Bias in television interviews towards politicians Master thesis Communication Science Student: Faranak Babai (10437983) Supervised by: Marjolein Moorman Graduate School of Communication University of Amsterdam June 2015 Abstract Television can be biased in many different ways; in this research two ways of possible bias are measured. The first is the bias in the representation of politicians on television. The second is the bias of the journalists in their approach towards politicians in interviews, on television. This study investigates the first type for the following characteristics: age, gender, experience, and political party and the second type for the following characteristics: Left/right winged party, coalition/oppositional party and gender. Bias is measured using six elements being: initiative, directness, assertiveness, accountability, opposition and persistence of the journalist, a research tool that is developed by Claymen, Elliott, Heritage and Mcdonald (2007) and improved by Huls and Varwijk (2011). Bias is measured in the political oriented program Pauw, a late night show about topicality with, among other guests, politicians, journalists and lawyers. The result of the study show that indeed bias is found. The first bias measured that males were more represented than females and among political parties, the PvdA was more represented than all the other parties. The second bias measures, left winged politicians, oppositional party politicians and males were approached more biased than right winged politicians, coalition party politicians and females. In the discussion these results were put in context with other bias studies and implications for future research are discussed. 2 Introduction The political arena is inseparably bound to television. It is even unimaginable without television. The figures of the Standard Eurobarometer (2013) show that when Europeans were asked: ”Where do you get most of your news about national political matters from?” The majority (82%) answered: the television. This makes it important for politicians to be able to represent their parties on television and this gives television the power and responsibility to represent the political arena. However, former studies have shown that the media can be biased (Huls & Varwijk, 2011: Vos, 2014). Definition of bias McQuail (2010) defines bias as “any tendency in a news report to deviate from an accurate, neutral, balanced and impartial representation of ‘reality’ of events and social world.” Bias can manifest itself on many different levels on television (D’Alessio & Allen, 2000). Two of these are relevant in this study, knowing: bias in representation and bias in journalists approach towards politicians. According to D’Alessio and Allen (2000), the representation can be found in the choices of who gets invited or interviewed, the physical amount of attention that the politicians get. The amount of attention the politicians get should be equal or in proportion with the political division at that time for television not to be biased. The representation bias is also called coverage bias or bias in attention. In this research it will be called coverage bias. The second type of bias according to D’Alessio and Allen (2000) is how much the journalists insert their own views and opinions in their questions and reporting. This does not mean that journalists cannot be critical but they do have to be neutral, meaning that the journalists should be equally critical towards all the politicians. When a journalist is more critical towards one politician than the other this can be seen as bias. This is called statement bias or bias in the demand draft. In this research it will be called statement bias. 3 Relevance of researching bias The role of television is important because apart from entertaining, television has a public function and a duty towards society. Its role is to be a watchdog in a participatory democracy making programs that informs citizens about politics representing parties and politicians. By doing so, the public can make informed political choices (Clayman, 1992). If bias would indeed exist it would mean that television is not informing the public in a neutral and objective manner. Consequently, the public is possibly steered towards certain choices, which interrupts the democratic system (DellaVigna & Kaplan, 2006). Studies have shown that television could influence public opinion by being more positive towards parties that get more positive attention (Gerber, Karlan, & Bergan, 2007). Influencing the public in their attitudes, leads to more power for parties getting approached more positively on the television and less power to politicians and parties that get negative or no attention (Entman, 2007). It could go even further by influencing voting behaviour when media showed to be biased (Bernhardt, Krasa, & Polborn, 2008; DellaVigna & Kaplan, 2006). So if bias would exist, this would mean it could interrupt the democratic system by influencing voters’ opinions and behaviour. This study wants to contribute to a healthy democratic system, by adding knowledge about a possible existing bias, the public can be made aware and the media or government can be stimulated to make code of conducts or regulations to prevent the bias. Especially because, in general and also in the Netherlands, there is not a lot of research done on this subject (Wind, 2007). This study tries to contribute to the academic field by extending the knowledge on this subject. For example, by studying statement bias toward oppositional/coalition party politicians and gender in television interviews which has not been studied before and by testing a tool on validity, reliability and feasibility that has been made by Clayman et, al. (2007) to measure bias in television interviews and extended by Huls and Varwijk (2011). 4 Theoretical framework As mentioned in the introduction, this study will firstly look at coverage bias and secondly at the statement bias on television. However, television is a broad understanding and not all programs are suitable for this study. A research of Veldkamp (2010) shows that the news is appointed as the most important program for politics and politicians in which they get attention from the public but also news shows about politics and topicality is mentioned in this list as important for politicians to be able to send out a message to the public. Kleinnijenhuis, Hoof, Oegema and De Ridder (2007) report news shows about politics and topicality programs as influential for voting behaviour in the Netherlands. Because of the impact of news shows and the opportunity that they have, as there is a journalist interviewing politicians, news shows will be used in this research to measure Coverage and statement bias. Coverage Bias Starting with coverage bias, representation of politicians in the past has been measured by looking at certain characteristics of politicians and how often those characteristics are represented. Based on former studies (e.g. Vos, 2014) the following characteristics are taken into consideration in this study: Experience, party size, gender and age of the politician. They are discussed in the following paragraphs that have led to the research question: RQ1: What are the characteristics of individual politicians on news show interviews? Most of the researches that are done base the division of the characteristics on news values and news routines (Vos, 2011). The news value is how much a journalists thinks the news is relevant and important enough to be shared and discussed. The news routine is the everyday procedural shortcuts that a journalist takes to make its decisions (Van Dalen, 2012). There are 5 also studies that do not agree with this, arguing that this assumes a journalist of being passive and reacting automatically to events, which journalists do not. They have working mechanisms, personal preferences and ideology, which their decisions are also based on (Tresch, 2009). Experience of the politician The experience of the politicians has been one of the most studied characteristics in the past (Vos, 2014). Khan (1991) studied newspapers and showed that the more experienced a politician is, the more media attention this person will get. One year later Kuklinski and Sigelman (1992) studied the same characteristic, but this time for television and found the same results. A more recent study of Gershon (2012) found the same effect. However there were also studies that found no effect of experience on media attention (Fogarty, 2008; Tresh, 2009). Looking further into it, it became clear that the studies that do find an effect were all conducted in election time. So it seems that in a regular period of time, experience does not play a role but it does play a role in election time. The explanation for this could be the electoral positions. Experienced politicians are expected to have a higher position on the electoral list because they are recognizable by the electorate which can get them more media attention (Vos, 2014). Size of the party Another characteristic that will be looked at is the party the politician belongs to and if that matters in the representation on television. Previous studies on this characteristic were not consistent. Van Aelst, Maddens, Noppe and Fiers (2008) found that a bigger vote share in previous elections gets the politicians more media attention. One year later the same result was also found by Tresh (2009), but other studies like Arnold (2004) and Midtbø (2011) 6 found the exact opposite. The largest parties were not necessarily the ones getting the most media attention, on the contrary, there were even researches that found the opposite (Shaffner & Sellers, 2003). Overall, the effect that was found was contradicting. The reason that this effect is contradicting might be because other factors like incumbency have a larger effect. When a party is large and incumbent it does get more attention, but when it is a large oppositional party the opposite results were found (Vos, 2014). Gender of the politician Concerning the characteristic gender, also mixed results were found, this seems to be explainable.