Shaping the race issue: A special kind of journalism

The paper examines the press coverage of the Los Angeles Times in the 1982 gubernatorial election between Mayor Tom Bradley and George Deukmejian in terms of the proclivity to highlight Bradley's race in campaign news stories. The paper focuses on the statement made by Deukmejian campaign manager, Bill Roberts, in the early days of October, with his candidate trailing badly in the polls, that “there was a hidden anti‐black vote” that would aid Deukmejian on election day. The authors detail the Los Angeles Times coverage of this statement and the tendency of the Times to focus on this story during the entire month of October rather than to report on the issues addressed by the candidates. The analysis notes that as campaign coverage zeroed in on the race issue, so did polls and voter interest. After examining the coverage and Deukmejian's narrow victory, the authors pose questions of ethics to reporters engaged in this writing and outline concerns for such practices in future elections and campaigns.     

Media Matter: How Newspapers and Television News Cover Campaigns and Influence Voters

The conventional wisdom in political communications research is that the media play a dominant role in defining the agenda of elections. In Bernard Cohen's words, the media do not tell us what to think, but they tell us what to think about. The present article challenges this conclusion. We present data on media coverage of the 1992 presidential election from the first nationally representative sample of American newspapers and compare these to the issue interests of the American public. We conclude that past claims that the media control the agenda-setting process have been overstated. Candidates messages are well represented in press coverage of the campaign, and coverage is even independent of a newspaper's editorial endorsement. We argue that agenda setting is a transaction process in which elites, the media, and the public converge to a common set of salient issues that define a campaign.     

The Local News Story: Is Quality a Choice?

The conventional wisdom about local TV news is that quality journalism does not sell and that only by focusing on crime, disasters, and other “soft news” can newscasts get good ratings. Political scientists have decried the poor quality of TV news as a betrayal of the press's mandate to inform citizens of the important policy issues of the day so that they can hold government officials accountable. This study tests the proposition that audiences prefer low effort, tabloid journalism by looking at external measures of commercial success—the Nielsen ratings data. Utilizing data from a 5‐year study matching the content quality of 33,911 local news stories from 154 TV stations in 50 TV markets nationwide to corresponding ratings success, we show that solid reporting and a focus on significant issues actually produce better ratings than slapdash or superficial tabloid journalism. Additionally, we find that strategy-oriented coverage of political campaigns that focuses on the horserace does not build an audience. These surprising results have practical implications for democratic practice and local TV news production.     

How the Media Shape Perceptions of Right-Wing Populist Leaders

It is often argued that right-wing populist party leaders are dependent on the media for their public image, which in turn is key for their electoral success. This study tests this assumption by comparing the effects of the media coverage of 2 Dutch right-wing populist leaders with the effects of the coverage of leaders of established parties, in a real-life setting, by tracking campaign developments in the Dutch 2006 national election campaign. We combine panel survey data (n?=?401) with repeated measurements of the party leaders' public images with a systematic content analysis of 17 media outlets (with a total of 1,001 stories), on the basis of the media consumption of individual respondents. Our results show significant effects of the content of media coverage on the public image of political leaders. However, only in 1 case (out of 10) is there a significant difference between right-wing populist party leaders and leaders of other parties in the strength of media effects. It thus seems that leaders of right-wing populist parties are just as dependent upon the media as leaders of other parties. The findings are discussed in the light of extant research on right-wing populist parties and media populism.     

Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age,by Alasdair Roberts

This article uses Ross Perot's campaign for president in 1992 as a case study in how two key political institutions—the conventional political press and the party system—mediate the effects of political communication. Reporters allocated positive and negative coverage to Perot according to the same rules that they normally follow, and voters were as responsive to this coverage as they were to media coverage of two earlier “outsider” candidates for president, Jimmy Carter and Gary Hart. Part I of this article, which appeared in the previous issue of Political Communication, dealt with the earliest, relatively unmediated phase of Perot's campaign and the takeoff phase of the mediated campaign. Part II deals with the remainder of the campaign, including the general election.     

The making of a public in a political campaign: A participant observation study

Abstract

The author served as a press assistant in the 1978 gubernatorial campaign of Ohio Lieutenant Governor Richard F. Celeste. This article examines the evolution of campaign strategy in the 1978 Democratic primary. Faced with token opposition, Celeste used the primary to introduce policies and establish themes for his general election campaign against incumbent James E. Rhodes. This study focuses on the Celeste campaign's efforts to identify and reach a particular constituency within the Ohio electorate. The “making of a public,” influenced by demographics and the results of opinion surveys, became a tentative, reactive process. The candidate's public identity and strategy were negotiated during the course of the primary campaign. Pressed by events and criticism from the press, the candidate eventually deemphasized the specifics of issues as he sought to redefine himself for a public of voters.     

A Review of: “Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers,by Pablo J. Boczkowski”

This study examines the way in which USA Today used tracking poll data in its strategy‐oriented coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign. Scrutiny of the methodological features of tracking polls suggests the news media's potential misuses of them. Studies on media polling lead to the general hypothesis that tracking polls serve the mass media as a device for generating news accounts that focus on candidate strategy. Using the ARIMA modeling technique, I conclude that as changes in the margin of difference between Bush and Clinton in the Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll increased, USA Today cited the poll results more frequently. The increase in the number of tracking poll references corresponded to an increase in the number of strategy‐oriented words in USA Today's campaign coverage. I discuss the implications within the context of the 1992 election campaign coverage.     

Presence to Press: How Campaigns EarnLocal Media

Today’s campaigns have ample resources with which to influence the media, while plummeting revenue, readership, and reporting staffs make local newspapers more vulnerable than ever. This imbalance raises an important question: if a campaign invests more resources in an area, can it earn positive media coverage? In this article, I propose a strategic relationship between campaigns and local media. Newspapers offer campaigns credibility and exposure, while campaigns offer local newspapers easy-to-report stories that will appeal to their readers. Campaign messages are more impactful when communicated through the local press, so campaigns will try to influence local news coverage (when they have the resources to do so) by establishing a local presence. When newspapers are vulnerable, they should be more likely to accept campaign prompting and provide campaigns with positive earned media. I employ an original data set of newspaper content and campaign investment from the 2004 and 2008 elections. I utilize a within-state matched-pairs design of newspapers from the state of Florida and a detailed content analysis of stories from 21 randomly selected days from each election cycle. I find that regional campaign presence generates positive earned media, but only in smaller newspapers. This article contributes to the fields of campaign and media effects by demonstrating how campaigns’ calculated decisions influence the construction of local political news. It is the first study to describe the connection between the voter contact and campaigns’ earned local media strategy.     

Assessing Americans' Opinions About the News Media's Fairness in 1996 and 1998

This article reports an analysis of Americans' opinions about the news media's fairness in covering public affairs. The data come from the 1996 and 1998 National Election Studies, which contained variables tapping exposure to and opinions about the news media, as well as key political dispositions?partisanship, ideology, and opinion about presidential and congressional job performance?and a plethora of demographic variables. The data show that people who adhere to traditional moral codes and are misanthropic tend not to trust the news media to cover politics fairly. In a presidential election year, opinion about the president's job performance affects perceptions of the press's fairness. In an off-year election, however, opinion about the president's job performance is replaced by opinion about how the Congress has been doing its job. In addition, perception of how the media covered the Lewinsky scandal also influenced opinion about the press's fairness in general.     

Through the Looking Glass: The Helsinki Final Act and the 1976 Election for President

The controversy surrounding the 1975 Helsinki Final Act made it an enduring issue in the 1976 campaign, and the political backlash against President Gerald R. Ford damaged his electoral chances. Ford's signature of the agreement, his continuation of détente, and his foreign policy more broadly may not have been decisive issues in his contests with Ronald Reagan and then Jimmy Carter, but they certainly were prominent throughout the election. Examining the influence of the Final Act on Ford's election campaign illuminates the extent to which a number of candidates sought to use popular opposition to the agreement to their advantage. Furthermore, it reveals how the 1976 presidential candidates, and Ford in particular, struggled to address growing questions about détente, human rights, and morality in foreign policy. Ford's failure to defend his signature of the Final Act adequately raised concerns about his foreign policy and personal leadership with the electorate.     

The Contingency of Voter Learning: How Election Debates Influenced Voters’ Ability and Accuracy to Position Parties in the 2010 Dutch Election Campaign

Election campaigns are expected to inform voters about parties’ issue positions, thereby increasing voters’ ability to influence future policy and thus enhancing the practice of democratic government. We argue that campaign learning is not only contingent on voters’ characteristics and different sources of information, but also on how parties communicate their issue positions in election debates. We combine a two-wave panel survey with content analysis data of three televised election debates. In cross-classified multilevel auto-regression models we examine the influence of these debates in the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election campaign on voters’ knowledge of the positions of eight parties on three issues. The Dutch multiparty system allows us to separate voters’ ability to position parties from their accuracy in ordering these parties. We reach three main conclusions. First, this study shows that voters become more able and accurate during the campaign. However, these campaign learning effects erode after the elections. Second, whereas voters’ attention to campaigns consistently contributes to their ability to position parties, its effect on accuracy is somewhat less consistent. Third, televised election debates contribute to what voters learn. Parties that advocate their issue positions in the debates stimulate debate viewers’ ability to position these parties on these issues. In the face of the complexity of campaigns and debates in multiparty systems, campaigns are more likely to boost voters’ subjective ability to position parties than their accuracy.     

Journalism education: bridging media and cultural studies

ABSTRACT

Journalism is more than an ensemble of newsgathering and writing techniques. It is, firstly, a way of viewing and writing about the social world for the public benefit. Similarly, journalism is a means of fomenting conversations in the public domain about events and issues of immediate public interest. While much of journalism training concerns the techniques of text production, too little attention is given to educating students in the ontology or ‘mindset’ within which those techniques and conventions work. Almost no attention is given to the epistemology or ‘research’ approaches by which journalists monitor social phenomena.

Short of calling for a more thorough grounding (as a framework) in critical thinking, we suggest that a more constructivist approach be taken to journalism training. This approach need not be prejudiced towards the more technical and functionalist approaches evident in so many textbooks on the subject. Constructive learning is described by some scholars as ‘active, cumulative, goal-directed, diagnostic and reflective behaviour’ (Breen 1996: 4). All these behaviours are found in journalism practice, and should frame both words in journalism training. This requires a more interpretive approach that teaches the practice of journalism as many of the same processes commonly understood as learning.     

The power of Trump-speak: populist crisis narratives and ontological security

Abstract

For most observers, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States (US) came as a shock. This has been widely recast as the culmination of the American public’s long-standing dissatisfaction with the political elite and deep-seated frustrations with broader socio-economic conditions. We argue that the Trump campaign’s success also stemmed from its effective use of an emotionally charged, anti-establishment crisis narrative. With insights from political psychology, we examine the socio-linguistic mechanisms that underlie the effectiveness of ‘Trump-speak’ through both quantitative and qualitative content analysis of Trump’s communications toolkit during the 2016?US presidential election campaign. We show that his leadership legitimation claims rest significantly upon ‘crisis talk’ that puts his audience in a loss frame with nothing to lose and explain why ‘crisis talk’ impacts on political behaviour. As we demonstrate, the crisis stories that political agents tell simultaneously instil ontological insecurity among the American public and serve to transform their anxiety into confidence that the narrator’s policy agendas are the route back to ‘normality’. Through these rhetorical mechanisms, the Trump campaign manipulated individuals’ ontological (in)security as a tool in the politics of reassurance at the broader, societal level.     

Presidential Influence of the News Media: The Case of the Press Conference

Can presidents influence news coverage through their press conferences? Scant research has explored this question leaving two possible answers. On the one hand, presidential news management efforts, combined with norms of journalistic professionalism and the cost of producing news, suggest that the nightly news will cover presidential press conferences. On the other hand, the costs of delivering press conferences espoused by some scholars insinuate that press conferences will have little impact on news coverage. To determine whether the press conference influences news coverage, I use plagiarism detection software to assess the propensity of television news to incorporate the president's rhetoric into stories that cover the president's press conferences. I find that news reports on the press conference rely heavily on the president's words, indicating that it is an important event for presidential influence of the news media and perhaps eventually the public.     

Anti-Americanism in Electoral Politics: Insights from South Korea's 2002 Presidential Election

Since September 11, 2001, anti-Americanism has emerged as an important issue in international politics. In democratic election campaigns, anti-Americanism should be an attractive issue where it is expected to have a favorable impact on key swing vote constituencies. Anti-Americanism has certain inherent ideological appeals and more varied historically-based attractions. Anti-Americanism should be least attractive where countries continue to rely on U.S. security guarantees. South Korea's December 2002 presidential election, in which winner Roh Moo-hyun openly sympathized with anti-American demonstrators, appears to contradict this expectation. Yet closer analysis of individual-level polling data shows that anti-Americanism was, both statistically and substantively, much less significant than alternative campaign issues. By activating the numerous voters hostile to the North Korean regime, anti-Americanism actually hurt the victor's electoral chances. The approach appears useful in understanding why anti-Americanism is a more prominent ideology and electoral issue in some regions, such as Western Europe and Latin America, and a less prominent one in others, for example Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Oceania.     

Is There a Local Dimension to Modern Election Campaigns? Party Activists’ Perceptions of the Media and Electoral Coverage of Canadian Constituency Politics

Modern election campaign studies focus on national dimensions at the expense of attending to local campaigns in legislative elections. This is also true of analyses of media coverage and impact of election campaigns. This paper examines the local dimension of media and election campaigns across a wide range of diverse constituency contexts in Canada in order to identify the political, socioeconomic, and geographic determinants of constituency party associations ability to attract local media attention during an election campaign. We also examine the role of these features of the constituency settings and explain variations in satisfaction with the medias coverage of the local campaign.     

Capitalizing on Contention: Issue Agendas in U.S. Senate Campaigns

This abstract addresses the divergent views that political scientists and members of Congress have about the role of issues in congressional campaigns. The scholarly perspective is based on the assumption that issues and policy are relatively unimportant in the relationship between members and their constituents. In contrast, the political parties in Congress devote a substantial amount of time and attention to developing an effective issue agenda for the campaign season. The research presented in this article is a systematic study of U.S. Senate candidates' campaign messages that assesses the impact of the parties' agenda setting efforts during the election year session. The parties' efforts are compared with mass media, major legislative accomplishments, and party issue ownership as alternative sources of agenda setting in campaigns. The results of this study indicate that Senate candidates do emphasize certain issues in their campaigns and that the contentious election year issues associated with party strategy along with major legislative accomplishments are the issues that the candidates are likely to discuss.     

Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End,by Nina Eliasoph

Extant research is not very specific about when the media matter for vote choice. In this study, we test multiple theories about the influences of the media on vote choice in 21 countries. The European Parliamentary (EP) election campaign offers a unique research context to test these influences. We rely on a two-wave panel survey conducted in 21 European Union (EU) member states, asking both vote intentions before the campaign and reported actual votes (among 14,000 voters). We link these data to media content data of campaign coverage between the two waves in these countries (37,000 coded news items). We conclude that media evaluations of the EU affect voting for Eurosceptic parties. On average, the more positive the evaluations of the EU a voter is exposed to, the less likely she or he is to cast a vote for a Eurosceptic party. In addition, our findings indicate that in countries where political parties have markedly different views on EU issues, the more a voter is exposed to framing of the EU in terms of benefits derived from membership in these countries, the less likely she or he is to cast a Eurosceptic vote. This suggests that the outcome of the 2009 EP elections was influenced by how the media covered EU-related news during the campaign.     

Framing the IRA: beyond agenda setting and framing towards a model accounting for audience influence

Coverage of Irish Republican Army (IRA) attacks and the Northern Irish peace process is affected by both the country a media organisation is located and their format. The coverage of the IRA in 1996 was studied in five newspapers based in Ireland, Northern Ireland, the UK and the USA to reveal similarities and differences in language use, stories reported and general emphasis. The frequency of keywords was examined to show that the location a newspaper is based in affects the stories run by the newspaper. However, the format of a newspaper affects the framing of this coverage more than the location. These results were analysed through the lens of two leading theories pertaining to media–public relations: agenda-setting theory and framing theory. While both are shown to be partially useful in explaining the results, a more holistic view that accounts for public influence on media coverage would be even more useful. As a result of this narrow focus on only one part of media–public relations, the two theories do not exhibit predictive power, and further study should be conducted to expand their scope to encompass the public’s affect on media coverage.     

Priming Issues,Party Visibility,and Party Evaluations: The Impact on Vote Switching

Voter volatility has become a hallmark of Western democracies in the past three decades. At the same time short-term factors—such as the media’s coverage of issues, parties, and candidates during an election campaign—have become more important for voters’ decisions. While previous research did look at how campaign news in general affects electoral volatility in general, it has omitted to explicitly test the mechanisms underlying these effects. Building on theories of agenda setting, (affective) priming, and issue ownership, the current study aims to explain why certain news aspects lead voters to switch their vote choice. We theorize it is the visibility of a party, the evaluation of a party, and the attention for issues owned by a party that primes voters to switch to a certain party. We use national panel survey data (N = 765) and link this to an extensive content analysis of campaign news on television and in newspapers in the run up to the 2012 Dutch national elections. The results show that issue news leads to vote change in the direction of the party that owns the issue. Even stronger is the effect of party visibility on vote switching. Our results, however, find the strongest support for the effect of party evaluations on vote change: More favorable news about a party increases switching to that party.