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UPCP1058-46091091-7675Political Communication, Vol. 23, No. 02, April 2006: pp. 0–0Political Communication

Guest Editor’s Introduction: New Institutionalism and the News

IntroductionDavid Michael Ryfe DAVID MICHAEL RYFE

Why write, no less publish, a set of essays on new institutionalist approaches to the news?For an answer, we must return to the late 1990s, more precisely, to the publication ofTimothy Cook’s Governing with the News (1998) and Bat Sparrow’s Uncertain Guard-ians (1999). By that time, the wave of scholarship on American news media that began inthe late 1960s was roughly thirty years old. Over this entire period, scholarly conclusionsabout the news had been remarkably uniform. Study after study had shown that acrossorganization, geography, size, and kind of news outlet, the news is extraordinarily homo-geneous. Why such homogeneity in the news? Largely, this literature concluded, becausejournalism is defined by a shared set of organizational routines and practices. Journalistspatrol the same beats, mostly located in and around government agencies; they appeal tothe same sources, mostly government officials; they use the same interview techniquesand ask the same questions; all journalists strive for balance, and all use the same narrativeconventions. This conclusion was, and remains, unequivocal: the “bias” of news is essen-tially organizational and professional.

This idea is so irresistible it is easy to forget that it is a theory, not a fact. Much of thesubsequent work in the field has simply assumed it and gone on to examine homogene-ity’s various “effects,” principally on policymaking and public opinion. Schuefele’s(1999) review of the literature on news frames, for example, cites Gans’ 1979 study ofnewsrooms as the most recent source for understanding the production of news frames.However, the idea of homogeneity, and that it is caused by organizational and professionalimperatives, ought to be a beginning, not an end, of discussion. Like all theories it raises ahost of empirical questions: what is the history of news routines? How have they diffusedacross organizations? Have news routines evolved over time, and if so, why? Is there anyvariability in their use across news organizations? Do news media in other parts of theworld use the same routines and conventions? If not, why? If so, do they lead to the sameoutcomes?

We do not have good answers to such questions, in large part because theoreticalwork on news production stalled in the early 1980s. Think of the major strands of thinkingidentified by Schudson (2000), whose review of the literature remains standard. Schudsonorganizes the field in terms of three traditions: political-economy, sociological, and cul-tural approaches. The political economy approach still has not provided a convincing

David Michael Ryfe is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism at Middle TennesseeState University

Address correspondence to David Michael Ryfe, School of Journalism, Box 64, MTSU,Murfreesboro, TN 37132. E-mail: dryfe@mtsu.edu

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account of how one gets from macro-level economic imperatives to micro-level news rou-tines (see Schudson, 2003, for a critique). Sociological theories of news organization havenot explained how organizational practices and routines transfer across organizations orreproduce themselves over time. In fact, the last extensive ethnography of newsrooms wasFishman’s, published in 1980 (but see McManus, 1994; and, Pedelsty, 1995). Finally, cul-tural theories of news have advanced little since the Marxist analyses associated with theBirmingham School of the early 1980s (cf. Gurevitch, Bennett, Curran, et al., 1982; Hall,Critcher, Jefferson, et al., 1978), or the Deweyan/Geertzian approach proposed by JamesCarey (1988; 1989) at about the same time. There is a reason that Schudson’s perusal ofthe field is heavy on work produced in the 1980s and earlier—there simply has been adearth of theorizing on news production in the last quarter century.

Part of the value of Cook and Sparrow’s work is to make the field’s working theory ofnews production explicit, and to offer a direction for new thinking. Both authors observethat news routines look very similar to what a growing chorus of economists, political sci-entists, historians and sociologists call “institutions.” As with many concepts in the socialsciences, a precise definition of institutions has been difficult to come by. Political scien-tists and economists tend to define institutions as formal organizations, like Congress, thePresidency, or the Supreme Court. Sociologists and historians tend to think of institutionsin terms of informal routines, scripts, rules, or guidelines for behavior that span acrossorganizations. Too much is sometimes made of this definitional issue. Key terms in everytheoretical tradition exhibit plasticity because different scholars use them for differentpurposes. Think of the concept of “paradigm” in the philosophy of social science, or,closer to the field of political communication, the notion of a “frame.” As Lieberman(2001) argues, the definition of institution “is necessarily vague because analysts workingwithin this framework conceptualize and define institutions in more precise ways accord-ing to their own questions and theories” (p. 1013). In fact, it turns out that Cook andSparrow use slightly different variations of the term. Not surprisingly, this difference hasconsequences both for their theory and their conclusions about American news media.

Of course, we want to take account of these differences. But such definitional dis-agreements should not detract from Cook and Sparrow’s accomplishment. By linking thestudy of news routines and practices to new institutionalist theory, they have captured theessence of what scholars have learned about the news media over the last three decades.Moreover, this linkage has opened the way to promising new directions for research. Justthree years after the publication of Sparrow’s book, Kaplan (2002) confirmed the promiseof institutional approaches to the news in a history of the rise of objectivity in Americanjournalism. Using a key idea of institutionalism—that the timing and sequence of eventsand processes strongly shapes outcomes—Kaplan persuasively argues that the rise ofmodern news has more to do with changes in the American politica system in the 1890sthan in the economic structure of news organizations over the same period.

I read these three books with great interest. As I (Ryfe, 2003) wrote in a review ofSparrow’s work, “in a field as heterogeneous as political communication, one book is aforay, but two can easily constitute a movement.” Perhaps, I thought, we are witnessingthe beginnings of a new theoretical tradition. Then Schudson’s (2003) most recent reviewof the field was published. Its title, “The News as a Political Institution,” sounded optimis-tic about the new direction taken by Cook, Sparrow, and Kaplan. However, after notingthat Cook’s account of news organizations is “persuasive,” Schudson observed that his“work has not provided clear direction for a research program or a set of questions tofollow up his general claim” (pp. 249–250). Clearly, this presents something of a chal-lenge. But not, I think, an insurmountable one. If an explicit new institutionalist research

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tradition has not yet been crafted, perhaps it is time to develop one. What are the basicprinciples of a new institutionalist theory of news? What kind of research program dothese principles suggest for the study of news?

Hence, the justification for the following essays. I have asked Cook, Sparrow, andKaplan to take up Schudson’s challenge: to articulate new institutionalism as a theory ofnews production and outline the research programs and questions they see as arising fromthe theory. Recently, Rodney Benson (1999; 2004; 2005) has been applying Bourdieu’sfield theory to journalism in interesting and productive ways (also see Chalaby, 1998).Since field theory shares many insights with new institutionalism (on this point, also seeMartin, 2003), I have asked Benson to compare the two approaches and assess their rela-tive strengths and weaknesses. For my part, I have become especially interested in a bed-rock claim of the literature, including new institutionalist accounts, namely, that inreporting the news journalists follow rules. My question is this: what is a journalistic ruleand what does it mean to say that journalists follow such a thing? Shorter essays byEntman and Lawrence round out the issue. Their close analyses of news coverage ofFallujah and Abu Graib, respectively, begin a discussion of how new institutionalismmight account for news frames—a key concept in contemporary studies of news.

These essays stand for themselves. However, as they conceptualize, compare, con-trast, and synthesize, the casual reader may miss the wider framework in which they areall working. It will prove helpful then, for me to sketch the backdrop of new institutional-ist strategies of thinking common to all of the essays, and to very briefly assess a few basicdifferences and similarities between them.

New institutionalism

New institutionalism arose across the social sciences at about the same time—the 1970sand early 1980s. Developing in such disparate locations, it is not surprising that the fieldhas many strands, some of which tangle with one another in complicated ways. Fortun-ately, there are many good reviews of these tangles (cf. Brinton & Nee, 1998; Peters,1999; Powell & Dimaggio, 1981; Rutherford, 1994; Steinmo, Thelen, & Longstreth, 1992;Soltan, Uslaner, & Haufler, 1994). These reviews free me to discuss in broad form thebasic strategy of thought which all new institutionalists share (see Pierson, 2004; and,Orren and Skowronek, 2005, for more extensive discussions). Whatever their disagree-ments, all new institutionalists accept and work within a common framework for under-standing social action. We might distill this framework in to a set of five key principles:

• Institutions mediate the impact of macro-level forces on micro-level action. Thus, out-comes are a product of the interaction over time of institutions and non-institutionalmacro-variables.

• Institutions evolve in a path-dependent pattern. Because initial patterns have positive-feedback characteristics, actors have an incentive to adapt to prevailing conditionsrather than seek to change the institutional order. New institutionalists sometimesrefer to this as the “stickiness” quality of institutions.

• Path-dependency implies that the timing and sequence of events and processes iscrucial. Initial events or processes ought to have a greater impact on the system thanlater events and processes.

• Timing and sequence implies the concept of periodization. New institutionaliststend to explore the life history of institutions, from their initiation, through theirelaboration, to their disintegration or reformation.

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• Institutional orders will reproduce in the absence of a shock to the system. This issometimes referred to as punctuated equilibrium. Over extended periods of time,we ought to see long periods of relative stability, critical junctures in which the sys-tem is shocked and opportunities for new directions arise, followed by the creationof new institutional orders and a corresponding increase in stability.

These principles: mediation, periodization, path-dependency, positive-feedback, timingand sequence, punctuated equilibrium, and critical junctures, represent a core vocabularyof new institutionalist thinking. Taken together, they place new institutionalists of allstripes on a common intellectual terrain. All new institutionalists examine the interactionof meso-level institutional variables with macro-level variables. All are sensitive to thehistorical genesis and evolution of these interactions. All see the outcome of these inter-actions as the creation of what are variously called institutional orders, regimes, matrices,or fields. And, all seek to explain the impact of these webs on micro-level roles, identities,values, and behaviors.

New institutionalism and the News

Cook and Sparrow apply this new institutionalist style of thinking to the production ofnews. On their view, the routines and practices that define journalism—balance, detach-ment, objectivity, the inverted pyramid style of writing, etc.—are, in fact, institutions. Inother words, they are taken-for-granted assumptions and behaviors that have becomedeeply embedded within the trans-organizational field of journalism. Cook and Sparrowencourage us to see news regimes as crucial mediators of macro-level forces on thebehavior of individual journalists. They invite us to think closely about the “stickiness”of these institutions as they shape the behavior of journalists over time. And they suggestthat we think closely about the historical trajectory of these institutional practices: thetiming and sequencing of their emergence, the mechanisms for their diffusion and repro-duction across news organizations, and their periodization and evolution. Fortunately, asis clear in their essays and more so in their books, Cook and Sparrow do not see them-selves as reinventing the wheel. They acknowledge and depend upon the great manyimportant studies of news production that have been conducted as far back as WalterLippmann’s Public Opinion (1922). Instead, using new institutionalist principles, Cookand Sparrow leverage the existing literature to produce new insights and new directionsfor research.

In saying this, I do not mean to say that they work in tandem. In fact, they begin witha fundamental disagreement, and this disagreement ripples through their analyses in sucha way that they end with very different images of journalism. The disagreement has to dowith which macro-forces news routines are taken to mediate. Sparrow and Bourdieu(though not Benson) argue that news routines primarily mediate economic forces. Two ofthe three “uncertainties” identified by Sparrow—how to make money and how to ensure asteady supply of information—can be traced back to economic forces. And, as Bensonobserves, of the two forms of “capital” Bourdieu identifies as essential for understandingjournalism, economics trumps culture. In contrast, Cook, Kaplan, and I identify the state,or, more broadly, polities, as a major exogenous force on news production. Of course, justas Sparrow (though, as Benson observes, not Bourdieu) acknowledges the pressures ofpolities on the news, we acknowledge that economics is important for explaining newsproduction. But we argue that political legitimacy is of more immediate concern for jour-nalists. To our way of thinking, economic considerations are simply too diffuse and

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remote from the day-to-day activities of journalists to generate the kind of uniform, trans-organizational routines identified by news scholars. Politics is much closer to the dailyhabits of journalists. In their search for political legitimacy, journalists find themselves ina complicated, uneasy relationship with public officials, and, more broadly, the politicalculture. It is this relationship that news routines and practices are intended to mediate. Itend to agree especially with Kaplan, who argues that journalism is thoroughly embeddedin political culture—a point that, as he notes in his essay, distinguishes his version of newinstitutionalism from that of Cook. Sparrow accepts all of this, but argues that, especiallyin the last thirty years, the incorporation of news media into large conglomerates has giveneconomics a more immediate, central role in the production of news. In other words,economic pressures are not as remote or diffuse as perhaps they once were.

Benson takes a more complicated position. He argues that perhaps we ought to com-bine the two forces—markets and polities—into state/market and state/civil society com-posites. For cross-national comparative purposes, this move seems sensible. Much as withHallin and Mancini’s (2004) recent book, it holds the promise of setting various nationalconfigurations of media systems along a common continuum. I am not sure it has as muchvalue for the study of particular national media systems, which have their own peculiarinstitutional trajectory. Regardless, Benson’s essay has the merit of showing how his the-ory might be operationalized. His attention to such indicators as audience demographics,advertising revenues, and the like offers a fruitful direction for empirically testing argu-ments about the relationship between particular news practices and exogenous pressureslike economics or politics.

Finally, it is interesting to note that only Kaplan hints at the role of another exogenouspressure on the news: literature (also see Darnton, 1975; Fishkin, 1985). News is, after all,a form of narrative. As Kaplan argues in his essay, reporters are under pressure not only toproduce legitimate narratives in ways that ensure their companies a profit, they must alsofashion compelling stories. Surely at some level their routines and practices respond to thepressure to tell a good story. And, since literary culture often differs across nations, it isreasonable to suppose that this exogenous pressure will take different forms, and elicit dif-ferent responses, across national media systems. Though none of the essays consider theseissues, they merit closer inspection.

For present purposes, it is important to recognize that Sparrow’s interest in the impactof economic pressures on the news leads him to adopt strands of new institutionalismdeveloped in that academic discipline. As Cook observes, this marks a significant contrastto his own interest in historical and sociological versions of new institutionalism. Thisdivergence has important implications for how they respond to the issue of how newsroutines reproduce over time (for a general discussion of the issue, see Mahoney, 2000;Mahoney and Snyder, 1999).

Borrowing from the economics literature, Sparrow argues that news routines work byconstraining journalists. His interviews with reporters lead him to conclude that they are“company men,” individuals who make the strategic calculation that getting ahead means,above all, getting along, and getting along means reproducing the political and economicstatus quo. This view bears many similarities to Bourdieu’s field theory, which posits thatthe “field” of journalism is largely defined by the interaction of economic pressures and astatus competition between journalists. As Sparrow recognizes, this argument can implythat all news routines inevitably reinforce economic considerations; or, put in moreabstract terms, that news routines efficiently reproduce the overarching structure of jour-nalism. But of course, as I suggest in my essay, it is likely that news routines will some-times contradiet one another, and that at least a few will emerge and reproduce for reasons

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of convention rather than efficiency. Sparrow accounts for this possibility by positing thatin such situations senior news managers will make decisions that maintain the status quo.His justification for this reasoning follows that of Sigal (1973): news managers make theirway up the corporate ladder precisely by embracing its values. Therefore, in times ofuncertainty, they unreflectively make decisions that preserve the institutional order.

This conception introduces a kind of Darwinian process into the historical develop-ment of institutional orders. Routines that tend to serve the status quo will be embraced,while those that do not will be winnowed, either through neglect or the purposive actionsof news managers. This is a hypothesis in need of more empirical testing. A historicalstudy might seek to detect whether and the extent to which news routines evolve in thisway. The supposition that they do leads Sparrow to his compelling image of news outletsacting in concert much like military planes flying in formation. His version of new institu-tionalism suggests that, at least with respect to the national news media, in ordinary timeswe ought to expect strong homogeneity in the news. And this homogeneity, he concludes,makes the news media a particularly powerful political institution.

An alternative view, shared by Cook, Kaplan, and myself, is that the very identity andinterests of journalists are defined by the routines and practices of journalism. In theirdaily routines, journalists do not take actions according to calculations of self-interest.Contrary to Bourdieu, they are not principally status-seekers. Rather, journalists try to dowhat is appropriate. Their actions are guided more by considerations of what they ought todo than of what is in their interest to do. This conception opens an entirely different prismon to the reproduction and maintenance of news routines. For instance, it puts a greateremphasis on the timing and sequence of various news routines. On Sparrow’s account,which institution precede which is not an overwhelming concern. All news routinesrespond to the same economic pressures. Those routines that do not serve the status quosuffer a natural death. In contrast, according to this alternative view, it is perfectly possiblefor an inefficient set of routines to take hold very early on in an institutional order. Overtime, these routines generate identities, behaviors, roles, and values that are seen as appro-priate. These norms may crowd out alternative ways of practicing journalism—even ifthose alternatives might respond more efficiently to exogenous pressures. The sequence inwhich news routines emerge then, is crucial for understanding the historical trajectory of aregime.

More broadly, this alternative view offers a much messier, contingent, and inefficientview of news routines than that of Sparrow. It suggests that particular routines may ariseby happenstance, but become taken-for-granted due to circumstances peculiar to a timeand place. And the approach allows for much greater variability in the news. As Cookargues in his essay, the actions journalists take will tend to vary around a mean. This pointabout the stochastic nature of news routines leads Cook to his own intriguing image ofjournalism as an institution. They act, he suggests, more like an interest group systemthan, as in Sparrow’s theory, as a singular, monolithic institution. This image implies that,as an institution, the news media are much more permeable than Sparrow allows. For thisreason, it is important to Cook that we study the interaction of journalists and their pri-mary sources, namely, government officials. Like Kaplan, Benson and myself, he arguesthat many news routines are not internally generated, but instead emerge and evolve as aproduct of interactions between news media and other political institutions. Anotherimplication of Cook’s interest-group analogy is that analysts need to sample the broad uni-verse of media content if they are to make generalizable claims about “the media.” Spar-row specifically confines his analysis to the major national news media, and for this cohorthis claims may ring true. But do they capture the dynamics of the wider media universe?

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For Cook, more needs to be done not only to learn how the Washington Post and the NewYork Times coverage of events compares, but how their coverage compares to the TulsaWorld and the Las Vegas Review-Journal (for just such a study, see Arnold, 2004).

A key question that follows from these dueling images of the news media has to dowith how much homogeneity one can expect in the news. The essays by Entman andLawrence do a great service by putting some flesh on to the bones of this question. In hisessay, Entman argues that, unlike its coverage of Abu Graib, which varied in importantways from the message put forward by elites, the national media’s coverage of Fallujahwas predictably homogeneous. More, in borrowing the Herfindahl-Hirschmann index (Hindex) of market concentration from economics, Entman provides an ingenuous way ofoperationalizing homogeneity. His data support Sparrow’s view that, at least with respectto the national media, news coverage is extraordinarily uniform. Lawrence’s data on newscoverage of Abu Graib—which like Entman’s is confined to the national press—also sup-ports Sparrow’s account. Contrary to Entman’s observation, Lawrence finds as muchhomogeneity in coverage of Abu Graib as he finds in coverage of Fallujah. These findingsraise interesting questions: is this homogeneity due to shared routines of an elite nationalmedia? Or, of a thoroughly commercialized media system? Or, of the kind of events (war;foreign affairs) being covered? Or, of American political culture?

And what does the presence of such homogeneity tell us about the current state ofAmerican news media, or the news media more globally? This question—about the “stateof news”—hangs over the field. Indeed, even many practicing journalists worry about thestate of mainstream news (cf. Fallows, 1999; Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2001; Roberts, 2002.Entman and Lawrence’s data at least imply that there may be less (or more, dependingupon your perspective) to worry about than is conventionally argued. At least with regardto news coverage of Fallujah and Abu Graib, the major mainstream news outlets appear tobe offering about the same kind of fare as they did twenty-five years ago, and in exactlythe same degree of uniformity. New institutionalism may help to throw the relevant issuesinto sharper relief. Are we witnessing a critical juncture for the news? If so, why? What iscausing it? If a change is under way, new institutionalism suggests that it must be causedby a shock to the system. What is this shock? Economics? Politics? Globalization? Fornew institutionalists fundamental change implies the development of new routines andpractices. Can we identify such routines in contemporary news? And it implies that some-one must be articulating and arguing in favor of the new routines. Who are these groupsand what is the nature of the struggle they are conducting?

New institutionalism is often taken to be a theory that explains stability and order par-ticularly well. However, as the essays below demonstrate, its greatest use for the study ofnews may lie in helping us understand the nature of change.

Conclusion

I have touched upon only a few of the issues raised by these essays. But even this limiteddiscussion shows new institutionalism’s value to the study of news. In this regard, I thinkAmerican journalism history—a field even its participants often describe as moribund (cf.Blanchard, 1999; Carey, 1974; Schudson, 1997)—may be especially invigorated by newinstitutionalist ideas. For example, one new institutionalist argument is that regimes tendto emerge chaotically. Before the existence of a regime, individuals exist in a state ofuncertainty. They literally do not know how to go on. In this state, they grapple with oneanother to develop, defend and diffuse institutional norms. How this grappling plays outrepresents a critical juncture. In this context, key questions about the number and kind of

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critical junctures in the history of American news media await further exploration. Cook(1998) and more recently Starr (2004) have argued that the dye of the American mediasystem was cast at the founding, when the framers embraced and subsidized independent,commercial news. Others have argued for other critical junctures, including: the rise of thepenny press (Schiller, 1981; Schudson, 1978), the growth of large, commercial urban dai-lies in the 1890s (Baldasty, 1992); the demise of the third party system (Kaplan, 2002;McGerr, 1986); the emergence of progressivism (Gans, 1979; Hofstadter, 1963); the adop-tion of the 1934 Federal Communications Act (McChesney, 1993); and the growth ofmulti-national conglomerates in the 1970s and 1980s (Bagdikian, 1992: Herman andChomsky, 1988; Sparrow, 1999) as important critical junctures. Clearly, the relationshipof these critical junctures to one another, and to the modern news regime, need to beuntangled.

But journalism history is only one subfield of news scholarship that might benefitfrom an infusion of the new institutionalist style of thought. The essays that follow articu-late questions and agendas for the study of news content, the political economy of news,the culture of news, and the comparative study of news regimes. In so doing, they admira-bly meet Schudson’s challenge.

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