| Throughout United States history, mass media have undergone social, cultural and technological transformations that have profoundly influenced the content and production of news. For much of the twentieth century, news programs rarely conflated opinion with fact or highlighted controversial stories. Prior to 1980, the evening network newscasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC generally reported similar news and paid equal attention to political issues, candidates, and perspectives. However, in recent decades, deregulation, the advent of cable television, and the rise of a twenty-four hour news cycle, have dramatically transformed the structure and content of news and journalism in the United States.;Cable news networks, in particular, have challenged the neutrality of traditional media through the development of opinion programs that have made highly politicized and entertaining content central to their prime-time coverage. Over the past three decades, opinionated programs---that feature political and governmental elites engaging in debate and rapid-fire discussion about contemporary political and social issues---have become increasingly popular as a programming strategy for cable news producers seeking to develop novel programming to target niche audiences. As a result of their predominance on cable news, these prime-time opinion programs---and the pundits who pontificate on these programs---have increasingly come to dominate our national political dialogue and play a significant role in setting the public agenda in the United States.;While punditry programs have increasingly become embedded within the identity and brand of each network, and public news preferences have shifted to include more overt political commentary, research has been slow to examine the process of punditry on cable news or the ways in which pundits on prime-time talk shows frame information. This dissertation seeks to remedy this neglect through an exploration of the structure of pundit programs (Chapter Five), how pundits on prime-time programs frame and rearticulate the news (Chapter Six) and how stories are fostered and sustained in a news cycle over time (Chapter Seven).;Utilizing a content analysis of prime-time cable news coverage, this dissertation explores how pundits on CNN, MSNBC and FNC framed the 2010 BP oil spill and the 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza (n = 615) across an entire issue-attention cycle. This research challenges some of the fundamental assumptions of the natural history model (Spector and Kitsuse 1973; 1977) and the issue-attention cycle (Downs 1972), which are traditionally the starting points for understanding social problems and the news cycle over time. Specifically, this dissertation demonstrates how, in the contemporary cable news environment, activist and expert claimsmakers no longer play as central a role in constructing social problems and gaining media attention as they have in the past. In place of these experts and outside activists, a new group of claimsmakers, pundits, have emerged. Thus, regardless of the original claims made by activists and experts, pundits---through the rearticulation of core news elements (government, business, individual)---frame information to fit their pre-existing ideologies (liberal, moderate, conservative) to advance a particular political position or argument. For example, FNC framed corporate malfeasance following the BP oil spill using `individual responsibility' to support a conservative ideology. In contrast, MSNBC, which tends to cater toward a more liberal audience, packaged this same issue using `government regulation and oversight' to support a liberal ideology. Finally, CNN framed the oil spill from a moderate approach by discussing both liberal and conservative arguments and arguing that some government regulation might be necessary. Thus, in this new media environment, seemingly non-partisan issues become politicized through pundit claimsmaking on cable news.;This dissertation also moves beyond much of the prior research on the issue-attention cycle that has focused on why media coverage of an issue declines (Downs 1972), to examine how news stories are sustained on cable news. In particular, this research shows that news stories that posses six key sustaining news characteristics including geographic location, blame, the use of visuals, responsibility, feasibility of change, and dramatic statistics, are more likely to remain within the cable news arena for an extended time period.;Taken together, findings suggest that information becomes politicized on cable news through a three part process that includes: (1) the use of structured segments that help pundits package and present claims in an interesting and novel way, (2) the rearticulation of core news elements (business, government, and the individual) that help pundits promote the ideology of their cable news network and prime-time program, and (3) sustaining news characteristics that help determine the likelihood of continued coverage of a news story over time. |
