Research Proposal

Final Research Project Proposal
Kyler Beaty
Topic:
The topic being observed in my research is a comparative analysis between the manner in
which liberal, progressive political movements are portrayed on conservative leaning news
networks, and how conservative political movements are depicted on more liberal news
frequencies. In particular, I am going to observe stories from providers such as Fox News, Rush
Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck shows, and analyze how they portray progressive movements like
the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street organizations. I will then watch stories from
networks that are considered more liberal, like MSNBC, The Guardian, and The Young Turks,
and discern how they interpret and construe conservative movements such as the Tea Party and
Neo-conservatism.
As I have gotten older, I have learned a lot about the political system. I have learned
about how it works, what its specific functions are, and why certain people are influenced to
think in one way or another. One of the biggest influences on political thought is the media, and
how it seems to portray the other side of the argument. The debate is not dichotomous. There are
many sides worth looking at. However, liberalism and conservatism tends to be very broad,
generalized terms that encompass a wide spectrum of ideas underneath them. Whether the media
is using slander or arguments supported with data to combat those who disagree, people who
wish to be more aware and intellectual about what they are watching and being influenced by
should know what is truly going on. This is why it is imperative that this topic is observed
further from a sociological perspective.
Terms:
Liberalism The movements associated with liberalism advocate for protection of individual
freedoms and rights guaranteed to them.
Conservatism Conservatism is the desire to adhere to traditional values and norms.
Conservative movements attempt to revert society back to a time in which they believe was
better than the society we are currently living in. Many times, they believe in a free-market
economy and traditional Christian values.
Research Questions
How are liberal progressive movements portrayed on conservative news outlets compared to how
conservative movements depicted on news stations that are considered more liberal?
Are there visible differences in how movements with opposing viewpoints are described?
Data/Sample
In order to analyze the news stations, I will browse through archives of stories done by
the networks within the past five years. These stories will come from news outlets such as the
OReilly Factor, the Sean Hannity Show, the Glenn Beck Program, Rush Limbaugh, the Rachel
Maddow Show, The Guardian, The Young Turks, and the Huffington Post.
Bill OReilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh are all very well-known
conservative news broadcasters. Many of them either have in the past, or presently work for
dominant conservative networks such as Fox News, The Blaze, and The Drudge Report.
However, Rachel Maddow, The Guardian, The Young Turks, and the Huffington Post are all
prominent examples of liberal news anchors or stations. I will be observing between five and ten
news stories from the last five years produced by both liberal and conservative news stations that
specifically pertain to political movements from the opposite ideology. During the collection of
this data, I will be explicitly observing what kind of language is used while criticizing or
reporting on the movements ideas and actions, as well as what sort of visuals are used to silently
describe what message the network wishes to associate with the organization.
Article Summaries
The title of the first article is Media Consumption and the Dynamics of Policy Mood.
This research article essentially observes how much, and what kind of, media is being consumed
on a daily basis, and how certain an individual is about their political opinion. The article has an
underlying tone of attempting to discern the strength to which the media influences and
reinforces our individual political ideas at the micro and macro levels. The study gathers political
ideology data from the General Social Survey (GSS), a questionnaire given out to thousands of
people almost annually that measures a wide variety of political, social, and demographic
questions, as well as the Stimson Mood database, which measures the publics domestic
liberalism and can sometimes measure indicators for decades. These researchers found a
statistically significant negative relationship between those who read the newspaper more often,
and the variance between their answers to different political questions. Simplified, this can be
interpreted to mean that those who read the newspaper more ten to have less uncertainty about
their political ideology. However, the study also found that the amount of television watched and
variance in answers had no statistically significant relationship. The authors of the article admit
that this could be because those who are watching television have such a wide variety of
programs to watch that they are not always settling down on the opinionated broadcasts (Johnson
2013). This article can assert that the media can reinforce our political beliefs, but the second
article supports the idea that conservative media is not always professional in its arguments
against liberal groups.
The title of the article is Conservative Consciousness and the Press: The Institutional
Contribution to the Idea of the Liberal Media in Right-Wing Discourse. This particular article
caught my attention, because it does a specific content analysis study that observes how a
conservative news publication Human Events. It is related to my own research in that it analyzes
how the publication, and the writers behind the publication, portrayed the media that they
believed to be liberal. The content research was only done on articles between 1957 and 1965,
because it coincided with a time in American history where modern conservatism was beginning
its rise to dominance. This was also a time when many movements, both liberal and
conservative, were beginning to gain great influence in the political and social community. It was
found, while reading through articles, that an overwhelming majority of the articles had negative
themes imbedded into the wording and stories. In fact, the researcher found 20 different negative
themes throughout the course of the study. These themes range from manipulation of the news to
outright slanderous statements like pro-communism and anti-American interests. This specific
news publication had so much influence on the conservative group that it has been reported that
multiple issues had been sent to the White House during the eight years of Ronald Reagans
presidency (Major 2014).
Bibliography
Johnson, Tyler and Paul M. Kellstedt. 2013. Media Consumption And the Dynamics of Policy
Mood. Political Behavior 36(2):37799.
Major, Mark. 2014. Conservative Consciousness And the Press: The Institutional Contribution
to the Idea of the 'Liberal Media' in Right-Wing Discourse. Critical Sociology
41(3):48391.

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Final Research Project Proposal

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