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Who's News? A New Model for Media Coverage ofCampaignsElizabeth A. Skewes & Patrick Lee PlaisancePublished online: 05 Mar 2012.

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Who’s News? A New Modelfor Media Coverage

of Campaigns

Elizabeth A. SkewesSchool of Journalism and Mass Communication

University of Colorado

Patrick Lee PlaisanceDepartment of Journalism and Technical Communication

Colorado State University

� Political debate in an election season is artificially constrained by the media’s focuson electability as the primary determinant of news coverage. What gets lost under thiscriterion is the wealth of ideas that lesser known candidates can bring to the debate.This article argues that political coverage by the mainstream media should be more re-sponsible in its efforts to cultivate public discourse by redefining the standards forwho gets covered and challenging the prevailing notions of electability. It also arguesfor a view of campaign news that is less driven by events and that gives voters more in-formation about candidates’ ideas on key issues of the day.

In November 2000, with a race between George W. Bush and Al Gore astatistical dead heat, only 51% of those who were eligible to vote chose todo so. That is only 2% more voters than turned out 4 years earlier—in anelection that pitted a strong incumbent President Bill Clinton against Rob-ert Dole, who had been trailing in the polls even prior to his nomination bythe Republican Party. In the 2004 election, again one that was closely con-tested and during which people from both major parties pushed “get outthe vote drives,” turnout among those old enough to vote was only 55.3%(McDonald, 2005). The paltry increases in voter participation in 2000, de-spite a contest that was the closest in U.S. presidential election history, andagain in 2004 raise serious questions about the U.S. electoral process. Keyamong these questions is why something so important apparently mattersso little to nearly half of the country’s voters.

Researchers who have studied nonvoting identify several reasons thateligible voters choose to stay home. They argue that the parties and candi-dates have given up on nonvoters, choosing instead to spend their time

Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 20(2&3), 139–158Copyright © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc..

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trying to get ideologues who are much more likely to support them to thepolls.

These efforts to push partisan groups toward the election booth while eitherignoring the half of the adult population that doesn’t vote or, in a more activerole, aggressively but subtly pushing political moderates away from the vot-ing booth confirm what many nonvoters believe—that politicians and electedofficials don’t care what they think. (Doppelt & Shearer, 1999, p. 15)

Nonvoters range from those who intend to vote, but for some reason donot make it to the polls, to those who are “unplugged” or “alienated” fromthe political system. However despite their cited reasons for not votingand their varying levels of political involvement outside of the electoralprocess, those who do not show up at the polls on election day share onething: a generally unfavorable view of the media.

The most popular criticism of the media was that they exaggerate stories,were too sensational, or were driven by ratings. Two thirds said that therewere too many reports about candidates’ personal lives.

Other criticisms included too much emphasis on stories about who’sahead in a political race, favoritism toward Democrats, and a liberal biasamong journalists. (Doppelt & Shearer, 1999, p. 27)

Although the question of bias has been debated and often debunked(Alterman, 2003; Goldberg, 2001; McChesney, 2003), most scholars whohave studied political coverage have found a heavy reliance on news aboutcampaign strategy, public opinion polls, and fund-raising and little atten-tion to issues of public policy (Patterson, 1994; Project for Excellence inJournalism, 2000).

In this article we argue for a new model for political coverage, one thatrelies on a more assertive conceptualization of candidate legitimacy andthat focuses on the breadth of political debate by expanding the field ofplay to a wider range of political candidates, even some who may bedeemed “unelectable.”

The Role of the Modern Media

As Lippmann (1922/1977) noted in Public Opinion, the media providepeople with a window to the world around them. As such, television andnewspapers—still the primary news sources for most Americans—arepowerful forces inshapingandframingpoliticaldebate.Lippmann’snotionthat the media help shape the pictures in our heads was the foundation for

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more contemporary media studies, and particularly with the decline of po-litical parties in voters’ lives during the 1970s and 1980s, “the electorate’s in-formation about political issues has become more dependent on what thenews media cover during campaigns and the way the issues are covered”(Blendon et al., 1998, p. 121; see also Davis, 1992; Patterson, 1994).

Media coverage of the early primaries and caucuses—especially IowaandNewHampshire—is importantpartlybecauseofsheervolumeandalsobecause it establishes political momentum. Candidates today know thatwinning the primaries is the path to their party’s nomination, and winningthe primaries means courting the press, especially television (Patterson,1994). In fact, the media have become so influential in the campaign processthat the realm of public discourse is now restricted to those who can eitherbuytimeinthemedia(Gilbert,1986)orcan,byappealingtothemedia’snosefor conflict and controversy, command the media’s attention.

The rise of the mediaas a powerful force

in the electoral process also hasresulted from the front loading

of the political primary calendar.

The rise of the media as a powerful force in the electoral process also hasresultedfromthefront loadingof thepoliticalprimarycalendar.Thecurrentprimary calendar is a stark contrast to the calendar of 1968, when BobbyKennedy was the odds-on favorite for the nomination even though he didnot announce his candidacy until March of that year. In June 2004, only fivestates held primaries or caucuses, and more than half of the races were overafter the March 2 “Super Tuesday” primary—barely 1 month into the pri-maryseason.Howevermanyof thecandidates for the2004race for theDem-ocratic Party nomination began running for office more than 2 years beforetheNewHampshireprimary,andJohnKerry’svictorythere—coupledwithhis win in the Iowa caucuses a week earlier—had many news outlets declar-ing the race all but over. The front-loaded calendar makes the media criticalin the election process (Patterson, 1994, p. 33) because voters have a shorterwindow through which to view the candidates.

In addition, coverage of politics has changed dramatically since the1960s, when reporters generally wrote about where the candidates trav-eled and what they said. The success of Theodore White’s (1965, 1969,1973) Making of the President books on the campaigns and Joe McGinniss’s(1969/1988) Selling of the President book about Nixon’s campaign, alterednot only the style of campaign reporting, but also the tone of it as well.

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Most … adopted White’s magic formula: present politics in novelistic terms,as the struggle of great personalities, with generous helpings of colorful detailto sugar the political analysis. … [B]y 1972 most editors were sending off theirmen with rabid pep talks about the importance of sniffing out inside dope,getting background into the story, finding out what makes the campaign tick,and generally going beyond the old style of campaign reporting. (Crouse,1973, pp. 34–35)

Today campaign coverage is not always favorable. Howard Dean’sspeech following his third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, for example,was seen as evidence that he had imploded, had lost his moorings, andwas unelectable. The media coverage portrayed him as the punchline in ajoke (Kurtz, 2004, p. C01). John Edwards, despite a win in South Carolinaon February 3 and a strong showing in Missouri and Oklahoma, was de-scribed in The New York Times (Purdum, 2004) the next day as havingmanaged to hold on for one last gasp before the nomination was sewn upby John Kerry. At the time, only 10% of the delegates to the Democraticconvention had been selected.

In fact, the coverage in 2004 largely repeated the pattern documented byPatterson (1994; see also Dautrich & Hartley, 1999; Patterson & McClure,1976; Sabato, 1991), focusing on public opinion polls, campaign strategies,and stories that put too much emphasis on the negative aspects of the candi-dates’ characters. An evaluation of coverage of the 1992 campaign, for in-stance, foundonly40%ofthereferences toeitherBillClintonorGeorgeBushwerepositive,whereas75%ofthereferences toeither JohnKennedyorRich-ard Nixon during the 1960 campaign were positive (Patterson, 1994). Cam-paign advertising—a primary source of information for many voters—alsois increasingly negative in tone (Ansolabehere & Iyengar, 1995).

A study of preprimary coverage of the 2000 election conducted by theProject for Excellence in Journalism (2000) found little evidence of “nega-tive” coverage in terms of bias toward a candidate, but found that report-ers generally focused their stories on issues that impacted the candidatesor political parties rather than voters. Roughly 80% of the early campaigncoverage discussed tactics of the candidates and parties, fund raising bythe campaigns, and internal organizational problems. Only 13% of the sto-ries were about the candidates’ ideas, their honesty, or what they had donefor their constituents while in public office.

In terms of story topics, more than half of those written or aired prior tothe Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary were about politicalpolls, campaign tactics, candidate advertisements, and fund raising (Pro-ject for Excellence in Journalism, 2000). The Project study concluded thatreporting in the early part of the election season was dominated by storiesabout campaign tactics and strategies. Of the stories analyzed, only 7% ex-

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amined the candidates’ ideas or core values. Moreover, the Project studysays that campaign coverage, as Patterson (1994) noted of the coverage inearlier campaigns

Paints a picture not of a contest of ideas between men but of a massive chessgame of calculation and calibration in which little seems spontaneous or gen-uine. And occasionally, the camera turns to the audience for a shot of its reac-tion. … What’s more, the focus on so-called inside baseball is hardly new, andthe political press has vowed in years past to seek better ways of connectingwith voters, and making the campaign more relevant. Apparently, even inthe early days of the campaign, the press has had difficulty keeping sight ofthat goal. (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2000, p. 4)

In a glut of coverage thatfocuses on the horse race

aspects of a campaign,the occasional issue storyis too easily overlooked

by voters.

A preliminary analysis of news coverage in the 2004 campaign showsvery similar patterns. As voters in the early primary states were trying tomake electoral decisions, the national news coverage treated them to sto-ries about Howard Dean’s “scream” and his decision to fire campaignmanager Joe Trippi, or about the relationships between the candidates andthe media, or about John Kerry’s ascendancy to the “front-runner” spotand how he now was the candidate to beat—all of this in the few days afterthe Iowa caucuses. However, the focus on strategy started much earlier inthe campaign season. In July 2003, for example, one national newspaperwrote a lengthy story about the fact that the “nine candidates” running forthe Democratic nomination (there were actually more than 50 Democratsin the race at the time) were artificially creating conflicts to generate mediacoverage and distinguish themselves from each other. Stories later thatmonth in the Los Angeles paper talked about the endorsements candidateswere receiving, attempts by the candidates to court the African Americanvote, and Bush’s attempts to stay above the electoral fray. Only one story inJuly talked about candidates’ policy positions—a piece that ran on July 29about the Democrats’ stances on universal health care and coverage for theuninsured. In a glut of coverage that focuses on the horse race aspects of acampaign, the occasional issue story is too easily overlooked by voters,who can quickly grow weary of strategy stories.

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The Concept of the Public Sphere

The idea of a “public sphere”—an arena of social and political interac-tion that simultaneously serves lofty notions of democratic action as wellas more prosaic functions of cultural and interpersonal exchange—emerged in the writings of Dewey (1985), Arendt (1951, 1958), Lippmann(1922/1997), and others. It was more fully conceptualized by the Germanthinker Habermas, who identified it as the institutional space of a societyin which political “will formation” was realized. The public sphere com-prised various media sources, clubs, salons, pamphlets, and other venuesin which individuals became social actors and manifested the human pur-suit of knowledge and freedom. A key aspect of the public sphere, forHabermas, is how exactly such places foster communication. Ideally, thepublic sphere reflected Enlightenment goals of rational thinking, argu-ment, and discussion, according to Dahlgren (2001).

The public sphere has been presented in both descriptive and normativeframeworks; whether it exists and, if it does, how its manifestations arechanging in our increasingly technological and fragmented society, butalso as a structural and ethical ideal of democratic action to which weought to aspire. The original neo-Marxist critique of the public sphere putforth by Habermas (1989, 1996) was a largely pessimistic one: After a pe-riod of relative health supported by the bourgeois classes of the 19th cen-tury, the public sphere has weakened and diminished as politics becomestrivialized and replaced by the industry of public opinion, and public dis-course is abandoned in favor of consumer interests. In his later writings,Habermas (1989, 1996) seemed to temper this pessimism, but theorists con-tinue to speculate on the health—as well as the existence—of a publicsphere in the 21st century. Sparks (2001) argued that it has died an ignobledeath; Dahlgren (2001) suggested that it does indeed survive, but “by anystandard of evaluation it is in a dismal state” (p. 35). Theorists continue todebate what exactly the spatial structure of an ideal public sphere ought tolook like; some have argued that it should aspire to encompass all“publics” in an overarching, national structure (Garnham, 1992; Sparks,2001). Others have argued such a thing is implausible at best and a threat todiversity at worst, calling instead for multiple and alternative publicspheres (Fraser, 1992; Verstraeten, 1996). Habermas’s own views on thishave evolved, and Dahlgren most recently conceptualized the ideal publicsphere as “consisting of a seemingly ungraspable myriad of distinct butalso overlapping, interweaving communicative spaces” (p. 39).

Advocates of new media have argued that the Internet is an antidote totraditional media coverage and that it has the potential to cultivate a publicsphere in the world of presidential politics. According to one ambitiousstudy into the political uses on the Internet, Hill and Hughes (1998) con-

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cluded that although only about 6% of the Web pages and Usenet groupswere referenced by the word “politics,” about 20% of the sites related to po-litical discussions fell outside of the political mainstream reflected by thetraditional media. “For its users, the Net can expand the political margins ofthe public sphere” (Dahlgren, 2001, p. 48). Americans have an anecdotal un-derstanding of how different groups have translated the communicative“space” of the Internet into public actions of engaged citizens, such as coor-dinated protests by environmental organizations and group-identity devel-opment of loose-knit political activists. In the 2000 election, those who wereplanning to vote for Ralph Nader used the Internet to arrange to swap votesin closely contested states, but to little real effect. However most campaignsites were “little more than online brochures that are difficult to find”(Selingo, 2002, p. G1)—brochures that continue to focus on the horse race ofthe election and have little original reporting.

A study of Web pages available to voters in early 2004 found that thereis little original reporting among online sites, that most of that coverage fo-cused on the strategy and horse race aspects of the election, and that thenumber of links to external sites had dropped from 2000 (Project for Excel-lence in Journalism, 2004b). A second Project for Excellence in Journalism(2004a) study that examined the final weeks of the 2004 race noted that theWeb logs examined by the group were “conspicuously similar to the main-stream press” in stories and topics that were covered, and in the tone ofthat coverage. More specifically, most voters still turn to traditional mediaoutlets—online and otherwise—rather than more independent Internet oralternative press, for campaign coverage.

Media Obligations in a Communicative Ethic

News media tendencies to provide “horse race” and “inside baseball”coverage, and to disregard those perceived as marginal candidates, reflectwhat many researchers have identified as continuing trends: a decrease inthe quality of news programming as media desperately compete for audi-ence attention and a distortion of news editorial choices by entertainmentsensibilities. As Bennett and Entman (2001) noted

In a predominantly commercial system such as the United States, profit pres-sures and audience calculations have never been far from the thoughts of me-dia executives, but the economic trends of the late twentieth century havemagnified them to a perhaps unprecedented degree. (p. xxiv)

Others have argued that the current state of affairs stems from a broaderstructural problem, of which the media are but one component:

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A corrosive climate of cynicism is emerging in many places. This cannot beunderstood as merely a response to the media, though this is no doubt part ofit. Rather, this atmosphere of “antipolitics” must also be seen as the conse-quence of the inability of the political system to meet social expectations … . Ifthe causes are complex, it is nonetheless clear that what we are faced with is aserious erosion of the civic engagement. (Dahlgren, 2001, p. 43).

A similar observation had been made years earlier: “The problems[stem], in our view, not from the deficiencies of this particular person, ofthat group, or of the other given institution, but from the interplay of polit-ical institutions, media institutions and audiences” (Blumler & Gurevitch,1995, pp. 6–7).

Research also has demonstrated the tendency of news media practitio-ners to constantly “personalize” the news, and in politics, this often trans-lates into a relentless focus on individual candidate traits: Dean’s temper,Kerry’s “nice guy” image, or Edwards’s youth in 2004. In 2000, it was AlGore changing his wardrobe from blue suits to a more casual brown pal-ette, Bill Bradley being low key and standoffish, John McCain having ayounger wife, and George Bush being a “C” student. This necessarily lim-its attention and resources devoted to examining candidates’ contributionto the public sphere. Sure, policy proposals and key issues are occasionallymentioned, but such details often become code for quantifying the per-ceived attributes or weaknesses of the individual. It is the electability stem-ming from that code, and not the substance of the candidate’s policypositions, that remains the focus of coverage. In fact, in a search for thephrase “electab!” in the Lexis/Nexis Academic database, the question ofelectability surfaced as an issue in more than 100 stories about the presi-dential campaign in more than 50 stories about the presidential electionthat appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The WashingtonPost and The Boston Globe in the past year. On January 27 as the returnsfrom the New Hampshire primary were coming in, Tom Brokaw and TimRussert told those who were watching NBC’s coverage that electabilitywas the key issue for Democrats in 2004.

Reassessing the standards of candidate legitimacy to encompassbroader criteria related to maintenance of the public sphere also wouldprovide a counterweight to the growing trend of the news that is exten-sively shaped by armies of public relations practitioners who see news out-lets merely as means of amplifying their messages.

Whether it is dead or nearly so, the Habermasian public sphere holdsimportant implications for the way scholars think about the function of themass media. After Peters and Cmiel (1991) indicted the field of media eth-ics for failing to develop a usable conceptualization of the public sphere,researchers recently have begun to fully engage Habermas’s work and to

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confront his challenges to the media (Allen, 1995, 2001; Baynes, 1994; Haas& Steiner, 2001). Habermas (1996) himself said his critique makes specificdemands on the media, many of which are currently disregarded.Habermas said a free press exists “to preserve an openness for competingopinions and a representative diversity of voices” (p. 368). He has beenmost concerned with promoting the proper procedure of the public sphere,rather than prescribing particular content. He argued that the media havea duty to ensure that the public sphere is not usurped by particular politi-cal interests. Dahlgren (2001), too, argued that because the media consti-tute a dominant feature of the public sphere, “they must be technically,economically, culturally and linguistically within reach of society’s mem-bers” (pp. 35–36) or else the media’s claim to a place at the democratic tableis undermined. Habermas was less concerned about the ability of the pub-lic sphere to offer up solutions to specific problems. However he also re-quired the media to acknowledge the manifestation of their powers and touse that power in specific ways, particular in the area of politics:

The mass media ought to understand themselves as the mandatary of an en-lightened public whose willingness to learn and capacity for criticism they atonce presuppose, demand, and reinforce; like the judiciary, they ought to pre-serve their independence from political and social pressure; they ought to bereceptive to the public’s concerns and proposals, take up these issues andcontributions impartially, augment criticisms, and confront the political pro-cess with articulate demands for legitimation. (pp. 378–379)

All this may sound utopian, but it led Habermas (1996) to very specificclaims about how the media should behave as an arbiter of public dis-course:

Political and social actors would be allowed to “use” the public sphere onlyinsofar as they make convincing contributions to the solution of problemsthat have been perceived by the public or have been put on the public agendawith the public’s consent. In a similar vein, political parties would have toparticipate in the opinion- and will-formation from the public’s own perspec-tive, rather than patronizing the public and extracting mass loyalty from thepublic sphere for the purposes of maintaining their own power. (p. 379)

Allen (2001) and others focused on behavior and strategies that legiti-mize a place for the media in the public sphere; this study suggests that oneof the legitimizing functions of the news media, in turn, is to ensure newssubjects, too, are making “convincing contributions” and appropriatelyparticipating in the public “will-formation.” As part of the larger enter-prise of cultivating the public sphere, media practitioners need toreconceptualize political candidate legitimacy if we are serious in our at-

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tempts to bring the media closer to what Habermas and others argued istheir obligation within communicative ethics.

A New Model for Candidate Coverage

More than 150 people declared themselves to be candidates in the 2004presidential election, including 29 Republicans and 55 Democrats. Despitea relatively large field in the two major political parties, the media did notcover any Republicans other than George Bush, and The New York Timesproclaimed last summer that Wesley Clark’s “late” entry into the Demo-cratic race had brought the number of candidates in that party to 10.Clearly the media simply write off some candidates—mostly those who donot get mentioned in the public opinion polls and those who do not raisesubstantial money in the year before the primary season starts. In fact, astudy of preprimary coverage of the 15 candidates who filed financialforms with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for the 2000 raceshowed very strong and significant correlations between news coverage—both in terms of volume and prominence of play—and the amount ofmoney a candidate raised and his or her poll numbers (Skewes, 2002). Therelation waned through 1999, however, so that the strongest predictors ofnews coverage going into the 2000 New Hampshire primary was priornews coverage—not money or poll ratings. News organizations maketheir assessments about electability prior to the start of the primary elec-tion season and once those assessments are made, it is nearly impossiblefor “secondary” candidates to receive any coverage at all unless they makea major gaffe.

We argue that there shouldbe a new model for candidate

coverage that includes a broaderrange of candidates, represents

a greater diversity of opinion,and comes at a time when voters

are more likely to be payingattention.

However, because most voters wait until at least the start of the pri-mary season—and sometimes even later—to tune into the election, themedia’s exclusionary practices leave most voters facing what they see asa narrow set of choices and a very constrained political debate. Thus, in

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this article we argue that there should be a new model for candidate cov-erage that includes a broader range of candidates, represents a greater di-versity of opinion, and comes at a time when voters are more likely to bepaying attention.

This model is grounded in the idea, advanced by Habermas (1996), Fra-ser (1992), and others, that the media have a duty to cultivate a publicsphere and to broaden the opportunity for citizen participation in demo-cratic government. Instead, the current world of campaign coverage con-strains debate and leaves citizens feeling more like spectators in theprocess (Patterson, 1994). However, effective democracy, in addition to re-quiring engaged citizens, also requires an engaged media and a more ag-gressive gate keeping function in the realm of politics. Rather than actingas stenographers for those who wield political power, those covering thecampaigns need to make certain that politicians—particularly those whoare ahead in the polls or in fund-raising—do not artificially drive the newswith photo-ops or self-serving attacks on their opponents. Political newsshould advance public debate, and politicians and their spokespeopleshould be given access to news channels only when they have somethingto say that offers solutions to public issues. In their role as gate keepers,journalists also must reconsider how they define news. Instead of a focuson conflict and controversy alone, they must turn to a focus on the causesof those conflicts and their policy implications. By doing so, journalists canmore fully acknowledge and carry out their obligations to consider themoral dimensions of their news gate keeping responsibilities.

There are two major components of the model: when and how that cover-age should occur and who gets covered. The first is suggested by initiativesalready undertaken by several organizations that have embraced the no-tion of civic or public journalism: presenting issues and questions in a con-text that strives to cultivate public engagement (Rosen, 1999). Newsorganizations do this by surveying and interviewing readers, viewers, andlisteners to understand what matters to them, and then use that to helpguide or shape news coverage. This means asking candidates about thingsvoters have identified as being important and stepping outside the “bub-ble” of campaign strategizing, polling, and fund-raising. The point of ref-erence for the political reporter, then, becomes the concerns of the averagevoter instead of the campaign “insider” or political news junkies.

Although such initiatives address some factors of the “disconnect” be-tween the process and the public, they leave other important factors. Jour-nalists’ news “routines” that dictate the constant search for the “newness”of campaign policies and positions actually serve to undermine the me-dia’s ability to cultivate a true public discourse. More than a year before theNovember 2004 election, major papers including The New York Times, TheWashington Post, and others were publishing lengthy, in-depth profiles of

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several of the Democratic candidates perceived to have the most“electability.” These profiles were telling and would, had anyone besidespolitical junkies been paying attention at the time, been useful for averagevoters. Many news outlets also have tried to publish a series of election-season “issue profiles,” but the routines of political coverage usuallymeans that the best or most useful coverage comes before the primaries,and thus is provided before the electorate has really “tuned in” to the cam-paigns. When voters do tune in toward late summer and fall, such substan-tive coverage has been replaced by breathless coverage of campaignstrategy and the horse race reflected in unending polls. Thus we have theproblem of too much good coverage provided too early in the campaign,and too little of substance coming later.

Although some early coverage is valuable to begin to turn voters’ atten-tion to the campaign, one interpretation of the elaboration likelihoodmodel (Petty & Priester, 1994) shows that it will have little effect on mostvoters because they are not yet motivated to pay attention. For news orga-nizations to assume voters are as engaged in the political process as jour-nalists are—especially in the year prior to the primaries—disregards thevolume of research showing that people will only passively process infor-mation they deem as irrelevant. Journalists who want to be a part of thepublic discourse on the candidates and the election cannot ignore that thepublic needs to be involved—otherwise, it is simply a monologue. Re-search on information processing shows that there is a sequence to howpeople engage in decision making. Involving the public in political dis-course requires first that they be exposed to the information, that they thenprocess it actively. Interest and comprehension will follow from that, andonly then will the public be a part of the campaign discourse. In the realmof presidential politics, this means the in-depth coverage that occurs in theyear before the primaries receives little active processing. Voters, for themost part, simply are not motivated enough to pay close attention to can-didate information nearly 2 years prior to their voting decision.

However, once they do start to tune in, which occurs with the Iowa cau-cuses and New Hampshire primary for more politically oriented voters,and often not until after the national nominating conventions for the lesspolitically interested, citizens become motivated to process political infor-mation. Sadly, the menu that is available to them at that point is limited.The glut of stories about who is ahead in the polls, who is changing cam-paign strategists, and who is taking out a new series of ads leaves votersfeeling undernourished and alienated. This then reduces their motivationto attend to political information and contributes to a less informed elec-torate in November. The way to fix this is to give the voters meaningful in-formation when they are likely to be paying attention, thus allowing it tobe processed through a more central route and enabling them to use the in-

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formation to form—or perhaps even change—their opinions and attitudesabout specific candidates.

News organizations can nolonger remain subservient

to the “tyranny of newness.”

Doing this will require some changes in the way news organizationsthink about political news. It will mean that news organizations can nolonger remain subservient to the “tyranny of newness.” What was news 6months ago, or even a year ago, may still be newsworthy today. Thus, themodel we are proposing would call for news organizations to considertiming more carefully and to be willing to revisit important issues andstory angles later in the campaign season. There is real value in the pro-files that ran in 2003. The stories connected some voters to the electoralprocess early on, when the field of candidates was considerably deeper,and allowed them to start to consider what issues would matter most tothem. However, those profiles that were so valuable to some voters in2003 should be repeated, or rewritten, for the voters who tune in later.The postconvention coverage needs to revisit the candidate’s back-grounds so that the “newly initiated” voters—those who now have tunedin—can have access to the same information without having to seek it outthrough newspaper archives. As it is now, those voters are ill-served by ajournalistic convention of defining news in a strictly linear fashion thatrelegates anything that has been published previously as “old news”and, therefore, background information that is boiled down to a singlesentence in an 18-in. story about the latest campaign gaffe. Those newervoters, who typically are less attached to the political process, need infor-mation that tells them where the candidates stand, and they need it intheir newspapers and on television broadcasts because they are lesslikely to seek it on their own.

Thus, although some news organizations have pointed to the Web as ananswer to the complaints about the fall campaign coverage, the Web is apoor substitute for reaching voters who may have only a mild interest inthe election. The Web is not the panacea for creating a politically informedelectorate. In the 2000 and 2004 elections, the nation’s major newspapersprovided voters with multiple links to archived stories and to othersources of political information. With a few quick mouse clicks, those whowere interested could access candidate biographies, delegate totals, pri-mary calendars, and historical data about previous elections. Even so,there was not as much information available as some people assume. A

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2004 study of Web-based political coverage on 10 major news organizationsites by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (2004b) noted that “the to-tal number of links to background information on each site … in manycases was smaller than four years ago. ABC, Washington Post and The NewYork Times all offered fewer such links than in 2000” (p. 8).

However, the bigger problem posed by the Internet is not as much whatis online as it is who is online. It would be easy to shift horse race coverageto the Web.

Although voters may have easier access to background and archival in-formation than they have in prior election years, the simple fact is that us-ing the Internet for information requires a greater level of interest in thesubject than most people have. Comstock and Scharrer (1999), in talkingabout television viewing, distinguished between active and passive view-ing. Active viewing occurs when people set aside time to sit down, soda al-ready in hand, to watch a favorite program. The viewing is intentional andthe viewer puts more effort into the experience as a result. Passive view-ing, on the other hand, occurs when the television is on as background. Theviewer may be “watching,” but his or her attention is not focused on theprogram. The distinction is important, and is relevant to this discussion be-cause most people are passive viewers when it comes to politics. We alsowould argue that Web page viewing habits are analogous to the claimsthat Comstock and Scharrer detailed regarding television viewing.Internet users are somewhat interested but not engaged enough to seekout information or follow the links on a Web page. To serve the public,news organizations need to put the information front and center—andthey need to do so at several key points during the campaign cycle.

Reconsidering Electability

Although the repeating of important stories at several points in the elec-tion season will help voters become more informed about the candidates, itwill not help them to understand the full range of political debate. That isbecause news organizations base many of their decisions about who tocover on notions of electability. The concept has become so prevalent thatvoters in the 2004 Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary werespouting it back to the journalists, saying they were voting for John Kerrybecause he was electable. The phrase surfaced among Republicans duringthe 2000 election and became a rallying call for the Democrats in 2004. Thequestion is, who put it there? More important, who gets left out as a result?The answer to the first again falls back on news conventions that lead jour-nalists to spend a lot of time talking to campaign strategists and pundits.For party strategists, having a candidate from their party in office is much

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more important than the public discourse about issues. Thus, electability isa critical issue for them, and it becomes a frame for the journalists to use indiscussing the election. Given the media’s ability to set the public agenda,it then becomes an issue for voters because it gets a disproportionateamount of news coverage.

However, the second question—who gets left out when electability be-comes a criterion for coverage—has broader implications for the social roleof the media in serving the public good. As Habermas (1996) noted in hisdiscussion of the press, it has a duty to ensure those allowed space and air-time in the public sphere can make “convincing contributions” to discus-sions of issues on the public agenda. However, when it comes to politicalcoverage, the press has almost entirely based its gate keeping function on acriterion that is detached from this Habermasian mission. Usingelectability as its primary—and sometimes only—standard for allocatingcoverage, news organizations ignore the responsibility to explore thebreadth of political debate required by their role in the public sphere. In the2000 election, this resulted in the marginalization of Ralph Nader, who en-tered the race because he had a message for voters. Instead, he was coveredas a “fringe” candidate who either spoiled, or even stole, the election fromAl Gore. In 2004, Nader was barely covered at all. In 2004, the standard ofelectability translated in coverage of Democrats like Dennis Kucinich, AlSharpton, and Carol Moseley Braun as political actors of little value.Sharpton, for example, was talked about as being a great orator who com-manded the vote of a single Democratic delegate. Braun, before she with-drew from the race, was cited as setting the stage for a run by HillaryClinton in 2008 or 2012. Kucinich was the Don Quixote of the Democraticfield, talked about more for his bachelorhood than his political positions.Electability, therefore, eclipsed any discussion of these three candidates ascontributing to the debate or to serious public discourse on policy issueseven though that is precisely why they chose to run for office.

A better model for who to cover, then, would broaden the notion ofwhat comprises legitimacy for a candidate. Electability is one standard,but certainly not the only standard, nor should it be the most important cri-terion in allocating coverage. Even electability should be revised to includemore than fund-raising or poll standings. Certainly the field of candidatesneeds to be winnowed somehow. News organizations cannot reasonablycover everyone in a field that extends to 100 candidates or more. However,a more elaborate effort on the part of the media needs to be made to assessthe value of each candidate’s contributions to public discourse. Thus, awider net needs to be cast to ensure that candidates who represent therange of possibilities on an issue have a forum to present their views. Tobetter serve the public, one criterion should be the degree to which a candi-date enlivens or adds to the debate on an issue. Too often the current politi-

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cal debate is artificially narrowed and electable candidates, in order to winthe middle-ground voters, will water down their messages—particularlybecause everyone else is paddling toward the middle as well. Candidateswho may not be electable will have greater freedom to pull the debate backout so that new options and fresh solutions can be tried out on the public.In fact, voters are eager for such approaches. Steve Forbes managed tomake it into the national debate in the 2000 election with his call for a flattax—something that the more mainstream, electable candidates mighthave been leery of putting forward.

There are some valid waysin which the field can

be winnowed.

Still, there are some valid ways in which the field can be winnowed.First and foremost, news organizations should feel free to exclude candi-dates who are not legally qualified to serve as president. Also, news orga-nizations should not feel obligated to cover major party candidates whofile for office in one or two states but not in enough states to garner the del-egates needed to win their party’s nomination. Likewise, candidates in theNovember election who do not appear on enough state ballots to have anumerical chance to command the electoral votes to win could be ex-cluded. All of these criteria are aimed at narrowing the field to those candi-dates who could conceivably be elected to the White House. Somecandidates will file in only one state or a handful of states in an attempt togarner a national platform for their views, but the media should not haveto turn over time and or space to each of those candidates.

An additional winnowing measure could be to limit coverage to thecandidates who have filed with the FEC. Although this is not required un-less a candidate wants to qualify for federal matching funds, the money re-quired to mount a national political campaign—along with the necessity tohave spending records accessible to the media and to voters in order to ap-pear aboveboard—means that candidates who are serious about servingas president will file quarterly financial statements with the FEC. In the2000 election, this would have narrowed the field to roughly 15 candi-dates—far fewer than the more than 200 who filed, but far more than thenumber who received coverage using the traditional notion of electability.In the 2004 race, 29 candidates filed quarterly reports with the FEC, rang-ing from George W. Bush and John Kerry to Mildred “Millie” Howard, anOhio Republican, and Lyndon LaRouche, a perennial candidate in theDemocratic Party. Offering these candidates a space in the national debate

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would have broadened the marketplace of ideas and could have led to adiscussion of policy positions that sought to respond to a public good orneed in an innovative way, rather than simply covering candidates who,by the end of January, were more interested in safe positions that madethem more acceptable to the middle-of-the-road or the undecided voter.

It would be naive to expect that all of the eligible candidates under thismodel should get the same amount of news coverage—either in airtime orcolumn inches. Certainly those candidates who have a greater likelihoodof electoral victory in November merit closer media scrutiny and, there-fore, more coverage. Thus electability remains a factor in determiningnews coverage, but not the only factor. Instead electability becomes oneconsideration that is weighed in a context of inclusiveness.

Executives of corporate media organizations may well balk at the rela-tive idealism of the model of political coverage proposed here. However,major news organizations already devote significant resources to politicalnews, paying roughly $20,000 per month for a seat on a campaign pressplane. However, journalists inside the campaign “bubble” are often con-strained by tight travel schedules and limited access to outside sources, re-sulting in news coverage that mimics campaign messages but provideslittle relevance for average viewers, listeners, and readers. These resourcescould be better spent on what news executives like to refer to as “news youcan use”—coverage that provides better understanding of policy positionsand their impact on individual citizens and that allows for easier compari-son of candidates. This more sophisticated, more socially responsible cov-erage is no more expensive and serves what Kovach and Rosenstiel (2001)identified as journalism’s primary purpose: to provide citizens what theyneed to be free and self-governing.

With the media freeing themselves from the tether of electability, theycan enliven coverage and, very likely, draw more interest from the elector-ate. With a veritable parade of candidates from which to choose, votersmay come to see Election Day as an opportunity to choose a leader ratherthan a duty to select from between the lesser of two evils. More important,they may come to see political involvement as a much more attractive andinteresting endeavor—a kind of fluid social dynamic in which they cantake part.

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