Below is a writing sample from an article suggesting that a better understanding of the institutionalization and normalization of cannabis, that is how cannabis becomes part of social activity in patterned ways, necessitates understanding how cannabis is made meaningful. The sample section describes some of the empirical findings in the research by tracing how cannabis has been built into in US news, and why this is important to consider.
Bringing Back the Symbolic:
A Cultural Sociology of Cannabis and News Media
The “cannabis media” literature lays important foundational groundwork for understanding the collective iterations of cannabis in news and how they affect social practice. Still, this line of inquiry can be pushed further. To better account for how cannabis has been folded into public discussion, and what influence this exerts “beyond” mediated spaces, scholarship must recognize the subtler but no less important ways cannabis is communicated and made meaningful in the news.
To help address this, an expanded discursive “map” of the cultural politics enveloping cannabis in mass media is needed. Refining such a map will help further clarify and crystalize important but overlooked symbolic dimensions of cannabis along with their social import.
One potentially fruitful approach to creating a new “map” is provided by the “strong program” of cultural sociology. This scholarship is useful for addressing questions concerning the relationship between mass media, public opinion and policy, and collective representations. It can be adapted to explore these relationships as it concerns cannabis. Collective understandings of the ways in which cannabis becomes a symbolic artifact in the mediated political public sphere, and to what extent it exerts a cultural influence, can be further refined by this hermeneutically sensitive framework. While a detailed discussion of the “strong program” of cultural sociology is beyond the scope of this paper, an admittedly vulgar comparison can be made with “weak programs” of the sociology of culture. In the context of a causal relationship, where the “weak program” treats culture as a dependent variable the “strong program” treats it as an independent variable.[1]
Deep(er) Play: “Marijuana”, and the New York Times 1990 – 2015
To better understand the relationship between cannabis, news, public opinion, and public policy, the research presented here integrates concepts and methodologies drawn from the “strong program” of cultural sociology. Applying them to questions raised by scholars interested in cannabis and mass media opens further lines of inquiry that may help unpack the role media coverage inclusive of cannabis plays in relation to things like rates of use, public opinion of, and legislative action. The strong program analytically and methodologically helps specify ways media coverage of cannabis affects social action. Moreover, it insists on a “cultural autonomy” in how this works. While other social-structural and social-psychological factors must be considered when studying media, those factors work con-jointly with culture and are not deterministic of it.
Empirical research grounded in a strong program approach draws from and extends existing scholarship about cannabis and news. To this end, there are some important cues this research has taken with regards to the extant “cannabis media” literature. For an initial point of consistency an analysis of cannabis and the news will focus on how the term “marijuana” is incorporated into news text. Without exception, the aforementioned research either used the term exclusively or in combination in analysis.[1] Additionally, in all but one example (Kang, Cappella, and Fishbein 2009), news was used as the textual corpus data would be drawn from. Here, the news organization chosen, the New York Times, shares important organizational properties with many of the data sources used in the prior research.[2]
Articles mentioning “marijuana” were collected from the New York Times at five-year intervals beginning in 1990 and ending in 2015. The data set spans two Democratic and two Republican presidential administrations while also including periods when each party exercised a congressional majority. Legislatively, the corpus starts shortly after the institutionalization of President Reagan’s “War on Drugs” under the administration of President George H.W. Bush. It ends in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, the first after recreational legalization of cannabis was instituted in several states during the administration of President Obama.
Two major divergences with prior scholarship appear at this point. The first regards sampling and filtering. Using Lexis-Nexis, the keyword “marijuana” was searched for within the time frame described above. In any instance where the keyword appeared in an article, irrespective of what the article was about, what section it was found in, who wrote it, or length, it was included in the corpus. After collecting and cleaning for repeats and false positives, the total number of articles was 2,463.[3] Taken in its entirety, articles incorporating the word “marijuana” appeared at an average rate of nearly one and a half articles per day over the whole of the data set.
With 1990 serving as a baseline, frequency trend lines for the term continually increase over the time period of the sample. Disaggregated by year, peak frequencies emerged in 2000 and 2015 with an uptick in mentions over the entirety of the period. The only decrease in frequencies occurred between 2000 and 2005. Still, even when total mentions decreased in a sampled year compared to a prior year, occurrences did not fall below their initial 1990 levels.
The sample suggests “marijuana” has been increasingly included in news content. Where these preliminary findings complement the extant cannabis media literature (Golan 2010; Witte 2013; McGinty 2016; Haines 2014; Verbergge 2014) is that the data suggests the volume of “marijuana” being included in news has increased over time. The difference is that the increase in volume found here may be more expansive than initially implied in the existing literature.
While related to changes in sampling and filtering, the second empirical divergence has to do with what is done with that data now. Here a completely inductive, interpretative, and culturally sensitive narrative analysis was combined alongside of field, or institutional, analysis. The former was captured through two measures of “content” while the latter with two measures of “structure”.
Here, “structure” refers to the production, distribution, and consumption of news text. In this instance structure was operationalized as consisting of the social field an author draws authority from, as well as the section of the New York Times an article appeared in. Gathering information on authors allows inferences to be made about the “variety of different conditions under which people speak and write, as well as marked differences in autonomy, influence, and proximity to power” (Jacobs and Townsley 2011 78). Analyzing the social field of an author provides important insight into the effect of the variety of voices and styles of rhetoric contributing to this public discussion (Benson 1999, 2005; Bourdieu 1993, 2005; Jacobs and Townsley 2011; Schudson 2012).
The second measure of structure focuses on the section of the paper an article featuring the word “marijuana” appeared. Noting where an article appears is a way to model links between the text and the audience. Someone reading an article from the Sports Desk, may find themselves in a different imaginative and interpretive community than someone reading an article found in the Culture Desk, Metro Desk, Editorial Page, or Business Desk. A section of a newspaper primes an audience and suggests with it, different interpretive frames to approach the text (Croteau and Hoynes 2006; Jacobs 2000, 2005, 2007; Schudson 1978, 2012 166). To be sure, a reader does not read content from the Foreign Desk as they would from the Obituaries.[1]
Shifting to “content”, emphasis was placed on the specific symbolic narrative, and semiotic characteristics of the text. The first measure of content detected several narrative frameworks at play within the collected texts where “marijuana” was present. Repeated readings noted characters, plots, and settings that could be typologized as a set of patterned stories distilled from the idiosyncrasies of any particular article in the dataset. Five frameworks in total were identified through this method. The categories were designated as Juridical, Biological/Biochemical, Cultural/Culture, Economic, and Political.[2]
A final measure was made as to the degree marijuana was referenced in a text. This constitutes a measure of embeddedness, position, and centrality of “marijuana” in any instance of news. Informed by Barthes’s (1968, 1977) structuralist semiotics, the term “marijuana” was treated as a symbolic unit with a presence in an article classified as “primary”, “secondary”, or “tertiary”. “Primary” stories were about cannabis, and without its presence a text would be unintelligible. A syntagmatic chain would break if a paradigmatic substitution was made. In “secondary” the inclusion of the term “marijuana” helps resolve ambiguities in the text, but its presence is not indispensable. A syntagmatic chain would be preserved even if paradigmatic changes were made. The final category, “tertiary” described those articles where the term “marijuana” was superfluous. Its presence or absence has minimal impact on the syntagmatic chains comprising the text.[1]
In primary stories, the stories are about cannabis, and without its presence the story would be unintelligible. Action (captured by plot) would not progress without its incorporation. In these types of articles cannabis is broadly recognizable and relatively explicated. Minimal supplemental information is needed to follow the story or how marijuana moves the action since much is provided in text; marijuana is presented in a largely denotative fashion.
Other articles incorporated “marijuana” in a way coded as secondary. Cannabis did not drive action. While marijuana’s incorporation helps move a story along or resolve ambiguities presented in a text, its role is to complement action already at play; it does not engender it. It is not indispensable for a text’s intelligibility. In other words, the story can be communicated without the word “marijuana”, and it would still make sense. Ancillary knowledge is helpful, but not necessary. There is no doubt “marijuana” is literally incorporated in the article, but it is not the critical focus. If anything, it’s expendable.
A final category of inference described as tertiary featured stories where “marijuana” was present, but was superfluous regarding action and meaning in a story. Borrowing again from Barthes, “marijuana” is conceptualized here as a signifier connotating “trivial incidents or descriptions” certainly coloring a narrative, but ultimately not consequential for its outcome (Barthes 1977 94, 1984). As a signifier, “marijuana” operated on overwhelmingly as a second order connotative level signifier. Marijuana is not necessary to understand the action at play, not it is it always clear in the text what it even is. If removed, the story could still meaningfully unfold. It is unlikely narratives would significantly deviate if marijuana was absent from the text. Yet its presence is simultaneously extraneous. Cannabis is not the central focus of articles in this case and is incorporated more as a malleable hypertext.
[1] All footnotes can be found in the full text version.