothesiseven when we
examine very old-fashioned news outlets, as Sparrow (1999), for one, suggests we do in
narrowing our focus to the largest and most prominent news organizations (p. 21). Our
consideration of similarity across news outlets has been hampered by scholarly concentration
on mandatory storieswhat all journalists consider to be news, such as election coverage or
wars. But greater variability may arise in stories and issues the news media may consider
discretionary. For instance, in my study of network news coverage of the emergent lesbian
and gay movement in the 1970s (Cook & Hartnett, 2001), NBC presented considerably
greater coverage than either CBS or ABCa difference that persisted into the 1980s as
NBC preceded the other two nightly news broadcasts by several months with the first story
on AIDS in 1982. As Gitlin (1980) suggests based on his history of the interactions of the
student New Left and the news media in the 1960s, isolated if lengthy outtake coverage,
such as the discovery stories by Fred Powledge in the New York Times or by Alexander
Kendrick and Stanhope Gould for CBS News, can have a powerful impact on how the social
movement itself developed and interacted with government officials.
Or consider Pages (1996) study of the mass-mediated discussion of presidential press
secretary Marlin Fitzwaters comment attributing the Los Angeles riots of 1992 to excesses of
the Great Society programs of the 1960s. Page shows that the news outlets, and the sources
they brought into the debate, engaged in speedy deliberation, mulling over Fitzwaters con-
tention and rapidly concluding he was mistaken. But the play this story received in a wide
variety of news outlets varied. Page concludes that some newspapers were unwilling to let the
story gomost notably the New York Times and Washington Post, papers with relatively
 The News Media as a Political Institution 165

liberal editorial pages. Reputable newspapers with more conservative editorial stances, such
as the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, dropped the story more quickly.
Pages suggestions about the key influence of the editorial policy of a newspaper on
the bias of the news itself have been reinforced by important research by Kim Kahn and
Patrick Kenney (2002). By means of a sophisticated statistical analysis, Kahn and Kenney
demonstrate that the editorial page slant is strongly associated with the slant of the news.
While one might wonder if such findings simply result from editorial-page staff reading
the news in the same paper, Kahn and Kenney show that the main direction of causality
runs from editorials to news, as editorials with a particular slant at Time 1 predict news
with that slant at Time 2 more than the other way around.
In short, the performance of the news media is a good deal more complex than most
scholars are willing to admiteven before we consider the heady brew of mass media,
middle media and micro-media (Bennett, 2005) that the Web and other newly applied
technologies facilitate. Looking at the full variety of news outlets or charting the rise and
fall of a news story over time (such as the consequences of Senator Trent Lotts comments
praising retiring senator Strom Thurmonds 1948 segregationist presidential campaign)
suggests a degree of complexity that defies a single-minded notion of homogeneity, as if
all media and all reporters report a story in a similar way, or as if certain prestigious news
organizations set the agenda that then trickles down to other news outlets with more
constrained resources. If there is a central tendency, and even a statistically significant
skew, that does not preclude dispersion around that central tendency. Again, as I held in
Governing with the News, any convergence of the news media on an understanding of who
is newsworthy, what is newsworthy, and why does not preclude different prominence,
play, or interpretationsall within the bounds of editorial discretionthat can power-
fully shape the political meanings of the news.
Those of us who have written on the media as a single institution have not overlooked
variety between different outlets. But I (1998) wrote, In contrast to an organizational the-
sis that would suggest different organizations attempting to most efficiently reach their
diverse goals, news content is more institutional, varying primarily as a result of the
resources the media could bring to bear on reporting, and by the news sources that could
be found in different locales. Sparrow (1999) goes one step further, suggesting comple-
mentarity of different news organizations within a single institution: The upshot is that
these multilayered news media institutions are, by and large, mutually consistent; they
cohere into a single actor for most intents and purposes (p. 133).
I would now modify those conclusions to be more careful to avoid exaggerating the
degree of homogeneity or the degree of complementarity across news outletsparticu-
larly in this messier system of news production where stories emerge from different
outlets and where ever speedier deliberation in a 24/7 news cycle encourages a plethora of
voices from potentially diverse points of view on a given event, development, or issue.
Certainly, powerful conditions push toward homogeneity across news outlets, and one
news outlet is sometimes uncannily similar to the next. But we should not take an institu-
tional focus to suggest identical or complementary coverage across all news media.
Thus, I agree with sociologists in characterizing the news media as an institution,
where distinct organizations operate by similar rules in similar contexts for similar ends.
But I would understand if political science colleagues might not to be so quick to see the
news media in institutional termsparticularly if their models for an institution reflect the
experience of organizations that are formally structured, such as the two chambers of
Congress or the federal bureaucracy. Bensons adroit discussion of organizational fields
helps us understand another approach to institutions. But rather than introduce a new term
166 Timothy E. Cook

into our discussion, those of us who do see the news media as a political institution might
be better off discussing the news media system, much as we talk, say, about another
intermediary institution, the interest group system. Like the interest group system, the
media system consists of a vast range of different organizations from behemoths to minus-
cule community groups. Some are aimed at profit, others at the public interest. Some are
longstanding, others ephemeral. The main distinction, of course, is that all interest groups
are aimed at making or preserving specifically political gains, whereas some if not most
news outlets submerge political considerations.
We can no longer quickly generalize from a narrow sample of news organizations and
the news content therein to the news media as a whole. Sometimes, of course, it is not
feasible to examine a wide swath of media content, especially when looking over vast
periods of time. But we need to justify the validity of our measures, and compare them to
alternatives, as Kellstedt (2003) has painstakingly done with his choice of four decades of
Newsweek coverage on race.
Otherwise, those of us who study the news media system as a political institution
would do well to emulate those who study the interest group system. We should make a
stronger effort to sample the full population of news media and chart a full range of
their activities. Two pathbreaking censuses of interest groups provide one model. For
example, Schlozman and Tierney (1986, chap. 4) proposed that an overall evaluation of
the interest group system should pay attention to two factors we could and should apply to
a news media system: its inclusiveness and its tilt. Similarly, Walker (1991) focused
on the operation of the interest-group system (p. 9) and argued that the interest-group
system provides a mechanism in an increasingly complex society through which emerging
issues and ideas can be offered up as possible new items on the national political agenda
(p. 14). If we follow these scholarly approaches to the interest-group system, it is only
if we look at the media system as a whole that we can recognize and chart the systems
institutional components.
A good example of how to proceed is provided by Douglas Arnolds (2004) innova-
tive attempt to ascertain whether the conditions of keeping members of Congress are
present. He sets out to characterize the typical newspaper coverage of typical members of
the House of Representatives over an entire session of Congress. Arnold, unlike most
scholars, was careful to draw a representative sample of American newspapers (broken
down into quintiles of circulation) from electronic sources. As he deftly shows, the cover-
age in smaller newspapers is far from the New York Times writ small. He finds remarkable
examples of journalistic enterprise about home-town legislators in outposts like Tulsa, Las
Vegas, and Lewiston (Idaho), which he sees as a result of editorial policy and discretion
over what to cover. Nevertheless, he finds similarities as well as variationsuch as in the
tendency not to pay much attention to members labors to enact a bill rather than simply
to take a stance. In short, Arnolds work tells us how the news media system as a whole
operates in a crucial task and gives us ideas of where there is openness to variation (in
ways that can be explained) and where there is not.

Newsmaking and Policymaking Across Institutional Divides

A second problem with examining the news media as a political institution is that it often
isolates newsmaking from other forms of politics. Let me put this more bluntly: While the
now-flourishing field of political communicationwith its various journals, meetings,
conference panels, and awardsenables us to accumulate knowledge about the workings
of the news media, the interlinking of the news media and politics, almost by definition,
 The News Media as a Political Institution 167

must cross subfield boundaries much as, say, studying the veto includes presidentialists as
well as congressionalists.
But the trick here is that for most political scientists most of the time, the process of
newsmaking is peripheral to the other work that is done within governmental institutions.
The one exception is the presidency, partly because of the unusually prominent position of
the office and the extraordinary resources allotted to publicity seeking, partly because of
the ready-made quantifiable data about speeches, press conferences, public opinion, and
the like in a branch that most scholars claim is difficult to study scientifically. My own
experience here is telling. I considered my book on media strategies in the U.S. House of
Representatives (Cook, 1989) to be as much about Congress as about the news media. But
the book has gotten more use in classes in media and politics and been more cited in work
on the news media than in either case with Congress.
The burden of proof is not on congressional scholars to say why they are not study-
ing the approaches that members of Congress take to making news. The burden of proof
is on political communication scholars to suggest why attention to the news media is
an absolute necessity to grasp the ways in which newsmaking increasingly becomes
an integral part of policymaking rather than an activity outside of, distinct from, or
ancillary to it.
Even those of us who have tried to document the officials-eye view of newsmaking,
in order to balance off the journalists-eye view that informs so much of the scholarly
literature, have tended to segregate the activity of publicity seeking or newsmaking as if it
were distinct from policymaking. But, in fact, publicity seeking and newsmaking are both
subsets of a larger and vital process for political actors of communication.
In her recent book, The Power of Communication: Managing Information in Public
Organizations (2003), Doris Graber makes this point beautifully (see especially chapter
8). Graber focuses on how officials in government agencies communicate more effec-
tively in order to accomplish their, and their organizations, policy goals. The news is
valuable as a way to communicateinternally to the agency as a whole and externally to
constituentswhat the agency is doing. Since, as Graber pointedly notes, each form of
communication has biases, costs, and benefits, officials can and do view communicating
through the news as one alternative to other forms of less public communication that have
their own pros and cons. Rather than see officials as thinking Should I make news
today? Graber views them as asking How best can I communicate what I need to
communicate to the audiences that matter most for the success of my policy?the
answer to which may be the news.
The old, unhelpful divide between mass communication and interpersonal communi-
cation makes it hard for us to envision picking up the phone to lobby someone and
contacting a reporter with identical information as being different tactical options within
the fundamentally same process of communication. But doing so is handy: Questions of
communication and information have long been central to scholarly accounts of numerous
political processes. Following Graber, we need not separate officials publicity-minded
activity from the rest of what they do, but instead should work to see how their pursuit of
news is (or is not) integrated in with their daily endeavors.
One of the arguments in Governing with the News is that newsmaking and policymak-
ing are increasingly intertwined to the point of being indistinguishable. Thus, what we see
as an effort to make news may be understood by an official as an effort to shape policy.
Take a hypothetical (but not imaginary) situation where Senate Minority Leader Harry
Reid holds a press conference with a moderate Democratsay, Ben Nelsonto address
support of a liberal party initiative. Whether or not that event gets into the news may be a
168 Timothy E. Cook

moot point to Reid. Getting Nelson to publicly endorse the initiative not only locks in
Nelsons vote but sends a message to other less than liberal Democrats (and perhaps less
than conservative Republicans) and to their constituents that it is safe for them to come on
board as well. This is called coalition building. It is also called publicity seeking. If report-
ers are willing and able, it is also called newsmaking. When Reid goes down to the press
gallery for the press conference, he may or may not be thinking Now Im going to go
make news. He could just as easily be thinking Now Im going to go make policy (see
L. Jacobs, Lawrence, Shapiro, & Smith, 1998; Sellers, 2000).
The inability to easily distinguish newsmaking from policymaking has resulted in
some scholarly confusion. For example, George Edwardss (2003) recent fine analysis of
presidents going public finds that there is seldom an impact of presidential publicity
efforts on public opinion. He raises the possibility that presidents might be better off
devoting scarce resources to staying private. But Edwardss mistake is to assume too
quickly that the target of going public is, in fact, the mass public. Sometimes, presidential
events are aimed less at either changing or mobilizing public opinion than at packaging a
particular image of public opinion to send to other officials who look to the news media as
constructing public opinion (Herbst, 1998; Canes-Wrone, 2001). Other media events
target individual publics rather than the mass public as a whole (Kernell, 1986; Hart,
1986). Still other media events are not aimed at larger publics at all, such as state visits
where publicity and the presence of many reporters are simply shows of respect and honor
to a visiting dignitary (Manheim, 1994). Given the range of possible outcomes for going
public, Edwardss nonfindings are less surprising and his prescriptionthat presidents
should spend less time giving speechesless credible.
Such a realization should shift how we as political communication scholars couch our
inquiries. We should be looking at officials newsmaking not as unto itself but as one
subset of their overall efforts at communication. In part, we already know quite a bit. We
know that executive branch leaders, such as presidents and state governors, devote much
if not most of their scarce resources (time, energy, staff, money) to the pursuit of or
monitoring of media publicity (Beyle & Muchmore, 1983; Hager & Sullivan, 1994).
Presidential chiefs of staff are now central in the White House office in directing policy,
directing communication, and coordinating policy and message (Kumar, 2003). The rise
of the press secretary in House offices served not only to devote more concerted attention
to publicity but also folded in media considerations more fully in policymaking (Cook,
1989). But most of these inquiries have been from the perspective of asking what purposes
the news might serve, or what activities the staffers designated to deal with the press
actually pursue. Starting from the other end, looking at the policymaking challenges that
officials address by means of communication and making sure we ask how the news
media are involved, can give us a clearer understanding of what David Swanson called
the media-government nexus.

Conclusion
Much of what I suggest might seem contrary to my interest in the news media as a politi-
cal institution. Yet in the context of the American political system, we cannot focus solely
or even primarily on the media as a single, separate actor. Institutional approaches, of
course, suggest impressive commonality, given the three central criteria I applied for iden-
tifying an institution. The proliferation of news outlets in recent years does not necessarily
undermine an institutional approach. At the same time, we need to recognize that common
elements of different news do not mean that they are identical. Understanding the range of
 The News Media as a Political Institution 169

sources, issues, and points of viewand the limits of that rangeis vital in testing the
institutional approach to the news.
The question of the politics of the news media, likewise, has tended to focus on the
choices that newsworkers make and the biases that their priorities impose. But newswork-
ers constitute only a small set of the coauthors of the news, along with officials, experts,
political activists, and, occasionally, persons-on-the-street. We need to better understand
why people outside of news organizations want to make the news. And we must place
those efforts in the context of everything else they seek to do and seek to communicate.
After all, their efforts at making news may actually be better thought as efforts to make
policy or send more direct and unmediated messages regardless of what reporters do with
what they say and do.
All of this is a challenge: I am suggesting we expand our purview to include more
media outlets beyond those customarily examined and to encompass more political
actors besides those most directly involved in the making of news. Yet if the techno-
logical revolution under way means anything, it provides us with more data to be
studied more fullyelectronic files of news coverage, accumulations of congres-
sional press releases and newsletters, Web sites with precise markings of when the
news story or Weblog was posted. The information is there to be used. Figuring out
how, whether, and when the news media act as a political institution provides us
strong reasons to do so.

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