Hillary and Barack: Will Atypical Candidates Lead to Atypical Coverage?

Abstract

This analysis compares how the press covered the campaigns of then-senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to determine if—when not compared to a White male candidate—the press still focused on a Black candidate's skin color, a female candidate's gender and appearance, and if it continued to portray both candidates unfavorably. As the first national election with an African American male and White female frontrunners, this is perhaps the first study that directly examines the effect the novelty of race and gender have on press coverage. It found the press still made gender a salient aspect of Clinton's campaign. Also, despite his reticence to focus on race, the press still more frequently portrayed Obama as the “Black” candidate. However, in contrast to previous studies, neither candidate received more coverage for their appearance (i.e., attractiveness, attire, or smile), nor did either receive more favorable coverage than the other. These findings suggest that to some extent, these atypical candidates may have led to atypical coverage.

KEYTERMS:

• agenda-setting
• appearance
• Barack Obama
• gender
• Hillary Clinton
• press
• race

Notes

Media scholars have paid particular attention to how the media portray political candidates in elections. In mid-February 2008, an article search using just the terms female and candidate turned up 1,039 articles in the EBSCO search engine alone. A query for male candidates returned 1,450 articles.

Underscoring this, a similar EBSCO search on African American female candidates yielded just 34 articles and only 21 articles on African American male candidates.

Hatley Major and Coleman (2008) compared press coverage of 2003 Louisiana governor's race between Kathleen Blanco (a woman of Cajun descent) and Bobby Jindal (a Louisiana native of Indian descent).

Because the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune are both owned by the Tribune Company, the Tribune was left out of this analysis to decrease the likelihood of coverage overlap with the Los Angeles Times. The Chicago Sun-Times has the second-highest circulation in Chicago (Audit Bureau of Circulations, 2008).

The notation “AND” was added to Clinton's analysis to decrease the likelihood of including stories that focused on former president Bill Clinton.