The Limits of the Fourth Estate - Issue Ownership and Accountability in Canada and the United States.

The media serves as an important institutional support for political accountability. This research essay will explore potential gate-keeper effects caused by issue ownership that may compromise the ability of the media to accurately convey policy performance to voters. The media may be more responsive to actual policy performance if a political party owns an issue (salient goal hypothesis), or, conversely, gives them a pass (immunity hypothesis). These hypotheses were tested using time-series cross-sectional regression analysis. Media coverage on federal government finances and unemployment was analyzed by constructing average tone scores using the Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary from a variety of high-circulation newspapers in Canada and the United States. The results support the salient goal hypothesis in Canadian media coverage, and the immunity hypothesis in American coverage in the long-run. Short-run findings were mixed in the American context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]