Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide. Pippa Norris. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 303 pp. $60 hbk., $20 pbk. Forecasts that the Internet heralds a world of more democracy and less poverty seem as inflated as dot.com stocks. This rosy view has electronic voting, political chat rooms, and email access re-engaging apathetic publics in politics. Digital technologies redress economic disparities, and the benefits of the Internet percolate down to transform poor societies. Equally exaggerated is the gloom of naysayers. The Internet Age has done little to narrow the gap between rich and poor countries, the information haves and havenots, cyber-skeptics contend. Indeed, digital technologies could create new inequalities and reinforce the dominance of power elites. In her new book, Digital Divide, Pippa Norris, associate director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, steps into this fusillade of cyber-hyperbole, lowers the decibel with a well-written and thoughtful examination of Internet use and access in 179 countries and dissects the claims and counter-claims. Her research and findings place her on middle ground, somewhere between current reality and optimism. The Internet era seems to be changing "politics as usual" in a number of countries, expanding and loosening information about governments and politics, allowing the entrance of new political players, and fostering international movements on the environment, women's rights, and other issues across borders. The disappointment is that digital technologies are activating the already politically active and passing up the disengaged and uninterested. A major challenge to digital democracy is the gulf between the United States, Scandinavia, and other early Internet adopters and the rest of the world. That gap is now so wide that at the turn of the century, more than three-quarters of the online community lived in the developed world. Internet use tracks the path of economic and technological development. But that situation could begin to change, Norris says. The Internet is in its technological adolescence. Costs of access are falling. And governments can make a difference if policymakers take the initiative. We have the historical patterns of other communication technologies to study. Norris examines theories of technological diffusion and points out that the American response to the Internet is more akin to the rapid spread of televisions and VCRs than the slower adoption of telephones and radios. American dominance could recede as Internet access grows worldwide. Contrary to what officials of the Bush Administration contend, Norris finds that the digital divide between rich and poor within the United States remains substantial. Europe mirrors that trend. In the long run, the Internet could become more accessible to the excluded: lower income families, minorities, and women. …

Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide

A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Postindustrial Societies. Pippa Norris. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 398 pp. $59.95 hbk. $21.95 pbk. The main finding of Pippa Norris's study is that exposure to the news media is positively related to citizens' levels of political knowledge, trust, and participation, even after controlling for demographics, attitudinal factors, and cultural differences. Although various positive contributions of exposure to news media already have been documented in other research, never was the amount of evidence as monumental as in this book. Norris analyzed European Community, Eurobarometer, European Election and Post-election, British Campaign Panel, U.S. National Election, and Pew Center for the People and the Press surveys, providing individual and aggregate level, over-time and cross-sectional evidence supporting her virtuous media thesis. The book is set up as a challenge to "conventional wisdom" or "unquestioned orthodoxy" of media malaise theories that argue that "exposure to the news media discourages learning about politics, erodes trust in political leaders and government institutions, and dampens political mobilization." The problem is that there is a huge gap between the abundance of glib charges and the scarcity of empirical evidence of negative effects of news media. Consequently, Norris mostly relies on Michael Robinson's long ago retracted videomalaise claim and strays away from her main line of theorizing by reviewing studies that deal with the issues well outside the scope of her own study, such as effects of framing news stories, political advertising, and television entertainment. Findings of negative media effects in contexts other than elections and those tapping more specific types of media content and their particular features remain unchallenged by the Norris study. Norris acknowledges that "we need to compare the effects of variance in the media messages so that we can see whether people who consistently use one distinctive source (such as crime-focused local TV news) differ from those who use others (such as rightwing talk radio)" and that "our measures of media habits are often diffuse and imprecise," but she is still restricted in her research to measures of frequency of general newspaper and television news use. Nevertheless, Norris urges us to stopblaming the news media for political problems and instead to direct our attention to "the problems themselves." This call, without showing that media in many of their specific content characteristics or structures are not a part of problems that extend beyond voting and political campaigning, seems premature at best. However, Norris's study makes a significant contribution to communication research by most convincingly showing that the news media may be an important part of solutions to some of the social ills. …

A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Postindustrial Societies

The Reality of the Mass Media

The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention Piers Robinson London: Routledge, 2002 192 pp $2395 The author of The CNN Effect brings intellectual honesty and insightful observations to one of the most current versions of the debate about the power, or lack of power, of mass communication Piers Robinson, a lecturer in political communication in the School of Politics and Communication Studies at the University of Liverpool, asks if intense mass media coverage of humanitarian crises can, on occasion, compel governments to intervene with the use, or threat of use, of force The author's intellectual honesty becomes evident as he first considers cases widely regarded as clear-cut examples of the CNN effect, but that on closer examination, show little or no effect of media coverage on policymaker decisions Unlike theorists who blithely dismiss contradictory cases as misleading or hegemonic, Robinson uses these cases to challenge commonsense notions and to extend and refine his own explanations for the CNN effect Robinson begins with cases widely regarded as evidence of the power of the news media, not just CNN, to provoke responses by both Western audiences and political elites The 1991 US Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq and the 1992 Operation Restore Hope in Somalia are both cases of military intervention in areas that were without traditional "national interest" such as business investments or oil Instead, these "humanitarian" interventions were to signal a post-Cold War New World Order In spite of policymaker insistence that television images of starvation and suffering in Somalia prompted a military response, Robinson provides evidence that media coverage increased dramatically only after the decision to intervene Media coverage, in this case, served a "manufacturing consent" role that supported military intervention Another case widely regarded as supporting the CNN effect was US military intervention in northern Iraq to help mitigate the suffering of the Kurdish refugees who were trapped in the mountains between Iraq and Turkey Conventional wisdom was that compelling images of human suffering forced the United States to reverse its policy of nonintervention in internal Iraqi affairs Robinson argues that US policy reversed not because of television coverage but instead to reward the Turkish government for its loyalty during Operation Desert Storm While appearing to be in response to critical media coverage, the US "no fly zone" was designed primarily to draw the Iraqi Kurds away from the Turkish border into Iraqi refugee camps Robinson does not simply discard the CNN effect hypothesis (powerful media), or throw his support behind the "manufacturing consent" hypothesis (subservient media) on the basis of these two cases …

The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention

While plenty of research has provided important insights into the uses of the Internet by politicians during elections, a relatively scarce amount of work has looked into these uses outside of such parliamentary events. This article seeks to remedy this lack of research by presenting a study on the 'routine' uses of two of the currently most popular social media services - Facebook and Twitter. Focusing on politicians elected to the national parliaments of Norway and Sweden, the article employs novel methodologies for data collection and statistical analyses in order to provide an overarching, structural view of the day-to-day social media practices of Scandinavian politicians. Findings indicate that use levels are rather low for both services - the median amount of tweets sent and messages posted on Facebook is close to one per day. Further analyses reveal that the most active politicians could be labelled as 'underdogs', as they are more likely to be younger, in opposition and out of the political limelight.

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‘Of course we are on Facebook’: Use and non-use of social media among Swedish and Norwegian politicians:

In recent years, political parties have reacted to far-reaching transformations in their media and sociocultural environments. These changes and adaptations, often assembled under the catchword “pr...

Modes of Professional Campaigning A Four-Country Comparison in the European Parliamentary Elections, 2009

In recent years, political parties have reacted to some far-reaching transformations in their media and sociocultural environment. Respective changes and adaptations, often summarized under the catchword of ‘professionalization’, become most vivid during election campaigns. However, parties’ election campaign professionalism has seldom been ‘measured’, and it has mostly been exemplified in single case studies so far. Against this backdrop, the article presents an empirical test of the party-centered theory of professionalization. It is an intertemporal comparison of political parties’ campaign structures and strategies on the occasion of the two most recent European and national parliamentary elections in Germany. The analyses provide empirical evidence for professionalization-related changes. Plus, it is demonstrated that transformations take place at two different campaign levels, the first-order national and the second-order European level. These exemplary results should be taken into account in future...

First- and second-order campaigning: Evidence from Germany

In this article, we address the problem of measuring the professionalism of political campaigns in national parliamentary and European Parliamentary elections by means of a comparative analysis. We use party-level campaign data from two fairly similar EU member states, Germany and Finland, and eight elections between 2004 and 2011. The data are used to build an index of campaign professionalism which significantly improves previous measures by giving more attention to various campaign strategies instead of focusing only on material resources. Theoretically, our analysis is based on the so-called party-centred theory of professionalism. We hypothesise that in addition to an increase in party-level campaign professionalism over time and higher levels of professionalism in campaigning in national parliamentary elections, professionalism is also positively associated with a party's size and its right-wing orientation. We find support for the time effect, party size and emphasis on national-level elections. Ho...

Two Levels of Campaigning: An Empirical Test of the Party-Centred Theory of Professionalisation

In recent years, both an increase in and a process of differentiation of ‘new’, digital media devices, including rising numbers of citizens turning to them, have stimulated recurring speculation about a readjustment of the communicative relationship between political representatives and the people. The debate about ‘electronic democracy’ has so far focused predominantly on technical potentials on the one hand and citizens' exposure to interactive political communication channels on the other. By contrast, the ‘supply side’, that is, the internet activities of political actors and especially their motives, has been investigated relatively rarely. Against this backdrop, two representative surveys were conducted among German and Austrian members of parliament that investigated their attitudes towards the internet. The results demonstrate similarities and differences in internet-related competences and assessments which are explained by micro- and meso-level factors. Foremost, an age-related ‘digital divide’ ...

MPs and the Internet – An Empirically Based Typology

War coverage in the media, its impact on people's perceptions of wars, and its influence on political actors have increasingly been analysed in political communication research. In recent times, there has been a special focus on television war coverage. In this study, the coverage of the Vietnam War in LIFE magazine, the most famous photo magazine of the 1960s and 1970s, is analysed. An iconographic analysis of all the covers devoted to the war in Vietnam (1960/65–1975) helps to identify different periods of the visual construction of the reality of the Vietnam War. Ambivalences and a polysemic variety of competing interpretations which are probably typical for any war coverage become obvious. Those results support the assumption that the growing rejection of the Vietnam operation by US citizens was not the effect of a supposedly homogenous, let alone unambiguous, presentation by the media, but rather of recipients transforming the construction of the social reality of the Vietnam War.

Jens Tenscher

Papers

Modes of Professional Campaigning A Four-Country Comparison in the European Parliamentary Elections, 2009

First- and second-order campaigning: Evidence from Germany

Two Levels of Campaigning: An Empirical Test of the Party-Centred Theory of Professionalisation

MPs and the Internet – An Empirically Based Typology

Front Cover Imagery and the Social Construction of the Vietnam War: A Case Study of LIFE Magazine's Iconology and its Impact on Visual Discourse