Thomas Patterson

Who they are

Patterson holds the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press chair at Harvard Kennedy School. His page there lists his expertise as media, politics, democracy and governance, and public leadership and management, and his research focus as the media's political role, democracy and governance, and public opinion and electoral participation. He is affiliated with the Shorenstein Center, which published the 2000 report discussed here. The page says his research has been funded by the Ford, Markle, Smith-Richardson, Pew, Knight, Carnegie and National Science Foundations.

His work is empirical political communication. He counts and surveys: what news outlets publish, what the public does with it, and how that bears on political participation. The report on soft news is characteristic. It rests on a two-year study that combined national surveys of Americans' news habits with a content analysis of 5,331 news stories.

The report's argument has two parts that are easy to separate and worth keeping separate. The descriptive part is that the news softened and, as the Shorenstein Center summarises it, became more critical in tone, in response to competition from cable and entertainment. The evaluative part is that these changes had not stopped the decline in news audiences. He argued that hard news, not soft news, is what draws people to the news, and that attracting audiences and informing the public are compatible and mutually reinforcing. In the report's words, soft news and critical journalism "may now be hastening the decline in news audiences".

For a reader testing Postman, the first part is the useful one. It is a count, it covers television, newspapers and newsmagazines together, and it supplies the figure that soft news rose from less than 35 per cent to about 50 per cent over a period that began in 1980. It is not a test of whether television's form caused the rise, and Patterson's own explanation is commercial, not formal.

Key papers

Patterson, T. E. (2000). Doing Well and Doing Good: How Soft News and Critical Journalism Are Shrinking the News Audience. Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School. The 5,331-story content analysis of soft news. Read for this site through the Shorenstein Center page and a Wilson Quarterly summary.

The books below are listed on his Harvard Kennedy School page and are not used in the article.

Key ideas

Soft news can be counted. Routine crime, accident and disaster stories and celebrity stories form a category that can be measured across outlets. See Soft News.

The softening has a commercial cause. Outlets softened in response to competition from cable and entertainment.

Softening did not rescue the audience. On his reading, hard news draws people to the news, and soft news with critical journalism may be hastening the decline in audiences.

Audiences and the public interest are compatible. The report's central claim is that attracting audiences and informing the public are mutually reinforcing.

How the article uses him

The article Was Amusing Ourselves to Death Right uses the count and the commercial explanation. It also notes what the count cannot do: the 50 per cent figure covers three kinds of outlet and so does not isolate television. The report text itself was not read for this page, only the Shorenstein Center description and a summary, so figures other than the share and the story count are not given here.

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