Much ado about nothing

Five media hypes in a comparative perspective Charlotte Wien

Vasterman, Peter (ed.), From Media Hype to Twitter Storm. News Explo-sions and Their Impact on Issues, Crises, and Public Opinion. Amsterdam University Press, 2018

doi: 10.5117/9789462982178/ch06 Abstract

This chapter challenges the widespread assumption that media hypes can put pressure on politicians to change their policies. Through a com-parative case study of five Danish media hypes, occurring between 2000 and 2005, the chapter will demonstrate that media hype’s influence on policymaking is indeed very limited. No – or only very little – evidence of political actions related to a media hype can actually be traced back to a media hype itself. On the contrary, politicians use media hypes strategically for their own interests, anticipating the recurring patterns of media hype. The chapter will conclude that even though media hypes receive extensive attention, their course and development are, in fact, quite predictable and so is their outcome.

Keywords: journalistic practice, media hype, news values, social prob-lems, media power, welfare policy, policymaking

Introduction

On 23 May 2006, media hype broke loose in Denmark. A young journal-ist had worked undercover at nursing home for the elderly and had been filming with a hidden camera for a couple of months. Featured clips shown on national TV revealed that the elderly at the home were humiliated and treated degradingly by the staff. During the first week, the story generated more than 100 articles in the country’s five largest newspapers.

This media hype contained a number of striking similarities with other media hypes on the care and spending on elderly in Denmark with regards to both the subject and the course. For example, the so-called Kærbo hype,

which began on 19 January 2000: A public administration bachelor’s student working part-time at the Kærbo nursing home had carried out undisclosed participant observations measuring how his colleagues were spending their working hours. The conclusion was that two thirds of it was spent drinking coffee and complaining about the high levels of stress. A quick glance at the Danish newspaper yearbooks from 2000 to 2006 reveal that a total of six media hypes on the care of and spending on the elderly ravaged the media scene in Denmark during this period. From a superficial point of view, this may seem surprising. Denmark is a modern welfare state and the care of and spending on the elderly is high on the political agenda. It therefore seems reasonable to assume either that the first media hype had led to changes in procedures and policies regarding this particular social area or that the conditions at Kærbo, after careful analysis, had proved to be an exception and therefore neither policies, nor procedures needed to be changed.

A couple of questions naturally arise in connection with both this sequence of media hypes in Denmark and media hypes in general: Firstly, do media hypes share similarities in terms of structure and dynamics?

Previous studies on media hypes suggest that they do: They occur suddenly and simultaneously in multiple media, they have a clear starting point, where the media attention is most intense, and they appear repeatedly in the same subject areas (Jørgensen & Rasmussen, 2001; Pedersen & Kjær, 2000b; Vasterman, 2005). Another, equally interesting question relates to the effect of media hypes. Do media hypes like these have any political significance, e.g. do they lead to changes and can they, thus, be said to exert power over politicians, forcing them to implement changes?

This chapter is a popularized and shortened version of the results of Elmelund-Præstekær’s and Wien’s research project ‘The power of media hypes’, which was previously published in three articles (Elmelund-Præstekær & Wien, 2008a, 2008b, and 2009). Like said articles, this chapter seeks to answer the two questions above. The chapter is divided into four sections: section one discusses the theoretical guidelines for the analysis. Section two describes the data collection and the method for the analysis. The third section analyses the results. The fourth and final section, the conclusion, will provide the answers to the research questions.

Theoretical guideline

In this chapter, Boydstun & Walgrave’s (2014) definition will be used.

They define a media hype as ‘an explosive increase in news coverage of a specific item (event or issue) constituting a substantial share of the total news agenda during a certain time’. As a consequence of this definition, a media hype must be said to arise from everyday journalism and only differ from ordinary news coverage in terms of its intensity. It therefore seems natural to take a theoretical point of departure in the existing theories on journalism and on how the media agenda is set. The literature on agenda-setting is quite voluminous and comprises more than 400 studies published since 1972 (McCombs, 2005: 555). Unfortunately, this vast body of literature has not created clear and well-defined concepts or a clear and well-defined boundary between research in agenda-setting and other areas of media research. In fact, studying agenda-setting today may well include a number of other central media research concepts, such as gatekeeping, stereotypes, silence spiral (McCombs, 2005: 546) and priming and framing (Weaver, 2007: 142ff). In this chapter, the agenda-setting literature will therefore be used as a theoretical tool for reducing real life complexity. Only the those theory fragments of agenda-setting that seem particularly relevant for this chapter will be presented here.

A media hype can only occur when the journalists prioritize the topic on the media agenda. Media agenda is a zero-sum game (see Zhu, 1992). If journalists prioritize the topic of the media hype then this will happen at the expense of one or more other stories.

This indicates that a news story that has the potential to develop into a media hype must have some special qualities that enables it to attract media attention and justifies the prominence of this particular story in the news flow. The question is, what are these qualities? It seems obvious to include the concept ‘scandal’ in the discussions of the qualities of media hypes. According to Thompson, scandals are ‘actions or events involving certain kinds of transgressions which become known to others and are sufficiently serious to elicit a public response’ (Thompson, 1999). Thompson continues arguing that transgressions of prevailing norms and values are core ingredients in scandals and that for a scandal to rise it is necessary that some are willing to express their disapproval. Thompson’s work does not focus on the activities of media, however it is clear that there is a linkage between the two concepts. Luhmann relates the discussion more closely to media coverage when he argues that a breach of norms is a news criteria in itself (Luhmann, 2000: 29ff). And that this particular news criteria is often

present in news stories that give rise to intense media coverage. Luhmann then indicates that the discussion of the quality of the events that may trigger a media hype should include a discussion of the ‘journalistic news criteria’. Schultz (2007: 199ff) has shown how five criteria govern which news stories are prioritized by journalists: relevance, identification, sensation, timeliness, and conflict.

Schultz believes that at least one more news criteria should be added, namely, ‘exclusivity’. One could argue that this particular news criteria appears, at first sight, to limit the chances of media hypes occuring, as it is part of the definition of media hypes that they evolve around stories that receive attention simultaneously in multiple newsrooms. So if exclusivity is added, it means that a paradox exists: How can multiple media outlets cover the same story, at the same time, and meet the exclusivity criteria.

The only way this is possible is if the story has the potential to be framed in a variety of ways. This provides a partial answer to the question of what characterizes the stories behind a media hype. This characteristic – having the potential for being covered within a variety of frames – leads one to focus on the starting point of media hypes, what is sometimes called the ‘key event’

(Vasterman, 2005), and at other times the ‘trigger event’ (Cobb & Elder, 1972).

The latter term will be used in this chapter since it more clearly illustrates that a media hype needs to be triggered by something. The question is, what are the special qualities of the news stories that are capable of triggering a media hype? According to Dearing & Rogers (1996: 78), a trigger event can simplify a complex subject into an image, in its broadest sense, that is easily understood by the audience. But apart from the classical news criteria, the requirement for exclusivity and the requirement for a complex issue to be put in an understandable frame, it remains relatively unclear what the special qualities of these trigger events are.

Regarding the second research question related to the political influence of media hypes, the focus of the study of the media’s agenda remains on the question of the media’s possible political influence. McCombs & Shaw (1972) argued that the public agenda should be seen as a mirror of the media’s priorities of subjects. This gives media heavy influence on public opinion and, consequently, political influence. Since McCombs & Shaw’s pioneering study, these relationships have been nuanced in a multitude of studies (useful reviews can be found in Dearing & Rogers, 1996; McCombs, 2005;

Newton, 2006; Takeshita, 2005; Weaver, 2007). Unfortunately, it is quite dif-ficult to find any unambiguous conclusion on this matter in the literature.

The reason for this is of course that it is extremely difficult to conduct empirical studies of power. Furthermore, it is difficult to compare the

existing results, because they are based on different types of methods and different kinds of empirical data (see Walgrave & Aelst, 2006).

Looking specifically at the political consequences and thus the power of media hypes, Vasterman (2005) argued that they can create ‘a spiral of social amplification that transform individual cases to general social problems’.

Thus, media hypes – more than everyday mainstream journalism – should be expected to have direct political impact. A similar claim is made by Pedersen and Kjær (2000b: 221), who argue that media hypes in fact have a direct influence on political processes.

Unfortunately, neither of the two studies explain what exactly they mean by ‘impact on the political work’. To counter the prevailing empirical and conceptual confusion, I will use the classic distinction between words and deeds.

Thus, it cannot be seen as ‘political impact’ if a minister promises to launch a study, or increase budgets, or change the law if he or she does not actually do it. Consequently, real actions leave some kind of evidence. Thus, if a politician has promised that a study will be carried out, it must result in a retrievable written report. Likewise, changes in the budgets can be traced when comparing original budgets to revised budgets and accounts, and a proposal for a legislative change translates into a bill that has been dealt with by the parliament and so forth.

Therefore, when analysing how the media hypes influence policymaking, we will first seek the political promises that were made in public during the media hype, and then we will discuss whether these promises were, in fact, prompted by the hype or were already ongoing initiatives. Finally, we will examine whether the promises were subsequently kept by the politicians and have left any traces.

This means that our study cannot conclude anything about the indirect effects of media hypes, or, for that matter, long-term effects of repeated media hypes on a specific topic.

Method

In the analysis to follow, I will present data from studies carried out on five national Danish daily newspapers over the period of 2000–2005. A more detailed account of the method can be found in Wien and Elmelund-Praestekaer (2008a and b).

In order to capture the media hypes, we developed a search statement on the basis of an earlier work on stereotypes about elderly people in the

Danish media (Wien, 2005). We ran the search statement against the five selected newspapers (using the full-text newspaper database ‘Infomedia’) and retrieved 7,703 unique articles for the six-year period. All articles were subsequently plotted into a graph showing the total number of articles found each day. By definition, a media hype requires intense media cover-age. The concept ‘intense coverage’ is relative, so operationally we decided to pick all days yielding ten or more articles. This was the case for thirty individual days. We considered each of the thirty peaks a potential media hype and carefully analysed all the articles published on these particular days to determine whether the high intensity was a random coincidence or if the articles concerned the same issue. In total, twenty-five peaks were dismissed as pure coincidence, while five of the peaks contained articles that dealt with the same issue and could thus be considered media hypes.

For each of the five media hypes, we carefully read all the articles that appeared a couple of days prior to and after the peak day. The purpose of this reading was twofold: we needed to identify the trigger event of the media hype, and we wanted to extract issue-specific search terms in order to perform a second and more precise search covering a shorter period around each of the five peaks. This way, we developed five new search statements, which – after irrelevant articles were extracted – yielded a total of 569 articles. These 569 are the empirical basis of the analysis to follow.

Analysis

The first media hype revolves around the Kærbo nursing home, which broke out in January 2000 following the national newspaper Jyllands-Posten, receiving a copy of a paper written by a Bachelor’s student. In his paper, the student describes how he carried out undisclosed observations while working part-time at the nursing home, in which he measured how the staff spent their working hours. He concluded that two thirds of the hours were spent drinking coffee in the staff room and complaining about the heavy work load. In the following three weeks, media coverage was very intense:

Initially, relatives of the elderly accommodated at the nursing home blamed the management and employees. But the unions, government, and the opposition parties joined in the debate and gradually the matter became increasingly political.

The second media hype took place in August 2001 and started in Co-penhagen. This particular media hype is slightly different from the others

because it has two trigger events. The first was an article with the title

‘Elderly are living in filth and dirt’, which was published in another national paper Berlingske Tidende. This article analysed the impact of changes to the standards of care for elderly in the light of a series of complaints from senior citizens. As fate would have it, just a few days later, the several-weeks-old corpse of an elderly man was found in his apartment: A communications failure had led to the deceased not being collected and buried. This devel-oped into a political conflict at a national level: The right wing demanded more money to be spent on care for the elderly, while the social democratic government promised better internal organization and better training of managers and employers in the care sector.

Our third media hype differs significantly from the previous two in one regard: that its trigger event stems from a political party’s actions and not from a scandal in the public sector. One month before the fiscal negotiations in November 2002, the ‘People’s Party’ (a supporting party for the newly formed right-wing government) demanded payment of a so-called elderly cheque to the 200,000 poorest elderly in Denmark. Opposition parties rejected the proposal, arguing that it would not benefit the disadvantaged elderly. In this particular case it makes little sense to discuss how

media agenda influenced the policy since cause and effect is reversed, i.e. in this case, the politicians influenced the media’s agenda.

The fourth media hype was also partially triggered at a political level. It broke out in May 2003 when Berlingske Tidende printed a few pages from a book being published by the Danish prime minister. In this excerpt, the prime minister advocated the raising of the retirement age in line with the growing life expectancy. Since the prime minister had previously pledged not to change the early retirement scheme, the opposition tried to distort the idea to make the proposal look like a broken promise.

The last of our media hypes started in January 2005, just three weeks before the Danish general election. This media hype was the result of a paradox: During the election campaign for the previous general election in 2001, the right-wing opposition criticized the social democratic government for applying an inhuman and rigorous barcode-based system to ensure the quality in the public sector. The term ‘barcode system’ became synonymous in the public’s minds with a meaningless time tyranny, inhumanity, and over-administration in the public sector. Just three weeks before the 2005 election, two national newspapers (Berlingske Tidende and Politiken) revealed that, despite the shrill attacks from the opposition a few years earlier, the barcode system was still being used under the new right-wing Government.

The anatomy of media hypes

The brief review of the five media hypes in the previous section reveals both differences and similarities between them. Therefore, we believe that is possible to describe the general anatomy of media hypes. In the two sections to follow, I will sketch out the similarities and, on the basis of these, draft a general model of media hypes.

Our analysis shows that, in order for an incident to become a trigger event for a media hype, it must meet the general news criteria. Moreover, at least four factors seem to be influential. Primarily, the trigger event must be suitable for public debate, meaning that it must be about a topic where several conflicting but legitimate points of view can be presented and thus debated in public. Conversely, it is a prerequisite that there are several actors (individuals, organizations, political parties, etc.), who are willing to participate in the debate. Secondly, and in accordance with the previous point, it is important that the trigger event can be presented in several frames. The reason for this is that media hypes place news media in the exclusivity dilemma: On the one hand, it annoys them to see the competitor have a ‘good story’; on the other hand, they are reluctant to jump on the bandwagon and copy the story since they all want ‘a solo’ (see Schultz, 2007:

199ff). It seems obvious from our material that the news media handle this challenge by choosing different frames for the same story. Exactly how they do this will be explained in the next section, ‘Editorial policies’.

Thirdly, each of our five trigger events contains a breach of norms. For example, it was a breach of norms for a student to conduct an undisclosed time-measurement study of his colleagues at Kærbo. And it was certainly a breach of norms if the staff at the nursing home were spending two thirds of their working hours drinking coffee and complaining about stress.

Thirdly, each of our five trigger events contains a breach of norms. For example, it was a breach of norms for a student to conduct an undisclosed time-measurement study of his colleagues at Kærbo. And it was certainly a breach of norms if the staff at the nursing home were spending two thirds of their working hours drinking coffee and complaining about stress.