Lydia Miljan - Hidden Agendas: How Journalists Influence the News

Few books in Canada empirically and systematically examine the role journalists play in the news-making process. While there are several books that look at how journalists do their jobs, and others that examine the political process, none - until now - have analyzed the opinions of journalists and how the news is reported.Focusing primarily on the political orientation of journalists, Miljan and Cooper investigate the link between what journalists believe about politics and how they report political issues. Using data gathered from interviews with over 800 Canadians and some 270 journalists, the authors compare how the attitudes of journalists differ from those of the general population, and how the journalists opinions influence the daily news. By examining the way they respond to questions on the economy, social issues, and national unity, and comparing these responses with how the stories were reported in Canadian news outlets, the book arrives at the controversial conclusion that journalists, moreso than the owners of the media, are the architects of the news, engineering not only its drama, but also its ideological thrust.A must-read for anyone interested in politics and the media, this book should be read by journalists, politicians, academics, and all Canadians who are concerned about the hidden agendas of journalists.About the author: Lydia Miljan and Barry Cooper are both professors of Political Science. They teach at the University of Windsor and the University of Calgary, respectively.The origin of this book is reflected in its dual authorship. In 1994, co-author Barry Cooper wrote an analysis of CBC television news, _Sins of Omission_. Among other things, that book examined news transcripts and compared what made it to air with other sources of information. The technique used is generally referred to as qualitative content analysis, and the conclusion, suggested by the title, was not just that a great deal of relevant information was omitted, but that it was deliberately omitted. As a result, TV news on CBC was both partial and systematically unbalanced.As we indicate in the present book, there is considerable controversy about *why* the media present readers and audiences with the coverage they do. Much of this discourse is speculative, and ranges from the effects of time zones on how stories from California or British Columbia get treated in New York and Toronto to the attractiveness of journalism to thin-skinned people with narcissistic personalities.One of the more obvious and perhaps important intervening variables between the raw reality of an event experienced in the world and the sophisticated and technically mediated product consumed through the flickering screen or the daily paper is the journalists the actual reporters, producers, and editors who convert events into news. Some, but not all, of their choices are conditioned by the imperatives of deadlines, the requirements of the medium, or various other widespread and well-studied considerations. But some choices are also conditioned by the political opinions that journalists hold. Or so most commonsensical individuals might plausibly believe.For media analysts, however, there is a problem not so much to determine the extent to which the personal views of journalists influence the product, but to document the existence of an influence. The reason why this problem exists may be summarized by the claim that the news merely is a mirror to events because journalists simply report what happens.The second source of this book, Lydia Miljans doctoral dissertation, The Backgrounds, Beliefs, and Reporting Practices of Canadian Journalists (2000), is a sustained examination of the validity of journalists conventional claim that, since they are professionals, their views whatever these may be have no impact on the product, the news itself. In the course of this work, Miljan conducted a survey of the attitudes of Canadian journalists and compared these data to data simultaneously collected from the general population. Much of the evidence brought to light by that survey, the first ever so conducted in Canada, is reported in this book.Together, these two studies constitute what the French call the _problmatique_ of the present book. Common sense indicates its simply prudent to have an attitude of skepticism toward the notion that the beliefs of journalists have no effect on their reporting. The reason is simple enough: it is true that journalists have long claimed to be professionals, rather like doctors and lawyers and men and women of the cloth. But one difference is obvious: whatever your anesthesiologist may think about global warming, the fate of the swift fox, or the fiscal policy of the government of Prince Edward Island, that opinion is not likely to have a noticeable impact on her ability to administer an epidural. In contrast, reporting, producing, editing, or visualizing a story can never begin to approach the technical procedures of an anesthesiologist. Stories are told from perspectives: that is not an accident or defect, but the essence of stories. This book tells the story of where Canadian journalists tell their stories from.Both sources for this book relied on the material collected in Canadas National Media Archive, of which Miljan has been the director since its inception in 1987. The archive is a division of the Fraser Institute and we would be gravely remiss if we did not first thank Dr. Michael Walker, executive director of the institute, for his intellectual support and a bracing managerial style that is such a refreshing change from that at most Canadian universities. We would also like to express our gratitude to the Donner Canadian Foundation and the Earhart Foundation for their assistance in supporting the original study by Miljan.