Presidential Candidate Viability & Partisan Online ... - Omnifoo.info

This effect applies to presidential campaigns in establishing which candidates are important—or more
tailored to the context, viable and electable—and thereby deserving of more attention and scrutiny, and which
are simply not worth thinking about, for various reasons. 2
While most media sources, even those professing to
report objectively and neutrally 3 , seek to shape evaluations of candidates, what are both more verifiable and
effective, though not necessarily intentional, are the quantitative coverage differences which leave some
candidates “off the agenda”. This study seeks to show empirically that the smaller amounts of coverage
afforded to those candidates whose polling number place them in the “dark horse” or “also-ran” category
assure that they remain so. Less flattering for the “mainstream” media is the disproportionate coverage given
to candidates embroiled in scandals, combining the predatory “feeding frenzy” effects with market incentives
to sensationalize, aptly described by Zaller’s “burglar alarm” model of news coverage and lamented in
Patterson’s Out of Order, among other texts favoring a “full news” standard. 4
Scholarly literature on the relationship of presidential primary success and mass media coverage is
surprisingly thin. Much, however, has been written about who votes in presidential primaries and why—or
much more likely, why not. 2008 voter turnout in presidential primaries fell just short of the record set in 1972,
with just under a third of eligible citizens casting ballots. 5
Intuitively, those in this group of voters must at least
be more politically active than the electorate as a whole, but the debate on whether primary voters are more
U.S. presidential campaigns. Farnsworth and Lichter’s book also outlines three theories of media effects on politics, largely adopting a
middle ground between “hypodermic” and “minimal effects” models, akin to agenda setting.
2 Deeming a campaign or candidate “unwinnable”, however factual, is often accompanied in mass media by unverifiable claims that
s/he is only running for egotistic or instrumental reasons and fabricates a convenient but unfortunate pretext for ignoring the issues
such candidates seek to raise. This study argues, contrarily and with no lack of evidence, that such campaigns soldier on in the face of
impossible odds precisely because they are committed in principle to champion causes which the front-runners either de-emphasize or
completely neglect.
3 Many media studies highlight an important difference between being objective and neutral, and here it is also key to the distinction
between partisan and non-partisan media. Being objective in reporting means primarily conveying facts, making very clear that
opinions and partisan statements are those of particular individuals only, “not necessarily” those of the media outlet. Thus, a media
outlet can easily, perhaps usually, give subtle preference to certain facts and opinions over others, thereby maintaining objectivity
while being far from neutral. And besides all this, few and weak indeed are the pundits who do not claim their views are “factually
based”.
4 While the debate seems far from settled, a consensus may be drawn in that the Burglar Alarm standard is closer to the status quo,
according to Bennett, and also deeply flawed for attracting public attention to one scandal after another, many of which are ephemeral
and all but irrelevant to larger issues. If news coverage is deeply flawed and insufficient in this model, Patterson (2003), Prior,
Waldman, and many others suggest that changing patterns of media consumption away from broadcast television and newspapers may
be further reducing the resources necessary for an unattainable “full news” ideal.
5 See Gans and generally American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate.
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