Blurring the Lines of the Public vs. the Market Audience

The image above is provided by the liberal blog ThinkProgress and the short, cranky article that dissects it can be found here. If you're not familiar with the Treyvon Martin story, the confirmed facts of the case be found here. In a nutshell, a 17 year-old, unarmed African American boy was shot by 28 year-old white man named George Zimmerman. So far, Zimmerman's motive is unclear, but a 911 recorded conversation just before the shooting revealed that Zimmerman followed him unnecessarily and reported that Martin looked "like he's up to no good, on drugs or something." Martin had no criminal record to date.

Above, ThinkProgress charts the amount of news coverage each of the three major news networks allotted to this story. To only report on the development of this story once is uhm, outrageous. Here, the liberal blog Wonkette eviscerates Fox News for their negligence, so if you're into that sort of thing, you'll enjoy their take down of the outlet they describe as a "steady stream of artlessly jingoistic vomit, spewing forth from helmet-headed hairspray sacks who move their lips while reading important reports on hurricanes and other outrages against Heartland (= white, irrespective of actual location) America." But it's easy to pick on Fox News.

Instead, I'd like to ask whether Fox News' decision to neglect this story reflects their view of their audience as a public or a market. Usually, stories of senseless violence are the sort of thing the public audience thinks it deserves to know about. Coupled with the issue of race, the Martin story is definitely the stuff of evening prime time news. Why did Fox ignore it? Were they worried about offending members of their white audience who sympathize with Zimmerman's fear of blacks? It strikes me that Fox could have still reported the story and weighed in on the issue by coming to the defense of Zimmerman. What's going on here?

On the Monkey Cage, John Sides blogged about public knowledge of recent political events, ones that we can assume were reported on by the mass media. In this blog titled, Why Campaigns Have So Few "Game-Changers," he commented that the survey showed that Americans cared very little about this campaign and the political events that have occurred.

While these are the findings of the survey, Sides concludes that although the inability to answer specific "events-related" questions accurately is shown, Americans are certainly not unintelligent or bad citizens. They just don't follow politics very closely, which is entirely normal.

Sides's most important comment however was what we can deduct from this survey- it does more "to question the assumptions of commentators, who are often anxious to inflate every argument during the campaign to a 'game changer'—even if many Americans aren’t really watching the game." This conclusion is interesting because it seems to contradict the nature of the "marketplace" with regards to the mass media providing what Americans desire to "consume." If Americans are not really watching the political game, then why would the media place emphasis on the campaign and what candidates are saying? Possibly, the media is fulfilling their role by still providing political coverage despite what the public truly desires to watch or read.

Typically, an average individual remembers the frivolous remarks or reports of the news such as the ones utilized in the survey-"Santorum’s statement about birth control, Obama’s call to Sandra Fluke, and Santorum’s comment about Obama’s snobbery." If Americans cannot even recall these highly reported events, what exactly are they doing? And if no one is truly watching, and the media still reports on it, are they doing their job?

Most importantly however, Sides's final conclusion raises the question of the media's role in influencing public opinion. If viewers aren't actually comprehending or using the news provided by the mass media, then they will never have a large effect on influencing public opinion.