Reporting Elections

Rethinking the Logic of Campaign Coverage

Stephen Cushion, Richard Thomas

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509517541
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

How elections are reported has important implications for the health of democracy and informed citizenship. But, how informative are the news media during campaigns? What kind of logic do they follow? How well do they serve citizens?e Based on original research as well as the most comprehensive assessment of election studies to date, Cushion and Thomas examine how campaigns are reported in many advanced Western democracies. In doing so, they engage with debates about the mediatization of politics, media systems, information environments, media ownership, regulation, political news, horserace journalism, objectivity, impartiality, agenda-setting, and the relationship between media and democracy more generally. Focusing on the most recent US and UK election campaigns, they consider how the logic of election coverage could be rethought in ways that better serve the democratic needs of citizens. Above all, they argue that election reporting should be driven by a public logic, where the agenda of voters takes centre stage in the campaign and the policies of respective political parties receive more airtime and independent scrutiny. The book is essential reading for scholars and students in political communication and journalism studies, political science, media and communication studies.

1
Setting the Campaign Agenda

Campaign agenda-setters: towards an understanding of media, political and public logics

An electoral contest is fought principally between political parties competing for power. They do so by campaigning in ‘air’ and ‘ground’ warfare, drawing on increasingly sophisticated communication strategies and practices to appeal to voters. While the ground war broadly represents direct ways of party campaigning, such as meeting voters face to face or targeting them digitally, the air war primarily involves parties influencing mass-media content on television or in newspapers or online or social media platforms. A voluminous literature about how each type of campaign warfare is planned and executed has steadily grown, with painstaking research and first-hand accounts of how elections are won or lost on the ‘ground’ or in the ‘air’ (see, for example, Kreiss 2012, 2016; Nielsen 2012; Vaccari 2008; West 2014).

The focus in this chapter – and, indeed, the book in general – is on the air war during a campaign and, more specifically, making sense of the influences behind the editorial selection of election reporting in television news. After all, while the race for power is between political parties during an election, the air war is fought by a far wider range of actors that, in different ways, contribute to the formation of media agendas (McCombs 2004; Semetko et al. 1991). McCombs’s metaphorical onion provides a vivid illustration of the many layers of influence shaping news agendas. In peeling back the onion to its core, McCombs (2014: 111) argues that the metaphor ‘illustrates the sequential nature of this process in which the influence of an outer layer is, in turn, affected by layers more proximate to the core of the onion.’ The outer core is represented by sources of news, such as leaders of political parties, particularly the president or prime minister, or other external influences, for example lobbyists, think tanks, academics and voters. Deep inside the onion lie the professional norms and values of news outlets, which operate according to their own regulatory framework and editorial goals. News media can also feed off each other, known as intermedia agenda-setting.

Our emphasis in this chapter is not just on the agenda-setting power of the media but on the role played by political actors and voters in shaping election coverage. Although there is a clear interdependence between these three primary actors, each has a degree of independence from the others, as competing interests and needs shape the agenda-setting process during an election campaign (McCombs 2014; Semetko et al. 1991). We consider, in particular, the intense power struggle between media and political actors and unpack a wide range of empirical news studies that have explored the battle to control the agenda during election campaigns. While external actors such as lobbyists or special interest groups also play an agenda-setting role, they all influence the actions and behaviour of media, political parties and voters in different but overlapping ways. So, for example, business lobbies may influence the content of election coverage, the manifestos of parties or people’s voting attitudes based on their assessment of the state of the economy. Different stakeholders, in other words, play an important, if not always visible, role in the formation of agenda-setting during an election campaign and beyond.

Extending the metaphorical onion of news selection, previous election news research – as the introductory chapter argued – has focused too heavily on the layers of influence shaping campaign reporting generally, most prominently in the US or in first-order elections. As a result, our understanding of news agendas in different types of electoral contests, across media systems and between political cultures or levels of voter engagement, is limited. We need to develop a more comparative and empirically richer mode of inquiry in political communication research and bring to light the range of factors that shape news agendas internationally and between different types of elections. We consider the agenda-setting influences of election reporting by drawing on the mediatisation of politics framework, introduced in the opening chapter. Our focus is not only the editorial influences shaping media and political logics during an election campaign – which dominate debates about the mediatisation of politics (Esser and Strömbäck 2014) – but how, and in what ways, a public logic informs the agenda-setting process. Since a key aim of the book is to explore how well the media inform citizens about an electoral contest, the final part of the chapter considers how a public agenda – or logic – can be evaluated when interpreting campaign coverage.

Overall, the aim of this chapter is to consider the editorial influences behind election reporting, beginning first with how scholars have explored the role of the media in setting the election agenda, then moving on to the role played by political actors and the general public. In doing so, we develop a framework that explains how subsequent chapters will analyse and assess the quality of campaign coverage.

Agenda-setting power in a fragmented environment: interpreting media vs. political logic

At the core of the metaphorical onion, the media have a central role in election agenda-setting. While politicians can canvass voters face to face or communicate with them directly on social media or in large rallies, established news outlets, such as the BBC, CNN or ABC, remain the most influential platforms for informing people about politics. Why else, for example, was the US president – Donald Trump – so incensed by negative post-2016 election coverage when he has nearly 50 million followers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram? Since most democracies allow the media to have the editorial freedom to decide on what to report – or exclude – it would appear journalists and editors, above all, have the decisive agenda-setting power when reporting elections. However, the theory and practice of agenda-setting is far from that straightforward, with editorial decision-making influenced indirectly by political forces, as well as by wider economic and cultural factors that shape the production of news (McCombs 2014).

In recent years it has been claimed that media agenda-setting power has been diminishing, since people can access a greater range of news outlets (Johnson 2014). So, for example, where once the three US television networks ABC, CBS and NBC were unquestionably key sources of news that reached tens of millions of Americans, the emergence of dedicated cable news channels, online news and, more recently, social media platforms has meant that their ability to influence people has gradually waned (Mitchell and Holcomb 2016). Between them, they still attract audiences of approximately 25 million – far more than cable or online platforms reach. But their degree of agenda-setting influence is waning in a more fragmented media environment.

In isolating particular news outlets, however, we risk overlooking the collective and systemic process of media agenda-setting power. McCombs (1997) has labelled this the consensus-building role of the media, which sets a framework of issues that inform public debate and people’s priorities. As research in political communication and journalism studies has long revealed, a broadly shared agenda is driven by economic, social and ideological factors that police the boundaries of news across different media systems and political cultures (Herman and Chomsky 1988; Philo 1990). The editorial selection of political news, for example, is not left to the discretion of individual journalists but broadly navigated by a set of news values that help constitute ‘what’s news’. Harcup and O’Neill’s (2001, 2016) systematic analysis of news values over time has shown, on the one hand, that the selection of news is fluid and informed by many factors, such as the resources at the outlet’s disposal, the time sensitivity of a story, the type of media and who owns it, and internal organisational pressures, along with other less tangible influences. On the other hand, their evidence shows that, for the most part journalists share a taxonomy of stories that signal greater newsworthiness than others. Put more simply, despite the growth of news media outlets over recent years, the power of agenda-setting has not necessarily diminished or led to a more diverse agenda of news reporting. There remains a conformity of reporting which, as Harcup and O’Neill’s (2016) latest study points out, bursts the bubble of many new media enthusiasts who had predicted that the media environment would become radically fragmented. However, there are signs that the gatekeeping power of established media is being challenged. During the 2017 UK election campaign, for example, some of the most shared online stories came from alt-left sites, such as The Canary, Evolve Politics and Another Angry Voice (Waterson and Phillips 2017). Nevertheless, the evidence generally shows the most widely shared news on platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, for instance, tend to be established mainstream media brands, such as Fox, the BBC, CNN, The Mail and The Guardian (Newman et al. 2016). In other words, while the consumption of news may have changed in the age of social media and smartphones, it has not been radically transformed, since many people in today’s online world continue to rely on the same offline sources.

In considering the editorial power of media in election coverage or political reporting more generally, scholars have increasingly turned to the concept of mediatisation. Broadly put, the mediatisation of politics asks whether political coverage has increasingly succumbed to a media logic, promoting its own set of news values to make the editorial decisions as to what should – and should not – be reported. Within this framework, media logic is defined in opposition to a political logic, both of which – it is argued – can be empirically measured according to a set of criteria. As Strömbäck and Esser put it:

The media can be more or less important as a source of information, and more or less independent from political institutions, and media content as well as political institutions and actors can be more or less guided by media logic as opposed to political logic. There might also be variations across different media and, not least importantly, different political actors, organizations and institutions, both within and across countries. The degree of mediatization along different dimensions is ultimately an empirical question and most often contextual. (2014: 7; original emphasis)

By following this framework, our aim is to answer this empirical question by drawing on a comprehensive range of studies that have examined media coverage of elections across different media systems, political cultures and advanced Western democracies. In doing so, we can draw evidence-based conclusions about the editorial power of the media during different election campaigns, asking if a media logic supersedes a political logic or whether the media agenda is influenced to a greater degree by political parties.

Comparing how media and political actors influence an election campaign is not a straightforward empirical task. As we argue throughout the book, while we can examine macro-ways of broadly understanding whether more of a media or political logic was pursued over an election campaign, it remains important to consider the micro-factors that influenced the editorial selection of coverage (Semetko et al. 1991). This requires more background and contextual analysis of specific election campaigns, which we provide in different chapters by developing relevant UK and US case studies. Comparative analysis is easier in a macroapproach, such as examining the quantitative supply of news in campaign reporting or the types of sources used to inform election coverage. So, for example, if a news item was principally about the process of politics, such as reporting the razzmatazz behind a campaign event, the personality of a candidate or the horserace contest between political parties, it could be seen as symptomatic of a media logic (Takens et al. 2013). Broadly speaking, these types of stories are viewed as reflecting the strategic game frame, which is seen to inject excitement and drama into routine political reporting (Aalberg et al. 2012). By contrast, if an election item is primarily about a policy issue, such as the economy, public health, crime or international affairs, within the mediatisation framework it is generally viewed as representing a political logic (Strömbäck and Esser 2014). At various points throughout the book we question this premise, in particular when understanding the 2015 UK general election and the 2016 US presidential campaign (see chapters 2, 4 and 5). Overall, according to the mediatisation of politics framework, reporting policy issues rather than campaign process represents evidence of party political influence during an election campaign.

The influence of political actors informing media agendas during an election campaign is more empirically visible by assessing how far they actually appear in coverage, rather than when journalists speak for them. After all, when political actors have the opportunity to speak in person, they can exercise at least some control over how they are represented. This is most commonly measured by the length of soundbites – the period of time that politicians speak uninterrupted on-screen. But, generally speaking, research has shown political actors have been granted less time to appear in television news. This was established by Hallin’s (1992) longitudinal study of presidential election reporting in US network news, which revealed that the average length of political soundbites was reduced from 43 seconds in 1968 to just 9 seconds in 1988. Of course, this period witnessed a major transformation in communication technology, allowing broadcasters to edit raw footage more easily.

But technology alone cannot explain how far politicians were allowed to appear on television news, since comparative studies have revealed the political and journalistic culture of different countries can influence editorial decisions (de Vreese et al. 2017; Semetko et al. 1991). As far back as the 1980s, for example, the study of election reporting by Semetko and her colleagues discovered that US network television news gave far less space and time for political parties to articulate their messages than UK broadcasters. In their view, US media exercised greater ‘discretionary power’ over political coverage, with journalists interpreting rather than simply conveying the views and behaviour of political actors (Semetko et al. 1991: 4). Put more simply, the US media set the election campaign agenda to a greater degree than their counterparts in the UK.

Semetko et al. (1991) outlined a number of macro- and micro-factors that accounted for the differences between nations in editorial power, but chief among them was the role played by public service broadcasting in the UK. Whereas the loosely regulated system of network television in the US was driven largely by commercial decisions, UK broadcasters operated within a public service framework, with stricter editorial guidelines about balance and impartiality. UK broadcasters thus considered it editorially appropriate to grant political parties greater airtime to articulate their messages. However, according to Blumler and Coleman (2010), subsequent decades witnessed an erosion of public service values in the UK and a shift towards a more American style of interpretive journalism. In doing so, journalists appear to have greater autonomy and control in setting the election campaign. The chapters that follow both examine whether UK coverage remains distinctive from that of the US and explore wider shifts in journalism that might influence who sets the campaign agenda.

Within the mediatisation framework, greater journalistic interventionism represents a victory of media over political logic. This has been measured not only by the relative length of political soundbites but by the role played by journalists according to certain criteria. So, for example, enhanced interventionism – or discretionary power – has been interpreted as journalists becoming ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction: Studying Elections
• 1 Setting the Campaign Agenda
• 2 Reporting Election Campaigns
• 3 Making Sense of Horserace Reporting
• 4 Regulating Balance and Impartiality
• 5 The Trumpification of Election News
• Conclusion: Rethinking Election Reporting
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement