News Media Framing of Negative Campaigning

Abstract

News media coverage of election campaigns is often characterized by use of the strategic game frame and a focus on politicians' use of negative campaigning. However, the exact relationship between these two characteristics of news coverage is largely unexplored. This article theorizes that consumer demand and norms of journalistic independence might induce the news media outlets to cover negative campaigning with a strategic game frame. A comprehensive content analysis based on several newspaper types, several election campaigns, and several different measurements of media framing confirms that news coverage of negative campaigning does apply the strategic game frame to a significantly larger degree than articles covering positive campaigning. This finding has significant implications for campaigning politicians and for scholars studying campaign and media effects.

Notes

¹Some studies have differentiated further between the game frame and the strategy frame (Aalberg et al., 2012). However, the conceptual overlap between the two frames is arguably great and the terms have been used interchangeably (e.g., Lawrence, 2000). Therefore this article focuses on the overall strategic game frame.

²Recent studies on media framing have investigated both the presence of conflict in a story and the use of the strategic game frame, but these studies have not investigated the interaction between the use of the strategic game frame and conflict (Strömbäck & Aalberg 2008; Strömbäck & Dimitrova, 2006).

³Articles were found in the database “Infomedia” by searching for articles with at least 100 words, published (in print) during the formal election campaign (October 25 to November 13, 2007, and August 27 to September 15, 2011). To capture relevant articles, the search string required that the article mentioned at least one of the nine political parties in the Danish parliament and the word “election” (“valg”). Included newspapers were Politiken and Jyllandsposten (broadsheets), EkstraBladet and BT (tabloids), and MetroXpress and 24Timer (free dailies). The newspaper EkstraBladet was not included in 2007.

⁴The codebook is available from the author upon request.

^a n = 201.

^b n = 142.

^c n = 117.

⁵Source: author's interview with anonymous government press officer.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rasmus Tue Pedersen

Rasmus Tue Pedersen (Ph.D., University of Copenhagen, 2013) is a Postdoc in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. His research interests include media framing, media effects, content analysis, opinion formation, survey methodology and survey experiments.