CHAPTER 4
Methodology and Results
Given that social capital has been declining since the early 1970s, it would make sense
that social capital-diminishing news stories have been increasing while social capital-enhancing
news stories have been decreasing. If social capital-diminishing stories have been increasing,
that would suggest that news stories have placed more and more emphasis on catastrophes or
political scandals and are also increasingly framed in a strategic, episodic, and individualoriented manner and increasingly filled with images of people working alone. The hypothesis of
this paper is that because of these changes in television news, Americans have become more
cynical not only about the political process and political figures but also about fellow citizens in
their community and aboutcommunity associations.
RESEARCH DESIGN
In designing my coding scheme, I primarily drew upon the literature of television news
framing, which I discussed in the previous chapter. I used Iyengar’s concept of episodic and
thematic frames, Cappella and Jamieson’s strategic and issue frames, and Patterson’s use of
measuring negativity in news stories. I also use Gerbner’s Violence Index, which includes
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counting the images of violent acts, to create my own method of coding television images.
Applying the concepts of television framing and priming to individual and group behavior, I
included in my codebook a method to code for individual-oriented and group-oriented stories
and individual and group images.
I honed my coding scheme through a number of pretests involving current television
news broadcasts. After watching a week of CBS News from February 17 to 23, 2003, I ran a test
run of my coding scheme. I was able to refine my coding scheme to include more story types
and instances of government interference in group-oriented frames and images. As discussed in
Chapter 3, seeing or hearing about groups of people who are working together restricted by
authority (i.e., police officers beating protesters) might prime viewers to avoid engaging in
organized activities.
As shown in Chapter 2, rates of participation and trust start declining in the early 1970s
and continue to decline in the 1980s. In order to prove that a correlation exists between social
capital-diminishing news and a decline in social capital, I need to show that there has been a
change in television news framing that starts before the early 1970s and that this change
continues through the 1980s. Thus, to test my hypothesis, I randomly selected a week of news
every five years from 1965 to 1990. I chose the weeks of January 17 to January 23, 1965;
December 13 to December 19, 1970; February 16 to February 22, 1975; June 8 to June 14, 1980;
April 14 to April 20, 1985; and April 15 to April 21, 1990. Due to the limitations of this project,
a week of news from every five years was the most reasonable amount news I could code.
Vanderbilt News Archive has CBS news archives dating back to August 1968; however,
the cost of accessing their archive made it impossible for me to use their news videos. Instead of
using Vanderbilt’s news archive, I found a free source of television news archives at the Motion
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Picture and Television research center of the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress’s
CBS Evening news archive only dates back to 1975, which is why I only coded news stories
from 1975, 1980, 1985, and 1990. I was also unable to locate complete transcripts of CBS news;
the University of Michigan owned abbreviated transcripts from CBS evening news dating back
to 1970. These transcripts were not particularly helpful because each news broadcast was
incomplete and because my coding scheme involved coding images from the news broadcasts.
Since I am only looking at a fifteen year period with a rather small sample of news
broadcasts, my small selection of news may not be entirely representative of news broadcasts
during the period; however, given the time and financial restraints of this project, I am only able
to code a total of four weeks of news. Ideally, this project would have covered the period from
1965 to 1990 and would have had a random selection of several weeks from each year, instead of
week, of news broadcasts. A greater amount of news would have insured a higher level of
confidence in my data. In other words, one could be more confident that my sample can be
generalized to the entire newscasts from 1975, 1980, 1985, and 1990 if I had selected a larger
number of newscasts from those years.
SOCIAL CAPITAL-ENHANCING NEWS STORIES
Because of the decline in social capital in the past thirty years, my hypothesis predicts
that social capital-enhancing news stories should also be declining. Issue, thematic, and grouporiented frames, human-interest and state and local stories, and images of groups of people
working together are all likely to prime the viewer’s sense of community and not activate
Figure 4.1: Trends in Issue and Strategic Frames, 1975-1990.
46
50
45
40
Percentage
35
30
25
20
15
10
Issue
Frames
5
Strategic
Frames
0
1975
1980
1985
1990
political and interpersonal mistrust. My hypothesis is that these characteristics of news stories
have decreased during the period of 1975 to 1990.
The results of measuring the change in social capital-enhancing and social capitaldiminishing is mixed. From my data, there is little support for the hypothesis that
the components of social capital-enhancing news stories have decreased; in fact, there has even
been an increase in some features such as images of formal and informal groups.
Frames that I classified as social capital-enhancing, as discussed in Chapter 3, remained
overall constant for the thirty year period that I examined. Figures 4.1 and 4.2 show that issue
and thematic frames were steady at an average of 34 percent and 8 percent, respectively. Like
many of the categories I measured, group-oriented frames did not conclusively decline or
increase between 1975 and 1990—the data on group-oriented frames fluctuates during
Figure 4.2: Trends in Episodic and Thematic Frames, 1975-1990.
47
80
70
60
Percentage
50
40
30
20
Episodic
Frames
10
Thematic
Frames
0
1975
1980
1985
1990
this period (Figure 4.4). Group reenactment of George Washington’s winter at Valley Forge and
groups of people protesting inflation problems in France and Spain are news stories that
contributed to the 20.9 percent of group-oriented stories in 1975; this percentage drops to 16.4
percent in 1980 and swings back up to 19.4 percent in 1985 and 29.4 percent in 1990. Figure 4.5
documents that there is also no conclusive evidence on changes in positive news stories: my data
shows that the percentage of positive new stories was in fluctuation, from 10.4 percent in 1975 to
5.2 percent in 1980 to 7.8 percent in 1985 to finally 11.8 percent in 1990. New stories that
focused on state and local issues, which were also classified as social capital-enhancing stories,
did not show a decline (Figure 4.7). The percentage of state and local stories, which included
such stories as sheep ranchers’ problems with coyotes in Colorado in 1975, a tornado disaster in
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Figure 4.3: Total Number of News Stories Compared to Human Interest Stories, 19751990.
140
120
100
Count
80
60
40
All news stories
20
Human interest
news stories
0
1975
1985
1980
1990
Nebraska in 1980, and a chemical factory’s pollution in a Texas community in 1990, kept steady
at around 14 percent in the four years that I sampled.
My data suggests signs that some of the social capital-enhancing components had not
decreased but in fact had increased over the past thirty years. Stories that I had classified as
human-interest stories had increased steadily from 12.2 percent in 1975 to 29.4 percent in 1990.
Human-interest stories are “soft” news stories that include news segments such as sled dog
practices in upstate New York (1975), the Muppets leaving television (1980), small-town
capitals in the United States (1985), and Greta Garbo’s death (1990). The increase in the
percentage of human-interest stories can be attributed to the fact that the number of news stories
declined from 1975 to 1990. Figure 4.3 shows that in 1975 and 1980, the sample of news
broadcasts contained a total of 115 and 116 news stories, respectively; this figure declines to 103
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Figure 4.4: Trends in Individual-oriented and Group-oriented Frames, 1975-1990.
40
35
30
Percentage
25
20
15
10
Individualoriented
5
Grouporiented
0
1975
1985
1980
1990
in 1985 and a mere 68 news stories in 1990. The drop in the number of news stories can be
explained by changes in advertising in the early 1980s, which caused a growth in the number of
commercials during the evening news.1 Thus, even though the actual count of human-interest
stories that were broadcast during a week increased from 14 in 1975 to 18 in 1990, the
percentage of human-interest stories increased more dramatically.
Not only have the percentage of human-interest stories increased, contrary to my
hypothesis, images of formal and informal groups have also become more prevalent. The
percentage of group images, formal, informal, and political, has not changed; but the percentage
of pictures of people in organized associations and people engaging in unofficial and
unorganized group activity have grown in the past thirty years. Formal groups, which are
1
Neil Postman and Steve Powers, How to Watch TV News (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 117-8.
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Figure 4.5: Trends in Positive and Negative News Stories, 1975-1990.
35
30
Percentage
25
20
15
10
5
Negative
Positive
0
1975
1980
1985
1990
featured in the pictures of such stories as a news report on a meeting of disgruntled conservatives
seeking to break away from the Republican party (1975) and an association of Chinatown
businesses in San Francisco protesting the destruction of a section of the freeway that served as a
primary road into Chinatown (1990). These images increased from 8.9 percent in 1975 to 13.6
percent in 1990. The percentage of images of informal groups more than doubled during the
same period, from 7.8 percent in 1975 to 16.9 percent in 1990. Pictures of a family doing
activities together, such as images of an “average” American family that is plagued by the health
problems caused by the chemical plant in the area eating a family dinner together (1990), and
mingling with their co-workers and neighbors, such as college students socializing with each
other while waiting in line to find jobs (1975), increased. The increase in the number of formal
and informal images may be due in part to better technology in the television news industry.
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Figure 4.6: Relative changes in social capital-enhancing television news, 1975-1990.
Relative change
1975-1990
-3.9%*
-2.7%*
8.5%*
1.3%*
0.2%*
14.3%
12.4%
-0.9%*
4.6%
9.1%
Issue Frames
Thematic Frames
Group-oriented Frames
Positive Tone
State/Local Stories
Human-Interest Stories
Stories about Political Groups
Images of groups working together
Images of informal groups
Images of formal groups
*These figures are inconclusive as percentages fluctuate greatly in 1980 and 1985. Please refer to Appendix B for
the complete figures.
Overall, the total amount of images I counted increased to 754 in 1985 and 634 in 1990, from
low levels of 448 and 464 images in 1975 and 1980 respectively. More advanced technology
allowed networks to capture more images for news broadcasts and also to move more equipment
into a greater variety of locations.
My hypothesis that social capital-enhancing components of news stories have declined in
the past thirty years is not supported by my data. Figure 4.6 tracks the relative changes of social
capital-enhancing television news and shows that my results are very mixed. In many instances,
the results are inconclusive but in some cases such as human-interest stories and formal and
informal group images, the results are contrary to my expectations. I shall next examine my data
on social capital-diminishing news stories.
SOCIAL CAPITAL-DIMINISHING NEWS STORIES
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Figure 4.7: Trends in National and State/Local News, 1975-1990.
70
60
Percentage
50
40
30
20
10
National
State/Local
0
1975
1980
1985
1990
The data for social capital-diminishing stories, like those for social capital-enhancing
stories, is also varied. Many components of social capital-diminishing news stories such as
strategic and individual-oriented frames have increased in the past thirty years, other features
such as negative tone and stories classified as alerts and catastrophes either fluctuated or
remained constant.
Overall, the frames classified as social capital-diminishing increased, as my hypothesis
had suggested. My data shows that the percentage of strategic frames, which Patterson and
Cappella and Jamieson argue are responsible for growing political cynicism in Americans,
doubled from 15.7 percent in 1975 to 22.4 percent in 1980 to 34 percent in 1985 to finally 32.4
percent in 1990 (Figure 4.1). Individual-oriented stories, which composed of 19.2 percent of
news stories in 1975, also increased during this period to 29.4 percent in 1990. Data for episodic
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Figure 4.8: Trends in New Stories Classified as Crime, Alert, Catastrophe, or Political
Scandal, 1975-1990
35
30
Percentage
25
20
15
10
Crime
Alert
5
Catastophe
Political Scandal
0
1975
1985
1980
1990
stories from the same period do not show the same increase (Figurer 4.2). The percentages of
episodically-framed news stories experienced some fluctuation: 67.8 percent of stories in 1975
had episodic frames; this figure increases to 70.7 percent in 1980 and decreases to 65.1 percent
and 57.4 percent in 1985 and 1990. Group-oriented frames with government interference also
did not change significantly as the percentage of group stories with instances of interference
consisted of less than 10 percent of the news stories each year. Stories that featured formal
groups in the story, however, increased dramatically in the thirty years. The percentage of
stories that featured formal groups and organizations nearly doubled: 28.7 percent of news
stories in 1975 contained instances of groups that are formally organized such as the Republican
party and the American Federation of Labor and by 1990 the percentage rose to 51.5. Informal
groups barely registered in my data; thus the findings are insignificant.
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Figure 4.9: Relative Change in Social Capital-Diminishing Television News, 1975-1990.
Relative change
1975-1990
16.7%
-10.5*
10.3%
1.8%*
4.8%
-32.3%
5.1%
2.2%
0.9%*
-1.9%*
6.5%*
0.3%*
-8.9%*
Strategic Frames
Episodic Frames
Individual-oriented Frames
Group-oriented Frames with Interference
Negative Tone
National Stories
Crime Stories
Alert Stories
Catastrophe Stories
Political Scandal Stories
Individual Images
Group Images with Interference
Catastrophe Images
*These figures are inconclusive because the percentages in 1980 and 1985 fluctuate greatly. Please refer to
Appendix B for the complete figures.
Negative tone, which as a component of social capital-diminishing stories should have
declined, showed no significant change: from 1975 to 1990, negative news stories increased by 4
percent from 26.1 percent to 30.9 percent.
Stories classified as political scandals, catastrophe, crime, and alert, which as social
capital-diminishing stories should have increased substantially in the past thirty years, showed no
significant or inconclusive changes, as pictured in Figure 4.8. In 1975, stories about the House
Speaker’s secretary Pauline B. Girvin, indicted by on charges of fraud, and profiles of the men
convicted in Watergate composed the 7.8 percent of stories that were coded as political scandals.
In 1985, however, the percentage had increased to 16.5, due to the plethora of scandal coverage
concerning President Reagan’s controversial visit to a World War II German cemetery where
Nazi soldiers were buried and Reagan’s plan to supply aid to the Nicaraguan contras, an action
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which he mistakenly claimed the Pope supported. The figures do not remain high, as only 5.9
percent of the news stories in 1990 were coded as political scandals. Stories concerning
catastrophes experienced a similar fluctuation in the years that I examined. Catastrophic stories
increased steadily from 18.2 percent (1975) to 29.1 percent (1985). The week of April 14 to
April 20, 1985 was characterized by events such as a fire in a New York skyscraper, deaths
caused by Mt. Vesuvius activity, and an armed Neo-Nazi, who had killed several people, on the
loose in the Midwest, all of which I coded as catastrophic events. In 1990, however, the figure
had fallen back to 19.1 percent. Crime and alert stories showed no significant changes as both
increased by only five and two percent, respectively.
My data on social capital-diminishing images are also rather inconclusive. Images of
people working alone, which according to my hypothesis should have declined, fluctuated from
16.5 percent to 25.2 percent back down to 16.3 percent and up again to 23 percent in the four
years that I coded. Like the group-oriented frames with interference news stories, the images of
interference were also insignificant; thus, no conclusions can be gleamed from my data on
images and news stories about groups and organizations that are restrained and prohibited to
work together by authorities.
As Figures 4.6 and 4.9 show, support for my hypothesis that my classifications of social
capital-enhancing and social capital-diminishing news stories have changed significantly is
mixed and inconclusive. According to my findings, social capital-diminishing news stories have
not been increasing steadily nor have social capital-enhancing stories been decreasing steadily
since 1975. Thus, my hypothesis that the changes in the news media might have affected social
capital is not supported. As a result, the notion that the declines in social capital that past
research has identified cannot be conclusively attributed to changes in television news. There
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are numerous explanations as to why my research has not shown the correlation between social
capital and television news, as I will discuss in the next chapter.
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