This 2007 book studies the impact of the media on politics in the United States during the last half-century.

The new media environment has challenged the role of professional journalists as the primary source of politically relevant information. After Broadcast News puts this challenge into historical context, arguing that it is the latest of several critical moments, driven by economic, political, cultural, and technological changes, in which the relationship among citizens, political elites, and the media has been contested. Out of these past moments, distinct "media regimes" eventually emerged, each with its own seemingly natural rules and norms, and each the result of political struggle with clear winners and losers. The media regime in place for the latter half of the twentieth century has been dismantled, but a new regime has yet to emerge. Assuring this regime is a democratic one requires serious consideration of what was most beneficial and most problematic about past regimes and what is potentially most beneficial and most problematic about today's new information environment.

I examine the political implications of the three most important changes in the media environment that occurred in the last half-century: broadcast television, cable television, and the Internet. The thesis starts by outlining a unifying theoretical framework to examine changes in the media environment and then follows the major changes in chronological order, focusing on implications for knowledge and turnout in the first part and on the impact on vote decisions in the second part. The theory extends existing explanations of political learning by focusing explicitly on the way in which different prerequisites for learning jointly affect the acquisition of political knowledge. Some media environments leave a lot of room for people's interests and skills to guide their media use and political learning, while others impose strong constraints on everyone. Before cable, the homogeneity of content on broadcast stations during the dinner hour meant that individual-level factors played a relatively minor role in guiding political learning. As a result, many Americans, even the less educated, less interested, and less partisan, watched national and local news and absorbed at least some of what they saw. As cable and Internet offer greater content choice, some people who were sufficiently interested to watch news in the absence of alternatives, abandon the news for entertainment programming. Others, in contrast, take advantage of the new opportunities to acquire even more information than before. As a consequence, the gap between the most and the least knowledgeable segments in the electorate widens. Furthermore, to the extent that knowledge motivates people to vote, the knowledge gap translates into a turnout gap. The second part of the thesis examines consequences of changing media environments for aggregate voting behavior. Less educated citizens who started to learn about politics from broadcast news had a moderating influence on election outcomes. Greater choice removes this moderating influence again. Politically interested people who continue to follow the news despite the increasing allure of around-the-clock entertainment are also more partisan. Cable television and the Internet, by increasing people's media choices, thus weaken the moderate elements and produce a higher concentration of partisans in the voting public, leading to greater political polarization among voters.

Political interest is the strongest predictor of 'good citizenship', yet little is known about it. This book explains why some people find politics interesting while others don't.

A state-of-the-art account of what we know and do not know about the effects of digital technology on democracy.

Almost twenty-five years ago, Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder first documented a series of sophisticated and innovative experiments that unobtrusively altered the order and emphasis of news stories in selected television broadcasts. Their resulting book News That Matters, now hailed as a classic by scholars of political science and public opinion alike, is here updated for the twenty-first century, with a new preface and epilogue by the authors. Backed by careful analysis of public opinion surveys, the authors show how, despite changing American politics, those issues that receive extended coverage in the national news become more important to viewers, while those that are ignored lose credibility. Moreover, those issues that are prominent in the news stream continue to loom more heavily as criteria for evaluating the president and for choosing between political candidates. “News That Matters does matter, because it demonstrates conclusively that television newscasts powerfully affect opinion. . . . All that follows, whether it supports, modifies, or challenges their conclusions, will have to begin here.”—The Public Interest

This book investigates public service broadcasting (PSB) models in post-authoritarian regimes, and offers a critical inspection of the development of a Western European-originated PSB system in Asian transitional societies, in particular in Indonesia since the 1990's. Placing the case of Indonesia's PSB within the context of global media liberalization, this book traces the development of public service broadcasting in post-authoritarian societies, including the arrival of neoliberal policy and the growth of media oligarchs that favour free market media systems over public interest media systems. The book argues that Western European PSB models or 'BBC-like' models have travelled to new democracies, and that autocratic legacies embedded in former state-owned radio and television broadcasters have resisted pro-democratic media pressures. As such, similar to new PSBs in other post-colonial, transitional and global south regimes, such as in Arab states or Bangladesh, this book demonstrates that the adoption of PSB in Indonesia has not reflected the ideal PSB project initially envisaged by media advocates but was flawed in both media policy and governance. It explores the history of broadcast governance in authoritarian Indonesia, and considers how Western European PSB or 'British Broadcasting Corporation/BBC-like' models have travelled – somewhat uneasily – to new democracies, but also how autocratic legacies embedded in former state-owned radio and television channels have resisted external parties of pro-democratic media systems.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or "Fake news" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a "post-truth" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives. Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analysing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment. The authors argue that longstanding institutional, political, and cultural patterns in American politics interacted with technological change since the 1970s to create a propaganda feedback loop in American conservative media. This dynamic has marginalized centre-right media and politicians, radicalized the right wing ecosystem, and rendered it susceptible to propaganda efforts, foreign and domestic. For readers outside the United States, the book offers a new perspective and methods for diagnosing the sources of, and potential solutions for, the perceived global crisis of democratic politics.

These essays discuss US policy in regulating the media and the reconciliation of the First Amendment.