Fighting for attention: Media coverage of negative campaign messages

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 412-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Haselmayer ◽  
Thomas M Meyer ◽  
Markus Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Press Releases ◽  
Negative Campaigning ◽  
Successful Strategy ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Public Opinion Surveys ◽  
Party Strategies ◽  
News Value ◽  
Campaign Messages ◽  
Party Press

The article studies whether and how negative campaigning is a successful strategy for attaining media attention. It combines extensive content analyses of party and news texts with public opinion surveys to study the success of individual press releases in making the news. The empirical analysis draws on 1496 party press releases and 6512 news reports in all national media outlets during the final 6 weeks of Austria’s 2013 general election campaign. We find that negative campaigning is a successful strategy to attract the attention of journalists and editors. It is particularly relevant for rank-and-file politicians, who lack the intrinsic news value of high public or party office, and for messages that focus on a rival’s best issues. These findings have broader implications for understanding party strategies and ‘negativity bias’ in the news.

Who Gets into the Papers? Party Campaign Messages and the Media

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 281-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Meyer ◽  
Martin Haselmayer ◽  
Markus Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Press Releases ◽  
Media Attention ◽  
Party Strategies ◽  
Campaign Messages ◽  
Potential Success ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Reports ◽  
Party Press ◽  
Shed Light

Parties and politicians want their messages to generate media coverage and thereby reach voters. This article examines how attributes related to content and sender affect whether party messages are likely to get media attention. Based on content analyses of 1,613 party press releases and 6,512 media reports in a parliamentary, multiparty context, we suggest that party messages are more likely to make it into the news if they address concerns that are already important to the media or other parties. Discussing these issues may particularly help opposition parties and lower-profile politicians get media attention. These results confirm the importance of agenda setting and gatekeeping, shed light on the potential success of party strategies, and have implications for political fairness and representation.

Are Perceptions of Candidate Traits Shaped by the Media? The Effects of Three Types of Media Bias

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob-Moritz Eberl ◽  
Markus Wagner ◽  
Hajo G. Boomgaarden
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Media Bias ◽  
Newspaper Coverage ◽  
Direct Impact ◽  
Press Releases ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Media ◽  
Party Press ◽  
Candidate Perceptions ◽  
The Impact

Media coverage can influence how citizens think about their political leaders. This study explores how three types of media bias (visibility bias, tonality bias, and agenda bias) affect voter assessments of politicians’ traits. Bias effects should be stronger for political traits (such as competence) than for nonpolitical traits (such as likability). Biases may also interact in their effects: Specifically, visibility bias should moderate the impact of tonality bias. Combining media, party, and survey data through manual content analysis of newspaper coverage ( N = 2,680) and party press releases ( N = 1,794), as well as a three-wave voter survey ( n = 927) during the 2013 Austrian election campaign, we find substantial effects of tonality bias and agenda bias on political trait perceptions. The effects are less clear for nonpolitical trait perceptions. Although visibility bias has no direct impact, there is evidence that it moderates effects of tonality bias on candidate perceptions.

Negative and Personalized Campaign Rhetoric: Party Communication and Media Coverage of Danish Parliamentary Elections 1994–2011

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 365-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Elmelund-Præstekær ◽  
Helle Mølgaard-Svensson
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Party Leader ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
Negative Campaigning ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Campaign Rhetoric ◽  
Campaign Messages ◽  
The Media

AbstractThe Danish 2011 national election campaign was allegedly characterized by the toughest political rhetoric ever in contemporary Danish politics. The political parties and the candidates apparently decided to “go negative” to a greater extent than usually. But was the 2011 campaign rhetoric actually the most negative in modern history? We seek the answer by means of quantitative content analysis of parties’ newspaper ads, party leaders’ letters to the editor and statements in party leader debates. We first compare the 2011 campaign with the five preceding campaigns and conclude that it was indeed the least negative of them all. We then compare the parties’ communication and the media coverage of the campaign to discover that the media strongly – and increasingly – emphasize the parties’ negative campaign messages relative to the positive messages. In sum: Danish parties were not especially prone to engage in negative campaigning in the 2011 election, but the media made the parties look more negative than in earlier campaigns.

scholarly journals Friendly fire? Negative campaigning among coalition partners

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 205316801879691 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Haselmayer ◽  
Marcelo Jenny
Keyword(s):  
Party Competition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Press Releases ◽  
Negative Campaigning ◽  
Friendly Fire ◽  
Coalition Politics ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Party Press ◽  
The One

In democracies with multi-party competition, government parties face a dual challenge in election campaigns: on the one hand, they have to compete against and criticize their coalition partners. On the other hand, they should avoid virulent attacks on their partners to preserve their chances of future collaboration in government. Going beyond a dichotomous operationalization of negative campaigning, this manuscript analyses the tonality and volume of negative campaigning. Studying 3030 party press releases in four national Austrian election campaigns, different patterns for the tonality and frequency of negative campaigning reflect the electoral dilemma of government parties. Coalition parties criticize each other abundantly but refrain from ‘burning bridges’ with their partners through virulent attacks. These findings have implications for studying negative campaigning and coalition politics.

One Bias Fits All? Three Types of Media Bias and Their Effects on Party Preferences

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (8) ◽  
pp. 1125-1148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob-Moritz Eberl ◽  
Hajo G. Boomgaarden ◽  
Markus Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Party Identification ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Media Bias ◽  
Parliamentary Election ◽  
Press Releases ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political News ◽  
Party Press ◽  
Using Data

Bias in political news coverage may have a profound influence on voter opinions and preferences. However, the concept of media bias actually encompasses different sub-types: Visibility bias is the salience of political actors, tonality bias the evaluation of these actors, and agenda bias the extent to which parties address preferred issues in media coverage. The present study is the first to explore how each type of bias influences party preferences. Using data from the Austrian parliamentary election campaign of 2013, we combine an online panel survey ( n = 1,285) with measures of media bias from content analyses of party press releases ( n = 1,922) and media coverage in eight newspapers ( n = 6,970). We find substantial effects on party preferences for tonality bias and agenda bias, while visibility bias has no clear impact. Voters who are less politically sophisticated and lack a party identification are more susceptible to bias, and media bias can also reinforce existing partisan identities.

Taking Aim at Attack Advertising

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Fridkin ◽  
Patrick Kenney
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Empirical Validation ◽  
Negative Campaigning ◽  
Senate Elections ◽  
Campaign Messages ◽  
Negative Messages ◽  
The Impact

This book develops and tests the “tolerance and tactics theory of negativity.” The theory argues that citizens differ in their tolerance of negative campaigning. Also, candidates vary in the tactics used to attack their opponents, with negative messages varying in their relevance to voters and in the civility of their tone. The interplay between citizens’ tolerance of negativity and candidates’ negative messages helps clarify when negative campaigning will influence citizens’ evaluations of candidates and their likelihood of voting. A diverse set of data sources was collected from U.S. Senate elections (e.g., survey data, experiments, content analysis, focus groups) across several years to test the theory. The tolerance and tactics theory of negativity receives strong empirical validation. First, people differ systematically in their tolerance for negativity, and their tolerance changes over the course of the campaign. Second, people’s levels of tolerance consistently and powerfully influence how they assess negative messages. Third, the relevance and civility of negative messages consistently influence citizens’ assessments of candidates competing for office. That is, negative messages focusing on relevant topics and utilizing an uncivil tone produce significant changes in people’s impressions of the candidates. Furthermore, people’s tolerance of negativity influences their susceptibility to negative campaigning. Specifically, relevant and uncivil messages are most influential for people who are least tolerant of negative campaigning. The relevance and civility of campaign messages also alter people’s likelihood of voting, and the impact of negative messages on turnout is more consequential for people with less tolerance of negativity.

News production theory and practice

Pragmatics ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Van Hout ◽  
Geert Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Process Analysis ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Press Releases ◽  
News Production ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Business News ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Control

This paper considers notions of agency, interaction and power in business news journalism. In the first part, we present a bird’s eye view of news access theory as it is reflected in selected sociological and anthropological literature on the ethnography of news production. Next, we show how these theoretical notions can be applied to the study of press releases and particularly to the linguistic pragmatic analysis of the specific social and textual practices that surround their transformation into news reports. Drawing on selected fieldwork data collected at the business desk of a major Flemish quality newspaper, we present an innovative methodology combining newsroom ethnography and computer-assisted writing process analysis which documents how a reporter discovers a story, introduces it into the newsroom, writes and reflects on it. In doing so, we put the individual journalist’s writing practices center stage, zoom in on the specific ways in which he interacts with sources and conceptualize power in terms of his dependence on press releases. Following Beeman & Peterson (2001), we argue in favor of a view of journalism as ‘interpretive practice’ and of news production as a process of entextualization involving multiple actors who struggle over authority, ownership and control.

Looking over the channel: The balance of media coverage about the “refugee crisis” in Germany and the UK

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Maurer ◽  
Jörg Haßler ◽  
Simon Kruschinski ◽  
Pablo Jost
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Television News ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Value Theory ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
British Government ◽  
News Value ◽  
The Uk

Abstract This study compares the balance of newspaper and television news coverage about migration in two countries that were differently affected by the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015 in terms of the geopolitical involvement and numbers of migrants being admitted. Based on a broad consensus among political elites, Germany left its borders open and received about one million migrants mainly from Syria during 2015. In contrast, the conservative British government was heavily attacked by oppositional parties for closing Britain’s borders and, thus, restricting immigration. These different initial situations led to remarkable differences between the news coverage in both countries. In line with news value theory, German media outlets reported much more on migration than did their British counterparts. In line with indexing theory, German news coverage consonantly reflected the consensual view of German political elites, while British news media reported along their general editorial lines.

scholarly journals Are microtargeted campaign messages more negative and diverse? An analysis of Facebook Ads in European election campaigns

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto López Ortega
Keyword(s):  
Future Research ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
National Elections ◽  
Negative Campaigning ◽  
Original Dataset ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Campaign Messages ◽  
European Election

AbstractConcerns about the use of online political microtargeting (OPM) by campaigners have arisen since the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit the international political arena. In addition to providing conceptual clarity on OPM and explore the use of such techniques in Europe, this paper seeks to empirically disentangle the differing behaviours of campaigners when they message citizens through microtargeted rather than non-targeted campaigning. More precisely, I hypothesise that campaigners use negative campaigning and are more diverse in terms of topics when they use OPM. To investigate whether these expectations hold true, I use text-as-data techniques to analyse an original dataset of 4,091 political Facebook Ads during the last national elections in Austria, Italy, Germany and Sweden. Results show that while microtargeted ads might indeed be more thematically diverse, there does not seem to be a significant difference to non-microtargeted ads in terms of negativity. In conclusion, I discuss the implications of these findings for microtargeted campaigns and how future research could be conducted.

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