Reporters & BureaucratsA Literature Review of International and Comparative Trends in Relations between the Media and Public Administration Mordecai Lee
PAPER
Abstract Political Science has focused on the relationships between politics and the media in the United States, but little attention is paid to the interaction of the media with the unelected side of government – public administration – and even less regarding those relationships abroad. A review of research about reporter-administrator relationships outside the United States seeks to identify whether trends identified in the research about American media-administration relationships are also occurring abroad. Political science has dedicated substantial attention to the reporter-politician relationship, both regarding coverage of candidates, campaigns and elections as well as coverage of elected officials once in office (Alger, 1998; Gans, 1998; Nimmo & Newsome, 1997; Nye, 1997; Jacobs & Shapiro, 1996; Lipset, 1996, pp. 285-7; Patterson, 1996a; Patterson, 1996b). However, the field generally focuses less on the relationship between the administrative side of government and the news media. In 1968, Heibert noted the very few studies of the public information function within federal administrative agencies or research that would be relevant to public information activities by state and local agencies (p. 6). Since then, little has changed. McKerns (1985) noted that the focus of the government-media literature "has been largely myopic, i.e. the primary focus has been on the relationship at the federal level and between the president and the news media in particular" (p. xx). According to Martin (1989), the study of agency relations with the press "is one of the more dramatic examples of a subject from which Public Administration has borrowed only a scattering of the available literature" (p. 149). Nimmo and Swanson (1990) summed up research in political communications by noting that "even more rare are analyses of bureaucratic communication" (p. 28). According to Garnett, all aspects of communication, whether internal or external, "have been under-emphasized in public administration practice and scholarship relative to its importance to the enterprise of public administration" (1997, p. 6). Similarly, the sub-field of comparative administration pays little attention to media issues. For example, administrative-media relations are not addressed in the overviews edited by Rowat (1988), Dwivedi and Henderson (1990), Garcia-Zamor and Khator (1994), Baker (1994), Heady (1996) and Hyden (1997). A contributing factor to this omission is the limited ability to draw generalizations between the wide variety of the governmental and media systems of contemporary nation-states (Rogers, 1997, pp. 35-39; Grunig, 1997, pp. 270-271; Lenn, 1996, p. 441). In addition, when the literature of media studies government, it tends
to focus on elected officials, politics and public policy making. Little
separate attention is paid to the non-elected side of government, the
bureaucracy. For example, Asante's (1997) comprehensive review of the
literature did not identify a sub-field regarding media coverage of public
administration in the section on the government-press connection (pp.
11-49). An assessment of trends in media coverage of American public administration concluded that it has been diminishing quantitatively. Further, the reduced coverage has been assuming a greater negative tone; with reporters often framing their stories with archetypal story lines, such as "wasteful bureaucrats," "citizen victimized by bureaucracy," and "agency ignoring real needs" reports (Lee, forthcoming). These patterns are spreading to other countries. Negrine and Papathanassopoulos (1996) reported on the Americanization of political communications throughout the world. "Indeed, as television becomes the main source of information for most people, the fact that its own development has been greatly influenced by the U.S. experience increases the connections between practices in the United States and elsewhere" (p. 53; see also Patterson, 1998). Several reports by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) suggest that the trends regarding U.S. media coverage of public administration are also occurring in other First World countries. OECD consists of 29 of the most advanced nations, which have a free-market economic system and a democratic political system. At its "Ministerial Symposium on the Future of Public Service" representatives expressed concern about pressures from the media for rapid responses to problems. "The part played by the media, clearly vital to the functioning of democracy and oversight of administrative action, can be disruptive if decision-makers are subjected to permanent inquisition" (OECD, 1996). A year later OECD issued a public management paper noting general trends in media coverage similar to those occurring in the United States (Washington, 1997), including a tone that is increasingly cynical, superficial and sensationalist. This negative trend was compounded in OECD nations by a media focus on scandal, real or fabricated crises, and policy failure. Another trend in media coverage is a sense of urgency and expectation of immediate response that has the effect of skewing policy agendas and decision-making. However, "what is urgent is not always what is most important" (p. 30). One of the responses recommended by OECD parallels a response undertaken
by American practitioners: "many countries are also stepping up the proactive
dissemination of government information to the public." For example, "many
governments are putting a wide variety of material for public consumption
on the Internet" (p. 35). Although Japan is similar to the United States as a democratic and economically advanced nation, media coverage of the bureaucracy is significantly different. Notwithstanding its modern media institutions on par with the United States, Japan's media give much greater coverage to the administrative state than U.S. media. According to Krauss (1996), Japanese television has an "exceptionally large percentage of stories related to the bureaucracy and its advisory councils (together occupying 36 percent in the Japanese sample versus only 2 percent for mentions of bureaucracy in the American sample)" (p. 99). While the U.S. media are executive-centered and input oriented, the Japanese media are bureaucracy-centered and output oriented. Krauss concludes that "the portrayal of politics and government, particularly the administrative state, is one of the most important and seemingly distinctive aspects of the content of NHK television news compared to American network news" (p. 102). This significant difference can be attributed partly to general cultural factors, but Freeman (1996) attributes it largely to the prevalence of press clubs in Japan. These press-based information cartels limit competition between reporters from different media outlets who are assigned to the same beat. Furthermore, most assignments are institution-based, normally corresponding to major administrative departments. Press clubs have the effect of giving bureaucrats the ability to assert control and define their own agendas. One similarity between U.S. and Japanese media trends is that "saturation
television news coverage in Japan of bizarre events easily rivals its
American counterparts" (Pharr, 1997, p. 136), which can have the effect
of slowly crowding out the current extensive coverage of bureaucracy.
According to O'Neill (1993), the criticism of the Americanization of television coverage of government news in Eastern Europe characterized such coverage as too aggressive, critical, reckless and sensational (p. 155). He concluded that "however much these trends may vary from country to country, they are traveling in the same general direction: toward various degrees of media-cracy, in which TV politics replaces old patterns of governance and instant public emotions override reflection and deliberation in the making of policy" (p. 156). A newspaper reporter from Germany who was assigned to cover southeastern Europe noted that "because of a journalist's constraints always to cover 'headline-news', important background stories on subjects like public administration reform never or seldom are written" (Rub, 1996, p. 47). Kimble (1998) suggests that in the successor states to the Soviet Union,
which had been dominated by the administrative apparatus, the emergence
of market economies, personal freedoms, and democracy mean that government
is becoming irrelevant. Diminished media coverage of the bureaucracy,
she argues, reflected evolving citizen perceptions of which institutions
are now important in their lives and which no longer are. The limited academic literature on media coverage of public administration
abroad prevents definitive conclusions from being drawn. From the modest
amount of research that is available, it appears that the trends regarding
press coverage of bureaucracy in the United States – reduced in quantity
and increasingly negative in quality – are occurring in other countries
as well. The pattern is most noticeable in First World nations, which
are economically, socially and politically at levels comparable to the
United States. This issue is too important for academics to ignore. It
is important that scholars write about their observations and experiences
regarding media coverage of administration throughout the world in order
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Mordecai Lee, Ph.D., is assistant professor of governmental affairs, University Outreach, at the Milwaukee campus, and coordinator of the Governmental Affairs Consortium, for the Extension service, University of Wisconsin. He can be reached at 161 W. Wisconsin Ave., Suite 6000, Milwaukee, WI 53203-2602, e-mail mordecai@uwm.edu, or Web www.uwex.edu/gac , www.uwm.edu/People/mordecai , and by phone (414) 227-3282 or fax 414.227.3168. This research was funded in part by a 1998 Scholar Access Grant from the Joint Center for Inter-national Studies of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Milwaukee.
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