Entman takes Harvard’s Lombard Professorship

Harvard’s Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory may have evolved into a position for a literature scholar, but Harvard is still very much in the business of studying the ways in which public policy gets made and communicated. That mission has largely been taken over by Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the form of study has focused more on mass communication than it has on rhetoric and oratory.

Nevertheless, communication is alive and well at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and this year, Professor Robert Entman holds the Kennedy School’s Lombard Visiting Professorship. If teaching at Harvard is akin to performing at Carnegie Hall (where the old joke goes, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice!”) then it is worthwhile exploring Entman’s scholarship, which is how he came to hold the Lombard Professorship.

Entman received his bachelor’s degree from Duke and his doctorate from Yale, both in political science. He also did graduate work in political science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and took an M.P.P. in public policy analysis from the University of California, Berkeley. He’s taught at Duke in public policy analysis, held a joint appointment in communication studies, journalism, and political science at Northwestern, and is currently a professor of communication at North Carolina State University, and an adjunct professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Entman’s work has been primarily concerned with how media “frame” coverage of public policy and social issues. In various papers, Entman and his associates have contended that while journalists attempt to cover stories in as fair a manner as possible, they have biases which cause them to give more weight to certain features of the stories they cover, and less weight to others. Moreover, Entman has written, these biases have become institutionalized, creating a style of coverage that makes the development of public policy difficult. Entman’s two books, Media Power Politics (The Free Press, 1981) and Democracy Without Citizens: Media and the Decay of American Politics (Oxford University Press, 1989), elaborate on this analysis.

A substantial part of Entman’s research has focused on how television news covers issues related to race, and Entman has a book titled Living Black and White: Media and Race in America in preparation on this topic. In an article in the Media Studies Journal (1994), however, Entman summarized his research on the topic up to that point.

Television news, particularly local television newscasts, tend to show African Americans in a much worse light than whites. For example, a substantial number of blacks accused of crimes are shown without name identification, while whites accused of crimes are almost always identified. Far more stories about crimes involving black defendants appear on local newscasts than are stories about white defendants. Far fewer black, as opposed to white “good Samaritans” are the subjects of stories.

African American politicians are often shown as posturing on behalf of the black community, and these same politicians are often shown as being demanding. Stories about poverty are often set in black neighborhoods, even though statistics indicate that substantially more whites live in poverty in the United States.

At the highest levels, there are few African American government officials who are in positions where they might be shown regularly on the media as experts; rather, when senior black officials appear it is often because they have gotten into trouble in some way.

Entman contended that the pattern of these stories allow viewers to assume that African-Americans are poor, uneducated, strident, demanding, selfish, and corrupt, citing as evidence studies which indicate that Americans who get their news primarily from television are more likely to express racist opinions about African-Americans than are those who don’t.

Entman has also contended that media practices hamper the development of policy innovation. While he is a staunch defender of freedom of expression, Entman has argued that freedom of expression has often been subverted by government reaction to press practices. Innovation, especially that involving a large and complicated bureaucracy, is tricky to introduce. It requires a good deal of negotiation, as well as trial and error. Continual press coverage of government policy means that the ability to experiment is often lost once the press become aware of the innovation. Moreover, delicate negotiations carried out in private often promote the appearance of doing the public’s business behind closed doors, thus providing a red flag to press investigators.

In response to such pressures, the government attempts to manage the information that the press receives and in many cases is extremely successful in doing so. Entman suggested that this management actually results in restricted freedom of expression, as it is often used to hamper the press from covering stories of legitimate interest that would provoke spirited debate on important policy issues.

As the Lombard Professor, Entman will have more of a “bully pulpit” to express these analyses than he has previously. There are some advantages to holding a teaching post at Harvard!