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ID: 153792

Snubbing Seth Rogen: does celebrity testimony increase congressional hearing attendance? / Atkinson, Matthew D ; DeWitt, Darin

Atkinson, Matthew D	Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract

Academic and popular accounts hold that celebrity activists command the attention of political elites. One manifestation of this idea is that celebrities garner greater congressional attention at committee hearings than the substantive experts who typically serve as witnesses. This implies that Members of Congress do not value interaction with experts and are willing to forego those interactions to allocate time to activities with low opportunity costs—activities unimportant enough that they can be passed up for a celebrity encounter. To evaluate these claims, we examined hearing attendance during a 20-year period. We found that celebrity witnesses have little effect on member attendance rates, which suggests that celebrities are a less efficacious route to congressional attention than is commonly believed.

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Political Elites ; Snubbing Seth Rogen

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ID: 134799

What’s a dog story worth? / Atkinson, Matthew D; Deam, Maria; Uscinski, Joseph E

Uscinski, Joseph E	Article
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Journalists consider the importance of events and the audience’s interest in them when deciding on which events to report. Events most likely to be reported are those that are both important and can capture the audience’s interest. In turn, the public is most likely to become aware of important news when some aspect of the story piques their interest. We suggest an efficacious means of drawing public attention to important news stories: dogs. Examining the national news agenda of 10 regional newspapers relative to that of the New York Times, we evaluated the effect of having a dog in a news event on the likelihood that the event is reported in regional newspapers. The “dog effect” is approximately equivalent to the effect of whether a story warrants front- or back-page national news coverage in the New York Times. Thus, we conclude that dogs are an important factor in news decisions.

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