Why Do the Media Focus So Much of Their Coverage

question 42

Essay

Why do the media focus so much of their coverage on stories that include conflict and controversy? Drawing on what you know about the types of stories the media report (for example, horse race stories and attack journalism), discuss the affect this has on the relationship between news coverage, the public's response, and government policy.

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Definitions:

Normally Distributed

Describes a statistical distribution that is symmetric about the mean, showing that data near the mean are more frequent in occurrence than data far from the mean.

Standard Deviation

A measure of the amount of variance or dispersion of a set of values, indicating how much the values in a dataset deviate from the mean.

Margin of Error

A statistic expressing the amount of random sampling error in a survey's results.

Sample Mean

The average value of a set of observations derived from a sample.