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Samuel Robert Lichter is a professor of communication at George Mason University, [1] where he directs the Center for Media and Public Affairs, which conducts scientific studies of the news and entertainment media, and formerly directed the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), which works to improve the quality of statistical and scientific information in the news.
Lichter has taught political science at Princeton, Georgetown, and George Washington universities, and he was a research faculty member at Yale University and Columbia University. He was also a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Smith College and held the DeWitt Wallace Chair in Mass Communications at the American Enterprise Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and his B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Minnesota. [1]
Lichter has authored or co-authored fourteen books and over a hundred scholarly articles and monographs on the news and entertainment media. His best-known work, The Media Elite, (written with Stanley Rothman and Linda Lichter, and funded by conservative foundations) argued that journalists, on average, held more liberal political views than the general public, and that their backgrounds and outlooks affect their coverage of the news. This claim was extended by conservative pundits as evidence for a liberal bias in the media. It also provoked widespread debate among journalists and their critics. The Media Elite was based on interviews with major media journalists and content analysis of their work.
Lichter and his co-authors have also written on the social and political perspectives of popular culture, in books such as Prime Time and Watching America, as well as on news coverage of science and health issues, in Environmental Cancer—A Political Disease and It Ain't Necessarily So. His most recent books (written with Stephen Farnsworth) are The Nightly News Nightmare: Television Coverage of Presidential Elections (2006, 2nd ed.); and The Mediated Presidency: Television News and Presidential Governance (2005). These works use content analysis to examine the media's coverage of government and election campaigns.
In 1986 Lichter and his late ex-wife, sociologist Linda Lichter, established the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA), a non-profit organization that sought to influence public debate on the media by publishing frequent studies of media coverage using the social scientific tool of content analysis. This was the first time this type of academic research was used on a regular and systematic basis to affect the general public's view of the media. Since then other groups have followed suit, including the Annenberg School for Communication and the Pew Foundation's Project for Excellence in Journalism. In 2004 the CMPA became affiliated with the George Mason University.
Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree of accuracy. The word, a noun, applies to the occupation, the methods of gathering information, and the organizing literary styles.
Media bias is the bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media in the selection of many events and stories that are reported and how they are covered. The term "media bias" implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening of the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist or article. The direction and degree of media bias in various countries is widely disputed.
The Media Research Center (MRC), formerly known as Culture and Media Institute (CMI), is an American conservative content analysis and media watchdog group based in Reston, Virginia, and founded in 1987 by L. Brent Bozell III.
The propaganda model is a conceptual model in political economy advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky to explain how propaganda and systemic biases function in corporate mass media. The model seeks to explain how populations are manipulated and how consent for economic, social, and political policies, both foreign and domestic, is "manufactured" in the public mind due to this propaganda. The theory posits that the way in which corporate media is structured creates an inherent conflict of interest and therefore acts as propaganda for anti-democratic elements.
Sports journalism is a form of writing that reports on matters pertaining to sporting topics and competitions. Sports journalism started in the early 1980s when it was targeted to the social elite and transitioned into an integral part of the news business with newspapers having dedicated sports sections. The increased popularity of sports amongst the middle and lower class led to the more coverage of sports content in publications. The appetite for sports resulted in sports-only media such as Sports Illustrated and ESPN. There are many different forms of sports journalism, ranging from play-by-play and game recaps to analysis and investigative journalism on important developments in the sport. Technology and the internet age has massively changed the sports journalism space as it is struggling with the same problems that the broader category of print journalism is struggling with, mainly not being able to cover costs due to falling subscriptions. New forms of internet blogging and tweeting in the current millennium have pushed the boundaries of sports journalism.
In media studies, mass communication, media psychology, communication theory, and sociology, media influence and themedia effect are topics relating to mass media and media culture's effects on individuals' or audiences' thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. Through written, televised, or spoken channels, mass media reach large audiences. Mass media's role in shaping modern culture is a central issue for the study of culture.
Claims of media bias have increased in the United States as the two-party system has become more polarized, including claims of liberal and conservative bias. " The U.S. media has come under intense scrutiny, with analysts, politicians, and even journalists themselves accusing it of bias and sensationalism". These claims generally focus on the idea of media outlets skewing information, such as reporting news in a way that conflicts with standards of professional journalism, or promoting a political agenda through entertainment media, on bias in reporting to favor the corporate owners, and on mainstream bias, a tendency of the media to focus on certain "hot" stories and ignore news of more substance. As "Americans’ concerns about media bias deepen, even as they see it as vital for democracy." A variety of watchdog groups attempt to combat bias by fact-checking biased reporting and also unfounded claims of bias. Researchers in a variety of scholarly disciplines study media bias.
Science journalism conveys reporting about science to the public. The field typically involves interactions between scientists, journalists and the public.
In politics, a political agenda is a list of subjects or problems (issues) to which government officials as well as individuals outside the government are paying serious attention to at any given time.
The Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) is a self-described nonpartisan and nonprofit research and educational organization that is affiliated with George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. It was founded in 1985 by political scientists Samuel Robert Lichter and his ex-wife Linda Lichter. It published a newsletter called Media Monitor from 1987 to 2010.
Jim A. Kuypers is an American scholar and consultant specializing in communication studies. A professor at Virginia Tech, he has written on the news media, rhetorical criticism and presidential rhetoric, and is particularly known for his work in political communication which explores the qualitative aspects of framing analysis and its relationship to presidential communication and news media bias.
The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy is a book published by Smith College professor emeritus Stanley Rothman and Harvard researcher Mark Snyderman in 1988. Claiming to document liberal bias in media coverage of scientific findings regarding intelligence quotient (IQ), the book builds on a survey of the opinions of hundreds of North American psychologists, sociologists and educationalists conducted by the authors in 1984. The book also includes an analysis of the reporting on intelligence testing by the press and television in the US for the period 1969–1983, as well as an opinion poll of 207 journalists and 86 science editors about IQ testing.
Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) was a non-profit organization that analyzed and critiqued the presentation of scientific findings and statistical evidence in the news media. Formerly associated with George Mason University and the Center for Media and Public Affairs, STATS is currently associated with Jon Entine's Science Literacy Project and Sense About Science USA.
The Media Elite: America's New Powerbrokers is a non-fiction book written by Samuel Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter, published in 1986. It details a social scientific study of the ideological commitments of 'elite' journalists in the United States, and the consequences of those commitments on both the reporting itself and on its reception by the public. The book states that because of the political opinions of journalists, the elite media has a liberal media bias.
Jonathan D. Karl has been an American political journalist and author. Throughout his career, Karl has covered the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the U.S. State Department, and has reported from more than 30 countries, covering U.S. politics, foreign policy, and the military.
Research strategies in the field of election campaign communication research are the decisions made concerning the objective, the scope, the sampling and the methodology used within a study of election campaign communication.
The Federalist is an American conservative online magazine and podcast that covers politics, policy, culture, and religion, and publishes a newsletter. The site was co-founded by Ben Domenech and Sean Davis and launched in September 2013.
Timothy Jay Groseclose is an American academic. He is Professor of Economics at George Mason University, where he holds the Adam Smith Chair at the Mercatus Center.
The political views of American academics began to receive attention in the 1930s, and investigation into faculty political views expanded rapidly after the rise of McCarthyism. Demographic surveys of faculty that began in the 1950s and continue to the present have found higher percentages of liberals than of conservatives, particularly among those who work in the humanities and social sciences. Researchers and pundits disagree about survey methodology and about the interpretations of the findings.
Robert Mathew Entman is the J.B. and M.C. Shapiro Professor of Media and Public Affairs and Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University.
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