Tiago Silva, European University Institute
This paper addresses the unclear and puzzling responsibility of both traditional media and political actors for the absence of substantial political issues in the media coverage of political elections. In fact, the literature has been observing, especially since the early 90s, an increasing tendency of the press and television, when reporting politics, to emphasize conflict, strategy, horse-race and other entertaining and controversial aspects, instead of presenting relevant policy information to the citizens. This trend of framing political events, by the traditional media, is worth of studying since it threatens the well functioning of modern democracy in two different ways: by making the citizens less informed; and by affecting citizens’ attitudes towards politics, increasing not only citizens’ political cynicism but also reducing their sense of political efficacy. It also raises the following question: Why does the traditional media coverage of elections emphasize the strategy/horse-race and conflict in the campaigns and lacks other important aspects, as the candidates and parties’ positions on relevant political issues? There are two possible answers. The first puts the responsibility on the media, with a large amount of literature blaming the messenger, stating that the uninformative news coverage results from the media distortion of the real campaign. On the other hand, it is possible that the accusations of lack of interest in reporting policy issues by traditional media are, somehow, unfair or exacerbated. The news coverage by the traditional media may, in fact, reflect new political campaigns where candidates are more concerned with strategic and mass marketing ideals and less worried about presenting substantial policy information to the electorate.
The Internet and Social Networking Sits (SNS) arise, in this context, as an important instrument for political parties and candidates to bypass the traditional media and easily reach voters, presenting their ideas and positions directly to them at a relatively small cost. I argue that most of the literature that studies the role of the Internet in political campaigns, by focusing almost exclusively on the electoral impact of the Internet, the potential to targeting voters and its interactive features, is neglecting the potential of the institutional communication made in the Internet as, perhaps, a more informative and less negative way for political actors to communicate with voters during electoral campaigns.
The research question of this paper is: How informative are the unmediated electoral campaigns made on the SNS, in comparison to their traditional news coverage? Or, to frame it in a different way, to what extent is the media logic and agenda of traditional mass media hindering the electoral competitors from producing more informative and less conflict-driven campaigns? The objective is to compare the electoral campaigns by the candidates in the SNS with the traditional news media coverage of those campaigns, examining the existence of differences in the frames used in those two communication means.
In order to examine this question we developed two sets of competing hypotheses: Uninformative news and Hollow campaigns. The first set suggests that the candidates’ attempts, during campaigns, to convey and discuss substantial political issues are, somehow, obstructed and reframed by the media’s commercial pretensions. In this perspective, the highly controversial and uninformative news of electoral campaigns are the result of the journalistic/editorial norms and commercial principles that nowadays rule traditional media. Considering this, we can expect that if the media logic or journalistic conventions are responsible for making the news coverage of electoral campaigns less informative then:
H1a – The media coverage of the parties/candidates elections campaigns will give less emphasis to issues/policies than the campaign presented by these parties/candidates in the Social Network Sites.
H1b– The media coverage of the parties/candidates elections campaigns will give more emphasis to strategy and horse-race aspects than the campaign presented by these parties/candidates in the Social Network Sites.
H1c – The media coverage of the parties/candidates elections campaigns will show more conflict between political actors than the campaign presented by these parties/candidates in the Social Network Sites.
H1d – The SNS will offer a higher diversity of issues.
On the other hand, theories of political mass-marketing strategy make us question how fair the accusations of the media’s lack of interest in political issues are, suggesting that traditional media news coverage might be controversial, entertaining and lack substantial political issues simply because the main campaign actors prefer to avoid those issues and produce hollow campaigns. In this sense, it is reasonable to ask ourselves how informative the political campaigns would be if all the parties and candidates owned their own newspaper and television channel. For the second set, hollow campaigns, we therefore expect that if political parties and candidates aren’t interested in producing more informative electoral campaigns then:
H2a – The media coverage of the parties/candidates elections campaigns will give the same or more emphasis to issues/policies than the campaign presented by these parties/candidates in the Social Network Sites.
H2b– The media coverage of the parties/candidates elections campaigns will give the same or more emphasis to strategy and horse-race aspects than the campaign presented by these parties/candidates in the Social Network Sites.
H2c – The media coverage of the parties/candidates elections campaigns will show the same or less conflict between political actors than the campaign presented by these parties/candidates in the Social Network Sites.
H2d – The SNS will not offer a higher diversity of issues
In order to test these hypotheses, a substantial content analysis of the traditional media news coverage of political elections and of the political campaigns made in the SNS was carried out for the 2012 US presidential election. We systematically, deductively and manually coded the news coverage made of this election, during the month before election-day, in the political section of two main national newspapers and in two main television evening news programs. Similarly, we also analyzed the campaign of the two main candidates in these elections, during the month prior to election-day, in three of the main and most successful SNS: Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. Our analysis examined which frames were presented by the news media and political actors and the nature of the discussed issues.