UNIVERSITAT POMPEU FABRA

Master of Research in Political Science

Who

controls the agenda-setting?

Content analysis of the sources in the news published by Catalan media

The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an aspect that has obtruded itself Walter Lippmann

Marc Martnez Amat Supervisor: Robert Fishman

INTRODUCTION

How would it be a world without newspapers? This is a current question that nowadays rises when the press faces a double crisis: the economical global recession that have damaged most of the companies in the planet in the recent months, and a structural crisis due to the gradual drops in readers in the recent years. It is within this dark scenario when the existential question marks hang over. This was also the initial question posed, a few weeks ago, in a master class conducted by the university professor Albert Saez, who has managed several Catalan media such as the papers Avui and El Peridico, as well as the public group that includes Catalunya Radio and TV3. In his answer to this question he highlighted that the functions by which the press was conceived were to democratize knowledge, to share information among a society and to advertise products. Saez quoted Alexis de Tocqueville, who in the XIX Century claimed that without newspapers, there is no chance for a representative democracy; and without democracy, newspapers are worthless. No doubt democracy expect from the press to represent the voice of the people and to challenge the political power, considering that the citizens only cast a vote every four years. Media is supposed to favor a marketplace of ideas to debate, to raise public concerns and to point out deficits in the system. The American system of checks and balances constitutes the clearest declaration of intentions: with the First Amendment of the Constitution, the press emerges as the fourth branch of the government to check the other three in what has been called the watchdog role.

This noble mission entrusted to journalist chases with the reality: the administration, parties, companies and even the social organizations have developed strategists to provide biased information, prepared stories ready to be published and willing to dominate the public agenda. In a metaphorical sense, public and private institutions deliver every day tasty fast-food to journalists in order to prevent them to prepare their own healthy dishes. So who controls the diet? Is it balanced?

The struggle between journalists and officials to control the public opinion has two rounds: the agenda-setting and the framing (what to be explained and how to explain it). This paper focuses on the former.

In this context, journalists also face the handicap of working close to the same voices that they have to check. They are supposed to critically interpret the performance of individuals who, at the same time, are the gatekeepers of concealed information that the professionals will seek. The adversarial role of press merges into the interaction (and sometimes cooperation) between political actors and newsmakers.

Following the indexing hypothesis by Lance Bennett about the media dependence on official sources, the aim of this paper is to provide an empirical instrument to determine whether the political actors or the journalists have more say in the agendasetting process. It will also take into account to what extend media include unofficial voices in the news to enrich their information with more sources than the official version. The research is based on the stories published by the main Catalan newspapers, radio stations and television.

In the next pages, firstly a theoretical framework on the journalists role and boundaries and on the agenda-setting function will be exposed. Afterwards, there are the methodology of the research and its findings of the content analysis. And finally, some conclusions are drawn.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Agenda setting is conceived to be one of the main functions of the press in a democratic state, as well as becoming a platform for the popular voice to gain visibility and be a messenger of social concerns between the folks and the power institutions. Regarding the expectations that democracy has on the media, Michael Gurevitch and Jay G. Blumler suggest some principles:

1. Surveillance of the sociopolitical environment, reporting developments likely to impinge, positively or negatively, on the welfare of the citizens.

2. Meaningful agenda-setting, identifying the key issues of the day, including the forces that have formed and may resolve them.

3. Platforms for an intelligible and illuminating advocacy by politicians and spokespersons of other causes and interests groups.

4. Dialogue across a diverse range of views, as well as between power holders (actual and prospective) and mass publics.

5. Mechanisms for holding officials to account for how they have exercised power.

6. Incentives for citizens to learn, choose, and become involved, rather than merely to follow and kibitz over the political process.

7. A principled resistance to the efforts of forces outside the media to subvert their independence, integrity, and ability to serve the audience.

8. A sense of respect for the audience member, as potentially concerned and able to make sense of his or her political environment.

However, the scholars also admit that the objective is not easy and several obstacles hinter it, such as the conflict among democratic values, the distance of the political communicators from the ordinary people and the heterogeneous audiences.

Models of journalism

Doris A. Graber adapted the interpretation of the classical two press philosophies: the libertarian and the social responsible (Siebert, Peterson and Schramm 1956). According to him, from a libertarian approach, news could be anything that seems important or interesting to the media audiences, and should be reported without any attempt to convey a particular point of view. Libertarians believe -he holds- that teaching is not the medias chef task nor is their responsibility to question the truth, accuracy or merits of the information supplied by their sources (it is left to news audience).

On the other hand, those in favor of the social responsibility philosophy defend that newsmakers should be participants in the political process, not merely reporters of the passing scene. They should foster political action when necessary by publicizing social evils, and deny exposure to undesirable viewpoints and questionable accusations. They should try to discover and publicize information that the suspect the government is hiding. The critics of the social responsibility model highlights that journalists do not have the mandate to act as arbiters of social values and policies, which legitimacy comes only from being elected by the people or appointed by elected officials.

Graber goes further and describe five visions of news making, none of which excludes the others but completes them:

The mirror model: news is a reflection of the reality, and journalists do not make news but just report it. They impartially report all significant happenings that come to their attention. Its critics points out that this vision is unrealistic, due to the inevitable task of the journalist to determine the relative newsworthiness of events to report it.

The professional model: news making is an endeavor of highly skilled professionals who put together a balanced and collage of events selected for importance and attractiveness to specific media audiences. There is no pretense that the end product mirrors the world.

The organizational model: also called bargaining model, believes that the pressures inherent in organizational processes and goals determine which items will be published. These pressures spring from interpersonal relations among journalists and between them and their information sources, from professional norms, constraints from technical processes, cost-benefit considerations and legal regulations.

The political model: assumes that all the news reflects the ideological biases of individual newspeople as well as the pressures of the political environment in which the news organization operates. The media covers high-status people and approved institutions; everything remoted from the centers of power are generally ignored or pictured as bad guys, in opposition to good guys, who are the supporters of the prevailing system.

Civic journalism: or public journalism, became popular in 1990 from the distrust from media and government and the concern that average citizen participate in public affairs. It believes that press can discover citizens concern and then write stories that help audiences play and active role in public life. Journalists must explain public policies in an understandable language and facilitate a public dialogue open to the diverse views.

Attitudes of the press

Two views of journalism are opposed when it comes to evaluate its attitude towards the news sources and the selection of voices. Thomas E. Patterson distinguishes between the passive and the active role of the journalists as regard for his autonomy as political actors. According to him, the passive journalist is one who acts as the instrument of actors outside the news system, such as government officials, party leaders, and interest group advocates. The journalist takes his cues from these actors, rather than operating independently. In contrast, the active journalist is one who is more fully a participant in his or her own right, actively shaping, interpreting or investigating political subjects.

A second dimension that Patterson identifies is the neutral-advocate axis. He defines the neutral journalist as that who does not take sides in political debate, except for a preference for good (clean, honest) government as opposed to bad (corrupt, incompetent) government. The neutral journalist does not routinely and consistently take sides in partisan or policy disputes. In contrast, the advocate journalist takes sides in a consistent and substantial way. The sides do not have to correspond necessarily to opposing political parties, but it could be the same than a particular ideology or group.

After applying these two dimensions to his study on five nations journalists, the scholar concluded that they are largely independent one from the other, and there is virtually no correlation. An advocate role conception is not associated to an active role conception; despite it might be assumed initially. He came to the conclusion that there are four combinations that include nearly all the role conceptions of the journalists: passive-neutral (neutral reporter, mirror, common carrier, disseminator, broker, messenger); passive-advocate (hack reporter, partisan press); active-neutral (critic, adversary, watchdog, Fourth Estate, progressive reporter); and active-advocate (ideologue, missionary).

Newsmakers boundaries

A realistic approach is that taken by Walter Lippmann, who claims that there is a very direct relationship between the certainty of news and the system of record. In his opinion, the hypothesis that seems more fertile is that the news and the truth are not the same thing: the function of the former is to signalize events and that of the latter is to bring to light the hidden facts. The press can fight for the extension of reportable truth but it is not constituted to furnish every day the amount of knowledge that the democratic theory of the public opinion demand. The scholar judges as false the theory that the press can itself record the governing forces, because it can normally record only what has been recorded for it by the working of institutions.

Daniel J. Boorstin uses the concept pseudo-event to describe the happenings organized by sources to become news. According to his description, a pseudo-event has 4 characteristics:

1. It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted or incited it. It could not be an earthquake but an interview.

2. It is planted primarily (but not always exclusively) for the intermediate purpose of being reported or reproduced. Its occurrence is arranged for the convenience of media, and its success is measured by how widely it is reported. If is valued by its newsworthiness rather than its reality.

3. Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous. Without some of this ambiguity, a pseudo-event cannot be very interesting.

4. Usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Boorstin states that in the last times a larger proportion of what we read and see and hear has come to consist of pseudo-events, which flood our consciousness.

Connected to pseudo-events, there is also a genre of news which is based on officials declarations. These sentences have the virtue that they are not nonsensical and yet they are neither true, nor false. J. L. Austin classifies them as performative utterances, and those who pronounce them would be said that are doing something rather than just saying something. The first rule for the effectiveness of performative language is that conventional procedures must exist and be accepted. And the second one is that the circumstances in which it is invoked must be the appropriate.

Media provide these conventional procedures required to this kind of utterances to be effective. According to Timothy E. Cook, performative language is handy both for officials and reporters. For journalists, it allows them to produce an account without laborious, time-consuming fact-checking. And for officials, doing something through words has the satisfaction of accomplishing something quickly and directly.

In a very crude analysis, Jarol B. Manheim highlights the gap between the myths of journalism (the view of news as natural events and a form of inquiry, and the conception of journalists as deep-earth miners who find the truth) and the reality (journalists are truly vulnerable due to their genuine and predictable internal pressures, their regularities and their dependence on the most superficial forms of information gathering). He believes that the commercial nature of the media organizations lead to seek for predictability to reduce risks, and it implies that daybooks, rolodexes, and new routines are far more important in shaping news coverage than are investigation and original discovery.

Coalition journalism

The traditional view of media-policy relationship is the muckraking model: the investigative journalist discovers the evidence of a problem and publishes it, which mobilizes public opinion, which leads to public initiative and finally has a policy consequence. In opposition to this paradigm, Harvey L. Molotch, David L. Protess and Margaret T. Gordon contrast another connection between journalists and political actors through an ecological orientation, which they label the coalition journalism. 8

According to them, outside manipulations of the information are the rule and not the exception, as the routine of many people working as public relations professionals, savvy politicians or dutiful bureaucrats is to structure media exposure possibilities. The policy actors goal is to foster an image of responsiveness to head off potentially damaging implications of inefficiency, corruption or incompetence; so they find their interest better served by joining in a journalistic investigation. The result of this is a logrolling process between journalists and political actors. Participation of policy actors in building stories can become a fully conscious effort in which both types of actors form concrete coalitions.

Doris A. Graber, Denis McQuail and Pippa Norris frame the role of the journalist to gain access to information as part of an evolving ecology of games, in which every actor (journalists and their sources) continuously try to anticipate each others moves and whose activities are mutually constituted. As it happens in these gaming situations, the payoffs for each group vary from game to game, but zero-sum games are rare. Compromises in the struggle to control news are easy to make as different actors share interests, as well as they also conflict. They are interdependent despite they could survive without each other.

These scholars also believe that journalists rely heavily on political actors as sources. They use information controlled by the executive and the legislative branches, by administrative personnel, and from experts by official and semi-official organizations. They claim that it is difficult to dig out some of this information by the investigative journalists without the aid of insiders. At the same time, political actors need journalists to disseminate their messages to large audiences and to other elites. But they also require some control over the flow of messages about them that find their way into the news. Eventually, policy advocates devote more energy to keeping news away from media than on gaining access to them. The result of this mutual interdependence is the necessity to bargain, and each part receives and grants concessions in return for influence over the news product.

Political and economical constraints

Doris A. Graber assumes that media have the marks of political and economical pressures. The later conditions the product, which have to be appealing to the larger potential public. And due to the former, news makers depend on political leaders for information and thus they become vulnerable to their manipulation. Self-serving stories from powerful elites are hard to resist; and intensive, frequent contacts between journalists and leaders and a desire of cordiality may lead to cozy relationships which runs in the opposite direction of any detachment. Wooing reporters to have favorable media coverage is a common resource of the astute politician, and journalists often succumb to the blandishments of politicians for fear of alienating powerful news sources.

Timothy E. Cook provides some examples of the ways in which government try to control the media. The author suggests, from the studies carried out in 1950s and 1960s, that there is a disjunctive between officials pursuit of secrecy to preserve maximum leeway and reporters devotion to publicity to write new stories. According to him, the risk of derailing an initiative through their negative coverage is higher than the probability to assure its success by favorable coverage. Nonetheless, this risk is taken by the officials because making news can also be making policy though words, they can call attention to their preferred issues and can persuade others to adopt their position.

All the public institutions have personnel to deal with media and guide their coverage in an optimal direction for their own policy interests (governing with the news, Cook states). As for the presidents influence in media, they do not have to seek out for opportunities, they have news to come to them. So they can dictate the terms of access due to their near-automatic news value. Reporters are dependent on presidents cooperation, and they are prisoners in a hermetic press room, which makes news management easier for his office. A reporter could be in last term sanctioned with freezing out, but it is rarely used. Instead, presidents gear their media operations toward serving reporters anticipating questions in news conferences, designing 10

prescheduled events and providing frequent access to the president. He has the monopoly over good information and the ability to regulate access to the key newsmaker.

As regards the parliament, Cook highlights that some MPs are media entrepreneurs, who make the conscious decision to court the media attention (which not just happens but it must be solicited). Their success depends on becoming a credible spokesperson in a policy arena. Their pursuit is not only gaining news coverage but influencing policy, which do not depend on the amount of attention.

Criticism on media

A demolishing analysis of the media power to frame the news is done by Thomas E. Patterson, who highlights the tendency of journalists to make a negative coverage of politicians. He sentences that the press sends the wrong message and journalists are the problem. According to him, its claim that candidates make promises in order to win votes is true, but that is only part of the truth, as they make them but also work to keep them. And he thinks that journalists fail to take into account the constraints to these commitments. Patterson attributes this anti-political bias of journalists (the muckraking influence) to Progressive movement, the reform which took place in United States in the turn of the 20th Century and reduced the power of political parties in favor of a more divided government and a more participative society. His conclusion is that US cannot have a sensible campaign as long as is built around the news media.

In the same direction, Pippa Norris analyses the media malaise concept, used in the 1960s to describe the negative impact of the press and the party campaigns in the civic engagement. She distinguishes between cultural accounts, related to the lessons the American journalism took from Watergate and Vietnam cases which lead to an adversarial role versus power; and campaign accounts, referring to the growth of political marketing. According to the political scientist, the European literature on media malaise stresses the blame on the rise of the political marketing for growing public cynicism about political leaders and institutions, whose credibility would be 11

undermined by the techniques of spin, selling, and persuasion of catch-all parties adopting whatever slogan.

Agenda-setting theories

As we saw, in terms of Gurevitch and Blumler, agenda-setting is conceived to be one of the main functions of journalism. Walter Lippmann is supposed to be the precursor to theorize the concept in his essay Public Opinion (1922), in which explained how indirectly we know our environment, that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself. According to him, what each men does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him.

Later on, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw proved a correspondence between what media inform on and what people concerns about. It was during the 1968 US presidential campaign. The surveys they carried out reflected a perfect correspondence between the ranking of the major issues on the press and the public agendas, and they used the term agenda setting to describe it.

An example of this in Catalonia can be found in list of main worries of the citizens in the surveys carried out by the Centre dEstudis dOpini (CEO), a public organism depending in the Generalitat. Recent surveys indicated that concerns on an issue, such as the relationship between Catalonia and Spain or the situation of the infrastructures, appear and rise when the topic is notorious in the public agenda due to tensions between both governments or the sum of incidents (reported by the media) in the railway services. A clear example of that happened in April of 2008, when the political and media debate on the drought boosted the worries about the issue to be the main problem for the 43% of the citizens. They were alarmed even considering that few restrictions on water consume were being applied. This concern had never before been on the top list of worries up to that moment and later on, in the next surveys of the CEO, move down to insignificant positions and disappeared.

12

The indexing hypothesis

Lance Bennett did an important contribution to the theories on the agenda-setting role of the media when he claimed the indexing hypothesis in 1990. Their starting point is that mass media in United States look to government officials as the main source of most of the mainly news the report. He states that journalists tend to index the range of voices and viewpoints in news according to the range of views expressed in mainstream government debate about a given topic. And unofficial voices are included when express opinions already emerging in official circles. In short, the scholar concludes that media have assumed a comfortable role as keeper of the official record while abdicating its traditional mandate to be an independent voice of the people.

Bennett establishes three possible causes to this phenomenon: the will of the media to safeguard the business climate by providing a virtual news monopoly to the public officials; the consequence of the transactional or symbiotic relations between journalists and officials; and the result of a democratic responsible fashion which advocates favoring the views of public officials, as they are representatives of the people. The as evidences he presents to prove his hypothesis are the correspondence between the political discussion about given international affairs, such as the war in El Salvador in 1982, and the news highlight on these conflicts only while the national debate lasts.

A redefinition of Bennetts hypothesis by Scott L. Althaus, Jill A. Edy et al. claims that the normative worry is whether the media discourse is so constrained by the boundaries of debate among political elites that the public remains poorly informed, its voice silent or reduced to granting manipulated consent. Its consequences would be that official debate sets the parameters of media debate and establishes the agenda of public discussion on one hand; and that the proportions of pro and anti administration commentary and others positions reflected in the news closely reflect the distribution of views expressed among officials on the other hand.

13

This concept has been used as an indicator in empirical researches such as the comparative study between the French and the American press carried out by Rodney Benson and Daniel C. Hallin in 2007. After analyzing the political information in Le Monde, Le Figaro and The New York Times in 1960s and 1990s, they concluded that there is slightly less indexing to the viewpoints of political elites in the French press than in the American one; and that the reliance on political elite sources increased in both between 60s and 90s. The results were that political elites make up 52,3% of all viewpoints presented in the French press versus 63% for the US press during the 60s, and the 63,7% versus the 696% respectively in the 90s. Civil society actors, especially trade unions, are more visible in French press than in the American one. And academics are better represented in France, too. The comparative research also included content analysis at the level of the story: dominant schema, tone and topic.

Another referent for this study has been carried out by the Project for Excellence in Journalism in the city of Baltimore. It examined the all the outlets that produced local news in the city and tracked every piece of content these outlets produced for three days during a week. The findings indicated that local TV newsrooms produced more content than any other sector, followed closely by newspapers.

On local television, fully 23% of stories studied were about crime, twice as many as other subject. In newspapers (online and print) coverage of crime was almost matched by that of government and closely followed by business and education. On radio in Baltimore, by contrast, government was the No. 1 topic. New media was most often focused on government.

According to the study, government initiated most of the news. In the detailed examination of six major storylines, 63% of the stories were initiated by government officials, led first of all by the police. Another 14% came from the press. Interest group made up most of the rest.

14

METHODOLOGY
The precursor scholar on the agenda-setting empiricism, Maxwell McCombs, stated: Reviewing the front pages of a newspaper over a period of time will reveal that newspapers agenda. Additional information about the position of issues in the newspaper agenda is provided by such cues as the size of headlines for individual articles, the length of articles, and the page numbers on which articles appear. There are similar patterns of coverage in television news program and other mass media. This exercise is the observation that inspires this research.

The object of the paper is to quantify the weight of the official sources (those coming from the political power) in the agenda of the media. The research hypothesis is that most of the news in the Catalan public agenda is based on official versions, similarly to what is proved in the Baltimore study and the French-American press comparative research.

The independent variables of the research are the pieces of news, the stories, published in the main conventional media in Catalonia during a period of time. The Baltimore study took into account the stories produced by media during three days of a week. This paper has selected the stories of two days: Monday the 31st of May and Tuesday the 1st of June of 2010.

The research only included in the analysis hard news, that is those contained in politics, economy or society sections, or the same issues published in audiovisual media. We excluded soft news, and also international and culture sections, as I consider that they are based in other kind of news sources that could deserve a further research.

For the analysis, I selected the four newspapers with mainly the same edition in the whole land of Catalonia which have at least 100.000 readers of average (source: Fundacc). They are El Peridico, La Vanguardia, Avui and El Pas. The latter only dedicate few pages to the Catalan information (the section Catalunya), so we will 15

only include this information to the analysis just as the other hard news edited in Barcelona.

We also included the three largest radio stations in Catalonia: RAC1, Catalunya Rdio and Cadena SER, whose audiences are between 400.000 and 500.000 listeners, far above from any other (source: EGM). In the former two, I analyzed the information provided in the prime time hour (from 7 to 8am), while in SER the selection of stories studied were those in 7pm, as it is the only hour exclusively dedicated to Catalan information.

In the case of the television, only TV3 has been analyzed, as it is the unique channel with news programs dedicated to Catalan information or exclusively edited in Catalonia. In this case, I studied the TN Migdia, on of the two news program with more viewers in Catalonia during the day (source: Sofres).

The amount of stories collected from these 8 outlets is 337, distributed as it follows:

Table 1. Stories collected for the study by media, outlet and day
Monday Total media Newspapers Radio TV Avui Catalunya Rdio El Pas outlet El Peridico La Vanguardia RAC1 SER TV3 142 96 35 11 29 13 10 32 25 13 9 11 Tuesday 195 148 29 18 39 11 15 47 47 8 10 18 Total 337 244 64 29 68 24 25 79 72 21 19 29

The main criteria to process the news information are the number of stories. This introduces a bias, since the analysis is not centered in the length or the position of the information. However, data regarding the size of the articles, the attachment of

16

pictures and whether they are on the front page or in the summaries of news programs have been included.

The stories from the media have been coded according to the following dependent variables:

Main source: Identification of the source that has triggered each story or, at least, its headline. Sources have been coded, similarly than in the FrenchAmerican press study, into the following categories: executive

branch/administration (include the governments, the officials of the administration, the public agencies, the police officials... ); legislative branch/parties (the parliaments, the lawmakers, the party leaders and spokespersons...); judicial sources (courts, indictments... ); business (the companies, the employers... ); social organizations (NGOs, trade unions, universities, ...); individual citizens; foreign sources (international organizations and institutions from abroad) and media (self-elaborated information).

Inclusion of unofficial voices: Whether the story contains sources unrelated to the political power (executive, legislative or judicial branch).

Publication of new information: Whether the story reveal information on an issue unrevealed up to the date.

Publication of a new story: Whether the story comes up with an issue never published up to the date.

Despite other variables have been coded, I finally left aside other data such as the localization of the stories (whether in Barcelona-Catalonia or Madrid-Spain) or other concerning the framing of news (whether their headlines were interpretative, performative or fact-centered; and their positive/negative/neutral tone), which could be worth material for a further research.

17

FINDINGS
Once concluded the fieldwork, the results showed a notable difference of the variables observed depending on the media. The main variable was the distribution of sources in general, from the 337 pieces of news analyzed:

Graph 1. Distribution of the main sources of news in all media observed

Main source
Executive branch / administration Legislative branch / parties Judicial branch Business Social organizations Individual citizens Foreign sources Media

1,19% 1,48% 5,93%

13,95% 34,72%

18,99%

7,12%

16,62%

The distribution reflects a huge attention of media to the power to explain hard news. Almost the 50 per cent of the stories had the executive or the legislative branches as the basic source of the news. This includes mainly politicians (from the government and from the parties) but also officials from the administration (police, technicians ...). So they are almost the exclusive source in politics information, but also in economical and social sections. Police reports are raw material for social reporters, but also in items such as the World Smokefree Day the studies provided by the public

18

administration reach the society pages of newspapers and the news programs on TV and radio.

The third branch of the power, the information from courts and from judicial documents, is included in all the sections (712%). On the other side, separated from the power, business sources become relevant (1899%), especially in newspapers as we will see-, which dedicate exclusive pages to the economic activity (alliances, nominations, results...). They predominate over social organizations information, which do not have fix spaces. Both contribute to a third of the news.

Even leaving apart the international sections, foreign sources have also a say in stories classified by papers as social or economic issues (593%). The clear example in the analyzed period is the spilling of oil in the Mexican Gulf, which was included in the society sections. Aside from the organizations, individual citizens constitute a little slice of the information (148%), with stories that can denounce unfair situations, such as the neighbor who is still waiting for the compensation from the government for the blackout of the winter. Media source includes self-elaborated information that outlets generate from surveys or information of themselves (119%).

Obviously, not all the stories are dedicated the same space or time in the media. Taking exclusively into consideration those which appeared in the front page of the newspapers and were explained in the initial summaries of the TV and radio news program, we observe that the importance of the executive branch is higher (4833%), and also the legislative sources (20%). Judicial sources remain stable (667%). On the other hand, companies (833%) and social organizations (1333%) drop in the first headlines of the media. The other sort of sources accounts for less than 5% of the top stories (334%). If we focus exclusively on the newspapers to analyze the distribution of the main sources of the stories, we realize that there is also a predominant dependence on official versions from the executive and legislative powers, and that the most distinguishing feature is a huge salience of business sources:

19

Graph 2. Distribution of the main sources of news in newspapers

30

Percent

20

31,15% 24,18%
10

14,75% 7,79%
0

13,52% 1,64%

6,15% 0,82%

Essentially, business sources are found in the section of economy, in which newspapers dedicate bites to the information related to companies activities. However, the sources of power are also present in the section, for instance, concerning the negotiation of the government with the social agents for the labor reform. An evidence of this claiming is the analysis of the main sources of the newspapers by sections (which excludes El Pas, as it uses a different classification in sections for the information):

Table 2. Distribution of the main sources of news in newspapers by sections

Mean
(3 papers)

Executive branch / Administration Legislative branch / parties Judicial branch Business Social organizations Individual citizens Foreign sources Media

s es sin Bu h s nc tie ra ar lb /p n cia di tio ch Ju an t ra is br in ive dm at sl /A gi ch Le an br

ia ed s M ce ur so n ig re ns Fo ze iti lc ua ns vid di tio In za ni ga or al ci So

ive ut ec Ex

main source

Economy 23,3% 2,2% 5,6% 60,0% 4,4% 4,4%

Politics 30,0% 46,0% 6,0% 14,0% 4,0%

Society 38,8% 6,3% 10,0% 3,8% 23,8% 2,5% 13,8% 1,3%

30,5% 13,6% 7,3% 25,9% 13,6% 1,8% 6,8% 0,5%

20

The weight of the executive branch is considerable in all the three sections (between 20 and 40%). Meanwhile in Politics the legislative branch is the elemental source for nearly most of the stories and the same happens with business in Economy; in Society the government is the main source (even in a strongest position than in Politics). Companies trigger about two thirds of the information in Economy, but they have little influence in the other two sections.

Displaying the analysis by outlet, we realize that there is no homogeneity but slightly differences among them:

Table 3. Distribution of the main sources of news in newspapers by outlet

Avui Executive branch / Administration Legislative branch / parties Judicial branch Business Social organizations Individual citizens Foreign sources Media 23,5% 17,6% 7,4% 23,5% 20,6% 7,4% 4,0% El Pas 36,0% 24,0% 12,0% 12,0% 12,0% El Peridico 32,9% 17,7% 8,9% 17,7% 10,1% 3,8% 7,6% 1,3% La Vanguardia 34,7% 5,6% 5,6% 36,1% 11,1% 1,4% 5,6%

In all the cases the executive and legislative branches together dominate the news sources, whose presence oscillate between 60% in El Pas and 40% in La Vanguardia. Only in Avui and in La Vanguardia the weight of the economical information (between 20% and 40%) is as high that the sum of social organizations and business sources, which led to a superiority of the socioeconomic over the official voices. In both newspapers, business world provide the main sources for the same or more news than the government. However, as we saw, from this result could not be extracted the conclusion that companies influence the framing of the whole reality in these outlets, but that the business world has more visibility in their economical pages than any other institution.

21

These figures remain similar even if we exclude the brief bites of information and we focus only on the big issues leading the pages of the newspapers. On the other hand, in El Pas and El Peridico the higher presence of information concerning the parliaments and the parties and the lower attention to business inverts the tendency of the other two papers. Social organizations only trigger about the 10% of the stories in El Peridico, La Vanguardia and El Pas, and the 20% in Avui. Other sorts of sources are more irrelevant (under the 10%).

Anyhow we should not forget that the analysis of El Pais only includes the information from the section Catalunya and any other political, social or economical story edited from Barcelona in the newspaper. This could mislead any conclusion applied to the whole newspaper.

The predominance of political voices in the Catalan radio stations is even higher:

Graph 3. Distribution of the main sources of news on the radio

50

40

Percent

30

48,44%
20

10

21,88%

6,25% 6,25% 9,38%

al ci So

3,12%

4,69%

al ci di Ju

e iv ut ec Ex br

ia ed M

r Fo

at sl gi Le e iv ch an tra is in dm /A

ne si Bu ss

gn ei

ga or

an br ch /p s tie ar

u so

n tio za ni

an br ch n tio

es rc

main source

22

About two thirds of the information in the prime time of the radio is triggered by official sources (mainly the executive, which constitutes about a half). Any other sort of sources reaches the 10% of the stories. The other distinctive feature of the information in this media is that in the socioeconomic environment, the salience of social organizations is higher than the business sources.

The patters are similar in the three main radio stations of the country:

Table 4. Distribution of the main sources of news on the radio by outlet

Catalunya Rdio Executive branch / Administration Legislative branch / parties Judicial branch Business Social organizations Foreign sources Media 45,8% 25,0% 4,2% 4,2% 12,5% 8,3% RAC1 42,9% 23,8% 9,5% 4,8% 4,8% 4,8% 9,5% SER 57,9% 15,8% 5,3% 10,5% 10,5%

Between the 65 and the 75% of the stories on the radio are based mainly in official information coming from the administration or the lawmakers. Companies and social organizations constitute only around 10 and 15% of the sources and they are balanced, except in the public station, where business has a little weigh. Apart from these general tendencies, few other conclusions could be reached as we only have 64 cases and the differences among.

In the public Catalan television, the distribution presents a high salience of social organizations:

23

Graph 4. Distribution of the main sources of news in TV3

40

30

Percent

20

34,48%

27,59%

10

20,69% 3,45% 3,45% 3,45%

6,9%

ss ne si Bu ch an br al ci di Ju

al ci So

Social organizations are by far the main socioeconomic source and have a similar relevance than the government and higher than the parties and the parliaments. As it happened with the radio analysis, again these patterns are based on few cases, so the inferences could have an important variation depending on the news of the day. However, these cases still work if we use them to compare TV with the other media.

Another important variable observed in the research is how many stories contain voices unrelated directly to the power, independently of which is their main source. A 423% of the stories include unofficial sources whereas a 577% does not. In a majority of cases we see that stories only include official versions of the reality. When we detail these data by media and outlet we see that the results are congruent with the main sources of news we saw:

iv ut ec Ex e

s ce ur so n ig re s Fo en tiz ci al du vi di ns In tio za

gi Le e iv at sl in dm /A

ni ga or

ch an br

ch an br n tio tra is

/p

main source

tie ar s

24

Graph 5 and table 5. Use of unofficial sources in the stories by media and outlet

100,0%

No Yes

Use of non official sources

75,0%

La Vanguardia Avui TV3 El Peridico RAC1 El Pas

52,8% 45,6% 42,3% 41,8% 38,9% 36,0% 31,6% 20,8% 423%

50,0%

25,0%

SER Catalunya Rdio Mean

0,0%

New spapers

Radio

TV

Media

So the media in which socioeconomic sources triggered a strongest amount of stories (La Vanguardia and Avui in business information, and TV3 with the social organizations) are, as well, those in which unofficial voices have more a say. Radio stations are in the queue when it comes to include unofficial voices, as they are also the media with a higher salience of official sources.

Finally, with regard to the two last variables, we realize that newspapers are the leaders when it comes to reveal new information or come out new stories:

Table 6. Publication of new information and new stories by media and outlet
Publication of new information media Newspapers Radio TV Avui El Pais El Peridico outlet La Vanguardia Catalunya Rdio RAC1 SER TV3 14,3% 15,8% 10,3% 3,4% 193% 94% 103% 14,7% 12,0% 25,3% 19,4% 3,4% 13,2% 4,0% 13,9% 13,9% Publication of new stories 12,7%

25

Newspapers account for the double of new information revealed to the public than the audiovisual media. This implies that, in relative terms, 2 out of 10 stories in the newspapers report new data while only 1 out of 10 stories on the radio and in the TV do the same. In absolute terms, considering that the 4 newspapers analyzed published 26 times more stories than the audiovisual media in the research period, they generate the 8393% of the new information (versus the 1071% of the radio stations and the 536% of the TV channel).

Two thirds of this new information was included in the Monday edition (6607%). And about 1 out of 6 new stories (8438%) were also published this day. So a minority were reported on Tuesday.

26

CONCLUSIONS
Once finished the analysis of the variables, some conclusions can be drawn:

o The agenda of the Catalan media presents a clear dependence on the official voices according to the results, as the 5846% of the stories analyzed have the executive, the legislative or the judicial power as the main source. This validates the research hypothesis, and situates the media system of Catalonia in the same level as the American and French ones according to the studies by Rodney Benson and Daniel C. Hallin and by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Political sources manage to put issues in the agenda not only in politics section, but also in economy and society. As Lance Bennett suggests in his indexing hypothesis, this limits the range of voices buffered by media. However, as all the analyzed media adopt the same praxis, there is no other pattern of behavior that challenges the mainstream.

o The only alternative to the salience of political power to set the agenda is the economical power. This is what happens in the newspapers, which inform with detailed news bites about companies activity (2418%) but not in the same proportion about the civil society activity. This focus on the business activity could respond to an economical strategy rather than an editorial orientation.

o Their dependence on the sound, on easy access and familiar voices, could be the reason why the 3 radio stations analyzed heavily rely on official branches to select their stories (7657%). On the other hand, the need for visual stories and their public character could explain why the TV is the media in which social organizations and individual stories have more salience (3104%). They are the only platform for these institutions, which seems to be a lack of public space for them according to the democratic functions of media claimed by Gurevitch and Jay G. Blumler.

27

o During the analyzed period, very few new stories were reported by the media (95%). The large majority of the information published came from organized events and programmed information gathered by political, social or economical institutions, with little investigative effort. However, newspapers put these new stories on their front page to take advantage of them. As Manheim states, news do not naturally happen and an evidence of this is that none of the stories collected in the two days had a natural origin. In accordance to Lippmann, the media just follow the record of officials in a great deal of the information accounted.

o The everyday activity during the workweek, with pseudo-events organized by institutions (in terms of Daniel J. Boorstin) and performative utterances used by politicians and officials (in terms of John L. Austin) fill the stories and take up the time of journalists. The contrast between the new information published by media on Monday (so after the holiday) and that provided in Tuesday proves it. This little development of the agenda-setting function puts the press closer to the passive role described by Thomas Patterson rather than to the active.

o This project has been carried out with a little sample of the news produced in Catalonia every day. However, it constitutes an instrument that could be applied to a biggest flow of information and for comparative studies among the media of different countries. An extension of this research could be a comparative study between the agenda of the Barcelona press versus that of the Madrid press.

o Apart from amplifying the research in extension, it could be also extended by focusing also in the shaping of the news. Some variables concerning the framing of the news such as the tone and the orientation of the headlines (following up the French-American press comparative study). There is a lack of empirical research on the topic in Catalonia.

28

BIBLIOGRAPHY
ALTHAUS, S. L.; EDY, J. A., et al. Revising the indexing hypothesis: officials, media, and the Libya crisis. In: Political Communication, num. 13, 1996. AUSTIN, J. L. Performative utterances. In: Perspectives in the philosophy of language: a concise anthology. Ontario: Broadview Press Ldt., 2000. BENNET, L. News. The politics of illusion. New York: Pearson Education Inc., 2009. BENNETT, L. Toward a theory of Press-State Relations in the United States. In: Journal of Communication, 1990. BENSON, R. and HALLIN, D. C. How States, Markets and Globalization shape the news: the French and US national press, 1965-97. In: European Journal of communication, 2007. BOORSTIN, D. J. The image. A guide of pseudo-events in America. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1992. COOK, T. The uses of news: theory and (Presidential) practice. In: Media power in politics. Washington DC: CQ Press, 2006. EVERETT, M.; and DEARING, J. Agenda-setting research: where has been, where is it going?. In: Media power in politics. Washington DC: CQ Press, 2006. GRABER, D. A. Mass media and American politics. Washington DC: CQ Press, 2009. GRABER. D.; MCQUAIL, D.; and NORRIS, P. The politics of news. Washington DC: CQ Press, 2008. KOVACH, B.; and ROSENTIEL, T. The elements of journalism. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007. LIPPMANN, W. Public Opinion. Portland: Filiquarian Publishing, 2007. LIPPMANN, W. Newspapers. In: Media power in politics. Washington DC: CQ Press, 2006. MANHEIM, J. The news shapers: strategic communication as a third force in newsmaking. In: The politics of news. Washington DC: CQ Press, 2008. MCCOMBS, M. The agenda setting function of the press. In: The Press. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. MCQUAIL, D. The influence and effects of mass media. In: Media power in politics. Washington DC: CQ Press, 2006. MOLOTCH, H.; PROTESS, D.; and GORDON, M. The media-policy connection: ecologies of news. In: Political communication research: approaches, studies, assessments.

29

NORRIS, P. A virtuous circle: political communications in postindustrial societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

PATTERSON, T. Political roles of the journalist. In: The politics of news. Washington DC: CQ Press, 2008.

PATTERSON, T. Out of order. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, 1993. PROJECT FOR THE EXCELLENCE IN JOURNALISM. How news happens: a study of the news ecosystem of one American city. Online at: www.journalism.org.

SCHUDSON, M. Why democracies need an unlovable press. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009.

SIEBERT, F.; PETERSON, T.; and SCHRAMM, W. Four Theories of the Press. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

30