Assumed Transmission in Political Science: A Call for Bringing Description Back In

Uplifting Manhood to Wonderful Heights? News Coverage of the Human Costs of Military Conflict From World War I to Gulf War Two

“…These general patterns of news coverage given to war casualties held fairly consistently across the five wars, even though these conflicts varied in duration, in the scale of human losses, in the censorship systems used to filter war information (e.g., Carruthers, 2000;Knightley, 2004), and in the strategic communication efforts made by American political leaders (e.g., Casey, 2001Casey, , 2005Coe, 2013;Ponder, 1998;Roeder, 1993). The relative similarity of tendencies in casualty coverage across wars therefore suggests that the news making process itself may be ultimately responsible for structuring how information about the human costs of war reaches ordinary Americans (Althaus, et al, 2011). Mainstream news media tend to structure their war coverage around whatever topics are being actively discussed by government officials (e.g., Bennett, Lawrence, & Livingston, 2007;Entman, 2003;Hallin, 1986;Mermin, 1999;Robinson, et al, 2010;Wolfsfeld, 2004).…”

“…In contrast, news coverage given to American casualties in Iraq focused mainly on deaths rather than wounds, even though the wounded outnumbered the dead by more than seven to one over the period considered here. In short, these findings underscore that the news attention given to American casualties is no mirror of events on the battlefield (Althaus, et al, 2011). Figure 2 also reveals important changes in the amount of news attention given by the Times to enemy and civilian casualties.…”

“…This ranking of wars by the human costs borne among American forces has no obvious relationship to the amount of news coverage given to American losses by the New York Times (for an extended analysis of this point in the context of American deaths alone, see Althaus et al, 2011). To the contrary, Figure 1 shows that news coverage of American casualties has remained fairly stable across wars.…”

Updating Supreme Court Legitimacy: Testing the 'Rule, Learn, Update' Model of Political Communication

“…Indeed, even the simple model of policy evaluation and updating makes a number of heroic assumptions that few students of political communication would accept. Althaus et al (2011Althaus et al ( , 1065, for example, are particularly critical of such simplistic models, complaining that:…”

“…Their continued neglect calls into question a wide range of theories about system-and individual-level processes rooted in the unlikely assumption that the observable facts serving as inputs to our models are communicated widely enough through a political system that they could serve as a proximal influence on individual-level opinions. (Althaus et al 2011(Althaus et al , 1077 The very first step in every model of updating -that citizens learn of, understand, and evaluate the outputs of the U.S. Supreme Court -seems suspect from the viewpoint of scholars like Althaus and his colleagues.…”