John’s recent blog inspires me to resurrect this note of mine from a couple years ago:
Paul Krugman writes,
The news media seem determined to destroy the republic:
In all, 63% of the campaign stories focused on political and tactical aspects of the campaign. That is nearly four times the number of stories about the personal backgrounds of the candidates (17%) or the candidates’ ideas and policy proposals (15%). And just 1% of stories examined the candidates’ records or past public performance, the study found.
And:
The press’ focus on fundraising, tactics and polling is even more evident if one looks at how stories were framed rather than the topic of the story. Just 12% of stories examined were presented in a way that explained how citizens might be affected by the election, while nearly nine-out-of-ten stories (86%) focused on matters that largely impacted only the parties and the candidates.
This has always bothered me too. One reason Gary and I did our research on why are American Presidential election campaign polls so variable when votes are so predictable was that we wanted to convince the news media to do more substantive stories and less polling. Our point was that general elections for president are generally determined by fundamental variables, not short-term news or bandwagon effects–things are different for primary elections, which have multiple candidates and are inherently unstable–and so this horse-race coverage was a waste of time.
Why, then?
Nonetheless, horse-race coverage persists. I don’t know whether it’s worse than before–the site linked to by Krugman does not have comparative time series data–but it’s still there. I’d also include the ridiculously-frequent polling as an example of this problem. Anyway, why is it still happening?
My theory, at least for the general election, is that most of the voters have already decided who they’re going to vote for–and even the ones who haven’t decided are often more predictable than they realize. Suppose, for example, that 40% have pretty much already decided they’ll vote for the Democrat, 40% will vote for the Republican, and the fight is over the remaining 20%–most of whom do not follow politics closely in any case. Now think of the audience for political news. 80% of the people don’t need to know the candidates’ positions–they’ve already decided their votes–but they’re intensely interested in the horse race: are “we” going to win or lose? The substantive coverage that Krugman and I might want is really just for 20% of the audience. So, from that perspective, it makes sense for the media to give people the horse race. (Yes, survey respondents say they want more of candidates position issues and less on which candidate is leading in the polls–but I don’t know that I believe people when they say this.)
That said, when talking about the primary elections, yeah, I think it would make sense for the media to report more on where the candidates stand on issues.
P.S. The histogram here should be a horizontal dotplot. Trying to read a colored plot with a key on the side–that’s bad news.