Biased Gatekeepers? Partisan Perceptions of Media Attention in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

ABSTRACT

Deciding which stories to cover is an essential function of the press, and pundits and citizens commonly criticize journalists for these so-called “gatekeeping” choices. While journalists may indeed be biased toward telling certain types of stories, research on the hostile media perception (HMP) suggests that audience judgments about how journalists divvy up attention may be biased as well–shaped, at least in part, by partisan preferences. This study explores how partisanship impacted perceptions of media coverage among news consumers (N = 657) shortly before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Results show that, across a variety of news stories involving the candidates, polling, and key election issues, rival partisans had diverging impressions of media attention that were not explained by differing news habits. A relative HMP pattern is evident when partisans evaluate how media allocate attention across news topics.

KEYWORDS:

• Audience perceptions
• election news
• gatekeeping
• hostile media perception
• partisanship
• perceived bias
• U.S. elections

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Mallory R. Perryman http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0798-6311

Notes

1 Readers may wonder why the Access Hollywood tape incident–a 2005 tape recording of Donald Trump making crude comments about women–was not included as one of his negative stories. These data were collected just before that story broke. In fact, none of the candidate-focused stories tested were particularly salient at the time.

2 Aalberg, Strömbäck, and de Vreese (2011) distinguish between the game and strategy dimensions of the larger strategic game frame. The items used in this study are more reflective of the game component, as strategy frames focus more on media interpretation of the candidates’ motives, personal styles, and campaign strategy.

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Mass Communication and Society Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.