Zachary A. Scott, Phd., 2020 Directed By: Professor David Karol, Department of Government and Politics
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ABSTRACT Title of Document: “MEDIA PRIMARIES: THE ROLE OF NEWSWORTHINESS VALUES IN SHAPING ISSUE COVERAGE IN PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES.” Zachary A. Scott, PhD., 2020 Directed By: Professor David Karol, Department of Government and Politics Presidential primary candidates vie for the attention of voters by emphasizing specific issue stances or prioritizations. Yet not all candidates get their messages across. Why does the media follow the candidate’s agenda in some cases but not others? I answer this question by noting the role professional values play in journalists’ evaluations of “newsworthiness” and the important political ramifications those professional values have. Journalists prefer news stories that feature conflict, human-interest components, are timely, and are simple. I argue that there may be ways candidates can cue these values via their rhetoric and that the structure of primaries may affect how journalists apply these values when crafting coverage. I further argue that media outlets should differ in how strongly they prioritize these values. Finally, I argue that the media ignoring a candidate’s message should affect how voters evaluate candidates and how well voters are able to “correctly” vote. I show that the amount of anger language and candidate-based appeal rhetoric are positively correlated with the level of similarity between a candidate’s and the media’s agendas. I also show that expanding primary fields, where the contextual simplicity of the race is shrinking, are correlated with reductions in agenda similarity between candidates and the media. I also show that these effects are not homogenous across media outlets. Newspapers react more strongly to anger in candidate messages than TV news while news outlets with tighter space constraints are more responsive to declines in contextual simplicity. To assess the ramifications of these findings on political behavior I designed a laboratory experiment to test the effects of candidate-media agenda similarity on candidate evaluations and “correct” voting behavior. Subjects exposed to the low convergence treatment displayed higher rates of incorrect voting behavior. Collectively, these findings improve our understanding of the political repercussions of journalism’s professional values and provide insights into an oft-overlooked level of election. They also illustrate the normatively undesirable effects of low convergence. I close with a discussion of how to create a more efficient, media-centric primary process. MEDIA PRIMARIES: THE ROLE OF NEWSWORTHINESS VALUES IN SHAPING ISSUE COVERAGE IN PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES By Zachary A. Scott Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2020 Advisory Committee: Associate Professor David Karol, Chair Professor Michael Hanmer Associate Professor Danny Hayes Associate Professor Patrick Wohlfarth Professor Mark Feldstein, Dean’s Representative © Copyright by Zachary A. Scott 2020 Dedication To my Mom and Dad, brother and sister. They know full well what a dork I am, but here’s more proof just in case. And to Emily, who is my partner, in this as in everything. ii Acknowledgements The preparation of this manuscript was dramatically shaped and improved by dozens without whom it never would have existed. I’ve amassed quite a (figurative) debt and, as is tradition, this is the place to pay some small amount of it off. I benefited from a committee composed of fantastic scholars. My adviser and mentor, David Karol, encouraged me to ask broad, fundamental questions about politics and gave me the freedom to work toward answers to those questions how I thought best. He, along with Mike Hanmer, Danny Hayes, and Patrick Wohlfarth, also served as exemplars of how to ask and answer political questions in a rigorous and thoughtful manner. From conversations, classes, comments on papers, and from reading their own scholarship I learned a lot about how to be a political scientist. Mark Feldstein, who served as the Dean’s Representative, helped me see how this could speak beyond the niche of political science to other audiences who are also interested in the role of the media in American politics. I also benefited from comments and conversations with other faculty members at UMD including Antoine Banks, Ernesto Calvo, and Lily Mason. I would also like to thank Frances Lee. In her Congress grad seminar in the Spring semester of my first year she assigned her book, Beyond Ideology, as a means of talking with us about the awesome amount of work that goes into a book-length research project. It sounded terrible. But she was clearly so proud of the work she had put in and that served as good motivation when I found myself in my own cycle of laborious coding and data cleaning. My fellow graduate students were wonderful colleagues and friends. Chief among them are Caitlin McCulloch and Jared McDonald. They were always game to talk iii through ideas, proffer advice, and to test the products of new recipes I wanted to try out. I also benefited from the advice and friendship of Annie Gomez-Vidal, Kelsey Hinchliffe, Charlie Hunt, Brandon Ives, Andrew Lugg, Neil Lund, Katti McNally, Alauna Safarpour, Raymond Williams, and Julian Wamble. My family supported me throughout this intellectual journey which was a tremendous source of comfort. My Mom and Dad have always indulged my inquisitiveness. At some point the process of answering my questions shifted from disappearing into the woods for a few hours to explore to spending too much time at holidays looking at spreadsheets. They never skipped a beat. My brother and sister were happy to take time to grab a beer and talk basketball when I finally got tired of staring at those spreadsheets. Most importantly, I’d like to thank Emily Kustina. We met when I thought maybe I would be a journalist who wrote about politics. Now I’m a political scientist who writes about journalists. She’s been my partner throughout. We’ve shared in each other’s successes and the not-quite-successes. Her love and support made this possible. iv Table of Contents Dedication ...................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... iii List of Tables................................................................................................................. ix List of Figures .................................................................................................................x Chapter 1: The Role of Journalists in Media-Centric Primaries ........................................1 Rules of the Primary ....................................................................................................5 Studies of Primaries and Media ....................................................................................9 Comparison to Studies of General Elections and Media ......................................... 10 Outline of Dissertation ............................................................................................... 11 Chapter 2: The Contextual Application of Newsworthiness Values ................................ 14 Mirror Theory v. New Institutionalism ....................................................................... 14 Economic Motivations ........................................................................................... 17 Technological Imperatives ..................................................................................... 18 Individual Preferences............................................................................................ 19 Professional Norms ................................................................................................ 20 Coexistence of Newmaking Influences................................................................... 21 A Contextual Theory of Newsworthiness Values ....................................................... 23 Hypotheses in Context ............................................................................................... 29 Candidate-Induced Differences in Newsworthiness ................................................ 29 Rules-Induced Differences in Newsworthiness....................................................... 33 Media Differences in Emphasis of Newsworthiness Values ................................... 34 Behavioral Implications ......................................................................................... 38 Summary ................................................................................................................... 40 Chapter 3: Methodology of Corpora Construction and Experimental Design.................. 42 Who Counts? ............................................................................................................. 42 Presidential Primary Announcement Corpus .............................................................. 45 Corpus Collection .................................................................................................. 45 Content Analysis Procedures .................................................................................. 47 Measuring Convergence......................................................................................... 48 Presidential Primary Communication Corpus ............................................................