Does the commerical media's dependence on advertising revenue force newspapers to attract affluent audiences and to promote consumerism, as suggested by a comparison of automobile and public transit coverage?
This study examined the relation between consumerism and news content in the daily press with a focus on coverage of the automobile industry. The hypothesis tested is that the daily press's dependence on advertising revenue and its promotion of consumerism tends to reduce coverage of the negative aspects of automobiles, such as their environmental impact.
A content analysis of the Vancouver Sun was conducted for a four-month period, from 1 April to 31 July, 1995. The Canadian News Disk (a service which provides full-text versions of five Canadian daily newspapers) was searched for all news items published on automobiles and public transit (several search words were used for each subject). This search yielded a total of 73 news items, 43 for automobiles and 30 for public transit.
Each news item was coded as follows. In terms of item length, while both categories have almost equal percentages of medium-length stories, transit coverage garnered fewer short stories and more long stories than did automobile stories.
In terms of news item content, 39.5% of the automobile news items focused on the auto industry, and 9% focused primarily on anti-pollution themes (the remaining news items dealt with a range of topics). As for the public transit items, 47% focused on a proposed new Rapid Transit service in Vancouver, while 20% were generally critical of public transit.
As for the tone of the news items: for automobile category, 79% were coded positive, 2% were negative, and 19% were neutral. For public transportation news items, 7% were positive, 70% were negative, and 23% were coded neutral. These data show a striking difference between the two categories: automobile coverage received mostly positive coverage, regardless of content, whereas transit received mostly negative coverage.
Conclusions
News items dealing with automobiles were shorter than those with public transit as the focus; they use fewer sources, address fewer issues, and identify fewer players. Transit items contained more in-depth coverage of issues, usually providing different points of view, whereas news articles dealing with the automobile industry tended to be shorter, elicited the views of only a few sources, and were more concerned with enumerating facts rather than examining in depth issues concerning automobiles. Speculatively, the relatively uncritical nature of news coverage of the automobile industry tends to promote (even if tacitly) consumption of these consumer products; public transportation services donšt receive this sort of promotion in the form of news coverage.
Researcher: Suzanne Maier