Political speeches and debates play an important role in shaping the images of politicians, and the public often relies on media outlets to select bits of political communication from a large pool of utterances. It is an important research question to understand what factors impact this selection process. To quantitatively explore the selection process, we build a three-decade dataset of presidential debate transcripts and post-debate coverage. We first examine the effect of wording and propose a binary classification framework that controls for both the speaker and the debate situations. We find that crowdworkers can only achieve an accuracy of 60 in this task, indicating that media choices are not entirely obvious. Our classifiers outperform crowdworkers on average, mainly in primary debates. We also compare important factors from crowdworkers’ free responses with those from data-driven methods and find interesting differences. Few crowdworkers mentioned that “context matters”, whereas our data show that well-quoted sentences are more distinct from the previous utterance by the same speaker than less-quoted sentences. Finally, we examine the aggregate effect of media preferences towards different wordings to understand the extent of fragmentation among media outlets. By analyzing a bipartite graph built from quoting behavior in our data, we observe a decreasing trend in bipartisan coverage.
The effect of post-debate coverage on public opinion. Studies have shown that media choices about coverage can have serious consequences @cite_37 @cite_24 @cite_38 @cite_27 @cite_17 @cite_1 @cite_50 . For instance, show that in the 2004 U.S. election, citizens who only read the news coverage rated Kerry more negatively compared to those who watched the debate firsthand, because media outlets highlighted the moment of Kerry outing Cheney's lesbian daughter, although this moment did not catch much attention from the live audience. develop a mobile app to collect real-time feedback for presidential debates. discuss the media's critical tendency and its partisan consequences in the U.S.
@cite_38 @cite_37 @cite_1 @cite_24 @cite_27 @cite_50 @cite_17
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We demonstrate that the news media's “spin” or analysis following the last presidential debate in 2004 influenced citizens' evaluations of the candidates. The media's “instant analyses” in the twenty-four hours following the debate was decidedly one-sided, favoring President Bush more than Senator Kerry. We show that the news media's spin persuaded potential voters to alter their attitudes regarding the competing candidates. We rely on a multimethodological approach, including an experiment with a quasi-experimental component, a public opinion survey, and a content analysis. To examine the media's spin, we conducted a content analysis of news coverage on television, on the Internet, and in newspapers for the twenty-four hours following the final 2004 presidential debate. Second, to examine how citizens reacted to the media's coverage, we relied on a representative public opinion survey conducted immediately following the debate. In addition, we conducted an experiment where certain individuals were expose... Television news coverage following a presidential debate often presents the debate as a contest between winners and losers by employing a horse race paradigm. The use of this paradigm can help viewers form their assessments of the candidates’ performances, but its overuse can limit serious campaign discourse on the issues. This study examines the effect of postdebate analysis by two cable news networks on the perceived outcome of a 2004 presidential debate and the perceptions of the candidates, finding perceptions of the outcome differing between viewers of the two networks. This finding contributes to our understanding of viewer interaction with postdebate television coverage by focusing on the importance of the sources of information. In a news media environment characterized by abundant choice, it is becoming increasingly easy for Americans to choose news sources slanted toward their own political views rather than sources providing more diverse perspectives. This development poses a challenge to ideals of deliberative democracy if people who consume politically like-minded news disproportionately populate the electoral process, while those presumably reaping the benefits of exposure to more diverse views in the news (e.g., more informed, tolerant attitudes) withdraw from politics. Using panel data collected during the 2008 presidential campaign, this study investigates the proposition that exposure to news slanted toward one's own partisan views increases political participation, while exposure to news with the opposite partisan slant depresses participation. The results suggest that, while exposure to partisan news does not alter the strongly habitual decision to turn out, the hypothesized energizing and enervating effects of exposure do appear for other behavior during the campaign; the partisan hue of the news sources citizens choose to consume affects both when voters decide and their levels of participation over time. This article integrates priming and framing into a cognitive-processing model that illustrates how the effects of watching a presidential debate might be influenced by a priming message as it interacts with an individual’s schema. We examine how the frame of postdebate news analysis primes audience reflection on a previously viewed segment from the 2004 presidential debates (a process we identify as ‘‘primed reflection’’). Results show that the influence of postdebate news analysis is a function of the interaction between the news-analysis frame (policy vs. performance) and the individual-level factors, namely, political knowledge and propensity to reflect on media content.