U.S. Media and Elections in Flux

Dynamics and Strategies

David A. Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317679271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Paid, earned, and social media are all crucial elements of modern electioneering, yet there is a scarcity of supplementary texts for campaigns and election courses that cover all types of media. Equally, media and politics courses cover election-related topics, yet there are few books that cover these subjects comprehensively.

This brief and accessible book bridges the gap by discussing media in the context of U.S elections. David A. Jones divides the book into two parts, with the first analyzing the wide array of media outlets citizens use to inform themselves during elections. Jones covers traditional, mainstream news media and opinion/entertainment-based media, as well as new media outlets such as talk shows, blogs, and late-night comedy programs. The second half of the book assesses how campaigns and candidates have adapted to the changing media environment. These chapters focus on earned media strategies, paid media strategies, and social media strategies.

Written in a concise and accessible style while including recent scholarly research, the book will appeal to students with its combination of academic rigor and readability. U.S. Media and Elections in Flux will be a useful supplementary textbook for courses on campaigns and elections, media and politics, and American introductory politics.

1THE NEWS MEDIA

DOI: 10.4324/9781315772721-1

By most measures, the news media are in deep trouble. Newspaper circulation has declined steadily for two decades, as have audience ratings for television news. Both are losing eyes and ears to talk shows and other opinion-based outlets, which are attracting small but growing audiences of highly engaged citizens. Many younger voters are getting their “news” from late-night comedy and other entertainment-oriented programming (Chapter 2). A swiftly growing number of Americans are getting their election news via Facebook, Twitter and other online social media platforms (Chapter 5). News organizations have adapted by massively escalating their online presence, allowing them to preserve and sometimes expand their audiences. But online advertising has fallen short for news organizations: there is plenty of it, but it earns nowhere near the revenue of conventional print ads and TV spots.

All of this means that campaigns can ignore the news media, right? Not so fast. Many voters still watch and read “the news” and turn to traditional media outlets to provide it. According to the 2013 report on “The State of the News Media” by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, newspaper circulation may have stabilized after many years of steady decline. In 2012, about 22 million people reported watching the evening news on either ABC, CBS or NBC—down only slightly from 2008. Local television viewership dropped more sharply during that period, but nearly half of respondents reported that they still watch their local news regularly (Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism 2013a). Most Americans over the age of 50 remain regular viewers of television news (Pew 2013a) and—as any campaign professional will tell you—these people vote regularly. Overall, although the report paints a disturbing portrait of steady decline, its findings remind us that traditional news media are still crucial sources of information during elections.

Indeed, for media coverage of major election-related events, live television is still where mass audiences gather. In 2012, for example, election night news coverage by the network and cable news networks attracted 66.8 million viewers during prime time, only slightly less than the record audience of 71.5 million people who watched televised news coverage of Barack Obama's historic victory in 2008 (Stelter 2012a). The first debate between Obama and Mitt Romney was watched by 67.2 million people on television at home—the largest audience for a first debate since the 1980 matchup between Ronald Reagan and then-President Jimmy Carter (Stelter 2012b).

It is true that the ground has shifted. As we will see in subsequent chapters, social media platforms and other online media outlets provide a relatively cost-effective means of bypassing the news media and communicating with voters directly. Yet without traditional news organizations, there wouldn't be much news to opine about on a talk show or blog, spoof on late-night comedy, tweet on Twitter, or share on Facebook. Journalists, whether they work for a traditional news outlet or an online startup, provide nearly all the original reporting that makes up the news. For this reason alone, maintaining a working relationship with professional reporters remains the most important part of a campaign's “earned media” strategy. It thus makes sense to develop a comprehensive understanding of how journalists cover elections, why they cover elections in these ways, and the impact of modern election news coverage on how voters think and behave.

Who Are the News Media?

This chapter focuses on the news media. These are media outlets that are primarily concerned with providing the news—that is, information about current events—as reported by professional journalists. Traditionally the news media are also called the “press,” a holdover from when most journalists worked for newspapers. Today they are commonly referred to as the mainstream media (sometimes abbreviated as the MSM). On the print side, examples include daily newspapers, the most prominent of which serve both a local and national audience—e.g., The New York Times and Washington Post—or are purely national in scope—e.g., The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. The Associated Press and other wire services supply national and international news stories to local newspapers and websites around the country. On television, examples of the news media include local television news broadcasts, the nightly network news, and the news operations of 24-hour cable news channels. All of these news media outlets have a significant presence online in the form of websites, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds. Indeed, these outlets now reach most of their readers and viewers online.

News media outlets are staffed by journalists—reporters, editors, producers, etc.—who work together to produce “stories” about current events. Journalists are professionally trained in their craft, and that training includes an emphasis on professional norms. The most important norm is to cover the news objectively—that is, in an even-handed, neutral, fair and balanced or non-partisan fashion. Objectivity emerged as a journalistic norm in the 20^th century, and it did so for a variety of reasons. This was the century of the “mass media,” when audiences were huge and politically diverse. By covering political events in a neutral manner, media outlets could present the news without offending large portions of their audience. After World War II, the Federal Communications Commission implemented the Fairness Doctrine, which required television and radio broadcasters to cover controversial information in a balanced manner—a regulation that remained in place until the late 1980s. Meanwhile, journalism was shifting from a blue-collar profession to one that required a college degree, and the journalism schools (“J-schools”) that attracted many would-be reporters, editors and producers reinforced objectivity and other professional norms (West 2001).

Today, it seems hopelessly naïve to think anyone—even a trained reporter—could report the news objectively. Even so, it remains a goal of most professional journalists. This professional norm sets journalists apart from talk show hosts and bloggers, who are primarily concerned with expressing their opinions or interpreting the news in a one-sided, sometimes inflammatory fashion.

For all their faults, journalists are also keen to provide good “newsworthy” stories that are fair, accurate and important—or, “buzzworthy,” to use the contemporary term. Sometimes they are driven by selfish motivations: they strive for professional prestige by authoring stories that lead the news broadcast or appear on the front page; stories that go viral on social media; stories that win journalism awards. Yet these selfish motivations are not always incompatible with the needs of a democratic society. Democracies need their media to, at minimum, inform citizens about public affairs and scrutinize the actions of the powerful. Modern journalists are motivated to produce rigorously reported news stories that “make a difference.” Their role models are more likely to be Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, not Fox News talk show host Bill O'Reilly or MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.

It is also true, however, that most journalists in the United States work for profit-seeking news organizations that are part of a larger corporation. The largest newspaper chain, Gannett, owns USA Today and a variety of local newspapers, as well as 43 television stations across the country. Comcast isn't just a cable and internet provider—it also owns NBC, MSNBC, and 24 local television stations. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has an enormous global reach—in the U.S., News Corp. holdings include Fox News on cable television, the Fox broadcast network, and The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post newspapers. CBS Corporation owns not only the broadcast network (including CBS News) but also 29 local television stations and 130 CBS radio affiliates. ABC is owned by Disney. In 2012, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Company bought 23 daily newspapers from the troubled Media General Company chain. Other news organizations are privately owned, including The Washington Post, purchased in 2013 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio.

The bottom line: nearly all news organizations in the U.S. are businesses, and businesses strive to make profits. That means generating sufficient revenue while controlling costs. And since most news organizations are part of publicly traded corporations, it isn't enough to merely make a profit—they are pressured to enhance the company's ability to increase profits over time.

The problem is, two-thirds of the news revenue comes from advertising (Pew 2013a), and advertising revenue has dropped sharply since the 1990s, especially for newspapers. Newspapers have been devastated by the nearly complete loss of classified advertising to Craigslist and other online sources. They also have been hard hit by declines in industries that had spent heavily on print advertising for much of the 20^th century: department stores and auto dealers. Newspapers have expanded their readership online, but online advertising revenues are nowhere near enough to compensate. According to one study, for every $1 gained in online advertising revenue, newspapers have lost $7 in print advertising (Pew 2013b). Meanwhile, television news audiences are aging, which means news programs are less attractive to advertisers aiming to reach viewers between the ages of 25 and 54—widely seen as the “sweet spot” for consumer spending. Once a source of huge profits for media corporations, advertising revenue for television news is now flat (Pew 2013a).

Faced with a grim revenue situation, media outlets have cut costs by scaling back their news operations. The number of full-time editorial jobs at newspapers plummeted from 56,400 in 2001 to 36,700 in 2014, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors (2014). The Star-Ledger, New Jersey's largest newspaper, cut 25 percent of its newsroom staff in April 2014. The New Orleans Times Picayune cut half of its newsroom staff in 2012. Even The New York Times has eliminated newsroom positions. The Washington Post editorial staff has been cut dramatically.

Naturally, these cutbacks have had a negative impact on news coverage of elections. Presidential campaigns still get intense, round-the-clock scrutiny. But local news media now lack the reporting resources to thoroughly cover state, local and Congressional elections. Stretched thin across multiple beats, many local newspaper and television reporters have neither the time nor the incentives to develop a particular expertise. Instead, much of the shrinking news hole for election news is filled by stories supplied by wire services, especially the Associated Press, which naturally are less equipped to provide local news. The 2002 race for governor of California was the focus of less than one percent of local news broadcast in the month of October (Iyengar 2011). According to one study, 92 percent of local news broadcasts in the month before the 2004 elections contained no stories at all about campaigns for the U.S. House and state and local offices. Based on content analysis of local news broadcasts in 11 media markets, this study reported that TV stations ran five times more paid advertisements by House and Senate candidates than news stories about their races (Kaplan, Goldstein and Hale 2005). In short, both the quantity and quality of election news have taken a hit.

Some of these developments are old news. The U.S. media environment has been highly commercialized since the advent of the penny press in the 19^th century. Business pressures have always placed constraints on good journalism. But now more than ever, news organizations compete with each other—as well as providers of more entertaining fare—for the eyes and ears of the American public. The resulting content is a mixed bag: plenty of high-quality information for news junkies with the means and motivation to pay for it, but increasingly thin, superficial, sensational and fundamentally flawed fare for less discerning citizens.

Patterns of Elections News Coverage

What does all of this mean for the content of election news? On what aspects of elections do the news media focus? Ideally, the news media will provide information about candidates’ issue positions and policy platforms, relevant background characteristics, and past performance. What is the reality? How do the news media cover elections?

Interpretation and Analysis

One long-term trend that has shaped election news coverage has been the decades-long shift toward more interpretive journalism (West 2001). The tendency accelerated in the 1970s, by which time the shortcomings of conventional objective reporting had become apparent. While traditional objective news aimed to be fair and balanced, critics charged that it lacked the context voters needed to make sense out of the factual information being presented. Objectivity was partly blamed for political failures that could have been prevented had the media been more aggressive and less...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of boxes
• Introduction
• 1 The News Media
• 2 New Options
• 3 Earned Media
• 4 Paid Media
• 5 Social Media
• Conclusion
• Index