sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

For my class on Media & Political Engagement, during the first semester of my masters program, I wrote a very short paper called "The Internet News Effect?," which was an exploration of the effect of online news sources on political cynicism. This was partially a response to the article "The Daily Show Effect" (Baumgartner and Morris, 2006), which attributed cynicism among viewers of The Daily Show to the show itself. Among other considerations, I wanted to explore whether cynical consumers were seeking out The Daily Show, as well as other alternative news sources, suggesting that Baumgartner and Morris had inverted the causal relationship.

While I still think this may be the case, my paper utterly failed to prove anything, largely because of the constraints of the assignment. The project was actually more concerned with methodology than results, and consisted of several components--

1. Each student interviewed an acquaintance about their political engagement and news habits.
2. Each interview was coded via content analysis, and the results entered in a database.
3. The interview subjects completed a short survey, which was also entered in the database.

Using a combination of statistical analysis and synthesis of the interview transcriptions, each student wrote a paper on a topic of their choice. The most obvious flaw with the project is that, because the class was small, the statistics were completely useless. So, ultimately, my analysis found some contradictory statistics that made it hard to draw any sort of conclusions, and my paper wandered and speculated quite a bit before ending with what felt like a whimper.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to read through the paper again today, and find that it wasn't nearly as bad as I remembered. In fact, it's a good read that makes a number of interesting points, the most relevant being an assertion that research on media use becomes very difficult during periods of major shifts in said media usage. For instance, asking an open ended question such as "Do you trust the media?" will draw responses that are heavily dependant upon what the respondent considers to be "the media." During the current era of blogs, podcasts, and other Web 2.0 technologies, our understanding of what constitutes the media is constantly changing, and research must do a better job of understanding and responding to that change.