Tilted Mirrors: Media Alignment with Political and Social Change—A Community Structure Approach, by John Pollock. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007. 360 pp.
$85 hard cover; $32.50 paperback.
Reviewed by DAVID DEMERS

David Demers is Associate Professor of Communication at Washington State University. Address correspondence to David Demers, 3107 E. 62nd Ave., Spokane, WA 99223. E-mail: ddemers@wsu.edu

Book Review

“How do journalists make decisions when reporting on critical political and social events?” John Pollock’s Tilted Mirrors begins by observing that much social science research has sought to find the answer to this question in “established professional conventions and norms” that journalists employ. Many explanations also rely upon news-gathering routines, newsroom social validation, media markets, or “imagined communities or real or potential sources.” But, he adds, “often overlooked are the social and political contexts of particular communities. . . . It is my conviction that ‘community structure’—demographics, city characteristics—surrounding journalist decision making has a great deal to do with reporting on social and political change.”

Pollock is not the first scholar to examine the impact of community structure on the news product. One of the first major studies was sociologist Robert Park’s The ImmigrantPress and Its Control, a 1922 classic that concluded that foreign-language newspapers helped assimilate immigrants into American life. The contemporary recognized leaders in the field of community structure and the press are Phillip J. Tichenor, George A. Donohue, and Clarice N. Olien, who, from the 1960s to the 1990s, conducted numerous studies that examined the social control function of newspapers in communities.

But Pollock’s book makes a unique and worthy contribution to the literature on media processes because it is one of the few empirical studies to employ a national cross-section sample of newspapers and contains a set of propositions that go beyond much of the contemporary research. Specifically, Pollock introduces five major hypotheses that link media content to community structure:

1. the Buffer Hypothesis, which proposes that the greater the proportion of a city’s population that is privileged or “buffered” from financial and occupational uncertainty, the more receptive or “accommodating” a city’s major paper is to claims for moral attention by those who are less privileged;

2. the Violated Buffer Hypothesis, which contends that the greater the proportion of city residents who are privileged, the less favorable newspaper reporting will be on issues framed as hazardous to physical safety;

3. the Vulnerability Hypothesis, which argues that the higher the poverty levels in a city, the more unfavorable the coverage of capital punishment and the more favorable the coverage of patients’ health rights;

4. the Protection Hypothesis, which holds that the higher the proportion of city residents who are privileged, the more favorable a newspaper’s reporting is likely to be toward economic developments that buttress privileged interests;
and

5. the Stakeholder Hypothesis, which posits that the larger a group’s presence or influence in a city, the more likely local media are to treat it and its concerns with dignity and respect.

Section II of Pollock’s 360-page book is devoted to the presentation of data that test each of these propositions and additional hypotheses. Pollock examines coverage of a number of issues, including the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, physician-assisted suicide, embryonic stem cell research, the tobacco settlement, the 2000 Bush versus Gore election, capital punishment, the patients’ bill of rights, the transfer of Hong Kong to China, the North American Free Trade Agreement, gun control, oil drilling in the Arctic,
and more.

Pollock creates what he calls a “media vector” variable for measuring a newspaper’s coverage of an issue. This variable measures the “combined impact of the strength or prominence of an article and its direction (favorable, unfavorable, or balanced/neutral toward an issue).” No doubt some methodologists will question the validity of such a measure.But Pollock’s methodology is creative and thought-provoking, and the theory he employs deserves far more weight than the methodology itself, or so most of the theorists in this field of research would argue. To his credit, Pollock draws upon a wide range of researchers to develop his theoretical models and hypotheses, including and especially the research of Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien.

Consistent with critical and cultural theory approaches, Pollock concludes that the media “are often ‘tilted mirrors,’ aligned with community structure along an axis of inequality.” However, Pollock also concludes that inequality is “not simply linked to reporting perspectives reinforcing ‘social control.’ Inequality is also associated with media frames accommodating social and political change.” Thus, Pollock’s research joins a growing body of other research showing that mass media can, from time to time, produce content that leads social systems to accommodate the needs of alternative and challenging groups, a phenomenon that, in turn, can help explain the relatively high
degree of social stability present in the United States and other media “rich” countries.

Pollock does not probe in detail the question of whether these acommodations are meaningful enough to emancipate those who are repressed within these communities or societies.But his research clearly shows that newspapers of all sizes are not homogenous lap dogs of the rich and powerful, as many critical studies in the 1970s and 1980s asserted.

Pollock’s book is a worthwhile text for a graduate-level class on media and social change. As he points out, “whatever its predictive power and constraints, the community structure approach exploring newspaper coverage of political and social change is a useful theoretical and methodological orientation.” Many scholars working in this perspective no
doubt will hope that Pollock’s study stimulates more research examining the impact of community structure on mass media.