The Project for Excellence in Journalism has a new study out on the mainstream media coverage of the primaries. The media have been more focused on the horse race than on informing citizens about candidates’ policies and records. Here are some nuggets:
In the early months of the 2008 presidential campaign, the media had already winnowed the race to mostly five candidates and offered Americans relatively little information about their records or what they would do if elected, according to a comprehensive new study of the election coverage across the media.
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In all, 63% of the campaign stories focused on political and tactical aspects of the campaign. That is nearly four times the number of stories about the personal backgrounds of the candidates (17%) or the candidates’ ideas and policy proposals (15%). And just 1% of stories examined the candidates’ records or past public performance, the study found.
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The press’ focus on fundraising, tactics and polling is even more evident if one looks at how stories were framed rather than the topic of the story. Just 12% of stories examined were presented in a way that explained how citizens might be affected by the election, while nearly nine-out-of-ten stories (86%) focused on matters that largely impacted only the parties and the candidates. Those numbers, incidentally, match almost exactly the campaign-centric orientation of coverage found on the eve of the primaries eight years ago.
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The majority of all stories (63%) were primarily about the “game” aspects of the campaign—topics such as who is winning, who is losing, their fundraising, and how a candidate is performing on the stump. Of these topics, the lion’s share (50% overall) was tactical or horse race—that is polls, strategy and candidate “performance.” The next biggest political concern was campaign fundraising, which made up 7% of all stories.
After internal political matters, the second-biggest grouping of topics (17% of the stories) focused on the personal background of the candidates—their families, marriages, biographies, and religion. The biggest share of these stories, 9%, looked at the marriage and romantic relationships of the candidates and the personal health of candidates and their spouses. This obviously was driven in March by the announcement by Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of Democratic candidate John Edwards, that she had a recurrence of breast cancer. And 2% of the stories were about candidate religion, principally that of Republican Mitt Romney, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
The policy proposals and ideas of the candidates constituted 15% of all stories examined—a slightly smaller percentage than the personal qualities of the candidates. This policy discussion was fairly evenly split between foreign (8%) and domestic policy (7%). Of the issues, the war was the biggest of all (6%). That was followed by abortion (3%), though much of this coverage focused on Republicans and particularly Giuliani, whose position on that subject does not fit squarely into what has become the tradition in the Republican Party platform.
Only roughly 1% of the stories were about the candidates’ public records.
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The “impact” analysis showed that the coverage was tilted even more toward strategy than analysis of the topic of the stories.
In the end, just 12% of stories primarily impacted ordinary citizens, for instance, by telling potential voters how a candidate might lead if elected.
By contrast, 86% of the stories were produced in a way that largely focused on how the politicians’ chances of election would be affected.
I haven’t seen an analysis for this year’s blog coverage yet but their 2004 analysis of the major political blogs showed that blog coverage is pretty similar to the mainstream media coverage.
