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Abstract
Recent work highlights the fact that there are clear differences in the quality of the news product offered by different news outlets. What is not clear is why some news outlets consistently produce a more informative and less superficial news product while others do not. Media scholars suggesting an institutional view of the news media have acknowledged the idea that institutions can be multi-layered, and point to the need to understand specific institutional aspects of the media at all levels. Building from the idea that we can benefit from understanding the institutional similarities and differences between local media outlets, this article examines the quality or issue substance in campaign news coverage as a function of the institutional arrangements within media outlets and their economic and political contexts.
Acknowledgements
Course time releases and data collection for this project were made possible by the 2009–2010 Louisiana Board of Regents ATLAS Grant, award number LEQSF(2009-10)-RD-ATL-14. The data collection for this study was also funded in part by a 2009 Summer Stipend Grant awarded by LSU's Council on Research for Funding and departmental funding from the Department of Political Science and the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU. The author is grateful to German Alvarez, Matt Gravens, Lindsay Horn, Ashley Kirzinger, Amy Mertensmeyer, Kaitlin Sill, and Matt Thorton for their helpful research assistance. The author thanks Kate Bratton, Belinda Davis, Laura Moyer, and Heather Ondercin for valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper and the larger research project. Any errors remain the author's.
Notes
1. Scholarly work has widely acknowledged the importance of institutions. Neo-institutionalists have asserted that institutional rules affect individual behavior and collective outcomes (Miller, Citation1992; Ostrom, Citation1990). In political science, institutions such as the US Congress, the Executive, and the Judiciary have been studied extensively, informing the discipline about how institutional rules and the designs of outlets serve to motivate individual behavior by conditioning preferences with constraints that exist within the institution (Krehbiel, Citation1991; Shepsle and Weingast, Citation1981). As a result of this work, we know a great deal about these institutions and their influence on policy outcomes and political behavior. However, one significant force in our system, though often acknowledged as an institution (Cater, Citation1959; Cook, Citation1998; Schudson, 1995; Sparrow, Citation1999), has been vastly understudied in institutional terms: the media.
2. The news content sample includes every newspaper story printed from September 1—Election Day (Kahn and Kenney Citation2002) in all newspapers (in each state) that were available in Newsbank's online newspaper archive at the time of data collection. Newsbank provides the most comprehensive archive of US local newspapers and back issues are difficult to obtain due to cost and availability. Thus, the newspaper sample is a convenience sample in that sense. The newspapers included are listed in Appendix A by state and year(s) of election.
3. This variable is coded using this question: In your opinion, what is the primary focus of the story? Answer choices were: strategy coverage, issue coverage, coverage of candidate traits, adwatch coverage, horse race coverage, and other. Along with their initial training on what each type of news story looks like, coders are provided a coding help sheet to which they can continually refer while coding. Inter-coder reliability is calculated using Cohen's Kappa, which approaches 1 as coding is perfectly reliable and goes to 0 when there is no agreement other than what would be expected by chance (Haney et al., 1998; Stenler, Citation2001). A Kappa coefficient of 0.61 indicates a reasonable level of agreement (Stenler, Citation2001). For the content data collected thus far, the Kappa score for news story focus is 0.66.
4. Since most newspapers today operate in markets with only one major daily, the analysis does not examine media market competition.
5. The market-level percentage of female audiences was not included in the analysis due to multicolinearity. Removing it did not affect the results for the primary variables of interest.
6. See Notes from .
7. Diagnostics indicate that this is not due to either the competitiveness of elections for any particular cycle, or to the fact that in one cycle there might have been more contests in which two statewide races were being held at the same time.
