ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, I discussed the influences of media organizations on policy-makers. I will now discuss the influences of media organizations, through their employees, on public opinion. In the previous chapter I introduced the notion of media working practices and discussed some of the ways in which they help facilitate media organizations’ policy refereeing role. I will now discuss practices associated with media workers’ decision-making in more detail; this is because the decision-making aspects of media organizations’ practices have important consequences for the media’s policy refereeing role. They are the basis of media representations and media effects, which I will discuss in this chapter. Media workers therefore facilitate their organizations’ values, norms and missions through these decisions. Additionally, media workers are influenced by other group processes – some associated with the umbrella group identity of being a media worker, and some associated with the public sphere. This means that, in certain policy instances, media workers from different organizations are subject to the same group influences and therefore we can observe patterns of faulty group decision-making processes across the media. In this chapter I will discuss how media organizations (focusing on media workers) contribute to polarization in public opinion about policy issues. I will then discuss how the public’s consumption of media transitions into private discussions about policy issues, thus facilitating media organizations’ policy agenda-setting or refereeing. I will explore two case studies that illustrate these processes at work: the Case of the Mental Health Bill and the case of UK national health policy. I will then take a deeper look at some working practices which contribute to faulty decision-making among media staff, such as poor information sampling practices and simplistic representations of outgroups’ policy needs.
