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The Effect of Fox News and CNN's Postdebate Commentator Analysis on Viewers' Perceptions of Presidential Candidate Performance
Abstract
Television news coverage following a presidential debate often presents the debate as a contest between winners and losers by employing a horse race paradigm. The use of this paradigm can help viewers form their assessments of the candidates’ performances, but its overuse can limit serious campaign discourse on the issues. This study examines the effect of postdebate analysis by two cable news networks on the perceived outcome of a 2004 presidential debate and the perceptions of the candidates, finding perceptions of the outcome differing between viewers of the two networks. This finding contributes to our understanding of viewer interaction with postdebate television coverage by focusing on the importance of the sources of information.
... We focus on news coverage of general debates, because there has always been one presidential candidate and one vice-presidential candidate from the Democratic party and the Republican party during the past three decades. 8 We thus build matrices for the bipartite graphs based on general debates in each presidential election. ...
... The effect of post-debate coverage on public opinion. Studies have shown that media choices about coverage can have serious consequences [8,17,23,25,26,38,56]. For instance, Fridkin et al. [17] show that in the 2004 U.S. election, citizens who only read the news coverage rated Kerry more negatively compared to those who watched the debate firsthand, because media outlets highlighted the moment of Kerry outing Cheney's lesbian daughter, although this moment did not catch much attention from the live audience. ...
Political speeches and debates play an important role in shaping the images of politicians, and the public often relies on media outlets to select bits of political communication from a large pool of utterances. It is an important research question to understand what factors impact this selection process. To quantitatively explore the selection process, we build a three- decade dataset of presidential debate transcripts and post-debate coverage. We first examine the effect of wording and propose a binary classification framework that controls for both the speaker and the debate situation. We find that crowdworkers can only achieve an accuracy of 60% in this task, indicating that media choices are not entirely obvious. Our classifiers outperform crowdworkers on average, mainly in primary debates. We also compare important factors from crowdworkers' free-form explanations with those from data-driven methods and find interesting differences. Few crowdworkers mentioned that "context matters", whereas our data show that well-quoted sentences are more distinct from the previous utterance by the same speaker than less-quoted sentences. Finally, we examine the aggregate effect of media preferences towards different wordings to understand the extent of fragmentation among media outlets. By analyzing a bipartite graph built from quoting behavior in our data, we observe a decreasing trend in bipartisan coverage.
... We focus on news coverage of general debates, because there has always been one presidential candidate and one vice-presidential candidate from the Democratic party and the Republican party during the past three decades. 8 We thus build matrices for the bipartite graphs based on general debates in each presidential election. ...
... The effect of post-debate coverage on public opinion. Studies have shown that media choices about coverage can have serious consequences [8,17,23,25,26,38,56]. For instance, Fridkin et al. [17] show that in the 2004 U.S. election, citizens who only read the news coverage rated Kerry more negatively compared to those who watched the debate firsthand, because media outlets highlighted the moment of Kerry outing Cheney's lesbian daughter, although this moment did not catch much attention from the live audience. ...
Political speeches and debates play an important role in shaping the images of politicians, and the public often relies on media outlets to select bits of political communication from a large pool of utterances. It is an important research question to understand what factors impact this selection process. To quantitatively explore the selection process, we build a three- decade dataset of presidential debate transcripts and post-debate coverage. We first examine the effect of wording and propose a binary classification framework that controls for both the speaker and the debate situation. We find that crowdworkers can only achieve an accuracy of 60% in this task, indicating that media choices are not entirely obvious. Our classifiers outperform crowdworkers on average, mainly in primary debates. We also compare important factors from crowdworkers' free-form explanations with those from data-driven methods and find interesting differences. Few crowdworkers mentioned that "context matters", whereas our data show that well-quoted sentences are more distinct from the previous utterance by the same speaker than less-quoted sentences. Finally, we examine the aggregate effect of media preferences towards different wordings to understand the extent of fragmentation among media outlets. By analyzing a bipartite graph built from quoting behavior in our data, we observe a decreasing trend in bipartisan coverage.
... And most large-scale individual-level research on debates also relies on postdebate evaluations (e.g., Abramowitz 1978; geer 1988; hillygus and Jackman 2003; steeper 1978). Whether surveys are cross-sectional (e.g., lanoue 1992; sigelman and sigelman 1984) or panel designs (e.g., kraus and smith 1977; tsfati 2003), the data cannot differentiate between the effects of the debate itself and other influences, such as media coverage of the debates (brubaker and hanson 2009; fridkin et al. 2007). Moreover, these studies cannot isolate which candidate messages are influencing viewers. ...
... this mobile-app methodology allows us to collect data from a large and diverse group of debate viewers reacting in their natural environments outside the lab (e.g., in their own homes or at debate-viewing parties). responses are viewer initiated and virtually instantaneous, thereby allowing us to capture and analyze unmediated viewer reactions as opposed to digested opinions (brubaker and hanson 2009; fridkin et al. 2007; tsfati 2003). ...
How effective are presidential candidates at engaging viewers during debates? To answer this question, we designed a mobile
app and conducted a large-scale national study of individual college students’ real-time reactions to the first general election
debate of 2012. Previous studies have relied either on real-time but small-sample individual dial reactions or on large-scale
public reactions to debates in their entirety, after the fact, and without consideration of specific statements or events
within the debates. By contrast, our approach allowed us to collect moment-by-moment data from a large and diverse group of
participants in natural settings. The resulting data make it possible to answer questions previously believed to be outside
the bounds of systematic inquiry. Here, we explain the method and provide some key findings that illustrate the payoff of
our approach. Our study suggests that collecting large-scale, real-time data is feasible and valuable for advancing research
on a host of public opinion phenomena.
... Election polls can be influenced by sampling errors, response biases, and the phrasing of questions [26,27]. Human analysts, despite their expertise, may have personal or ideological biases that color their interpretations [7,28,29]. Similarly, media coverage of debates often reflects the political leanings of news organizations or the preferences of their audience [7,30]. In this context, our LLM-POTUS Score offers an alternative approach that, while not free from biases inherited from model training, provides an alternative and flexible form of analysis that is less susceptible to direct human subjectivity or blatant media influence. ...
Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing, yet their application to political discourse analysis remains underexplored. This paper introduces a novel approach to evaluating presidential debate performances using LLMs, addressing the longstanding challenge of objectively assessing debate outcomes. We propose a framework that analyzes candidates' "Policies, Persona, and Perspective" (3P) and how they resonate with the "Interests, Ideologies, and Identity" (3I) of four key audience groups: voters, businesses, donors, and politicians. Our method employs large language models to generate the LLM-POTUS Score, a quantitative measure of debate performance based on the alignment between 3P and 3I. We apply this framework to analyze transcripts from recent U.S. presidential debates, demonstrating its ability to provide nuanced, multi-dimensional assessments of candidate performances. Our results reveal insights into the effectiveness of different debating strategies and their impact on various audience segments. This study not only offers a new tool for political analysis but also explores the potential and limitations of using LLMs as impartial judges in complex social contexts. In addition, this framework provides individual citizens with an independent tool to evaluate presidential debate performances, which enhances democratic engagement and reduces reliance on potentially biased media interpretations and institutional influence, thereby strengthening the foundation of informed civic participation.
... The debut of Fox News in 1996 helped to usher in an era of "niche news" (Stroud, 2011) in which cable television viewers could choose the news that they think best fits their political views. Fox News tends to give more favorable coverage to Republican politicians and policies than other television news (Aday, 2010;Brubaker & Hanson, 2009;Harmon & Muenchen, 2009). Exposure to Fox News is related to more positive attitudes toward Republican candidates and policies (Hyun & Moon, 2016;Morris & Francia, 2010), and towns where Fox News was available in 2000 had increased vote share for Republicans (Della Vigna & Kaplan, 2007). ...
Secondary analysis of panel data found, after controlling for prior belief and many covariates, 2011 Fox News viewing was negatively related to belief in global warming in 2016 and 2019, while MSNBC, broadcast news, and political comedy viewing in 2016 and CNN in 2019 had positive relationships. Partisan belief gaps in 2016 widened with CNN viewing and narrowed with viewing broadcast news, Fox News (especially with higher knowledge) and MSNBC (especially with lower knowledge), while political comedy viewing was associated both with wider (with lower knowledge) and narrower gaps (with higher knowledge). Implications for practice and theory are discussed.
... reporting and opining disproportionately about stories and scandals that would be damaging to the opposing party (Baum & Groeling, 2008;Puglisi & Snyder, 2011). The tone of Fox's coverage of presidential candidates tends to be positive for Republicans and negative for Democrats (Brubaker & Hanson, 2009), which is reflected in viewers' candidate evaluations (Hyun & Moon, 2016) and changes in those evaluations over time (Morris & Francia, 2010). Beyond the specifics of a claim, a drumbeat of negative coverage of Democrats and Hillary Clinton arguably made it easier to believe a negative claim about them, just as consistently laudatory news about Donald Trump and Republicans made it easier to believe a positive claim about them. ...
This study examined secondary survey data (N = 3,015) that asked respondents about real and pro-Trump fake news headlines in late 2016 as well as their reliance on online news sources. Reliance on Facebook for news was a vector for exposure to pro-Trump fake news but not for believing it. Reliance on Fox News online and on nonlegacy news sites was positively associated both with exposure to and perceived accuracy of pro-Trump fake news. The Fox News relationship with perceived accuracy was moderated by party and education such that Fox News reliance was a stronger predictor for Democrats and the more highly educated. Reliance on CNN online and elite newspaper sites was negatively related with the perceived accuracy of pro-Trump fake news. Implications for motivated reasoning theory and future directions are discussed.
... It is unlikely we will see a new era of political discourse on US news networks any time soon, even when that means that they are possibly preparing their next political foe for life in their own spotlights, and who they will need to fact-check on live television for bending the truth. It is vital to study the role of political commentators in these types of news programming, because those analysts can shape the political perceptions of their viewers (Brubaker & Hanson, 2009). This may be especially the case for CNN as it has a worldwide reach and political debates in the US are shown on global affiliates. ...
In this chapter, I analyze the various theoretical approaches to peace journalism. While these approaches have significantly contributed to the relevant scholarship, some arrangements are still required to apply these in the non-western scenarios. In this regard, I argue that critical pragmatism is better suited to address the queries relating to the theory and practice of peace journalism particularly in the context of Pakistan—a country marred by an array of deadly conflicts. Critical pragmatism offers practical solutions to systemic problems. Since different conflict scenarios possess different challenges for media, peace journalism strategies cannot be static. The approach of one solution to all problems is lopsided. The critical pragmatic approach supports peace journalism to strategize for its practice in conjunction with the structural forces that shape and determine media content.
... Several studies have examined Fox News and/or CNN coverage of American presidents and presidential candidates. For instance, Brubaker and Hanson (2009) found that Fox News provided significantly more favorable analysis of Republican George W. Bush than Democrat John Kerry following a 2004 presidential debate. The study found that CNN provided more balanced analysis. ...
This study used critical discourse analysis to examine Anderson Cooper 360° (AC 360) and The O’Reilly Factor coverage of the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina church shootings and the subsequent controversy surrounding the removal of the Confederate Flag from South Carolina government grounds. While AC 360 used a “Good versus Evil” discourse to structure its reportage, suggesting that the shooting represented a series of battles between right and wrong, The O’Reilly Factor used the Charleston tragedy as a launching-off point to defend the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Although both shows drew attention to racism, they ignored the structural context of racism that makes racist violence thrive. Their coverage implied that America has moved into a post-racism era.
... Benoit and many researchers conduct analysis using the functional approach (Benoit, 1997(Benoit, , 1999(Benoit, , 2001(Benoit, , 2003(Benoit, , 2004(Benoit, , 2007a(Benoit, , 2007b. Other researchers examine specific issues such as agenda, frames and public opinion (Boydstun et al., 2013;Fridkin et al., 2007;Kenski and Jamieson, 2006;Olson, 2013), politeness strategies (Dailey et al., 2008;Hinck and Hinck, 2002), survey and voting research (Kenski and Jamieson, 2011;Prior, 2012), television viewing, issue knowledge and perceptions (Brubaken and Hanson, 2009;Kenski and Jamieson, 2006;Kenski and Stroud, 2005;McKinney et al., 2011;Warner, 2011;Warner et al., 2011), voters' attitudes (Yawn et al., 1998), effects on citizens' engagement (Cho and Ha, 2012;McKinney and Rill, 2009;Ricke, 2010), feminine style (Johnson, 2005) and hedge, humour, political satire and laughter (Alavi-Nia and Jalilifar, 2013;Duffy and Page, 2013;Kugler and Goethals, 2008;Stewart, 2010Stewart, , 2012. ...
Presidential debates have become a pre-election fixture in Taiwan since the first-ever televised presidential debate held in 2004. In the 2012 Taiwan presidential election, it was a three-way contest among the incumbent Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang (KMT) and the two challengers: Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and James Soong of the People First Party (PFP). The crucial issues in this presidential race were the domestic economy and cross-strait stability. Candidates jousted in two televised presidential debates on 3 December and 17 December 2011, respectively, to persuade the undecided toss-up voters. This article aims to adopt a critical discourse analysis approach to explore the ideological underpinnings of modality used by the three candidates in the 2012 Taiwan Presidential Debates. This modality analysis of the debate discourse, in view of a dearth of studies on the use of modality in Chinese political discourse, will provide an insight into the politicians’ use of modal verbs, adverbs, and adjectives as linguistic and ideological tools to show their obligation, make promises, demonstrate their commitment, and most importantly frame their arguments in a purpose of persuading the electorate and soliciting their support.
... 33 Reaffirming Swanson's reading of frames in television coverage of debates in particular, Jennifer Brubaker and Gary Hanson explored how a "horse race" paradigm dominates post-debate commentary and coverage, potentially influencing viewer and voter perceptions of candidate performance. 34 Also consistent with Swanson's analysis, Robert Tiemens carefully examined the pictorial/visual treatment of the candidates during the 1976 presidential debates, "to determine differences in how each candidate was portrayed by the television medium." 35 These studies are among the many that highlighted the circulation and recirculation of political debates through the political culture, particularly as that circulation happened in the news media and in post-debate commentary. ...
This response to Kathleen Hall Jamieson's “The Discipline's Debate Contributions” brings forth, via a sampling of existing literature, those research trajectories about political debates ignored or minimized by Professor Jamieson as those trajectories hold true to the values and traditions of the Communication discipline and as they operate alongside the literature she surveys about debate effects. In particular, we suggest that political debates provide fascinating material for a range of rhetorical analyses that examine (1) the production and creation of political debates as rhetorical/political artifacts; (2) the language and arguments put forth in these events; and (3) the circulation of political debates as rhetorical texts in and through U.S. political culture. In so doing, we resist the hegemony of Professor Jamieson's “effects” approach to political debates both as that hegemony demarcates research about political debates and as it describes the limits and scope of Communication research generally.
... Wir formulieren daher die erste Erwartung 2 , die es für Österreich zu explorieren gilt: (Morello 1990;Tsfati 2003) und kann dabei zumindest kurzfristig auch die Bewertung der AkteurInnen, so zum Beispiel die Einschätzung über SiegerIn und VerliererIn einer Wahlkampf-Debatte, beeinflussen (Fridkin et al. 2008;Brubaker/Hanson 2009). 3 Dieser Vorgang kann auch abhängig vom gewählten Informationsmedium (z.B. unterschiedliche Zeitungen oder TV-Sender) variieren (Semetko/Valkenburg 2000, 106f.). ...
Im Kontext politischer TV-Ereignisse eröffnen sich über das Internet im Allgemeinen und Social-Network-Sites wie Facebook oder Twitter im Speziellen neue Möglichkeiten des Medienkonsums und der Anschlusskommunikation, die das klassische Bild von TV-Ereignissen und deren Analysen in Frage stellen. Politische TV-Ereignisse werden nicht mehr primär über ein einziges Medium, das Fernsehen, wahrgenommen. Ihr Konsum verläuft in einer internetaffinen Subpopulation viel eher über eine Mehrzahl an Informationskanälen, die in gängigen empirischen Methoden nicht alle berücksichtigt werden. Wir befinden uns in einer Ära der E-merging Media und des Second Screen, in welcher Social-Network-Sites, Online-Foren, Blogs und auch die Medienberichterstattung im Internet einen vielfältigen Medienkonsum und eine breite Anschlusskommunikation zu TV-Ereignissen erleichtern. Die vorliegende explorative Studie untersucht, inwieweit das potenzielle Publikum von politischen TV-Ereignissen weit über das Fernsehpublikum hinaus reicht, und kommt dabei zur Erkenntnis, dass der Einfluss-und Analysebereich von TV-Ereignissen neu diskutiert werden muss. Grundlage der Untersuchung ist eine Online-Befragung von Studierenden der Universität Wien im Rahmen der ORF-Sommergespräche 2012.
The internet in general and social networks such as Facebook or Twitter in particular have opened up new ways of using media and exchanging content in the context of televised political events. The internet and social networks now challenge the established image of televised events and their analysis. In an internet-oriented subpopulation, televised political events are no longer watched via a single medium, the television screen. Instead, their consumption passes through numerous information channels such as social networks, political web forums, blogs and online media coverage. Yet, these channels are often not included in conventional empirical methods. This descriptive study shows how the potential 2 audience of televised political events extends far beyond its TV audience, which is why the impact and the methods of analysis of these events need to be discussed anew. The basis of this article is an online survey of students at the University of Vienna about the ORF-Sommergespräche (summer talks) 2012.
Previous research has shown that presidential debates have “minimal effects” on aggregate electoral preferences because they mainly reinforce people's pre-existing political preferences. However, most of what we know about the behavioural effects of debates comes from research conducted in the United States and other institutionalised democracies. We re-evaluate the effects of debates on electoral preferences by focusing on Latin American elections. Given higher levels of electoral volatility, weaker partisan brands, lower partisanship, and more personalised voter linkages, we expect that debates play a significant role in shaping vote choice in Latin America. We test these expectations by conducting an analysis of presidential debates on aggregated vote preferences in thirty-two elections across fourteen Latin American countries from 2002 to 2019. Our results show that presidential debates shape electoral preferences in countries with weakly institutionalised party systems.
Now in its third edition, Political Campaign Communication: Inside and Out examines the intricacies of political campaigning through the eyes of both an academic and a political consultant. Unlike others in its field, this text takes a broad view of political campaigning, discussing both theories and principles, along with topics such as political socialization, the role of money, ethics, and critical events. This new edition delves into ongoing changes in the American political environment, with fuller examinations of women and gender, the involvement of social media in political campaigning, political money, and ethics. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students of political communication can make use of updated chapter-by-chapter discussion questions and online practice quizzes.
Social media could serve as an easy and fast window to the climate of public opinion. In the current study, we examined the influence of perceived opinion climate revealed via Twitter postings in shaping televised debate viewers’ candidate evaluation. We conducted two Web-based experiments in the high- and low-stimulus elections: (a) the 2012 Korean presidential election and (b) the 2014 Seoul mayoral election. Instead of using contrived stimulus materials, we were able to examine the influence of exposure to Twitter postings in voters’ judgment of candidate performance in real time. Using a custom-designed Web application, participants evaluated the candidates as debate-related Twitter postings were being fed in real time during each televised debate. Our results suggest that exposure to Twitter postings has induced significant bandwagon effects. Bandwagon effects were pervasive even among partisans and the knowledgeable. Our findings show that more policy efforts ought to be made to strengthen the informative role of social viewing.
When Pope Francis, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, released his encyclical on climate change in June 2015, the Fox News Channel, the most watched cable news network in the United States, faced a dilemma. Some of its news anchors and regular commentators are Catholics, and therefore have a positive bias for the Pope. But the network is also known for its bias against man-made climate change. Guided by cognitive dissonance theory, this study analyzed how Fox News’ anchors and commentators discussed Pope Francis’ stance on climate change. The analysis found a clear ambivalence in their discourse and identified four discursive strategies that they used to navigate discursive dissonance.
Pollster Frank Luntz has built a substantial global business by shifting the terminology in public policy debates to a corporate and conservative perspective. He played a substantial role in the recent U.S. health care debate, and his approaches and terminology likely will be tried again regarding health care policy in other nations. This project searched the U.S. broadcast news transcripts to discover to what extent they reflected Luntz’s list of words for opponents of health care reform. Sixteen Luntz terms were compared to a list of 16 more neutral terms describing the actual changes being considered. The Luntz words outnumbered the “descriptor” terms on Fox News, and made up a significant percentage of the terminology hits on CNN, MSNBC, and ABC, CBS, and NBC News. This content analysis adds to the growing body of work on framing, specifically how tactical use of terminology can turn a mediated debate.
This study content analyzed the on-screen visuals (i.e., candidate quotes, live Twitter feed, and poll results) displayed during the final presidential debate on the ABC News/Yahoo News live-streaming online coverage. Gatekeeping and research on political campaign coverage were used to provide rationale about the nature of the on-screen visuals. Results largely confirmed previous research into presidential campaign coverage: The on-screen visuals revealed a reliance on elite sources (media-related professionals and public figures), the on-screen visuals were largely neutral in nature for the candidates (although there was a slight pro-Obama advantage in the tweets and a slight pro-Romney advantage in the quoted material shown on-screen), and the on-screen visuals focused on horserace, strategy, and image at the expense of issue and policy discussion.
The timing of the 2008 American National Election Studies panel's implicit and explicit items on race allowed for a kind of natural experiment about the effect of presidential debate exposure on racial attitudes. The 2008 debates and Obama's composed performance in them gave tens of millions of Americans an extended look at a highly vivid, salient, cognitively available, counterstereotypical exemplar that may have changed the way they feel about African Americans. Exposure to the presidential debates was positively related with post-debate affect toward African Americans after controlling for predebate affect, whether this affect was measured implicitly or explicitly. The results for explicit affect were more robust to the addition of more controls to the model. Party interacted with debate exposure such that the effect on implicit affect was reversed for Republicans.
This study drew on the literature in motivated reasoning and 2009 Pew survey data to examine the roles of partisanship, education, news exposure, and their interactions in the misperception that health care reform would create “death panels.” Radio news exposure encouraged the misperception only among Republicans, while newspaper exposure discouraged it, especially among non-Republicans. But rather than polarize perceptions along partisan lines as predicted, Fox News exposure contributed to misperception mainstreaming. Finally, this study identified a complex role for education in both inhibiting misperceptions (as a main effect) and promoting them (as an interaction with Fox News exposure).
Rather than studying the effects of a programmed debate per se, this article examines the “total information environment” that surrounds the debate. A model explaining how people make judgments about the “winner” of a debate is suggested and tested on survey data (N = 748) collected in the days following the second 1996 presidential debate. Results demonstrate that consumption of debate-related news coverage, interpersonal discussion about the debate, and prior candidate attitudes are associated with perceptions of the winner of the debate. In addition, exposure to news coverage of the debate significantly interacted with exposure to the actual debate, so that the impact of news coverage was stronger for those watching little of the actual debate.
How do different media cover politics and affect voters? Are newspapers a boon and television a bane to democratic functioning? While these questions have long been the subject of debate, a variety of methodological hurdles have hampered prior attempts to document media differences and their effects. In this article, I discuss these challenges and offer an approach for overcoming them to the greatest extent possible. I then combine comprehensive media content analyses with an election day exit poll to assess campaign coverage and its effect on voters. I find that television news and newspapers differ substantially in the quantity of coverage but do not drastically differ in terms of content. More important, I find that newspapers, and not television news, play a significant, although potentially limited, role in informing the electorate.
The eighth edition of Political Campaign Communication: Principles and Practices provides a clear understanding of the strategic decisions made and tactical communication practices used in contemporary political campaigns.
The primary phase of political campaigns, and messages like primary debates, are an important component of the contemporary campaign process. However, relatively little is known about how newspapers report on the content of these messages. This study compared data from content analysis of presidential primary debates with news coverage of those debates from 1980–2004. Debates and newspaper coverage were content analyzed for functions (acclaims or self-praise, attacks or criticism, and defenses or refutations of attacks) and topics (policy and character). Newspaper coverage over-represented attacks and defenses but under-represented acclaims. At times newspaper accounts stress character more, and policy less, than the debates, but this relationship was not consistent across campaigns. Journalists served a gate-keeping function, reporting about 8% of what the candidates said in the debates.
This study compared data from content analysis of the 1996 and 2000 presidential debates with news coverage of those debates. Debates and news coverage were content analyzed for functions (acclaims or self-praise, attacks or criticism, and defenses or refutations of attacks) and topics (policy and character). In both campaigns the news coverage over-represented attacks and defenses but under-represented acclaims. In 1996, the news stories stressed character more than did the debates (and policy less than the debates), but in 2000 the news coverage accurately reflected the proportion of policy and character in the debates themselves. The study of 1996 found scant reporting of the debates in evening television news, compared with newspapers. The 2000 study found that there were more reports of Gore's than Bush's remarks. Finally, the average newspaper story in 2000 only reported 7% of what the candidates said in a debate. Clearly, voters cannot expect to obtain an accurate or complete representation of presidential debates from media coverage.
How important are presidential debates today? To answer this question, the authors place modern debates in their cultural and historical context, tracing their origins and development in the American political tradition, from the eighteenth century to the present, and concluding with some thoughtful suggestions for improving their current effectiveness.
Last year's election night blunders by the networks highlight the extent to which the news media—and particularly television—have become major actors in presidential elections. This article employs a content analysis to examine how thorough, balanced, and substantive network news was in Campaign 2000 as compared with 1996, 1992, and 1988. Although the principal focus is on the broadcast networks, data on other news genres, as well as candidate discourse, are brought to bear on the research questions. The study finds little or no improvement in election coverage over time despite numerous reform efforts from inside and outside the newsroom. The amount of coverage has declined, along with the airtime available to candidates. Attention to the horse race increased sharply in 2000, but issue coverage did not. The tone of coverage has remained consistently negative, but Democrats sometimes fared better than Republicans. Media discourse was also less substantive and more negative than candidate discourse, and voters continued to give the media low marks for their performance. These findings call into question the effectiveness of recent efforts to make election news more useful to voters.
This study investigated journalist‐panelists’ questions and candidates’ corresponding answers in the televised presidential and vice presidential debates from 1976 to 1992. There were no trends for longer or more complex questions. Question length and complexity, however, were both positively associated with longer responses. Question complexity was also positively associated with the failure of candidates to answer all or component parts of the questions. These findings indicated that the journalist‐panelists might be contributing to the verbosity of the debates and, possibly, permitting the candidates to evade difficult and embarrassing questions.
This study of 798 potential voters interviewed beginning three days before the September 25, 1988, presidential candidate debate and ending four days later analyzed the influence of exposure to television post-debate analysis and television and newspaper reliance on evaluations of candidate debate performance, candidate image, and voting preferences. Exposure to the debate and to post-debate television analysis had measurable and consistent influences on the evaluation of Dukakis as a debater (Dukakis was the consensus post-debate analysis winner), on Dukakis's image, and on the probability of voting for both candidates. Television news reliance for debate information was significantly related to debater ratings and the candidates' images for both candidates. There was a slight relationship between television news reliance and the probability of voting for Dukakis.
Media election campaign coverage is said to have changed fundamentally in recent decades. Among the trends identified are personalization, negativism, more interpretive coverage, deauthentication, and horse-race coverage. Usually, U.S. studies are cited as empirical evidence for these developments. Recent studies of European campaigns have shown, however, that the picture seems to be different there in various respects.This article argues that one of the reasons for the differences might be the lack of some central campaign events in European elections. Taking Germany as an example, it investigates how the introduction of American-style televised debates in 2002 and 2005 changed media coverage of the major candidates. On the basis of a long-term content analysis between 1949 and 2005, several dramatic effects of this new campaign event are shown.
While scholars recognize that the media devote significant attention to electoral expectations, most notably in the form of horse race coverage, little is known about the content of and variance in these media expectations. In this article, the author argues that the media's reporting on electoral expectations should vary in sensible and meaningful ways. In particular, he examines the basis for media expectations, the extent of this coverage, and how expectations coverage varies across electoral settings and over the course of elections. Based on an analysis of the media coverage of eight gubernatorial elections, the author demonstrates that while electoral expectations are a significant component of campaign coverage, the media expectations environment is less uniform than is typically assumed and that this variance in electoral expectations matters politically.
Many studies of partisan bias in political news employ balance as a baseline. That is, the party/candidate receiving more or better coverage in any given source is automatically deemed the beneficiary of favorable treatment by the source. A study employing the balance baseline potentially exaggerates the amount of meaningful partisan bias in the source, however, for failure to control for nonpartisan, non-ideological news judgment criteria. This study models variation in the relative amount and tone of coverage received by candidates in 95 content analyses of newspapers' Senate election coverage from 1988–1992. This enables a direct test of the relative power of partisan and structural (nonpartisan, news-judgment-driven) biases in explaining the slant of election coverage. While news-organizational factors are found to dominate the amount model, a modest amount of residual slant toward the Democratic candidates remains in the tone of coverage, controlling for structural bias.
Televised debates are now an expected component of the American presidential election campaign. A meta-analysis was used to cumulate the research on the effects of watching presidential debates. General campaign debates increase issue knowledge and issue salience (the number of issues a voter uses to evaluate candidates) and can change preference for candidates' issue stands. Debates can have an agenda-setting effect. Debates can alter perceptions of the candidates' personality, but they do not exert a significant effect on perceptions of the candidates' competence (leadership ability). Debates can affect vote preference. Primary debates increase issue knowledge, influence perceptions of candidates' character, and can alter voter preferences (the effect sizes for these variables are larger in primary than general debates). The effect sizes for the dependent variables with significant effects were heterogeneous (except for effects of debates other than the first on vote preference). No support was found for several possible moderator variables on issue knowledge, character perceptions, candidate competence, and vote preference: nature of subject pool (students, nonstudents), study design (pretest/posttest, viewers/nonviewers), number of days between debate and election, or data collection method (public opinion poll or experimenter data). The first debate in a series had a larger effect on vote preference than other debates, but was not a moderator for other dependent variables. The possibility that other moderator variables are at work cannot be rejected.
Although presidential debates have been studied extensively, few truly basic, generic questions have been raised. The following study does so by asking (a) What textual features distinguish debates from other types of campaign messages ? (b) How have such factors as time, format, party, and incumbency affected political debates? and (c) How did the 1996 debates relate to such trends? In answering these questions the authors present findings from the Campaign Mapping Project, a research endeavor funded by the;Ford and Carnegie Foundations and devoted to examining campaign behavior from 1948 to the present. The study suggests that debates add sobriety to campaigns, ground political discourse, make candidates introspective, and restrain political overstatements. Moreover the generic regularities of presidential debates provide an equal footing to incumbents and challengers, Democrats and Republicans, as well as former and recent presidential campaigners. in essence, debate encourages all politicians to speak a common language.
This study investigates New York Times coverage of the Democratic and Republican general presidential campaigns from 1952–2000. Content analysis reveals that the most common topic of campaign coverage was horse race. Discussion of the candidates' character was more common than discussion of their policy positions (even though candidates discuss policy more than character in campaign messages). The statements in these stories were more often negative than positive (despite the fact that candidates' messages are more positive than negative). Reporters are the most common sources for the statements in these articles, followed by candidates, supporters, and others.
Presidential debates traditionally attract millions of viewers and heavy press coverage. There is much evidence that the media interpretation of these events is influential even for people who have viewed the debates themselves. This study examines the 1996 evening news coverage and postdebate specials ofABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN, exploring the way television journalists constructed the candidates' debate goals and expectations, their rhetorical strategies, and the effects of the debate.
Although presidential debates have been studied extensively, few truly basic, generic questions have been raised. The following study does so by asking (a) What textual features distinguish debates from other types of campaign messages? (b) How have such factors as time, format, party, and incumbency affected political debates? and (c) How did the 1996 debates relate to such trends? In answering these questions the authors present findings from the Campaign Mapping Project, a research endeavor funded by the Ford and Carnegie Foundations and devoted to examining campaign behavior from 1948 to the present. The study suggests that debates add sobriety to campaigns, ground political discourse, make candidates introspective, and restrain political overstatements. Moreover, the generic regu larities of presidential debates provide an equal footing to incumbents and challengers, Democrats and Republicans, as well as former and recent presidential campaigners. In essence, debate encourages all politicians to speak a common language.
This study examines the relationships of exposure and attention to various news media, including the Internet, with information learned about the issue positions of candidates George Bush and Al Gore, interest in the 2000 election campaign, and intention to vote among a random sample of adult residents of Indiana who were interviewed by telephone in October and November 2000. The findings are compared with those of previous studies of the 1988, 1992, and 1996 presidential elections. They confirm the importance of television news and television debates as sources of issue information, despite criticisms, and the importance of paying attention to newspaper campaign news for voting. David Weaver is the Roy W. Howard Research Professor in the School of Journalism at Indiana University, where Dan Drew is professor and associate dean for Graduate Studies. They appreciate the support of the Roy W. Howard Chair, the Research & University Graduate School, and the School of Journalism for this research. They especially appreciate the data analysis help of Sung Tae Kim of DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois.
While mediated reaction to presidential debates assumes many forms, one dominant strain of commentary involves the declaration of “who won.” While there is no shortage of opinion about the utility of the press's interest in picking debate winners, we have little understanding of the kinds of arguments employed to make these cases. The paper examines the types of arguments used in one form of media commentary about television debates and advances three claims about the argumentative criteria media analysts employ in declaring winners in presidential debates: (1) editorials are guilty of the same flaws which media critics assert are problems in the debates themselves, (2) the press uses debate criteria which it admits are flawed, and (3) ineffectual argumentative criteria, not the decision to declare debate winners and, losers, demeans the role that presidential debates assume in the political process.
Most Wanted: Drilling Down Presidential Debates; with Questions Come Ratings The New York TimesA Televised Event That Delivered High Drama and Garnered High Ratings
- Mark Glassman
Mark Glassman, ''Most Wanted: Drilling Down Presidential Debates; with Questions Come Ratings,'' The New York Times, October 18, 2004; James Bennet and Jim Rutenberg, ''A Televised Event That Delivered High Drama and Garnered High Ratings,'' The New York Times, October 15 2004.
Who Won?''', 114; Tsfati
- Morello
Morello, '''Who Won?''', 114; Tsfati, ''The Impact of Exposure,''; Weaver and Drew,
''Voter Learning and Interest''.
Inaccuracies in Media Coverage
- Currie Benoit
Benoit and Currie, ''Inaccuracies in Media Coverage.''
The Impact of Exposure
- Tsfati
Tsfati, ''The Impact of Exposure.''
The Next Step: Kill Political Debates
- Charles Gordon
Charles Gordon, ''The Next Step: Kill Political Debates,'' Macleans (1992).
Television News and Presidential Debate Verdicts a Compara-tive Study of Network Newscastspaper presented at the Annual Convention of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research
- James M Bernstein
James M. Bernstein et al., ''Television News and Presidential Debate Verdicts a Compara-tive Study of Network Newscasts, 1976–1988,'' (paper presented at the Annual Convention of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research, Chicago, November 1989).
Poll: Viewers Divided on Debate Winner
- Gary Langer
Gary Langer, ''Poll: Viewers Divided on Debate Winner,'' http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/
Vote2004/story?id=150662 (accessed August 24, 2008).
Assessing Partisan Bias
- Schiffer
Schiffer, ''Assessing Partisan Bias.''
The Effect of Postdebate Analysis 351 Downloaded by
- Ibid
Ibid. The Effect of Postdebate Analysis 351 Downloaded by [University of Illinois Chicago] at 14:19 28 October 2014
A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Viewing U.S. Presidential Debates [8] Mark GlassmanMost Wanted: Drilling Down Presidential Debates; with Questions Come Ratings The New York TimesA Televised Event That Delivered High Drama and Garnered High RatingsVoter Learning
- William L Benoit
- Glenn J Hansen
- Rebecca M Verser
- James Bennet
- Jim Rutenberg
William L. Benoit, Glenn J. Hansen, and Rebecca M. Verser, ''A Meta-Analysis of the
Effects of Viewing U.S. Presidential Debates,'' Communication Monographs 70, no. 4
(2003): 335–350.
[8]
Mark Glassman, ''Most Wanted: Drilling Down Presidential Debates; with Questions Come
Ratings,'' The New York Times, October 18, 2004; James Bennet and Jim Rutenberg, ''A
Televised Event That Delivered High Drama and Garnered High Ratings,'' The New York
Times, October 15 2004.
[9]
Weaver and Drew, ''Voter Learning.''
[10]
Kathleen Hall Jamieson and David S. Birdsell, Presidential Debates: The Challenge of
Creating an Informed Electorate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
The Debate Effect: How the Press Covered the Pivotal Period of the
The Debate Effect: How the Press Covered the Pivotal Period of the 2004 Presidential
Campaign, (Washington, DC: Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2004);
The State of the News Media
The State of the News Media 2005 (Washington, DC: Project for Excellence in Journalism,
2005).
A Critical Examination of Newspaper Editorials Evaluating Nationally Televised DebatesThe Impact of Exposure to Debate News Coverage and Its Interaction with Exposure to the Actual Debate
- T John
- R William
- Jayanthi Elliott
- Sothirajah
John T. Morello, '''Who Won?': A Critical Examination of Newspaper Editorials Evaluating
Nationally Televised Debates,'' Argumentation & Advocacy 27, no. 3 (1991): 114–126; Yariv
Tsfati, ''The Impact of Exposure to Debate News Coverage and Its Interaction with Exposure to the Actual Debate,'' Harvard International Journal of Press=Politics 8, no. 3 (2003):
70–86; David Weaver and Dan Drew, ''Voter Learning and Interest in the 2000 Presidential
Election: Did the Media Matter?,'' Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 78, no. 4
(2001): 787–798; William R. Elliott and Jayanthi Sothirajah, ''Post-Debate Analysis and
Media Reliance: Influences on Candidate Image and Voting Probabilities,'' Journalism
Quarterly 70, no. 2 (1993): 321–335.
Most Wanted: Drilling Down Presidential Debates; with Questions Come Ratings
- Mark Glassman
Mark Glassman, ''Most Wanted: Drilling Down Presidential Debates; with Questions Come
Ratings,'' The New York Times, October 18, 2004; James Bennet and Jim Rutenberg, ''A
Televised Event That Delivered High Drama and Garnered High Ratings,'' The New York
Times, October 15 2004.
Television News and Presidential Debate Verdicts a Comparative Study of Network Newscasts
- James M Bernstein
James M. Bernstein et al., ''Television News and Presidential Debate Verdicts a Comparative Study of Network Newscasts, 1976-1988,'' (paper presented at the Annual Convention
of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research, Chicago, November 1989).