Blame The Press: Study Says Campaigns Less Negative

WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, July 23) -- Presidential campaigns are far less negative than they appear, according to a study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The culprit: the press's negative reports.

"Journalism, both print and broadcast, is creating a unrepresentative sense of the negativity of candidate discourse," said Annenberg Dean Kathleen Hall Jamieson. The study, which analyzed ads and speeches as far back as the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon campaign, found that candidates more often advocate their own positions than attack their opponents.

Just like sports highlight films, the candidates' hits and scoring drives garner more attention in press accounts than the rest of the game. The Campaign Mapping Project, beginning in September, will issue weekly reports analyzing candidate speeches, ads and debate performances in an effort to judge the disparity between campaign utterances and press reports.

While only print media was included in the long-range study, researchers said broadcast media contains even more negative attacks. The report attempted to quantify the percentage of "oppositional" campaign material and its relationship to press reports. The news media consistently reports a higher level of oppositional material than actually exists, although the disparity is not as great as some might think.

In 1960, for example, oppositional material comprised 16 percent of candidate speeches and 45 percent of quotations used in news reports. By 1980, it was about 18 percent to 28 percent; in 1988, 12 percent to 31 percent; in 1992, 26 percent to 32 percent. The 1988 Bush-Dukakis race, one of the nastiest in recent years, was actually less negative than most campaigns but among the harshest in reporting.

A related study on political language by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found that the 1992 campaign was considerably less ideological than the 1980 and 1988 races, thanks largely to Texas billionaire Ross Perot's candidacy. "The larger question is, from the perspective of the voter, are you getting a sense of what the candidates' discourse was like or not?" said Jamieson. This report gives a simple answer: no.

AllPolitics home page

Blame The Press: Study Says Campaigns Less Negative

Related Stories:

Related Site: