Kiss 2013
Kiss 2013
Kiss 2013
Legislation by Agenda-Setting:
Assessing the Media's Role in
the Regulation of Bisphenol A
in the U.S. States
a
Simon J. Kiss
a
Journalism Program , Wilfrid Laurier University
Published online: 06 Sep 2013.
To cite this article: Simon J. Kiss (2013) Legislation by Agenda-Setting: Assessing the
Media's Role in the Regulation of Bisphenol A in the U.S. States, Mass Communication
and Society, 16:5, 687-712, DOI: 10.1080/15205436.2013.768345
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Mass Communication and Society, 16:687–712, 2013
Copyright # Mass Communication & Society Division
of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
ISSN: 1520-5436 print=1532-7825 online
DOI: 10.1080/15205436.2013.768345
Legislation by Agenda-Setting:
Assessing the Media’s Role in
the Regulation of Bisphenol A in
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Simon J. Kiss (Ph.D., Queen’s University, 2008) is an Assistant Professor in the Journalism
program at Wilfrid Laurier University (Brantford campus). His research interests include the
media’s role in politics and the policy process with a focus on the media’s coverage of environ-
mental and scientific controversies.
Correspondence should be addressed to Simon J. Kiss, 73 George Street, Brantford,
Ontario, Canada, N3T 2Y3. E-mail: skiss@wlu.ca
687
688 KISS
to European and North American media agendas with impressive speed and
force. In the wake of this explosion of media interest, nine American states
(Massachusetts, Vermont, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington, Maryland,
Maine, and New York), four national governments (Canada, Denmark,
the United States, and France), and the European Union have issued sub-
stantial regulatory prohibitions on the use, manufacture, sale, or import
of products made from the chemical, primarily polycarbonate baby bottles.
It is argued here that media coverage played an important role in shaping
the legislative process across the U.S. states. Although there is a
well-established literature that examines the diffusion of policies across
U.S. states, these studies have tended to ignore the effects of within-state
media coverage, emphasizing instead the demographic characteristics of
individual states (Berry, 1990), networks of professional policy entre-
preneurs (Mintrom, 1997), or, at best, levels of national media coverage
(Hays, 1997). However, there are good empirical and theoretical reasons
to think that within-state media coverage should play a role as well.
This article begins by presenting a theoretical framework for why we
would expect within-state media coverage to have shaped the legislative
process. Then it reviews the scientific debate about the potential hazards
from exposure to BPA with the goal of establishing the case that there is
no scientific consensus that humans are at risk of adverse health effects at
current levels of exposure. Then it introduces a statistical methodology that
is well suited to test the hypothesis that media coverage shaped the legislat-
ive process and details the control variables and data-collection procedures.
Last, it presents the results of two model fittings that establish that media
coverage—particularly critical, high-impact newspaper coverage—shaped
the diffusion of legislative bans on products made from BPA in U.S.
states by spurring the consideration of legislation in prolonged, multiyear
processes.
One finds some direct empirical evidence for the starting hypothesis in
Brewer and Ley (2011), who conducted a survey of residents of Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, in the wake of a high-profile advocacy campaign about BPA by
LEGISLATION BY AGENDA-SETTING 689
the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The survey found that newspaper use was
significantly related to self-reported behaviors aimed at avoiding exposure
to BPA. Newspaper coverage, it seems, was able to concern citizens
sufficiently to change their behavior.
One finds theoretical justifications for this hypothesis in the voluminous
literature on agenda-setting. The power of the mass media to impact what
citizens deem to be important (the agenda-setting power) is very well
documented, particularly for issues that citizens do not experience in a direct
fashion, such as environmental issues (Behr & Iyengar, 1985; Erbring,
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Goldenberg, & Miller, 1980; McCombs & Shaw, 1972). Moreover, there is
equally strong evidence that newspaper coverage can influence what
politicians deem to be important issues. In his study of national-level
agenda-setting dynamics, Soroka (2002) distinguished between the media,
public, and the government’s agenda, arguing that the news media could
directly influence the policy agenda, because politicians use the news media
as a source of information of what constitutes an issue or problem. In
addition, Cook, Tyler, Goetz, and Gordon (1983) and Protess et al.
(1987) found evidence that increased coverage of an issue can make it more
salient for elites, even in the absence of effects on mass opinion. At the
municipal level, Mead (1994) found evidence that the local newspaper was
a major factor in pushing municipal government reform onto the policy
agenda over a prolonged period.
Other evidence suggests that this dynamic occurs specifically in the
domain of U.S. state legislatures as well. For example, Bybee and Coma-
dena (1984) found that newspapers were among the most frequently used
sources for information by legislators in Indiana. Herbst (2002) found that
legislative staff regularly relies on the news media as a source of information
and as a proxy measure of public opinion, suggesting an indirect route for
media influence. Another study of the Louisiana state assembly found that
nearly all legislators surveyed felt newspapers served as a source of infor-
mation for their legislative activity, regardless of whether they thought
newspapers provided balanced and accurate coverage (Kral, 2003, p. 46).
These trends are reflected in a quantitative analysis of the relationship
between the media agenda and the state policy agenda: Tan and Weaver
(2009) found moderate to high correlations between the number of stories
dedicated to any given issue in a state’s newspapers and the number of legis-
lative bills introduced in that session. Thus, media coverage can increase the
salience of any given issue for citizens, but it can also increase the salience of
any given issue for politicians. There is evidence of this at the state level.
But this body of evidence does not, in and of itself, explain policy change.
For that, it is necessary to adduce a theory of policy change via a process of
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Three studies of the role of media coverage in the fields of technology and
environmental health support the argument that changing levels and content
of media coverage can play an important role in shaping policies. Scheberle
(1994) found that a dramatic and sudden spike in national media interest
about the health effects of radon exposure was necessary to force formal
action by national legislators, whereas in the case of asbestos, a sustained
and constant period of media coverage forced the issue onto the formal
agenda. Nisbet and Lewenstein (2002) found that in the 1970s, newspapers
1
This model of policy change via punctuated equilibrium was developed primarily in con-
trast to previous models of policy change that emphasized stasis or incremental changes (e.g.,
Wildavsky, 1964). The relationship between the use of punctuated equilibrium in political
science and Wildavsky’s theory of budgetary incrementalism is analogous to the relationship
between punctuated equilibrium’s role in evolutionary biology, where it is contrasted to the pre-
vious theory of phyletic distinction, which posited steady, slow, and gradual evolution
(Eldredge & Gould, 1972).
LEGISLATION BY AGENDA-SETTING 691
The theoretical framework presented here can account for two major
characteristics of the diffusion of bans on products made with BPA. On
one hand, it can account for the expansion of the issue first from a small
community of scientists, environmental activists, chemical firms, and regu-
lators at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to state legislatures.
As social movements and scientists were concerned about regulatory
inaction, they looked to expand the venue in which this conflict was taking
place. In this they were aided by newspapers which capitalized on the
preexisting scientific conflict and made it a genuine public issue (on the
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need for conflict to generate an issue, see Cobb & Elder, 1971). Second, it
can help explain why some states adopted legislative measures at different
points in time, namely, because levels of media coverage in each state
differed.
It is important to emphasize that nothing in this conceptual framework
precludes the news media as serving as an intervening variable between
important, politically relevant actions (e.g., lobbying by environmental
groups) and regulatory outcomes. However, it does imply—and supportive
evidence is provided next—that, at minimum, politically interested actors
must transform the policy image (i.e., change the quantity and quality of
news coverage) essentially to spur state legislators to action. This implies
raising the attention of disinterested, unknowing, or apathetic citizens via
news media coverage and changing the tone of media coverage, making it
less sympathetic to existing policy insiders. The theoretical framework
presented here conceptualizes high levels of critical media coverage as a
necessary, perhaps not a sufficient, tool on the road to policy adoption in
a U.S. state.
In the following analysis, the hypothesis is tested that media coverage
shapes policy change by examining the impact that raw levels of media
coverage, levels of critical health news, and levels of ‘‘high-impact’’ feature
stories had on the life of BPA as a political issue through the U.S. state
legislatures. However, first, the case is made that something other than a
scientific consensus drove policy.
Concerns about BPA are part of a widespread debate over so-called endo-
crine disruptors, which are synthetic compounds that have been accused
of having adverse effects on animal and human health, particularly in
regards to human reproductive systems (Colborn, Dumanoski, & Myers,
1997). In 1997, Professor Frederick vom Saal and colleagues published
the results of a study that reported that exposure to very low doses of
LEGISLATION BY AGENDA-SETTING 693
TABLE 1
Exposure Estimates to Bisphenol A
x-fold <NOAEL
Age category x-fold<TDI(50 micro- (5,000 micro-
w per day Micrograms=Kg=B grams=kg=bw=day) grams=kg=bw=day)
2
There are far more than 1,000 studies about BPA indexed in the PubMed database.
694 KISS
on the question of whether there are observable, adverse effects below these
tolerable daily intake levels. This ‘‘low-dose’’ hypothesis remains heatedly
controversial within toxicology and the scientific community remains
divided.3 Scientists are divided on fundamental questions of experimental
science: the validity of industry-funded science, the way in which causation
is assessed, the validity of animal-based findings for human risk assessment,
the meaning of null findings and the danger of publication bias. Nagel et al.
(1997) observed increased weights of mouse prostate glands at levels of 2
micrograms=kg=bw=day, and this finding serves as a bedrock for the scien-
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Even if the reader is not yet convinced that the scientific evidence under-
lying the claim hat contemporary exposure to BPA poses hazardous risks to
humans is inconclusive at best, then it is hoped that one will at least be per-
suaded that the rhetoric characterizing this position far outstrips the scien-
tific evidence. On one occasion, vom Saal argued that ‘‘the science is clear
and the findings are not just scary, they are horrific. When you feed a baby
out of a clear, hard plastic bottle, it’s like giving the baby a birth control
3
The European Food and Safety Authority convened a high-level scientific meeting in June
2012 to discuss the status of the scientific debate.
LEGISLATION BY AGENDA-SETTING 695
Between 1997 and 2005, the debate about BPA was restricted almost entirely
to the scientific community, a few environmental organizations in the
United States and regulatory authorities in the National Toxicology Pro-
gram (NTP) and the FDA. Between those years, the number of
peer-reviewed studies increased substantially, with no corresponding
increase in regulatory activity. However, this started to change in 2005,
and the issue expanded out of this narrow scientific and regulatory circle.
First, state legislatures started to take up the issue in that year, with Califor-
nia debating legislation in 2005 and Minnesota and Maryland in 2006.
Second, the Wall Street Journal published a series of five news articles in
2005, one of which focused on the scientific debates around BPA. Third,
the NTP began a 3-year process of formally evaluating the risks to human
health posed by BPA.
Although the issue had migrated from the scientific to the regulatory
arena after 2005, the circle of actors remained small; it had no prominent
place on the public agenda. But the simmering conflicts between scientists,
696 KISS
One way to test formally whether within-state media coverage of BPA was
related to the legislative process is via event history analysis. This is a
LEGISLATION BY AGENDA-SETTING 697
of ‘‘lien’’ laws as a deterrent to hate crimes across the U.S. states. Hays
(1997) used event history analysis to argue that the level of media coverage
about living wills increased the probability that a state would adopt such
legislation in any given year. Similarly, Brace, Hall, and Langer (1998)
examined the factors that contributed to court cases being filed challenging
legislative restrictions on abortions following the Roe v. Wade decision.
These models are estimated to assess whether independent variables of
interest have a significant impact on what is known as the ‘‘hazard rate.’’
For discrete data (as is here the case), the hazard rate is simply a ratio of
the probability that a unit failed in any discrete period (in this case a legis-
lative year) to the probability that a unit would survive up to the same per-
iod. To express this colloquially, the rate of failure (dying) for humans in the
100th year of life is quite high; half of 100-year-olds might die in their 100th
year. But the probability of any given human surviving to 100 is quite low.
The hazard rate of failure (death) for humans in the 100th year of life is the
ratio of the failure rate in that year to the probability of survival to that
point. Of course, calculating the hazard rate of any given process is usually
only a starting point for any analysis. Usually, one is interested in assessing
whether any configuration of independent variables has any discernible
impact on the hazard rate.
In this case, we fit a Cox proportional hazards model to the data to exam-
ine the role that media coverage played in the spread of debate on policies
about BPA. It is important to emphasize that the Cox model is not a para-
metric model. That is to say, it makes no claims to estimate how long a pro-
cess might take until the event of interest happens; rather, it assesses the
change in hazard rates that independent variables can bring about. To
put this in the language of the current study: A Cox model of proportional
hazards could tell us the ratio of risk that Democratic states have in experi-
encing the event of interest (a ban on BPA) compared to Republican states,
but it could not tell us that the time to adoption of legislation for Demo-
cratic states was four years, whereas for Republican states it was six years.
It is worth pointing out that there are distinct legislative pathways
that are apparent in the diffusion of bans on products made with BPA
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TABLE 2
Distribution of Legislative Processes
Counts
No events 14
Consideration without adoption 14
Debate in more than one session leading to adoption 8
Adoption in one session 1
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Case Selection
In the case of the American states, 37 states are analyzed over the period
2005 to 2011. Thirteen states were eliminated because there was no suitable
daily newspaper within the state contained in the Lexis-Nexis database
(e.g., Delaware and Vermont), or there were no data on the environmental-
ism variable (e.g., Alaska and Hawaii). Then, state–year combinations were
created for each year in which the state legislature sat and could potentially
have passed legislation regarding BPA. Although most state legislatures
meet annually, some meet biannually; for those states, years where the
legislature did not sit were deleted.
4
For those interested in the technical details, the data set is doubled to account for compet-
ing risks. There each state–year combination is represented twice. To account for repeating
events, a conditional interevent counting process developed by Prentice, Williams, and Peterson
(1981) and advocated by Box-Steffensmeier and Zorn (2002) is implemented.
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no distinction. For the purposes of this study, the only outcome of interest
was that there was a bill that considered banning products made from BPA
enacted or considered in any given session.
News Coverage
The primary independent variable of interest is within-state news coverage.
To gather this, a search was conducted in all daily newspapers in each state
contained in the Lexis-Nexis database. To be included in the data set, stories
had to be 150 words long and either mention the phrase ‘‘Bisphenol A’’
twice or mention the search string in the headline or the lead of the news
story. These measures were introduced to prevent frivolous and irrelevant
stories such as news digests or passing references to BPA from being
included. The stories selected represent a census of nontrivial newspaper
coverage in American daily newspapers indexed in Lexis-Nexis from the
period 2004 to 2010. The number of newspaper stories for each state pub-
lished in each period was normalized by dividing the number of stories by
the number of newspapers. Then an undergraduate student coded each
newspaper story along two variables, topic and tone.5
5
We achieved intercoder reliability in the following way. The author developed a coding
scheme provided to and discussed with the student. The initial pilot sample received low
reliability scores (0.46 for tone and 0.49 for topic, N ¼ 20, all statistics here are Cohen’s Kappa).
We discussed problems and revised the coding scheme, achieving much better results for topic
on the second round (0.86 for topic) but still low results for tone (0.49, both N ¼ 20). We revised
the coding scheme for tone again, providing clearer directions for distinguishing stories critical
of BPA from simply neutral accounts of developments in the story. Again, we achieved a low—
albeit improved—score for tone (0.52, N ¼ 20). It was apparent that all but two of the stories in
this subsample had been coded correctly. The author further clarified ways for the student to
distinguish ‘‘critical’’ from ‘‘neutral’’ stories, and a final sample was taken, which resulted in
identical coding. Cohen’s Kappa was 1 (N ¼ 25). In addition to the restrictions adopted at
the search string stage, the undergraduate coder also marked news stories that could only be
deemed as irrelevant. These were stories that were not caught by either of the restrictions just
noted but were still irrelevant to the debate at hand. An example of stories excluded under these
criteria was a story about BPA-free products as gift ideas.
LEGISLATION BY AGENDA-SETTING 701
TABLE 3
Number of News Stories by Tone and Year
Most of the coverage was critical of BPA, but it involved a wide range of
topics (see Tables 3 and 4). Two clusters are evident: One cluster of news
stories included those that report on regulatory or political activity about
steps to regulate BPA. These types of news stories reported on legislation
moving through stages of debate, or on legislative initiatives by legislators
or the regulatory initiatives by the FDA. A second cluster focused on poss-
ible negative effects posed by BPA. These stories included reporting on the
publication of peer-reviewed studies about the potential negative effects,
activity by social movements to demonstrate or highlight negative effects,
or stories about commercial responses, including manufacturers offering
BPA-free products because of fears of adverse effects.
In the foregoing analysis, we test hypotheses about relationships between
three different types of news coverage and legislative outcomes. First, we
examine the relationship between absolute levels of news coverage about
BPA, with no regard for topic or tone, and legislative outcomes. We test this
hypothesis because of previous research findings previously noted that the
high prominence of news coverage, regardless of quality, can evoke
deep-seated popular fears about technological innovations (see Mazur,
1981). Second, the relationship between routine critical news stories about
TABLE 4
Topics of News Stories About Bisphenol A by Year
possible adverse health effects from exposure to BPA and legislative outcomes
is tested. This is examined for two reasons. First, according to Baumgartner
and Jones, the quality of news coverage is as important to the policy image as
quantity of coverage. It might be the case, therefore, that it is not absolute
levels of routine news coverage about BPA, which are linked to outcomes,
but levels of a particular type of news coverage. Given that there is a clear
cluster of news stories that deal with the health and safety of BPA, we assess
whether it is levels of routine, critical health coverage that impact the legislat-
ive outcome. Second, by restricting news coverage to encompass only news
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stories that are critical in tone and deal only with adverse health effects, we
avoid a possible problem with endogeneity. Because many of the cases under
consideration involve multiyear legislative processes, if all news stories are
included, the risk exists that news stories reporting on a bill’s passage in 1 year
will be counted toward the legislative outcome the following year.
Last, there also exists the possibility that the legislative process could be
influenced by high-impact news stories rather than by a series of routinely
generated, low-impact news stories. Story length can communicate a great
deal of information about the salience of an issue, with longer stories com-
municating greater importance. For example, Pritchard (1986) found that
newspaper story length was inversely related to the chances that a pros-
ecutor would negotiate a plea bargain, whereas Peter (2003) found that
the number of stories, weighted by prominence, was importantly related
to the salience of European integration in a cross-national comparison.
Although the Lexis-Nexis database does not contain any consistent and
reliable information on the position of any story in the newspaper (e.g.,
front page, Life section, etc.), it does contain reliable information on the
word length of each story. Thus, in addition to the health news variable just
introduced, the content analysis coded a news story as a ‘‘high-impact’’
story if it was 1 standard deviation longer (359 words) than the average
word length (697 words). Thus, high-impact stories were longer than
1,056 words. To control for the number of newspapers that are included
in the data set, each variable is normalized by dividing by the number of
newspapers in the Lexis-Nexis database. Moreover, to avoid problems with
causal inference, all news stories are lagged by 1 year; that is to say, a story
that is published in the calendar year in 2008 counts only toward the out-
come of the 2009 legislative calendar (see Mills, 2011, p. 93).
Table 5 lists standard descriptive statistics for the continuous and discrete
variables in the analysis; it immediately reveals one challenge the distri-
bution of news stories presents. Namely, a significant portion of the cases
had no news stories about the issue, whereas only a small fraction had
any news coverage. As a consequence, hypotheses about relationships
between three news variables are tested first by converting news variables
LEGISLATION BY AGENDA-SETTING 703
TABLE 5
Descriptive Statistics
into dichotomous variables. This does not allow for the testing of hypothe-
sized linear relationships between news and outcome, that is, as news cover-
age increases, the chance of legislative action increases. Rather, this allows
one to test whether any level of news coverage compared to no news cover-
age increased the chance of legislative action. Given the lopsided distri-
bution of cases where there was no coverage compared to where there
was coverage, this is an important assessment.
Environmental Sentiment
Although the issue of the potentially toxic effects of BPA on human health
may seem to be only tangentially related to traditional environmental issues
of ecosystem protection and species preservation, it remains the case that
BPA has manifested itself primarily as an environmental issue. In the United
States, the Environmental Working Group was active on the issue. It is
worth testing, therefore, whether the salience of environmentalism was also
an important variable that distinguished those jurisdictions that adopted a
ban from those that did not. Here, a measure of environmentalism is used
that was developed by Mazur and Welch (1999). They assigned a score to
each state (save Alaska and Hawaii) on an index derived from four mea-
sures: the size of the membership of three environmental organizations,
the rating of the state’s congressional delegation by the League of Conser-
vation Voters, the percentage of respondents saying the government spends
‘‘too little’’ on the environment over a period of 20 years, and a rating of
state policy on 50 different environmental policies.
Partisanship
Most legislatures that adopted bans on products made with BPA were con-
trolled by the Democratic party, moreover, environmental issues tend to be
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Professionalism
A common finding in the literature on policy diffusion across the American
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states is that states with professional legislators (e.g., a high level of compen-
sation with full-time staff support) tend to exhibit a greater willingness to
adopt policy innovations (Kousser & Cain, 2004, p. 168). Accordingly, this
model integrates the dominant variable for measuring the professionalism of
a legislature, a measure developed by Squire (2007) that accounts for salary,
staff support, and demands on the legislator’s time.
Regional Diffusion
One of the more robust findings in the literature on policy diffusion across
U.S. states is the impact of neighboring states on policy adoption (see
Mooney, 2001). The models introduced in the next section introduce a vari-
able that captures what proportion of any given state’s neighbors had
adopted a ban to control for this effect.
6
Nebraska was coded as ‘‘non-Democrat’’ because it has a non-partisan legislature.
LEGISLATION BY AGENDA-SETTING 705
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FIGURE 1 Average number of three types of news stories—all news stories with no regard for
content, routine, critical health stories and high impact, critical health stories—by different legis-
lative outcome. Note. Values marked by gray bars are the normalized number of stories appear-
ing prior to legislative sessions where the legislature was at risk of experiencing that particular
legislative outcome, but it did not occur. Values marked by black bars are the normalized num-
ber of stories appearing prior to legislative sessions where the same outcome did occur.
7
The analysis that follows adopted the following modeling strategy. First, univariate models
were fit with each variable of interest just identified. Variables that had p values greater than .25
were excluded. Then a multivariate model was fit with the remaining variables. Last, models
were assessed for linearity, conformity with assumptions, and any interactions between
variables.
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TABLE 6
Modeling the Repeating Events Nature of Legislative Considerations
variables on the hazard rate, without distinguishing the order of events in any
way. This initial fitting suggests positive relationship levels of high-impact
news coverage and environmentalism in state public opinion. On average, a
legislature was 2.1 times as likely to consider legislation when there was a
high-impact news story published prior to a legislative session compared to
legislative sessions where there had been no high-impact news story.
The next two columns report the coefficients for two separate models.
The first is fit only to cases at risk of experiencing the first occurrence of
a legislative consideration, whereas the second is fit only to cases at risk
of experiencing a second or later legislative consideration.
Disaggregating the legislative events by chronology reveals only a slightly
different pattern. On average, a state was 3.2 times more likely to consider legis-
lation for a first time when there was a high-impact story published in the pre-
vious calendar year, although this finding was only significant at the .1 level
(p ¼ .06). High-impact coverage was strongly and significantly related to the
chance a legislature would consider legislation a second time; states were 1.9
times more likely to consider a second piece of legislation following any high-
impact coverage compared to when there was no high-impact coverage. Neither
of the two other news variables were related to the legislative outcome.8
8
Following the comprehensive analysis, the exact models were fit above replacing the categ-
orical news variables with continuous variables. This did not significantly change the results; the
only major change was that high-impact news coverage did not have a significant, linear
relationship with the risk of a second consideration.
LEGISLATION BY AGENDA-SETTING 707
TABLE 7
Modeling Competing Risks of Legislation
Considerations Bans
N 250 250
Wald 31 on 5 df 5 on 2 df
p ¼ .00 p ¼ .09
R2 0.09 0.02
Max 0.69 Max 0.18
that the only news variable to show an effect on the legislative process was
one that only counted news coverage of a particular subject matter reflects
the central tenet of their theory that quantity and quality are central compo-
nents of a policy image. This also suggests that Mazur’s hypothesis that raw
levels of media coverage—without regard for quality—might be sufficient to
evoke primal concerns about technology is not supported, at least in regard
for how media coverage is related to policy developments. In that arena,
quality of media coverage is as important as quantity of coverage. Going
further, these data also suggest that not all news stories are equal; the pres-
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ence of high-impact critical health stories seems to matter more than the
presence of routine, shorter critical health stories. The literature on media
effects does not commonly account for the impact of news story length,
but this suggests that it should become more common. Electronic databases
usually contain information on word length and on position in the
newspaper; these could be integrated in future analyses of the impact of
newspaper coverage on agenda and policy change.
However, one dynamic of this issue, somewhat beyond the scope of the
event history analysis just presented, does not actually fit with predicted out-
comes of Baumgartner and Jones’s theory. In particular, policy change via
punctuated equilibrium should exhibit short and rapid bursts of policy
change followed by a return to stasis. The case of BPA regulation certainly
exhibits the short and rapid bursts of policy change but does not really fol-
low the return to stasis as posited. Rather, because the initial burst of inter-
est in 2008 has lingered, interest has declined, to be sure, but it would not be
fair to characterize the issue as having returned to stasis. Instead, the FDA
acceded to an industry request in 2012 to ban BPA from polycarbonate
baby bottles, while continuing to reiterate that it remains safe for human
exposure. The issue also periodically attracts significant media attention.
For example, in the fall of 2012, a new cross-sectional survey of American
children found a correlation between children’s obesity and blood levels
of BPA (Zhao et al., 2012).
Second, this case presents serious challenges for regulators in the tricky
field of the regulation of hazardous substances. Our societies do not handle
information about potentially hazardous substances very well; ‘‘chemophobia’’
is a very real problem. The distribution of topics in Table 4 shows that news-
papers in the United States tend to concentrate on straightforward reporting
of the regulatory process and allegations about potential adverse effects by
scientists and environmental groups. In this regard, newspaper coverage prob-
ably reflects the vox populi. In some ways this is laudable, but there is a cost
attached with this. Humans do not perceive risks terribly well, and excessive
media coverage can hamper more sober assessment of the risks, costs, and ben-
efits of any given technology. Certainly in the case of BPA it appears that media
LEGISLATION BY AGENDA-SETTING 709
coverage drove state legislators in many states to act in the absence of really
credible scientific evidence that a risk to human health existed. Media coverage
of potentially hazardous substances can seriously complicate the process of risk
assessment and management.
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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