Running Head: CITY CHARACTERISTICS and COVERAGE of NAFTA

Running head: CITY CHARACTERISTICS AND COVERAGE OF NAFTA

City Characteristics and Newspaper Coverage of the

NAFTA Agreement

John C. Pollock Author's Note: John C. Pollock, assistant professor in the Communication Studies Department at The College of New Jersey, (P.O. Box 7718, Ewing, NJ 08628) is writing a book for Hampton Press on the impact of city characteristics on media agenda building, focusing on emerging public issues such as HIV/AIDS, human rights (women's rights, physician-assisted euthanasia, Cuban refugees), economic downsizing and the Internet. This article is based on a paper presented at the Political Communication Division of the International Communication Association Annual Conference in Albuquerque, in May, 1995. Jodi Giannattasio and Brian Siano, both graduates of The College of New Jersey, assisted in the data collection. The research was funded by the Faculty and Institutional Research and Sabbatical Leave (FIRSL) Committee of The College of New Jersey. CITY CHARACTERISTICS AND NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF NAFTA

Abstract

Since so many citizens identified the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with employment/unemployment issues, this critical event is an ideal opportunity for studying the association between citizen/influential concerns and newspaper coverage. Using a DIALOG national newspaper database, locally generated articles published from September 1, 1993 to December 31, 1993, were analyzed in twenty major newspapers representing a geographic cross- section of cities in the United States. A content analysis technique evaluated both the "amount of attention " an article received and its"direction" to yield a single score for each newspaper. Those scores were compared with a variety of city characteristics to test hypotheses associating several aspects of community structure with reporting variations.

Employing correlation and multiple regression analyses, one key factor was found clearly associated with coverage favoring or opposing NAFTA. Occupational sector, specifically percent employed in manufacturing, outweighs the factors of education, income and occupational status in its association with reporting on NAFTA. Contrary to positions taken by organized labor, the higher the proportion of the labor force employed in manufacturing in a city, the more positive that city's reporting on NAFTA is likely to be. A possible umbrella explanation for the positive association of media coverage and manufacturing is the "guard dog" conception of media as sentries for established groups in social conflict. This perspective, articulated by Gans (1979) and Olien, Donohue, and Tichenor (1995), suggests that media news is primarily about those at or near the top of power hierarchies and those low in the hierarchies who threaten the top. In this case, media coverage was more consistent with the interests of owners and senior managers in manufacturing than with the interests of hourly wage-earners. Mapping coverage of the NAFTA debates demonstrates that archival data comparing newspaper databases and city characteristics can reveal significant variations in reporting on political and economic policies.

Introduction The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect on January 1, 1995. Consistent with the post-World War II effort to develop more integrated, open markets, the NAFTA agreement, a 2000 page extension to the 1988 U.S. - Canada free trade agreement, removes tariffs, trade barriers, and restrictions on foreign markets to increase the flow of products, agricultural goods, and services among the three countries. Its provisions will go into effect over the next fifteen years. With so much historic and bipartisan support, the NAFTA agreement nonetheless became the most controversial free trade agreement in recent decades. A variety of business journalists and publications reassured U.S. citizens that the agreement is in the national interest in the long run, leading to strengthened exports. (Dowd, 1993; Marshall, 1993). Some groups remained opposed, nevertheless, including labor unions, the textile industry and environmentalists, concerned about loss of certain industries, certain jobs, and what by United States' standards appear to be lenient environmental protection laws. Although passing NAFTA presented President Clinton with substantial dilemmas, the controversy as reported in the mass media represents an opportunity for communication scholars to craft serious questions. Asking the question that Bennett and Manheim posed about coverage of the Gulf War, how well did the media "frame" or "cue" events so that mere facts being reported were given attention and broader meanings? In their Gulf War report, Bennett and Manheim (1993) argued that "the public defines an issue as it is cued by media, and the media as they are cued by policy elites." The authors also argued that unless policy elites debate matters early and vehemently in the course of a developing news story, opportunities to cue the public may be lost. Unlike reporting on the Gulf War, policy elites had multiple opportunities to debate NAFTA early and vehemently in the course of a developing news story, so that few opportunities to cue the public were lost. The NAFTA debate is also an excellent example of a critical event evoking employment issues because, according to an August, 1993 Gallup poll, the American public was concerned about it as an employment/jobs issue, with 68 % surveyed saying they thought jobs would be lost because U.S. businesses would move to Mexico. Only 22 % believed NAFTA would create jobs in America because Mexico would buy more U.S. exports. Further, the public was almost evenly split on NAFTA, with 44 % opposed, 41 % in favor. (Gallup and Moore, 1993). NAFTA was clearly controversial. With the public so divided, even disapproving, newspapers had many options in covering the NAFTA debate. To the extent papers varied, what factors present in their communities are associated with that variation? And are the factors associated with variation linked to relatively short-term or long-term community concerns or characteristics?

Employment Issues Scarce in Communication Literature A review of the communications literature reveals few articles focusing on the association between the umbrella issue of employment/unemployment and mass or public communications regarding it. Some attention has been paid to the use of information technologies by populations employed in the rural sector and by telecommuters, working from home. (LaRose, 1989; Abbott, 1989; Kraut, 1989). Three articles do focus directly on media and unemployment as a political or social problem, noting that television for schooling in developing countries can strain government capabilities to absorb employment demands (Arnove, 1975); television reports offer few explanations of the reasons for unemployment (Barkin and Gurevitch, 1987); and as a city's unemployment level rose, local coverage of the issue increased. (Shaw, 1988) Given this "information gap" or "attention gap" between public or scholarly concerns (among economists, political scientists, and sociologists) about unemployment and the dearth of concern displayed in the communication literature, it is worthwhile focusing on NAFTA coverage in particular because the issue was universally discussed in the United States, Ross Perot demonized it, and there was a win-lose vote on the NAFTA agreement in the Congress. A Community Structure Approach With so much political, business and public concern about NAFTA, and with the public evenly split, newspapers had many choices about the way they "cued" media agendas and

"framed" discussion on the agreement. Seeking explanations for variations in newspaper coverage of the NAFTA debate can lead scholars to at least three levels of analysis: individual Johnstone, Slawski and Bowman, 1976; Pollock, 1981; and Weaver and Wilhoit, 1988), organizational (Sigal, 1973; Tuchman, 1978) or community. A community focus is perhaps the most promising analytical level to probe for systematic variations in newspaper reporting on employment issues. News coverage might vary with different newspaper audiences of course, but that would be expected in communities or cities where there are at least two or more vibrant papers, a circumstance that is decreasingly true of major cities in the United States, where one major paper is increasingly the norm. In their pioneering studies of cities of different sizes in Minnesota, Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien (1980) concluded that newspapers in relatively large cities are unlikely to be easily controlled by a single set of political or economic elites, and rather than stake out a single, preagreed position, such papers serve as crucibles for the discussion of significant issues. In general, newspapers are viewed by media scholars as closely linked to the communities they serve. In a structural-functionalist paradigm, long popular in the social sciences, "media may be viewed as prominent subsystems within the larger social systems of the community; thus they tend to reflect the values and concerns of dominant groups in the communities they serve." (Smith, 1984a, p. 280). Tichenor, et. al. (1980, pp. 102-103) have also articulated the importance of newspapers as "mechanisms for community social control that maintain the norms, values and processes of a community, and . . . their functions necessarily fit into a pattern that varies predictably according to size and type of community." Building on the work of Tichenor, Donohue and Olien (1973; 1980), Stamm (1985), Smith (1984a; 1984b), Dearing and Rogers, 1992), Pollock and Robinson (1977), Pollock,

Robinson, and Murray (1978), Pollock, Shier, and Slattery (1995), Pollock and Killeen (1995), Pollock, Coughlin, Thomas, and Connaughton (1996), and Pollock, Kreuer, and Ouano (1997), this approach suggests that community or city characteristics (using aggregate data and demographics) have a great deal to do with reporting on critical events (such as a new trade agreement) that affect the nation. For example, city differences in racial composition, religious involvement, and poverty level were significant in reporting on critical events such as Roe v. Wade (Pollock, Robinson, and Murray, 1978); as well as the 1971 prisoner uprising at Attica, a 1976 High Court abortion decision and a Dade County (Miami) referendum revoking the right of homosexuals to non-discrimination in housing (Pollock and Robinson, 1977). Consistently, this study compares census, demographic and marketing data for different cities to explore which city characteristics are linked most closely to variations in reporting on NAFTA. (See Slater and Hall, 1992; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1992; The Lifestyle Market Analyst, 1993.) Hypotheses Two clusters of hypotheses emerge, focusing on city characteristics such as: media size and saturation; and social and economic advantage. Media Size and Numbers. In the Minnesota studies conducted by Tichenor, et. al., partially summarized in Community Conflict and the Press (1980), larger cities or communities are believed (and found) to display a wider range of group interests and perspectives than smaller communities, due to the greater social differentiation and stratification found in larger cities. This "structural pluralism" is also presumed associated with a wide range of viewpoints expressed in relatively large newspapers or an abundance of media outlets -- a relatively large number of radio or television stations. Tichenor, et. al. find that larger newspaper circulations and larger numbers of media outlets increase the likelihood that media will serve as crucibles for the negotiation of community concerns and conflicts, opening communication channels to proposed changes, including favorable coverage on new policy perspectives such as NAFTA. Accordingly: H1-H3: The larger a newspaper's circulation size, the greater the number of television stations in a city, or the greater the number of radio stations in a city, the more favorable the newspaper coverage of NAFTA. Status Advantage: The Buffer Hypothesis. Other research on the relationship between community structure and reporting patterns has pointed to a buffer hypothesis when exploring the relationship between status advantage (measured by indicators of occupational, educational, economic or sector advantage) and newspaper perspectives on social change: those groups least at risk from political and social change are associated with reporting patterns most open to change. Keith Stamm (1985) noted in Newspaper Use and Community Ties that amenity-rich environments, those with higher quality of life measures, are those most likely to attract knowledgeable, educated citizens and to have the best prospects for prosperity. One can extrapolate from this observation a "noblesse oblige" or "privileged liberal" hypothesis, suggesting that the comforts of privilege can yield a certain generosity toward those less fortunate. Cross-section studies of major papers throughout the United States, for example, have found that the higher the income or educational level in a city, the greater the likelihood of newspaper reporting favoring an "open door" toward Cuban refugees (Pollock, Shier, and Slattery, 1995). In another study, the higher the proportion of those with professional occupational status or high educational status in a city, the more likely newspapers were to report favorably on Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings (Pollock and Killeen, 1995). In each case, those groups most buffered from the uncertainties of social change (influx of refugees or changing roles for women) were associated with reporting likely to accept that change. Consistent with these findings, it is anticipated that in cities with relatively high proportions of economically advantaged, well educated, high occupational status residents, in particular where the service sector is comparatively large, reporting on NAFTA may be relatively receptive to the changes it can introduce because such groups are relatively buffered from many of the uncertainties accompanying large scale social or economic change. Economic self-interest may also be at work as well. High proportions of privileged residents may be linked to relatively pro-NAFTA reporting in a city because economically and socially dominant groups, according to Smith (1984b) and Tichenor et. al. (1980) can be associated with news reports articulating those groups' interests, which are likely to favor the economic benefits offered by NAFTA. These umbrella expectations lead to an overall status advantage or buffer hypothesis: The greater the status advantage, the greater the support for NAFTA. Five specific status advantage hypotheses for cities are as follows: H4-H8: The higher the median income, the greater the percentage of residents with annual incomes above $100,000, the higher the percentage of professionals or executives , the higher the percentage of civilian workers employed in the service sector, or the higher the proportion of residents who have completed four years of college, the more favorable the newspaper coverage of NAFTA. Status Disadvantage. By contrast, in cities with relatively high levels of economically disadvantaged (high proportions of unemployed, residents below the poverty level, blue collar workers or employees in manufacturing) reporting on NAFTA is predicted to be less favorable. (Manufacturing workers were presumably more at risk than service workers once NAFTA was passed.) Therefore: H9-H11: The higher the percentage of unemployment or poverty in a city, the higher the proportion of blue collar workers, or the higher the percentage of the civilian labor force employed in manufacturing in a city, the less likely media are to be favorable to NAFTA. Methodology For this analysis, 553 articles printed from September 1, 1993, through December 31, 1993 -- averaging more than 20 articles per paper -- were measured and evaluated using the DIALOG newspaper database. All locally generated articles on NAFTA activities or their implications more than one paragraph in length printed in the stated time period were sampled in 21 newspapers representing a geographic cross-section of the United States. The newspapers included in the study are: The Akron Beacon Journal, the Allentown Morning Call, The Atlanta Constitution, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Dayton Daily Press, The Detroit Free Press, The Houston Post, the Lexington Herald, The Los Angeles Times, the Orlando Sentinel, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Phoenix Gazette. The Pittsburgh Gazette, the Portland Oregonian, The Rocky Mountain News, the St. Petersburg Times, the Sacramento Bee, The Seattle Times, and the Wichita Eagle. Each article was read and given two scores. The first was an attention or display score, which is a total numerical rating from 3 to 16 points based on the following criteria: placement (front page prominent, front page non-prominent, inside prominent - including editorial, or other), headline word count, length of article word count and photograph (with/without caption). This attention score provided a measure of the significance of an article based on the way it was displayed in the newspaper publication. The higher the number of assigned points, the more attention the article received. The second score, a direction score, was derived from evaluation of article content. The nominal measurements of favorable, unfavorable or balanced/neutral toward NAFTA were assigned to each newspaper article. A major challenge for this content analysis method was to ensure that favorable articles did indeed legitimize NAFTA, and that unfavorable articles did indeed criticize NAFTA. Examples are as follows: 1. Coverage favorable" to NAFTA included articles describing it or its supporters as "gigantic agreement," "winners," "help world trade," and "results oriented." Other terms coded as favorable included "mature economic partnership," "dynamic era of growth," "enlarge the pie," "seize the moment," and "rejecting NAFTA would be an international disaster." 2. Coverage "unfavorable" to NAFTA included articles containing such phrases as "pro- NAFTA propaganda," "republicrat," "orgy," "bully pulpit," and "depressed wages." Unfavorable articles also tended to focus on such terms as "jobs are disappearing", "trigger a stampede," "cheap labor," "will kill American jobs," "one giant sting," "twilight of unionism," "bill of bads," and "good deal for the rich only." 3. Balanced/neutral" coverage either contained material that made no effort to legitimize or delegitimize NAFTA, or it contained an approximately equal proportion of both favorable and unfavorable material. After evaluating article direction with this threefold classification, a systematic random subsample of 50% of the articles was coded by two researchers and yielded Holsti's coefficient of intercoder reliability of .84. Each article's attention score and its directional score (favorable, unfavorable, or balanced/neutral) were then used to calculate the Janis-Fadner Coefficient of Imbalance for each newspaper. The resulting statistic, which can vary between +1.00 and -1.00, permitted quantitative comparisons of each newspaper's coverage of the NAFTA debate (Janis and Fadner, 1965). Results

Positive Janis-Fadner scores indicated the legitimizing of NAFTA, while negative scores revealed the delegitimizing of the international agreement. To test the 12 hypotheses using interval level data, correlation and regression analyses were used. Table 1 shows that the Janis- Fadner Coefficients of Imbalance scores ranged from .232 for the Lexington Herald to -.14 for the Pittsburgh Gazette. A Disconfirmation: Manufacturing Associated Somewhat Favorably with NAFTA. Correlation analysis yields directional disconfirmation of the manufacturing hypothesis. Contrary to prediction, as Table 2 reveals, the higher the percentage of city employees in manufacturing, the less favorable media are toward NAFTA. Curiously, this finding was not significant at less than the .05 level of significance until Detroit was removed from the sample. Scatterplot analysis revealed that Detroit was not typical but somewhat deviant among cities with considerable numbers in manufacturing .1 Perhaps Detroit was different because it still represents one of the most highly organized areas of unionized labor, the United Auto Workers. Further, Detroit's core industry, automobiles, is especially sensitive to foreign competition. Whatever the reason, when Detroit was removed from the sample a clear, significant finding surfaced in Table 2: high levels of manufacturing were associated with newspaper coverage relatively favorable to NAFTA (r = . 46; p = .045) Little or No Correlation Between Other Occupational or Media Characteristics and Coverage of NAFTA. Although multiple regression analysis confirms that percent in manufacturing is the only variable that can explain any variance (22 %) at a significant level (.045), in its association with favorable reporting on NAFTA, none of the other 10 tested hypotheses resulted in significant results. Contrary to the hypotheses, there are no significant relationships between newspaper coverage of NAFTA and long-term indicators of personal advantage or disadvantage accrued over a lifetime, such as education level , income level, unemployment level or even poverty level. Nor are measures of media presence and saturation (such as newspaper circulation or number of television and radio stations) linked systematically to variations in NAFTA coverage. Perhaps media penetration factors were of less importance in this case than in some others because the NAFTA debate was aired so broadly and discussed so thoroughly that a wide range of people had an opportunity to pass judgment. Media penetration and plurality may matter most in gaining public attention at the inception of a debate (Pollock, O'Neill, Pizzutello, Hall, 1996). Conclusion: The Value of a Community Structure Approach The study finds that a high percentage employed in the manufacturing sector is related positively with media support for NAFTA, contrary to initial expectations. The community structure approach to reporting on NAFTA suggests that in this case newspapers may have functioned less as watchdogs of the public interest, skeptical of official pronouncements, than as guard dogs for groups having "the power and influence to create and command their own security systems" (Olien, Donohue and Tichenor, 1995). According to Gans (1979) and more recently to Olien, et. al., (p. 306), "Media news is primarily about those at or near the top of the power hierarchies and those low in the hierarchies who threaten the top." The absence of significant associations between city characteristics and media size and saturation variables, or all but one of the status advantage factors, does not invalidate the community structure approach. Similar studies have revealed extraordinarily strong relationships, accounting for over 50 or 60 percent of the variance, between percent professionals or percent college educated and reporting on Magic Johnson or Anita Hill. Since the NAFTA debate is linked so specifically to only one city characteristic, however, this study suggests two cautions for the city structure approach. One limitation is that individual newspapers may have well-identified histories or positions -- in the case of the Detroit Free Press, strongly pro-labor -- that may exist or persist independent of a city's demographic configuration. Scatterplot analysis can reveal whether a particular city's characteristics are consistent with, dissociated from or contrary to predominant patterns. With the Detroit Free Press, its contrary pattern justified close examination and, given its relatively idiosyncratic history, exclusion from a revised sample. A second caution focuses on how many citizens an issue appears to affect. Magic Johnson's HIV announcement and Anita Hill's testimony raised issues of essentially universal importance. It was not unexpected that several city \characteristics were linked significantly to reporting on those issues. NAFTA, by contrast, appears most relevant to very specific economic interests. It may not be surprising, therefore, that only one city characteristic -- percent labor force in manufacturing -- varies strongly with NAFTA reporting because of a high degree of issue specificity. Nevertheless, although a particular newspaper's special history or a concrete issue's specificity can constrain the use of the city characteristic approach, it remains a valid tool. Evidence from this study of reporting on the NAFTA debate confirms that newspapers reported positively on NAFTA in proportion to the proportion of each city's workforce employed in manufacturing. Since so much of labor was clearly against NAFTA, for reasons outlined in the section on hypotheses, the pattern is precisely contrary to the presumed interests of labor and congruent with the interests of manufacturing management. Analysis of newspaper NAFTA coverage reveals a substantial amount of evidence consistent with the "guard dog" conception of media as "sentries for established groups in social conflict" (Olien, et. al., 1995).

Note 1. In a similar fashion, the Rocky Mountain News was removed from a sample of coverage of China's bid for the 2000 Olympics because Denver is the only U.S. city to mount a successful referendum to reject a winter Olympics after the city's organizers had made a successful bid before the International Olympic Committee (Pollock, Kreuer, and Ouano, 1997).

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Newspapers Coefficients of Imbalance Lexington Herald .232 Wichita Eagle .225 Philadelphia Inquirer .210 Akron Beacon Journal .199 Seattle Times .156 Atlanta Journal/Constitution .125 Orlando Sentinel .120 Rocky Mountain News ( Denver) .095 Phoenix Gazette .060 Dayton Daily Press .040 Los Angeles Times .039 Portland Oregonian .029 Boston Globe .020 Chicago Tribune .020 Houston Post .018 Allentown Morning Call .009 Detroit Free Press .004 St. Petersburg Times -.090 Sacramento Bee -.110 Pittsburgh Gazette -.140

Table 2

Pearson Correlations of Selected Status Variables

Including Detroit Without Detroit Variable Correlation Probability* Correlation Probability Percent in Manufacturing .372 .11 .465 .045* Percent Below Poverty -.223 .34 -.229 .345 Percent Unemployed -.222 .35 -.188 .440 Percent in Services -.221 .35 -.230 .342 * p < .05