Public opinion and the news: Polls and journalists’ perceptions of issue importance

Most work on the media and the public starts from the premise that coverage influences opinion and behavior. We report results of a field experiment attempting to identify whether the reverse is true. Specifically, we examine the effects of providing public opinion information to journalists on their perceptions of the newsworthiness of different topics. We randomly assigned journalists to receive results of a survey of Americans about the importance of different political issues, and followed up with a survey of those journalists (from a different source) asking about the newsworthiness of stories about those issues. The results provide some support for the hypothesis that public opinion influences journalists’ perceptions of topical newsworthiness, particularly on low salience issues, and also allow us to rule out large opinion effects on journalists’ perceptions of the newsworthiness of certain issues. The effects appear to be more pronounced for those journalists with less experience in the communities in which they currently work. Overall, we see the research as both offering insight into the nature of the effects that public opinion has on news coverage and helping guide future research, which we consider in the concluding section.