Biasing influences on balance in election news coverage: An assessment of newspaper coverage of the 2006 U.S. Senate Elections

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 85, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 499-514

  Fico, Frederick ^a   Freedman, Eric ^a  

^a MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ASSESSMENT METHOD; ELECTION; MASS MEDIA; MEDIA ROLE; PARTY POLITICS; POLITICAL PARTICIPATION;

EID: 59249107371     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900808500302     Document Type: Article

References (62)

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4. Bernard Goldberg, Bias: A CBS insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News (Washington, DC: Regency Publishing Inc., 2002).
5. James Druckman, "Media Matter: How Newspapers and Television News Cover Campaigns and Influence Voters," Political Communication 22 (2005): 463-81.
6. Frederick Fico, Eric Freedman, and Brad Love, "Partisan and Structural Balance in Newspaper Coverage of U.S. Senate Races in 2004 with Female Nominees," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 83 (spring 2006): 43-57.
7. Pamela Shoemaker and Stephen Reese, Mediating the Message: Theories of Influence on Mass Media Content, 2d ed. (White Plains, NY: Longman, 1996);
8. Doris Graber, Mass Media and American Politics (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, Inc., 1997).
9. Shoemaker and Reese, Mediating the Message: Theories of Influence on Mass Media Content.
10. J. Herbert Altschull, Agents of Power (New York: Longmann, 1995).
11. Cyberalert, "Five Times More Journalists Are Liberal Than Conservative" (2004, May 24, retrieved May 23, 2007, from http:// www.mediaresearch.org/cyberalerts/d004/cyb20040524.asp#1);
12. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, "Bottomline Pressures";
13. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter, The Media Elite: America's New Powerbrokers (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1986);
14. David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, A Portrait of U.S. News People and Their Work (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986).
15. Curtis P. Haugtvedt and Duane T. Wegener, "Message Order Effects in Persuasion: An Attitude Strength Perspective," Journal of Consumer Research 21 (June 1994): 205-18.
16. Frederic Brunel and Michelle Nelson, "Message Order Effects and Gender Differences in Advertising Persuasion," Journal of Advertising Research 43 (September 2003): 330-41;
17. Lance Holbert, Jennifer Lambe, Anthony Dudo, and Kristin Carlton, "Primacy Effects of The Daily Show and National TV News Viewing: Young Viewers, Political Gratifications and Internal Political Self-Efficacy," Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 51 (March 2007): 20-38;
18. Richard Petty, Zakary Tormala, Chris Hawkins, and Duane Wegener, "Motivation to Think and Order Effects in Persuasion: The Moderating Role of Chunking," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27 (2001): 332-44.
19. James Dearing and Everett Rogers, Agenda Setting (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996);
20. Sei-Hill Kim, Dietram A. Scheufele, and James Shanahan, "Think About It This Way: Attribute Agenda-Setting Function of the Press and the Public's Evaluation of a Local Issue," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 79 (spring 2002): 7-25.
21. Frederick Fico and William Cote, "Fairness and Balance of Stories in Newspaper Coverage of the 1996 Presidential Election," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 76 (spring 1999): 124-37;
22. Frederick Fico and William Cote, "Partisan and Structural Balance of News Coverage of the 1998 Governor's Race in Michigan," Mass Communication and Society 5 (spring 2002): 165-82.
23. Frederick Fico, Geri Zeldes, and Arvind Diddi, "Partisan and Structural Balance of Local Television Election Coverage of Incumbent and Open Gubernatorial Elections," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 81 (winter 2004): 897-910;
24. Susan Carter, Frederick Fico, and Jocelyn McCabe, "Partisan and Structural Balance in Local Television Election Coverage," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 79 (spring 2002): 41-53.
25. Fico, Freedman, and Love, "Partisan and Structural Balance in Newspaper Coverage of U.S. Senate Races in 2004 with Female Nominees."
26. Shoemaker and Reese, Mediating the Message: Theories of Influence on Mass Media Content.
27. Peter Clarke and Susan Evans, Covering Campaigns (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983);
28. Dennis Lowry and Jon Shidler, "The Sound Bites, the Biters and the Bitten: A Two-Campaign Test of the Anti-incumbent Bias Hypothesis in Network TV News," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 75 (winter 1998): 719-29;
29. Fico and Cote, "Partisan and Structural Balance";
30. Frederick Fico and Eric Freedman, "Bureau, Wire Reporters Write More Balanced Stories," Newspaper Research Journal 25 (spring 2004): 897-910.
31. Stephen Lacy, "A Model of Demand for News: Understanding the Impact of Competition on Daily Newspaper Content," Journalism Quarterly 66 (spring 1989): 40-48, 128.
32. Stephen Lacy, Frederick Fico, and Todd Simon, "Relationships Among Economic, Newsroom, and Content Variables: A Path Model," Journal of Media Economics 2 (fall 1989): 51-66.
33. Fico and Freedman, "Bureau, Wire Reporters Write More Balanced Stories."
34. Bill Dedman and Stephen K. Doig, "Does Your Newspaper Reflect Its Community?" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the ASNE, New Orleans, LA, April 2003). Accessible at http://www.asu.edu/cronkite/asne.
35. Stephanie Craft and Wayne Wanta, "Women in the Newsroom: Influences of Female Editors and Reporters on the News Agenda," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 81 (spring 2004): 124-38.
36. Fico and Cote, "Partisan and Structural Balance of News Coverage of the 1998 Governor's Race in Michigan";
37. Fico and Cote, "Fairness and Balance of Stories in Newspaper Coverage of the 1996 Presidential Election";
38. Fico and Freedman, "Bureau, Wire Reporters Write More Balanced Stories."
39. Fico, Freedman, and Love, "Partisan and Structural Balance in Newspaper Coverage of U.S. Senate Races in 2004 with Female Nominees";
40. Fico and Freedman, "Bureau, Wire Reporters Write More Balanced Stories";
41. Eric Freedman and Frederick Fico, "Male and Female Sources in Newspaper Coverage of Male and Female Candidates in Open Races for Governor in 2004," Mass Communication and Society 8 (summer 2005): 257-72.
42. Craft and Wanta, "Women in the Newsroom: Influences of Female Editors and Reporters on the News Agenda."
43. Fico, Freedman, and Love, "Partisan and Structural Balance in Newspaper Coverage of U.S. Senate Races in 2004 with Female Nominees";
44. Fico and Cote, "Partisan and Structural Balance of News Coverage of the 1998 Governor's Race in Michigan';
45. Fico and Cote, "Fairness and Balance of Stories in Newspaper Coverage of the 1996 Presidential Election."
46. Papers ranked in descending order of circulation as of September 2006: New York Times (1,653,778);
47. Los Angeles Times (1,172,005);
48. Houston Chronicle (692,572);
49. Detroit Free Press (656,953);
50. Arizona Republic (503,953);
51. Hartford Courant (264,539);
52. Tennessean (235,910);
53. Las Vegas Review-Journal (202,850);
54. Honolulu Advertiser (156,077);
55. Portland Press Herald (110,484);
56. Burlington Free Press 52,337). Source: Audit Bureau of Circulations.
57. The emphasis on the prominence of partisan assertions is reader driven. Schramm found in a post-World War II study that between a quarter and half of readers would leave a story by the sixth paragraph. Wilbur Schramm, "Measuring Another Dimension of Newspaper Readership," Journalism Quarterly 24 (1947): 293-306. A widely used reporting text warns beginning reporters that fewer than 60% or readers complete a five-paragraph story and that fewer than 40% complete a ten-paragraph story. Fred Fedler, John R. Bender, Lucinda Davenport, and Michael W. Drager, Reporting for the Media, 8th ed. (New York: Oxford, 2005), 132.
58. Democratic incumbents won in California, Hawaii, Michigan, and New York. Republican incumbents won in Arizona, Maine, Nevada, and Texas. A Democratic incumbent running as an Independent Democrat won in a three-way race in Connecticut. A Republican won an open seat in Tennessee, and a Socialist won an open seat in Vermont against a Republican.
59. The regression analysis replicated the one used in the 2004 study. Nomina-level variables met regression assumptions because their distribution across values did not exceed boundaries for skewness. Circulation was recoded as an ordinal-level variable because the wide range of raw circulation figures could distort the analysis. A lower level of measurement for this variable was therefore considered more appropriate for assessing the relative effect of circulation on dependent variables.
60. The Connecticut race accounted for a quarter of all stories as an Independent Democrat attempted to keep his seat against the Democratic primary winner and the Republican nominee. Tennessee's hotly contested open race made up about a fifth of the stories Races whose outcome was never seriously in doubt garnered far fewer stories. In California, for example, only five stories covered an incumbent Democrat's effort to keep her seat.
61. Such disparity in newspaper coverage of U.S. Senate elections is consistent with other studies. See Kim Kahn, "Does Being Male Help? An Investigation of the Effects of Candidate Gender and Campaign Coverage on Evaluations of U.S. Senate Campaigns," Journal of Politics 54 (May 1992): 497-512.
62. The proportion of women reporters at the eleven newspapers ran from 31% to 56%, with a mean of 39%. The proportion of women editors at the newspapers ran from 28% to 46%, with a mean of 38%, according to data provided to the authors by each newspapers.