Chu Hwang
PLAP 496
14 October 2002
My paper will examine the change in the content and style of television news programs from the 1950s to the 1990s in the context of explaining the decline in social capital and political participation. My tentative hypothesis is that differences in news framing and coverage of stories such as Vietnam and Watergate are correlated with the decline in different aspects of social captial, in particular, poltical and community participation. I will analyze the content of television news from 1950 to the 1990s taken from the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and examine it in the context of changes in political and community participation during the same period.
In Bowling Alone and “Tuning in, Tuning out: The Strange Disappearance of Social
Capital in America,” Putnam names television as one of the culprits in the decline in social capital. He focuses his attention on the individualizing effects of television—it is more difficult to socialize with family and friends while watching television as compared to in a bowling alley.
Time that could be spent socializing at family dinners or writing letters is spent instead in front of the television. Since the 1950s, he shows, more people are spending a greater amount of time watching television. He notes the correlation between the greater amount of time watching television and a less active and connected role in the community and he attributes this relationship to the individualizing effects of the medium of television. Putnam, however, only examines the inherent individualizing effects of television; he does not explore the idea that different types of television programming or the content on television may also be correlated with the decline in civic engagement.
1

The idea that different types of television programming may have varied effects on political and community participation is studied by Pippa Norris in “Does Television Erode
Social Capital? A Reply to Putnam.” Norris reveals that there is a substantial difference between participation levels of TV news watchers and regular TV entertainment viewers. She shows that individuals who watch primetime television news and public affairs programing spend more time active in politics and in their communities. But has civic engagment declined over time even among news watchers or among viewers of different news programs (primetime news programs, Sunday talk shows, and C-SPAN)? I would like to build upon the findings of
Norris and Putnam by examining the relationship between televison news content and social capital.
In examining television content and social capital, I think that one important point for me to consider is whether my findings result from media effect or selection effect: is the decline in social capital due to the change in television content or is the change in television content just a reflection of a population with declining social capital due to another reason. Without controlled experimental data, panel survey data, or focus focus group analysis, I may not be able to verify causal relatioships but I can locate and analyze relationships and associations; however, each relationship must still be considered and will be important to how I report my findings and write my paper.
2

Bibliography
Berman, David R. and John A. Stookey. “Adolescents, Television, and Support for
Government.”
Public Opinion Quarterly 44, no. 3 (Autumn 1980): 330-40.
Brehm, John and Wendy Rahn. “Individual-Level Evidence for the Causes and Consequences of Social Capital.”
American Journal of Political Science 41, no. 3 (July 1997): 999-
1023.
Gerbner, George, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan and Nancy Signorielli. “Political Correlates of
Television Viewing.”
Public Opinion Quarterly 48, no.1 (Spring 1984): 283-300.
Hart, Roderick P. “Easy Citizenship: Television’s Curious Legacy.” The Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 546 (1996): 109-19.
Iyengar, Shanto and Donald Kinder. News That Matters: Television and American Public
Opinion . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Lazerfeld, Paul and Robert Merton. “Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized
Social Action.” In Mass Communications , ed. Wilbur Schramm. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1948, 492-503.
Levi, Margaret. “Social and Unsocial Capital: A Review Essay of Robert Putnam’s Making
Democracy Work
.”
Politics & Society 24 (1996): 45-55.
McBride, Allan. “Television, Individualism, and Social Capital.”
PS: Political Science and
Politics 31, no. 3 (Spetember 1998), 542-52.
Morgan, Michael. “Television and Democracy.” In
Cultural Politics in Contemporary America , ed. Ian Angus and Sut Jhally. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Norris, Pippa. “Does Television Erode Social Capital? A Reply to Putnam.”
PS: Political
Science and Politics 29, no. 3 (September 1996): 474-80.
Newton K. “Social Capital and Democracy.”
American Behavioral Scientist 40 (1997), 575-86.
Paxton, Pamela. “Is Social Capital Declining in the United States? A Multiple Indicator
Assessment.” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 1 (July 1999): 88-127.
Patterson, Thomas. Out of Order . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993; Vintage Books, 1994.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death . New York: Viking, 1985.
Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community . New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
3

Putnam, Robert. “Tuning in, Tuning out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in
America.” In
Controversies in Voting Behavior , 4 th
ed., ed. Richard G. Niemi and
Herbert F. Weisberg. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 2001, 38-68.
Putnam, Robert. “The Strange Disappearance of Civic America.”
American Prospect (Winter),
34-48.
Putnam, Robert. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy . Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1993.
Rahn, Wendy and John E. Transue. “Social Trust and Value Change: The Decline of Social
Capital in American Youth, 1976-1995” Political Psychology 19, no. 3 (1998), 545-65.
Robinson, Michael J. “Public Affairs Television and the Growth of Political Malaise: The Case of ‘The Selling of the Pentagon.’”
American Political Science Review 70, no. 2 (June
1976): 409-32.
Rosenstone, Steven J. and John Mark Hansen. Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in
America . New Topics in Politics. New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1993.
Shah, D. “Civic Engagement, Interpersonal Trust, and Television Use: An Individual-level
Assessment of Social Capital.”
Political Psychology 19 (1998), 441-67.
Stolle, D. “Bowling Together, Bowling Alone: The Development of Generalized Trust in
Voluntary Associations.”
Political Psychology (1998).
Sullivan and Transue, “The Psychological Underpinnings of Democracy: A Selective Review of
Research on Political Tolerance, Interpersonal Trust, and Social Capital.” Annual Review of Psychology (1999).
Uslander, E.M. “Social Capital, Television, and the ‘Mean World’: Trust, Optimism, and Civic
Participation.”
Political Psychology 19, no. 3 (1998), 441-67.
Verba, Sidney, Kay Lehmann Schlozman and Henry E. Brady. Voice and Equality: Civic
Voluntarism in American Politics . Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer
4