It is clear that Matthew A. Baum is experienced in his field of expertise. Baum has a PhD in political science and is a professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. (Matthew Baum Harvard Profile, 2015). His research has been featured in prestigious scholarly journals and has published another book besides Soft News Goes to War. Baum has researched many political issues, one of them being examining the relationship between mass media and public opinion in today’s American politics. This relationship is examined in Soft News Goes to War. This relationship has also been examined in Princeton Associate Professor Markus Prior’s essay, Any Good News in Soft News? The Impact of Soft News Preference on Political Knowledge. …show more content…
For instance, the sentence, “Driven by market competition and the relatively low cost of producing soft news broadcasters are finding human interest and other entertainment values in places where their predecessors saw only dry news,” (as cited in Kollman, 2014) is straight to the point. On the other hand, the sentence, “In general, issues that can be readily framed in stark and dramatic terms, thereby priming widely accessible frames, without generating significant cognitive conflict between simultaneously accessible yet contradictory causal narratives are more likely to be covered by soft news media,” (as cited in Kollman, 2014) is wordy and requires a dissection to get to what the text is trying to convey. Because it is a very detailed piece, and the fact that the topic is political, this piece would be aimed towards scholars and researchers interested in the field of politics, and also anyone interested in becoming a political scientist. It follows the conventions of academic writing, being organized into sections and having titles before each section. The first section of the writing is titled “Summary and Hypothesis” and the second is titled “What are crises and when do they become water-cooler events” (Cited in Kollman,