The Evanescent Newscast: Network Coverage of US Presidential Campaigns, 19681988 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Journalism of Opinion: Network News Coverage of U.S. Presidential Campaigns, 19681988
Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 1996
This essay updates the research on sound bites in U.S. presidential campaign coverage by looking at the speech of journalists rather than sources. Using the metaphor of the election report as a political conversation among journalists and their sources, the authors apply Bales' categories to discover that journalists have become more dominant, increasing their share of air time in more tightly controlled, faster paced reports. A significant shift toward expressing opinions and judgments of campaign events confirms previous qualitative observations that newscasts have become more journalist-centered. The focus on journalists and their opinions may turn anchors into celebrities and attract larger audiences but provides information less often about the election.
Sound Bite News: Television Coverage of Elections, 1968–1988
Journal of Communication, 1992
You do not currently have access to this article. Download all figures Based on samp les of network evening news broadcasts from each p residential election from 1968 through 1988, this article shows that the average sound bite has declined from 43 to 9 seconds. This change is interp reted as p art of a general shift in the style of television news toward a more mediated, journalist-centered form of journalism. Three factors help
Journalistic infotainment in election coverage. The case of presidential debates
Journalistic coverage of elections is increasingly about conflict, scandals, horse race coverage and gaffes, a phenomenon called infotainment, which is detrimental to the political content of elections, this is to say, the candidates' proposals and leader profiles. To assess the scope of these tendencies in the Mexican press, we focused our research on the coverage of presidential debates in the 2012 campaign, events with profuse political content, and undertook a content analysis of five national newspapers to measure framings related to infotainment (N=209 units). We found that the coverage was focused on the conflict between actors and performance assessment of the event, with little reference to the candidates' political positions and profiles. Such treatment is detrimental to the potential of civic formation of the debates, a significant feature of democracy.
Comunicación y Sociedad, 2022
Campaign coverage would prefer strategic game and personalization topics more than public policy proposals. Instead, electoral debates on television are expected to differentiate from the journalistic routine. Through a content analysis, the journalists’ agenda in four Chilean presidential debates is compared with that of the written press in the coverage of the respective campaigns. The results show that journalists in the debates focus on public policies while the press concentrates on strategies or political issues.
Experts in Election News Coverage
Nordicom Review, 2011
Previous studies have shown that experts appearing in the media are increasingly speculating about trends and developments rather than presenting their own research. With respect to political journalism, this raises the question of whether increased use of expert sources has also led to an increased focus on process relative to substance in election news coverage. The study, conducted in 1998 and 2007, surveys what types of experts are referred to in the election coverage, what topics the experts comment on (in particular whether they focus on substance or process), and whether the number and types of experts as well as topics have changed over time. As expected, there is an increase in newspapers’ references to experts in their election campaign coverage. However, contrary to our expectations, in both 1998 and 2007, there is an equal number of articles referring to the election campaign’s political content (i.e., they mentioned the topics promoted by the political actors during the...
Setting the News Story Agenda: Candidates and Commentators in News Coverage of a Governor’s Race
This study nssciscd the kinds of sources setting the story 'agenda" in election iieics covering the 1998 governor's race in the nine largest Michigan dailici. The assertions of candidates or their partisan supporters were more likely than those of experts or other sources to dominate story leads and paragraphs. Sources included for their expertise on the "horse race" and issue aspects of the campaign ivcrc cited in only a third of the election stories, and their comments were usually placed far Liown in the stories. Statehouse bureau reporters were more likely than their newsroom-based and wire-sen'ice colleagues to write stories including experts. A substantial number of stories also contained unattributed "reporter leads." Most of these leads were references to events or developments that could be verified by any reader. Other reporter leads contained interpretations that were substantiated in the stories. But about 5 percent of the stories were introduced by reporter leads that contained interpretations or conclusions that were not or could not be substantiated in stories. Statehouse bureau reporters were also more likely than wire service or newsroom reporters to write interpretative leads.
Indicating mediatization? Two decades of election campaign television coverage
European Journal of Communication, 2013
This article traces mediatization in the coverage of election campaigns in Danish and German television news over the past 20 years (1990–2009). The analysis is based on news content analyses focusing on the major candidates in the two countries. Considering that Denmark and Germany are similar but nevertheless different countries, the data show remarkable similarities in the coverage of elections and how it changes over time. Observing the amount of horse-race coverage, personalization, visualization and negativity, most findings fitted the mediatization hypothesis at a first glance. At a second glance, multivariate analyses controlling for important other variables confirmed the notion of mediatization for only three of the five content indicators studied. In addition, the mediatization process apparently stalled in the 1990s.
Media logic in election campaign coverage
European Journal of Communication, 2013
The media logic thesis holds that the content of political news is the product of news values and format requirements that media make use of to attract news consumers. This study tests whether three content characteristics -personalized, contest and negative coverage -manifest a single media logic by analysing whether they co-vary over time. It also tests the implicit assumption underlying the media logic thesis that media adhere to a single media logic as one institution. A semantic network analysis measured the degree to which television and newspaper coverage of five Dutch national election campaigns (1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010) contained the three content characteristics. The study shows that personalized, contest and negative coverage form three indicators of a single logic that is shared by different media. Since the turn of the century, Dutch political news has simultaneously become decreasingly personalized, less focused on the contest and less negative.