The audience is listening: talk radio and public policy in Newfoundland and Labrador
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I can tell you categorically, unequivocally, that [a former deputy minister] is com-pletely wrong if he’s implying that government decisions are made on the basis of open-line shows. I find that offensive and stupid, quite frankly. (Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams, quoted in Brautigam, 2008) Political communication and the mass media play a key role in Canadian democracy. Yet we know little about Canadians ’ ability to influence public policy directly through the media or how the media itself shapes political discourse and by extension, public policy (Blidook, 2008; Soroka, 2002a, 2002b). While political parties remain a primary conduit to express political preferences in modern democracies, their position as entrenched players in Canadian political theatre may be challenged. Some have argued that the mass media may be in the process of replacing political parties and interest groups as an accessible conduit of political communication between govern-ment and the governed (Leighley, 2004: 7). On one hand the suggestion that the mass media is replacing political par-ties is overly simplistic, if only because it ignores the filtering capacity of those who manage the media – those who are capable of agenda-setting. However, circumstances may exist where the thesis is applicable. These cir-cumstances would entail an unfiltered and unfettered access to the media by the polity, as well as some expectation that the target audience – those in posi-tions of political power and decision-making – are paying attention. In order to further explore the relationship between media and public pol-icy, we propose to examine the political effects of talk radio in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.1 Specifically, we ask the research question: what impact does talk radio have on public policy in Newfoundland?2
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".