![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
To better understand the role of local news in voters’ opinions of candidates, we ask whether candidate coverage in local news sources readily activates race and gender stereotypes in voters’ opinions of presidential primary candidates? We conduct an original content analysis of local newspaper coverage of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential primary season. We code 1,849 news articles in 11 battleground and early primary states to evaluate how local news coverage frames issues of race and gender for each candidate. Then we utilize the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP) to match primary voters with their local news content. We find considerable variation in local news coverage of candidates’ race and gender across states. While local news coverage frames Obama and Clinton in terms of race and gender issues, we find that race is covered more frequently. In addition, we find that as news coverage of gender issues increases, voters are not less likely to characterize Clinton as a strong leader. However, as local news focuses more readily on Obama’s race, voters are less likely to consider him trustworthy. These findings illustrate the power of local news media to activate stereotypes related to race and gender.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 While 26% of the population following local newspapers for information about campaigns and elections may seem low, it is worth noting that only 30.4% of eligible voters voted in the 2008 primary election (Pew Citation2016).
2 While we acknowledge that some media use habits have changed since 2008 (e.g., more citizens now use the internet to get the news), the discussion of news consumption habits is indicative of the studies timeframe.
3 Physical appearance and partisanship are the other two categories. In nominating contests partisanship is not a factor because the candidates have the same party affiliation.
4 McDermott (Citation1998) explores another dimension of social stereotyping of backs – belief stereotypes – and finds that the social stereotypes of blacks as being liberal and more concerned with the issues of racial inequality impacts how voters view black candidates; especially in low-information elections where other heuristic devices, like party identification, are not accessible.
5 There is a great body of evidence that indicates that voters expect female political candidates to be more competent on “female issues” like poverty, women’s issues, and childcare. While “male issues” include economic issues and military/police issues (Huddy and Terkildsen Citation1993a, Citation1993b; Shapiro and Mahajan Citation1986; Witt, Paget, and Matthews Citation1994). Moreover, voters use these gendered issue assessments as a heuristic in the voting decisions – much like they use party identification (McDermott Citation1997, Citation1998).
6 We choose to examine these three candidates, the remaining Democrats in the race, because we wanted to examine race and gender, but wanted to exclude potential differences as a result of party identification. Moreover, there was no variation in race or gender among Republican primary candidates. We include John Edwards to understand what race and gender coverage looks like for a white male candidate running against more diverse opponents.
7 Newspapers by state include Florida – Saint Petersburg Times, Iowa – Des Moines Register, Minnesota – Star Tribune, Nevada – Las Vegas Review-Journal, New Hampshire – New Hampshire Union Leader, New Mexico – Albuquerque Journal, North Carolina – Charlotte Observer, Ohio – Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oregon – the Oregonian, Pennsylvania – Philadelphia Inquirer, Wisconsin – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Candidates include the three Democratic candidates: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. Information on daily and Sunday circulation for each newspaper is drawn from the 2008 Burrelles Luce list of Top Newspapers. See https://www.burrellesluce.com/top100/2008_Top_100List.pdf for information on each newspapers daily circulation numbers from 2008.
8 Coverage was obtained from Access World News and the Des Moines Register News Archive. The sample includes any article that includes one mention of both the first and last name of one of the three candidates, e.g., “Barack Obama”. We begin our analysis three weeks before the first nominating contest: the Iowa caucuses. Prior to mid-December, little attention was paid to the presidential candidates in local newspapers, including the Des Moines Register – about one article every three days. In mid-December, coverage of presidential candidates increased to roughly an article per day; our timeframe includes several days before coverage increased. We conclude our content analysis on the last day of the third wave of the CCAP.
9 While there may be a number of local newspapers in a state, evaluating the highest circulating newspaper is representative of the news environment of a state. Specifically, while we acknowledge the regionality of these local newspapers, Kahn and Kenney find little variation in the type of campaign coverage across state newspapers in terms of content, amount, placement, and tone (Kahn and Kenney Citation1999, 36).
10 This coding scheme is in line with the stereotype activation literature, which concludes that gender pronouns alone do not trigger stereotype activation (Blair and Banaji Citation1996). Coders were instructed that gendered nouns (man/woman) were only considered explicit mentions if it would be clear to a lay reader that gender was being highlighted in that context. For example, mentions of Hillary Clinton as the first major woman presidential candidate were considered explicit mentions of gender.
11 Seven coders conducted this content analysis. All coders were trained together using articles included in the analysis. Inter-coder agreement was measured on a subsample of the articles used in this analysis; the Cohen’s Kappa reliability score for general tone is 58.6, for race tone 69, for gender tone 66.2, for the number of race paragraphs 58.8, and gender paragraphs 66.3. Coding was completed by hand to allow for a more complete understanding of the tone of news coverage in addition to discussions of race and gender. We borrowed Kahn and Kenney’s (Citation1999) coding scheme for our coding of tone. All articles were read for overall tone. Coders were instructed to code based on the overall feeling of the article, as a standard reader might understand. Articles were coded as positive, negative, or neutral – the most frequent overall article tone coded was neutral. In addition to coding for the overall tone of each article, each issue and candidate mentioned in an article were coded for tone. That is, if an article discussed both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, coverage for each candidate was determined separately, in addition to the overall tone of coverage. As in Kahn and Kenney, the paragraph is the unit of analysis. Additional information about the content analysis, including the codebook/sheet, is available from the authors upon request.
12 The survey waves used for this analysis include the Baseline survey (conducted 17 December 2007 – 3 January 2008), and two survey waves conducted during the nominating season (24 January 2008 – 4 February 2008 and 21 March 2008 – 14 April 2008).
13 Polimetrix uses a sample matching methodology to produce a sample that is representative of the US electorate (Rivers Citation2006).
14 Voters were asked the extent to which the words trustworthy and strong leader described each candidate, with four substantive options: “not at all well”, “not too well”, “quite well”, “extremely well”, and a “don’t know” option.
15 Campaign contact includes seeing a campaign ad, receiving campaign mail, donating money to a campaign or party, receiving a door pamphlet, discussing a candidate with someone, receiving a visit from a campaign worker, hearing a radio ad, seeing a yard sign, or wearing a sticker or button for a candidate, hearing a candidate speak, getting a phone call from a campaign, visiting a campaign website or hearing about a candidate at religious services.
16 While political advertisements may also influence voters’ evaluations, candidate spending and the amount of political ads in a state are highly correlated. To avoid multicollinearity, only candidate spending was included in the final model. Visit https://www.fec.gov/data/candidate/P80003338/?cycle=2008&election_full=true for more information on candidate spending.
17 Ideological proximity is a measure of the difference between voters’ self-identified ideological predisposition and their rating of each candidate’s ideology. Note: this is not an objective measure of a candidates’ ideology, but the participant’s perception of the candidate’s ideology in proximity to their own.
18 Because the content analysis revealed that there was no variation in race or gender coverage in local newspapers for John Edwards, he is excluded from the statistical analysis.
19 For the majority of candidates the cut points were significant, indicating differences among the response groups.
20 In addition to the racial framing of local news coverage, we find that the campaign context influences the way voters think about candidates. The amount that Obama spent on the campaign was significantly and positively related to his evaluations as trustworthy and a strong leader. Campaign contact is significant and positive for evaluations of Obama as trustworthy. Overall, the more contact voters had with the campaign and Obama’s message in general, the more likely they were to positively evaluate his trait characteristics.
21 Gender is another individual attribute that is significantly related to evaluations of Obama’s trustworthiness and strong leadership, though in opposing directions. Male respondents are significantly more likely to consider Obama trustworthy, illustrating that they likely related to him as a candidate. However, male respondents were significantly less likely than female respondents to say that they considered Obama a strong leader when accounting for the amount of race based coverage in local news.
