Background

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Key Points

Agenda setting and selection bias refer to the processes by which the news media select which of the myriad stories each day to report on.
Most previous research has focused on political and international communication, rather than individual organizations like universities. Higher education studies have largely focused on athletics.

Discussion

News coverage contributes to the public's perception of the higher education sphere. Institutions develop reputations, often reinforced by the mainstream media, of particular competencies and they attempt to further those reputations through constant media coverage. Universities devote substantial budgets to public relations: writing news stories, developing press releases, contacting reporters, and performing public service activities designed to increase their share of news coverage. Yet, no comprehensive study has compared the longitudinal patterns in news reporting of US higher education institutions, exploring which institutions receive the most coverage and how coverage has changed over the post-World War II era.

Intuition would suggest that not all universities receive the same level of media coverage: some appear in the national press routinely, while others make only the rare cameo appearance. Gatekeeping bias is the communicative theory that describes the decision making process determining which stories are covered out of the myriad that occur each day. (Donohew, 1967) Agenda setting theory (McCombs & Shaw, 1972; 1993) argues that the selection of particular stories and the way in which they are presented to the public can have a significant impact on the popular view of an issue. Safon (2009) finds that rankings of business schools produced by the news media can play a significant impact on their public reputation, while Carroll & McCombs (2003) present a framework for understanding the impact of media coverage on corporate reputation.

Yet, as Carroll & McCombs point out, the literature on agenda setting has focused primarily on political and international communication, rather than its impact on organizations like corporations (or universities). The little work that has focused on higher education seems to be directed at specific aspects of coverage, such as gender equity in athletics coverage, (Wann et al, 1998; Pedersen, 2002) but not institutional coverage as a whole. This paper therefore seeks to explore selection bias from the standpoint of higher education and examine the core factors that seem to have the greatest association with elevated news coverage.

References

Craig, Carroll E. & McCombs, Maxwell. (2003). Agenda-setting Effects of Business News on the Public's Images and Opinions about Major Corporations. Corporate Reputation Review. 6(1). pp. 36-46.
Donohew, Lewis. (1967). Newspaper Gatekeepers and Forces in the News Channel. The Public Opinion Quarterly. 31(1). pp. 61-68.
McCombs, M.E., and Shaw, D.L. (1972) The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36: 176-187.
McCombs, M.E., and Shaw, D.L. (1993). The Evolution of Agenda-Setting Research: Twenty-Five Years in the Marketplace of Ideas. Journal of Communication. 43(2): 58-67.
Myers, Daniel & Caniglia, Beth Schaefer. (2004). All the Rioting That's Fit to Print: Selection Effects in National Newspaper Coverage of Civil Disorders 1968-1969. American Sociological Review. 69(4). pp. 519-543.
Safon, Vicente. (2009). Measuring the Reputation of Top US Business Schools: A MIMIC Modeling Approach. Corporate Reputation Review. 12(3). pp. 204-228.
Pedersen, Paul Mark. (2002). Examining Equity in Newspaper Photographs. International Review for the Sociology of Sport. 37(3-4). pp. 303-318.
Wann, Daniel L., Schrader, Michael P., Allison, Julie A & McGeorge, Kimberly K. (1998). The Inequitable Newspaper Coverage of Men's and Women's Athletics at Small, Medium, and Large Universities. Journal of Sport & Social Issues. 22(1). pp. 79-87.