THE HEAVENLY CHORUS - INTEREST GROUP VOICES ON TV-NEWS

The work of E. E. Schattschneider (1960) and other suggests that there may be systematic biases or unrepresentativeness in the voices that i nterest groups contribute to public deliberation about policy. Evidenc e from hundreds of TV news stories concerning 80 diverse policy issues from the 1969-82 period indicates that corporations and business grou ps predominated (especially on economic issues), with 36.5% of all int erest group mentions, contrasted with only 13.2% for labor. Profession al and agricultural interests were rarely heard from. Citizen action g roups had 32% of all interest group stories, but these often concerned unpopular protest activity. Such imbalances, apparently resulting fro m differential command of money and other resources, seem to violate n orms of equal access, representativeness, balance, and diversity in th e marketplace of ideas.