Horse-Race Journalism Dominated Primary Media Coverage

The media love to tell “horse race” stories. And if you’ve been watching/reading about the presidential race over the last year, you’ve seen a lot of them. While horse race stories are certainly legitimate storytelling “frames,” we’re not sure democracy is best-served with an overabundance on that particular frame.

From Poynter in a piece written by James Warren:

Blow-by-blow coverage that gives disproportionate attention to one or two candidates. Some getting short shrift or gratuitously negative coverage. A press obsession with tactics and strategy that outpaces policy differences and leadership characteristics.

Sound familiar?

The second installment of a Harvard study of the 2016 presidential campaign is also a look at how even in the digital age, some basic themes of political reporting never change. And it includes the assertion of clear “journalistic bias” in over-coverage of the Trump campaign even when it was clear he was the Republican nominee.

Thomas Patterson authors the report from Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy that inspects coverage of the primary campaign, “concluding that coverage of the primaries focused on the horse race over the issues — to the detriment of candidates and voters alike.” The first installment looked at the 2015 run-up to the primaries, while this look at coverage of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders through June 2016.

Inevitably, there’s a lot said about Trump amid the large amount of coverage surrounding his candidacy. In particular, the report tries to assess the quantity and quality of coverage in eight mainstream outlets: CBS, Fox, the Los Angeles Times, NBC, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Trump’s own assumptions about being a victim of the media doesn’t quite get the support he’d like. At a key juncture, his coverage “was far more favorable than that of either Cruz or Kasich. They got hammered. Cruz’s coverage was 61 percent negative to 39 percent positive, while Kasich’s coverage split 65 percent negative to 35 percent positive.”

“Trump got positive press out of his electoral success. On the other hand, his issue stands and character were sources of negative press. By this point in the campaign, reporters had settled on their meta-narratives—the characterizations they were using in reporting on each of the candidates.”

To read the rest of this piece, click here.