This research project began as a collaboration between Ibrahim Abuelyaman, Stephen Anderson, Emma Thompson—three undergraduate student researchers who were part of the Dean’s First-Year Research & Creative Scholars Program—along with Michaele Myers (a PhD student) and myself. We set out to investigate the changing nature of U.S. entertainment television content over time.

Click the image above to check out our poster summarizing the information on this page.

We were specifically interested in the degree to which entertainment media contains political themes and messages, whether the amount of political content has increased or decreased, and whether broad trends concerning partisan polarization among the mass public, which has mainly been studied with respect to news media consumption, might be reflected in entertainment media as well.

Below you will find a summary of stage one of our project, which is largely descriptive. We briefly provide an overview of the theoretical motivation for this project, the data we collected and the methodological choices we made in gathering, processing, and analyzing these data, as well as our preliminary findings and initial assessment of what these results mean. At the bottom of this page, we also outline some of the next steps we plan to pursue in the latter stages of this project. Because there is a lot of information reported on this page, some parts of the methods and findings sections below will expand or contract when headers are clicked on.

Theoretical Motivation

While political communication research has paid considerable attention to fragmentation in media consumption (e.g., Webster, 2005) and the tendency of partisan audiences to selectively seek out like-minded news sources (Stroud, 2011), much of this work has focused on the growth of cable television (Prior, 2007) or online media (Hindman, 2018) and how growing access to choices may impact audience demand for news. Prior (2007), for example, suggests that more media choices will result in a stratification of media consumption such that those who are most interested in news will consume larger and larger quantities of politically informative content and those who instead prefer entertainment media will largely opt out of paying attention to news, disconnecting from political and civic affairs in the process.

In this project, we look more closely at the political dimensions of entertainment television. Even if these larger media audiences trends may be occurring, it does not necessarily follow that entertainment media consumption will result in less politically engaged citizens if the entertainment media being consumed contains a great deal of politically informative themes and ideas. That is, if people are consuming programs like “Scandal” and “House of Cards” in their leisure time, is it fair to suggest that they are in fact disengaging from politics when they do so?

More than 15 years ago, Williams and Delli Carpini (2002) observed that “the extent to which any communication is politically relevant depends on what it does—its potential use—rather than on who says it and how it is said.” They called for greater scholarly attention to the question of politically relevant media outside of conventional news content. They noted that a lack of research on the political dimensions of non-news media had obscured the possibility that “the political relevance of a cartoon character like Lisa Simpson is as important as the professional norms of Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, or Peter Jennings.” They explained:

A Jay Leno monologue satirically pointing out the political ignorance of the general public, a scene from Law & Order exploring racial injustice in our legal system, an episode of The Simpsons lampooning modern campaign tactics, or an Internet joke about Bill Clinton that generates discussion about the line between public and private behavior can be as politically relevant as the nightly news, maybe more so. Williams & Delli Carpini (2002)

What limited research has been conducted on the political dimensions of entertainment media has largely focused on the impact of such media on variables such as political knowledge and participation—entertainment as a tool for information acquisition (Baumgartner & Morris, 2006; Kim & Vishak, 2008), learning (Becker & Bode, 2018; Feldman, 2013), and socialization (Bode & Becker, 2018). But most of this research has tended to focus narrowly on the forms of entertainment media closest to news: political satire like the “Daily Show” in which the presentation of political information is largely a byproduct of entertainment (Baum, 2003) but where the format itself involves propagating topical content that touches on various current events.

But as Williams and Delli Carpini (2002), Holbert (2005), and others have noted, there is great potential for political content to be communicated through a wider range of media. In fact, politically informative content may well be present in the diversity of characters and plots and dialogue contained in the stories that still dominate prime time—not just in the jokes and monologues that occupy the late-night portion of most network line-ups.

Holbert’s (2005) typology of entertainment television and its relationship with political themes and content. Our focus on scripted entertainment encompasses all the types of content on the right-hand side along with “Fictional Political Dramas” at the top but none of the other examples.

We focus in this project on scripted entertainment television because it remains among the most consumed media content in the U.S., even as overall consumption of news has steadily declined. While mass communication research has long focused on possible long-term effects of entertainment television consumption on shaping people’s sense of social reality (e.g., Gerbner & Gross, 1976), only relatively recent work has begun to examine specific dimensions beyond violence and its impact on political preferences and behaviors. For example, Hoewe and Sherrill (2019) examine how political dramas in prime time television with counter-stereotypical female lead characters may increase the political involvement of their audiences. In Jones and Paris (2018), the authors examine how dystopian fiction such as that found in “The Handmaid’s Tale” or “Game of Thrones” may influence viewers’ willingness to justify violent, radical forms of political action. And in a working paper, Eunji Kim (2018) shows how consumption of entertainment programs that emphasize “rags-to-riches” narratives can increase beliefs in the prospects for upward mobility and the “American Dream.”

But even if entertainment media is politically consequential, no previous efforts have been undertaken to map out in a broad systematic way what forms of politically informative themes, ideas, and narratives may be present in such content or how these forms may change over time in relation to the public policy agenda. In stage one of this project, reported below, we seek to address two specific research questions meant to serve as a foundation for future research on this area:

Research Questions

Does prime-time scripted entertainment television in the U.S. contain more political themes than in the past? How polarized are audiences along partisan lines for prime-time scripted entertainment television?

Methods and Data

This project required several stages of data collection and analysis, combining automated computational methods with conventional survey data analysis. These steps involved developing a corpus of entertainment television data, devising a codebook, hand-coding large numbers of episode synopses for political themes, and analyzing the results alongside secondary datasets. The steps involved in this process can be summarized as follows:

Developed Corpus of Entertainment Television Data Collected lists of relevant entertainment series (N = 1,543) Obtained episode IDs for all seasons of the series from the IMDb website (N = 41,463)

Created Database of Episode Synopses Used the Open Movie Database (OMDb) API to obtain relevant data about each episode to construct corpus of prime time entertainment television data

Developed Coding Strategy Randomly sampled 100 episode synopses from the corpus and used open coding methods to generate ideas for coding strategy

Using training data, developed codebook for coding synopses for political themes and issues

Sampled from the Corpus and Coded the Episode Synopses Randomly selected larger sample to be used in the project (N = 2,995 after excluding missing data) Hand coded broader sample from larger corpus

Collected Secondary Data and Conducted Analysis Collected secondary data sources: national surveys in which respondents were asked about watching entertainment television. These included the National Annenberg Election Survey in 2008 and the American National Election Studies in 2012 and 2016. Analyzed and plotted descriptive results



Click on each of the bolded headings below for additional details concerning what this process entailed.

Develop Corpus of Entertainment Television Data

As a starting point for this project, we sought to gather lists of scripted entertainment programs over time that could be used to represent in a broad sense what kinds of programs were on the air in any given year. While it is impossible to collect data on every program, our sample consisted of two kinds of series: shows that received high ratings and shows that were recognized by television critics. In selecting programs from both lists, we ensured our corpus captured the most relevant and influential shows in any given season. Top-Rated Shows We gathered lists of the top 30 programs averaging the highest ratings in prime time each year from 1981 to 2018, using published reports from Brooks & Marsh (2009) and supplemented by Wikipedia. These lists of top-rated series on American primetime television have changed some over time as trends in television network programming have evolved through different eras. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was not uncommon for “Movies of the Week” to rank highly in the overall ratings averages. In the 2000s, reality television and game shows became regular fixtures on the rankings. The “top 30” programs in the ratings receive less than half the ratings on average that they did in the 1980s. Despite these trends, scripted entertainment television has remained fairly consistently among the top rated programs on these lists, as evidenced by the figure above. The downside of focusing just on the top-rated programs is that even if these shows represent the highest rated programs in any given year, media fragmentation over the past several decades ensures that these series are no longer representative of the broad range of series Americans are actually watching. Therefore in addition to this sample of highly rated programs, we supplemented our sample with additional lists of the shows nominated to Best Comedy or Best Drama at the Emmy Awards and Golden Globes. Award-Nominated Series By gathering lists of award-nominated series as well, we ensured that our sample of entertainment television included both the most watched series as well as the most culturally influential series. This approach also ensured that our sample included programs on cable television, premium cable, and online streaming services, which are unlikely to make the Nielsen rankings but which have nonetheless become important sources of entertainment programming for many Americans. Indeed, as the figure below indicates, there is no longer hardly any overlap between the series which are nominated for Best Comedy or Best Drama awards and those that break the Top 30 in the Nielsen rankings.

Create Database of Episode Synopses

Once we obtained lists of relevant series, we needed to then obtain the unique IMDb ID numbers for each series and episode we wanted to include in our corpus. For example, the NBC series “Seinfield” has a series ID of “tt0098904” corresponding to this URL: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098904/ Each episode also has a unique ID, such as Season 1, Episode 1, which has an ID of “tt0098286” and can be found at this URL: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098286/ Example of a user-generated episode synopsis on IMDb. Ultimately, in gathering IMDb IDs for each episode in our corpus—more than 40,000 of them (N = 41,463) spanning 1981 to 2018—our intention was to feed this information back into a web service API called Open Movie Database designed to provide structured data about each television episode. In particular, in addition to the year in which episodes were aired, we were especially interested in collected the user-generated synopses about each episode. These synopses varied from as little as a single sentence to a paragraph-length summary of everything that happened in a given episode, averaging approximately 287 characters per summary (or about 50 words), excluding missing synopsis data, which accounted for 17.1% of the entire corpus (N = 7,101).

Develop Coding Strategy﻿

Once we successfully collected this database of entertainment television information, we randomly selected 100 episode synopses and as a group we began reading them and generating ideas for how to code this data for political themes and other variables of interest. We ultimately devised a codebook that draws partially on an existing codebook developed by the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), a large collaborative scholarly project used to track the various policies enacted and debated in different countries over time. Specifically, we relied on an adapted codebook for a CAP project that examined policy agendas on television news in the United States (Uscinski, 2009). Campaigns and Elections

Health Issues (but not healthcare like Medicaid, Medicare, etc.) Federal Government Operations Social welfare (includes healthcare like Medicaid, Medicare, etc.) State and Local Government Operations Law & Crime (includes trials, reports of crime) Religion (but not Civil Rights or Civil Liberties or Holidays)

Labor and Employment Family Issues (includes marriage, divorce, adoption) Education Civil Rights (includes human rights, treatment of prisoners) Community Development and Housing Immigration Issues (includes border issues) Drugs and Substance Abuse Agriculture

Public Lands and Water Management

Environment Weather and Natural Disasters

Energy (includes oil and oil prices) Fires Banking, Finance and Domestic Commerce

International Affairs Macroeconomics (include stock reports) Defense Foreign Trade Space, Science, Technology, and Communications Transportation (includes disasters and airport security) National Holidays Culture and Entertainment Other In addition to these policy areas, we also coded for whether synopses contained explicit references to particular types of characters (from a list of 22) and themes (a list of 10), although most of the analysis below focuses on the policy issues above.

Sample from the Corpus and Code the Episode Synopses﻿

Before coding the data, we needed to select a relevant sample of synopses. Because of the two research questions above, we sought to strike a balance in our sampled data between a representative sample of episodes over time and data that could be linked directly to the years in which survey data was available about audiences for the series. Therefore, our sample involved drawing from two overlapping frames. First, to characterize changes over time, from 1981 onwards (excluding the first year in the sample in which only fall episodes were collected), we randomly selected two episodes for each series broadcast in each year. This ensured that programs with 10 episodes in a given season were as represented as programs with 24 episodes. This approach also excluded episode data for seasons of series when they were not highly rated or nominated for awards, even though our overall corpus contained all data for such programs. Next, we oversampled episode data for the specific programs asked about on the NAES in 2008 and the ANES in 2012 and 2016. (More on this survey data below.) We did not collect data about all the programs asked about, only those that were asked about and were on the original lists of highly-rated and/or award-nominated shows. This resulted in 24 separate series-year observations for which audience data and episode synopsis data was available (N = 7 in 2008, N = 3 in 2012, and N = 14 in 2016). For each of these series, we selected all available episode synopses in the year in which the survey asked respondents whether they had watched the series. Selected episode synopses were then randomly assigned to each of the five coders, with 200 coded by everyone to assess levels of inter-coder reliability. In the analysis that follows, we separately analyze data from the two samples as each are useful for examining the two distinct research questions outlined above.

Collect Secondary Data and Conduct Analysis

As already noted, we gathered 2008, 2012, and 2016 survey data in order to examine characteristics of the audiences for a small number of the various scripted entertainment shows we collected data on. This allowed us to examine the partisan composition of the audiences for these shows, as well as other demographic information about the characteristics of who reported watching these programs in the election years in which they were broadcast. These self-reports provide a flawed and incomplete portrait of the audiences for these shows (Prior, 2009), but in the absence of other audience data, they are an improvement over nothing. One limitation of these data is that in all three surveys, consumption of specific television programs was only asked of the subsample of individuals who first reported hearing about the presidential campaign from television news or talk programs. As a result, this aspect of the questionnaire design excludes a relatively small percentage of the sample in 2008 (~5%) but a larger share in 2012 (12%) and 2016 (14%). It may limit our ability to make inferences across the three years of data—although with few observations generally in any given year, our empirical analysis is already constrained. In addition to whether respondents reported “regularly” watching the specific series (“at least once a month”), we also gathered data on the age of respondents, race and ethnicity (Black or hispanic), gender, level of educational attainment, household income, self-reported interest in politics, and information about how frequently respondents consumed news. In the analysis that follows, we performed two kinds of descriptive examination of these primary and secondary data sources. First, to address RQ1, we used the larger sample of coded episode data to plot changes over time in particular policy issues in the content of entertainment television. To address RQ2, we examined the relationship between how Democratic/Republican a given show’s audience was and the types of policy themes present in the series that year.

Findings

We find evidence that suggests that (a) there may have been small increases over time in the degree to which prime time entertainment television references political themes and ideas, and (b) there are some distinctive patterns along partisan lines in the types of political themes in series consumed by Democrats versus Republicans.

RQ1: Are there more political themes than in the past?

The share of episode synopses coded as including references to various policy issues. To evaluate this question, we examined the political issues and themes present in the sample of coded episodes. Overall, on average, each coded episode contained one or more policy theme (Mean = 1.005) although a third were coded as containing no policy issues at all. The most common theme across the entire sample was “Law & Crime,” which applied to a third of episodes, followed by “Family Issues,” which included marriages, divorce, and/or reproductive health policy, and “Labor and Employment.” Summing across the wide range of policy issues coded (26 in total), we plotted the average number issues per episode by year the episodes were broadcast. Doing so indicated a gradual increase in political themes over time, with most of the increase occurring in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Aggregating across all coded episodes and all policy issues indicated a slight increase over time in political themes in the content of prime time entertainment television. The dashed blue line reflects a lowess smoothed trend line. This increase applied regardless of the whether episodes were from series in the top 30 Nielsen rankings or from shows nominated for Golden Globe or Emmy awards. To be sure, the political issues coded were quite broad by design, so to assess whether this trend was due to themes which are indisputably political, we also separately examined several specific policy issues. For example, it did not appear that the overall increase was due to issues such as “Law & Crime” or “Health Care.” Instead, we found evidence of increases in themes where the political substance of the content is particularly overt including “Federal Government Operations” or “State Government Operations” (combining the two separate codes for readability below) as well as “Defense” and “International Affairs” (also combined below). We also found slight increases in episodes coded as including references to “Campaigns and Elections,” which tended to rise in relation to presidential election years (noted in gray below). Likewise, we found similar if gradual increases in explicit mentions of politicians or political candidates in coded episode synopses over time. These descriptive findings are not definitive but they suggest there may well have been a small increase in political themes in entertainment television compared to the 1980s and 1990s.

RQ2: Partisan polarization among audiences?

Examining survey data for the small sample of programs for which audience data is available reveals that party identification is often—although inconsistently—a significant predictor of being a “regular” audience member for many entertainment programs. On the one hand, this may be intuitive; many shows appeal to particular demographic groups—especially age, race, gender, and education—and as mass audiences become increasingly rare, the television industry has increasingly sought out niche subgroups for building fan bases for their shows. As our political parties are increasingly divided along many of these same demographic lines (see Mason, 2018), it is perhaps unsurprising that mass television audiences should also cleave according to these same patterns. However, the survey data suggests that in many cases audiences for entertainment programs divide along partisan lines over and beyond that which can be explained by demographic differences alone. Even when age, race, gender, age, income, education are controlled for, party identification often remains a significant predictor of entertainment consumption patterns. In the figure below we plot some of these coefficient estimates (and confidence intervals at the 95% level) for several key variables from logistic regression models, including politically salient characteristics like news use and political interest. For readability, these coefficient plots exclude some of the aforementioned control variables although they are included in the models. The results suggest that some shows (although by no means all) have distinctly partisan audiences. To be sure, these results do not indicate particularly large partisan divides in the audiences for most entertainment shows. Party identification is far more predictive in similar models of consumption of cable news programs such as Fox News’ “O’Reilly Factor” or “Hannity.” But the results indicate that political content contained in entertainment programming may well correspond to distinct patterns of partisanship. Indeed, when the audience data is combined with the coded episode content data, we find clear differences in the relationship between particular policy issues and the partisan composition of the audiences for many series. In fact, these divides appear to align well with the “issue ownership” literature from political science (Petrocik, 1996) which suggests that Republican candidates for office are more likely to emphasize issues such as law and crime and defense and the military—issues voters historically perceived Republicans as most competent at handling—whereas Democratic candidates are more likely to address issues such as health care, education, and labor where their party is most advantaged. Although the data is noisy, we see similar differences emerge among the small sample of programs asked about by the NAES in 2008 and the ANES in 2012 and 2016. In the figures to the right and below, the partisan breakdown of the audience for each show is plotted against the degree to which the series addressed the relevant policy issue in the year of the survey. The dotted line depicts the linear trend. The size of the dots corresponds to the percentage who reported regularly watching the show. In other words, entertainment media choices appear to reflect systematically different partisan issue domains. Shows concerned with depicting narratives that involve social welfare issues are more likely to attract Democratic audiences, whereas shows about defense and the military or issues of law and order are more likely to have a larger percentage of Republicans as regular viewers. There are of course many exceptions to these patterns; the trend lines only capture a central tendency with considerable error in either direction. But the pattern depicted here nonetheless reaffirms the notion that entertainment media may reflect and reaffirm important partisan differences in the worldview of its audiences. In the previous section, we found a slight increase over time in the average number of policy issues referenced in episode synopses. Do we find a corresponding relationship between “more political” shows—series containing a larger number of policy themes—and shows with more highly partisan audiences—or a higher percentage of their audiences identifying as strong Democrats or strong Republicans? In a final scatterplot (right), we show that in fact a slight positive relationship is indeed evident. In other words, not only do shows cater to different partisan audiences by focusing on different policy issues, shows with more partisan audiences (of either party) are more likely to contain a larger number of policy themes.

Discussion

Our analysis builds on a small but growing literature which suggests that entertainment television media may expose people to considerable politically informative ideas concerning varying themes and policy issues. These run the gamut from shows that focus intensely on issues of law and criminal justice to shows explicitly grappling with campaigns and elections or corruption in government to shows that examine the plight of the poor or family issues involving marriage or adoption.

Although this examination of our data is preliminary, we do find some limited evidence to support the hypothesis that as the media environment has changed, there may be somewhat more rather than less attention to political matters in entertainment media compared to previous decades. This may be partly due to fragmentation—more of the content in the episode data over time comes from award-nominated rather than highly-rated shows—but the increases generally appeared across both kinds of shows which suggests there may be other factors underlying these results. It is worth nothing that the increasingly political nature of entertainment media may not necessarily reflect audience interest so much as the sensibilities of the people involved in creating, producing, and giving awards to scripted entertainment television. After all, prime time ratings have been steadily declining for years amidst competition from DVR, internet streaming, and other media choices. It is also possible that the inclusion of some political themes may be due to strategic marketing reasons. Given the competitive media environment, with entertainment programs struggling to attract attention, some writers and show-runners may opt to pursue politically topical themes and narratives in an effort to attract greater media coverage which may serve as free publicity.

Analysis of survey data also suggests that there may be some systematic partisan differences in entertainment consumption—not just changes over time. In other words, Republicans and Democrats may consume different kinds of politically informative entertainment. Again, our results are preliminary and suggestive, but we do find evidence that policy themes generally associated with Democrats (including health care, labor and employment, and education) are somewhat more likely to appear in shows consumed by Democratic-leaning audiences, while the reverse is true for Republicans. Such polarization in entertainment content could contribute to citizens developing different views about the importance of particular policy concerns or to the tendency to perceive different groups in society through a biased lens shaped by persistent exposure to particular entertainment narratives. Future research should seek to examine the possibility of such effects using other methods such as experiments better suited to identifying causal effects.

Next steps…

Automated text-as-data analysis of full corpus of episode synopses using coded data as training set

Generate partisanship scores for entertainment television by applying audience data to larger corpus

Compare political themes in prime time entertainment television to themes coded in television news (Uscinski, 2009)

References