Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t: How Journalists Sideline Electoral Participation (Without Even Knowing It) 9780271082905

Citation preview

Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

D RD RHETORICANDDEMOCRATICDELIBERATION VOLUME 13 17

edited by cheryl glenn and stephen browne the pennsylvania state university

Co-­­­founding Editor: J. Michael Hogan Editorial Board: Robert Asen (University of Wisconsin–Madison) Debra Hawhee (The Pennsylvania State University) J. Michael Hogan (The Pennsylvania State University) Peter Levine (Tufts University) Steven J. Mailloux (University of California, Irvine) Krista Ratcliffe (Marquette University) Karen Tracy (University of Colorado, Boulder) Kirt Wilson (The Pennsylvania State University) David Zarefsky (Northwestern University)

Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation focuses on the interplay of public discourse, politics, and democratic action. Engaging with diverse theoretical, cultural, and critical perspectives, books published in this series offer fresh perspectives on rhetoric as it relates to education, social movements, and governments throughout the world. A complete list of books in this series is located at the back of this volume.

Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t How Journalists Sideline Electoral Participation (Without Even Knowing It)

sharon e . jarvis and soo -­h ye han

The Pennsylvania State University Press | University Park, Pennsylvania

This book is freely available in an open access edition with the generous support of The Pennsylvania State University Libraries. Digital copies are available for download through the Pennsylvania State University Press website. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jarvis, Sharon E., 1969– author. | Han, Soo-Hye, 1976– author. Title: Votes that count and voters who don’t : how journalists sideline electoral participation (without even knowing it) / Sharon E. Jarvis and SooHye Han. Other titles: Rhetoric and democratic deliberation. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2018] | Series: Rhetoric and democratic deliberation | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Examines how journalists have portrayed electoral participation in the United States. The authors analyze depictions of voters in print news coverage over the course of eighteen presidential elections (1948– 2016), describe people’s reactions to those depictions, and share insights from their interviews with more than fifty elite journalists”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2018026202 | ISBN 9780271081250 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 9780271081267 (pbk : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Voting—United States—History. | Voting research—United States. | Journalism—Political aspects—United States. Classification: LCC JK1965.J37 2018 | DDC 324.973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov /2018026202 Copyright © 2018 Sharon E. Jarvis and Soo-­Hye Han All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-­free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

Condescension is never a good look. —msnbc’s willie geist (two days after the 2016 presidential election)

Contents



Acknowledgments  |  ix



Introduction: Journalists and Voters  |  1

1 Portraying the Voter  |  13 2 Discounting the Voter  |  34 3 Positioning the Voter  |  56 4 Influencing the Voter  |  78 5 Struggling with the Voter  |  96 6 Spinning for the Voter  |  116



Appendix  |  141



Notes  |  161



Index  |  191

Acknowledgments

Voters are not fools . . . in the large the electorate behaves about as rationally and responsibly as we should expect, given the clarity of alternatives presented to it and the character of the information available to it. —v. o. key, The Responsible Electorate

V. O. Key was a path-­breaking expert on the empirical study of elections and voting. He was born in Austin, Texas, in 1908, earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas in 1929 and his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1934, and published seminal works between the 1930s and early 1960s. Influenced by the place of his upbringing and the time of his education, this former president of the American Political Science Association was motivated less by big social science and more by a progressive outlook, a sense of meliorism, and an appetite for reform.1 Regarded as a scholar who cared about “everyday politics and ordinary people,” he theorized about individuals lacking political power, processes that mobilize the public, and organized activities that can overcome inertia in the populace.2 Key is credited with being ahead of his time in studying the topics that preoccupy scholars today.3 Yet, he is also identified as having “curiously little substantive impact on the flow of mainstream research,” particularly after his death.4 The Responsible Electorate, from which our epigraph comes, was published posthumously and serves as a rare cautionary tale of how electoral research could be used politically in the public conversation by those with power against those with less of it. Specifically, Key was concerned about how polling data on voters might be disseminated by campaigns looking to curry favor for their causes, manipulated by journalists seeking compelling storylines, and utilized by elected officials to shape how voters view themselves and their capacity to affect future electoral outcomes. He

x   acknowledgments

worried, too, that these data could be employed unreflectively by social scientists to establish trajectories of research that take scholarship away from the concerns of real people. Prominent voices ranging from Philip Converse, to Walter Dean Burnham, to Larry Bartels observe how electoral research has departed from Key’s concerns for political power, context, and meaning.5 We start our acknowledgments by discussing Key as we are deeply inspired by the respectful stance he took toward the electorate and the sense of meliorism that marked his work. Our own research initially started as an effort to understand what it means to be a voter in the United States. After conducting a sixty-­eight-­year content analysis of how voters are portrayed in print news coverage of presidential elections, an experiment and focus groups to assess how everyday people respond to these portrayals, and interviews with elite journalists to get their insights on our data, our purpose expanded. For researchers, our hope is that this project returns attention to Key’s reservations about what opinion data can be used for in the conversation surrounding elections (in addition to what it actually measures). For the public, our goal is to invite people to become more reflective about the mindset concerning voting in the United States and how this outlook both helps and hinders democratic life. For the future, our aim is to start a conversation about how news professionals specifically, as well as other interested parties more generally, can talk about electoral participation in ways that contribute to the American polity. We have many people to thank for their support. First, we are grateful for intellectual, collegial, and financial resources at the University of Texas. We are tremendously appreciative for the opportunity to discuss, question, and refine these ideas with fellow faculty, including Maxwell McCombs, Walter Dean Burnham, Roderick P. Hart, Barry Brummett, Joe Cutbirth, Natalie (Talia) Stroud, Nicholas Valentino, Regina Lawrence, Christopher Wlezien, Stephen Reese, Gene Burd, Caroline Frick, Courtney Byrd, Barry Bales, Matthew McGlone, Rene Dailey, Richard Cherwitz, Erin Donovan, Yale Patt, Brent Iverson, Martha Hilley, Jim Vick, Abena Dove Osseo-­Asare, Mark Morrison, Mary Bock, Renita Coleman, Paula Poindexter, Robert Quigley, George Sylvie, and Rusty Todd. We have become smarter by talking through findings with colleagues who studied here, including Amanda Davis Gatchet, Lisa Glebatis-­Perks, Nicole Laster, Jennifer Asenas, Becky LaVally, Jeff Bechdel, Kelly Kaufheld, Seth Lewis, Dave Shaw, Erica Whittington, Eric Busch, Jay Childers, Johanna Hartelius, Maegan Stephens, Robert McDonald, Ashley Muddiman, Jessica Collier, and Joshua Scacco. We have been blessed to work with many fantastic undergraduates over the years and want to extend

acknowledgments   xi

special thanks to Emo Rosas and Carla Wright. We are further indebted to the wisdom and generosity of Margaret Surratt, Melissa Huebsch, Mary Dixson, Aida Gonzalez, Susan Nold, Christine Plonsky, and Jennifer Betancourt. We thank the University of Texas Vice President for Research for funding to support experiments and focus groups over the years and the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life for granting access to the Campaign Mapping Project, an initiative by Roderick P. Hart and Kathleen Hall Jamieson to archive texts surrounding presidential campaigns over eighteen presidential elections (1948–2016). Next, we are so thankful for colleagues outside of the University of Texas. We value the thoughtful input from Craig A. Smith, Mary Stuckey, Kimberly Meltzer, Kevin Coe, Robin Jensen, Gregory Payne, Bethany Ann Conway, Frank Esser, Danna Young, Kate Kenski, Vanessa Beasley, Jill Edy, Kristin Johnson, Laura Kelso, Zach Bowen, David Hardy, Kelly Mosser, Shelby Wilson, Kelly Harrison, Fred Hatfield, and other unnamed reviewers. We are also deeply obliged to over fifty journalists (and their incredibly kind staffs) for scheduling interviews, agreeing to talk to us, answering our questions, keeping in touch, and continuing to care about the public conversation about elections that appears in print news. We thank the professionals at Penn State University Press. We are so happy to have worked with Kendra Boileau, Alex Vose, Laura-­Reed Morrison, and Dana Henricks. Their wisdom and insights have made this a much stronger project. Finally, we are truly grateful for our families. Sharon thanks her Phillips family forebears for valuing democratic life and working to contribute to it, loves her Phillips and Jarvis contemporaries for continuing to care about these matters, and is deeply appreciative to Hank and Mary for really caring about elections. Your strength has given me strength, faith given me faith, hope given me hope, and love given me love. Soo-­Hye is grateful for the love and support of her parents and for Matt’s patience and Texas-­sized heart.

introduction: journalists and voters

On November 2, 1948, over 47 million Americans voted in their country’s forty-­first quadrennial presidential election. The Chicago Tribune did not wait for these votes to be tallied, however, before naming Republican Thomas Dewey the winner. Facing deadline pressures, and convinced by pre-­election polling numbers, veteran reporter and political analyst Arthur Sears Henning called the election for this Chicago paper before the polls had even closed on the East Coast. Consequently, the next day’s print edition featured the infamous—and incorrect—headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.” When the votes were actually counted, the Democratic nominee Harry Truman received 2,188,055 more votes than Dewey (giving him an Electoral College edge of 303 to Dewey’s 198). While this incident is renowned for several reasons—Truman’s victory surprised the campaign and media elite, Henning’s forecast put the practice of public opinion polling into question, and AP photographer Byron Rollins’s iconic photo of a victorious Truman holding an early edition of the faulty front page became seared into the public memory—this book is concerned with a more fundamental element of the event. What led an esteemed journalist to write the conclusion to the campaign narrative before the election was even over? As it turns out, Henning’s rush to do so has not been unique. A review of election reporting practices reveals a set of similarly hurried efforts to record history before it has happened. In 1964, for instance, even though over 70 million Americans voted in the presidential election, news stations on the East Coast began discussing Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson’s lead in the race well before polls had closed on the West Coast. While Johnson went on to win 61 percent of the popular vote, media outlets talked openly about his likely victory hours before all votes were cast.1 In 1980, even though over 86 million Americans voted in the presidential election, NBC called the contest for Republican Ronald Reagan at 8:15 p.m. EST. This action led incumbent

2   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

president Jimmy Carter to deliver his concession speech 90 minutes later— well before the polls had closed in Western States.2 In 2000, even though over 6 million Floridians voted in the presidential election, Democrat Al Gore was declared the winner of the state at 7:49 p.m. by NBC, at 7:50 p.m. by CBS, at 7:52 p.m. by the Voter News Service, and at 8:02 p.m. by ABC. These calls were retracted at 10:00 p.m. by CBS and at 10:16 p.m. by the Voter News Service. Republican George W. Bush was then named the winner in Florida at 2:16 a.m. by FOX and at 2:20 a.m. by ABC, only for these pronouncements to also be rescinded hours later.3 It would take more than a month for the courts to settle on the winner of the election in Florida in that year. In the spring of 2016, an early call was made on the eve of the last major day of the Democratic primary. The Associated Press ran a story—just before delegate-­rich states like California and New Jersey could vote—declaring that Hillary Clinton had enough support to become the Democratic nominee. This announcement prompted a wave of responses. Clinton herself tweeted, “We’re flattered, @AP, but we’ve got primaries to win. CA, MT, NM, MD, NJ, SD, vote tomorrow!”4 News reports featured citizens’ concerns with the call. Travis Fox was quoted as saying, “Disgusting. Absolutely horrible to hear.”5 Jacob Chase offered, “How can you call this on the eve of the California primary? The media is trying to suppress the vote, and they’re trying to anoint her. They’re doing an anointment process.”6 Isabelle Saenz added, “It makes no sense. We haven’t even voted yet. It’s not fair—California is the biggest state.”7 In the months leading up to the 2016 election, prominent voices in the media continued to foretell successes for Clinton. A Donald Trump victory was labeled “a fantasy” as media elites suggested “it would take video evidence of a smiling Hillary drowning a litter of puppies while terrorists surrounded her with chants of ‘Death to America’” for him to win.8 Data analysts and reporters offered to eat crickets on CNN as well as printouts of their Washington Post columns should Trump be victorious.9 On Election Day, the New York Times shared that “Hillary Clinton has an 85% chance to win,” noting that “a victory by Mr. Trump remains possible,” but “Mrs. Clinton’s chance of losing is about the same as the probability that an N.F.L kicker misses a 37-­yard field goal.”10 According to Politico, “even Trump has admitted that, on the morning of November 8, he didn’t think he was going to win.”11 America has witnessed considerable political, cultural, and technological changes in the sixty-­eight-­year span between the Dewey headline, the Florida fiasco, and the Clinton projections. A constant over these years, however, can be witnessed in journalists’ instinct to call elections before the votes have

introduction   3

been tallied. In the contests above, millions of citizens turned out to perform their democratic duty. And, in these cases, the media would not wait for their decisions to be counted. These early election calls raise key questions: How have journalists told the story of electoral participation during presidential campaigns? How have they signaled the value of the vote, the role(s) of voters, and the act of voting? Have they depicted participation as meaningful and worthwhile? Or have they described it as preordained and a waste of time? Heading into Election Day, has the electorate been cued as central, or superfluous, to democratic life? These questions have a special urgency in the United States—a country with a history of ambivalence about electoral participation. On one hand, voting is a key symbol of American democracy, a venerated privilege for generations. On the other, there is no affirmative right to vote in the U.S. Constitution as the nation’s Founders were uncomfortable with the idea of suffrage. Interestingly, at least 135 subsequent democracies whose founding documents were written after the U.S. Constitution was ratified, including neighbors Canada and Mexico, explicitly guarantee the right to vote to their citizenry. That the United States continues to have “Constitutional silence” on the right to vote places it in a small group of countries such as Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Pakistan, Singapore, and the United Kingdom, prompting the Brennan Center for Justice to label the United States “backward” on this issue.12 Additionally, the United States is one of the rare countries that places the responsibility for registration entirely on the voter.13 While between the years 2015 and 2016, states including California, Connecticut, Oregon, Vermont, and West Virginia authorized automatic voter registration for citizens interacting with their state Department of Motor Vehicles offices, comparative research shows that the United States trails other countries in this practice.14 In commenting on such matters, Walter Dean Burnham observes how “in all other advanced capitalist democracies, it has for generations been a first principle that the right to vote is a fundamental human and political right and that it is the duty of the state to protect and facilitate its exercise.”15 He continues, “The administrative hurdles, incompetencies and inadequate funding” allocated to conducting elections “would not be allowed to exist in any country which viewed the political rights of the citizenry as of fundamental importance and mobilized the resources of the state accordingly.”16 Seminal works in political science have attended to how elite actors, powerful institutions, and scholars in the United States view voting. In his 1966 book The Responsible Electorate, V. O. Key worried that the picture of the voter

4   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

emerging in “the new electoral studies,” contributing to “political folklore,” and “being spread to a larger public by reporters” was not pretty.17 Survey research findings like those published in the influential 1960 book—The American Voter—or those used by “public-­relations” consultants to advise candidates, he feared, were being interpreted and acted upon in ways that cast voters as “fools” who could be “managed by campaigns” rather than as “citizens” charged with the role of “making and unmaking governments.”18 He saw such a mindset as problematic, for it could shape how people see their roles in the polity and influence how leaders and the government treat them. Employing the metaphor of an “echo chamber” to refer to the public mindset, he wrote, The perceptions that leadership elements of democracies hold of the modes of response of the electorate must always be a matter of fundamental significance. Those perceptions determine the nature of the voice of the people, for they determine the character of the Echo Chamber. While the output may be governed by the nature of the input, over the longer run the properties of the Echo Chamber may themselves be altered. Fed a steady diet of buncombe, the people may come to expect and respond with highest predictability to buncombe. And those leaders most skilled in the propagation of buncombe may gain lasting advantage in the recurring struggles for popular favor.19 In his 1968 book Elections in America, Gerald Pomper was also apprehensive about the “pessimistic portrait of the voter” emanating from analyses of survey data in the 1960s.20 Like Key, he was uneasy that scholarship had begun to “ridicule the electorate,” potentially portending a research trajectory that could become a “self-­fulfilling prophecy.” He discussed how survey findings were elucidated in ways that treated voters not as participants in the democratic process but as “susceptible to manipulation by socioeconomic influences, propaganda, and glamorous candidates.”21 In interpreting his own research from the 1964 election, he hesitated to regard voters as either “philosophical citizens” contributing “direct popular control over policy” or as “manipulated subjects” offering “no direct or indirect influence.” Instead, he argued that voters could be seen as individuals who protect themselves and their interests by participating in elections and by controlling who is elected.22 Failing to be mindful of how elections offer citizens opportunities to protect themselves, he cautioned, might lead to actions that could “minimize the power of ordinary citizens” by “restricting their roles in elections” for “if elections are not respected, they could become unworthy of respect.”23

introduction   5

Similar concerns have been voiced more recently. In his 2013 book drawing on data from Great Britain, Stephen Coleman addressed how “there is a sense in which the act of voting as described in most election studies is stripped of its cultural vitality, leaving the individual voters as a disembodied cog in a vast political counting machine.”24 In a 2001 review of the state of election research, Larry Bartels noted that the subjection of the electorate to “microscopic analysis”—a trend that had grown steadily in prominence since the early 1960s—tends to make electoral study a “nonpolitical endeavor.”25 This development troubled him as it “divorces the subjects of microscopic examination” from their place in the larger political situation and means that many academic studies of voting do not “add impressively to our comprehension of the awesome process by which the community or nation makes decisions at the ballot box.”26 For Bartels, a “key intellectual challenge facing scholars of voting” is to take a step back and pay more attention to the power and place of elections in a political system more broadly.27 A tradition of ambivalence and these scholarly concerns take us back to the uneasy relationship between reporters and voters evidenced in the examples that opened this chapter. From a grand perspective, proclamations about the democratic duty of journalists abound.28 As Buzz Merritt and Maxwell McCombs put it, all journalists have “a stake in the condition of citizenship because we have a stake, both personal and professional, in the condition of democracy.” If, they continue, news professionals “cannot figure out how to play an effective role in the interrelated dynamic of journalism and democracy, neither will flourish.”29 From a more practical vantage point, news professionals face pressures—particularly for television and digital sites—to be first with the facts. Howard Kurtz, media writer for the Washington Post, contends, “The pace has gotten dizzying for me and my colleagues. . . . everyone wants it now, now, now. And that’s understandable in a wired world, but the sacrifice clearly is in the extra phone calls and the chance to briefly reflect on the story that you’re slapping together.”30 Here, the competing goals of getting the facts right versus getting the facts first complicate reporting on elections. To date, analyses of how these temporal pressures influence the story of voting have taken an outcomes-­based approach. Specifically, scholars have examined if and how premature announcements affect voter turnout and electoral results. Such analyses have revealed how in 1964, “the number of vote changes among voters who heard election returns before voting was not very large,”31 and in 1980, no evidence was found to “support the belief that early projections significantly depress voter turnout.”32 While these findings offer understandings of the effects of rushed calls in two lopsided

6   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

contests (Johnson and Reagan won by wide margins in those years), Kurt and Gladys Lang warn how such studies neglect how early calls could influence a broader sense of respect for voting in general. They believed that “a failure to locate a significant number of vote changes in 1964 does not mean that more such changes cannot occur under different circumstances.”33 Because “no two elections are exactly alike”34 they continue, the “matter of regulating the dissemination of returns on Election Day should be debated less in terms of the number of voters affected than in terms of the impact on the legitimacy of the electoral process.”35 Inspired by elite apprehension surrounding voting and the Langs’ call to focus on the intersection of campaign reporting and understandings of electoral participation, this book takes a mixed-­method approach to study the linguistic cues surrounding voting in the United States. We attend to the linguistic signaling that happens in the months prior to the moment that people walk into, or avoid, the voting booth. We argue that the public messages about voting at this time set the stage for electoral contests, cue the roles citizens should play in them, signal how closely the electorate should be paying attention to the campaign, and gesture to if and how participation even matters. Early chapters present findings from a content analysis of the words vote, voter, and voting in print news coverage of presidential campaigns (1948– 2016). We selected these three words as they are the terms journalists use most frequently to study our topic, and they allow us to measure the idea, the actors, and the process of electoral participation. We studied coverage appearing between the nominating conventions and Election Day because political scholars argue that is when voters are paying closest attention to the campaign. It is during these periods, researchers elaborate, that elections become “centerpieces of civic culture” whereby “the scattered millions of the electorate come together to decide their political futures.”36 We employed a set of variables derived from the fields of political communication, rhetoric, sociolinguistics, and political science to track the political setting leading up to the election (variables: mobilization agents, associations, context, time, and frame), the nature of the voting act (variables: assumptions, challenges, goals, and rewards), and the agency of the voter (variables: grammar, role, potency, behavior, and quality). All of these variables are explained in detail in our appendix. We chose to focus on print news texts from the Campaign Mapping Project (CMP) at the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life at the University of Texas. Originally codirected by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Roderick P. Hart, the CMP features presidential campaign materials over a sixty-­eight-­year period

introduction   7

(1948–2016). A guiding assumption behind the project is that “research has too often lunged from campaign to campaign, with few consistent questions being asked and with few broad findings emerging as a result.”37 To date, book projects have employed CMP materials to track how political words are shaped by specific voices38 as well as to quantify shifts in political tone over the years.39 Strengths, then, of employing these news texts (as well as the aforementioned content analytic variables, several of which have been used in our earlier work) are that they allow a longitudinal analysis whose findings can be compared and contrasted to insights from earlier analyses. The CMP print news archive was designed to offer several glimpses of presidential campaign coverage. Sources were selected to offer both a national (New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, AP, and UPI syndicate stories) and more regional (Atlanta Constitution, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times) perspective.40 Campaign stories were pulled from the front page as well as from the “A” section of the papers to give a sense of what articles had been fronted as well as those deemed less newsworthy by editors.41 For the early years of our research, the daily newspaper had been touted as “one of the foundation stones of American social life,” ministering to and creating communities.42 Even though its near “monopoly on content and advertising” has been challenged by the emergence of commercial radio in the 1920s, the expansion of television in the 1950s and 1960s, and the rise of the Internet and social media in the 2000s, as recently as the early 1980s the print news business was “very prosperous” with record employment levels surpassing “steel mills, automobile/car body plants, and auto parts manufacturers to assume the lead among the biggest U.S. manufacturing employers.”43 Admittedly, by the 2000s, newspaper circulation had dropped roughly 30 percent from its peak in 1984, and advertising revenues had “halved” (from “$20 billion in 2000 to $10 billion in 2009”). Further, the industry had “shed more than 25 percent of its workforce.”44 Journalists covered these changes extensively. Scholarly analyses of how the newspapers told the story of their decline show that reporters labeled it a “crisis,” invoked death imagery and metaphors, and focused largely on short-­term drama rather than comparing the moment to prior falloffs.45 So vivid was the reporting that one media economics reporter opined that news professionals were “arguing the sky is falling” and “making the situation appear far worse than it is.”46 Despite these recent developments, print still holds a special place in the public political conversation.47 Throughout the years of our study, print has

8   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

served a powerful agenda-­setting role, influencing the topics and treatment of content elsewhere. Research shows this sway is particularly strong on television and in public affairs reporting, as well as for digital news, social media messaging, and interpersonal conversations.48 Print also plays an investigative role in the polity. It is projected that it produces “upwards of 70 to 80 percent of new information that circulates in online content.”49 On this point, John S. Carroll, former reporter and editor of the Los Angeles Times has stated, “I estimate that roughly 85 percent of the original reporting that gets done in America gets done by newspapers. They’re the ones who are going out and knocking on doors and rummaging through records and covering events and so on. And most of the other media that provide news to people are really recycling news that’s gathered by newspapers.”50 Print, further, is widely preferred by audiences to digital news. Iris Chyi’s analyses document how reader response to online news has “fallen short of expectations,” as “major newspapers’ online readership has shown little or no growth since 2007” and some have seen a “decline since 2011.”51 Data from 2016 underscore these findings as “51% of those who consume a newspaper read it exclusively in print.”52 So, while news industry conditions have changed over the years of our analysis—dynamics we address in chapter 3— we opt to study print content from the vantage point that scholarship has documented several such changes to the industry and that “slimmed down” versions of newspapers continue to publish (suggesting, perhaps, that the “myth of the death of newspapers” may be “exaggerated”).53 After presenting the findings from the content analysis, subsequent chapters address how citizens react to dominant portrayals of voters in the news as well as how journalists respond to the challenges of covering electoral participation. This multimethod approach is influenced by models of political communication inviting a more holistic stance to the various actors and perspectives at play in a presidential campaign.54 Craig Smith, for one, advises that campaign messaging should be viewed as a “trialogue” between campaigners, reporters, and citizens, and that scholars gain special insight by attending to the interplay between the differing identities, motivations, and agendas of these three entities.55 Specifically, he contends that campaigners are composed of candidates, strategists, and advocates who must decide whether to run, organize substantial resources, win a party’s nomination, consolidate the splintered party, and win state elections. Reporters are broadly conceived of as those who observe and comment publicly. They must follow the campaign, frame observations as stories, and attract audiences to

introduction   9

make their reporting worthwhile. Citizens comprise “millions of individuals who talk, listen, reflect, and sometimes, vote,” and they must decide how to follow the campaign, assess their own political priorities, decide whom to prefer, and decide how to participate.56 Other book projects have targeted the relationships contributing to this trialogue, advancing important insights on the relationship(s) between campaigners and citizens as well as between campaigners and reporters.57 We take a close look at the understudied connection(s) between reporters and citizens. In doing so, we are mindful that reporters embrace a democratic duty and face temporal pressures and that audiences listen to the campaign conversation seeking cues if, and how, participation might be worth the effort.58 More specifically, this book proceeds as follows. Chapter 1 begins by addressing definitions of electoral participation from political theory. It then draws from research in political communication, rhetoric, and sociolinguistics to review the role language plays in introducing political topics, signaling power and political positions, and hiding its own influence from the people who use it. We discuss how mediated portrayals of electoral participation in the United States, as well as across the globe, have offered far more linguistic cues empowering candidates and campaign strategists than the role(s) citizens play in elections. Chapter 2 offers the answers to a broad question: how have the words vote, voter, and voting been depicted in print news coverage of presidential campaigns, from 1948 to 2016? The chapter presents the dominant findings from a content analysis of 36,400 instances of these words appearing in 10,307 articles from the six newspapers and wire services in the CMP. The macro-­level findings uncover how these terms are newsworthy when endangered, but otherwise largely unremarkable. Reporters used the word vote prominently between the years 1948 and 1968 but gradually gave more attention to the term voter later in the analysis. The shift from discussions of the vote—which was depicted as “sought after” and “counting”—to greater attention to the voter—which was subjected to thin personalization and often cast as marginalized and isolated from the political game—devalued the general meaning of electoral participation in coverage. Chapter 3 looks underneath these dominant depictions to show notable changes in portrayals over time. The data reveal how the key labels were presented as meaningful between the years 1948 and 1968 and again in 2008. From 1948 to 1968, journalists were likely to include lengthy sound bites from candidates that spoke directly to voters; these statements often solicited

10   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

voter participation, underscored the importance of the vote, and cast voting as consequential. In 2008, journalists detailed how voters were heavily courted by the Barack Obama campaign, calling attention to his sophisticated techniques to mobilize citizens and the public’s appreciation of his efforts. Outside of those campaigns, the key terms were largely treated as objects in the news—ones that were measured and managed by strategic campaign operatives (1972–2000) and then trapped in a system of electoral mishaps (2004), allegations of voter fraud (2012), and flawed candidates (2016). The differences, in both content and tone, between the years 1948 to 1968 and 2008 versus 1972 and 2000 reveal how news coverage can signal varying levels of power to the electorate. The distinctions between these two types of reporting led us to ask: Would newspaper readers notice such differences? Would portraying voters as actors in news coverage influence how people regard electoral participation in the United States? Chapter 4 presents answers to these questions. We worked with an experienced political reporter to craft articles that captured the sounds of the voter as a mobilized-­participant (common in reporting from 1948 to 1968 and in 2008) and as an isolated-­spectator (common in reporting from 1972 to 2000) and conducted an experiment and set of focus groups to see if the linguistic cues in these conditions might affect how individuals think about the importance and influence of electoral participation. Findings show that they did. People who read news stories in which voters were portrayed playing a role in the election were more likely to express the value of voting, a sense of external political efficacy, more positive language about elections, and greater trust in the media than did individuals who read articles signaling how electoral outcomes can be predicted via polling data or a control condition article. The patterns from chapters 2, 3, and 4 led to another set of questions: Are political reporters mindful of how they depict voters in the news? How would print journalists react to our findings? One of the assumptions guiding our project is that meaningful efforts to study news portrayals that might create opportunities for democratic life should work with—and not simply critique—journalists’ perspectives and the daily practices of newsrooms.59 Accordingly, we conducted in-­depth interviews with over fifty journalists who had experiences in political reporting for the six newspapers in the content analysis as well as in positions ranging from editors, journalism educators, bloggers, and online news entrepreneurs. Chapter 5 offers barriers to—as well as opportunities for—more meaningful coverage of voters in future campaigns. Specifically, the journalists we talked to were surprised that they

introduction   11

have neglected voters in the past, were detached from the voting experience, felt guilty about this detachment, and were frustrated that campaign strategists have such control over the news cycle. At the same time, however, these journalists expressed a normative connection to the role of voters in the system, explained how pressure could be placed on them to be more inclusive of voters in future coverage, and saw online news as a place that should, naturally, involve more citizens in the campaign narrative. Chapter 6 addresses how the shifting news environment raises possibilities for portrayals of voters in the future. Will journalistic efforts to innovate and connect with audiences position voters more prominently and meaningfully in future coverage? Or will campaign strategists enjoy even greater influence on political coverage (leading to even more elite control over the news and even fewer readers regarding the political campaign narrative as relevant and meaningful for them)? While time, of course, will provide richer answers to these questions, the conclusion underscores the problem of current forms of coverage, previews the promise of integrating electoral labels more meaningfully in news narratives, and closes by inviting news organizations, journalists, scholars, educators, and citizens to consider becoming advocates for voters in the news.

Conclusion Voting is a primary form of citizen power and news coverage of presidential elections is a key place where individuals learn about their potential for such influence.60 While many scholars look at the impact of the electorate through analyses of electoral outcomes, our plan is different. We will examine the mediated messages about electoral participation in the months leading up to presidential elections to address the developments to which traditional outcomes-­based analyses cannot account. In advocating for this type of an approach, Murray Edelman contends that a close analysis of the electoral setting prior to Election Day allows insight into areas of action as well as “areas of caused inaction,” understandings of the individual as well as “influences outside the individual.” Knowing more about the intersection of context and power allows researchers to understand how people make sense of political life and do what they do. As he puts it, “The fawn, unmoving in the thicket, may be asleep, but it also may be paralyzed with fear of a predator. In the latter case, only the observer who is alert to the structure of power will provide a persuasive account of the fawn’s behavior.”61

12   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

Voters might not have obvious predators in the United States, but—as Burnham argues—their rights are far more vulnerable than those of citizens in other advanced capitalist democracies.62 Tracing how electoral participation is depicted through language will offer a richer understanding of how citizens and elites have been invited to think about “the modes of response” of the electorate and the legitimacy of the electoral process in the United States.63

1

portraying the voter

Journalists are power brokers. As Michael Schudson details, when they “offer the public an item of news, they confer upon it public legitimacy,” bringing it “into a common public forum where it can be discussed by a general audience.”1 Consider how they helped turn businessman Donald Trump into a political possibility through the 2016 campaign. From July 2015 to October 2016, Trump was handed an estimated “$5.6 billion worth of earned media” including print and television stories, radio segments, blog posts, podcasts, and social media mentions, with “$58 million” coming during October 2016 alone. This sheer amount of coverage nearly doubled what Hillary Clinton was given during this same time period, and it led analytics professionals to opine “You can add top 20 celebrities or top 15 athletes in season and they still won’t total what Trump got in a single month.”2 So ever-­present was his reportage that political scholar Thomas Patterson observed, “Trump is arguably the first bona-­fide media-­created presidential nominee. Although he subsequently tapped a political nerve, journalists fueled his launch.”3 If reporters viewed Trump as incredibly newsworthy—a perception that granted him attention and power in the campaign narrative—how did they regard the labels of electoral participation (vote[s], voter[s], and voting) in this contest?4 Read the article “Energized Obama Stumps for Clinton, and His Own Legacy” and the answer is remarkable. This story ran on the front page of the New York Times on November 8, 2016. It told of a rally on a baseball field at the University of Michigan where President Barack Obama’s core mission was to “implore voters to rally behind Mrs. Clinton.” The narrative described the warm connection Obama had with the audience, his sincere desire that they turnout, and his encouragement that they help support a significant cause: “I already voted,” he added. “I voted for Hillary Clinton because I am absolutely confident that when she is president, this country will be in good hands—and I’m asking you to do the same.”

14   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

“I love you!” supporters kept shouting at the president as he turned serious to lay out the stakes of an extraordinary race. “I love you back—I do,” Mr. Obama said in Michigan. “But tomorrow, you will choose whether we continue this journey of progress or whether it all goes out the window.” Read the story “Election Officials Brace for a Chaotic Day of Voting” on the front page of the Washington Post on the very same day, however, and the labels of electoral participation appear in a different context. This piece led with the words “state leaders, voting experts, and advocates say they are preparing for an unusual level of confusion and chaos Tuesday as voters cast their ballots in a historically bitter race.” It discussed how “early voters in some states have faced hours-­long lines,” detailed “last-­minute lawsuits alleging voter intimidation,” and recirculated concerns from voting rights advocates that “some voters will be discouraged enough to stay home.” It closed with a quotation from Wendy Weiser, an election expert at the Brennan Center for Justice who stated, “You have many people worried for the first time about the integrity of our election system, which is actually pretty good. You have people talking about needing to watch other people as they watch voters. It’s crazy.” Newspapers choose the most important stories of a given day for their front pages. What is more, the New York Times and the Washington Post are two of the most prominent papers in the closing days of a national election. The stark contrast in how electoral participation was presented raises some significant questions. What might it mean that one story signaled more agency and enthusiasm to voters than the other? Are depictions of voters being mobilized by beloved political actors frequent or rare? Is this type of story line tied to specific politicians or constituencies? Alternatively, how does one make sense of an article addressing electoral confusion and chaos? Is this type of reporting common? Is it tied to distinct political moments? More broadly, how do these types of narratives shape how other reporters look at, and report on, voting? And, how do they influence how voters think of their own roles in electoral politics? With the power to place voters on the national agenda and depict them as engaged (as did the New York Times) or endangered (as did the Washington Post), print news journalists help to shape the meaning(s) of electoral participation in the polity. They do so motivated and constrained by their place in the campaign trialogue between campaigns, reporters, and citizens. That is, these reporters are mindful of the need to attract audiences in the citizenry,

portraying the voter    15

confronted with temporal pressures, and bound to an investigative role that goes beyond simply recirculating campaigners’ claims. Marjorie Hershey and John Zaller advance compelling models on how such pressures influence election reporting. Hershey begins by noting that elections are “blunt instruments” that could be interpreted in a variety of ways in the news. She then explains how candidates, strategists, and activists work swiftly to craft and circulate explanations of elections that favor their position and perspective. Time is of the essence as there is tremendous power in being first with a spin on events. Journalists are drawn to such statements, as they have professional incentives to be “the first to forward an especially plausible interpretation” of electoral politics.5 Actual voter preferences and choices do not necessarily inform dominant news narratives or even the emerging conventional wisdom of what happens. Rather, the accounts constructed by campaign operatives and legitimated by the press, shape how the story of electoral participation is reported.6 Zaller points to the late 1960s as a critical moment for these processes.7 In his Model of Product Substitution, he contends that the 1968 presidential contest marks a moment when advancements in campaign strategy and professional incentives in journalism collided. Specifically, at that time, strategists began limiting the press’s direct access to their candidates, and—as a response to this lack of access—journalists began to report more heavily on the artifice of campaigning. The professional motivation for campaigns was to have greater control over the public narrative; the inducement for the journalists was to write stories that went beyond tightly scripted and recurring campaign activities and that advanced the types of narratives other newsrooms would notice and editors would promote. This change is notable for the current project because it shifted the reportorial gaze away from the relationship between candidates, voters, and policy positions over to the power of strategists and political operatives in American life. How reporters view electoral participation is critically important in the United States, a country where persons and institutions of influence have been lackluster advocates for voters. For starters, take elected officials. They have been reluctant to protect or expand voting rights in a linear way. The history of American suffrage, Alexander Keyssar observes, is one of enacting barriers to vote, amending the Construction to prevent discriminatory acts, and then reinserting obstacles to participate in elections.8 Both the Democratic and Republican parties have taken these actions over the years, often when they have comfortable majority party status. On this point, Keyssar maintains, the appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of barriers to

16   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

electoral participation are difficult to appreciate “in real time” as these political moves are naturalized by favored political elites.9 He concludes that the history of suffrage should “lead us to expect recurrent skirmishing” in the future as political parties know that creating unequal districts and introducing complex registration requirements is “one way for them to win.”10 Presidential candidates—especially after the 1970s—also serve as halfhearted promoters of electoral participation. Analyses of their campaign speeches reveal, to borrow a phrase from political scholar Richard Fenno, how they have started running for election while rhetorically running against voting.11 A few examples from a content analysis of how presidential candidates have discussed the key terms of electoral participation in campaign speeches help to illustrate the pattern.12 In the 1950s and 1960s, candidates often connected the words vote, voter, and voting to civic ideals, as did Dwight Eisenhower when he stated, “We must see, as we do our civic duty, that not only do we vote but that everybody is qualified to vote, that everybody registers, and everybody goes to the polls in November.”13 In later years, though, candidates have become less reverent and more prone to politicize, and even mock, the key terms of voting. Republican nominee John McCain, in 2008, told an audience, “In case you haven’t been following my opponent’s get-­out-­the-­vote campaign, ACORN is helping to register groups previously excluded, overlooked, and underserved—second graders and deceased Disney characters. In Florida they even turned up an ACORN voter registration form that bore the name of one Mickey Mouse. We’re checking the paw prints. Although I might let that one go, I’m pretty sure the big rat’s a Republican.”14 Later in his speech, McCain added, “I do trust we can keep the turnout amongst the deceased and fictional voters to a minimum.” Additional examples of how the key terms of electoral participation got politicized over time can be found in the 2012 campaign. In that year, Democrat Barack Obama offered, “Now, our friends at the Republican convention were more than happy to talk about everything they think is wrong with America, but they didn’t have much to say about how they’d make it right . . . they want your vote, but they don’t want you to know their plan.”15 And Republican nominee Mitt Romney stated, “If you like what you’ve seen in the last four years then you can vote for the same guy and you’re going to see more of it because if you re-­elect President Obama you’re going to see in this nation chronic unemployment, no growth in take-­home pay, and of course, fiscal crisis at the doorstep.”16 Although presidential candidates were once more likely to connect the key terms of electoral participation with “honored values,” over time, they have become more prone to associate them with “harmful choices.”17

portraying the voter    17

Further, the nation’s schools have become hesitant about their connection to electoral participation. As recently as the 1950s, students in the United States took courses in civic problems and learned practical civic skills, such as how to vote, in their high school classrooms. As the nation became more disenchanted with political life during the 1960s and 1970s, though, such grounded and practical instruction disappeared. Instead, civic education became more scientized (influenced by a spirit of government as a social science, by a sense of modernist detachment, and by a spirit of objectivity), more sanitized (influenced by the mass adoption of textbooks, by the complications of a civil rights movement, and by political conflict), and more nationalized (emphasizing the federal government, national institutions, and governmental processes).18 Intriguingly, these emphases have not created a more knowledgeable youth cohort. Despite an amplified emphasis on information in public schools, and despite an increasingly educated citizenry, young Americans know less about their government than their parents or grandparents did at their age. Moreover, young Americans are less likely to participate in electoral politics, to read about their communities in local or national newspapers, or to voice faith in their system.19 This book presents a multimethod examination of the language associated with electoral participation in recent presidential elections. We are guided by three assumptions about language, news coverage, and political life: 1. Citizens come to know their role(s) in a democracy through language, and the uses of the key words of electoral participation (such as the terms vote, voter, and voting) provide important cues for how individuals come to understand their political system, as well as their places in it. 2. Elite voices, like those found in the nation’s most read and most respected newspapers, help to manage the uses of the key words of electoral participation. Through linguistic signaling, news reports can send cues that promote or discourage it. 3. Meaningful efforts to study the echo chamber surrounding voting should work with, and not simply critique, journalists’ perspectives and the daily practices of newsrooms. Often academics condemn coverage they do not like without considering the actual events, pressures, and routines that lead to such reporting.20 Our goals here are to partner with journalists to identify, and to promote when possible, prospects for a meaningful public conversation about voting.

18   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

Driven by these beliefs, we are drawn to the dueling portrayals of electoral participation that opened the chapter. A steady media diet of depictions like the enthusiastic mobilization appeals at the University of Michigan rally might send cues to help voters see themselves and their roles as valued. Conversely, an abundance of coverage addressing electoral confusion and chaos might signal how attending to politics could be a waste of time. This book assesses which type(s) of representations are most common in the coverage of presidential campaigns, if and how they change over time, what implications they might have for citizen understandings of their role(s) as voters, and how journalists might respond to such phenomena.

Voters in Democratic Theory There are at least three schools of scholarly thought surrounding the role and influence of voting in a polity. First, contemplate statements by those who praise electoral participation. Scholars in this camp express how elections are the great public ceremonies of American life and the most important public referents of democracy.21 Elections, these scholars continue, reveal important historical data about political cultures, expose power relations, and unmask the qualitative nature of the experience of self-­rule.22 These researchers celebrate how elections offer citizens many benefits, including an opportunity to confirm authority, a chance to elect and empower representatives, and an occasion to foster the development of viable communities.23 Scholars in this group also applaud the political and symbolic aspects of casting a ballot. For them, the vote is the most important activity in the political engagement domain and the most critical of political decisions in the United States.24 The vote, too, is the paramount democratic right and the quintessential marker of community membership.25 The opportunity to vote, these scholars maintain, often results from a long and sometimes violent fight and should be viewed as “one of the ultimate prizes in the struggle for freedom from tyranny, oppression, and autocracy.”26 As Richard Katz, specifically, explains, “No country allows all adults to vote, and examination of the expansion of the right of suffrage provides a useful vehicle for understanding the restrictions that remain.”27 A second group of researchers is more critical of electoral participation. Some authors in this cohort critique voters for having low levels of political information and for more closely resembling manipulated subjects than educated, autonomous actors.28 Others place a sharper point on this concern,

portraying the voter    19

warning that an “excess of democracy” can override the ability of those with more “expertise, seniority, experience, and special talents” to make informed decisions for a polity.29 Still others comment on the “paradox of voting,” noting that for a rational, self-­interested citizen, the costs of participation typically exceed the benefits.30 Following this line of thought, researchers assert “people should not vote expecting to change outcomes, certainly not in national elections in a democracy the size of the United States” because “citizens would be better off playing the lottery and using their winnings (if any) to influence the political process.”31 A third set of scholars looks at electoral participation more broadly, often connecting it to definitions of democracy and the legitimacy of governance. Robert Dahl suggests that for a country to be democratic, it must feature six minimal requirements, including: (1) elected officials—representatives are to be chosen by citizens and to be given control over government decisions; (2) free, fair, and frequent elections—citizens are to be given the opportunity to select elected officials in frequent and fairly conducted elections in which coercion is comparatively uncommon; (3) freedom of expression—citizens have a right to express themselves without danger of severe punishment on political matters broadly defined; (4) alternative sources of information—citizens have a right to seek out alternative and independent sources of information from other citizens, experts, newspapers, magazines, books, telecommunications, and the like; (5) associational autonomy—citizens also have a right to form independent associations or organizations, including political parties and interest groups; and (6) inclusive citizenship—adults permanently residing in a country, and subject to its laws, cannot be denied the rights that are available to others.32 In Dahl’s widely cited criteria, then, voters—and free, fair, and frequent elections—are foundational for any democratic system. Others concur, emphasizing how voting provides legitimacy to government.33 According to Seymour Martin Lipset, legitimacy allows “the capacity of the system to engender and maintain the belief that the existing political institutions are the most appropriate ones for the society.”34 Guillermo O’Donnell argues that “across most of the globe today, the ultimate claim of a political regime to be legitimate—or at least acceptable—rests on the kind of popular consent that purportedly finds expression in the act of free voting.”35 The process of selecting elected officials via free, fair, and frequent elections, Dahl adds, helps citizens to see their government as legitimate and to regard their government’s decisions as “morally binding.”36 Gerald Pomper connects such concerns to the U.S. system, holding that the legitimacy of American government is achieved only when leaders are elected by consent

20   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

of the governed. The moral principle of popular sovereignty, he contends, is deeply ingrained in the American psyche, so much so that no other form of government than elective government would be considered legitimate here.37 These scholars also believe that voting contributes to the personal development of the electors.38 When citizens engage in electoral activities, they are called upon, theoretically at least, to consider not only their own immediate interests but also the public interests as a whole. Conceptually, this process stimulates a sense of public responsibility in voters and broadens their perspectives. John Stuart Mill articulates this position when writing that a citizen is “called upon, when so engaged, to weigh interests not his own; to be guided in cases of conflicting claims, by another rule than his private partialities. . . . He is made to feel himself one of the public, and whatever is for their benefit to be for his benefit.”39 Mill’s observations have been supported in studies showing that voters often engage in deliberative processes that place public interests before private concerns. When making electoral decisions, for instance, Warren Miller and J. Merrill Shanks contend that voters are more likely to engage in “sociotropic” than “pocketbook” voting (i.e., evaluating the economy as a whole rather than just their own personal financial situations).40 Further, many argue that elections provide a check on power and protections against tyranny. In Federalist No. 52, James Madison wrote, “It is particularly essential that the [representatives] should have an immediate dependence on, and intimate sympathy with, the people. Frequent elections are unquestionably the only policy by which the dependence and sympathy can be effectually secured.”41 Stephen Macedo and colleagues update such concerns, arguing that “there is not now, and never will be, a class of empathetic, non-­self-­interested elites who can be trusted to advance the common good,” and therefore the public must be vigilant in holding elites accountable for their actions.42 They believe that elections provide opportunities for citizens to reward or punish their representatives with their votes and work to ensure that the interests of citizens are served. But this check on power, of course, is not automatic. For elections to provide these political blessings, citizens have to exercise their right to vote. An impressive line of research has addressed patterns of turnout in the United States and one prominent work, at least, questioned if Americans were approaching an electoral crisis in the early 2000s.43 Looking closely at American turnout data over time, one sees national participation rates over 60 percent from the years 1952 to 1968 (1952 = 62.3%, 1956 = 60.2%, 1960 = 63.8%, 1964 = 62.8%, and 1968 = 62.5%). Except for the 1992 election, featuring a prominent third-­party challenger, voting levels dropped over the

portraying the voter    21

next twenty-­eight years (1972 = 56.2%, 1976 = 54.8%, 1980 = 54.2%, 1984 = 55.2%, 1988 = 52.8%, 1992 = 58.1%, 1996 = 51.7%, 2000 = 55.3%). Turnout picked up in 2004 (60.7%) and 2008 (62.2%), fell to 58.6% in the 2012 contest, and returned to 60.0% in 2016.44 The turnout rates in 2012 and 2016 locate the United States behind thirty democracies in recent national elections. For instance, Belgium and Turkey—two countries that have laws making voting compulsory—boast turnout levels over 80 percent in recent countrywide contests. Other countries such as Sweden, South Korea, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Israel, New Zealand, Finland, France, and the Netherlands all saw turnout levels over 70 percent in recent national elections. While research points to a general decline in turnout across the globe, it is notable that the United States lags behind many democratic states in electoral participation at the national level.45 Further, turnout in nonpresidential elections in the United States is far lower. In the 2014 midterms, for instance, just 36.4 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot; this figure was down from 40.9 percent in 2010, marking the lowest level of midterm participation since the Second World War and featuring close to half as many voters as turned out to participate in the 2008 presidential election.46 To date, scholars have attempted to explain these voting trends by considering various political socialization agents. Some have pointed to the changing role(s) of political parties as intermediaries between citizens and political life.47 Others have analyzed social connectedness among citizens, families, schools, workplaces, and churches.48 Still others have proposed that the trends between the 1970s and 1990s, in particular, might be related to a declining psychological involvement in politics and belief in government responsiveness.49 All of these factors seem to contribute to patterns of electoral participation over time. These scholars, however, have left a critical relationship unexamined: a systematic analysis of how the news invites Americans to regard their roles as voters. Part of the citizen’s job in the campaign trialogue is to monitor the information environment to assess if electoral participation might be worth the effort. This book pays close attention to how cues in print news coverage shape how these citizens might regard their role(s) in presidential elections.

Voters in Language To learn more about how journalists have told the story of electoral participation, we will pay close attention to the intersection of language and power.

22   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

Theoretically, we are motivated by seminal scholarship in framing, a line of inquiry that calls attention to the presentation, selection, emphasis, and exclusion of content in news stories.50 Scholars have defined framing in related ways. William Gamson and Andre Modigliani call attention to how frames arrange content, and define frames as “a central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events, weaving a connection among them.”51 Todd Gitlin emphasizes how frames repeat and reinforce meaning, and defines frames as “persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion by which symbol-­handlers routinely organize discourse.”52 Robert Entman underscores how frames identify problems and perspectives, and defines a frame as selecting “some aspects of a perceived reality and making them more salient, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, or treatment recommendation for the item described.”53 While much is known about the intersection of frames, content, meaning, and problem definition, less is known about the frame-­building process. Scholars have yet to comprehensively tackle how frames emerge in the news, what voices are responsible for them, when they endure versus change over time, and how mindful journalists are in crafting and recirculating them. One way to begin to learn more about these processes is to view language as the building blocks of frames and to focus directly on how word choice and use combine to shape, shift, and normalize public understandings.54 In this book, we will attend to how three specific words—vote(s), voter(s), and voting—appear in three types of situations: (1) a longitudinal content analysis of news of presidential elections, (2) an experiment and focus groups of audiences reading such coverage, and (3) interviews with journalists writing these stories. Paying close attention to when and how these terms are used across these contexts is valuable for a set of reasons. For starters, people come to know politics through language. A central tenet for many is that individuals learn about their worlds through words. Murray Edelman, for instance, contends that “only rarely can there be direct observations of events.”55 In most instances, political happenings are largely “creations of the language used to describe them.”56 Others agree. John Joseph observes how “language is the primary text through which culture is transmitted.”57 Carol Gluck adds that “words offer entry to political and social experience.”58 Roy Peter Clark maintains that “words stabilize understanding.”59 Some of these scholars exercise caution, noting how “perception of language is, like all perception, only partial”60 and “words make many things

portraying the voter    23

possible, few things inevitable.”61 It is words, nevertheless, that allow people and groups to insert themselves in “institutions and social relations.”62 Language has also been alleged to be one of the only things elites and non-­elites share in a polity. In his seminal 1949 analysis, Harold Lasswell espouses how “one obvious function performed by political language is that of providing a common experience for everyone in the state, ranging from the most powerful boss to the humblest layman or philosopher. Indeed, one of the few experiences that bind human beings together, irrespective of race, region, occupation, party, or religion, is exposure to the same set of key words.”63 More recent projects underscore this claim. Karen Callaghan and Frauke Schnell note how the words in mediated portrayals of politics “supply a common vocabulary” enabling elites and citizens to take part in the same conversation.64 David Rochefort and Roger Cobb expand such contentions to governing, observing how “if policy making is a struggle over alternative realities, then language is the medium that reflects, advances, and interprets these alternatives.”65 Next, people gather cues about power through language. For many, words do more than merely acquaint. They also send cues about authority, informing audiences about what to anticipate and tolerate. Researchers address these points by calling attention to the intersection of language, access to audiences, and prospects for influence. As Lasswell puts it, when people “want power, they act according to their expectation of how to maximize power” and thus their words and symbols “affect power as they affect expectations of power.”66 Robin Lakoff makes a related observation. Language, for her, marks whose needs will be met, which groups have efficacy, and which interests rise to the top of the hierarchy.67 She observes how linguistic power drives political power as “those who already have it parlay it into authority, and their superior status enhances the credibility of their message, which in turn enhances their power over us.”68 Elite voices also manage the public uses of words. This process is notable in a few ways. First, political scholars such as V. O. Key, Philip Converse, and John Zaller have noted how elites have the time, vested interest, expertise, and visibility to guide political conversations.69 While these actors cannot determine public sentiment, their prominence aids them in calling attention to certain topics and using, or avoiding, specific terms. Research outlines how those in power routinely use language to define matters as “professional or technical in character” which justifies “decision making by profes­sionals and technicians” and “promotes mass acceptance of their conclusions.”70 These steps avoid the need for those with power to consider, or even listen

24   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

to, non-­elite input and nudge citizens to “believe that those who know best will deal with it.”71 Second, scholars from sociolinguistics observe how language is constantly changing and maintain that as words change, worlds change.72 Thus, the strategic, and routinized, ways in which elites employ specific terms can cause the meanings of words to expand (by taking on new meanings), contract (by shedding old meanings), or shift (by drifting to new meanings).73 As our related content analyses on political key words show, patterns of use and adornment during the second half of the twentieth century in news reports and political speeches helped to reify words like strategist, conservative, and independent and debase words like the media, and liberal in American politics.74 Repeated exposure to these word uses can be internalized by audiences, becoming “taken as fact” and “desensitizing” people to alternative understandings or perspectives.75 Further, people learn about their political roles through language. In many ways these cues are subtle and they are often sent subconsciously. Nevertheless, how words are arranged in sentences, let alone in political statements or news articles, sends hints as to which actors have agency and responsibility and which ones are acted upon or have limited accountability. Scholarship on linguistic agency, for instance, tracks the patterns and effects of assigning power to audiences or to external factors in communication. Interpersonal research shows how in conversation, individuals are prone to assign agency to themselves when describing positive events and shift to the passive voice to distance themselves from the arrival of negative events.76 Research on health campaigns offers additional findings based on whether agency is assigned to humans (e.g., “fighting the flu,” “People guard themselves through vaccination”) or external factors (e.g., “Don’t let the flu catch you,” “Vaccination guards people”).77 Studies show how these ostensibly modest linguistic shifts have powerful effects. Assigning agency to a virus or bacteria, for instance, encourages people to regard viruses as more severe or to believe they are more susceptible of catching them.78 It also influences how individuals see situations, understand their roles in them, and act in their self-­interest.79 These findings from interpersonal and health communication invite critical consideration of horse race, game, and battle story lines in election coverage. Scholars have written widely on how journalists often portray politics as a game attending to such notions as opinion polls, election outcomes, winners and losers, and the language of sports and war as well as on political strategies highlighting campaign tactics, motives and instrumental actions, personality and style, and metacoverage.80 Content analytic researchers have

portraying the voter    25

documented how these narratives have appeared throughout the twentieth century and in primary and general election campaigns.81 Effects researchers have shown how they exert a damaging influence on attitudes and behaviors in the United States and around the world.82 Journalists admit they are aware of such scholarly concerns but continue to write this way to offer a novel spin on events in a highly compressed news cycle.83 Perhaps because most of the scholarship on the game reporting addresses how it influences coverage of candidates and issues, researchers have yet to think more broadly about how the linguistic cues in it assign or deny agency to citizens, how readers notice and make sense of such cues, and how mindful journalists are with their word choices while crafting such stories. Scholarship on linguistic responsibility reveals how words allocate accountability. Research shows how journalists ascribe the active voice to audiences when sympathetic to a political cause.84 Persons of prominence are often named, given titles, and attributed with important and individuating features.85 These persons are also more likely to be treated as potent actors in the news and described as doing things—assigned verbs and efficacy in a sentence—rather than as objects that have things happen to them.86 Political roles can also be tracked in the subtle ways that a story is told. Research on the intersection of language and responsibility in the news identifies several upward biases, particularly in connection to sourcing, interviewing, and patterns of quoting versus paraphrasing. Consider these patterns in coverage. First, government officials and employers are frequently interviewed in dominant positions such as important buildings or quiet offices, whereas protesters and strikers are interviewed outside with all of the noise and other distractions of protests and picket lines.87 Second, government officials and employers are often depicted as reasonable and in control, whereas strikers and protesters are cast as difficult and demanding.88 Third, government officials and elite sources are likely to be quoted and have those quotations appear higher up in the story in news coverage, whereas citizen voices are often paraphrased and placed deeper in news narratives.89 Fourth, these sources receive “friendly edits” regarding their agency, responsibility, and perspective as related to protesters, ethnic minorities, or those holding views outside of the mainstream.90 Studies, too, reveal the linguistic mitigation of agency and responsibility. Government reports and political speeches regularly employ the passive voice to convey negativity about individuals, signal out-­group status, and downplay the autonomy of citizens.91 News outlets offer less agency and the passive voice to individuals and groups that have fallen out of favor.92 Mary Sykes’s

26   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

analyses of ethnic minorities in the news reveals “syntactic structures of sentences” that point to the “passiveness and dependence” downgrading the “active initiative of out-­group members.”93 In summarizing many of these patterns, Teun van Dijk maintains that “overt abuse” of out-­groups in the news is “exceptional.” Rather, it is far more common the case that “properties and situations are described in a manner that may be used by readers as components or arguments” that support prevailing and accepted political and social understandings of power.94 These observations connect to other works on how language designates roles. Consider scholarship in rhetoric. Edwin Black, in The Second Persona, suggests that audiences are implied in messages.95 For him, the ideology of the audience will appear in the language of a text and the representation of this implied audience can and should be judged. This construction of the audience may be realistic or ideal; it can be a picture formed by empirical data of an audience or it can be a guess as to whom a speaker would, ideally, engage in conversation. Philip Wander, in The Third Persona, contends that audiences can also be negated in messages, alienated through language or denied in history or in silence.96 Wander suggests that the groups historically left out of discourse tend to be acted upon as nonsubjects in political life and have been discriminated against in the body politic. Political communication scholarship offers related sentiments. In commenting on how audiences attend to the news, John Zaller, Michael Schudson, and Lance Bennett have opined that people do not respond to content equally. Rather, they suggest that (1) individuals respond to “burglar alarms” in coverage that beckon their attention, (2) citizens monitor the news environment as parents would watch children in a pool (paying closer attention to moments of possible danger), and (3) audiences attend more closely to domestic coverage that connects to everyday experiences than economic or international stories that infer more sophisticated expertise to understand.97 In these lines of work, linguistic cues position audiences as ideal and involved or as negated and having limited operational role in the topic of discussion. Moreover, people underestimate the influence of language. As Kenneth Burke put it, humans use symbols and are used by them in return.98 He expounded how language creates opportunities for people to express themselves but also to become sentenced to their sentences—repeatedly committed to the priorities of the words they use. Words, Burke believed, can conceal or reveal, magnify or minimize, elevate or degrade, link or divide. Linguistic choices, he continued, begin to do the thinking for people as they shape

portraying the voter    27

experiences of the world and how others react (and possibly validate) such experiences. It can be tempting for scholars in other fields to overlook the power of language. They may initially dismiss it as “just words” and regard it to be less important than economic or military forces or less impactful than social movements or mediated images. We contend that the very taken-­for-­granted notion of political terms—particularly as they interact to build frames— underscores the need to study them. As we have written elsewhere, language is often used unthinkingly, individuals of all levels of education are only partially aware of the labels that they choose, and word choices reveal political priorities, opportunities, and obstacles.99 Political language matters, precisely because people are often so cavalier about its influence. These points are decidedly germane to journalism. The ways in which power is cued and roles signaled in media coverage are meaningful, even and especially when such cueing is beyond the intent of the newsroom. In summarizing his analyses of how higher-­status individuals receive more linguistic agency and responsibility than lower-­status people in coverage of conflicts in hospitals, Roger Fowler observes how the picture emerges of a large number of specific surgeons, politicians, administrators and the like, who are being active and vociferous, if ineffectual; and of countless anonymous patients who have no opportunity for action, or even for personal recognition. The latter are, linguistically, on the receiving end of official actions, but all that happens to them is they get classified, quantified, and ranked. I do not think that this is quite the story that the Sunday Times wished to tell. The writer of the article would doubtless claim that he has exposed a hospital system whose inadequate resources seriously underserve the needs of patients, and which desperately requires both more funds and also procedural reform. But in writing about the inadequacy of the system, the text uses institutional language which strongly encodes a power differential as if it were natural. I suspect the mass publication of such discourse tends to inhibit, rather than encourage, change.100 Fowler further states “we should not assume that newspaper writers are doing these things consciously: they probably accept without question that the contexts make their word usages natural, to the extent that they are not even aware of the choices of phrase.”101 Nevertheless, the normal usage of how language marks clout requires critical reflection.102

28   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

Voters in the News When journalists look at electoral participation, what do they see? Conceptual expectations for what reporters might notice when covering citizen participation can be found in research on newsworthiness, particularly in Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge’s influential essay identifying a list of values central to news selection.103 In order for something to make the news, they believe, it must happen within the news cycle, have impact, be unambiguous, be meaningful, be consonant with other newsworthy stories, be unexpected, relate to prior happenings, fit the purpose of the news outlet, connect to elite nations or elite persons, and refer to something negative. Winfried Schulz, for one, streamlined their list, suggesting that topics were newsworthy if they contained one or more of six dimensions of news values, including: (1) status (elite nation, elite institution, elite person), (2) valence (aggression, controversy, values, success), (3) relevance (consequence, concern), (4) identification (proximity, ethnocentrism, personalization, emotions), (5) consonance (theme, stereotype, predictability), and (6) dynamics (timeliness, uncertainty, unexpectedness).104 Subsequent typologies have added notions of timeliness, proximity, drama, visual attractiveness, entertainment, brevity, celebrity, oddity, and surprise to the inventory of news values.105 While scholars note that taxonomies of news values should “remain open to inquiry rather than be seen as a closed set of values for journalism in all times and places,”106 practicing journalists often look at news values with a more practical eye. In her handbook for budding reporters, for instance, Deborah Potter writes, “News is what is new. It is what’s happening.”107 A few projects have attended to how voters and citizens have received limited attention, agency, and responsibility in political coverage. Many of these studies are rooted in the aforementioned research on news norms, and primarily the well-­documented premise that journalism offers little room for the voices of ordinary people, focusing instead on the activities of the powerful.108 Acknowledging this top-­down bias, analyses have tracked how voters and citizens have been cast in television and print news coverage of election and nonelection periods. Justin Lewis, Karin Wahl-­Jorgensen, and Sanna Inthorn conducted an analysis of citizens during noncampaign periods in both the United States and Great Britain. They collected a sample of 5,658 television stories run on evening news programs between October 2001 and February 2002.109 Their data show that the portrayals made citizens appear almost “childlike”—as they had moods, experiences, and emotions but

portraying the voter    29

no deliberative skills—and as generally excluded from news about public affairs.110 These depictions led them to conclude that “most citizens have no authority, celebrity, or expertise, and thus have no obvious place in a news story, which is mostly reserved for elite sources and opinions.”111 Gabriel Weimann traced how voters and public opinion polls have been represented in news coverage of Israeli elections.112 In his content analysis of all press reports on polls during six pre-­election campaigns in Israel (1969– 1988), he found a dramatic increase in the overall use of polls over time. He worried about this trend, as the increased focus on polls turns the campaign narrative into a popularity contest in which voters are prompted to think about the polls rather than the issues. Additionally, the emphasis on early polls encourages voters to imagine that campaign outcomes are preordained months in advance of Election Day, a development that forestalls opportunities to discuss issues or learn more about all of the candidates. Ian Ward’s research compared coverage of voters in the 1993 federal Canadian and Australian elections.113 In that year, Australian news outlets cast voters as passive consumers of politics, whereas efforts were made in Canada to experiment with inclusive strategies such as talk-­back radio, vox pop interviews, the creation of panels of typical voters, and citizen-­created questions in political debates. While Ward was careful to note that much of the Canadian campaign coverage was “business as usual” (including horse race reporting, a preoccupation with leaders and political elites, and attention to campaign gaffes), the media did attempt to “weave a new thread into the tapestry” by experimenting with strategies to “shift the focus of election news away from the leaders, restrict the opportunities of the spin doctors to massage the news, and instead give voters a greater voice.”114 Ward concluded that “it is indeed possible to conceive of alternative journalistic practices, and of ways of reporting elections which might include the voices of voters as well as those of the politicians, sectional interests, and the expert commentators” who dominate news narratives.115 Stephanie Larson’s work traced how citizen opinion appeared in television coverage of the 1996 presidential campaign in the United States. In one study, she found that “people-­on-­the-­street” stories offered more diverse (demographically and geographically) and substantive discussions of the public’s issue positions than did opinion poll stories.116 In a follow-­up project, she found differences across the networks (with NBC offering more “people-­on-­the-­street” reports while ABC focused more heavily on a game schema) and that most coverage across the three channels covered citizen

30   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

opinion through game-­focused polling stories (instead of the more thematic “people-­in-­the-­street” segments).117 These studies show how portrayals of citizens—even with the experimental efforts in Canada—have been rare and thin in campaign coverage. They also call to mind an observation that journalist (Davis) Buzz Merritt and scholar Maxwell McCombs make in their discussion of public affairs journalism. In any news story, Merritt and McCombs argue, the audience can be depicted as citizen-­stakeholders or as passive-­spectators. They believe that more stories should be written to define political situations as “public problems involving everyone, not simply one of the shenanigans in far-­off Washington D.C. involving only the direct players.”118 In making this case, they maintain that “the more citizens are treated as only spectators (or worse, the objects of manipulation) during the weeks leading up to an election, the less likely they are to vote and the less stake they feel they have in government.”119 In their minds, journalists and journalism educators should see their roles as not to “try to make politics-­hating Americans love politics [. . .] but to do journalism in ways that allow citizens to see the possibilities that engagement presents. This cannot be accomplished by merely reflecting the political environment constructed by political leaders and their handlers. Something else is required, and story framing is the primary tool for providing that something else.”120 Merritt and McCombs are mindful that news has an elite bias; nevertheless, they maintain that news narratives can be written to position voters and the public as relevant to a political contest. That choice, they insist, always exists. Patterns of giving citizens a limited role in campaign reporting are intriguing, particularly in light of shifts in news organizations and newsrooms at the time that this book was written. Economic and cultural pressures over the past few decades have forced reporters and news outlets to think aggressively about audiences and their futures. These pressures have also led to some experimentation with news content. One type of news reform can be found in efforts to fixture readers more prominently in news content. The public journalism movement, for instance, encouraged reporters to conceive of readers as “stakeholders in the democratic process rather than as victims, spectators, or inevitable adversaries” of the news.121 As David Perry reviews, the public journalism movement called for reporters to (1) imagine newspapers and journalists as active participants in community life (rather than as detached observers); (2) approach the newspaper as a forum for discussion of community issues; (3) consider the topics, happenings, and problems important to readers; (4) address public opinion through the discussion and

portraying the voter    31

debate among members of a community (not simply through polling data); and (5) work, when possible, to use reporting to enhance social capital.122 It is important to note that public journalism has been opposed by many elite journalists (or, as public journalism proponent Jay Rosen coined them, “members of the high church of journalism”) for unnecessarily handing the news agenda over to audiences, and that empirical assessments of it have not shown dramatic and consistent effects on concerns such as increasing public deliberation, improving civic skills, changing public policy, or leading to greater community involvement.123 Nevertheless, one of the greatest contributions of this movement has been renewing interest in a conversation about “the role and responsibility of journalism” to its readers and to the American political system.124 Michele Weldon’s content analytic research suggests that some front pages may actually be moving in such a citizen-­oriented direction, one that she calls “everyman” news.125 She suggests that “readers of newspapers demand, expect and respond more favorably to an increased dosage of everyman narrative about real folks, less critical analysis of larger issues, and fewer official sources delivering ‘top down’ news.”126 She contends that the “everyman” approach is an important response to citizen frustration with politics and the press, particularly in light of instances ranging from “the 2000 presidential election and the events of September 11, 2001 to the weapons of mass destruction’s mythical seduction of the press,” when “sources in authority either were not forthcoming with answers or were not truthful.”127 Her data reveal an increase in stories attempting to connect through this perspective, and she advocates that the news should speak to the audience, rather than at it.128

Conclusion Journalists possess a special type of power. When they see something as newsworthy—like Trump’s unexpected successes in the 2016 campaign— they can grant it attention and influence, agency and worth. On a daily basis, what they see, recirculate, and describe influences the national agenda and public mindset. This book focuses on how the journalist’s gaze shapes the public’s understanding of electoral participation. As the examples at the opening of this chapter show, it can be depicted in very different ways, even on the very same day. Indeed, on November 8, 2016, the front page of the New York Times

32   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

signaled passion and potential power to voters at a rally at the University of Michigan; meanwhile, the front page of the Washington Post cued threats and turmoil as voters prepared to cast their ballots. How the language surrounding electoral participation appears in print news is of special consequence in the United States. As discussed, there is no affirmative right to vote in the U.S. Constitution, and voting has few public or ardent advocates, particularly in recent decades. Scholarship documents how it is not routinely protected by lawmakers, consistently championed by presidential candidates after the 1970s, or wholeheartedly taught in our nation’s schools since the 1960s. Because elections are “blunt instruments” that take on meaning through how they are described, the conscious and subconscious ways that journalists report on them contribute to the public mindset. There are several ways, of course, to conceive of voting. Some scholars embrace it as the fundamental symbol and ultimate right in a democracy. Others point to the limitations of the franchise as well as the imperfections of those who exercise it. Still others underscore that, despite such concerns, the stance taken toward the idea, practice, and actors engaged in electoral participation is critical—for citizens and elites. As V. O. Key argues, the perception and regard that political elites have “for the electorate must always be a matter of fundamental significance” as it shapes how voters come to know their roles in the polity and what they should expect from their democratic system.129 As Gerald Pomper adds, patterns of elite disregard, let alone processes of ridiculing the electorate while interpreting survey research about them, are problematic for “if elections are not respected, they could become unworthy of respect.”130 Respect for voters in news narratives is largely expressed through words. We employ research on language as a lens in this book for several reasons: people come to know politics through language, they gather cues about power and their political roles through it, and they often underestimate its influence. Additionally, the words used by reporters and noticed by citizens are influenced by these actors’ places in the campaign trialogue. For reporters—the audience, temporal, and campaign pressures facing them encourage certain treatments of words in reporting. For citizens—cues in the news that invite attention and the worth of potential participation influence campaign surveillance. To date, research shows that portrayals of voters have been rare and thin in campaign news coverage. Most of these studies, though, have focused on single elections and on a single methodology (largely content analytic or qualitative assessments of news texts). The conclusions of many of these

portraying the voter    33

works critique journalists for neglecting the role voters play in elections without either assessing if audiences notice such omissions or consulting journalists to learn more about why they report as they do. Our approach is different. We believe that efforts to understand the mindset inspired by news coverage of voting should work with, and not simply deride, news professionals. Thus, the following chapters take a multimethod approach to portrayals of electoral participation with the goals of identifying prospects for a constructive campaign news narrative about it.

2

discounting the voter

Elections are important, and yet they are also imperfect. Consider how journalists have reported on complications surrounding voting machines over the years. First take “G.O.P. Precinct Captain Hits Loss of Vote Machines,” which ran in the Chicago Tribune on November 6, 1960. This piece informed how Mitchell Edelson Jr., captain of the 3rd Precinct, 48th Ward, charged that the “number of voting machines in his precinct had been cut from two to one after the district recently turned from Democratic to Republican even though population had increased.” In his words, “The polling place had two voting machines in the local election 3 1/2 years ago” and “the lobby is large enough for two or more machines,” but “the board said one was requested because there isn’t enough room.” Edelson continued, “3 1/2 years ago the precinct voted 2 to 1 for the Democrats. Now it is about 1 1/2 to 1 for the Republicans.”1 A similar, yet more technologically current, article ran on October 22, 2004. Under the headline “Integrity of Florida E-­Voting in Doubt,” the AP-­ UPI wire service shared how “with polls showing nearly equal numbers of Florida voters for President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, the election’s outcome may again hinge on a Florida recount. And the more that Floridians learn about how voting machines work the more they question whether the 15 counties with paperless voting systems can accurately count and recount votes.” It then explained how “Edward Bitet fought in World War II, built affordable housing for veterans, and taught sixth grade,” and after retiring to Florida, “fulfilled another civic duty by becoming a poll worker” in past elections. He would not volunteer for election 2004, however, because “he doesn’t trust Palm Beach County’s electronic voting machines.” The article went on to quote Bitet, a Democrat, as saying, “We lost an election four years ago because they fooled around with the paper ballots and couldn’t recount them . . . now we’re moving to a system without paper and they won’t even have the ballots to recount. I can’t be a part of this.”2

discounting the voter    35

These columns apprise readers to threats to the electoral environment. But how common is this type of reporting? This chapter takes a macro-­level look at how journalists have used the labels of electoral participation—vote(s), voter(s), and voting—over a sixty-­eight-­year period. It presents our analysis of the overall word-­count data of the 36,400 appearances of these three key words from the 10,307 articles in the Campaign Mapping Project (CMP) as well as describing the large-­scale findings from our content-­analytic coding of a stratified sample of that textbase. It is motivated by works emphasizing the influence of repeated terms and portrayals in the news. Indeed, Todd Gitlin has encouraged attention to depictions that receive “persistent patterns of emphasis,” Robert Entman has summoned examination of messages that “repeatedly invoke the same objects and traits,” and Stephen Reese has urged consideration of how situations are “habitually defined and consistently normalized.”3 Tracking the word choices and uses that are routinely offered to audiences, they contend, allows scholars to unmask the cues that pervade over time and are so commonplace that they are left unquestioned and remain unchallenged. Our content analysis employed a set of theoretically derived variables to assess three key aspects of electoral participation. A first set of variables tracked the political setting leading up to the election. These measures examined if the key terms (vote[s], voter[s], and voting) were depicted as mobilized by politicians, political parties, other citizens, or none of these (mobilization agents variable); as connected to other political actors or not (associations variable); as inhabiting a positive, negative, or neutral environment (context variable); as placed in the past, present, or future (time variable); and as involved in the political game or not ( frame variable). A second set of variables explored the nature of the voting act. These measures assessed if the three key words were described as connected to an electoral choice, right, or duty (assumptions variable); as linked to a barrier to participation or not (challenge variable); as motivated by collective, private, or no goals (goals variable); and as associated with tangible, intangible, or no rewards (rewards variable). A third set of variables investigated the agency of the voter. These measures monitored largely if the key words were portrayed as an actor or as recipient of action (potency variable); as part of the solution or part of the problem (role variable); as thinking, feeling, or acting (behavior variable); and as being modified by adjectives such as “undecided” or “candidate-­centered” (quality variable). A thematic analysis of the output of these variables reveals a set of findings. As previewed in the opening examples of this chapter, electoral participation is most newsworthy when it is endangered. When it comes to specific

36   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

labels, the term vote has been portrayed as having more value and greater worth than the word voter. Further, patterns of thin personalization associated with the voter label signals how these individuals are marginalized from the electoral game and isolated from each other. The following paragraphs illustrate these patterns in greater detail.

Electoral Participation Is Unremarkable, Unless It Is Endangered Bad news sells. To date, scholarship has identified a journalistic propensity and an audience appetite for narratives like those addressing problems surrounding voting machines that opened this chapter. On the supply side, reporters are attracted to disruptions, particularly problematic ones. Studies of media content suggest that they write up to seventeen negative stories for each positive one.4 On the demand side, longitudinal analyses on audience preferences show that people consistently tune into coverage of wars, terrorism, bad weather, natural or man-­made disasters, and general conflict stories.5 Additionally, a variety of studies confirm a craving for contentious story lines.6 In particular, one study employing survey and experimental methods shows that even though people say that they do not like bad news, when given the opportunity to read whatever they wanted, they sought out stories addressing negative rather than positive or neutral content. Further, in that analysis, people who reported enjoying following politics and current events were particularly prone to choose contentious story lines.7 The news value of referring to something negative helps to inform our initial finding. As figure 1 illustrates, the three key words of electoral participation were used most commonly in 2004—in the aftermath of the hotly contested 2000 election. The 2000 race between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore featured a set of complications, including how it was long (a victor was not named until December 12, thirty-­six days after citizens voted on November 7), litigated (including recounts and lawsuits going to the Florida and United States Supreme Courts), very close (decided by just 537 votes in Florida), and divisive (marking the fourth time in American history that the ultimate winner, Bush, won the electoral vote 271 to 266 but trailed the loser by 540,000 popular votes).8 Chapter 3 addresses how journalists deployed the key terms in 2004, specifically, and will detail how reporters reported on votes that may not have been counted correctly in 2000, voters who were captives of a flawed electoral system, and unjust barriers to voting. For now, an opening quantitative finding is that journalists found electoral

discounting the voter    37 Word Ratio of Electoral Labels in the News 0.01 0.009 0.008 0.007 0.006 0.005 0.004 0.003 0.002 0.001

19 48 19 52 19 56 19 60 19 64 19 68 19 72 19 76 19 80 19 84 19 88 19 92 19 96 20 00 20 04 20 08 20 12 20 16

0

Figure 1 Electoral labels (vote, voter, and voting) in the news by year—overall (1948–2016). Note: The word ratio of electoral labels was calculated by taking the frequency of the three key terms in a given year divided by the total number of words in news coverage per year.

participation particularly newsworthy right after it was deeply, and publicly, compromised. A complement to the quantitative spike in coverage of these terms in 2004 appears in macro-­level findings from the content analysis. When all three terms were examined over the sixty-­eight-­year period, we found that they were routinely underdeveloped in the campaign story outside of when they were endangered. Consider the following patterns that point to a thin description of the key words on several of our measures. The role variable assessed if the labels were depicted as “part of the solution,” “part of the problem,” or in a “no role assigned” condition. Overwhelmingly, the key terms were not given credit for playing a prominent part in presidential elections (92.4%) and were just occasionally connected to “the solution” (4.4%) or “the problem” (3.2%). The rewards variable traced if the key labels were portrayed as connected to “tangible,” “intangible,” or “no clear rewards.” Most of the time, “no distinguishable rewards” were evident in these portrayals (88.9%), followed by “tangible” (8.5%) and “intangible” (1.9%) benefits. The goals variable measured if the labels of electoral participation were described as pursuing a “broad or collective goal,” a “narrow or private goal,” or if the

38   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

goal was “unclear.” Similar to the role and rewards variables, “no discernable goals” was the most common attribution (78.0%), followed by “narrow goals” (18.0%), then “broad goals” (4.1%). These data illustrate how the terms of electoral participation were rarely credited with their participation (role), represented as benefiting from democratic outcomes (rewards), or aligned with political objectives (goals). Taken together, the sharpened attention to electoral participation in 2004—and the overall lack of detail from the role, rewards, and goals measures across the sixty-­eight-­year analysis—help show how the key terms were rarely adorned with deep description outside of direct threats to them. On one hand, reporting on challenges and barriers to participation in the wake of the 2000 contest alerts audiences to very real concerns about how elections are conducted in the United States.9 On the other, outside of these threats, citizen input has not been meaningfully involved in the battle of symbols in coverage of presidential campaigns.10 Connecting this coverage back to the discussion of electoral participation in chapter 1, it appears that journalists have offered heightened coverage of threats to the “free, fair, and frequent” elections that Robert Dahl described more than they have signaled attention to other dimensions of voting.

Counting Votes, Discounting Voters A next pair of questions concerns the individual terms vote, voter, and voting. Do journalists employ these words with similar frequency? Do they treat them equally? As addressed in chapter 1, word choices might not always be conscious, but when deployed routinely, they can signal cues about power and political roles to an audience. In addition to examining macro-­level patterns of all three terms together, we also analyzed how the individual labels were used. Figure 2 presents the appearances of the terms vote(s) (n = 15,834), voter(s) (n = 17,448), and voting (n = 3,118) in our data. While the visibility of all three terms in 2004 has been addressed above, a second key finding for this chapter is the shift in prominence from the term vote(s) to the word voter(s) over the years, a change that is notable both quantitatively and qualitatively. As figure 2 indicates, vote was the most deployed term from 1948 to 1968 and in 1980. Voter saw an increase in use in 1972 and became the most frequently used word from 1988 to 2016. Voting, in contrast, appeared fairly modestly except for in 2004, 2012, and 2016. A close examination of the

discounting the voter    39 Word Ratio of Each Electoral Label in the News 0.0045 0.004 0.0035 0.003 0.0025 0.002 0.0015

Vote(s) Voter(s) Voting

0.001 0.0005

19 48 19 52 19 56 19 60 19 64 19 68 19 72 19 76 19 80 19 84 19 88 19 92 19 96 20 00 20 04 20 08 20 12 20 16

0

Figure 2 Electoral labels (vote, voter, voting) in the news by year—by word (1948–2016). Note: The word ratio of each electoral label was calculated by taking the frequency of each key term in a given year divided by the total number of words in news coverage per year.

overall attention to the word vote in 1948–1968 and 1980 versus the voter label in later years reveals how the term vote signaled something that was pursued, that mattered, and that added welcome citizen input to the news narrative. These findings are particularly vivid in the early years of the analysis, when vote was the most frequently occurring label of participation. In contrast, the word voter was personalized in thin ways, cueing less value and less worth in coverage, patterns that become particularly prominent after 1988. Linking back to the democratic theory addressed in chapter 1, vote has been associated with both the symbolic blessings of electoral participation and the political power of casting a ballot; voter, in contrast, is less frequently associated with such meaningful designations. To begin, the term vote is regularly cast as something that is sought by candidates. An example can be found in the associations variable that measured the entities interacting with the key terms in coverage. Output from this measure showed that “candidates” were the most frequently occurring connection to both vote (58.0%) and voter (57.0%), and a close read of these linkages reveal how candidates are represented as fighting harder for the vote than for voters. Such depictions added clout to the idea and place of the franchise more so than the actors who might perform it. Consider examples from the early years of the analysis. Headlines featuring the term

40   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

vote announced, “Mrs. F.D.R. Urges Vote for Truman” (1948), “Nixon Urges Democrats in Texas to Vote for Ike” (1956), “Kennedy to Make Nation-­Wide Vote Bid” (1960), “Johnson Woos Western Vote” (1964), “Big Chicago Vote Sought” (1968), and “Humphrey Pleads for Key Ohio Votes in Push for Upset” (1968). In contrast, headlines featuring the word voter during those years proclaimed, “Nixon Almost Rides Off with Voter’s Son” (1952), “Survey Finds Voters Interested in Truman Campaigning but Antagonistic to It” (1952), “Nixon Says Rival ‘Lies’ to Voters” (1960), “Johnson Exhorts Voters to Reject Demagogic Pleas” (1964), “Humphrey’s Election Bet; He Counts on Shaming or Scaring Voters into Keeping the Democrats” (1968), and “Kennedy Asks Voters to Repudiate Wallace” (1968). In subtle yet routine ways, the term vote was honored and unsullied, while the word voters was connected to adverse situations and complicated emotions. The word vote was also pursued when this term appeared inside news articles. Again, consider data from the early years of our analysis when it was the most commonly deployed label. A story from 1948 explained how “the farm vote which has always been the hard core of Republican strength will get some careful attention on this trip.”11 A piece from 1956 informed how “Senator Estes Kefauver and Ezra Taft Benson fought for the farm vote in the same ring today.”12 Yet another article from 1960 offered how “Mr. Meany told the Machinists that if they wanted action to reduce unemployment and stimulate the economy they ‘had better go to work and get our people out to vote. . . . Just get them out and they will vote right.’”13 And still another one from 1964 detailed how President Johnson exhorted crowds to “go vote and get your uncles and cousins and aunts to vote.”14 These portrayals cast the vote as something political elites valued and encouraged, linguistically signaling worth to this term. Vote, too, was depicted as something that counted—both in terms of quantifying ballots and in contributing to the political system. Staying with the early years of the analysis when this term was frequently utilized, headlines from 1956 touted both “Nixon’s Campaign at Crucial Point; His Future Seen Hinging on Vote in California” and “Stevenson Pins Hopes on Key California Vote.”15 An article from 1964 featured a quotation from President Lyndon Baines Johnson to underscore how the vote, and the failure to vote, matter in the polity: “Mr. Johnson indicated that he is apprehensive lest his supporters take victory for granted and fail to vote. ‘If you and your neighbor disagree and if he votes while you stay home you have increased the importance of his vote,’ Mr. Johnson said. ‘You will influence the election but in a way directly opposed to your own desires.’”16

discounting the voter    41

Furthermore, vote contributed citizen potential to the coverage.17 The term signaled dynamism, both when used as a verb (32.0%) and as a noun (66.0 %—grammar variable). A 1948 story addressed how Senator Alben W. Barkley, the Democratic vice-­presidential nominee, urged “labor to get out a big vote in November” because “labor must not only vote itself. It must see to it that its friends vote” as “a Democratic victory in November is inevitable if workers, housewives, businessmen, and veterans exercise their right to vote.”18 Another 1952 piece quoted President Harry Truman as stating, “There is one way to stop the forces of reaction. Get every vote out on Election Day and make it count. I’m not asking you just to vote for me. Vote for yourselves, vote for your farms, vote for the standard of living that you have won under a Democratic Administration—get out there on Election Day and vote for your future.”19 In these instances, the term vote signaled an uncomplicated sense of vivacity to the articles, citizen input reminiscent of how theorists ranging from John Stuart Mill, to Seymour Martin Lipset, to Robert Dahl have discussed electoral participation. Moreover, this label signaled how citizens could protect themselves and their interests, a benefit of electoral participation discussed by Gerald Pomper. The term voter faced more problematic portrayals. Research on storytelling outlines the promise and pitfalls of personalization in narratives. It has, at times, been applauded as when Roy Peter Clark describes how “the best writers create moving pictures of people,” presenting images that “reveal their characteristics and aspirations, their hopes and fears,” and developing characters to help readers see and hear the truths of a story.20 Maria Grabe and Jessica Myrick argue similarly, noting that personalized reporting shows how people are impacted by social problems, is popular with readers, leads to knowledge gain (especially for those not interested in politics), and can shape engagement and policy support.21 Lance Bennett further agrees that personalization can be engaging as it (1) emphasizes “individual actors who are easy to identify with positively or negatively,” (2) invites audiences to “project their own private feelings and fantasies directly onto public life,” and (3) helps viewers develop “psychological relationships” with the individuals profiled in the news.22 He does worry, however, that personalization in news coverage can come with a political cost. Too often, he elaborates, journalists work to place “direct, personal, emotionally charged appeals” in the news at the expense of developing the social, institutional, or political conditions surrounding events such that “journalistic responsibility to stir the conscience and intellect of the audience with information they ought to have about the world” gets “lost in the emotional shuffle.”23

42   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

Our data show that the term voter has not been characterized in ways that Clark would argue “reveal their truths,” that Grabe and Myrick would suggest “engage uninterested readers,” or that Bennett would maintain allows readers to “identify with them.” The macro-­level patterns in our content analysis show that for the most part, the voter label received thin personalization and did not contribute to the campaign narrative as did the term vote. Consider findings from the following variables. Returning to the previously discussed variables rewards and goals, the word voter received even thinner treatment on these measures than the three labels considered together. That is, almost nine times out of ten, voters were not associated with the tangible or intangible benefits of participation (89.6%—rewards variable) and more than eight times out of ten voters were not cast as being connected to a goal in the election (86.1%—goals variable). Additionally, nine times out of ten voters were not given a clear role in the narrative (92.0%—role variable) and almost half of the time, voters were not portrayed as being encouraged to cast a ballot (50.7%—mobilization variable). As the term voter appeared more frequently after 1988—and as journalists became more prone to expose the private gamesmanship of the campaign rather than reporting on the public connection between candidates and the electorate—the voter label began to be described with less power than the term vote and in ways consonant with political scientists who question the value and worth of citizen participants.24 Perhaps the strongest support for this claim comes from an analysis of two variables together. Context assessed the tone of the climate surrounding the key words and potency tracked if voters were cast as “actors,” “recipients of action,” or with “unclear potency” in a narrative. While voters were represented as not having a clear depiction of potency almost one-­third of the time (32.8%), when they were cast as either “actors” (34.4%) or “recipients of action” (26.9%), they were more likely to be associated with negative verbs than positive ones (21.0% vs. 2.8%).25 Here, voters received attention when they were depicted as bringing more harm than good to the American system, the types of individuals described by political scientists critiquing electoral participation. A close read of these negative connections shows that it is rare for journalists to use their own words to critique voters. Instead, the negativity is found in disparaging remarks made by candidates and campaign strategists—comments that were more common in the later years of the analysis. Reporters often paraphrased elite concerns that voters had attitude problems (“apathetic voters,” “cynical voters,” “troubled voters”) or did not meet expectations for participation (“intimidated voters,” “uninformed voters,” “puzzled

discounting the voter    43

voters”). These attributions are similar to those observed by Justin Lewis, Karin Wahl-­Jorgensen, and Sanna Inthorn when they noticed how media coverage of citizens in Great Britain and the United States depicted these individuals as having “moods” and “emotions” but few “democratic skills” or “political expertise.”26 In reading these paraphrases over time, our data show that after 1972, it was rare for such comments to compliment voters or to signal their potential worth in a democracy. Reporters also offered direct quotations from candidates and campaign staffers that disparaged voters. These statements were most vivid when they came from candidates trailing in the polls. A column from 1984 recounted how “Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale accused President Reagan of trying to exploit the supposed selfishness and greed of young voters.”27 Later, in 1996, a reporter detailed how Republican nominee Bob Dole implored an audience in Houston, Texas, to “rise up and pay attention to the campaign.” After vocalizing concerns with his opponent President Bill Clinton, Dole accused the crowd of not taking the election seriously. He was quoted as saying, “Where’s the outrage? Where’s the outrage! When will the voters start to focus?” Later in the day, Dole was reported as worrying aloud that “voters are not angry enough at the media.” He scolded them, saying, “Don’t read that stuff! Don’t watch television! Don’t let them make up your mind for you!”28 These cases depict how journalists recirculated the charges of candidates, a move that signaled negativity to the otherwise neutral portrayals of voters. When the first two themes of this chapter are considered together, and placed in political time, it is notable that the greater—and more empowering—use of the term vote occurred in a period leading up to the 26th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Ratified on July 1, 1971, it lowered the legal voting age from twenty-­one to eighteen. Historians point to several precursors to this amendment, including (1) state legislative efforts in Georgia and Kentucky and advocacy by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s, (2) waves of student activism and protests of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, and (3) the 1970 Supreme Court Case of Oregon v. Mitchell (which decided that the U.S. Congress could dictate a voting age for federal elections but not for state or local contests).29 Our data show that this effort to expand the franchise also took place after over two decades in which reporters signaled value and worth to the label vote. It also merits mention that there was a broad movement to curtail voting rights at the state level following the 2010 midterm election.30 Motivated by a desire to curb in-­person voter fraud, forty-­one states had introduced

44   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

restrictive voting legislation by the year 2012. As of 2016, thirty-­four states had laws requesting or requiring voters to show some type of identification at the polls,31 and—that year alone—saw fourteen states pass stringent laws limiting early voting and introducing complex registration processes.32 While these efforts have been attributed to Republican attempts to shape the electorate in their favor—acts, it should be noted, that have also been taken by the Democratic Party at different times in the United States—they take place after forty-­four years of news in which the term voter was more prominent and depicted in thin and occasionally negative ways.33 It is certainly outside the scope of this project to suggest that language in the news led to a Constitutional amendment or to state-­level legislation. It is also important to be mindful that the United States has a circuitous path to enfranchisement that is often politicized as political parties have discovered that changing the rules of voting is one way to win.34 Yet the prevalence of the term vote in the early years of our research—and the respectful ways it was treated—as well as the rise in the word voter—and its less affirming treatment—send two different messages into the echo chamber surrounding electoral participation in presidential elections. The former connotes an idea and an action that is routinely valued, the latter an actor regarded less highly. From the macro level, this shift in word choice and use sends cues that serve to compromise and dismiss the meaning of electoral participation, particularly as it pertains to electoral participants. The recommending force, here, is similar to the mindset of political scientists who critique the influence of citizen input. So, even though journalists once signified value and worth to the term vote, fewer such indications were associated with the word voter, particularly in the latter years when this word was the most frequently used label in our analysis.

Marginalized from the Game and Isolated from Each Other A third theme follows from the thin personalization afforded the voter label, as described above, and focuses more specifically on how routine underdevelopment of this term signals both a limited and a detached role for citizens in presidential elections. As addressed in chapter 1, how audiences are situated in public texts is a matter of great interest to rhetorical scholars Edwin Black and Philip Wander, to political communication researchers John Zaller and Michael Schudson, and to journalism experts Buzz Merritt and Maxwell McCombs. All such works contend that messages feature cues

discounting the voter    45

that can engage audiences or that infer that audience involvement ranges from unnecessary to uninvited. Our data show how thin personalization of the voter label has placed citizens on the margins of the electoral game, isolating them from each other and the grand tradition of elections. The following paragraphs offer quantitative data that support these patterns, as well as qualitative examples that illustrate select—and rare—instances when the voter label was depicted as involved and valued. Variables associated with voter activity illustrate how voters were largely represented as inactive, and when doing something, as merely responding to elites. First, the behavior variable assessed if the term voter was portrayed as “thinking,” “feeling,” “acting,” or “unclear.” The data show that voters were most commonly shown as “unclear” (60.4%), followed by the “acting” (18.0%), “thinking” (13.5%), and “feeling” (8.2%) categorizations. Next, the assumptions variable tracked if voters were discussed in terms of “rights,” “duty,” or “choices.” The labels were most commonly cast in terms of “choices” (91.5%), followed by “unclear” (5.6%), “right” (2.4%), and “duty” (0.5%). In examining the data closely on the assumptions variable, we saw how the “choice” category covaried with the “connection to a candidate” category on the associations variable. Taken together, the data from these variables reveal how voters were routinely portrayed as not doing much other than reacting to “choices” given to them by candidates. In presenting these data, we agree with Gerald Pomper that it is important to avoid harboring an unrealistic perspective of citizen participants. As he puts it, “Certainly American voters are not persistently interested and active” and “Surely the Jeffersonian dream of independent yeomen discussing politics learnedly is unachievable.” In his mind, “coherent and well-­argued political philosophies are no more to be expected at shopping centers than in college classrooms.” Nevertheless, even if voters are not “philosopher-­kings” they should neither be regarded as “insignificant helots” for the electorate responds to “what is brought into their view.”35 Our point in describing how news coverage marginalizes citizen input, thus, is not to critique the press unnecessarily for not routinely overstating the power or genuflecting the place of voters in the polity. Rather, our aim is to document how a thin understanding of the voter’s role is widespread, to note how this has been the dominant portrayal signaled to newspaper readers since 1972, and to underscore how the prospect of potential voter initiative appears to be largely outside of trending story lines. The frame variable offers an additional type of quantitative and qualitative support for how voters were sidelined in news narratives. It also raises

46   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

questions for future research. This measure was originally designed to assess whether the terms of electoral participation appeared as connected to “issues” (where attention focuses on policy matters) or to “gamesmanship” (where the focus is on political strategy and who is ahead, behind, or catching up in the polls). As discussed in chapter 1, researchers have long bemoaned the latter type of reporting, lamenting how focusing on opinion polls, the language of sports and war, campaign tactics, and personality and style precludes attention going to more meaningful political matters.36 They have also shown, experimentally, how this type of coverage exerts a damaging influence on attitudes and behaviors.37 A vexing aspect of game reporting for these scholars, though, is that many audiences find it engaging and prefer it over other narratives.38 Studies show how people can be engrossed by the prospects of a public contest and intrigued by the opportunity to contribute to its outcome. The data from our content analysis expose how voters were often placed in an “unclear or mixed” position with this variable (44.6%), were sometimes connected to the “game” (35.2%), and were rarely associated with “issues” (9.3%). Many of the aforementioned framing researchers might critique these data for the limited attention to the intersection of citizen participation and policy reporting. Given decades of research arguing that “issue” coverage is preferable to “game” reporting, that is a valid concern. After reading the portrayals closely, we have a slightly different appraisal, one that proposes that richer game reporting might be favorable for the voter label. Specifically, when discussed in stories addressing which candidate had more public support, voters were sometimes signaled as playing a meaningful role in the election. The tone of these portrayals is similar to the value and worth that political scholars John Stuart Mill, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Robert Dahl connect to electoral participation and call to mind Gerald Pomper’s contentions that voters control which candidates are returned to, or removed from, office. The strongest examples of how individuals were credited as mattering in the electoral game appear in extended narratives describing public campaign events. These stories called attention to large crowds of voters who cared enough about the electoral contest and their place in it that they left their homes to support their preferred candidates. These articles did not stress how political operatives manipulate or act upon voters; instead, they treated masses of people as agents who could contribute to the electoral contest.39 Consider these examples. One article from the New York Times in 1948 emphasized the magnitude of voters showing up to support President Harry

discounting the voter    47

Truman in Michigan, including “125,000 cheering workers who filled Detroit’s Cadillac Square,” “15,000 in Oakland Square in Pontiac,” “several thousand at the railroad station in Lansing,” “over 120,000 lining the route from the train side to Flint,” “35,000 at the joint AFL-­CIO rally in Flint,” and “20,000 in Grand Rapids.” The Times covered Truman’s remarks to the audience in Grand Rapids extensively, sharing how he told the crowd that “the upcoming election would determine your destiny for years to come,” because “the necessity that faces us is one of voting on Nov. 2. You must register, you must vote, if you expect to get a square deal in this great nation. It doesn’t do any good to talk about voting if you are not on the books. It doesn’t do any good to talk about voting if you sit around on Election Day, too lazy to turn out.”40 A story from the Atlanta Constitution in 1952 also highlighted the public aspects of the electoral game, describing how Republican nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower met “enthusiastic” crowds of “30,000 in Atlanta, Georgia,” and “40,000 in Columbia, South Carolina.” It was there that South Carolina governor James Byrne said, “This is a historic occasion . . . It is the first time a candidate for the presidency after being nominated has visited South Carolina seeking of the voters of this state.”41 Yet another column from the New York Times in 1956 emphasized how Eisenhower, then seeking reelection, invited five hundred Republicans to his Gettysburg farm in Pennsylvania for a picnic-­style rally where tents would be set up, refreshments would be served, and guests would include “the Republican National Committeemen and Committeewomen of each state, the ninety-­six Republican state chairmen and vice chairmen, the state chairmen and chairwomen of the Citizens for Eisenhower groups, national officers of the Young Republicans organization, and representatives of Youth for Eisenhower and Democrats for Eisenhower.” Invitations to the event, continued the Times, “emphasized that the Republicans wanted more voters to register throughout the country” and that “guests are being asked to do everything possible to see that every eligible voter that supports our cause registers so that he or she can vote.”42 In 2008, too, journalists described how throngs of voters gathered for Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign events. Articles offered estimates of attendance for these rallies in pivotal states such as Ohio (where 60,000 voters showed up in Columbus; 80,000 in Cleveland), Missouri (where 100,000 voters attended in Saint Louis; 75,000 in Kansas City), and Colorado (where 15,000 voters appeared in Pueblo). Reporters emphasized how young voters, newly registered voters, and infrequent voters turned up “decked out for their candidates in Obama-­Biden hats, T-­shirts and buttons”43 and shouting “O-­ba-­ma! O-­ba-­ma!” “Yes, we can!” “Sí, se puede!” and “I love you, Barack!”44

48   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

Extended discussions of the connection Obama and musician Bruce Springsteen made with voters appeared in three of the papers in this analysis: the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune. All three outlets included extended quotations from Springsteen’s endorsements of Obama, employing “The Boss’s” words to praise the many voters assembled at the rallies: “I travel around the world. I occasionally play to big stadiums, crowds like this, just like Sen. Obama does. I continue to find out that wherever I go, America remains a repository for people’s hopes, their desires. It remains a house of dreams. Sen. Obama, help us rebuild our house, big enough for the dreams for all our citizens. I want my country back. I want my dream back. I want my America back.”45 These specific instances illustrate how coverage can pull the citizenry into the electoral contest. As research on news norms would predict, the politicians are still the news pegs here, as they are making the appearances and holding the events. Yet, the journalistic act of signaling how many voters show up to attend these events and sharing candidate messages encouraging voting sends cues consistent with scholarly claims that campaigns are grand public ceremonies and important public referents of democracy.46 The richer reporting of crowds in the earlier era, as well as in 2008 encourage attention to how thick and engaging game narratives signal value and worth to participation. Our overall findings, however, reveal that such portrayals have not been the dominant means of depicting voters over this sixty-­eight-­ year period. As the quantitative data suggest, newspaper readers have witnessed relatively few instances of participation—much less participation rewarded—in the news. The role and status of game reporting was much discussed in the wake of the 2016 election. Initially, journalists and strategists addressed limitations with the polls contributing to the prevailing story line that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency.47 Then, the conversation shifted into how prominent voices in the news read meaning into the data. Margaret Sullivan, of the Washington Post, shared how staff at Nate Silver’s 538 offices were “very cognizant of some unknown factors—for example, who would actually come to vote” but because the idea of the intemperate Trump as president was unthinkable, cues in the polls pointing to his victory were under-­reported.48 Journalists acknowledged how the data were used to “fit” preexisting narratives about the candidates, rather than to foster stories addressing how voters were feeling.49 London School of Economics scholar Charlie Beckett put this pattern in context, commenting how it is amazing that “the news media has missed the populist movements that have been rocking national politics

discounting the voter    49

since at least 2008,” pointing to a failure to see the Tea Party and shifts in the Republican base in 2010 and 2014 in the United States as well as the Brexit vote (addressing the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union) during the summer of 2016 in Great Britain.50 Chapters 5 and 6 offer strategies generated by journalists to keep a closer eye on voters’ role in the electoral game. One approach connecting to our data on the frame variable regards more thorough interpretation of them in game reporting. Introduced by Gilbert Ryle and developed by Clifford Geertz, the notion of “thick description” encourages descriptions of cultural phenomena featuring details, context, and interpretations.51 We propose that game reporting on the electorate could shift to provide “thick prediction,” columns that go deeper than offering thin and simple, singular explanations of survey data.52 Social scientists are drawn to predictions as they indicate a “high level of development” and are only possible with a “full understanding of underlying variables” and a thorough understanding of “supporting conditions.” 53 Indeed, as Philip Tetlock, author of Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? puts it, “prediction without explanation sets us up to be blindsided.” 54 Former Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander laments that too often horse race prediction stories inform who is “ahead or behind,” but fail to “adequately interpret why.” Thicker prediction stories could offer that, providing more information on the voters and less on “political celebrities and the stats.”55 Becoming more curious about voters’ emotions, lived experiences, goals, reasons for supporting—or failing to support—candidates can enrich coverage. Marion Just and colleagues found that it can also connect with audiences. In their research, campaign stories that focused on people’s concerns were well regarded and allowed audience members to bring their personal experiences into political discussions.56 Similar to models advanced by John Zaller, Michael Schudson, and Lance Bennett in chapter 1, the details in these narratives signal alarms that voters should be paying attention to the campaign. Our data further point to how voters have been largely isolated from the past, the future, or each other in reporting. The time variable traced whether the key labels were placed in the “past,” “present,” “future,” or “across time.” Voters were mostly placed in the present (90.9%) and less commonly connected to the past (3.7%), to the future (.6%), or to a transcendent sense of time (4.8%). While research has found that this temporal orientation is common in coverage, the emphasis on the present signals attention to timely events—be they important or not—and may discourage a focus on broader concerns such as the sacrifices of those who fought to secure the franchise or

50   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

voters’ own roles in safeguarding their democratic system for future generations.57 Again, it is not our goal to unfairly critique reporters for not offering history lessons in their coverage; a key news norm for them to follow is timeliness, a force that concentrates the mind on the here and now, the breaking events of the campaign. Rather, our objective is to note how—particularly after the 1970s when civic education was disappearing from the nation’s schools and when candidates were less likely to herald the value of voting in their own remarks—few cues of a democratic tradition, let alone a grand one, have been sent into the public echo chamber surrounding elections. Descriptions of voters, too, imply division. The quality variable attended to characteristics of voters, including if they were “partisan,” “independent,” or “connected to a candidate,” or simply as “demographics and numbers.” Overall, such characteristics were not linked to voters in 43.0 percent of the data; when such qualities did appear, though, “demographics and numbers” accounted for the largest category on this variable (29.6%). Examples of such depictions include how electoral participants have been separated into various subgroups, such as region (e.g., “Southern voters,” “Rust belt voters”), race and ethnicity (e.g., “Latino voters,” “African American voters”), religion (e.g., “Catholic voters,” “Evangelical voters”), occupation/income (e.g., “blue-­ collar voters,” “Labor voters”), and age (e.g., “young voters,” “senior voters”). A close read of these “demographics and numbers” portrayals signaled division among the electorate that was frequently mentioned and rarely interpreted in depth. Many instances resembled this excerpt from the Chicago Tribune in 1976. The detail in this narrative focuses on percentages marking separation, not sense making of such fractures. It also highlights the proportions of the electorate connected to the candidates, not how or why voters supported such choices. In doing so, the emphasis is on blocs and breaks, demarcations that often push Americans away from politics:58 The Tribune Poll indicates some problems for Carter among major groups of Illinois voters. For instance, Catholic voters—who cast 30 per cent of Illinois’ votes—were found currently to prefer Ford to Carter by 50 to 37 per cent. Traditionally seen as Democratic voters, Catholics also prefer Republican Thompson to Howlett, but less strongly than they choose Republican Ford over Carter. Voters who consider themselves Protestants—55 per cent of the electorate—reflect the statewide preference in choosing Ford over Carter by 44 to 39 per cent. Carter makes up the seeming difference by taking a strong share of Illinois voters who identify their religious preferences in other terms.

discounting the voter    51

When voters are divided by age, Carter emerges as a narrow favorite of those under 30; he evenly splits voters 30 to 49 years old with Ford; and loses those 50 and older to Ford by 11 points. Thompson is the favorite of voters in each of the age groups—leading Howlett by 13 points among those under 30, by 31 points among 30-­to-­49-­year-­old voters, by 23 points among those 50 and older. The only group of voters which disproportionately prefers Carter and Howlett over their opponents are blacks. Carter wins an impressive 74 per cent of the blacks, compared with Ford’s 10 per cent. Blacks favor Howlett to Thompson by 47 to 27 per cent.59 Additionally, coverage of these voter groups was not equal, quantitatively or qualitatively. Some racial and ethnic groups received more prominent and favorable attention, than others. An analysis of the groups mentioned in the “demographics and numbers” category of the quality variable reveals how “African-­American voters” were most frequently featured (39.4%), followed by “Jewish voters” (23.6%), “White voters” (14.4%), and “Hispanic” and “Latino voters” (4.6%—phrases that increased dramatically in the 2000–2012 campaigns). Several articles emphasized how specific groups play a more meaningful role than others in upcoming elections. “Jewish voters,” for instance, were featured as “crucial” in 1976, as the New York Times reported, “Carter campaign strategists believe that Jewish voters, while relatively few in number compared with the overall electorate, will be crucial to Mr. Carter’s chances of carrying certain key states in November.”60 These voters were also cast as significant in a Washington Post 2004 column, which stated, “In swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and here in Florida—where the election hinges on razor-­thin margins—a slight shift among Jewish voters could tilt the outcome.”61 Starting in 1980, “Hispanic” and “Latino” voters received considerable attention for their growing size and potential in the United States. In 1980, the New York Times reported how the growth of the political power of Hispanic people is no isolated phenomenon. It appears to represent the first wave of a tide of politically awake Hispanic voters in the western half of the Sun Belt, the Middle West, New York, New Jersey, and Florida. Already the most rapidly growing ethnic group in the nation Hispanic voters bid to outstrip blacks eventually as the nation’s largest minority. And like the blacks they ordinarily vote heavily Democratic. What is happening here in

52   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

Texas therefore may be a preview of what will occur elsewhere as Hispanic influence grows in the nation. And here it is commonly recognized that Mr. Carter must get these voters to turn out if he hopes to carry Texas.62 By 2004, a Washington Post article explained how polls showed incumbent George W. Bush “holding a significant lead among Hispanic voters in Florida” and having “an overwhelming lead among Florida’s Cuban Americans, who dominate the state’s Hispanic population”—critical data as the article reported how “nearly one in five Florida residents is of Hispanic descent.63 In 2012, the potential influence of Latino voters was even starker. The Los Angeles Times depicted how both President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were “focused keenly on the power of Latino voters to determine the election’s outcome in Colorado, Nevada, and Florida among other states.” The article continued thusly: Dual gestures this week by the presidential rivals demonstrated two things: The president cannot do enough to ensure that Latinos show up to vote and Romney is struggling to narrow the Democratic incumbent’s lopsided advantage among them [. . .] On a visit to Las Vegas on Sunday Obama held a rally on the city’s heavily Latino east side. Over and over he urged the 11,000 cheering supporters to be sure to cast their ballots. The event featuring the Mexican rock group Mana was part of his campaign’s push to sign up thousands of new voters before Saturday’s registration deadline in Nevada.64 From a strategic perspective, it is likely that particular subsets of the population are pivotal in specific elections, and it may be tactically wise for campaigns to target them aggressively (rather than work to mobilize everyone).65 And, from a narrative perspective, it is probably exciting to be part of a group that is mentioned as “most influential” in the news. When it comes to the story of American elections, though, portrayals that represent most voters as outside of the game and just a few types of voters as critical to victory might complicate the meaning of electoral participation. Uneven emphases in coverage could signal uneven understandings of political worth and—possibly—uneven representation in a democratic republic. In connection to the 2016 narrative, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen observed that scholars and reporters may have “assumed knowledge” about the majority and, consequently, were prone to ask questions about “the lived experience

discounting the voter    53

of groups that were considered minorities.”66 This pattern may have led many to miss underlying dynamics of that election and points to a need to “qualitatively research the (diverse, fractious, fascinating) majority to, and see whether a better, evidence-­based understanding of how people relate to politics and public life can help us get it right next time.”67 Additionally, from a broader perspective, inattention to larger groups would trouble Stephen Coleman who has argued that democracy “depends on commonly recognizable social performance.” He fears that “the greatest risks facing late-­modern culture emanate from cultural diffusion” such as a decrease in “shared understandings of what it means to be and act in the world” and a sense that “the rules of the political game seem too much like imposed rules and someone else’s game.”68 The depictions of the voter label addressed above send few signals to remedy such concerns.

Conclusion Journalists, Marjorie Hershey argues, represent the primary and public explainers of elections. This chapter has analyzed how they have told the story of electoral participation over a sixty-­eight-­year period by taking a macro-­level look at our data. The purpose is to learn more about the portrayals that have been habitually defined and consistently normalized in coverage. Studying all 36,400 instances of these words yielded three key patterns. A first theme is purely quantitative and reveals how electoral participation is unremarkable, unless it is endangered. As figures 2.1 and 2.2 reveal, all of the words in this analysis were employed most frequently in the wake of the 2000 election. As quantitative analyses of other variables show, outside of this burst of attention, our key labels received thin treatment on several measures that might call forth a more robust understanding of citizen participation in the news. To be sure, it is valuable that journalists allocated space to discussions of very real complications facing the electoral system in 2004. At the same time, however, it bears stating that the labels of electoral participation are not a good fit for the news norms that shape coverage. Indeed, the slight attention to the three words outside of that moment calls to mind Gerald Pomper’s concerns about the intersection of the political context and electoral participation. For him, “the electorate is capable of responsiveness,” but “it seems unlikely that voters will be able to seek out for themselves the information necessary to create an organized view of the political world.” Thus, the overall matter of “appropriate stimuli” to “create the conditions

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for a participatory and aware citizenry” merits continued mindfulness and vigilance.69 Given a two-­hundred-­year period of ambivalence about voting, as well as the hesitant stance that our nation’s schools take toward it, the print news reports we studied are largely responsible for recirculating the “stimuli” to which citizens can react. Whether intentional or not—as Roger Fowler addressed in chapter 1—the macro-­level story that journalists have provided primarily calls attention to electoral participation when it is imperiled. A second theme addresses individual word use. A key finding here is that the term vote is treated more generously than the term voter. The former word is connected to a respected idea and act, one that is connected to candidate interest, value, and power. The latter label, in contrast, regards individuals who have been subjected to thin personalization and who rarely receive notable attention unless they are causing problems or in trouble. The limited characterization of voters, particularly in the later years of the study, would trouble V. O. Key—partially for how these messages invite citizens to see their own roles in the polity, but more prominently because they shape the mindset of “candidates and other political leaders.” If, Key writes, “leaders believe the route to victory is by projection of images and cultivation of styles rather than by advocacy of politics to cope with the problems of the country, they will project images and cultivate styles to the neglect of the substance of politics.”70 Again, a general lack of advocacy for voters in the United States, met with narratives that discount citizen participants, sends a message similar to theorists who critique the place and proficiency of citizen input in presidential campaigns. A third theme continues to focus on the narrow personalization of voters and investigates how they have been marginalized and isolated in coverage. The data here show how they are infrequently given a meaningful role to play in the electoral game and are routinely isolated in time and space. Although this section offers some departures to such portrayals—mostly by offering empowering descriptions of crowds as well as fleeting attention to Jewish and Hispanic voters—the majority of the coverage does not. While proponents of presidential elections contend that these events offer the great public ceremonies of American life, where popular influence is on display, and Americans can see themselves as an imagined community of electors working together, news coverage—particularly of the voter label, and largely after 1988—rarely sends such a message.71 In his analyses, Coleman addresses how “being counted (quantitatively) is only a small part of casting a vote” as “far more important is the sense of feeling counted (qualitatively).” In his mind, when the media treat people “as

discounting the voter    55

if they are king-­makers,” “respected by neighbors,” with a vote to cast that is equally valuable to that of their bosses and public officials, “they feel present and counted.”72 The next chapter looks underneath our macro-­level patterns to investigate portrayals across cultural eras and in response to political events and changes in the media landscape. The purpose is to assess if differing signals of value and worth have been sent to the electorate. Chapter 3 will show that what aggregates reveal, they may also conceal. Specifically, the key terms of electoral participation have not always been devalued in the news, and they may not always be in the future.

3 positioning the voter

The media landscape has changed dramatically over our sixty-­eight-­year period, altering how the news has been written and received. Quantitatively, there have been decreases in the number of daily print newspapers, circulation rates, advertising revenues, and staff sizes.1 Culturally, print newspapers have been traumatized by the juggernaut of television and by the explosion of digital news and social media.2 Temporally, knowing that readers may have already heard about political topics through television, digital news, or social media, many journalists must focus on second-­day leads to “move stories forward.”3 And, politically, reporters moved from a mindset of an “obedient press,” viewing government as a vehicle of the solution helping Americans through the Great Depression and World War II, to an “adversarial press” regarding politicians as “bad guys” who needed to be interrogated and exposed.4 One constant over these years, however, is that publicly the words of print news reporters continue to be disseminated through other media and repeated in interpersonal conversations.5 Chapter 2 addressed the macro-­ level output of our content analytic variables. This chapter looks underneath those broad themes to examine how cultural and political developments may have shaped the portrayals over time. Journalism scholars argue that attending to the context and events that give rise to reporting helps to inform how and why journalists portray actors and events as they do.6 When it comes to understanding the electorate, many political scholars argue similarly. As Gerald Pomper puts it, “There is no single answer to the question ‘who is the American voter?’” In his mind, “the question must be further specified by ‘when’ and ‘where’” for “the electorate can respond differently when the times and the alternatives change.”7 The findings in this chapter highlight how the key terms of electoral participation have been positioned—and repositioned—over the years, granted, denied, and resignaled roles in the polity. After running descriptive statistics

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by year, decade, and twenty-­year periods, we located prominent changes in how the labels of electoral participation were portrayed over time. The following themes will describe how the words vote(s), voter(s), and voting have been cast as engaged partisan actors vital to campaign outcomes (1948–1968), defined as pawns of campaign strategists (1972–2000), and depicted as captives of a flawed electoral system (2004, 2012, and 2016), but also portrayed as targets of sophisticated and enthusiastic mobilization efforts (2008). In some ways, these representations underscore a steady devaluation of voting as discussed in chapter 2; yet in others, a return to public campaigning and mobilization in 2008 is reminiscent of earlier reportage suggesting that the affirming tone of a prior era might not be extinct.

Voters as Mobilized-­Partisan Actors Vital to Campaign Outcomes: 1948–1968 The years following World War II may not have been a perfect period in American life, but it is tempting for many to romanticize them. Historians detail how “American flags were displayed everywhere—in front of homes, public buildings, and fraternal lodges” as “the war reinforced solidarity even among strangers.”8 Sociologists describe a sense of “unconscious well-­ being,” resulting from individuals engaging in a “co-­operative rather than a private spirit.”9 Media observers convey how “television portrayed a wonderfully antiseptic world of idealized homes in an idealized America” as there were “no economic crises, no class divisions or resentments, no ethnic tensions, few if any hyphenated Americans, and few if any minority characters” on TV at the time. Nothing in television programming, moreover, led viewers to doubt “that American values worked and that anyone with even an iota of common sense would want to admire them.”10 Rhetorical scholars point to how presidential candidates spoke with a “certain,” “bright,” and “clear” political voice that has become less confident over the years, shot through with “distinctions and qualifications.”11 And, political scholars explain how people during this period reported the highest levels of political efficacy, electoral participation, group membership, church attendance, and newspaper reading of any cohort since World War II.12 While this era was not a “golden age” for Americans who were marginalized because of race, gender, social class, or sexual orientation, Robert Putnam details how these years featured a sense of faith in institutions, a visible commitment to democratic values, an overt trust in fellow citizens, and a genuine excitement about the future.13

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When the data in this project are examined over time, the findings suggest that portrayals of the key terms between the years 1948 and 1968 reflect this robust milieu. At this point, these words were closely aligned with political parties and cast as valued participants in the democratic process. Also, as previewed in chapter 2, extended quotations in coverage from presidential candidates during these years connected the key terms to the symbolic role citizen input plays in the United States. Even though such claims may seem antique to contemporary sensibilities, they were prevalent markers of a period in which electoral participation was signaled as meaningful and consequential. To begin, party loyalty was praised and made prominent—a cue that added passion and purpose to electoral life. Our key terms were linked to party references more frequently between the years 1948 and 1968 than during subsequent time periods (1948–1968 = 39.3%; 1972–2000 = 24.4%; 2004, 2012, and 2016 = 13.7%; 2008 = 18.9%—“party” category, associations variable). In his seminal discussion of citizenship, Michael Schudson details how the more politics is “understood as team sport and the rivalry of social groups” the more enthusiastically people participate in politics.14 While he is quick to note that “lively political campaigns and deeply held political loyalties” have not always led to enlightened policy or gestures toward the public good, such energy can make citizens want to be engaged.15 The tone and content of the examples below reveal how when the terms of electoral participation were linked to parties during these years, they cued notions of allegiance and pride. An example of such positive energy can be found in the 1956 article “How Will Irish Go.”16 This piece from the Christian Science Monitor discussed a group of “largely Irish American voters, most of whom had long been proud of voting the straight Democratic ticket.” It detailed how these voters were loyal to “the party of the working man,” drawn to “what the Democratic Party stood for,” and frustrated by their opponents—the “Republican boys.” While the article addressed how one Irish woman liked incumbent president Dwight D. Eisenhower, it also underscored how her fondness for the president did not complicate her devotion to her party or her intention of voting for it. This woman is represented thusly, “A housewife who had seen many a quadrennial campaign opened her front door (which had a window covered with a lace curtain inscribed ‘God Bless America’) and said simply: ‘Ike brought our boys home and I like the way he looks. A lot of women in the neighborhood say so. But I’m a Democrat, of course.’”17 This narrative departs from the “demographics and numbers” examples from chapter 2

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that called attention only to voter isolation and division. Instead, many of the articles from 1948 to 1968 discussing partisanship employed the voices of party activists and loyal party members, a gesture signaling richer detail on how and why they were engaged in the electoral contest. Other articles borrowed quotations from candidates to connect voters to parties. Consider how reporting from the Chicago Tribune in 1960 emphasized the Democratic nominee’s reminder to consider party cues when voting: “Sen. John F. Kennedy last night pleaded with a nationwide television audience not to forget party labels in electing the next President on Tuesday. . . . Kennedy said he came here to ask for help. He said the ­voter’s decision Tuesday should be ‘not only between candidates, but between two parties. Americans should choose between (Richard) Nixon with the Republican Party, and Kennedy with the Democratic Party.’”18 The piece also addressed the audience’s reaction to Kennedy’s statements. Specifically, “disciplined battalions of Labor Unions and the nation’s most powerful Democratic organization approved every word Kennedy uttered, when they could hear. At times they erupted before he finished a sentence.”19 In this article, the journalist recirculated Kennedy’s requests to be mindful of partisanship as well as the audience’s enthusiasm upon hearing such appeals. A Los Angeles Times piece, also from 1960, highlighted the Republican nominee’s emphasis on party cues. In this case, Richard Nixon had traveled to the South to question the Democratic Party’s commitment to civil rights. Nixon was quoted as telling a “jubilant crowd of 10,000” in Jackson, Mississippi, that the Democrats who crafted their party’s approach to civil rights “forfeited the right to ask millions of Democrats to vote for them in November.” He continued, “The party of Galbraith, Schlesinger, and Bowles is not the party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Wilson—and I don’t believe it is the party of Jackson, Miss., either.” Nixon “won loud cheers when he introduced his running mate Henry Cabot Lodge,” and “seemed to be drawing energy and enthusiasm from the large crowds which turned out for his fifth invasion of Dixie.”20 In this time period, the connections between voters and the parties were portrayed as meaningful and the differences between the major parties were emphasized (particularly, in the instances above, by the presidential nominees). Such detail brought vigor to the terms of electoral participation. Voters were depicted as valuing the parties they belonged to and candidates were quoted as praising their own party and demonizing that of their opponent. Related projects show that these types of candidate statements have become less common in campaign speeches over time, a likely reason why they appear less frequently in subsequent news coverage. Yet, such utterances

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added a sense of connection and meaning to the stories of electoral participation between the years 1948 and 1968.21 Language also signaled how citizens were invited to participate in elections. Coverage during this period contained the second-­highest level of mobilization attempts of the texts examined (1948–1968 = 41.9%; 1972– 2000 = 33.9%; 2004, 2012, and 2016 = 31.5%; 2008 = 46.7%—mobilization agents variable). While the 2008 campaign featured a higher overall emphasis on mobilization strategies, those focused largely on excitement surrounding the Barack Obama campaign; the mobilization messages between 1948 and 1968, however, sent a broader message, naturalizing the sentiment that electoral participation was widespread. The following excerpts depict such attempts, starting with a colorful example from the Los Angeles Times. The article entitled “Women Voters Form Brigade for Eisenhower” described how Republican women in Beverly Hills—including movie star Lucille Ball—worked to get out the vote for Richard Nixon in 1952. A group of militant women gathered yesterday in a Beverly Hills garden but it was no garden party. They were organizing for a fight. They call themselves the Women’s Brigade for Eisenhower and their purpose is to do everything in their power to help elect the General and his running mate, Sen. Richard M. Nixon. . . . The group, which contains a number of screen stars, including Irene Dunne, Adrian Booth, Lucille Ball, June Allyson, and Zazu Pitts, plans to campaign throughout the State, using its own funds and its own volunteer speakers. Said Mrs. Florence Stevens, one of the organizers, “We want to talk to the people, to the women, to the young people. We want to win that fight.”22 A related article appeared in the Washington Post in 1964. This story detailed how the wives of prominent officials were hitting the road to generate votes for the Democratic Party: “Five Washington women will embark on a ‘Midwest caravan on wheels’ today, to woo votes for the Democratic ticket of Johnson and Humphrey in four states. They will start in Detroit, Mich., and travel through the state to the Upper Peninsula and across Wisconsin and Minnesota to end in Northern Illinois on October 30. The Caravaneers will include Mrs. Samuel J. Lanahan, Mrs. Eugene C. Carusi, Mrs. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., and Mrs. F. Wistar Janney.”23 Both of these stories highlight how noteworthy individuals worked to mobilize voters and how they were excited to be involved in the political

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process. Judged by contemporary sensibilities, there was an innocence to the “brigade” in Beverly Hills and the “caravan on wheels” hitting the Midwest. These women saw value in the process of talking to “people,” “women,” and “young people,” and going on the road to “woo votes.” In the early years of our data, these citizens were not too cynical to see elections as important, nor were the reporters writing for the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post too skeptical to cover their efforts. Other forces were also depicted as mobilizing voters. In a 1952 piece from the Atlanta Journal-­Constitution, a variety of local individuals were described as encouraging each other to participate. This article informed how “Don Stewart, president of the Chatham County Eisenhower for President Club” helped to organize an event in downtown Atlanta that would mark “the first time a Republican candidate had ever filed in the state.” It noted how “thousands jammed Hurt Park,” as well as how citizens brought signs reading “Georgia Tech Likes Ike,” “Georgia Likes Ike,” “Army Brats Like Ike,” and “Georgia needs a two-­party system.” Mayor Roy Foster of Wadley was quoted as stating, “I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is one of the biggest days in the history of Georgia Republicans,” and “pretty blonde Mary C. Townsend” was described as passing out “‘Ike’ buttons to Democrats, Republicans, and ‘interested neutrals’ who awaited the general’s arrival.” Roscoe Tucker, Republican committeeman, was quoted as saying, “The people of Georgia took him to their hearts. His visit has gained him thousands of votes here. I think you can say that Georgia is no longer a Democratic state—it is now a doubtful one.”24 In offering these details, in naming these citizens, and in recording their political agency, this narrative sent the message that people cared enough about the contest to work toward its outcome. A 1964 story from the New York Times described an intensive registration campaign for African Americans in South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. It addressed “threats and official obstruction on the part of registration officials” as well as how “Mrs. Alberta Kelly said that she had been dismissed from her job because she tried to register to vote.” It also cued a commitment to voting as a fundamental right, as something worth fighting for, and as something that could impact electoral outcomes. It features quotations from several named actors directly, including “J. Arthur Brown, state president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People”; “C.  G. Gomillion, president of the Tuskegee Civic Association”; “Dr. Reginald A. Hawkins, a dentist in Charlotte N.C.”; “Dr. Charles H. Thomas, an instructor at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg”; “lawyer Avon Williams of Nashville”; “Rev. Calvin

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A. Hood, an instructor at the Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte”; “Rev. Joseph Carter”; “Hosea L. Williams, director of the Chatham County Crusade for Voters”; “Ronnie Moore and Edward Hollander of CORE”; and “Mrs. Annie Bebe Devine.” These individuals were quoted as stating they were “prepared to deliver on Nov. 3 what civil rights workers call the largest vote bloc in history,” their “vote will make the difference,” and participation in “this Presidential election marks an important milestone in our struggle for full equality.”25 Here, the column depicts our key terms in line with democratic theorists who regard elections to be grand moments of democracy and view the right to vote as central to citizenship. A 1968 piece, further, discussed how labor groups were organizing for the Democratic Party. In this case, organizations in Michigan were working to register voters, as third-­party candidate George Wallace was “expected to pull from 6 per cent to 20 per cent of the vote mostly from factory workers, traditionally Democrats.” The column detailed how “The unions have undertaken the state registration drive, and $250,000 will probably be spent in an effort to add 495,000 voters to the rolls. ‘The election will be decided by Oct. 4 when the final registration figures come in,’ said Aldo Vagnozzi, editor of The Michigan A.F.L. C.I.O. News and chairman of the Democratic 19th District organization. ‘If we can register enough, it can be close.’”26 In many ways, the earnest tone of these examples seems dated. These uses of the key terms, nevertheless, feature some notable departures from the overall patterns depicted in chapter 2. The labels of electoral participation between the years 1948 and 1968 were connected to the energy, passion, and in-­group identity of political parties, and a political culture in which overt mobilization efforts were plentiful. Further, the relationship between voters and candidates took place in public and featured extended and direct quotations from elites and citizens. This coverage connotes a sense that voters are mobilized-­partisan actors whose input can influence electoral results. These citizen participants are not necessarily ideal, but neither are they immobilized; press attention to their place and role(s) in these years signaled how they can protect themselves by participating in elections.27

Voters as Pawns of Campaign Strategists: 1972–2000 Events of the 1960s and 1970s—including political assassinations, the civil rights movement, the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate, and a worldwide economic recession—were met with less hopeful, communal, and civic

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appetites.28 These years witnessed decreased rates of following politics, voting, attending meetings, trusting American institutions, and marrying. As Putnam explains, these years also saw a transfer from “active participation” in leisure activities to higher levels of “passive spectatorship,” in which Americans shifted from a doing society to an observing society.29 Newsrooms also changed. As previously addressed, John Zaller suggests that by this time journalists were exposing private campaign actions instead of merely recirculating polished and controlled campaign messaging.30 Alex S. Jones sees the early 1970s as a moment when the press stopped protecting politicians and started unmasking their actions by publishing the Pentagon Papers and investigating the Watergate scandal.31 Larry Sabato employs an extended metaphor to describe these developments. For him, reporters once resembled lapdogs, supporting and protecting politicians between the years 1941 and 1966. Over time, though, they adopted roles as watchdogs that questioned and critiqued the private lives of politicians between the years 1966 and 1974, and later as junkyard dogs that discarded extensive research to break news stories quickly, from 1974 onward.32 Sabato saw two sets of implications for these developments. For newsrooms, they meant an increase in competition, a strengthening of pack journalism, and decreased access to elected officials. For newspaper readers, they led to an encouragement of cynicism and greater media control in vetting and selecting candidates. Storytelling preferences also shifted during this period. The early 1970s saw a rise in precision journalism in which reporting began to emphasize “the application of social and behavioral science research methods.”33 At that time, there was a marked increase in the use of public opinion polls to describe audience sentiment as newsrooms regarded such content as timely, concrete, topical, reliable, objective, and more sophisticated than prior news narratives.34 The depictions of electoral participation reflect such adjustments. Between the years 1972 and 2000, there was a general decrease in the previously discussed engaged partisan actor portrayal. The shift was marked by an 8 percent decrease in mobilization attempts (1948–1968 = 41.9% and 1972–2000 = 33.9%—mobilization agents variable). It also included a 15 percent decrease in connections to political parties (1948–1968 = 39.3% and 1972–2000 = 24.4%) and an almost 10 percent increase in connections to candidates (1948–1968 = 49.6% and 1972–2000 = 59.4%—associations variable). Additionally, while the shifts on the next two variables were modest, vivid qualitative examples added to the tone of coverage. These years

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further featured (1) the highest level of voting being treated as a “choice” (1948–1968 = 87.4%; 1972–2000 = 92.2%; 2004, 2012, and 2016 = 70.4%; 2008 = 77.8%—assumptions variable) and lowest level of it being depicted as a “right” (1948–1968 = 4.6%; 1972–2000 = 2.9%; 2004, 2012, and 2016 = 9.3%; 2008 = 6.7%—assumptions variable) and (2) the second highest level of “game” reporting (1948–1968 = 37.6%; 1972–2000 = 41.5%; 2004, 2012, and 2016 = 41.9%; 2008 = 22.2%—frame variable) with the lowest attention to “issue” reporting (1948–1968 = 10.4%; 1972–2000 = 6.9%; 2004, 2012, and 2016 = 19.3%; 2008 = 17.8%—frame variable). In reading the texts closely, we noted how attaching the key terms to choices—with few links to issues or rights—took coverage “inside” and began to emphasize strategy, offer thin description of polling data, and the voices of strategists in the news. This interchange of voices—from citizens to campaign operatives— has done more to alter the nature and tone of coverage of electoral participation than anything else in our research. During these years, campaign strategists were often called on to read meaning into the campaign game. While a few Democratic tacticians were mentioned and quoted, there was a far heavier emphasis on Republican experts during this time period. Consider how the following GOP operatives spoke for, and sometimes down to, the voters who had appeared so prominently in the earlier period: • From the Chicago Tribune (1980): “‘Presidential politics in the South is simple,’ as Lee Atwater, one of Reagan’s aides, put it, ‘The blacks vote Democratic, the upper income whites vote Republican, and the blue collar whites, rural and urban, are the swing vote. Those are the ones we’re after.’”35 • From the Washington Post (1980): “Chief of Staff Ed Meese who said that ‘the main thing voters will be looking for on Tuesday is what lies ahead for the next four years. And I think they’re going to vote on that basis rather than just the events of the next few days.’”36 • From the Washington Post (1984): “Richard B. Wirthlin the top Reagan pollster said the late-­week stabilizing in the polls indicated that both men are so well known that even a perceptual loss for the president did not translate into a shift in the vote.”37 • From the New York Times (2000): “Karl Rove, the chief strategist for the Bush campaign, described these voters as ‘very practical.’ ‘They want to know: what are you going to do for them, and how does it differ from the other guy,’ Mr. Rove said.”38

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As these examples illustrate, out were the public mobilization pitches suggesting voters could make a difference and in was a sense that citizens were pawns in a game controlled by hired guns. The focus on Republican strategists in 1988 was particularly stark. One piece from the Washington Post considered the power, assertiveness, and legacy of these actors. It depicted how “George Bush’s campaign chairman, James Baker III’s goal” was to “to control, if possible, every minute the voters get to see and hear Bush.” It then relayed a narrative of how, fifty minutes into a televised presidential debate, Baker “ordered one of his deputies to place a telephone call with an urgent message” for moderator Jim Lehrer for the purposes of complaining about the debate format. Ten minutes after the call, the article continued, the debate shifted to address “friendlier terrain” for the Republican candidate. The column elaborated how “a sense of campaign history runs deep in Bush’s high command,” as “media consultant Roger Ailes first earned a national reputation in 1968 by advising Nixon on the use of television,” and “pollster and issue strategist Robert Teeter worked for Ford in 1976, as did Stuart Spencer, who is now guiding vice presidential nominee Dan Quayle.” The article concluded by mentioning a laundry list of the “key players” hired to help Bush “win over voter blocs,” including Paul Manafort, Richard G. Darman, Margaret Tutwiler, Lee Atwater, James Lake, Charles Black, Roger Stone, Craig L. Fuller, and Kevin Phillips.39 Another story from 1988 appearing in the Christian Science Monitor concentrated on a Republican operative’s efforts to “spin” survey data. This piece began by noting how a “Los Angeles Times poll reported the race dead-­even (47 percent for each candidate).” It then quoted Sheila Tate, George W. Bush’s press secretary, as “confident” that “behind the scenes, Bush’s position relative to Democrat Michael Dukakis is steadily growing stronger” for four reasons. The reporter proceeded to recirculate her arguments that (1) Bush was up “25 points among white Protestants, 27 points among retailers, 17 points among college graduates, and 11 points among men”; (2) “voters regard Bush as more competent by a 51-­to-­32 margin”; (3) “Bush endlessly repeats his basic themes about defense, jobs, crime, and family values” which play “well with the crowds”; and (4) Dukakis “spends valuable time answering Bush charges that he is weak on defense, opposes the pledge of allegiance in public classrooms, favors prison furloughs for first-­degree murderers and rapists, and would raise taxes on the middle class.”40 In the end, 422 of the article’s 821 words were devoted to a discussion of Tate’s take on the poll. Much of the coverage between the years 1972 and 2000 took a prognostic stance to the electoral game. These narratives departed from the coverage

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addressed in chapter 2 from 1948, 1952, and 2008 that assigned massive crowds a role to play in unfolding electoral contests. Instead, these game stories closely resembled the patterns Gabriel Weimann observed in coverage of Israeli elections from chapter 1. As troubled Weimann, a focus on predicting the “game” of politics took the mystery—as well as the voters’ agency and responsibility—out of the story of elections.41 As shown in the dates below, reporters often projected outcome certainties well in advance of the Election Night calls addressed in our introduction: • On August 13, 2000 (12 weeks and three days before Election Day), the Los Angeles Times reported how “fundamentally, Democrats control the vote in California. . . . If the Gore campaign has to sweat California, it means the country doesn’t look pretty good, period,’ said Democratic pollster Paul Maslin, a veteran of California campaigns. ‘Bottom line answer: No matter what [Republicans] do, short of winning a [national] landslide, it’s not going to put California in play.”42 • On October 1, 1972 (four weeks and six days before Election Day), the Washington Post reported how “Reed predicted that the President (Richard Nixon) would carry Mississippi with 70 per cent to 80 per cent of the vote and that Eastland would also win overwhelmingly.”43 • On October 21, 1992 (13 days before Election Day), the Los Angeles Times reported, “‘I think this election has been over for a long time’ said John Petrocik a political science professor at UCLA and a polling consultant to Bush’s 1988 campaign. ‘People don’t have a reason to vote for Bush and you can’t get from your base vote to a majority just by giving people reasons to vote against your opponent.’”44 • On October 30, 1988 (nine days before Election Day), the Chicago Tribune reported, “Voter preference for the vice president has propelled Bush into a sizable lead in the final poll of five key states Illinois, New York, Texas, Florida and California taken for The Tribune by Peter D. Hart Research Associates of Washington.”45 • On October 29, 1976 (four days before Election Day), the Christian Science Monitor reported, “The nationwide trend seems to be toward Gerald Ford and this voter movement in his direction may be enough to give him a come from behind victory.”46 In Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy, Eric Alterman bemoans the emergence of the pundits’ voice in shaping news narratives.47 In his words, “a tiny group of highly visible political pontificators who make their

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living offering ‘inside political opinions and forecasts’ in the elite national media” rose to prominence, particularly during the 1980s. He details how pundits live in an elite world where “the public’s views are not relevant” because, in their minds, “the public does not possess the means, nor apparently, the inclination, to interfere in Washington’s policy apparatus in any but the most exceptional cases.”48 His concerns echo trepidations advanced by V. O. Key twenty-­six years earlier. In the opening of The Responsible Electorate, Key noted how “the new analyses of voter behavior” relying on survey data add to a “conception of voting not as a civic decision, but as an almost purely deterministic act,” whereby “the actions of persons are made to appear to be only predictable and automatic responses to campaign stimuli.”49 While Key might not have foreseen the exact linguistic choices survey professionals and strategists would come to use in the 1980s, he sensed how a dismissive mindset neglecting the value and meaning of electoral participation could emerge. Even though campaign operatives played a part in all eighteen of the campaigns under examination, coverage between the years 1972 and 2000 credited them—more so than the voting public—with determining electoral outcomes. As the data show, narratives that reached to strategists to comment on the political “game” and upcoming electoral “choices” took the agency, and energy, out of the mobilized-­partisan portrayal.

Voters as Captives of a Flawed Electoral System: 2004, 2012, and 2016 While the 2004, 2012, and 2016 elections were not contiguous, narratives highlighting imperfections of the electoral environment bring them together in our analysis. During these contests, journalists called attention to flawed processes (2004), ruthless partisans (2012), and bad presidential candidates (2016). As journalists signaled attention to the inadequacies of these three electoral settings, labels were more prone to be treated as “recipients of action” than any other time period (1948–1968 = 24.4%; 1972–2000 = 26.7%; 2004, 2012, and 2016 = 35.6%; 2008 = 16.7%—potency variable). Intriguingly, though, the key terms were also more likely to be discussed as “part of the solution,” as journalists cued the role voters could play in elections if the system were not so compromised (1948–1968 = 3.5%; 1972– 2000 = 0.8%; 2004, 2012, and 2016 = 16.3%; 2008 = 3.3%—role variable). While changes in the next three variables were quantitatively modest, the 2004, 2012, and 2016 campaigns also saw vivid instances of (1) voting being described as a “right” (1948–1968 = 4.6%; 1972–2000 = 2.9%; 2004, 2012,

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and 2016 = 9.3%; 2008 = 6.7%—assumptions variable), (2) positive and negative aspects of the electoral context (1948–1968 = 16.1%; 1972–2000 = 15.8%; 2004, 2012, and 2016 = 30.0%; 2008 = 21.1%—context variable), and (3) barriers making voting more difficult (notably for the voter label, 1948– 1968 = 5.6%; 1972–2000 = 2.1%; 2004, 2012, and 2016 = 14.1%; 2008 = 6.7%—challenge variable). Taken together, the coverage in these years overtly emphasized the problems facing—while subtly signaling the promise of— electoral participants. As discussed in chapter 2, the 2004 campaign received the highest overall attention to the key words in our analysis. That year featured a tight contest between incumbent president George W. Bush and Democratic senator John Kerry, but much of the news at that time fixated on events transpiring four years earlier: the 2000 Florida recount and concerns surrounding deceit in that election. One Chicago Tribune article emphasized how little had changed in the past four years as well as how the Help America Vote Act—legislation passed to improve voting systems and voter access—was not being supported sufficiently.50 It informed how “instead of brand-­new equipment, computerized voter-­registration lists and other improvements, most voters will find the same machines they used last time” with “few changes for poll workers, and little sign of the overhaul Americans were promised after the 2000 election.” It continued, “Come November three-­quarters of the voters will use the same machines as they did in 2000,” and quoted California Voter Foundation president Kim Alexander saying, “The Help America Vote Act is a broken promise.”51 Other stories addressed how the compromised system in 2004 introduced barriers to participation that ranged from inconveniences to injustices. The Los Angeles Times informed how “voters had to wait in line for more than an hour.”52 The New York Times described how with “the presidential race tight enough that every vote could count, elections officials say that charges of voter intimidation are flying more furiously than anyone can remember in recent elections.”53 This outlet also shared how “in Lake County Ohio officials say at least a handful of voters have reported receiving a notice on phony board of elections letterhead saying that anyone who had registered through a variety of Democratic-­leaning groups would not be allowed to vote this year.”54 And the Chicago Tribune explained how activists were “still angered by the invalidated ballots and blocked polling places of the 2000 election. The result they believe was disenfranchisement for more than 20,000 black voters.”55 A more sinister threat appeared in 2012 coverage: partisan restrictive voting legislation. Between 2011 and 2012, at least 180 restrictive bills had been

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introduced in forty-­one states to preserve the integrity of elections.56 These efforts were spear-­headed by Republican and Tea Party elites and promoted, as follows, in the 2012 Republican Party Platform: Honest elections are the foundation of representative government. We support State efforts to ensure ballot access for the elderly, the handicapped, military personnel, and all authorized voters. For the same reason, we applaud legislation to require photo identification for voting and to prevent election fraud, particularly with regard to registration and absentee ballots. We support State laws that require proof of citizenship at the time of voter registration to protect our electoral system against a significant and growing form of voter fraud. Every time that a fraudulent vote is cast, it effectively cancels out a vote of a legitimate voter. Voter fraud is political poison. It strikes at the heart of representative government. We call on every citizen, elected official, and member of the judiciary to preserve the integrity of the vote. We call for vigorous prosecution of voter fraud at the State and federal level. To do less disenfranchises present and future generations. We recognize that having a physical verification of the vote is the best way to ensure a fair election. “Let ambition counter ambition,” as James Madison said. When all parties have representatives observing the counting of ballots in a transparent process, integrity is assured. We strongly support the policy that all electronic voting systems have a voter verified paper audit trail.57 Reporting on Republican concerns with voter fraud dramatically shaped the tone and scope of the 2012 portrayals. An extended narrative in the Los Angeles Times addressed how forty-­year-­old Lori Monroe, who was recovering from cancer and had lived in the same apartment in Lancaster, Ohio, for seven years, “was startled a few weeks ago to open a letter that said a stranger was challenging her right to vote in the presidential election.” After calling the local Election Board to protest, she learned that a “local Tea Party leader was trying to strike Monroe from the voter rolls for a reason that made no sense: Her apartment building in Lancaster was listed as a commercial property.” The article continued, “Monroe’s is one of at least 2,100 names that Tea Party groups have sought to remove from Ohio’s voter rosters.” While “the groups and their allies describe it as a citizen movement to prevent ballot fraud,” the “Republican Secretary of State said in an interview that he knew of no evidence that any more than a handful of illegal votes had been cast in

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Ohio in the last few presidential elections.”58 In this coverage, conservative groups were depicted as forces complicating people’s ability to participate. Democrats, on the other hand, were portrayed as advocating for voting rights and opportunities, particularly in the contested states of Ohio and Florida. One article informed how “the Obama administration scored another voting rights win on Friday when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit said the key swing state of Ohio can’t single out military voters for special treatment, a ruling that will re-­open a three-­day weekend voting period that’s become known to black voters as the souls to the polls program.”59 Another explained how “Democrats fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and won to keep Ohio polls open to all voters this weekend.”60 Still another noted how Florida’s “Democratic Party filed a lawsuit on Sunday morning that would force the Republican-­led government to extend early voting in South Florida after complaints that extremely long lines on Saturday had prevented some people from casting their ballots.”61 Two visible villains emerged to unnerve the electorate in 2016: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Polls showed that they were the most disliked major party nominees in the past ten presidential cycles and they were reviled for distinct reasons.62 Trump’s penchant for bullying offended millions and inspired the New York Times to start a list of the “people, places, and things” that he insulted. The list grew to identify 289 targets ranging from foreign nations, President Barack Obama, other presidential candidates, Democrats, Republicans, policies, journalists, news organizations, books, the parents of a slain war hero, actors, comedians, beauty pageant contestants, major department stores, Broadway shows, the Internal Revenue Service, Major League Baseball, and, even, voters.63 For her part, Clinton had suffered decades of opposition, ranging from concerns about her keeping her maiden name while married to the governor of Arkansas (1979–1981, 1983–1992); appearing as an ambitious spouse when her husband was president (1992–2000); being linked to scandals such as Whitewater, Travelgate, and the death of Vincent Foster; serving as a target of ridicule for right-­wing media outlets; and running for the United States Senate from New York—a state she was neither born in nor had been a long-­term resident. In the months leading up to the 2016 contest, she was connected to Wall Street and insider elites during a cycle favoring outsiders, critiqued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for maintaining a private email server while secretary of state, and investigated for her actions preceding and following an attack on the Benghazi consulate.64 Like Trump, her negatives ran high.

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Chapter 2 addressed how journalists frequently quoted candidates and strategists saying negative things about voters in our data. In 2016, voter sentiment was used to criticize the candidates in return. This reportorial choice connects to several markers of the 2004, 2012, and 2016 coverage as voters’ own views were used to address how they were (1) subjected to the actions of unpopular candidates (potency), (2) confronted with a negative environment (context), and yet (3) cast as individuals who could help someone get elected, if they could hold their noses and vote for one of the nominees (role). Thomas Patterson’s research shows that journalists offered more positive quotations from citizens about Trump than other candidates throughout 2015. In the months leading up to Election Day, though, public sentiment for the businessman became far more charged.65 In some instances, reporters addressed groups he had affronted. For instance, in a story on Trump’s history of sexual harassment, the New York Times shared, “Mr. Trump is already the most disliked presidential nominee in the history of polling”; “His reputation is unlikely to recover if he continues to peddle conspiracy theories about election fraud and mock the looks of the women who have accused him of sexual assault”; and “Another slashing performance against Mrs. Clinton could push away even more undecided voters—though at this point there may be few swing voters left for Mr. Trump to alienate.”66 In another on his “fiery immigration” rhetoric, this same paper featured an interview with “Javier Palomarez, president of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.” Mr. Palomarez is quoted as calling Trump a “clown,” claiming 2016 was a “sad moment for the Republican Party” and adding “I think he’s done for with the Hispanic community. He’s never going to see the White House if he doesn’t get a significant portion of the Hispanic vote.”67 Other articles let everyday voters speak for themselves about Trump. Nathan Udall, a third-­year law student stated, “I just can’t vote for somebody that is that lewd, that rude and divisive.”68 Debbie Windle, an office administrator, said she was considering not voting because “I look at Donald Trump, and I think, oh, my God, he’s rough. He could cause us a lot of damage.”69 Will Kremer, a former College Republican, offered, “It’s awful that Americans can’t look up to the president—whoever it will be—as a role model.” In describing his choice to support a third-­party candidate, he continued, “I might be throwing away my vote, but I want a candidate I am proud to cast a vote for.”70 And, Seth Millican, who had “voted for Republicans at the top of every ticket every chance he had” shared, “It’s nothing short of a rebellion against a community—basically a way of life. It’s not something you take lightly. It’s the biggest gut-­check vote any Republican has ever had to

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make. . . . And it took me a long time to come to the place where I couldn’t vote for him. But that’s where we are.”71 Trump’s temperament was big news in the final months of the campaign; as these examples show, coverage of it influenced the treatment and tenor of labels of electoral participation in 2016. The narrative of Clinton’s relationship to the electorate was also bleak. Younger voters—whom news narratives repeatedly stated could help her on Election Day—were reported as not supporting her because of an “enthusiasm gap.” Articles also addressed how her primary opponent Bernie Sanders “was their true love. They fell for him. It didn’t work out. They had to grieve.”72 Additionally, Clinton was attacked from the right and the left as journalists recirculated how conservatives and liberals had no intention of ever supporting her. Both Republicans and Democrats could not vote for her because they found her “dishonest,” “untrustworthy,” “smug,” “crass,” “talking down to them,” not “genuine,” and thus were firmly on the “never Hillary train.”73 Republican Bobby Booth, who had initially supported Republican U.S. senator Ted Cruz in the primaries, specified, “This year I am not so much voting for the person but rather for the platform of the Republican Party. Whoever the Republican nominee is will get my vote. I would rather die” than support Clinton.74 Curiously, Daniel Abrams, a millennial Democrat, employed the same word in regard to supporting Clinton. He had been a Sanders supporter in the primaries and indicated, “I would rather die than vote for Hillary Clinton. I am a man of my morals and I cannot vote against my conscience.”75 As seen in these instances, the campaign narrative did not merely focus on public opinion polls and campaign strategists in these three elections. Instead, the complications of the 2000 recount, conservative efforts to curb voter fraud in 2012, and emphases on aversion to the candidates signaled the problems facing electoral participation.

Voters as Targets of Sophisticated Mobilization Efforts: 2008 The mood in campaign 2008 was much more hopeful. This historic election featured the first African American presidential nominee (Barack Obama), the first time in fifty-­six years that neither an incumbent president nor incumbent vice president sought the office, and the first female vice presidential nominee on the Republican side (Sarah Palin). Journalists’ interest in Obama’s race, as well as his unprecedented efforts to target and mobilize new and infrequent voters by employing innovative communication technologies,

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helped to reshape the portrayal of voters in the news. Instead of appearing as mere objects as they had from 1972 to 2000, or captives as in 2004, 2012, and 2016, in 2008, voters were repositioned as targets in demand. Importantly, this election featured a resurgence in mobilization agents, ranking highest on this variable of all years in the analysis (1948–1968 = 41.9%; 1972–2000 = 33.9%; 2004, 2012, and 2016 = 31.5%; 2008 = 46.7%— mobilization agents variable). While the mobilization agents between 1948 and 1968 were connected to a variety of forces, the efforts in 2008 were tied to the Obama campaign directly. Take coverage of their work in Colorado. One article quoted Democratic state legislator Ed Perlmutter as saying, “The Obama effort is impressive for its scale and consistency and persistency,” and “They’re just touching everybody and anybody.” That same piece also quoted Democratic Governor Bill Ritter as adding, “I’ve never seen a ground game like Barack Obama’s.”76 Another column discussing Obama’s voter registration work in Georgia and North Carolina described his “massive organizational effort to turn out registered voters who stayed home in the past” as “the campaign has spent almost $3 million on television ads in Georgia and has seen voter rolls grow by almost 400,000 since the beginning of the year.” It quoted an Obama field organizer, “Do we think it’s going to be one of the harder states to win? Yes. Do we think it’s winnable? Yes.”77 Still another story reported on an interview with Marshall Ganz, a labor organizer with extensive experience in organizing. Ganz’s quoted comments on Obama’s voter outreach efforts included, “They’ve invested in a civic infrastructure on a scale that has never happened,” and “It’s been an investment in the development of thousands of young people equipped with the skills and leadership ability to mobilize people and in the development of leadership at the local level. It’s profound.”78 The most vivid of the mobilization examples from 2008 appeared in the reporting of former vice president Al Gore’s visit to Florida to campaign for Obama. One Los Angeles Times article depicted the trip as “a merging of man and state that served as painful symbolism to Democrats of the need to cast every ballot.” The article quoted Gore as telling the crowd, “Vote early. Take people with you to the polls.” It then put these comments in context, elaborating how “Gore’s 2000 campaign foundered in Florida after ballot problems led to a long legal standoff. The Supreme Court ultimately determined that Bush had won the presidency with a 537-­vote margin in Florida.”79 Research shows how messages that emphasize how voting is prevalent (a descriptive social norm) and important (an injunctive norm) influence how people see their roles in elections.80 In 2008, news coverage signaled how the Obama

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campaign was passionate about, and committed to, registering and recruiting support for their candidate. A related pattern appears with the potency variable. In contrast to the 2004, 2012, and 2016 coverage, the 2008 contest featured the lowest rates of voters being treated as “recipients of action” of all years in the analysis (1948–1968 = 24.4%; 1972–2000 = 26.7%; 2004, 2012, and 2016 = 35.6%; 2008 = 16.7%—potency variable). A close read of these data reveals that voters were voicing positive agency—a departure from how strategists spoke down to them (1972–2000) or how they were quoted reacting to their negative choices in other years (particularly in 2016). Examples of the agentic voices from 2008 include these: • Sherryl Harvey, a therapist from Sandy Springs, Georgia, offered, “I love going out and meeting these amazing people. You know you’re not alone,” after describing how she was working to register voters, going door-­to-­door, hosting phone-­bank parties, and dreaming up ways to help Obama.81 • Ed Helvey, a Democratic county chairman, said, “We are working our tails off. The Republicans had it in ’04. It was like electricity in the air—you could feel it,” in describing how Helvey was working to energize Democratic voters in Ohio.82 • Sandra Clemons, a former municipal worker who “voted early Friday near Pittsboro in Chatham County N.C.,” along with her husband, said, “They chose Obama whom they described as an inspirational figure. I think it’s a major historic event—just unbelievable and very exciting.”83 From a news narrative perspective, these citizen accounts may have been inserted in articles to help to develop the story line that Obama had amassed considerable voter support. From a label perspective, though, they contribute to the excitement surrounding the terms of electoral participation in the 2008 contest. This campaign also saw the most balanced pairing of connecting the labels to “games” and “issues” in the analysis, a combination that exerted a unique influence on the tone of the portrayals (frame variable). Many of the game stories in 2008 associated the terms of electoral participation with pressing issues and the stake of the election. For instance, the Washington Post article “Black Turnout Could Decide House Races” focused on “10 white Democrats in white-­hot competitive U.S. House races who are counting on a

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surge of black voters to carry them into office.” The reporting did more than focus on the strategy of these white candidates, though. It also offered context on a voter’s background and exposed his stake in the election: Daniel Miller weaved through the pews at Lewis Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, past the ladies in their Sunday hats and boys squirming in their suits, and headed for the only white face in the crowd. It belonged to Larry Kissell, a Democratic candidate for Congress, and Miller was eager to tell him why, at 49, he is quietly panicked. He showed up for work one day at Alandale Knitting to find the factory doors locked. He got a job mixing mud at a tile factory, but it relocated to Mexico. He moved 100 miles to work in a meatpacking plant but injured his back lifting an 80-­pound vat of scraps. “The jobs are just disappearing overnight,” Miller said. “Something’s got to change.” That’s why he is voting for Barack Obama, and why he will scroll down the ballot to mark Kissell’s name, too. It was Kissell’s fourth trip to the church, and he prays that African Americans turning out in unprecedented numbers will push him across the finish line as well.84 The terms of electoral participation, then, were portrayed as connected to weightier matters in 2008 than between 1972 and 2000 and to a more hopeful context than in 2004, 2012, and 2016. While the coverage did not publicly engage voters with extended quotations from candidates emphasizing the importance of voting and the meaningfulness of elections (as those between 1948 and 1968 did), it came closer to the mobilized-­partisan portrayal than anything witnessed since 1968.

Conclusion A concern facing many media scholars is: How do story lines change? Researchers point to several factors, including historical and cultural shifts, pressures on newsrooms and adjustments to news norms, key events, and social and political movements.85 The eighteen elections under analysis featured many such disruptions. After looking closely at how the key terms of electoral participation appeared in news, and after running descriptive statistics by year, decade, and twenty-­year periods, four themes emerged in the data. These shifting portrayals do not overwhelm the macro-­level patterns

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appearing in chapter 2 but offer nuances and trends underneath them that shaped the public narrative surrounding voting over time. In the early years of the analysis, voters were cast as mobilized-­partisans vital to electoral outcomes (1948–1968). Historically and culturally, these engaging portrayals surfaced in the patriotic glow of World War II and the Korean War. They were written at a time when journalists were more loyal to political elites and less skeptical about campaigns. Others have noted how reporting then was more generous to candidates; our data show that this generosity also extends to the key words of electoral participation.86 Some of the reporting techniques that have faded with time—including offering presidential candidates extended quotations in the news (rather than inserting the journalists’ voice in the news narrative); covering campaign events with an emphasis on what candidates said (rather than what their strategies might have been); and covering public partisan, group, and citizen activities as newsworthy (rather than letting political strategists and spinners speak for these entities)—brought the value and worth of electoral participation to life in the news between 1948 and 1968. These nuances disappeared in 1972 and did not reemerge with regularity in coverage again until 2008. Other factors influenced coverage in the 2004–2016 elections. The historic candidacy of Barack Obama in 2008, as well as his massive voter outreach endeavors helped to reposition voters as targets of sophisticated mobilization efforts. Reporters recounted how his campaign worked to solicit citizen participation and returned to quoting citizens directly, adding their excited and enthusiastic voices to the campaign narrative. Reporting in other years took a more somber tone, signaling how citizens were captives of a flawed electoral system (2004), targets of partisan efforts to deny voting rights (2012), and unsettled by imperfect presidential nominees. These stories emphasized new and varying barriers to people’s ability to vote. The most widespread theme in coverage, though, comes from the years 1972–2000, when the key terms were cued as pawns of strategists. Those elections represent the longest era of similar coverage and were shaped profoundly by a movement toward precision journalism. During those years, reporters called attention to the artifice of campaigns and relied on surveys to describe electoral participants—reportorial gestures that put a spotlight on strategists and employed their voices to “read meaning” into these data. So, to borrow Weldon’s language from chapter 1, while voters were talked to from 1948 to 1968 and again in 2008, from the 1970s on, they have largely been talked at (and, sometimes, even down to).87 This shift, particularly as it

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persisted over time, did more to alter the tone of reporting on the key labels than any of the other changes in our analysis. Scholars have analyzed how discussions of opinion data affect public conversations. Susan Herbst believes that polls “narrow the range of public discourse” by defining the boundaries for public debate and by influencing the ways that journalists report on politics.88 Lisbeth Lipari argues similarly, contending that survey data offer a “status-­conferring function” by identifying and legitimating certain issues as “worthy of consideration.”89 Because polls feature the “the illusion of reflective objectivity,” she continues, audiences may not notice how they “justify status quo policies” and focus the public conversation on what can, and has been, polled.90 When it comes to our findings, the focus on polls in coverage, the use of strategists to interpret them, and the thin portrayals of the voter label send a message that elections are controlled by forces outside of the electorate’s grasp. Strategists are identified as controlling the candidates, the campaigns, and the electoral context. Repeated over many decades, such coverage does more than expose their power; by virtue of taking up so much space, this attention to strategists displaces discussions of voters as “makers and unmakers” of governments or as forces that protect themselves by participating in elections. As addressed in chapter 1, how audiences are positioned in news stories is a matter of great interest to journalist (Davis) Buzz Merritt and scholar Maxwell McCombs.91 They fear that too often, the news focuses on shenanigans in far-­off Washington D.C. (rather than discussing weightier public problems) and emphasizes a select group of elites (rather than showing readers their involvement in politics). More inclusive news reporting, they believe, can help to raise public consciousness about issues and help readers to see themselves as included in the political process.92 Thinking about such a possibility led us to question: Would news audiences today notice the difference between the two larger portrayals in our analysis? Would portraying voters in an updated version of the mobilized-­partisan actors depiction lead to greater interest in, and support for, the idea of electoral participation than when they are talked about by pollsters and strategists? The next chapter examines such matters.

4 influencing the voter

I believe it is everyone’s duty to become involved in the politics of this country. Those who don’t vote will have no other voice. —A participant’s reaction after reading a mobilized-­participant portrayal My overwhelming feeling was one of disappointment that the mainstream media can’t seem to give us any real information. . . . enough of the horse race aspects already. —A participant’s reaction after reading an isolated-­spectator portrayal

Expectations are powerful. In his educational research, Robert Rosenthal documented how students verbally categorized as having “unusual potential for intellectual growth” and with prospects to “bloom” showed greater performance over a school year than students not receiving such praise. A compelling aspect of these findings is that Rosenthal assigned such labels to young people at random, not in relation to prior performance or in connection to a recently administered IQ test.1 In their studies of factory settings, Elton Mayo and colleagues tracked how environmental adjustments could increase productivity. Although associations with higher and lower levels of lighting were located, the most widely cited aspect of these inquiries was that employees appeared to work harder, and have higher levels of motivation, simply because they knew they were being watched.2 Extensions of both of these projects document how when individuals are exposed to heightened expectations—in contexts ranging from military service, to corporate training, to matchmaking and interpersonal relationships—they show stronger performance and greater satisfaction than those not sent such cues.3

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In many ways, such research projects relate to how individuals respond to respect, be it from teachers, from colleagues, from observers, or from themselves. As addressed in the introduction to this book, respect was a topic of great concern to political scholars V. O. Key and Gerald Pomper, particularly concerning the assessment of voters by survey data.4 It is also one that Ann Crigler, Marion Just, and Edward McCaffery worry has been missing in more recent analyses of elections. In their book addressing complications surrounding the outcome of the 2000 presidential contest, they wondered if political scientists have been “looking in the wrong place for the meaning of voting all along.”5 More specifically, after reviewing the academic debate between participatory minimalists—empiricists who allege that citizens “would be better off playing the lottery and using their winnings to influence the political process” than voting6—and participatory democrats—theorists who place improbable faith in the “possibilities of individual citizen participation in governance” to make a difference7—they questioned if both sides might be missing an important point. “Maybe,” these authors suggest, participation is good in and of itself, not just because it does or might in some remote counterfactual case affect actual political outcomes. Perhaps the right to participation that voting entails makes people feel better about themselves, their role in their country, and their country itself. . . . Maybe we have avoided ‘political chaos’ because of participation . . . [for] when people are hopeful and feel engaged and partici­ patory in a society they are less, not more, likely to be ‘insurrectionary.’ After all, the greatest periods of unrest in our nation’s history have come when people or groups have felt disempowered, disrespected, disenfranchised.8 In developing this possibility, they point to scholarship—such as that which opens the chapter—addressing respect and attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Namely, patients who feel that their doctors care about them experience better health, communities who feel that law enforcement officers listen to them have lower rates of inter-­neighborhood crime, and students who feel that their teachers value them are more likely to succeed in school.9 In applying these patterns to electoral participation, Crigler, Just, and McCaffery contend that “maybe voters want, need, and deserve the same kind of attention, to feel that they are being treated with concern.” Even though greater esteem for voters may not “bring a revolution today, or tomorrow, or ever,”

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these scholars propose that respect might make people feel better about themselves, their fellow citizens, and their democratic system.10 The data from chapters 2 and 3 invite consideration of the portrayals of electoral participation and these fundamental matters of respect. While it is certainly not the job of journalists to write stories simply for the purpose of making voters feel good about themselves, it is not necessarily their charge to reify strategists’ voices, either. This chapter presents findings from an experiment and focus groups conducted to see if and how audiences respond to two ways that electoral participation has been described in the press. The first is a mobilized-­participant portrayal. It offers a modernized version of the mobilized-­partisan representation (addressed in chapter 3, common between the years 1948 and 1968) blended with the voter as a target of mobilization efforts depiction (appearing in 2008).11 This description calls attention to how voting is solicited and valued in a news narrative. The second is an isolated-­spectator portrayal. It poses the largely thin personalization connected to electoral participation discussed in chapter 2, as well as how the key labels were often subsumed under the discussion of public opinion polls and given few cues of worth (especially between the years 1972 and 2000). It is important to note that both of these conditions in our experiment are embedded in an article that features elements of “game” reporting, a choice we made consciously. As discussed in prior chapters, game narratives have been pervasive over the sixty-­eight-­year period that we have examined. Additionally, these story lines represent a style that journalists employ regularly and that readers, particularly those who enjoy following politics, find engaging.12 While political communication researchers traditionally pit “game” reporting against “issue” or “policy” reporting—finding that the former crowds out more important topics and exerts a damaging influence on attitudes and behaviors—our goal after studying the linguistic cueing of electoral participation in the news is somewhat different. As was evident in coverage from 1948 to 1968, and again in 2008, “game” reporting has not always offered a passing gaze to the labels of electoral participation. Indeed, select stories that began with a focus on which candidate was ahead, or behind, during those years could, and sometimes did, signify meaningful roles to voters and call attention to their responsibility in elections. Such articles, linguistically at least, marked people’s place and stake in elections. The key difference between the two portrayals we will study in the current chapter, then, is how the mobilized-­participant story writes citizens into the electoral game, whereas the isolated-­spectator column merely

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discusses which candidates have support from which voter blocs in advance of Election Day. The appendix features a full description of the procedures, participants, and measures employed in the experiment and focus groups. To craft realistic newspaper articles, we worked with a political journalist who had over thirty years of experience in political reporting and editing for both a national print newspaper and a wire service. Three stories were created for the experiment, which was conducted in January of 2008, two weeks before Super Tuesday (a twenty-­four-­state primary held on February 5, 2008).13 1. The (baseline) control condition story addressed the 2008 presidential primary contests and consisted of three paragraphs. It read as follows: Washington (AP)—There is life in politics after New Hampshire and Iowa. Presidential hopefuls who survive those two early presidential contests in January will face a daunting challenge spanning 21 states and four time zones: the Feb. 5 primaries. Political observers say they expect Feb. 5 voting to winnow the field even further—perhaps to two or three major candidates. “It may not decide who gets the nomination, but Super Duper Tuesday will probably take a huge chunk of the field out,” said Joe Patterson, Washington-­ based political analyst. It is hard to predict how things will turn out in this election. But, one thing is certain. As laid out by the United States Constitution, the individual who receives a majority of votes for president in the Electoral College will be the 44th president of the United States, and will be sworn in to the office early 2009. 2. The mobilized-­participant portrayal featured the original three paragraphs from the control story as well as a paragraph that described voters as being mobilized and as having a meaningful contribution to the electoral process (as was common between the years 1948 and 1968 and in 2008). The paragraph unique to this condition appears in italics, below: Washington (AP)—There is life in politics after New Hampshire and Iowa. Presidential hopefuls who survive those two early presidential contests in January will face a daunting challenge spanning 21 states and four time zones: the Feb. 5 primaries. Political observers say they expect Feb. 5 voting to winnow the field even further—perhaps to two or three major candidates. “It may not

82   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

decide who gets the nomination, but Super Duper Tuesday will probably take a huge chunk of the field out,” said Joe Patterson, Washington-­ based political analyst. While candidates navigate hurdles posed by the primaries, major party hopefuls are asking American voters to perform their own important role in the 2008 election. “We need every vote to move this country forward,” one Republican candidate said. A Democratic candidate opined, “If voters act in the interests and welfare of the country and the world, they will make a historic difference in this election.” It is hard to predict how things will turn out in this election. But, one thing is certain. As laid out by the United States Constitution, the individual who receives a majority of votes for president in the Electoral College will be the 44th president of the United States, and will be sworn in to the office early 2009. 3. The isolated-­spectator portrayal also featured the original three paragraphs from the control story as well as a paragraph that depicted voters as subsumed under public opinion poll data (as was common between the years 1972 and 2000). The paragraph unique to this condition appears in italics, below: Washington (AP)—There is life in politics after New Hampshire and Iowa. Presidential hopefuls who survive those two early presidential contests in January will face a daunting challenge spanning 21 states and four time zones: the Feb. 5 primaries. Political observers say they expect Feb. 5 voting to winnow the field even further—perhaps to two or three major candidates. “It may not decide who gets the nomination, but Super Duper Tuesday will probably take a huge chunk of the field out,” said Joe Patterson, Washington-­ based political analyst. While candidates must navigate hurdles posed by the primaries, American voters must face a fierce horse race in the upcoming election. In polls following the New Hampshire primary, Clinton led Obama among white voters by 39 percent to 35 percent, while Obama led Clinton among black voters by 36 percent to 32 percent. On the other side, McCain gained 40 percent among conservatives while Romney gained 39 percent among voters under age 50. It is hard to predict how things will turn out in this election. But, one thing is certain. As laid out by the United States Constitution, the

influencing the voter    83

individual who receives a majority of votes for president in the Electoral College will be the 44th president of the United States, and will be sworn in to the office early 2009. To maintain consistency among conditions, only one out of four paragraphs was manipulated for the mobilized-­participant and the isolated-­spectator portrayals. These conditions were crafted to ensure that any differences found between the control group and other groups were due to the manipulation of the portrayal of voters and not simply due to the exposure to election-­related coverage.14 We contracted with a prominent research firm that builds random assignment into its recruitment process to conduct the online experiment.15 The goal was to assess reactions from a nationally representative sample of adults. The individuals recruited from this firm completed questionnaires regarding media habits and political engagement and then were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: mobilized-­participant, isolated-­spectator, or control. After reading their articles, they were asked a series of closed-­ ended questions pertaining to their attitudes on politics and the press and an open-­ended question requesting them to “Please write down all thoughts and feelings you had while reading this article, including thoughts and feelings that are not necessarily relevant to the article.” This prompt has been employed in related projects to seek open-­ended data in experiments.16 The appendix explains how 337 participants completed the experiment.17 Follow­up focus groups, then, were conducted with younger voters as this age cohort offered shorter responses in the online experiment open-­ended prompt. The remainder of this chapter discusses how individuals saw differences between the portrayals. Namely, after reading the mobilized-­participant depiction, people were more likely to emphasize the importance of voting and to express higher levels of political efficacy in their open-­ended responses. In contrast, after reading the isolated-­spectator depiction, people were prone to mention negative aspects about the political system, and voice frustrations with the media in the open-­ended prompt.

Individuals Respond to Depictions of Voters in the News How did individuals react in the open-­ended prompt to the articles they read in the online experiment? We conducted descriptive statistics on the responses and found that they ranged from 212 words to one word. More

84   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

specifically, the average length of comments for the three conditions was as follows: 34.1 words (isolated-­spectator), 30.4 words (mobilized-­participant), and 32.7 words (control condition). After assessing the length of these responses, we then coded each one for five dichotomous variables connected to how political scientists have viewed electoral participation: importance of voting (noting if comments mentioned the importance of voting), positive tone (observing if comments had a positive tone), negative tone (recording if comments had a negative tone), citizens as efficacious (documenting if comments referred to citizens/voters as efficacious in the electoral process), and game language (observing if comments included game-­oriented language).18 A first concern connects to the broad purpose of this chapter: did reading the mobilized-­participant portrayal influence how individuals discussed voting in their open-­ended responses? Our results show that it did. Twenty-­one percent (21.8%) of those who read the mobilized-­participant article expressed the importance of voting in their comments while only 2.2 percent of those who read the isolated-­spectator article and 5.7 percent of those who read the control article did (see table 1). The difference between the mobilized-­ participant and the isolated-­spectator conditions and the difference between the mobilized-­participant and the control conditions were both statistically Table 1.  Frequency of use in open-ended responses, by experimental condition Control

Mobilized-participant

Isolatedspectator

Mentioned

  5.7%

21.8%

  2.2%

Not mentioned

94.3%

78.2%

97.8%

Importance of voting

Positive tone Used

  6.9%

16.1%

  7.8%

Not used

93.1%

83.9%

92.2%

Used

32.2%

27.6%

45.6%

Not used

67.8%

72.4%

54.4%

Expressed

13.8%

26.4%

  6.7%

Not expressed

86.2%

73.6%

93.3%

Used

40.2%

26.4%

53.3%

Not used

59.8%

73.6%

46.7%

Negative tone

Citizens as efficacious

Game language

influencing the voter    85

significant (p = .001; p = .004, respectively, see table 2). The odds ratio indicates that those who were exposed to the mobilized-­participant condition were twelve times more likely than those in the isolated-­spectator condition to mention the importance of voting (exp(B) = 12.29) and four times likely than those in the control condition (exp(B) = 4.58). Individuals in the mobilized-­participant condition voiced the importance of voting in a variety of ways. To begin, several offered a type of get-­out-­the-­ vote message. Many of these reactions were brief, but they struck us as notable. Rather than responding to details from the article, some replied to the open-­ended prompt with a pro-­voting statement in all capitals, no less, such as when they wrote “go vote” and “get out to vote.” Other responses featured a more collective and normative stance, stating “We all need to vote”; “People need to get out and vote”; and “I was just thinking that everyone needs to vote. Everyone.” Table 2.  Results of binary logistic regression analysis, by experimental condition B

S.E.

p

Exp(B)

  m-p v. i-s

2.50

0.76

.001

12.29

  m-p v. control

1.52

0.52

.004

  4.58

– 0.98

0.85

.246

  0.37

  m-p v. i-s

0.82

0.49

.094

  2.27

  m-p v. control

0.95

0.51

.064

  2.58

  i-s v. control

0.13

0.57

.822

  1.13

  i-s v. m-p

0.78

0.32

.014

  2.19

  i-s v. control

0.56

0.31

.069

  1.76

– 0.22

0.33

.508

  0.80

  m-p v. i-s

1.61

0.48

.001

  5.03

  m-p v. control

0.80

0.39

.040

  2.24

– 0.80

0.52

.124

  0.44

1.15

0.32

.000

  3.18

0.52

0.30

.082

  1.69

– 0.62

0.32

.055

  0.53

Importance of voting

  i-s v. control Positive tone

Negative tone

  m-p v. control Citizens as efficacious

  i-s v. control Game language   i-s v. m-p   i-s v. control   m-p v. control

86   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

Others personalized the importance of voting in their responses. These offerings featured an element of self-­disclosure, as if the mobilized-­ participant portrayal reminded them to share something about the electoral process with the online discussion prompt. One person affirmed, “Everyone has their own opinion and I will cast mine when it’s time to vote.” Another admitted, “I am a resident in one of the states holding a Feb. 5 primary, and I wish I could vote in it, but I discovered I would be out of town too late to request an absentee ballot in time.” Still another added, “I will be glad when we have the field narrowed down. I wish I was not committed at church on the night when Kansas finally gets a Democratic caucus, because I would like to be there. I will be glad to see the current administration out of here.” It was also common for individuals in the mobilized-­participant portrayal to mention the upcoming 2008 presidential election. More than the brief get-­out-­the-­vote responses, or the instances in which respondents personalized their remarks, these comments linked the value of voting to the upcoming presidential race: • “Voting this year will be important. These are extremely important times for our country.” • “This election may be the most important one of my lifetime. The stakes are high and the challenge is for every American to make a difference.” • “How important this election is going to be.” • “This election is extremely important.” Thus, to sum up, the mobilized-­participant portrayal led more respondents to volunteer some type of statement about the importance of voting in their open-­ended comments than the other conditions. These responses are reminiscent of the instincts voiced by V. O. Key and Gerald Pomper; if, and when, an echo chamber cues value to voting, people—these scholars believed— might respond accordingly. A second matter in the open-­ended responses involved tone: Did individuals respond differently to the mobilized-­participant and isolated-­spectator portrayals? Two sets of tests show support for differences across conditions. The mobilized-­participant condition induced more positive reactions than other conditions (16.1% of the participants in the mobilized-­participant condition responded with positive open-­ended responses vs. 7.8% in the isolated-­spectator and 6.9% in the control conditions). The difference, however, between the mobilized-­participant and the isolated-­spectator conditions

influencing the voter    87

was not significant (p = .094), nor was the difference between the mobilized-­ participant and the control conditions (p = .064). Additionally, there was no significant difference between the control and the isolated-­spectator conditions (p = .822). Negative comments were more common in responses to the isolated-­ spectator portrayal. Almost half of those in that condition featured a negative tone in their comments (45.6%), compared to 27.6 percent in the mobilized-­participant and 32.2 percent in the control conditions. The difference between the isolated-­spectator and the mobilized-­participant portrayals was significant (p = .014). The odds ratio indicates that those in the isolated-­ spectator condition were twice as likely as those in the mobilized-­participant condition to use a negative tone in their responses (exp(B) = 2.19). The differences between the isolated-­spectator and the control conditions (p = .069) and between the mobilized-­participant and the control conditions (p = .508) did not reach the standard level of significance. While it is important to note that there was just some statistical support for differences in tone, vivid qualitative patterns were spotted across groups. Individuals responding to the mobilized-­participant portrayal were both likely to praise their article in their positive responses and prone to pick on individual candidates—and not the act of voting or the article, itself—in their negative responses. Consider how these individuals complimented the mobilized-­ participant column and voiced agreement with it, something that never happened in the isolated-­spectator condition. People stated such things as, “This article explained the political process well.” “It was a good observation about the political atmosphere in general without being biased in either direction partywise. I found it easy to read and understand and appreciated not being subjected to heated comments, snide remarks, or anything else that generally ‘raises the dander.’” And, “I agreed with what the writer was saying and with what the candidates said. Every vote does count, and you should let your voice be heard.” When the participants in the mobilized-­participant condition did respond with negative comments, they targeted their frustration to specific candidates rather than to the article or to their own roles as voters. Individuals wrote such things as “bad candidates,” “I certainly don’t want another idiot in office,” “the Democrats are full of it. If they win we are all in trouble,” “pray Hillary does not win,” “I do not have much confidence in Rudy Giuliani,” and “(I’m) annoyed because Fred Thompson dropped out of the race.” These markers of negativity appeared more connected to glandular reactions to specific candidates (and parties) than to the article, to the importance of voting, or to their roles as voters.

88   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

In contrast, negativity was far more systemic in responses to the isolated-­ spectator portrayal. Disapproval ranged from basic concerns with politics, to frustration with the process of polling, to irritation with the media. The basic concerns with politics were straightforward and conspicuous by their absence in the mobilized-­participant condition. Individuals responded that “politics just plain suck,” and “I am not too interested in politics. I do not get it.” They also voiced frustration about when preferred candidates were left out of the article. For instance, one person wrote, “Why aren’t you mentioning Edwards? He’s still very much in this race if only the media would give him more air time, I wonder why that is? This should be a democracy or at least that’s what we were raised to believe.” Another questioned, “What about Kucinich? Who gets to determine who gets to debate? Corporations??????” Individuals in the isolated-­spectator condition further disclosed sharpened frustrations with the process of polling. In brief phrases, they suggested how “polls are crap,” and “polls are often wrong.” In more extended comments, they voiced frustration about how the reporting of survey data invites them to think about smaller voting blocs and not larger concerns. One person wrote, “I was feeling annoyed that polls polarize the nation by dividing us into so many subgroups.” Another contended, “I don’t really care what groups prefer one candidate to another. The more we try to divide our country along racial and ideological lines, the more we divide our country overall.” People in the isolated-­spectator group advanced even harsher assessments of the media, and as they saw it, the political role the fourth estate has given itself in campaigns. They were concerned, in the words of one individual, how “the press publishes what they want to happen and not the accurate facts.” Another person put this point more specifically, contending, “It aggravates me that the media call Clinton the winner of Nevada while failing to note Obama received more delegates, and almost no one is reporting that Obama is ahead in delegates overall. He is the front-­runner. The media should get it right.” Still another connected polls to unnecessary forecasting, observing, “No one can tell the future . . . unfortunately, this is typical of the media nowadays.” Heading into the 2008 election, millions of Americans were angry at the media and troubled by the contemporary state of politics. What strikes us as compelling is not simply that the individuals in the isolated-­spectator condition voiced resentments—at the political system and at the media—but that those in the mobilized-­participant condition failed to do so. The opening paragraphs of this chapter addressed the power of respect in promoting positive outcomes and in dampening negative ones. The influence of the media’s

influencing the voter    89

portrayal of voters and their roles in electoral process may extend beyond mere positioning in electoral politics. The linguistic mixture of offering a layer of respect to the audience and holding back on forecasting results may also help to dampen frustrations with the press. A third concern involved political efficacy: Did the mobilized-­participant portrayal inspire individuals to offer responses suggesting that they can make a difference in their political worlds? Those who read the mobilized-­ participant article were more likely to describe citizens as efficacious (26.4%) than those in the isolated-­spectator (6.7%) or the control conditions (13.8%). These differences were significant (the mobilized-­participant condition vs. isolated-­spectator condition, p = .001; the mobilized-­participant condition vs. the control condition, p = .040). The odds ratio shows that those who were exposed to the mobilized-­participant were five times more likely than those in the isolated-­spectator condition (exp(B) = 5.03) and two times more likely than those in the control condition (exp(B) = 2.2) to describe citizens as efficacious. A spirit of worth appears in the presence (and absence) of personal pronouns across the conditions. Individuals reading the mobilized-­participant article were prone to use “I” statements in their responses, a gesture that signaled ownership of their comments and that suggested how they wanted to be involved, wanted to vote, and wanted to be counted. These individuals wrote how “I will be glad when we have the field narrowed down”; “I was thinking that I hope John Edwards gets more attention because I’d really like to vote for him to be our next President”; and “I believe it is everyone’s duty to become involved in the politics of this country.” This sense of personal initiative was less common in the isolated-­spectator portrayal. Individuals in that group were less likely to employ “I” statements and were also more reluctant to credit themselves with any type of agency or to give themselves a verb in a given sentence. Instead, they credited the media, the parties, the candidates, and campaign coffers as meaningful actors in the political process. They wrote such things as, “The media is pushing the big money candidates”; “The political parties are vying for anyone with a vote”; “What are they going to do next?” and “All of the money determines who can endure the process rather than what the issues are. It’s like, which of these rich people can spend the most to get nominated.” Not only did responses to the isolated-­spectator portrayal assign power and meaning to external forces, but they also featured a widespread sense of disappointment in politics that was far less prevalent in the mobilized-­ participant condition. Several of the participants in the isolated-­spectator condition commented brief and stark phrases such as “Don’t care”; “Bored.

90   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

Heard it all before”; and “Politics is very dirty when candidates are running.” A variety of indicators show how levels of external efficacy in the United States have generally fallen over the years of this study.19 What intrigues us, again, is not just the indifference in the isolated-­spectator condition, but the lack of such sentiment in the mobilized-­participant group. The sense of political value in responses from the mobilized-­participant condition can be documented in another way. We submitted the open-­ended responses from all three conditions to a computerized text analysis program (LIWC) with a master-­dictionary specifically designed to measure “clout”— a measurement that speaks to power, self-­assurance, and status. As James Pennebaker explains, a high clout score reveals that an “author is speaking from the perspective of high expertise and confidence whereas a low score suggests a more tentative, humble, or even anxious” mindset.20 The data show that the mobilized-­participant group had a significantly higher level of clout (x = 49.2) than the isolated-­spectator (x = 38.5) or the control conditions (x = 45.3).21 Comments from the open-­ended responses in the mobilized-­participant group that ranked high on clout were sometimes brief. They included comments such as “Every vote does count, and you should let your voice be heard.” Others extended more confident prescriptions for what should happen in the future. One individual wrote, “We need to have leaders in Washington that represent the American people. Our leaders need to work together to get this country back on the right track. Everyone needs to stop blaming one another for what has happened in the past and look out for the future of our nation.” Another contended, “These are extremely important times for our country. We need to take back our country from the criminal Republicans, from the corporations, from the conservative media determining who are to be our political candidates. . . . This year’s general election will determine whether or not we will save our nation, and return to a democracy under the US Constitution.” The people reading the mobilized-­participant article, then, expressed a stronger confidence in, and commitment to, the future of the American polity than those reading and responding to the other conditions. After receiving cues that they were welcomed participants in the news narrative, as scholars ranging from Edwin Black, to John Zaller, to Michael Schudson, to Lance Bennett have commented, they appear to have responded by seeing themselves as involved in the story. A fourth concern connects to a potential complication of the isolated-­ spectator portrayal: Did an emphasis on polling data encourage individuals to discuss the election as a game, and if so, what role did they assign themselves in it? The data show that more than half of participants in the

influencing the voter    91

isolated-­spectator condition used game language in their comments (53.3%), whereas 26.4 percent in the mobilized-­participant and 40.2 percent in the control conditions did. The difference between the isolated-­spectator and the mobilized-­participant conditions was statistically significant (p < .001) and the difference between the isolated-­spectator and the control conditions was not significant (p = .082, see table 2). The odds ratio suggests that those in the isolated-­spectator condition were three times more likely to use game language than those in the mobilized-­participant condition (exp(B) = 3.18). Individuals in the isolated-­spectator condition used game language in two ways. Many individuals simply peppered their responses with the vernacular of competition, including, “horse race,” “winner,” “whittle down,” “wide open race on both sides,” “candidates may bow out if they have a poor showing,” “narrowed down,” and “my candidate dropped from the race today.” Others used these terms more pointedly, often to signal something wrong with both politics and the news. One individual, for instance, voiced frustrations with the political game by stating, “Too many people are excited about the big states. Populated states get way more publicity as to who will win.” Deeper frustration took a temporal component, as when people wrote, “It’s really too early to predict who will end up the front runner in the election”; “Journalists are inadvertently or purposely making the race between the two top contenders of each party, they should not do that this early in the race. I would love to read an article that talks about the candidates’ positions”; and “It’s a wide open race on both sides. And I’m not sure that I believe the polls. The media is trying to get voters to think one way which is the way they want it to turn out. The polls have been wrong.” As addressed in earlier chapters, scholars have widely critiqued game language in political communication.22 Our data show that the individuals in the isolated-­ spectator condition trafficked in game language twice as often as did those in the mobilized-­participant condition and most of the time game language was connected to the problems, rather than promise, of American elections. These responses follow from concerns voiced by Phillip Wander, John Zaller, Michael Schudson, and Lance Bennett; when individuals receive few cues to attend to a news narrative, they might opt out and regard agency and responsibility to reside elsewhere. In addition to the experiment, we also conducted focus groups with younger voters to solicit reactions to the mobilized-­participant and isolated-­ spectator portrayals. In all instances, their comments were consistent with the open-­ended comments in the online sample, save one: younger voters were less likely to employ efficacy language in connection to the

92   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

mobilized-­participant depiction than their older peers. They did, however, discuss how the isolated-­spectator portrayal depressed their sense that they could make a difference in the election. Similar to the older individuals in the online experiment, the younger voters who read the mobilized-­participant article discussed voting as an important political act. They stated such things as “Voters hold the real power in that situation,” and “I should probably get out and vote. This article said more than both of the candidates are trying to get people to vote for them . . . it said your vote, your vote matters. And your vote is going to move the country forward.” In contrast, after reading the isolated-­spectator portrayal, young voters were likely to emphasize negative reactions to politics, lower levels of efficacy, and more game language. First, consider negative responses. One person shared, “This article tells you what already happened. That’s great for them [laughs]. How past people were polled. What about me? My vote?” Several comments also connected to the subgroups mentioned in the article. They stated such things as “It turned me off. Me being Hispanic, I wonder where do I fit? Where does that leave me? What about Asian voters? I didn’t feel like I was included” and “Once you read it, you are already calculating . . . comparing the white voters for Clinton, the black voters for Obama. You are trying to figure it out.” The findings from the online experiment and the follow-­up focus groups with younger voters show that both groups noticed the differences between the mobilized-­participant and isolated-­spectator portrayals. In responses to the mobilized-­participant article, individuals’ words pointed to a greater emphasis on the importance of voting, greater efficacy, and less game language. Alternatively, in the isolated-­spectator depiction, responses featured less emphasis on the importance of the vote, a more negative tone (regarding politics and the media), less efficacious language, and a greater emphasis on politics as a game controlled by the media.

Individuals React to Portrayals of Voters in the News In addition to the open-­ended items, there was a series of closed-­ended measures included in the experiment. The Methodological Appendix features a more detailed discussion of these items. Across the board, participants reported high levels of participatory intentions, which does raise concerns about a social desirability bias.23 That stated, the data show that those who

influencing the voter    93

were exposed to the mobilized-­participant portrayal expressed a significantly higher level of intention to vote (F(1, 217) = 2.768; p = .049), external efficacy (F(1, 216) = 2.964; p = .043), and trust in news media (F(1, 216) = 3.254; p = .036) compared to the control group.24 While these patterns are consistent with the open-­ended data, one important aspect of the closed-­ended items merits close attention: quantitative results concerning trust in the media. People who read the mobilized-­ participant depiction reported significantly higher levels of media trust than those who read the isolated spectator article or the control text. This finding offers even stronger support for a theme discussed in the open-­ended data. That is, individuals in the mobilized-­participant condition volunteered higher levels of praise for their article and less frustration with the media in their written reactions as well as reported higher levels of media trust in their closed-­ended responses. These findings offer a type of empirical support for journalism scholarship calling for greater respect for readers as well as a connection to the works on expectations that opened this chapter. The participants in our experiment noticed, and responded to, articles that talked to, versus talked at, them—both by becoming more interested in participating (in the former) and by becoming more frustrated with the press (in the latter). Buzz Merritt and Maxwell McCombs lament how treating audiences as mere spectators— or worse, the “objects of manipulation”—reduces their stake in politics, decreases their belief that the news is relevant, and dampens their sense that they are capable of meaningful public action.25 While these authors are insistent that it is not the press’s job to make people feel good about themselves or to love politics, they underscore how journalists should attend more aggressively to “the public voice.”26 Michele Weldon argues similarly. She sees the incorporation of citizen voices and perspectives in the news as a storytelling device that can help readers connect to content, make newspapers financially competitive in the contemporary business climate, and begin to rebuild the relationship between people and news outlets.27

Conclusion This chapter reports on an experiment and focus groups conducted to assess if individuals notice and react to the differences between articles casting voters as mobilized-­participants versus isolated-­spectators. The findings show that they do. The open-­ended data from the experiment reveal how

94   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

individuals who read the mobilized-­participant article were more likely to express the importance of voting and a sense of agency than persons reading the isolated-­spectator or control article. Data also illustrate how individuals reading the mobilized-­participant article offered slightly more positive language about elections and less game language and how individuals who read the isolated-­spectator column employed more negative language and more game language. Further, the closed-­ended data illustrate how adults who read the mobilized-­participant text displayed higher levels of intentions to vote, external efficacy, and trust in the media. It is important to interpret the findings here cautiously, as they reflect individuals’ reactions to one example of a mobilized-­participant article at one moment in history. We do not know, for instance, if these findings would hold true in other time periods. How journalists reacted to Obama, however, caught our attention. In covering his campaign, reporters once again signaled voters as being mobilized and as participatory—ascriptions that largely disappeared from our data after 1968. The 2007–2008 campaign narrative, then, provided a unique—almost organic—opportunity to examine the potential impact of a type of portrayal that once appeared more prominently in the news. So while our results do not explain all that needs to be known about the influence of these cues across time and circumstance, they do show that reinserting voters as engaged subjects in the news might encourage more positive attitudes about politics and the news media. In so doing, they lead to at least two fertile paths for future research. For those interested in media effects, the conclusion of Joseph Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s seminal work on game reporting suggests that “the real challenge for future research will be to propose and evaluate news that reduces the public’s cynicism about politics.”28 Because so many experiments focus on problematic news coverage and negative outcomes, these authors contend that it is critical to locate and evaluate news narratives that “dampen cynical reactions—ones that inform, engage alternatives, critique, but still move toward solution of important problems in a civil way.”29 Even though the experiment here was not designed to specifically test alternatives to undesirable reporting, it offers a test of coverage that appears to ease negative perceptions of the electoral process. Attending to the motivational power of respect, as in the projects that open this chapter, might be a fruitful way to follow Cappella and Jamieson’s challenge. For those concerned with the relationship between audiences and the press, it is notable that the mobilized-­participant article also lessened frustration with the media in the open-­ended comments and is associated with

influencing the voter    95

higher levels of trust in the press in the closed-­ended items. This depiction may be promising both for a polity and struggling news outlets. Writing the voter back into electoral news coverage, then, might be a strategy to help journalists regain some public trust and, possibly, rebuild their readership. At the very least, it merits continued study. Moreover, a key concern of this book is how the journalists’ gaze influences the public’s gaze. This chapter shows how an article that signaled interest in electoral participation was met with interest in politics and faith in the media. News norms dictate that not every story will be a voter story and it is not our goal to contend that coverage must always send such honorific signals to the electorate. Nevertheless, it bears underscoring that the topics and details that reporters find compelling shape the news narrative, even— as Roger Fowler contends—when they do not realize it. How reporters see elections and regard the value and worth of electoral participation is a key aspect to if and how they report on it. The next chapter turns to solicit their insights on such matters.

5 struggling with the voter

On July 19, 2016, businessman Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for president of the United States. He had been a visible presence on the American scene for many years, known as an author of best-­selling books, a star of widely watched television shows, and a symbol of extreme wealth.1 He had not, however, served in political office, given detailed policy statements, or run a conventional campaign. As addressed in chapter 1, a key aspect of his success in the primaries was the unprecedented amount of free media he received. In the months leading up to the nominating convention, the press’s fixation with Trump became a story of its own and some journalists reflected on what their focus on him meant about themselves and about understandings of their audience. An editor from TIME magazine commented on how the media elite did not understand the electorate in 2016. In her words, “seldom have so many people been so wrong so consistently about so much.” She elaborated, “I believe the bigger story, the more important and lasting story is less Donald Trump himself, as remarkable of a character he is, than why it is voters have been responding to him in the way that they have. What does that tell us that we need to understand in a more profound way about where our country is?” In the future, she concluded, journalists should not carry the assumption that they “know everything that is going to happen before it happened,” as “it would probably be good for all of us as both consumers and producers of media to be a little less in the prediction business.”2 Then, on November 8, 2016, Trump was elected president of the United States. A second round of handwringing followed. A reporter from Rolling Stone wrote, “We were too sure of our own influence, too lazy to bother hearing things firsthand, and too in love with ourselves to imagine that so many people could hate and distrust us as much as they apparently do. . . . The world may never forgive us for not seeing this coming.”3 And, an editor of the Columbia Journalism Review offered, “Reporters’ eagerness first

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to ridicule Trump and his supporters, then dismiss them, and finally to actively lobby and argue for their defeat have led us to a moment when the entire journalistic enterprise needs to be rethought and rebuilt. In terms of bellwether moments, this is our anti-­Watergate . . . journalism’s fundamental failure in this election, its original sin, is much more basic to who we are and what we are supposed to be. Simply put, it is rooted in a failure of reporting.”4 After having “missed the story” of Trump’s support twice in one year, these media professionals were forthcoming about their detachment from voters and contemplative of their stance toward them. But, how widespread is this sentiment? Outside of the case of Trump, how mindful and reflective have reporters been about their depictions of electoral participation? How do they describe the perspective they take toward—and their linguistic choices while describing—voters? This chapter is guided by early seminal projects that relied on interviews to assess how journalists discover the news and write the stories they do.5 It is also inspired by more recent projects that employ elite interviews with news professionals to add depth and meaning to studies of media content.6 Interviewing journalists can be challenging as they face constant deadline pressures and are well aware of public hostility toward them. Yet, there has been a return to this type of research to understand more about their news judgment, particularly as they are adjusting to pressures facing the news industry.7 We conducted in-­depth, semi-­structured interviews with over fifty political reporters, editors, journalism educators, and online news entrepreneurs. The interview sample started with journalists who wrote for the newspapers and wire services in our content analysis (New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Atlanta Constitution, and Associated Press/United Press International). It grew, though, as those news professionals (1) referred us to their colleagues on other beats and other outlets and (2) encouraged us to also talk with journalism educators, online entrepreneurs, and reporters who had left the news business to work in politics. Adding this larger range of news professionals allowed us to see when the insights from those outside of the papers in our analysis accentuated versus departed from those offered by the original sample. Our goals were to learn more about three concerns: Why do journalists cover electoral participation as they do? What are the key barriers to inserting voters (and voter concerns) in the news? What are opportunities for inserting voters (and voter concerns) in coverage? A thematic analysis of the interview transcripts generated a set of findings.

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Overall, journalists seemed genuinely surprised that voters have been devalued in the news. Next, they noted an institutional distance from the voting experience and yet often appeared ambivalent about that detachment. Overwhelmingly, they expressed frustration that campaign strategists work to hijack the campaign narrative away from them and that this tussle influences their storytelling. And yet, they voiced an organizational awareness that their coverage—and their outlets—must do a better job of connecting with audiences in the future.

Journalists Are Surprised That Voters Have Been Devalued in the News Journalists write the news, as Michael Schudson puts it, but they do not make it up.8 As discussed in chapters 1 and 2, a variety of factors contribute to what journalists see as newsworthy. Some suggest that familiarity is the overwhelming norm affecting the composition of news, as storylines that are consistent with journalists’ understandings of the world are most likely to influence news coverage.9 Others take a broader approach, noting how external forces (such as political actors, authorities, interest groups, and prevailing cultural norms), journalist-­centered biases (such as an individual’s ideology, political predispositions, and reactions to professional norms), medium or outlet influences (such as organizational routines, corporate pressures, and constraints), and unexpected events and tensions (such as access to governmental elites, struggles between political adversaries, and intra-­newsroom agendas) shape coverage.10 A common thread across these approaches, though, is the contention that “understanding the routines and values of news work” helps to explain why certain narratives are “favored over others.”11 An initial pattern in the interviews was stark: while journalists were aware of their reliance on polling data in their campaign reporting, they were surprised to learn how often their linguistic choices devalued voters. Their responses took a few forms. Many of the reporters offered a simple reaction, murmuring “Really?”12 “Huh?”13 “How?”14 and “Wow.”15 Other reporters elaborated in their responses, acknowledging that signaling value and worth to voters in news coverage was not something they had actively considered or thought that audiences would notice. They stated such things as: “I hadn’t thought about that.”16 “I didn’t think that readers notice these things. It is interesting to me that they do.”17 “Why haven’t I heard about this? It never

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occurred to me that voters would care. I would have thought that audiences were impervious to all of this. There are voters out there who care about what reporters say?”18 Still others began to analyze the importance of the neglect in coverage. One reporter uttered, “So it is almost as if the voter is invisible in news coverage.”19 Another connected the neglect to citizen frustration with the media, sharing, “No wonder no one likes us anymore. We treat them like they don’t matter. Turns out it is true. We’ve ignored voters since 1968. We have been very condescending.”20 After stating their surprise, most of the reporters waited for the next question. We found it intriguing, though, that a few female reporters commented on how the inattention to voters was not an intentional—or perhaps even conscious—act of the press. For instance, one female reporter told us, “I don’t really think there is malice toward voters or voting here. We don’t have anything against the victims in this situation. I get that it is not empowering, but I don’t know anyone who sets out to be condescending in the first place.”21 Another female journalist elaborated, “[One of the biggest surprises for me] is that academics think that journalists know what we are doing. That we sit down and think about our power. That we are aware of our influence. In reality, most journalists are just trying to find good stories. We have no bigger agenda than that.”22 That female journalists offered these responses could be interpreted in a few ways. From a methodological perspective, it is important to note that female academics conducted the interviews. Research shows that female interviewees are more likely to “volunteer” additional perspective and experience when talking with other women (as opposed to men) in interview situations.23 From a reportorial perspective, female print news journalists have also been shown to draw upon a larger number of sources, stereotype less, and write more positive stories than their male counterparts.24 While research reveals some variation to these patterns based on the size of newspaper and ratio of male-­to-­female reporters and editors at a newspaper, scholars contend that women are socialized to see and write about audiences differently than men.25 Even though both methodological and socialization forces could contribute to these offerings from female journalists, we found their comments on a lack of malice noteworthy. As we listened to the language that both male and female reporters used, we observed how they called overt attention to the differences between voters and other types of laypeople (e.g., citizens, readers, individuals). After examining all of our transcripts closely, we saw that they employed more normative verbs when discussing voters than when talking about other types

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of people, emphasizing how voters “deserve,” “should get,” and “merit” the “type of news that helps them make decisions on Election Day.” A few reporters told us stories about their “naïve” readership, or about the “crazy” people who repeatedly wrote letters-­to-­the editor, but none of them placed such negative judgment on the term voter. The careful, and perhaps subconscious, ways that they treated the label gave it a type of “god-­term” status in our conversations. Richard Weaver defined god terms as abstract labels expressing something that is good or desirable, identifying values that may not always be used rationally.26 Our interview transcripts show a consistent, and curious, form of respect for this term. Reporters may regularly look down at their audience and want more from their readership, but voters may be—as Herbert Gans would put it—an acceptable issue for coverage (even if they do not currently receive much attention in the news).27 An early pattern in the interview data, then, reveals a vital point: the journalists we spoke with were not actively aware that they have been devaluing voters. Some reporters did express that their inattention was not intentional and all of them used the term voter respectfully when talking to us. Even though scholars repeatedly critique reporters for ignoring citizens in coverage,28 the professionals we spoke to were not mindful of the extent of the neglect. Returning to the campaign “trialogue” between campaigns, reporters, and citizens, these news professionals have been so socialized and incentivized to attend to the relationships between themselves and campaigns, and campaigns and voters, that they have become inattentive to their relationship to voters. Outside of involving voters in the 2008 campaign, decades of disregard seem to have created a blind spot to their goal: writing news narratives that embolden democratic life. Connecting back to research on linguistic signaling from chapter 1, this first theme is notable; the things that journalists do not notice impact the echo chamber surrounding electoral participation in the United States.

Journalists Are Detached from Voters and Citizen Concerns After telling us that their inattention to voters was not deliberate, many reporters shifted to address how easy it is for them to avoid thinking about citizen participation. Scholars have written widely about how journalists identify with candidates and other elite reporters,29 and we found overt support for this claim when the journalists writing for the papers in our content analysis told us,

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• “We see ourselves as part of the game. We are on the plane with the candidates. We see ourselves as players. And part of our role is to interpret the campaign”;30 • “My audience is the public, but also my editor and other reporters. Any reporter wants other reporters to think that their work is a good story”;31 • “The news media are often writing for itself”;32 and • “The pundit class has grown. Has become more aggressive.”33 By emphasizing their experiences on the road with the campaigns, and by suggesting that editors and other reporters are the audiences they care about impressing, our journalists revealed a type of disconnection from voters. Their ideal readership, to return to Edwin Black’s Second Persona, is one that values what they value, that appreciates the nuances of narratives that expose campaign artifice more than ones that signal the citizenry’s worth in electoral politics.34 Skepticism about politics also seems to shape journalistic detachment. Our interviewees had limited initial reactions after seeing examples of articles that signaled attention to public opinion polls or the roles strategists play in campaigns (as in the isolated-­spectator condition). When they saw articles depicting voters as vital actors in elections, featuring quotations explaining how voting matters, and describing candidates connecting with campaign crowds, however, they became animated. Several reporters noted how they would be reluctant to quote candidates praising voters at length, with one telling us directly, “After I hear a stump speech for the seventh time, I’m not going to report it.”35 They contended that they are not mere stenographers who record candidate remarks; rather, their jobs are to “challenge candidates” with their reporting. And, more pointedly, they told us that quotations mentioning the voter’s role in elections struck them as “generic,”36 “lacking dynamics,”37 “boilerplate,”38 and “pandering.”39 One senior editor went so far as to suggest that addressing candidate interest in citizen participation struck him as a “public service announcement.”40 Perhaps to verbally justify their detachment, journalists told numerous stories revealing how their suspicions shape their worldview. In doing so, their offerings mirror Thomas Patterson’s observations on levels of cynicism in newsrooms and journalistic attraction to negative events and developments.41 Our interviewees admitted that they are so busy protecting themselves from falling for campaign spin that they may be unduly critical of all interactions between candidates and voters. As one reporter told us,

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It is really hard to trust. I have to find the real story to translate what is going on in a way that the public can understand. I can’t get bogged down in too much of the politician’s “b.s.” And, you know, maybe that goes for the “b.s.” about the voter. A politician would love for me to cover that and not the politicking. But, again, my job is to find the real story. You know, politicians are funny. They do say this stuff (pointing to the mobilized-­participant portrayal) all the time. They believe this. Nobody knows like a politician how much voters matter. They are constantly connected to voters. The oldest trick in the book is for candidates to talk about voters. How much they need voters. How much they love their voters. Journalists have to make a decision. We have to discipline the candidates. We aren’t just going to report, or record, everything they say. We can’t give them a pass like that. It probably sounds good to voters, but we aren’t going to just repeat that. You know, my not covering (the relationship between candidates and voters) is probably an insult to the voter at the same time. I hadn’t thought about that.42 While journalists have always struggled with conceptions of the public,43 and while scholars have shown that journalists attend to elite concerns far more often than those of citizens,44 this journalist’s statement highlights how skepticism leads to a type of inadvertent neglect. The tone of this statement was reminiscent of Donald Heider’s observations on portrayals of race in television news. As he wrote, “I knew that journalists didn’t generally sit around the table and say ‘how do we exclude (insert Blacks, Latinos, Asians, or Native Americans) today?’ Yet if you watched our 5:00 p.m. show, it was as if that’s exactly what we had done.”45 Self-­reflections published after the 2016 campaign promoted similar sentiments. Jim Rutenberg, from the New York Times, observed, “The misfire on Tuesday night was about a lot more than a failure in polling. It was a failure to capture the boiling anger of a large portion of the American electorate that feels left behind by a selective recovery, betrayed by trade deals that they see as threats to their jobs and disrespected by establishment Washington, Wall Street and the mainstream media.”46 The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel remarked, “saturation coverage of Trump” displaced the story of how “Americans are strikingly agitated not just about politics and governance but about an economic ‘recovery’ that never seems to reach them” so “the media for the most part wasn’t covering issues that were of real concern to

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people.” She added, “I do think there was a backlash effect against a media that was constantly denouncing Trump and by extension—and again I’m not speaking of all Trump supporters but of many—it seemed by extension that the media was denouncing them or had contempt for them.”47 Further, Project Facet’s Heather Bryant noted, “We missed real stories. We missed important voices. We missed the part of journalism that involves talking to people rather than making assumptions or broad generalizations about communities we didn’t know well. Larger, more broadly published stories that actually acknowledged the genuine sentiments of rural, working class, less educated and/or middle America voters were few and far between. It’s also worth noting that some of the ones that rang particularly true were written on comedy sites.”48 To sum up, these news professionals voiced such a collective focus on elites and on each other that they were not mindful of what might actually interest voters. In other words, they identified so strongly with the campaign bubble and with their peers that just about any strategic act of a candidate or campaign could merit inclusion in the campaign narrative regardless of the value of such attention. Meanwhile, voters were not on the bus, not in the bubble, and not on their minds.

Journalists Struggle with Their Detachment from Voters As the interviews progressed, we were struck by how many reporters moved on to discuss being troubled by their distance from voters. Scholarship on interviewing warns of the social desirability bias, a natural response by interviewees to speak and act in ways that protect their self-­identity and reputations. In the first few interviews, we were concerned that statements in this direction reflected (1) efforts by journalists to save face by sharing that they really do respect voters, (2) cathartic moments where journalists said supportive things about voters to reduce their guilt after reviewing the patterns in our content analysis and experiments, or (3) a mixture of both of these possibilities. The longer we spoke with them, however, the more we heard reporters struggle with the notions of detachment—particularly as they relate to voters. It is important to note that discussions about their ambivalence largely followed explanations of detachment in the interviews. It also bears repeating that we were skeptical of this theme through the first twenty interviews. Nevertheless, our interviewees repeatedly addressed an ambivalent relationship to their detachment in a set of ways.

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Many reporters questioned if electoral participation is a good fit for campaign reporting, the front page, or their outlet. One senior editor got quiet and then questioned, “What about editorials? Features? Letters-­to-­the-­editor? Cartoons?” She then wondered aloud, “Much of our attention to voters might happen outside of election coverage.”49 Another editor shared, “I get where this is going, but it can’t look like a public service announcement. I could assign something like this to a neighborhood reporter to do some of this PSA [public service announcement] work, get out in the community, follow groups around . . . but then, you see, it would take it off the front page.”50 Several reporters viewed attention to voters as being a topic for regional and local papers. One told us, “You should look at Florida, at Virginia. Don’t look at the Miami Herald, look at the Sun Sentinel. Look at the Richmond paper. Look more local and statewide. Those are the papers that still have a connection with their readers, and I bet they are putting voters at the forefront.”51 On one hand, our interviewee’s hopes that voters were receiving richer coverage and attention outside of campaign reporting and at other outlets is promising, revealing a sense of concern about electoral participants. On the other, abdicating responsibility for cues sent to voters in elite news would trouble scholars like V. O. Key and Gerald Pomper, particularly when readership of papers is decreasing and when editors of statewide and local papers, in the words of one of our interviewees, “need to save money at a time of declining readership” and are “turning to the wires for presidential stuff.”52 In working through how electoral participation “fits” in elite news, reporters discussed the power of “moments” on coverage. Speaking to the early years in the analysis, one senior reporter and editor discussed the political and cultural priorities of the “men in newsrooms who had served in World War II and Korea” who “had a strong connection to the government and to traditional values” and “were maintaining and supporting an old time sense of civics.”53 He recounted how those values began to be questioned throughout the 1960s, perhaps “more quickly for the younger reporters who felt they were being lied to about Vietnam than for the patriotic ones who had served in Korea and World War II.”54 Others remembered how prior to the rise of television, print reporters did not worry about other media usurping the campaign narrative. They covered campaign events, interactions with crowds, and lengthy sound bites because “there wasn’t anything else for reporters to write.”55 These senior reporters and editors expressed a common sentiment: it used to be easier to discuss the importance of voters and voting in the news. Journalists of all ages were not surprised that the 2004 election featured the highest use of electoral labels of any year in our analysis. They told us

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how the anger surrounding the Florida recount, the frustration connected to compromised ballots, and the fury associated with voter suppression led to natural campaign narratives. As one reporter summarized, “I understand how the negativity makes people not want to get involved,” but “you have to understand that the 2004 story was automatic in the aftermath of campaign 2000.”56 In chapter 3, we noted the importance of press attention to flaws to the electoral system; certainly, concerns with voting machines, voter intimidation, and complicating the ability to cast a vote merit attention in the nation’s elite newspapers. Yet the comfort that journalists had with the aftermath of the 2000 election, coupled with their detachment from electoral participation, underscores how coverage has signaled the problems surrounding, not the promise of, citizen input. A slightly more upbeat tone accompanied the discussion of the 2008 campaign, for, as one journalist stated, “Some years just offer up a good narrative.”57 Almost all of our interviewees complimented Barack Obama as a candidate—noting his connection with voters, historic candidacy, message of hope and change, charismatic personality, response to the late September financial crisis, and entrepreneurial online mobilization efforts. Many admitted that Obama received a type of “human interest” bias, one that rewarded his novelty and popularity. While they did not identify this bias as necessarily partisan, three of them confessed they were skeptical of Obama’s youth and relative inexperience and wondered if the coverage of him was “just.” Even these reporters, though, acknowledged how “people really responded to Obama and his campaign” and “we covered it.”58 One stated, “There was a lot of coverage marveling about the crowds and if the new and younger voters would turn out. Maybe these re-­energized voters felt that this time their vote would count. I don’t know if that was our doing or Obama’s, but the feeling was out there.”59 In these ways, reporters acknowledged how patriotism, the wake of an electoral crisis, and a historic candidacy simply made it easy to include voters in the campaign narrative. We also sensed a bit of ambivalence about their detachment when they mentioned “advocacy journalism”—reporting that is less tied to the objective norms dominating most of their newsrooms. Some of the reporters we talked to had experience in journalism education, either as individuals who taught an occasional university course or as those who had retired from newsrooms to teach full-­time. One such reporter-­turned-­educator said, “You know, talking about elections is not part of the newsroom culture. Take early voting. The paper doesn’t run an article reminding people to vote every day during early voting. Something simple, like ‘Remember, absentee voting is running

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now. You don’t have to wait in line on Election Day.’ They just wouldn’t do that. But they could.”60 Another reporter-­turned-­educator connected promoting elections in the news to concerns with objectivity and repetition in the news. He told us, The media rarely include information on how to vote. And, you know, they would never say, “Your vote is needed.” They just would never do that. But they should! All of this speaks to the twentieth-­century model of objectivity. We take no sides. It is the news from nowhere. So we can’t even take a normative stance of “Go out and vote.” When I worked at the newspaper they were very sensitive about “We’ve already covered that. We are not going to go out and do it again.” They were very sensitive. But I always wondered, how many people actually read the entire paper every day and every week? No one does that. We ought to be repeating information more often. People are not going to be turned off by a little repetition of the upcoming election if that’s the issue. The editors might say, “We published our voter’s guide last week. We did that. We’re done with that.” But 10 or maybe 20 percent of our readers would have seen that. What harm would really be done by presenting that information again?61 A much younger reporter connected such concerns to his mindfulness of writing for the print and online versions of the paper. He began by asking, “I really wonder if we have a responsibility to encourage voting?” As he worked through his own question, he seemed to suggest different answers for his different charges at his news organization. In discussing his work for the print edition of the paper, he tried to justify a focus on campaign strategists, saying, “I’ve done stories on how strategists only want their base to turn out. I don’t see anything really wrong with that.” In reflecting on his columns posted to the online version of the paper as well as his blog on the paper’s website, however, he shared, There are little things on blogs that we can do to be inclusive of voters. You know, we can tell them that early voting starts today, or where they can link to find their polling places. And we can leave that content up; it won’t disappear. And we can insert a Google map to help encourage people to find their polling places and vote in the election. As a journalist, there is nothing wrong, I guess in a blog format, to say, “Go vote today.” That strikes me as a reasonable thing to do on one of our election blogs.62

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After bringing up notions of advocacy journalism, several reporters strongly encouraged us to talk to their colleagues who cover health, sports, and business beats. They noted how those jobs afforded a less stringent attachment to “objectivity.” One of our interviewees expressed how, As a sports reporter, you get to root for your team. You don’t have to be objective. As a health reporter, you know, your consciousness is raised to the point where trying to make things better is not a bad thing. For political reporting, though, we teach them to focus on just the facts. Reporters are not allowed to be for one side or the other. You are not supposed to. But we don’t teach them that political reporting is supposed to make the system better. It is not about rooting for one candidate or the other, but what do you want to do with your reporting? Do you want to acknowledge that getting people involved in the political system is a good thing? That you as a journalist ought to be encouraging?63 Nothing in this subtheme about reporters’ ambivalence regarding their detachment challenged the predominance of their detachment in reporting. Nevertheless, it was curious to hear journalists muse about the possibilities of making small shifts to reporting in the online section of the paper as well as in repeating information about registration dates, Election Day, and possibly encouraging voting in general.

Journalists Fear That Strategists Are Hijacking the Campaign News Narrative All good narratives need a villain. The professional storytellers we interviewed made it clear that they felt campaign strategists should be held accountable for the unfavorable trends in the content analysis. So strong were they in making this case that in the first few interviews, we were concerned that we were not explaining our intentions clearly and that possibly the interviewees thought we were solely interested in scolding them for the prevalence of the isolated-­spectators portrayal. It was only hearing this theme repeatedly that we sensed how adamantly they feel compromised by campaign operatives’ rhetorical skills, financial resources, and sheer time to spin for their causes. As one interviewee put it, “Here’s your bottom line—voters have become the collateral damage of my needing to expose them (strategists) in my stories.”64

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A pair of subthemes illustrates how journalists want to take back their control over campaign news narratives. First, these reporters told us how they feel pressured to criticize and hold accountable strategists who gain positions in “the media.” One stated, “The establishment takes the profession very seriously. We guard the rail of who is in and who is out, and they take that guard very carefully.”65 Another elaborated, You know most people in the media aren’t journalists. They are paid hacks with a position to push. Peggy Noonan? Karl Rove? Both are writing for the Wall Street Journal. They are not journalists. They are commentators. Too few in the media today have covered a car accident. Have had to be fair-­minded. Know from bitter experience how to be fair. Have ever had to do research. Have ever had to know a story. So many in the commentariat have an agenda. They take the voters out of it. They already have the answer. Why should a voter be involved? [The strategists’] coverage has everything to do with their spin and nothing to do with voters or why people should vote.66 Still another who wrote primarily for her paper’s online edition added, “The mainstream media no longer controls the message. With technology the media have to keep an eye on each other to see where the story is starting and going. Now anyone can comment on the campaign. You don’t need to be a journalist to do it. You don’t need “news” anymore, really. You just need a surprise. Some drama. A take on things. No one knows what is going to happen. A blog can really run with that.”67 The journalists we spoke to voiced concern about “people from the outside who get to ask the questions,”68 worrying that these potentially “unobjective” and “untrained” voices might unduly sway the campaign narrative. Second, journalists feel pressured to keep up with the tone of modern campaigns. They are aware of the increased negativity in campaign news and acknowledge how sharpened sound bites and fear appeals break through the clutter of the campaign conversation.69 One senior reporter connected frustrations with “guarding the rail,” shrinking newsroom resources, and strategist influence over the campaign news agenda, telling us, Oh yes, handlers. They have money. Most have a background in journalism. And now they have more power than a journalist. They have more power! It is an ugly thing to say, but most of us go into journalism for the power. Now the strategists have the power. They have more

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power than the journalists. The strategists are the ones who are telling the stories. They have the money, the spin, they get to tell the public what to think, they have more and more control. This perplexes journalists. Journalists are supposed to have the power and we have to play it straight. The strategists and commentators, they get to spin off. And the power of phrase. They get to say what they want, and phrase it so elegantly. Doesn’t even matter if it is true. Journalists probably want to keep up with commentators. We want the power back. We want to be the ones who are elegant.70 The conscious desire for power in this statement, which was uttered by a male reporter who had extensive experience working for two of the newspapers in our sample, departs from the statement that “we (don’t) sit down and think about our power” offered by a junior female reporter earlier in the chapter. While these are just two statements, and while there are aspects of gender and experience involved here, we find it notable that one reporter was very mindful of power when he spoke about keeping up with moneyed political strategists while another was not conscious of power when covering mere citizen participants. Taken together, our interviewees feel that they are so busy keeping up with strategists that they have limited time and few incentives to consider other elements or actors of the campaign story. In a sense, their preoccupation with political strategists is not unlike press fascination with Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016.71 Whether they realize it or not, journalists’ desire to call out strategists (and Trump) puts these campaign actors in the news time and again. This process offers few cues in the news to remind citizens that they are the ones who should get to decide elections. It also solidifies a newsroom mindset that complicates seeing, or telling, the campaign story in any other way.72 In commenting on this phenomenon after the 2016 campaign, Heather Bryant argued that journalism “lost the big picture by ignoring ‘small’ stories.” In her mind, there are “plenty of times when Real Journalists™ have turned up their nose at small town stories they’ve deemed Not Real News™.” She elaborates, The time for that is over. People’s stories and lives are real news to them, no matter where they live. Their feelings are real. Their perspectives are real. Their opinions are real. Their struggles are real. And their choices and their votes have a very real impact. For better or for

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worse. Newsrooms have much in common with many of the people we’re not fully reporting on. We’re all just hanging in there, getting by as best we can, scraping for the money to get through. It’s time for us to move past the competitiveness of an industry that doesn’t look anything like itself when there was the money to go around. Collaboration is our best and most viable option for immediately improving the state of media in our country.73 Other news professionals agree, contending that efforts to rebuild a relationship with the electorate and working to increase trust with their audience will involve critically rethinking what counts when crafting election coverage.74

Journalists Are Aware That They Must Connect with Audiences in the Future A final theme in the data addresses how voters might be covered more meaningfully in the future. In some of the interviews, we guided this discussion. In many interviews, however, journalists beat us there. Indeed, one of the journalists who covered the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential campaigns jumped to this topic very early on in the interview by saying, “Your study is at the heart of the key debate that takes place in every newsroom at the beginning of every campaign. The debate is ‘How can we improve our reporting this season?’ It happens every election. Every election. The debate is how can we improve on this instinct to write about the process and start to address what is really important, what issues are really important to people. And, even though we have this discussion, we probably fail every time. We set out with the best intentions. Overall, how do we do? Well, this research tells us.”75 Other scholars have noted how journalists serve as guardians of democracy, operate with honorable intentions, and enter the field to make a difference in political life.76 Our interviews cast an intriguing contribution to these assessments. We asked journalists if they had ideas for future coverage of electoral participation. Their suggestions addressed changing patterns inside, and outside, of reporting. To the former point, they advised that news professionals could • investigate what voters are interested in, even if that is not what candidates and strategists are talking about (as one journalist told us, “We don’t do a good enough job of actually asking what the voters care about”);77

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• talk to community groups and ask questions of local opinion leaders to learn more about their concerns (a strategy that fits the needs of editors who are interested in seeing stories with local angles);78 • consider how stories about voting transcend sections of the news­ paper (including articles in the metro section on group activities and in the opinion section on studies on voters conducted by academics, etc.);79 and • think thematically about subjects central to any campaign (and compose thematically driven stories on issues such as immigration, taxes, and gay marriage, noting the connection to voters and voter interests).80 Senior reporters and editors, though, cautioned that shifts inside the news narrative represent just part of a movement toward more inclusive coverage of voters. In their minds, larger changes outside of the news narrative might be more likely to lead to enduring changes in how voters are cast in news stories. In commenting on the pressures currently placed on them from strategists, several senior reporters recalled a time when political parties and other political organizations pressured them to attend to citizen and community concerns. One senior editor told us, If now individual politicians and their strategists are putting pressure on newspapers, it used to be that parties did. When the forces on papers were more disciplined and regulated by political parties, there was a larger place for voters in coverage. The erosion of political parties as grassroots entities contributes to the shift from your engaged coverage to the discussion of strategists. The old determinants were party, church, civics, collective entities. Now there are too many different determinants, too many individual groups trying to drive the bus. Parties were obvious lobby groups that could keep themselves and their supporters in the news. As the parties fractured they couldn’t keep voters in the news.81 Experienced reporters mentioned how other groups ranging from AARP, to labor unions, to teachers associations might put pressure on journalists to be mindful of citizen concerns. Additionally, several reporters encouraged asking organizations committed to maintaining the integrity of the press, as well as high-­profile journalists, to pay attention to the perils of ignoring voter concerns in the news. As one journalist noted,

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You need to build a different perspective. That is the point. You need a different perspective so that changes in the media and media coverage can come from the inside out. . . . Reporters have got to discover it for ourselves. [Scholars] can only say so many times that there is a problem. We’ve got to discover it from within, as opposed to external people trying to tell us something. Because the response [from reporters] is going to be, “you [scholars] don’t know what you are talking about.” Change may happen but we have to discover it, really own it, from within.82 Another external change involves the movement of news from the print format to newspaper websites. News professionals of all ages regard this shift to represent a positive opportunity, both with regard to breadth and depth of coverage. One told us, “The days of the Los Angeles Times offering 2,000 words for an extended story are over.”83 In detailing a “numbers piece” story he had written the night before describing Republican challenges in connecting to subsets of voters, he shared how a shortened piece of the article would appear in the newspaper the following day. A longer version was scheduled to go online at the time of our interview. In this case, the online reader would have greater detail and access to a set of links accompanying the data. The journalist did point out, however, that the opportunities on newspaper websites need to be utilized judiciously. As he put it, “One has to really think about the value of these (longer stories). Not all topics really deserve the longer story. And, sometimes we don’t have the time and energy to write a good short story. There are really several ways to look at the size of an article. Some of these economic changes limiting the news hole are not necessarily bad.”84 Other opportunities for more prominent attention to voters online include blogs, both those connected to and independent of online news­papers. One editor spoke proudly of the Election Day blog his newspaper had experimented with recently.85 He felt that letting reporters put up blogs adds to online coverage, gets into the lives of the voters, asks new questions about community concerns and turnout, and gives reporters space to ask citizens who they voted for and why. In his words, “The culture has changed in our newsroom. We now think web. Blogging beats. Ways of supplementing the print coverage, making the news dynamic online.”86 The bloggers we spoke to also saw opportunities for engaging portrayals of voters online. They reflected on their experiences covering politics for newspapers versus writing for blogs, commenting that on their blogs, they have more room for “emotional identification and connection.”87 One

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reporter-­turned-­online-­editor felt she was closer to her audience on her blog; there she could “throw anything out there and wait for the readers to respond. And, it is like a conversation. If I am wrong, a reader will catch it and snark back at me.”88 Online journalists and bloggers receive immediate feedback if something engages (or enrages) an audience. Our reporters believe that such knowledge, as well as the mindset that the audience’s reactions matter, could possibly lead to news content that could involve audiences in campaigns more solidly in the future. Published interviews after the 2016 election added a sense of urgency to (re)building connections to the audience. One digital and entertainment officer stated, Sometimes when you’re seeing shots fired, it’s hard to know that they’re actually shooting at you. The media missed the anti-­establishment tide overwhelming all of the western world because we were one of the main targets of the people’s ire. As journalists, we should’ve known better. Polling from PEW and Gallup show that trust in journalists is at an all-­time low. This has been an existential threat that we have failed to address. We live in the age of inequality. One of the outcomes of inequality is that we wall ourselves off and resent each other. We journalists lately have too often been holed up in elite areas of New York, Washington, Palo Alto, Miami, or LA. We didn’t realize that just a few miles away from us in places like Staten Island and Homestead, the people there were hopeless and also hopeless about us. If we are to regain their trust we must move ourselves closer to the people. Remember who we are really supposed to serve (them), and hope to rebuild that relationship. It is on us.89

Conclusion Journalists offered powerful public reflections about being out of touch with voters in 2016 and completely missing the story of Trump’s victory. But, how pervasive are such musings? How mindful have reporters been about how they depict the electorate in the news? Our findings from interviews with over fifty political reporters, editors, journalism educators, and online entrepreneurs offer a mixture of obstacles and opportunities for coverage that could engage of electoral participation. On one hand, our interviewees appear detached from the voting experience, admit that they primarily write for political elites

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and for each other, feel pressured to keep pace with a sharpened and negative campaign discourse, and worry that political strategists are attempting to hijack the news narrative away from them. All of these forces pull reporters away from focusing on voters and from addressing the concerns of interest and import to citizens. In many ways, the journalists’ responses were supportive of the status quo and tied to an emphasis on elite concerns. Several of their comments call to mind Regina Lawrence’s observations that in many instances, strategic reporting “is entirely appropriate.” As she puts it, “After all, electoral politics is largely about strategy and attack, winning and losing, and news that did not inform the public about the candidates’ political calculations would be guilty of some sort of misrepresentation.”90 On the other hand, journalists were also thoughtful about such matters. They voiced a genuine ambivalence about their detachment to voters, observed how special campaign periods make it easier to include voters in the news, and spoke openly about changes inside and outside of the news narrative that might result in more meaningful portrayals of voters and voting. These journalists were quite familiar with academic complaints about strategic narratives but were not mindful of how this coverage squeezes out voter concerns in the news. And, all but twelve of our interviewees talked to us for at least one hour, indicating an interest in contemplating the coverage of voters. One pressure that has been affecting journalists for quite some time—but is particularly present at the time this book is written—is the compromised economic state of the news industry. Print newspapers have lost readership steadily over the years of this analysis and have been experimenting with online content and web-­based business models. Many of the senior reporters and editors emphasized how sharpened economic pressures may make the timing right to incorporate some changes to connect with audiences. As one editor told us, “The costs of experimenting are far less than the costs of doing nothing.”91 Another editor concurred, suggesting, “Right now is really the best time [to try to suggest change], because the industry is afraid. I mean no one knows what is happening. They may be more receptive now than a few years ago, so your timing is real good.”92 Moreover, he emphasized how the drive to urge elite journalists covering presidential campaigns to change (even in a complicated economic moment) would be best taken if senior journalists, scholars, and media organizations could work together to increase the credibility of calls for change. He advised, “You are talking about the most seasoned journalists who already know so much and you are trying to tell them to do it differently, so it is going to be a challenge. But if you ask the right questions of the right people, and say it over and over again, that’s

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how you might bring about change. In order for you to make a difference, you have to say it over and over. And get seasoned political reporters to say it, too. To go on the record. That’s how you might bring about change.”93 One of our most skeptical interviewees was deeply interested in the topic and seemed intrigued by the challenge of attempting to engage readers through narratives calling attention to voters. In telling us how he would report on our data, he saw “engagement” as the lead. After sharing this, though, he began to reflect on how such a story line could be sustained. He offered, You could issue press releases and papers could be all over this because it is a new and provocative look at elections. Reporters could write stories that are driven from one university study, but notice how that dies out. The question you have to ask yourself is, “How do you sustain the story line?” You would have to generate it yourself. You would have to run a set of studies. You would have to offer data on the mistrust of voters for both candidates and the media to generate conflict after the first article. You would have to be a self-­generating force for this story line.94 The next chapter will turn to a discussion of such a possibility.

6

spinning for the voter

Barack Obama has been accused of having a minor obsession with electoral participation.1 As a presidential candidate in 2008, he told people who had never registered or voted before that they could “make a difference in this election” and “we’ve got to vote!”2 As the incumbent candidate in 2012, he insisted, “If you believe in a country where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share and everyone plays by the same rules, then I need you to vote this November.”3 As an advocate for Hillary Clinton in 2016, he urged, “Don’t boo. Vote.”4 And, as the sitting president speaking to a press conference after Donald Trump’s victory, he stated, “Elections matter and voting counts. I don’t know how many times we have to relearn this lesson, because we ended up having 43 percent of the country not voting who were eligible to vote.”5 A deeper look at his reverence for voters appears in an extended interview with Rolling Stone magazine. There, Obama recounted a story from his first presidential bid that taught him how elections are decided by people, not predictions: I will tell you, New Hampshire, 2008, I had just won Iowa and had this whirlwind tour of New Hampshire, huge rallies, huge crowds, and our internal pollster had us up by 10. And around 7:30, as I’m putting on my clothes to deliver my victory speech, I get a knock on the door by David Plouffe, David Axelrod, and Robert Gibbs. And they’ve got sheepish looks on their faces [chuckles]. And they say, “Barack, we have some interesting news for you. We don’t think we’re gonna win this thing.” That’s the thing about democracy. That’s the thing about voting. It doesn’t mean polls are irrelevant, but there is always a human variable involved in this. So I think the odds of Donald Trump winning were always around 20 percent. That [doesn’t] seem like a lot, but one out of five is not that unusual. It’s not a miracle.6

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This book has studied how linguistic cues in the news have signified the importance and influence of electoral participation. While most projects have researched what happens on, or after, Election Day, our goal has been to attend to the news narratives that set the stage for electoral contests, cue the roles citizens play in them, signal how closely the electorate should be paying attention to the campaign, and gesture to if and how participation even matters. Our findings stand in stark contrast to the lesson learned by Obama in New Hampshire. While news narratives from 1948 to 1968, and then again during his historic 2008 campaign, called attention to how people contribute to electoral outcomes in meaningful ways, coverage in other years rarely did. The data show how an emphasis on forecasting, and on thin game narratives, have overlooked the voter’s role in the United States. The inattention took a special form in 2016. Coverage in that year focused on how two flawed candidates were disappointing the electorate. In the days following the surprise outcome, journalists acknowledged how the story line that Clinton would surely win may have lulled “voters and the news media into a sense of complacency about the election.”7 As addressed in chapter 5, journalists stated that they did not understand the “breadth of anger” voters felt toward the established political order—including themselves. Journalist Jim Rutenberg wrote how “all the dazzling technology, the big data and the sophisticated modeling that American newsrooms bring to the fundamentally human endeavor of presidential politics could not save American journalism from yet again being behind the story, behind the rest of the country. The news media by and large missed what was happening all around it, and it was the story of a lifetime. The numbers weren’t just a poor guide for election night—they were an off-­ramp away from what was actually happening.”8 In reading meaning into 2016, media professionals mused about being out of touch with the “fly-­over states,” ones that supported Trump and that elite outlets did not listen to seriously.9 This phrase has become rhetorical shorthand to refer to a vast swath of the United States that are “flown over” as individuals travel by airplane from urban areas in the East to the West Coast. From one vantage point, this idiom imprecisely lumps together broad geographic areas that are hardly monolithic. Indeed, there are a variety of historical and cultural differences between the Midwestern, Southern, and mountain states. Politically, too, just a handful of Rust Belt states in the Midwest (Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) had a particular late-­ breaking impact in the 2016 contest. As a concept, though, scholars point to this expression to pool together “a part of the country that some Americans only view by air and never see in person at ground level.”10 Employing this

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notion of being unnoticed, our data point to the possibility that the American voter has lived in a “fly-­over” nation for decades. More specifically, three prominent books shed light on what many potential Trump supporters might have been feeling heading into the 2016 campaign. These works point to the variables that the “thick prediction” news narratives discussed in chapter 2 might have considered. Katherine Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker describes how people in the Badger State make sense of politics and their role in it.11 After five years of listening to people in rural areas, Cramer discovered their deep resentment toward cities, urbanities, universities, government, and the media. Her interviewees felt a deep lack of respect from those entities; they believed that they were hardworking and being overlooked, that policymakers were allocating resources to less deserving people in cities, and that an urban mindset, propagated by the press, looked down on them as uneducated and racist. These feelings, Cramer details, lead them to support candidates who critique and policies that roll back government. J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis offers another take on people’s anger and mistrust toward elites and government.12 Written by a Yale Law School graduate who was born in Kentucky and grew up in Ohio, it tells of his family’s poverty and decades of harmful cultural tendencies. Through describing interactions with family members and friends, he reveals a lack of agency in Appalachia and the Rust Belt as well as a propensity to blame others (and the government) for difficult conditions. Further, Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right addresses the great paradox of “opposition to federal help from people and places that need it.”13 To do so, she spent five years interviewing Tea Party members in Louisiana, paying close attention to how they felt about politics. Similar to depictions in the Cramer and Walsh books, the people she talked to were (1) frustrated that others (often racial minorities and immigrants) were cutting in line to receive special treatment from the government and (2) tired of being mocked and disrespected by the liberal media. Even though Trump offended millions during the 2016 campaign, he struck a chord with the people studied by Cramer, Vance, and Hochschild. As journalist Jack Shafer put it, Trump “slung praise upon a constituency that was starved for the respect of a plain-­speaking candidate. . . . For these people he conveyed dignity and the rescue of lost honor.”14 Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, suggested that Trump offered, “A promise to work hard at restoring left-­behind Americans’ dignity by bringing

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back jobs and striking back at the cultural elites who disdain them. This story is not merely crucial for understanding this extraordinary election. It is also the lodestar for cultural renewal and better politics, no matter one’s place on the ideological spectrum. Leaders on both sides will likely take issue with some parts of Mr. Trump’s agenda. But all must contend with the central reality he has unearthed—the hunger for dignity in communities where it is most absent.”15 If a hunger for dignity helps to explain Trump’s victory, a hunger for acknowledgment might help to explain some of our key findings. Learned helplessness is a psychological phenomenon that people develop when they feel that their choices do not matter and that they cannot affect their futures in meaningful ways.16 In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance employs this phrase to describe an attitude that emerged in his community, a response that people developed in reaction to tough economic circumstances they felt were out of their control. In many ways, our data from chapters 2 and 3 have signaled a similar lack of power and responsibility to voters for decades. Indeed, outside of the years 1948 to 1968, and again in 2008, the linguistic patterns in our content analysis may be contributing to a type of learned helplessness surrounding electoral participation. And yet, in chapter 4, we saw that when people were given attention and a role to play in an election, they noticed and responded in positive ways. We chose language as a lens for investigating the tone of the echo chamber surrounding voting for several reasons. Linguistic choices combine to create frames and story lines. Sometimes, these story lines change abruptly as did coverage between the 2000 and 2004 elections. In coverage from those years, readers saw a stark difference between reports emphasizing how strategists could predict the vote to go in the former contest with a heavier focus on ballots that might not be counted in the latter one. That quick shift shows how vivid public events can refocus the attention of newsrooms and lead to different narratives. At other times, however, patterns of word choices are more enduring. Our data from chapter 3 show how in a less adversarial news environment, with newsrooms staffed with reporters who had served in World War II and Korea, reporters signaled value and worth to voters for a twenty year period (1948–1968). Then, in a more contentious political climate, and at the dawn of precision journalism, news professionals shifted agency to polls and strategists for twenty-­eight years (1972–2000). Journalists admit that they are not always mindful about how they linguistically assign power in coverage.17 The words in their reporting, however, contribute powerfully to public understandings of electoral participation in the United States.

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The Problem with the Discounted Voter A vivid example of the challenge of viewing the key terms of electoral participation as dismissed in news coverage can be spotted in an article from October of 1983. At that time, Pulitzer prize winner and political advisor to President Ronald Reagan, George Will opened one of his columns with these words, “Here comes another campaign to encourage voting, alas.” The piece—entitled “In Defense of Nonvoting”—addressed a symposium sponsored by ABC News at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on the problem of declining voter participation.18 At that time, voter turnout in the United States had dropped steadily since 1960, despite the reduction of many barriers to voting such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (which outlawed racial discrimination in voting), the 26th Amendment (which lowered the voting age to 18). And, at that time, Will’s column included such phrases as, “as more people are nagged to the polls,” “not voting in a presidential election often is understandable as an economy of effort,” and “might as well curl up with a good book. Casting a vote is not inherently virtuous.” Will’s column was elegantly composed. It featured a voice with a point of view. It was broadly disseminated, as it was penned by a widely syndicated author employed by prestigious news outlets. Further, given its connection to the Harvard symposium, it was even cited regularly in the political science literature. Why, then, is it troubling? Will’s article is deeply dismissive of electoral participation and takes us back to the concerns V. O. Key and Gerald Pomper addressed in the introduction to this book.19 News, as Gaye Tuchman has argued, “is a window on the world” and through it “Americans learn of themselves and others, of their own institutions, leaders and lifestyles.”20 The recommending force of Will’s words is that voters do not matter, that work to mobilize them is open to ridicule, and that the voting act is about as honorable as staying at home and reading a novel. This type of portrayal signals few cues for either citizens, or elites for that matter, to value electoral participation. It is not our goal of this conclusion to lay too much blame directly upon this one column or its author. The objective, here, is to show how pervasive Will’s perspective on voting became—particularly between 1972 and 2000— as well as how several adverse outcomes come from it. Specifically, it is easy for journalists to neglect the virtues of voting in the news (chapter 2) and it is also tempting for them to depict electoral participation as something controlled by strategic consultants and sophisticated polling techniques (chapter 3). Both types of stories push the campaign conversation away from

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voters and over to a group of self-­serving campaign professionals. What is more, our experiment and focus groups show that citizens notice the difference between articles that portray voters as mobilized-­participants versus isolated-­spectators (chapter 4) even if journalists do not realize that they are repeatedly describing electoral participation in such ways (chapter 5). Our data suggest that portrayals like Will’s may serve to talk Americans out of believing in—and safeguarding—their democratic system as well as their role in it.

The Promise of Voters Who Count While it is not practical to suggest that all campaign stories must focus on voters, our research shows that calling greater attention to the voter’s role in news narratives holds promise for the legitimacy of the electoral system as well as the future of the media. Several of the senior reporters connected the mobilized-­participant portrayal to the culture of an earlier newsroom, and the pro-­democratic and pro-­voter focus being exerted on them at that time. They noted how political parties used to exert some of the same pressures that campaign operatives put on them today. In their words, “The parties used to represent the voter,”21 and “Organized groups once stood up for voter interests.”22 Younger journalists phrased a similar observation in a different vernacular, “You know, what if journalism groups put pressure on journalists to write about voters in new ways? What if you presented these findings to those types of groups? They might take up the cause and encourage us to change?”23 Editors, too, suggested that pressuring them could be helpful, offering advice for academics on strategies for partnering with the press and working to sustain a narrative by steadily releasing findings on a research topic.24 These journalists believed that an important way to reinsert voters in the news would be to exert more external pressures on them, in a sense to start spinning for the voter. Nothing in our conversations with journalists—let alone the political environment—suggests that the campaign operatives whom journalists see as their adversaries will go away on their own accord. Because their goal in the campaign trialogue is to keep the campaign conversation focused on their causes and candidates (and the liabilities of their opponents), an answer for more meaningful portrayals of voters, then, may not be to cede the floor to the current cast of political spinners, but to attempt to join them at their own game.

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In introducing the metaphor of spinning for the voter, we do not mean to recruit more voices to speak in sharpened sound bites or to add to the negative tone of campaign discourse. Nor do we hope to shift the campaign news narrative to focus solely on the concerns of citizens (ignoring the policy proposals and political responsibilities of candidates and elected officials). The invitation, rather, is to encourage concerned parties—ranging from organized groups, to prominent journalists, to academics, to educators, and to citizens, alike—to imagine themselves as forces that can help to keep voters and their concerns in the news in meaningful ways.

Spinning for the Voter To become news, Gaye Tuchman observes, an item or event must be more than “‘merely’ physically and temporally part of a reporter’s here and now.” It must also be “sociologically or psychologically pertinent to a reporter’s grasp of the world—and the issue or event must resonate with the reporter’s purposes and practical activities.”25 Our data show how easy it is for journalists to overlook the key words of electoral participation in reporting. The following strategies emanate from our interviews with journalists and were offered by the reporters to create a mindset in which voters are worthy of quality storytelling. The first few are geared toward their colleagues in the journalism profession; the final one, however, is open to academics, educators, and other interested advocates. As one of our interviewees summed up, the “answers (for securing meaningful coverage for voters) are not new, but for any change to come, you have to keep saying the same thing again and again. Again and again, and hope that, eventually, people see the need to change themselves. Hope that someday they see the need to attend to voters coming from within.”26 Spinning Involves Listening to Voters As reviewed in chapter 5, the journalists we talked to harbor an intriguing ambivalence about their detachment from voters. On one hand, their norms of objectivity encourage them to attend to polling data (which offers a broader, more scientifically valid assessment of voter opinion) over contact with individual voters (which many reporters fear is anecdotal and not representative of greater trends). On the other hand, they note that attending solely to polling data prevents them from really understanding what is happening with

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the electorate. A first piece of advice from them is to underscore how listening to the concerns of real voters can help journalists tell important stories that need to be told. Although it is less efficient than summarizing polling data, listening to how voters understand the campaign can help reporters from missing how people perceive their electoral choices. A column appearing in the New York Times on November 17, 2000 (ten days following that year’s presidential contest), captures this notion. Written by reporters Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, the piece argued that the problem with the reporting in 2000 was not just due to the closeness of the race. “What happened,” they argued, is that an election that didn’t lend itself to being easily reported has exposed longstanding weaknesses in the modern political press.  .  .  . Political reporting has given way to campaign reporting, a process that the changing technology of campaigning has encouraged. With each election, campaigns become increasingly sophisticated at targeting voters in their homes. This, in turn, has made politics more individual and private and less a group activity occurring in public. Rather than follow the campaign into the private space, political journalism has become more focused on understanding the newly elaborate campaign machinery, like targeted e-­mail messaging, push polls and focus groups. The trouble is what’s missing. Reporters have lost touch with voters, with regional politics and with campaigns as national conversations. On election night, no network had adequate sources in Florida who could tell them that they were relying on questionable numbers. Campaign journalism increasingly tends to see voters as abstractions, through polls, or as targets of campaign manipulations, to be interviewed in artificial focus groups or panels assembled to observe debates. Even the polling is increasingly limited to tracking polls, which tell us only the horse race and rarely the underlying reasons why people feel as they do.27 The answer, for Kovach and Rosenstiel, is for the press to view the election “not as two campaigns, but as a national conversation.” They suggest that reporters “should stop interviewing voters in artificial focus groups and start knocking on doors . . . and to begin to try to understand the campaign that now goes on inside the private space.” “Only then,” they continue, “can journalism begin to help us all understand the underlying factors in our elections and provide the context for societies to self-­govern.”28

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Our interviewees, particularly journalism educators, echoed such concerns. They called attention to well-­documented prescriptions in the journalism literature, claiming that the best reporters are the best listeners;29 journalists should listen more than they speak;30 looking out the window of the campaign bus puts reporters in closer touch with the citizenry;31 and the public deserves a journalism “sophisticated and generous enough to relinquish the patronizing notion of a passive citizenry.”32 Moreover, our interviewees paraphrased reports and speeches from their prominent peers that resonated with them. Several pointed to journalist David Broder’s speeches and essays on the importance of “a very old-­ fashioned kind of reporting.” For Broder, connecting with communities is “not that complicated. If you’re covering the campaign,” he continues, you need to know where (the votes are coming from), because I guarantee you the candidates know where those areas are. That’s where they’re going to concentrate and that’s where you ought to be doing your reporting. Then you basically knock on doors. The best times to do it are starting around 3 or 3:30 in the afternoon. Before that you get only retirees. And retirees are important but you want a mix. And depending on the part of the country you’re in you can work until 7:30 or 8, some places 8:30, without interrupting people too much. Then you have conversations. It is not like polling. It is very different from polling. It’s asking them what’s on their minds. You’re not coming with a fixed set of questions and asking them to respond.33 Other interviewees referenced an article by journalist Geneva Overholser, recalling her self-­reflections on the responsibility reporters have to citizens. As she put it, “We need to have a vision of our communities, what they are and what they could be, and the roles we can play in making it come about. . . . Every time we think to ourselves that the political process is leaderless, self-­important, risk-­averse, colorless, self-­perpetuating, pays lip service to change and avoids action on it—we ought to ask ourselves: Is this politics we are describing? Or us?”34 Journalistic self-­reflections in 2016 similarly focused on listening.35 Reporter and media critic Jeff Jarvis prescribed, “Listen. Observe. Don’t talk. Don’t test your ideas. Don’t interview them to get quotes. Just watch and listen. Learn about their problems and goals. Find out how they try to accomplish those goals now and what frustrates them. Ask what they believe they need to know. Listen for where they’re confused, wrong, worried, and

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curious. Empathize. Don’t come back until you can give me insights about their lives and needs. Bring me evidence of what you find out. Then build a new journalism around them.”36 He concluded, “if we can do this—better informing and building trust even with Trump’s community—we can do the same for any community.”37 Spinning Involves Listening for Context A second prescription offered by the interviewees connects to another theme in chapter 5: how journalists feel pressured to call out the voices of campaign strategists in the news. Referred to by our interviewees as “spinners,” “hacks,” “handlers,” “the commentariat,” and “players in the food fight,” the campaign professionals who chime in on the news cycle troubled our reporters for several reasons. While our interviewees credited their resources, intelligence, elegance, and political success, they worried that strategists (1) do not respect the basics of reporting (e.g., “have never covered a car accident,” “have never worked the phones to do real research,” “What they do is all top of head, not real investigating or real background”), (2) do not respect the norms of objectivity (e.g., “They have never had to be fair,” “They just spin,” “They have answers for everything”), (3) do not focus on the real campaign (e.g., “They spend way too much time talking to themselves and trying to impress each other,” “They only talk to each other and are several degrees away from what is really happening”), and (4) do not respect the ultimate purpose of journalism—creating conditions in which citizens can self-­ govern (e.g., “so many in the commentariat have an agenda,” “Why should a voter be involved? Their columns have everything to do with their spin and nothing to do with voters or why people should vote”38). While the content analytic data show that reporters often reward these very political strategists with news coverage (see chapters 2 and 3), our interviewees acknowledged that one way to take these forces out of the campaign conversation is to attend to broader issues. Shifting the focus, as journalist Buzz Merritt and scholar Maxwell McCombs observe, tends to frustrate strategists because it “moves some of the control” of the news cycle out of their hands.39 Journalist Eric Alterman, too, advises that spinners can only influence the conversation when their spin fits the prevailing news narrative. As long as timeliness is the currency of news, he observes, “wisdom is judged not on the depth of knowledge, but the speed with which it is acquired.”40 He contends that “a more honest journalism could deal a mighty blow to the power of pseudo-­language, pseudo-­events and pseudo-­environments

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in American politics”41 by replacing it with reporting emphasizing “context and deeper expertise,” for spinners would “have to revert to becoming real journalists again, forced to test their desk-­hardened opinions against a messy reality.”42 Listening for greater contextual information, then, can help journalists limit the power of the strategist in the news. This listening can also lead to compelling, unexpected coverage about the election—the good stories that our reporters unanimously respected. In her work, Deborah Potter contends that listening to how a community conceives of a topic (like transportation) and understanding what they have to say about it (where the traffic jams occur, what the biggest problems are with public transportation, etc.) can help journalists tell valuable stories for their communities, without constantly resorting to what candidates have to say about the topic. She writes, “If you frame the story” from the citizen’s perspective, and then include what the candidates are saying, “you can make the stories quite interesting.”43 Additionally, in his handbook of reporting, Rob Armstrong encourages reporters to think of citizens as more than anecdotes, but as the actual “centerpiece of your story, the backbone of your story” something that can keep a reader all the way to the end. “That kind of approach,” he believes, “leads to reorienting your storytelling and coming at it from where the voters are.”44 Spinning Involves Listening to Citizen Journalism, Blogs, and Regional Reporting Many of the journalists we talked to were of two minds concerning citizen journalism and blogs. In their initial statements, they voiced concerns about the objectivity, accuracy, and credibility of the information spread via such practices and they questioned the practicality of seeking readers’ input on the news agenda. Toward the end of their interviews, however, they resigned themselves to admit that a third important type of listening includes attending to the content and tone of these voices. One senior reporter did so with a dramatic gesture, licking his finger and putting it up into a hypothetical breeze, advising us to “follow the blogs. The answer may be there.”45 After sharing their concerns about the potential costs of turning too much of the news agenda over to uninformed citizens, many of the journalists acknowledged how some of their well-­known peers (citing Broder again, as well as William Greider and Dan Gillmor) call for exactly such a move. Several cited a Broder speech that emphasized an openness to citizen input. Indeed, in his address to the 1979 winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Broder stated, “We

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might even encourage the readers to contribute their own information and understanding to the process. We might even find ourselves acknowledging something most of us find hard to accept: that they have something to tell us, as well as to hear from us. And if those readers felt they were part of a communications process in which they were participants and not just passive consumers, then they might more easily understand that their freedoms— and not just ours—are endangered when the search warrants and subpoenas are visited on the press.”46 Greider argued similarly, noting how news organizations determined to bring people back into public life will “create a space for them in the political debate and draw them into it.”47 While Broder and Greider linked listening to citizens to a greater understanding of and connection to the press, Gillmor connected such a pattern to notions of trust. Contending that sources in authority were not fully forthcoming (and perhaps even not truthful) in their statements on events such as the 2000 presidential election, September 11, 2001, and the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Gillmor’s book We The Media (1) details a type of journalistic backlash against official sources’ accounts of events and (2) labels efforts to rely on everyday citizens without titles or expertise a type of “grassroots journalism.”48 Other scholars—namely Lance Bennett, Regina Lawrence, and Steven Livingstone—have added concerns surrounding the reporting of Hurricane Katrina to Gillmor’s argument, contending that a lack of press scrutiny led to exacerbated citizen frustration with elites and the press.49 Similarly, Michele Weldon has argued that the better way to report on Hurricane Katrina would have been “from the point of view of the people escaping the flood, not the ones in Washington arguing about how high the water was or whether or not the bottles of drinking water were on their way.”50 Several of our interviewees noted, particularly in hindsight, how the inclusion of such voices could help to remedy moments when they ran the risk of getting a political story wrong. Their examples ranged from admitting they had few real contacts on the ground in Florida in 2000 (to get a strong sense of what that close election meant to the voters of Florida), few strong connections to the Tea Party protests and town hall meetings in the summer of 2009 (to sense the frustration and anger of that movement), and few contacts in western Massachusetts to foresee and understand the rise of United States senator Scott Brown in a special election of January 2010 (an instance in which a little-­known Republican candidate beat tremendous odds to capture the seat of late Edward “Ted” Kennedy, a position that had been in Democratic hands in that state since 1953). In 2016, further, they

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admitted they were so eager to “ridicule Trump and his supporters, then dismiss them, and finally to actively lobby for their defeat” that they did not interrogate his connections with voters in either the primaries or the general election.51 And yet, it is difficult to underscore how many statements acknowledging the value of non-­elite sources were prefaced or followed by reporters’ concerns about change. Most of our interviewees noted how difficult it would be to see dramatic changes in reporting practices (particularly of detachment and of identifying with each other and with campaign and political elites). Three vivid ways that reporters reduced the dissonance of acknowledging how change would be difficult included discussions of online experimentation, local news, and Barack Obama’s online efforts in 2008. Reporters were honest, and often excited, about the potential for their online product to connect to citizens. A representative observation included how “there is so much space and experimentation with our online efforts. And, there are so many ways to link to other reform groups that might be interested in this type of things.”52 Several editors added that Election Day blogs could help them supplement traditional coverage. One editor put it this way: “The paper is experimenting with things to do on Election Day. Letting reporters put up blogs adds to the online coverage, gets into the lives of the voters, asks new questions about turnout, including asking who did you vote for? And why?”53 Several reporters also discussed the differences in election coverage between local and national outlets. Many expected that local news coverage might be more reflective of the concerns of individual communities, an observation borne out in academic research. Indeed, in examinations of local versus elite newspapers, Phyllis Kaniss showed how in the United States “the primary concerns of local news are often quite different from those which dominate national news and tend to reflect issues that are closer to people’s lives.”54 Bob Franklin and David Murphy found similar patterns in the United Kingdom as a “detailed examination of many local newspapers reveals how carefully they are geared to the needs of their local communities—both in content and style.”55 Our own data offer similar findings. In one study comparing the portrayals of voters in five local newspapers and two national newspapers in 2002, we found some promising portrayals in the local press in that midterm election. While national newspapers depicted voters as passive and inhabiting a negative context, local newspapers described them as more active, dynamic, and engaged. Examples of the texture of these portrayals can be found in

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articles from the Des Moines Register (which begins with a connection to the voice of voters) and the Washington Post (which focused on President George W. Bush’s key strategist, Karl Rove): From the Des Moines Register: On one issue, Iowa voters spoke clearly: They want the state’s gambling facilities to remain open. Voters in all 11 counties with casinos overwhelmingly approved pro-­gambling ballot measures.56 From the Washington Post: As Rove combs through a sheaf of computer printouts, gleaning statistics to support his case, he begins to sound more like a Patience man than a Bold man. A few thousand new voters here, ten or twenty thousand there, spell, in his mind, the chance to tip a handful of key states away from the Democrats. Over time a Republican majority will create itself.57 Additionally, our research comparing the portrayals of voters in electorally competitive swing states (Florida and Ohio) to less competitive states (Texas and California) prior to the 2012 election shows that reporters gave swing state voters more attention, interest, and agency than in safe states. In that study we also found compelling differences between how regional media (e.g., the Cincinnati Enquirer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Miami Herald, and Tampa Bay Tribune) and national news (Washington Post and Wall Street Journal) depicted electoral participation, observing how the national outlets paid far greater attention to strategists, with regional media allocating space in coverage for voters and voter concerns.58 Yet another of our studies compared coverage of voters in 1965 during the passage of the Voting Rights Act to that in 2013 surrounding the Supreme Court’s reversal of part of that legislation in Shelby County v. Holder. Results there show that in 1965—connected to a civil rights movement—outlets in the north (New York Times and Washington Post) and south (Dallas Morning News and Birmingham News) portrayed voting as an important, and contested, right. By 2013, however, only the Birmingham News depicted voting as a valued right; the other newspapers took a detached stance, discussing electoral participation as a partisan wedge issue that the Supreme Court justices and state legislatures would fight over rather than something involving, or important for, citizens.59 The reporters we talked to were cautious, however, in relying too heavily on regional and local news outlets as a place to resuscitate the meanings

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of voters in the news. Almost all of the interviewees told stories of how all newsrooms are facing cuts and many of them addressed how the cuts at smaller papers mean less original reporting on political concerns, particularly at the presidential level. One of our interviewees who traveled with the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential campaigns described how there were often no reporters from Arizona on the plane with them in 2008. “What has happened to the news,” he wondered, “if a senator from Arizona is running for president and no reporter from that state is traveling with the campaign?”60 Additionally, all but a handful of our interviewees also spoke at length about Obama as a person who influenced how they approached campaign reporting. Chapter 5 addresses how many of them believe that their emphasis on Obama’s efforts to connect with first-­time and irregular voters in 2008 led to a type of “human interest bias” in the news, casting Obama as positive, inclusive, and likable. In addition to voicing these concerns, journalists seemed intrigued by all of the online activity connected to the Obama campaign: the number of videos that were posted, emailed to friends, and viewed online; the emotional connection that the campaign team was able to create with millions of citizens online; and the risks that the campaign was willing to take in decentralizing so many of their Obama for America efforts. One reporter summed up the observations of many journalists by connecting Obama’s outreach strategies to an inevitable challenge facing newspapers during difficult economic times: “I mean, Obama had such a disciplined operation and they used the web so well to mobilize people. I think what newspapers could learn is how to use the web right. To get readers, we need to find them. They are not automatically coming to us. We have to find them so that they will buy us.”61 Spinning Involves Changing How We Talk About Voting In the beginning, we set out to only talk to journalists who covered presidential campaigns for the print outlets in our content analyses. Our interviewees, though, kept nudging us to talk to their colleagues who wrote on different beats as well as those who had left reporting for campaign work or to teach journalism. Those interviews offered insights that complemented the observations from our initial sample. One such digression came from a political-­reporter-­turned-­educator, who offered a lengthy observation on how many university professors and researchers are also guilty of neglecting voters. As he put it,

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Not only do reporters forget about voters, but scholars do, too. Voters are the audience for the news. We should want to give them as many cues about how to sustain democratic life as possible. Your data on references to the voters really mean something. They are more than just a slight form of style. News that engages voters has an impact. These references (to voters as actors) become a type of content in the news. Content that should be encouraged for the betterment of democratic life. We can’t take voters for granted, as journalists, as researchers, or as educators. They are the audience for news on campaigns and democratic life. It is a grave disservice to take them for granted.62 His remarks inspire a related prescription, underscoring how a broader set of individuals can help to advocate for voters when talking about electoral participation. By pointing the finger back at researchers and educators, this interviewee calls to mind patterns of neglect—in scholarly research, in curriculum, in public comments, and in language, itself—that may be equally as inadvertent for academics as for many of our interviewees. Topically, most political research focuses on elite actors, political candidates, and elected officials. While these players are certainly important, a fixation on their activities limits a broader understanding of citizen actions, appetites, and understandings. Methodologically, advances in measurement and analysis techniques have led to steady progress “in the amount of individual political behavior that could be explained.”63 While sophistication and rigor are certainly valuable advancements, scholars have long cautioned that analyses of American voting can seem “unrelated to American politics”64 or, in the words of V. O.  Key, have “no real bearing on politics” as it can be “extraordinarily difficult to relate those findings to the workings of government, the payoff of the political process, or a “continuing interplay between elite and mass” concerns.65 In the wake of the 2000 election, political scholars Ann Crigler, Marion Just, and Edward McCaffery returned to such an observation, contending that even though “participatory minimalists” appear to “have the better of things” in accounting for the power of individual voters, researchers may benefit by looking at participation more broadly, imagining it as “in and of itself, not just because it does or might in some remote counterfactual case affect actual political outcomes.”66 A plurality of approaches benefits any field, but given the elitist tendencies of political research, the point that scholars are (consciously or subconsciously) culpable of studying electoral participation as detached from voter or citizen concerns bears stating.

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Pedagogically, many university classes, too, emphasize the gamesmanship of elections, perhaps at the expense of addressing the fragility of democracy. Gregory Brunk’s research shows how individuals exposed to a “discussion of a model of rational choice participation” (in which the limited effects of each individual’s vote on the election’s outcome is emphasized) were found to be more negative toward the institution of elections and indicated that they would vote less often.67 Such findings have led to debates surrounding political science education, in which some have argued that “teachers should be much more aware of the political implications of their teaching” and “students should be told in a very explicit way that (certain) theories may explain how many current politicians behave but not necessarily how they should behave.”68 And, rhetorically, scholars are just as guilty (if not more so) than journalists of sidelining voters when commenting publicly on campaigns. A provocative content analysis conducted by Paul Brewer and Lee Sigelman shows that when researchers are quoted in the news, their quotations are often as shallow, strategic, and game focused as those offered by strategists and spinners. In their coding, these scholars found that more than half of political scientists’ quotations in the news featured the game frame alone (and 80% of the quotations featured the game frame either by itself or in conjunction with an issue or leadership frame). To assess if these data reflect how political scholars really think (imagining politics as a strategic game), or if these data better explain journalists’ selection processes (preferring strategic statements to those focusing on issues or leadership), they conducted a follow-­up content analysis of two years of published studies on elections. In doing so, they found that political scientists emphasized the game frame in 48 to 58 percent of published articles, leading them to conclude that “political scientists are probably witting participants in the gaming of campaigns.”69 A communication model advanced by Roderick Hart and Don Burks offers a mindset to change how people talk about voting. Their concept of rhetorical sensitivity provides a way of thinking about when and how to send messages.70 It is rooted in observations from prominent theorists with deep commitments to social interactions as the model is committed to how messages share content and shape interpersonal relationships. Hart and Burks credit George Herbert Mead’s work, noting that people are by nature “role-­takers”—as they anticipate and regard behavior prompted by social roles—and thus the “choice is not one of playing or not playing a role but of selecting among the roles available” to them.71 Hart and Burks also acknowledge John Dewey’s belief that communication is a shared experience. More

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than simple self-­expression, “genuine communication involves contagion; its name should not be taken in vain by terming communication that which produces no community of thought and purpose.”72 Guided by the notions that people are always playing one role or another (and roles influence how information is noticed and regarded) and that messaging should be generative (and offer more than what is simply notable to the speaker), they outline how rhetorically sensitive people are mindful of when to speak and what to say. In their minds, rhetorically sensitive people harbor an attitude toward communication that predisposes them to do several things. Primarily, they distinguish between all information and information that should be shared. Hart and Burks explain how “not all ideas and feelings are grist for our communicative mills.”73 Rhetorically sensitive people, then, are highly conscious that the most basic communicative decision is whether or not to say anything at all.”74 This fundamental observation connects back to V. O. Key and Gerald Pomper’s concerns about how academics and strategists were interpreting survey data about voters in potentially pejorative ways in the early 1960s. Such readings, they worried, could create trajectories that could create a self-­ fulfilling prophecy about the limits of voters over time. This contention also links to patterns in news coverage. As chapter 3 discussed, Republican strategists received ample coverage between the years 1972 and 2000. These hired guns, too, were signaled prophetic agency at that time. The journalistic instinct may have been to expose their roles and power in politics; reifying them through coverage, though, may not have been the story reporters wanted to tell. Additionally, through the 2016 campaign and into the early months of his presidency, Donald Trump was labeled as “trolling” for attention, sending tweets and saying things publicly to provoke reactions. In many cases, in these communications he cast himself as a victim to connect with followers.75 Writing in 2013, before Trump had surfaced as a Republican candidate, Ryan Holliday analyzed how tempting it is for the media to cover such claims of outrage, fear, and anger.76 The instinct to cover the influence of these Republican strategists and of Trump’s trolling invite pause; perhaps, not all of the negative attributions merit story lines that warrant constant recirculation. The contention, further, invites attention toward messages and story lines about elections that perhaps should be sent. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Paul Waldman, and James Devitt’s research shows how journalists found the 1996 campaign between Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican Bob Dole “boring.” The press’s lack of interest in that contest corresponded with a 40-­percent decrease in major print news outlet coverage from the 1992

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campaign between Democrat Bill Clinton, Republican George H. W. Bush, and Independent H. Ross Perot. Interestingly, the decline in coverage was met with the lowest voter turnout in a presidential election since 1924. In interpreting these data, Jamieson and colleagues questioned if the election was empirically boring, if the electorate organically felt that way, or if reportage encouraged an outlook nudging audiences to believe, as reporters did, that there was nothing notable about the campaign.77 Additionally, rhetorically sensitive people understand ideas can be rendered in multiple ways and are comfortable in taking multiperspectival approaches to phenomena. In developing these points, Hart and Burks contend, “Only rarely do the facts speak for themselves.”78 Rhetorically sensitive people, for them, consider a variety of verbal alternatives and viewpoints before “giving utterance to an idea.”79 The notions that individuals have the opportunity to take several different stances on a topic and these stances influence linguistic choices, is reminiscent of the cautions urged by Kurt and Gladys Lang in our introduction. Additionally, it forms the conclusion of Herbert Gans’s seminal book Deciding What’s News. Writing in 1979, he argued the news should be multiperspectival, presenting and representing as many perspectives as possible.80 In many ways, a multiperspectival approach to discussing electoral participation involves recognition of all three sides of the campaign trialogue: signaling attention to the rhetorical relationships between campaigns and reporters, campaigns and citizens, and reporters and citizens. Statistician Nate Silver offers a concrete application of this notion, particularly with regard to how polling data should be described in coverage. Silver’s background includes the development of PECOTA (a means of forecasting the performance of professional baseball players), successes in predicting presidential election outcomes (correctly calling forty-­nine of fifty states in 2008 and then fifty of fifty states in the 2012 contest), and editing the FiveThirtyEight​.com data journalism blog. In the column “The Media Has a Probability Problem,” he argues that the “media’s demand for certainty—and its lack of statistical rigor—is a bad match for our complex world.”81 Specifically, he addresses how statistical forecasting requires attention to probability and uncertainty—elements of importance to data scientists and of inconvenience to political reporters. It is tempting, he believes, for journalists to cherry-­pick poll findings to fit a preexisting narrative and to fall prey to confirmation bias by ignoring polling evidence that does not fit a preferred narrative. Newsrooms, for him, need to be more comfortable in linguistically signaling complexity and uncertainty in their reporting. Doing

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so increases the likelihood that news narratives “get the story right.” This approach, too, resembles our call for “thicker prediction” in chapter 2—narratives that embrace the complexities of the electorate, acknowledge multiple and varied concerns of voters, and move the story closer to electoral participants than professional strategists. While discussing the intersection of role taking, crafting messages, and considering whether to send them or not with a political reporter who also had experience on campaigns, he burst out with a sports metaphor. “Have you heard the phrase ‘working the refs?’” he asked. That question was followed by an explanation of the expression and a connection to the problem of the discounted voter. The saying, he described, refers to the practice of coaches complaining to referees about calls, not necessarily to get a specific one changed but to adjust the tone of the rest of the game. He gave an extended baseball example, discussing how managers approach umpires to bully them and to communicate expectations about future “make-­up” calls. When such efforts are successful, he continued, umpires are no longer focused on protecting the integrity of the game by being consistent and fair to the players. Rather, their minds are concentrated on the complaining managers. In offering this extended metaphor, he called attention to how in his professional experience, strategists have been working the reporters, affecting their perspectives, and deliberately influencing them to make questionable calls in their storytelling. One of the public voices in the media championing voting in recent years— largely by avoiding being “worked by political elites”—may strike some as a surprise. To place the longitudinal content analytic data presented in chapters 2 and 3 in stronger context, we further analyzed portrayals of voting in objective, partisan, and comedy television programming.82 Across all of these venues, the most ardent advocate for voting has been Jon Stewart, the former host of The Daily Show (a late-­night, half-­hour program that he hosted on the cable channel Comedy Central). While there are scholarly debates questioning if Stewart’s approach led to cynicism or engagement, most researchers agree that his lack of “objectivity” allowed him to address topics differently than traditional journalists.83 In our analyses of how he treated voters in the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, we found that in contrast to CBS News, Stewart advocated for voter potency (by reminding citizens of their roles in the polity), voter protection (by lambasting what he saw to be unfair voter identification legislation), and voter participation (by actually asking citizens, particularly young ones, to turn out on Election Day).

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On this latter theme, Stewart’s 2008 and 2012 Election Eve broadcasts were remarkably sincere. In 2008, Stewart’s interest in voting was apparent in two Election Eve segments: an interview with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and a segment with Stephen Colbert. First, Stewart asked Kearns Goodwin, “From a historical perspective, how long should you wait in line to vote before you say, ‘Ok. That’s it, I’m done.’” To this question, Kearns Goodwin responded that people should wait to vote, underscoring that it would be a historic election and how the selection of Obama could be a historical milestone. To this possibility, Stewart said, “It would be the first ‘show’ not ‘tell’ moment. You know so often this country is about possibility. You can be whatever you want to be. Anybody can be president. This is the first time that this would be demonstrable. Usually it is a white guy saying you can be president, lady. Wink. Wink. But now it can be shown, not told.” As the conversation continued, Kearns Goodwin shared that she believed young people would vote in record numbers the next day. In response, Stewart appeared to lose his train of thought and uttered, “I’d like to see it happen!” Swept up in an interview with a historian, Stewart did little to undermine democratic ideals; rather, his off-­script remarks were far less detached, negative, or cynical than the typical tone of mainstream news. Later that evening, Stewart joined his correspondent Stephen Colbert for a segment entitled “Get Out and Vote.” Stewart told the audience, “Both of us have a message for you people. Get out and vote! Election Day is like the Olympics for out-­of-­shape people. One day every four years. It can be grueling. It can take six hours. But on the upside, no doping tests. . . . By the way, to all the youth voters out there: do not blow this for us! Every four years, every four years, we hear about your vote-­rocking powers. And, every four years you stay home and play Super Mario. not this time!”84 In 2012, Stewart offered a similar commitment to electoral participation in his Election Eve program. In that year, he connected the importance of voting to “Super Storm Sandy,” a deadly and destructive hurricane that had recently affected the greater New York area. He closed his program with these words, “That’s our show. Join us tomorrow night, live election coverage at 11 o’clock here. And my final message before that would be, just please vote! I know there are people here in the Tri-­State Region that are struggling with the basic necessities. They are going to work their asses off to get to the polls. You should, too.” 85 Stewart has been adamant that he is not a traditional journalist. In a sense, his stance to politics may prevent him from falling prey to the tensions elite journalists voiced in chapter 5. Psychologist Steven Pinker contends that

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experts in many fields—ranging from the military, to law, accounting and finance, technology, music, cooking, sports, and art—struggle to communicate with non-­experts. He coins this condition the “curse of knowledge: a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know.” 86 The curse, he contends, plagues communication for it does not occur to professionals that their audiences are not mindful of what seems “too obvious to mention” or “clear as day.” 87 The curse, he continues, becomes insidious as it “conceals not only the contents of our thoughts from us but their very form,” for when people know things well, they forget how their audience may not be members of their exclusive “clubhouse.” 88 The elite journalists we talked to acknowledged how their preoccupation with exposing the power of strategists affects how they think, and write about, electoral participation. Pinker would find that professional focus common to the fixations experts hold in other fields. His solution—for reporters or specialists of all types—is to spell out situations and roles concretely so that audiences are not left out.89 In this case, that could mean occasionally signaling—even if not as pointedly as Stewart—the role and responsibility their audience has in the story of elections. To sum up, the time is ripe to start spinning for the voter. The metaphor of spinning invites attention to one of the most powerful ways to fight back and help shape the news, particularly after the contentious 2016 election. When organized groups, researchers, and educators are not mindful that even we have some influence over the key words of electoral participation, we become guilty, too, of contributing to the reification of elite forces over the American electoral system. Additionally, the metaphor addresses a characteristic that is often missing in other news reform strategies: the need to tell, or spin, a good story. Storytelling is a “god term” for journalists, a pattern apparent in the published literature and a key theme from our interviews. And, at the present time, it is at a type of crossroads. As ambivalent as our interviewees are about change, the forces of economic pressures, reduced readership, and technological innovations present change as an inevitable course. As one of our interviewees who spent thirty years in journalism before becoming an online editor told us, “Journalism has changed more in eight months than in thirty years. We are having to make many adjustments to our audience. We used to deliver our product to them. Now we have to attend to how they interact with our website as we are putting together our stories.”90 Now, in other words, may be a productive moment to advocate for news narratives that respect the importance of electoral participation in our democratic republic.

138   Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t

Conclusion Chapter 1 began by discussing two articles offering divergent perspectives of voting in the 2016 election. On November 8, 2016, a front page New York Times story discussed a rally at the University of Michigan, depicted fondness between the crowd and Barack Obama, and distributed his rationale for why people should vote for Hillary Clinton. On that same day, a front page Washington Post piece focused on voter confusion and included quotations suggesting that amidst the chaos, many people might not make the effort to turnout. We have taken a mixed-­method approach to study the linguistic cues surrounding voting in the United States. We focused on the word choices of print news journalists as they are the most prominent and public interpreters of elections. We paid close attention to the uses of the key words of voting because language, it is argued, often does our thinking for us. We also attended to the months prior to Election Day as coverage at this time sets the stage for electoral contests, cues the roles citizens should play in them, signals how closely the electorate should be paying attention to the campaign, and gestures to if and how participation even matters. We submit that a comprehensive look at how voters are invited to imagine their roles in elections is especially needed in the United States, as elites have an enduring ambivalence about electoral participation. Our findings address how in special times and circumstances over a sixty-­eight-­year period, the press has treated voters as engaged, voting as important, and participation as desired and widespread. Most of the time, however, voters have been dismissed in coverage and the primary agency in the news narrative has been reserved for public opinion polls and the strategists who are called upon as sources to read meaning into these data. Treating voters as sidelined may be an expedient act for time-­starved journalists, but it ultimately does not serve the press or democracy well. As Walter Dean Burnham offered, “the ultimate issues” are “to be located in the kinds of choices the system and its candidates offer to voters and the incentives and disincentives” that “these choices contain.”91 The coverage studied here shows how voters have been signaled far more disincentives than incentives to value their roles or consider their worth in the dominant news narratives of the elections. We hope that this book stimulates discussion about the treatment of electoral participation in the news as well as how coverage might help democracy and the press. Spinning for the voter has empirical, and normative, value. It

spinning for the voter    139

is a mindset journalists can employ in their reporting, and it is also a practice open to academics, educators, and other interested advocates in their daily lives. As Douglas Ehninger and colleagues wrote in the Prospect of Rhetoric, “Institutions in a free society are as good as the rhetorical transactions that maintain them.”92 A greater emphasis on the role that voters play in news narratives about elections can help the American political system and the news outlets that write about it.

Appendix

This methodological appendix provides an overview of the steps taken and measures employed in the content analysis, experiment and focus groups, and interviews.

Content Analysis This book presents findings from an extensive content analysis that keys on three pivotal terms (vote, voter, and voting—and their derivatives, e.g., votes and voters) found in print news coverage of presidential elections, between 1948 and 2016. These three terms were selected because they serve as the obvious markers of electoral participation. This time period was selected to offer a longitudinal understanding of the concept as well as an understanding of meanings of electoral participation prior to the widespread use of television and during the declines and resurgences in turnout. Texts While there are various media texts that can be analyzed to learn more about electoral participation, we chose to examine newspaper articles since newspapers tend to be the dominant agenda-­setter for other news outlets.1 For this study, six newspapers and wire services were examined: the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Atlanta Constitution, and Associated Press/United Press International.2 These specific newspapers were selected because the New York Times often sets the national agenda (and the agenda of televised nightly news),3 the Washington Post serves as another elite paper on governmental affairs, and the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Constitution, Christian Science Monitor, and Associated Press/United Press International provide regional perspectives, while still being widely read newspapers. All of the texts were drawn from the database of the Campaign Mapping Project (CMP)—directed by Roderick Hart and Kathleen Hall Jamieson.4

142   appendix

Two sets of analyses were conducted on the electoral key terms. Quantitative tests were run on all appearances of the electoral key terms in newspapers stored in the CMP database. Such analyses map trends in word usage over time. Additionally, a stratified random sample of all key terms was drawn and subjected to human coding techniques. We analyzed a sample of 540 instances for each key term (i.e., 30 instances of each term x 18 campaign periods between 1948 and2016). Accordingly, this project subjected 1,620 electoral key terms to qualitative and quantitative analysis. When we were interested in making statements about the proportions of electoral key terms in the CMP dataset, we reported “density ratios,” and such ratios were calculated by dividing the number of appearances of a particular key term by the total number of words in the newspaper. Coding Unit and Scheme The unit of analysis for this project is the electoral key term as located in a forty-­one-­word cluster (with twenty words of verbal content preceding and following the label, a commonly employed coding unit for this database).5 All of the texts were scanned and introduced to a key-­word-­in-­context program. The key words program located the three terms of the study and reproduced them with the twenty words preceding and following the electoral key terms. There are two parts to the following coding scheme. First, it features a series of simple descriptive measures. These include the following: key term (vote(s), voter(s), voting) and year (recorded). Also, we employed a set of variables derived from political theory and sociolinguistics to track the political setting leading up to the election (variables: mobilization agents, associations, context, time, and frame), the nature of the voting act (variables: assumptions, challenges, goals, and rewards), and the agency of the voter (variables: grammar, role, quality, potency, and behavior). The following paragraphs describe how these measures were developed and assessed. First, the mobilization agents variable tapped into the core of political campaigns. Scholars have examined the mobilizing agents that influence voter turnout, including: political parties,6 candidates,7 family members, groups such as the League of Women Voters, and churches.8 While there is no agreement on which mobilization agent has the biggest influence on voter turnout, many seem to agree that a decrease in electoral mobilization is partially responsible for the decline in voter turnout between 1950 and 1996. As Steven Rosenstone and John Hansen suggest, “political participation is

appendix   143

the product of strategic interactions of citizens and leaders. Few people spontaneously take an active part in public affairs. Rather, they participate when politicians, political parties, interest groups, and activists persuade them to get involved.”9 The mobilization agents variable assessed if individuals were portrayed as mobilized in newspapers, and if so, who was soliciting votes. Mobilization agents: an entity mobilizing electoral participation 0. None/Unclear (“In 1996, 49 percent of eligible voters cast their ballot.”) 1. Political party (“The Republican Party needs your vote.”) 2. Candidates/Politicians (“Gore urged young adults to vote.”) 3. Friends/Family (“A voter said her vote choice was influenced by her family.”) 4. Other voters (“Local voters gathered to register new voters.”) 5. Other groups (e.g., interest group, church, etc.) (“The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has mobilized 4,000 voters in Florida.”) 6. Media (“MTV targets young voters.”) 7. Issue (“Abortion is getting much attention from conservative voters.”) 8. Mixed (“Both parties and their presidential hopefuls asked for their votes.”) The next variable is similar to the mobilization agents but does not include the element of solicitation. Ruy Teixeira argues that while election law changes and socioeconomic changes point to an increase in turnout, the decline in social and political “connectedness” is pulling turnout down.10 During political campaigns, citizens interact with political parties, specific candidates, the media, and other groups. The associations variable tracked those entities with which voters interacted and shared space in news coverage. Associations: a reference to some social entity with which the terms of electoral participation interact 0. None/Unclear (“Today, voters decide.”) 1. Candidates/Politicians (“4 percent of likely voters said they support Nader.”) 2. Citizens/Voters (“The first-­time voter was sitting next to an elderly voter.”)

144   appendix

3. Political party (“63 percent of Indiana’s voters favor Republican party ticket.”) 4. Other groups (“Voters talk about the election with their church members.”) The tone of the portrayal was examined by the context variable (a notion that has been used in several projects analyzing the Campaign Mapping Project).11 Context was measured as follows: Context: overall tone of the article as linked to the key term of electoral participation 1. Positive (“Your vote will move this country forward.”) 2. Negative (“Voting for the third party is complete waste of time.”) 3. Neutral (“You have an option to vote or not.”) Another concern was the rhetorical use of time in describing voters. Specifically, was electoral participation portrayed as an activity in the past, present, or future? This variable helped to interpret other variables by adding a temporal aspect to them. Time: the voter’s moment in history 1. Past (“Many voters were frustrated by what happened in the last election.”) 2. Present (“Voters are concerned about our foreign policy in the Middle East.”) 3. Future (“Democratic voters will be working hard for the next election.”) 4. Across time (“Today, voters had a chance to reflect on the decisions made four years ago.”) Framing scholars have documented the pervasiveness of “game” reporting.12 Researchers suggest that the media’s focus on strategic narratives (as opposed to public policies and issues) have created cynicism among the American electorate. This next variable looked at the frame surrounding the key word. Frame: What is the frame? 1. Game (strategy, horse race) (“Bush has built a ten-­point lead with undecided voters in the past week.”)

appendix   145

2. Issue (“Civil rights is primary issue these voters care about.”) 3. Mixed (“Candidates compete for the voters’ support on tax reform.”) 4. Other/Identity (“Experts suggest that voter apathy is growing especially among young adults.”) Next, we examined the nature of electoral participation through the following variables: assumptions, challenges, goals, and rewards. The assumptions variable explored the basic philosophy behind the act of voting as discussed in news coverage. Interestingly, there is no agreement on the assumption of voting in the academic literature. Some scholars argue that voting is a duty,13 while others argue that it is a right,14 or a choice.15 With this variable, we investigated the assumptions of voting that were presented in coverage of electorate participation. The variable was coded as follows: Assumptions: the assumption of (or philosophy behind) voting 1. Voting as a right (“I urge you to exercise your right to vote.”) 2. Voting as a duty (“Voting is your sacred duty as a citizen.”) 3. Voting as a choice (“You may choose not to vote.”) 4. Other/Unclear (“There is a controversy over electoral votes.”) The challenges variable assessed if electoral participation was portrayed as hard or easy. It tracked informational burdens as well as institutional barriers (e.g., complications with voter registration, voter ID requirements, long lines for voters). Challenges: a level of difficulty of engaging in electoral participation 0. Not Mentioned/Unclear (“As a citizen of this country, we have to vote.”) 1. Mentioned (“As initiatives and referenda proliferate, voters say that they need to enroll in graduate school to understand all the issues.”) The subsequent pair of variables examined the goals and rewards of electoral participation. The goals variable investigated if voters were (1) guided by a broad collective good or (2) driven by narrow self-­interests. Some economic political scientists suggest that voters seek private goals,16 while others contend that they seek greater collective goals than their immediate

146   appendix

self-­interests.17 Similar to the goals variable, the rewards variable tapped into what was promised to citizens as a reward of their participation. Goals: the goal behind electoral participation 0. None/Unclear (“Few voters are expected to turnout in November.”) 1. A broad (collective) goal (“Vote for liberty.”) 2. A narrow (private) goal (“Vote to protect your social security.”) Rewards: the benefit of electoral participation 0. None /Unclear (“Almost a half of eligible voters showed up on election day.”) 1. Tangible benefits (“A vote for Reagan is a vote for lower taxes.”) 2. Intangible benefits (“A voter said she felt good about fulfilling her civic duty.”) 3. Mixed/Other (“Early voting starts next week.”) Five additional variables traced citizens’ political agency. The grammar variable examined if the electoral key terms were used as a noun, verb, or adjective. The role variable investigated what kind of job was assigned to electoral participation. Specific attention focused on if voters were portrayed as a part of solution, or a part of problem. The potency variable looked at whether the voters, specifically, were portrayed as active participants or passive observers of political affairs. The behavior variable examined a verb linked to the voters, specifically, to assess how they were conceptualized in news coverage. (Note: both potency and behavior were coded just for the term voter[s]). The quality variable explored characteristics of electoral participation mentioned or implied in the news. These variables were coded as follows: Grammar 1. Noun (“The President would carry Mississippi with 70 to 80 percent of the vote.”) 2. Verb (“We are asking for everyone to vote.”) 3. Adjective (“Many people are concerned about voter fraud and suppression.”)

appendix   147

Role: the social or political job being performed by the voter(s), the act of voting, and the vote(s) 0. None/Unclear (“Mr. Ryan is a Democrat who plans to vote for Mr. Gore.”) 1. Part of the solution (“Your vote will get this country moving forward again.”) 2. Part of the problem (“Democracy is in decline because an estimated 100 million eligible voters don’t vote on Election Day.”)

Potency: a stated or implied task being projected on to voters 0. None/Unclear (“There are a growing number of Latino voters.”) 1. As actors (“In California, voters have requested 3.2 million absentee ballots.”) 2. As recipients (“The candidate alienated young voters.”) 3. Balanced (“Clinton made an effort to get voters to reflect on the progress he asserts has occurred during his watch.”) The behavior variable tracked what, exactly, voters do. Theorists have conceived of voters as rational (thinking), psychologically driven (feeling), and acting entities.18 The behavior variable investigated how voters were conceptualized in news coverage. Behavior (based on verb): How does the coverage conceptualize the voter as measured by the voter-­linked verb? 0. None/Unclear (“The survey of 1,000 voters was conducted last month.”) 1. Thinking (rational) body (“Voters questioned the candidate’s qualification.”) 2. Feeling (emotional) body (“Voters are frustrated with the current situation.”) 3. Acting body (“Voters organized the protest.”) Finally, the qualities of the voters and electoral participation were measured. While the behavior variable depended on verbs, this variable was

148   appendix

based on adjectival phrases and assessed implicit and explicit traits attached to voters and their electoral participation in newspaper articles.19 Quality (based on adjectival phrases): qualities of the voters, vote(s), and voting mentioned or implied 0. None/Unclear (“Voters cast their ballots.”) 1. Undecided/Potential (“Many undecided voters watched the debate.”) 2. Partisan (“Republican voters are better mobilized than Democratic voters.”) 3. Independent (“This election hinges on independent voters.”) 4. Demographic/Numbers (“Gore made a special appeal to women voters,” “Gore needs about 5,000 voters”) 5. Affect (positive or negative) (“Apathetic voters have been a fixture in American politics.”) 6. Intellectual (positive or negative) (“They are sophisticated voters.”) 7. Candidate-­centered (“Perot voters are excited to vote.”) 8. Other (“Young voters are considered apathetic about the candidates, but they are quite knowledgeable about issues like environment and education.”) A team of coders was trained on this coding scheme. After acceptable reliability was reached, the team coded the texts. Both authors engaged in the content analytic coding, double-­coding over 10 percent of the articles, as well. The inter-­coder reliability statistics show acceptable agreement across coding decisions.20 After analyzing the texts with this coding system, we ran a series of descriptive and nonparametric statistics on these data to answer our research questions.

Experiment and Focus Groups In order to learn more about the portrayals of voters in newspapers, an online experiment was conducted in January 2008 with a nationally representative sample of adults (n = 337). Participants read a manipulated newspaper article which contained a paragraph featuring the attributes of voters found in the content analysis and then were asked to complete a number of survey items tapping into citizens’ intention to vote, sense of civic duty, political efficacy,

appendix   149 Table 3.  Coding results by label

Mobilization agents   None/Unclear   Political party   Candidates/Politicians   Friends/Family   Other voters   Other groups   Media   Issue   Mixed Associations   None/Unclear   Candidates/Politicians   Citizens/Voters   Political party   Other groups Context   Positive   Negative   Neutral Time   Past   Present   Future   Across time Frame   Game   Issue   Mixed   Other/Identity Assumptions   Right   Duty   Choice   Other/Unclear Challenges   Not mentioned   Mentioned

Vote (n = 540) No. (%)

Voter (n = 540) No. (%)

Voting (n = 540) No. (%)

Total (n = 1620) No. (%)

354 (65.56) 27 (5.00) 103 (19.07) 1 (0.19)

274 (50.74) 27 (5.00) 179 (33.15) 0 (0)

395 (73.15) 19 (3.52) 77 (14.26) 1 (0.19)

1023 (63.15) 73 (4.51) 359 (22.16) 2 (0.12)

7 (1.30) 10 (1.85) 4 (0.74) 17 (3.15) 17 (3.15)

3 (0.56) 11 (2.04) 2 (0.37) 21 (3.89) 23 (4.26)

3 (0.56) 7 (1.30) 0 (0) 19 (3.52) 19 (3.52)

13 (0.80) 28 (1.73) 6 (0.37) 57 (3.52) 59 (3.64)

15 (2.78) 311 (57.59) 37 (6.85) 155 (28.70) 22 (4.07)

41 (7.59) 308 (57.04) 5 (0.93) 138 (25.56) 48 (8.89)

33 (6.11) 254 (47.04) 80 (14.81) 149 (27.59) 24 (4.44)

89 (5.49) 873 (53.89) 122 (7.53) 442 (27.28) 94 (5.80)

7 (1.30) 61 (11.30) 472 (87.41)

15 (2.78) 83 (15.37) 442 (81.85)

21 (3.89) 114 (21.11) 405 (75.00)

43 (2.65) 258 (15.93) 1319 (81.42)

53 (9.81) 447 (82.78) 7 (1.30) 33 (6.11)

20 (3.70) 491 (90.93) 3 (0.56) 26 (4.81)

23 (4.26) 449 (83.15) 5 (0.93) 63 (11.67)

96 (5.93) 1387 (85.62) 15 (0.93) 122 (7.53)

296 (54.81) 40 (7.41) 25 (4.63) 179 (33.15)

190 (35.19) 50 (9.26) 59 (10.93) 241 (44.63)

149 (27.59) 84 (15.56) 38 (7.04) 269 (49.81)

635 (39.20) 174 (10.74) 122 (7.53) 689 (42.53)

21 (3.89) 7 (1.30) 487 (90.19) 25 (4.63)

13 (2.41) 3 (0.56) 494 (91.48) 30 (5.56)

43 (7.96) 6 (1.11) 415 (76.85) 76 (14.07)

77 (4.75) 16 (0.99) 1396 (86.17) 131 (8.09)

521 (96.48) 19 (3.52)

513 (95.00) 27 (5.00)

489 (90.56) 51 (9.44)

1523 (94.01) 97 (5.99)

(continued)

150   appendix Table 3.  Coding results by label (cont’d) Vote (n = 540) No. (%) Goals   None/Unclear 421 (77.96)   Broad 6 (1.11)   Narrow 113 (20.93) Rewards   None/Unclear 502 (92.96)   Tangible 32 (5.93)   Intangible 3 (0.56)   Mixed/Other 3 (0.56) Grammar   Noun 356 (65.93)   Verb 173 (32.04)   Adjective 11 (2.04) Role   None/Unclear 504 (93.33)   Part of solution 25 (4.63)   Part of problem 11 (2.04) Quality   None/Unclear 252 (46.67)   Undecided/Potential 5 (0.93)   Partisan 16 (2.96)   Independent 1 (0.19)   Demographic/Numbers 186 (34.44)   Affect 2 (0.37)   Intellectual 0 (0)   Candidate-centered 25 (4.63)   Other 53 (9.81) Potency (coded for voter only)   None/Unclear   As actor   As recipient   Balanced Behavior (coded for voter only)   None/Unclear   Thinking body   Feeling body   Acting body

Voter (n = 540) No. (%)

Voting (n = 540) No. (%)

Total (n = 1620) No. (%)

465 (86.11) 27 (5.00) 48 (8.89)

377 (69.81) 33 (6.11) 130 (24.07)

1263 (77.96) 66 (4.07) 291 (17.96)

484 (89.63) 46 (8.52) 6 (1.11) 4 (0.74)

454 (84.07) 60 (11.11) 22 (4.07) 4 (0.74)

1440 (88.89) 138 (8.52) 31 (1.91) 11 (0.68)

495 (91.67) 0 (0) 45 (8.33)

103 (19.07) 210 (38.89) 227 (42.04)

954 (58.89) 383 (23.64) 283 (17.47)

497 (92.04) 23 (4.26) 20 (3.70)

496 (91.85) 24 (4.44) 20 (3.70)

1497 (92.41) 72 (4.44) 51 (3.15)

230 (42.59) 61 (11.30) 21 (3.89) 14 (2.59) 160 (29.63) 13 (2.41) 0 (0) 10 (1.85) 31 (5.74)

393 (72.78) 11 (2.04) 10 (1.85) 0 (0) 35 (6.48) 1 (0.19) 0 (0) 37 (6.85) 53 (9.81)

875 (54.01) 77 (4.75) 47 (2.90) 15 (0.93) 381 (23.52) 16 (0.99) 0 (0) 72 (4.44) 137 (8.46)

177 (32.78) 186 (34.44) 145 (26.85) 32 (5.93) 326 (60.37) 73 (13.52) 44 (8.15) 97 (17.96)

appendix   151 Table 4.  Coding results by era

Mobilization agents   None/unclear   Political party   Candidates/politicians   Friends/family   Other voters   Other groups   Media   Issue   Mixed Associations   None/unclear   Candidates/politicians   Citizens/voters   Political party   Other groups Context   Positive   Negative   Neutral Time   Past   Present   Future   Across time Frame   Game   Issue   Mixed   Other/identity Assumptions   Right   Duty   Choice   Other/unclear Challenges   Not mentioned   Mentioned

1948 –1968 (n = 540) No. (%)

1972 –2000 (n = 720) No. (%)

2004, 2012, and 2016 (n = 270) No. (%)

2008 (n = 90) No. (%)

Total (n = 1620) No. (%)

314 (58.15) 37 (6.85) 141 (26.11) 2 (0.37)

476 (66.11) 23 (3.19) 140 (19.44) 0 (0)

185 (68.52) 12 (4.44) 58 (21.48) 0 (0)

48 (53.33) 1 (1.11) 20 (22.22) 0 (0)

1023 (63.15) 73 (4.51) 359 (22.16) 2 (0.12)

4 (0.74) 6 (1.11) 0 (0) 15 (2.78) 21 (3.89)

3 (0.42) 15 (2.08) 2 (0.28) 32 (4.44) 29 (4.03)

4 (1.48) 4 (1.48) 1 (0.37) 3 (1.11) 3 (1.11)

2 (2.22) 3 (3.33) 3 (3.33) 7 (7.78) 6 (6.67)

13 (0.80) 28 (1.73) 6 (0.37) 57 (3.52) 59 (3.64)

16 (2.96) 268 (49.63) 21 (3.89) 212 (39.26) 23 (4.26)

28 (3.89) 428 (59.44) 59 (8.19) 176 (24.44) 29 (4.03)

37 (13.70) 125 (46.30) 35 (13.00) 37 (13.70) 36 (13.33)

8 (8.89) 52 (57.78) 7 (7.78) 17 (18.89) 6 (6.67)

89 (5.49) 873 (53.89) 122 (7.53) 442 (27.28) 94 (5.80)

9 (1.67) 78 (14.44) 453 (83.89)

10 (1.39) 104 (14.44) 606 (84.17)

18 (6.67) 63 (23.33) 189 (70.00)

6 (6.67) 13 (14.44) 71 (78.89)

43 (2.65) 258 (15.93) 1319 (81.42)

33 (6.11) 465 (86.11) 0 (0) 42 (7.78)

31 (4.31) 627 (87.08) 0 (0) 62 (8.61)

26 (9.63) 217 (80.37) 14 (5.19) 13 (4.81)

6 (6.67) 78 (86.67) 1 (1.11) 5 (5.56)

96 (5.93) 1387 (85.62) 15 (0.93) 122 (7.53)

203 (37.59) 56 (10.37) 26 (4.81) 255 (47.22)

299 (41.53) 50 (6.94) 49 (6.81) 322 (44.72)

113 (41.85) 52 (19.26) 39 (14.44) 66 (24.44)

20 (22.22) 16 (17.78) 8 (8.89) 46 (51.11)

635 (39.20) 174 (10.74) 122 (7.53) 689 (42.53)

25 (4.63) 4 (0.74) 472 (87.41) 39 (7.22)

21 (2.92) 6 (0.83) 664 (92.22) 29 (4.03)

25 (9.26) 5 (1.85) 190 (70.37) 50 (18.52)

6 (6.67) 1 (1.11) 70 (77.78) 13 (14.44)

77 (4.75) 16 (0.99) 1396 (86.17) 131 (8.09)

514 (95.19) 26 (4.81)

699 (97.08) 21 (2.92)

232 (85.93) 38 (14.07)

78 (86.67) 12 (13.33)

1523 (94.01) 97 (5.99)

(continued)

152   appendix Table 4.  Coding results by era (cont’d)

Goals   None/unclear   Broad   Narrow Rewards   None/unclear   Tangible   Intangible   Mixed/other Grammar   Noun   Verb   Adjective Role   None/unclear   Part of solution   Part of problem Quality   None/unclear   Undecided/potential   Partisan   Independent   Demographic/numbers   Affect   Intellectual   Candidate-centered   Other

1948 –1968 (n = 540) No. (%)

1972 –2000 (n = 720) No. (%)

2004, 2012, and 2016 (n = 270) No. (%)

2008 (n = 90) No. (%)

Total (n = 1620) No. (%)

407 (75.37) 30 (5.56) 103 (19.07)

565 (78.47) 26 (3.61) 129 (17.92)

217 (80.37) 5 (1.85) 48 (17.78)

74 (82.22) 5 (5.56) 11 (12.22)

1263 (77.96) 66 (4.07) 291 (17.96)

474 (87.78) 48 (8.89) 11 (2.04) 7 (1.30)

637 (88.47) 66 (9.17) 15 (2.08) 2 (0.28)

247 (91.48) 18 (6.67) 5 (1.85) 0 (0)

82 (91.11) 6 (6.67) 0 (0) 2 (2.22)

1440 (88.89) 138 (8.52) 31 (1.91) 11 (0.68)

329 (60.93) 116 (21.48) 95 (17.59)

421 (58.47) 167 (23.19) 132 (18.33)

154 (57.04) 75 (27.78) 41 (15.19)

50 (55.56) 25 (27.78) 15 (16.67)

954 (58.89) 383 (23.64) 283 (17.47)

505 (93.52) 19 (3.52) 16 (2.96)

696 (96.67) 6 (0.83) 18 (2.50)

213 (78.89) 44 (16.30) 13 (4.81)

83 (92.22) 3 (3.33) 4 (4.44)

1497 (92.41) 72 (4.44) 51 (3.15)

291 (53.89) 18 (3.33) 14 (2.59) 9 (1.67) 133 (24.63) 3 (0.56) 0 (0) 32 (5.93) 40 (7.41)

423 (58.75) 41 (5.69) 21 (2.92) 3 (0.42) 163 (22.64) 4 (0.05) 0 (0) 24 (3.33) 41 (5.69)

62 (68.89) 3 (3.33) 2 (2.22) 1 (1.11) 13 (14.44) 1 (1.11) 0 (0) 2 (2.22) 6 (6.67)

875 (54.01) 77 (4.75) 47 (2.90) 15 (0.93) 381 (23.52) 16 (0.99) 0 (0) 72 (4.44) 137 (8.46)

1948 –1968 (n = 180)

1972 –2000 (n = 240)

99 (36.67) 15 (5.56) 10 (3.70) 2 (0.74) 72 (26.67) 8 (2.96) 0 (0) 14 (5.19) 50 (18.52) 2004, 2012, and 2016 (n = 90)

2008 (n = 30)

Total (n = 540)

77(32.08) 82 (34.17) 64 (26.67) 17 (7.08)

25 (27.78) 30 (33.33) 32 (35.56) 3 (3.33)

9 (30.00) 12 (40.00) 5 (16.67) 4 (13.33)

177 (32.78) 186 (34.44) 145 (26.85) 32 (5.93)

147 (61.25) 39 (16.25) 18 (7.50) 36 (15.00)

53 (58.89) 13 (14.44) 10 (11.11) 14 (15.56)

14 (46.67) 6 (20.00) 4 (13.33) 6 (20.00)

326 (60.37) 73 (13.52) 44 (8.15) 97 (17.96)

Potency (coded for voter only)   None/unclear 66 (36.67)   As actor 62 (34.44)   As recipient 44 (24.44)   Balanced 8 (4.44) Behavior (coded for voter only)   None/unclear 112 (62.22)   Thinking body 15 (8.33)   Feeling body 12 (6.67)   Acting body 41 (22.78)

appendix   153

perception of meaningfulness of elections, information-­seeking desires, and trust in news media. Procedure Each participant completed a questionnaire regarding media habits and political engagement and then was randomly assigned to one of three conditions: the mobilized-­participant condition, the isolated-­spectator condition, or a control condition. In the mobilized-­participant condition and the isolated-­spectator condition, participants read a newspaper article containing a manipulation paragraph; in the control condition, participants read the same article without a manipulation paragraph. After the participants read their article, they were asked a series of questions pertaining to political beliefs and attitudes. Participants Participants were recruited through Polimetrix (now YouGov, https://​today​ .yougov​.com​/find​-­solutions/), a leading firm in online opinion measurement in political science. Three-­hundred and thirty-­seven adults participated in the study. Fifty percent of participants were female, 77 percent identified as white or Caucasian, 11 percent identified as Black or African American, 9 percent as Hispanic, and 3 percent as other. The average age of the participants was 45 years old (SD = 15.9, Range = 18 to 83). Sixty-­one percent of the participants had beyond a high school education. Since chi-­square tests indicated no significant differences between the experimental conditions, these demographic variables were not included as covariates. There were no significant differences for these demographic dimensions across the experimental conditions. Materials To create realistic news articles for each experimental condition, we worked with an experienced journalist with over thirty years of print journalism experience. The baseline story addressed the 2008 primary contests. The mobilized-­participant condition was created to mirror the patterns found in newspaper articles in the 1948–1968 and 2008 time periods and portrayed voters as being mobilized by the candidates and as important actors in electoral process. To reflect the characteristics of newspaper articles during this

154   appendix

period, party labels were inserted as well. The isolated-­spectator condition was crafted to represent newspaper coverage of voters between 1970 and 2000 and featured voters as numbers and demographics in horse race opinion polls. The total word count for each article was roughly 220 words. To maintain consistency among conditions, only one out of four paragraphs was manipulated. The control article consisted of three paragraphs that were identical in other conditions with no manipulation involved (thus, even the control group—that was not exposed to either of the other portrayals—read a newspaper article pertaining to the upcoming election). This step ensured that differences found between the control group and other conditions were due to the manipulation and not simply due to the exposure to election-­ related coverage. Measures The experiments featured an open-­ended question and a series of closed-­ ended items. The bulk of chapter 4 unpacks the responses to the open-­ended prompt (that asked participants to react to the article). Additional information on the closed-­ended measures appears below. dependent variables

Intention to vote was measured by the following question: “Looking forward to the 2008 election, do you expect to vote in the general election? Please indicate how likely you think it is that you will vote in the general election in 2008, where “0” means you definitely will not vote and “10” means you definitely will vote.” The self-­reported intention to vote is considered to be susceptible to the social desirability bias.21 However, since the experimental conditions were randomly assigned, it is safe to assume that any social desirability bias was also randomly assigned. Therefore, any differences across conditions should not be attributed to the social desirability effect. Civic duty was measured by the extent to which participants agreed with the following statement: “People like me have a duty to vote in elections.” The response options ranged from “strongly disagree,” “somewhat disagree,” “neither disagree nor agree,” “somewhat agree” to “strongly agree.” Political efficacy was measured in two dimensions: internal and external efficacy. Internal efficacy was measured by the extent to which the participants agreed with the following five statements (Cronbach’s alpha = .79): (a) “I consider myself well-­qualified to participate in elections”; (b) “I feel that I have a pretty good understanding of the important political issues facing

appendix   155

our country”; (c) “I feel that I could do as good a job in public office as most other people”; (d) “I think that I am as well-­informed about elections as most people”; (e) “Sometimes elections seem so complicated that a person like me can’t really understand what’s going on” (reverse-­coded). The response options ranged from “1 = strongly disagree” to “5 = strongly agree.” External efficacy was measured by the extent to which the participants agreed with the following three items (Cronbach’s alpha = .68): (a) “People like me don’t have any say about who gets to be president” (reverse-­coded), (b) “I don’t think public officials care much what people like me think” (reverse-­coded), and (c) “Candidates for office are only interested in people’s votes, not in their opinions” (reverse-­coded). The response options ranged from “1 = strongly disagree” to “5 = strongly agree.” Desire for information seeking was measured by the following question: “Are you interested in getting more information on the topic discussed in the article?” The response options consisted of “not at all interested,” “not so interested,” “somewhat interested,” and “very much interested.” Trust in news media was measured by the following six items (Cronbach’s alpha = .92): (a) “How much of the time do you think you can trust newspapers to report the news fairly?” (“none of the time,” “only some of the time,” “most of the time,” “just about always”); (b) “Thinking about the newspapers you are most familiar with, please indicate whether you think they are fair; (c) tell the whole story; (d) accurate; (e) can be trusted” (“not at all,” “not so much,” “not sure,” “somewhat,” “very much”); (f) “How much confidence would you say you have in the people now running the newspapers?” (“none at all,” “not much,” “some,” “a great deal”). For multiple item measurements, all scales were added and converted to 0 to 1, with higher scores representing higher levels of each dependent variable. independent variables

Participants were asked whether they identified as strong Republicans, weak Republicans, Independent-­leaning Republicans, Independents, Independent-­leaning Democrats, weak Democrats, strong Democrats or other (including Third party, apolitical or don’t know). Nineteen percent of participants identified themselves as strong Republicans, 12 percent weak Republicans, 10 percent Independent-­leaning Republicans, 12 percent Independents, 13 percent Independent-­leaning Democrats, 14 percent weak Democrats, 19 percent strong Democrats, and 2 percent don’t know. Those who identified as either strong or weak Democrats or strong or weak Republicans were classified as partisans (64 percent).

156   appendix

Political knowledge was measured by the following five items (Cronbach’s alpha = .66): “What job or political office is now held by Dick Cheney?”; “Do you happen to know which party currently has a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives?”; “Whose responsibility is it to determine if a law is constitutional or not?”; “How much of a majority is required for the U.S. Senate and House to override a presidential veto?”; “Which one of the parties would you say is more conservative than the other at the national level?” On average, the participants answered 3.7 out of 5 questions correctly (SD = 1.2). covariates

Because there were slight differences between the groups in the Polimetrix survey, we employed a set of covariates. Political interest was measured using the following question: “Some people seem to follow what’s going on in government and public affairs most of the time, whether there’s an election going on or not. Others aren’t that interested. How often would you say you follow what’s going on in government and public affairs?” The response options included “hardly at all” (4.7%), “only now and then” (4.4%), “some of the time” (32.6%), “most of the time” (57.9%). The average score was 3.44 (SD = .79). An ANOVA was conducted to see if there were any differences between the mobilized-­participant condition and the control condition. The results indicated some differences between the experimental conditions. Specifically, those who were in the mobilized-­participant condition showed a slightly higher level of political interest (M = 3.57) compared to the isolated-­ spectator condition (M = 3.37) and the control group (M = 3.39). Therefore, political interest was included as a covariate. Political participation was measured using the following question: “Here is a list of things some people do about government and politics. Have you happened to have done any of these things in the past?” Participants were asked to select from the following five political activities that they have done in the past: (a) Tried to persuade someone to vote for a specific candidate or party; (b) Wore a campaign button, put a campaign sticker on your car, or placed a sign in your window or in front of your house; (c) Attended political meetings, rallies, speeches, dinners, or things like that to support a particular candidate; (d) Worked for a political party or candidate as a volunteer or paid staff; or (e) Gave money to a political party or an individual candidate for public office. The political participation item ranged from “none of the above” (23.5%), “one of the above” (28.5%), “two of the above” (16.2%), “three of the above” (11.2%), “four of the above” (8.5%), and “all of the above” (12.1%). The average score was 1.89 activities (SD = 1.7). As with the political

appendix   157

interest item, an ANOVA was conducted to see if there were any differences between conditions. The results suggested no difference. Therefore, political participation was not included as a covariate. Previous voting behavior was measured using the following question: “Have you ever voted in local, state, or national elections?” Eighty-­nine percent answered yes. A chi-­square test indicated some differences between the conditions. Specifically, the mobilized-­participant condition had a higher percentage of participants who have voted before (93.7%) than the isolated-­ spectator condition (88.1%) and the control group (84.6%). Therefore, previous voting behavior was added as a covariate. Because younger participants offered shorter responses on the open-­ended prompt in the experiment than did older participants, we conducted three follow-­up focus groups with them to solicit reactions to the two portrayals. The focus groups were held on the University of Texas campus and college students were recruited via a participant pool. In the recruitment, they were told they would join a discussion on “news and newspapers.” Seven to ten participants were recruited for each group.22 These “group interviews”23 were held on June 23, 2009, and June 24, 2009. The discussion guide featured an introduction, then opening questions, introductory questions, transition questions, and key questions.24 The groups were recorded and transcribed and a thematic analysis was conducted on “the group discussion.” We made distinctions between what participants spent the most time discussing and their most important statements25 as well as listened to themes emerging in their statements. We stopped holding groups after the discussion in the third led to few additional insights in reactions to the articles.

Interviews To learn more about portrayals of voters in the news, we conducted fifty-­four in-­depth interviews with political reporters, editors, journalism educators, and online entrepreneurs. This approach is a good fit for understanding journalists’ experiences with the stable and shifting pressures and norms in newsrooms as well as the barriers to (and opportunities for) stories that involve citizens in the campaign narrative.26 Additionally, such interviews are central to descriptive projects as they allow previously unrevealed insights to emerge. In building this study, we drew from data in the content analysis. First, we used examples from the sixty-­eight-­year content analysis to ground conversations about the mobilized-­participant portrayal that led to increased levels

158   appendix

of political engagement and trust in the media and the isolated-­spectator portrayal that led to frustration with the media (see chapter 4). Second, we built the initial sample around journalists who wrote for the outlets included in our study (New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal-­Constitution, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, and Associated Press/United Press International). To schedule meetings with journalists who wrote for these papers, we placed phone calls and sent email requests and offered to send ahead an electronic copy of key questions for their review. While the original goal was to talk to reporters from the aforementioned outlets, our interviewees often recommended that we talk to other specific individuals to explore topics and questions that emerged through conversation (suggestions resembling a theoretical sampling approach).27 Specifically, they encouraged us to seek out (1) other named political journalists (who had covered specific presidential campaigns for newspapers beyond those mentioned above); (2) health, sports, and business reporters (who engage in advocacy reporting—supporting good health, the home team, and profits—and do not face pressures of “objectivity” as strictly as political reporters); (3) former reporters who now work for political campaigns (who are familiar with the processes of reporting as well as the strategies campaigns employ to try and influence the news cycle); (4) journalism educators (who are responsible for training the next generation of political reporters); and (5) online reporters and bloggers (who are conscious of the need to connect with audiences and aware of shifts facing papers as they attempt to produce print and online content). While our interviewees do not resemble a random sample, the participants reflected a pool of professionals of different ages and experiences who have worked for elite and regional newspapers, and who—on average—had at least twenty years of experience in reporting (although the online reporters and bloggers we talked to had an average of five years of experience in reporting before moving to these positions). Interviews were conducted in person or over the phone. Interviews ranged between forty-­five minutes and ninety minutes, with most interviews lasting about sixty minutes. All interviews began with an introduction to the project, including a handout to illustrate key findings from the content analysis as well as findings from the experiments. We then asked “grand tour” questions about portrayals in election coverage over the years to allow the journalists to “educate us” by “pointing out the key features—the routines, rituals, and procedures” associated with the depictions of our keywords.28 As journalists spoke, we listened for overall patterns as well as variations from dominant

appendix   159

stories (and asked follow-­up questions when journalists departed from overall patterns). We then asked “category questions” that invited journalists to discuss distinctions between the mobilized-­participant and isolated-­spectator portrayals, the norms and pressures facing reporters over the years and in specific elections, barriers to reporting on voters, and opportunities for writing stories that resemble the mobilized-­participant portrayal.29 These questions were prepared in advance, but the interviews were loosely structured so that we could focus on certain topics depending on the expertise and responses of the journalists.30 Throughout the interviews, we asked the journalists to offer specific examples of stories that fit their responses. When possible, the interviews were audiotaped and all tapes were transcribed in full. Extensive field notes were taken during and after the interviews. Following in the tradition of ethnographic fieldwork, the names of the interviewees are not used in the project, as we were more interested in “the roles people perform and the positions they occupy” than in their individual personalities.31 Learning that they would not be quoted with identifying information permitted the interviewees to speak candidly, a key concern considering how journalists “often avoid being interviewed or do so with great care” as they (1) are well aware of critiques of bias and negativity in the media and (2) can “be defensive when reflecting on their own reporting.”32 When quoted directly, journalists are referred to as Journalist 1 through Journalist 54 (as designated in our interview schedule). A thematic analysis was conducted on the interview transcripts to search for general reactions to the project as well as for opportunities for (and barriers to) meaningful coverage of voters in campaign news.33 The data were revisited time and again to search for emergent patterns, categories, and themes as well as disparate patterns.34 Our efforts are descriptive and our hope is that future projects can continue to pursue the themes presented and potentially test hypotheses derived from this work.

Notes

Acknowledgments The epigraph is drawn from V. O. Key, The Responsible Electorate (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 7. 1.  Walter Dean Burnham, “V. O. Key, Jr., and the Study of Political Parties,” in V. O. Key, Jr., and the Study of American Politics, ed. M. C. Cummings (Washington, D.C.: American Political Science Association, 1986), 4. 2.  Philip Converse, “V. O. Key, Jr., and the Study of Public Opinion,” in Cummings, Key and the Study of American Politics, 40; David Mayhew, “Why Did V. O. Key Draw Back from His ‘Have Nots’ Claim?,” in ibid., 25. 3.  Milton C. Cummings, “V. O. Key, Jr., and the Study of American Politics: Conclusion,” in Cummings, Key and the Study of American Politics, 48. 4.  Burnham, “Key and the Study of Political Parties,” 3. 5.  Converse, “Key and the Study of Public Opinion”; Burnham, “Key and the Study of Political Parties”; Larry Bartels, “An Agenda for Voting Research,” in Election Studies: What’s Their Use?, ed. Elihu Katz and Yael Warshel (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2001), 59–­81.

Introduction 1.  Kurt Lang and Gladys Lang, Voting and Nonvoting: Implications of Broadcasting Returns Before Polls Are Closed (Waltham, Mass.: Blaisdell Publishing, 1968). 2.  John R. Carter, “Early Projections and Voter Turnout in the 1980 Presidential Election,” Public Choice 43, no. 2 (1984): 195–­202. 3. Thomas M. Guterbock and Robert P. Daves, “The Polls, Review Symposium Election Night 2000 in Perspective: Fluke or Normal Accident?,” Public Opinion Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2003): 1–­4; Joan Konner, “The Case for Caution: This System Is Dangerously Flawed,” Public Opinion Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2003): 5–­18. 4.  Issie Lapowski, “AP Psychics Call the Nomination for Clinton—­and They’re Right,” Wired, June 6, 2016, http://​www​.wired​.com​/2016​/06​/ap​-­­­psychics​-­­­call​-­­­nomina tion​-clinton​ ­­­ -they​ ­­­ ’re​-­­­right/. 5. Robert Costa, “In San Francisco, Berniecrats Lash Out at Media for Calling Nomination for Clinton,” Washington Post, June 6, 2016, https://​www​.washingtonpost​.com​ /news​/post​-­­­politics​/wp​/2016​/06​/06​/in​-­­­san​-­­­francisco​-berniecrats​ ­­­ -­­­lash​-out​ ­­­ -at​ ­­­ -press​ ­­­ -for​ ­­­ -­­­calling​-­­­nomination​-for​ ­­­ -­­­clinton/. 6.  Ibid. 7.  Lapowski, “AP Psychics.” 8. Ruairí Arrieta-­­Kenna, “The Worst Political Predictions of 2016,” Politico, December 28, 2016, http://​www​.politico​.com​/magazine​/story​/2016​/12​/the​-­­­worst​-­­­political​-­­­pre dictions​-of​ ­­­ -­­­2016–­214555.

162    notes to pages 2–5 9. Sam Wang, “Why I Had to Eat a Bug on CNN,” New York Times, November 18, 2016, http://​www​.nytimes​.com​/2016​/11​/19​/opinion​/why​-­­­i​-­­­had​-­­­to​-­­­eat​-­­­a​-­­­bug​-­­­on​-­­­cnn​ .html; Arrieta-­­Kenna, “Worst Political Predictions.” 10.  Josh Katz, “The Upshot: Who Will Be President?,” New York Times, November 8, 2016, http://​www​.nytimes​.com​/interactive​/2016​/upshot​/presidential​-­­­polls​-­­­forecast​.html. 11. Arrieta-­­Kenna, “Worst Political Predictions.” 12.  Jamin B. Raskin, “A Right to Vote: Amazingly, the Constitution Fails to Guarantee the Most Basic of Democratic Rights,” American Prospect, accessed November 4, 2015, http://​www​.thirdworldtraveler​.com​/Democracy​/A​_Right​_to​_Vote​.html; Steven E. Schier, You Call This an Election? America’s Peculiar Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003); Jamelle Bouie, “Making Voting Constitutional,” American Prospect, January 30, 2013, http://​prospect​.org​/article​/making​-­­­voting​ -­­­constitutional. 13.  Jennifer S. Rosenberg and Margaret Chen, “Expanding Democracy: Voter Registration Around the World,” Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2009, http://​www​.brennancenter​.org​/sites​/default​/files​/legacy​/publications​ /Expanding​.Democracy​.pdf. 14. Heather K. Gerken, “Make It Easy: The Case for Automatic Registration,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, no. 28 (Spring 2013), http://​democracyjournal​.org​/magazine​ /28​/make​-it​ ­­­ -­­­easy​-­­­the​-case​ ­­­ -­­­for​-automatic​ ­­­ -registration/; ­­­ “Automatic Voter Registration and Modernization in the States,” Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, accessed July 12, 2016, http://​www​.brennancenter​.org​/analysis​/voter​ -­­­registration​-­­­modernization​-­­­states/. 15.  Walter Dean Burnham, Voting in American Elections: The Shaping of the American Political Universe Since 1788 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Academica Press, 2010), 18. 16.  Ibid., 46. 17.  V. O. Key, The Responsible Electorate (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 4. 18.  Ibid., 4–­6. 19.  Ibid., 7. 20.  Gerald Pomper, Elections in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1968), 69. 21.  Ibid. 22.  Ibid., 254. 23.  Ibid., 14–­15. 24. Stephen Coleman, How Voters Feel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), viii. 25.  Larry Bartels, “An Agenda for Voting Research,” in Election Studies: What’s Their Use?, ed. Elihu Katz and Yael Warshel (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2001), 59. 26.  Ibid. 27.  Ibid., 60–­61. 28. Robert Entman, Democracy Without Citizens: Media and the Decay of American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); James Fallows, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (New York: Vintage Books, 1996); Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007); Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); Clifford G. Christians, Theodore L. Glasser, Denis McQuail, Kaarle Nordenstreng, and Robert A. White, Normative Theories of the Media: Journalism in Democratic Societies (Urbana-­­Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 29. Davis “Buzz” Merritt and Maxwell McCombs, The Two W’s of Journalism: The Why and What of Public Affairs Reporting (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 30.

notes to pages 5–8    163 30. Howard Rosenberg and Charles S. Feldman, No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-­­Hour News Cycle (New York: Continuum, 2008), 26. 31.  Lang and Lang, Voting and Nonvoting, vii. 32.  Carter, Early Projections, 195. 33.  Lang and Lang, Voting and Nonvoting, vii. 34.  Ibid. 35.  Ibid., xi. 36.  Pomper, Elections in America, 122. 37. Roderick P. Hart, Campaign Talk: Why Elections Are Good for Us (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 31. 38. Sharon E. Jarvis, Talk of the Party: Political Labels, Symbolic Capital, and American Life (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Roderick P. Hart, Sharon E. Jarvis, William P. Jennings, and Deborah Smith-­­Howell, Political Keywords: Using Language That Uses Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 39. Roderick P. Hart, Jay P. Childers, and Colene J. Lind, Political Tone: How Leaders Talk and Why (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 40. The Atlanta Constitution merged with the Atlanta Journal to become the Atlanta Journal-­­Constitution in 1982. References to this paper before the merger are referred to as the Atlanta Constitution; references after the merger appear as Atlanta Journal-­­Constitution. 41. Editorials, and op-eds were not included in the archive or our content analysis. 42.  George H. Douglas, The Golden Age of the Newspaper (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), ix, x. 43.  Marc Edge, Greatly Exaggerated: The Myth of the Death of Newspapers (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2014), 15; Keith L. Herndon, The Decline of the Daily Newspaper: How an American Institution Lost the Online Revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 7. 44. David M. Ryfe, Can Journalism Survive? An Inside Look at American Newsrooms (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2012). 45. H. Iris Chyi, Seth C. Lewis, and Nan Zheng, “A Matter of Life and Death? Examining How Newspapers Covered the Newspaper ‘Crisis,’” Journalism Studies 13, no. 3 (2012): 305; Philip Meyer, The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004). 46. David Lieberman, “Extra! Extra! Are Newspapers Dying? Closings Scare Some; Other Say No Way Newsrooms Will Die,” USA Today, March 18, 2009, 1B. 47. H. Iris Chyi and Ori Tenenboim, “Reality Check: Multiplatform Newspaper Readership in the United States, 2007–­2015,” Journalism Practice 11, no. 7 (2017): 1. 48.  Guy Golan, “Inter-­­Media Agenda-­­Setting and Global News Coverage,” Journalism Studies 7, no. 2 (2006): 323–­33; Stephen Reese and Lucig H. Danielan, “Intermedia Influence and Drug Influence: Converging the Cocaine,” in Communication Campaigns About Drugs: Government, Media, Public, ed. Pamela Shoemaker (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989), 29–­45; Daron Shaw and Bartholomew Sparrow, “From the Inner Ring Out: News Congruence, Cue-­­Taking, and Campaign Coverage,” Political Research Quarterly 52, no. 2 (1999): 323–­51; Ramona Vonbun, Katharina Kleinen von-­­Königslöw, and Klaus Schoenbach, “Intermedia Agenda-­­Setting in a Multimedia News Environment,” Journalism 17, no. 8 (2016): 1054–­73. Rens Vliegenthart and Stefaan Walgrave, “The Contingency of Intermedia Agenda Setting: A Longitudinal Study in Belgium,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 85, no. 4 (2008): 860–­77. 49. Ryfe, Can Journalism Survive?, 2; Russell Baker, “Goodbye to Newspapers?,” New York Review of Books, August 16, 2007, http://​www​.nybooks​.com​/articles​/2007​/08​ /16​/goodbye​-­­­to​-­­­newspapers/.

164    notes to pages 8–13 50.  John S. Carroll, “Newswar,” interview by Frontline, February 27, 2007, http://​ www​.pbs​.org​/wgbh​/pages​/frontline​/newswar​/interviews​/carroll​.html. Carroll continued, “Who’s going to pay for the news? Google and Yahoo! And those people aren’t putting reporters on the street in any number at all. They can link to the L.A. Times; why should they spend hundreds of millions of dollars gathering news when they can basically get it free? The blogs can’t afford it. Network television is taking reporters off the street. Radio journalism—­commercial radio journalism—­is almost nonexistent. The newspapers are the last ones standing and somebody’s got to do the reporting. Otherwise . . . there will be plenty of stuff on our computer terminals and the TV, but we will not really know very much. Public discourse will be diminished because the sheer reporting that goes into achieving the factual baseline just won’t be there . . . reporting is absolutely an essential thing for democratic self-­­government. Who’s going to do it?” 51. H. Iris Chyi and Mengchieh J. Yang, “Is Online News an Inferior Good? Examining the Economic Nature of Online News Among Users,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 86, no. 3 (2009): 594; Chyi and Tenenboim, “Reality Check,” 1. 52.  Michael Barthel, “Newspapers: Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center, June 15, 2016, http://​assets​.pewresearch​.org​/wp​-­­­content​/uploads​/sites​/13​/2016​/06​/30143308​/state​-­­­of​ -­­­the​-news​ ­­­ -­­­media​-­­­report​-­­­2016​-­­­final​.pdf. 53.  Pablo J. Bockowski, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 50. 54.  Bruce Gronbeck, “The Functions of Presidential Campaigning,” Communication Monographs 45 (1978): 268–­80; Sharon E. Jarvis, Maegan Stephens, and Soo-­­Hye Han, “Political Language in American Political Campaigns,” in Praeger Handbook of Political Communication in the United States, ed. William Benoit (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2016), 3–­24; Marion R. Just, Ann N. Crigler, Dean E. Alger, Timothy E. Cook, Montague Kern, and Darrell M. West, Crosstalk: Citizens, Candidates, and the Media in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Dan Nimmo and James E. Combs, Mediated Political Realities (New York: Longman, 1990); Robert M. Perloff, Political Communication: Politics, Press, and Public in America (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998). 55.  Craig A. Smith, Presidential Campaign Communication (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2015). 56.  Ibid., 46. 57.  Vanessa Beasley, You, the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2011); Thomas Patterson, Out of Order: An Incisive and Boldly Original Critique of the News Media’s Domination of America’s Political Process (New York: Vintage, 1994). 58. Smith, Presidential Campaign, 50. 59.  Kovach and Rosenstiel, Elements of Journalism. 60.  Jay Blumer and Denis McQuail, “Political Communication Scholarship: The Uses of Election Research,” in Katz and Warshel, Election Studies, 219–­45. 61.  Murray Edelman, Political Language (New York: Academic Press, 1977), xix. 62.  Burnham, Voting in American Elections. 63.  Key, Responsible Electorate, 7. Lang and Lang, Voting and Nonvoting.

Chapter 1 1.  Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 19. 2. Roger Yu, “How Do You Use the Media to Win? Just Ask Donald Trump,” USA Today, November 11, 2016, http://​www​.usatoday​.com​/story​/money​/2016​/11​/09​/trump​ -­­­presidential​-victory​ ­­­ -­­­lesson​-­­­how​-­­­use​-­­­media​-win​ ­­­ /93552638/.

notes to pages 13–18    165 3. Thomas Patterson, “Pre-­­primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race: Trump’s Rise, Sanders’ Emergence, Clinton’s Struggle,” Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, June 13, 2016, https://​shorensteincenter​ .org​/pre​-­­­primary​-­­­news​-­­­coverage​-­­­2016​-­­­trump​-­­­clinton​-­­­sanders/; Thomas Patterson, “News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Primaries: Horse Race Reporting Has Consequences,” Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, July 11, 2016, https://​shorensteincenter​.org​/news​-­­­coverage​-­­­2016​-­­­presidential​-­­­primaries/; Thomas Patterson, “News Coverage of the 2016 National Conventions: Negative News, Lacking Context,” Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, September 21, 2016, https://​shorensteincenter​.org​/news​-­­­coverage​-­­­2016​ -­­­national​-­­­conventions/; Thomas Patterson, “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed Voters,” Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, December 7, 2016, https://​shorensteincenter​.org​/news​-­­­coverage​ -­­­2016​-­­­general​-­­­election/. 4.  Patterson, “Presidential Primaries,” 12. 5.  Marjorie Hershey, “Constructing Explanations for Election Results: When ‘the Voters Have Spoken,’ What Have They Said?,” in Language, Symbolism, and Politics, ed. Richard Merelman (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), 89–­90. 6.  Ibid. 7.  John Zaller, “The Rule of Product Substitution in Presidential Campaign News,” ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science November 560, no. 1 (1998): 111–­28. 8. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2009). 9.  Keyssar, Right to Vote, 8. 10.  Keyssar, Right to Vote, 301. 11. See Richard Fenno, Homestyle: House Members in Their Districts (Boston: Little Brown, 1978). 12. Sharon E. Jarvis and Soo-­­Hye Han, “From an Honored Value to a Harmful Choice: How Presidents Have Discussed Electoral Participation (1948–­2012),” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 12 (2013): 1650–­62. 13. Dwight Eisenhower, “Acceptance Address to Republican National Convention” (speech, San Francisco, Calif., August 22, 1956), Campaign Mapping Project. 14.  John McCain, “Remarks at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner” (speech, New York City, October 16, 2008), Campaign Mapping Project. 15.  Barack Obama, “Acceptance Address to the Democratic National Convention” (speech, Charlotte, N.C., September 6, 2012), Campaign Mapping Project. 16.  Mitt Romney, “Remarks at Lake Erie College” (speech, Painesville, Ohio, September 14, 2012), Campaign Mapping Project. 17.  Jarvis and Han, “Honored Value.” 18. Sharon E. Jarvis, Laura Barberena, and Amanda Davis, Civics, Not Government: Redirecting Social Studies in the Nation’s Schools (research report of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Participation, May 2007). 19.  Jarvis, Barberena, and Davis, Civics, Not Government; Russell Dalton, The Good Citizen: How a Younger Generation Is Reshaping American Politics (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2008). 20.  Michael Schudson, Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2008), 88; Brandon Nyhan and John Sides. “How Political Science Can Help Journalism (and Still Let Journalists Be Journalists),” Forum 9 (2011), www.bepress /forum/vol9/iss1/art2. 21.  Gerald Pomper, Elections in America (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968); Ivor Crewe, “Electoral Participation,” in Democracy at the Polls: A Comparative Study of Competitive

166    notes to pages 18–21 National Elections, ed. David Butler (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1981), 216–­63. 22.  Ibid. 23. Richard S. Katz, Democracy and Elections (New York: Oxford, 1997), 100. 24. Hugh A. Bone and Austin Ranney, Politics and Voters (New York: McGraw Hill, 1971); Stephen Macedo et al., Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation and What We Can Do About It (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2005); Cliff Zukin, Scott Keeter, Molly Andolina, Krista Jenkins, and Michael W. Delli Carpini, A New Engagement: Political Participation, Civic Life, and the Changing American Citizen (New York: Oxford, 2006). 25.  Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964); Crewe, “Electoral Participation”; Katz, Democracy and Elections. 26. Robert Dudley and Eric Shiraev, Counting Every Vote: The Most Contentious Elections in American History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2008), 6. 27.  Katz, Democracy and Elections, 217. 28. Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960); Rick Shenkman, Just How Stupid are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 29. Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 113. 30. Antony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957). 31. Ann Crigler, Marion R. Just, and Edward J. McCaffery, Rethinking the Vote (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 231. 32. Robert Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 85–­86. 33.  Gerald M. Pomper, Elections in America (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1968); Guy, S. Goodwin-­­Gill, Free and Fair Elections (Geneva: Inter-­­Parliamentary Union, 2006). 34. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 64. 35.  Guillermo O’Donnell, “The Perpetual Crises of Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 18, no. 1 (2007): 6. 36. Dahl, On Democracy, 60. 37.  Pomper, Elections in America. 38.  Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Dennis F. Thompson, The Democratic Citizen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Pomper, Elections in America. 39.  Pomper, Elections in America, 28. 40.  Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks, The New American Voter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 41.  Pomper, Elections in America, 30. 42.  Macedo et al., Democracy at Risk, 12. 43.  Martin P. Wattenberg, Where Have All the Voters Gone? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). 44.  Michael McDonald, United States Elections Project, University of Florida, accessed December 1, 2016, http://​www​.electproject​.org​/national​-­­­1789​-­­­present. 45. Drew Desilver, “U.S. Voter Turnout Trails Most Developed Countries,” Pew Research Center, May 6, 2015, http://​www​.pewresearch​.org​/fact​-­­­tank​/2015​/05​/06​/u​-­­­s​ -­­­voter​-­­­turnout​-­­­trails​-­­­most​-developed​ ­­­ -­­­countries/. Also, data show that only 65 percent of the U.S. voting-­­age population is registered to vote, a number much lower than democracies such as Sweden (96%) or the United Kingdom (93%).

notes to pages 21–22    167 46.  Charlotte Alter, “Voter Turnout in Mid-­­Term Elections Hits 72-­­Year low,” TIME, November 10, 2014, http://​time​.com​/3576090​/midterm​-­­­elections​-­­­turnout​-­­­world​-­­­war​ -­­­two/. McDonald, Elections Project. 47. Steven J. Rosenstone and John M. Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America (New York: Macmillan, 1993); Wattenberg, Where Have All the Voters Gone? 48. Ruy A. Teixeira, The Disappearing American Voter (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1992); Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001); Paul Allen Beck, “The Role of Agents in Political Socialization,” in Handbook of Political Socialization: Theory and Research, ed. Stanley A. Renshon (New York: Free Press, 1977), 115–­41; Herbert Hyman, Political Socialization (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959); M. Kent Jennings and Richard G. Niemi, Generations and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Edgar Litt, “Civic Education, Community Norms, and Political Indoctrination,” American Sociological Review 28 (1963): 69–­75; Richard M. Merelman, “The Family and Political Socialization: Toward a Theory of Exchange,” Journal of Politics 42, no. 2 (1980): 461–­ 86; Norman H. Nie, Jane Junn, and Kenneth Stehlik-­­Barry, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Miranda Yates and James Youniss, “Community Service and Political Identity Development in Adolescence,” Journal of Social Issues 54, no. 3 (1998): 495–­512; David Buckingham, “News Media, Political Socialization, and Popular Citizenship: Towards a New Agenda,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 14 (1997): 344–­66; Marco Calvita, “Within the Context of Many Contexts: Family, News Media Engagement, and the Ecology of Individual Political Development among ‘Generation Xers,’” Communication Review 6, no. 1 (2003): 23–­43. 49. Teixeira, Disappearing American; Wattenberg, Where Have All the Voters Gone? 50. Robert M. Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm,” Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 52; Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); William Gamson, Talking Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); William Gamson and Andre Modigliani, “The Changing Culture of Affirmative Action,” in Research in Political Sociology, ed. Richard Braungart (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1987), 137–­ 77; William Gamson and Andre Modigliani, “Media Discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach,” American Journal of Sociology 95 (July 1989): 1–­37; Robert Entman, Jorg Matthes, and Lynn Pellicano, “Nature, Sources, and Effects of News Framing,” in Handbook of Journalism Studies, ed. Karin Wahl-­­Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitszch (New York: Routledge, 2009), 175–­90; Paul D’Angelo and James A. Kuypers, Doing News Framing Analysis: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010). 51.  William Gamson and Andre Modigliani, “The Changing Culture of Affirmative Action,” Research in Political Sociology 3 (1987): 143. 52.  Gitlin, Whole World Is Watching. 53. Entman, “Framing,” 52. 54. Entman, “Framing.” Gamson and Modigliani, “Changing Culture.” 55.  Murray Edelman, Political Language: Words That Succeed and Policies That Fail (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 3. 56.  Ibid, 65. 57.  John Joseph, Language and Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 131. 58.  Carol Gluck, Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 2.

168    notes to pages 22–25 59. Roy P. Clark, Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2009), 11. 60.  Joseph, Language and Politics, 46. 61.  Clark, Writing Tools, 9. 62.  Ibid., 11. 63. Harold D. Lasswell, Language of Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1949), 19. 64.  Karen Callaghan and Frauke Schnell, “Assessing the Democratic Debate: How the News Media Frame Elite Policy Discourse,” Political Communication 18, no. 2 (2010): 183–­213. 65. David A. Rochefort and Roger W. Cobb, The Politics of Problem Definition (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1994), 9. 66.  Lasswell, Language of Politics, p. 19. 67. Robin Lakoff, Talking Power: The Politics of Language (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 13. 68.  Ibid., 21. 69.  V. O. Key, Public Opinion and American Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961); John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Public Opinion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Philip E. Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David E. Apter (New York: Free Press, 1964), 206–­61. 70. Edelman, Political Language, 136. 71.  Ibid., 136–­37. 72.  Joseph, Language and Politics, 81. 73.  Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, An Introduction to Language (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974). 74. Hart et al., Political Keywords; Sharon E. Jarvis, The Talk of the Party: Political Labels, Symbolic Capital and American Life (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). 75.  Gamson and Modigliani, “Media Discourse,” 8. 76.  Matthew S. McGlone and R. Abigail Pfiester, “Does Time Fly When You’re Having Fun, or Do You? Affect, Agency, and Embodiment in Temporal Communication,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 28, no. 1 (2009): 3–­31. 77.  Matthew S. McGlone, Robert A. Bell, Sarah T. Zaitchik, and Joesph McGlynn, “Don’t Let the Flu Catch You: Agency Assignment in Printed Educational Materials about the H1N1 Influenza Virus,” Journal of Health Communication 18, no. 6 (2012): 740–­56; Robert A. Bell, Matthew S. McGlone, and Marko Dragojevic, “Vicious Viruses and Vigilant Vaccines: Effects of Linguistic Agency Assignment in Health Policy Advocacy,” Journal of Health Communication 19, no. 10 (2014): 1178–­95. 78.  McGlone et al., “Don’t Let the Flu Catch You”; Bell, McGlone, and Dragojevic, “Vicious Viruses.” 79.  Bell, McGlone, and Dragovic, “Vicious Viruses.” 80. Toril Aalberg, Jesper Stromback, and Claes H. de Vreese, “The Framing of Politics as Strategy and Game: A Review of Concepts, Operationalizations, and Key Findings,” Journalism 13, no. 2 (2011): 167. 81. Roderick P. Hart, Campaign Talk: Why Elections Are Good for Us (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Kathleen Kendall, Communication in the Presidential Primaries: Candidates and the Media, 1912–­2000 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000); Lee Sigelman and David Bullock, “Candidates, Issues, Horse Races, and Hoopla: Presidential Campaign Coverage, 1888–­1988,” American Politics Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1991): 5–­32. 82.  Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen H. Jamieson, Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and the Public Good (New York: Oxford, 1997); Claes H. de Vreese and Matthijs Elenbaas,

notes to pages 25–27    169 “Media in the Game of Politics Effects of Strategic Metacoverage on Political Cynicism,” Press/Politics 13, no. 3 (2008): 285–­309; Matthijs Elenbaas and Claes H. Vreese, “The Effects of Strategic News on Political Cynicism and Vote Choice Among Young Voters,” Journal of Communication 58, no. 3 (2008): 550–­67. 83.  Kelly Kaufhold, Amber Hinsley, and Seth Lewis, The Future of News: An Agenda of Perspectives (San Diego, Calif.: Cognella, 2011); (Davis) Buzz Merritt and Maxwell McCombs, The Two W’s of Journalism: The Why and What of Public Affairs Reporting (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004). 84. Roger Fowler, Bob Hodge, Gunter Kress, and Tony Trew, Language and Control (London: Routledge, 1979); Teun A. van Dijk, Discourse and Power (New York: Palgrave-­­ Macmillan, 2008). 85. Roger Fowler, Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1991), 131. 86.  Ibid, 96. 87.  Glasgow University Media Group, Bad News (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976); Glasgow University Media Group, More Bad News (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); Glasgow University Media Group, Really Bad News (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). 88.  Glasgow University Media Group, Bad News. 89. Sharon E. Jarvis, “Voting Rights vs. Partisan Might: How Sources Shaped Coverage of Electoral Participation in 1965 and 2013” (paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Convention, Las Vegas, Nev., 2015); Sharon E. Jarvis, “Are Voting Rights Newsworthy? How Sources Depicted Electoral Participation in 1965 and 2013 (paper presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Convention, San Francisco, Calif., 2015). 90.  Fowler, Language in the News, 94. 91.  Mary Sykes, “Discrimination in Discourse,” in Discourse Analysis in Society, ed. Teun A. van Dijk, vol. 4 of Handbook of Discourse Analysis (London: Academic Press, 1985), 83–­101; Sykes, “From ‘Rights’ to ‘Needs’: Official Discourse and the ‘Welfarization’ of Race,” in Discourse and Discrimination, ed. Geneva Smitherson-­­Donaldson and Teun A. van Dijk (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 176–­205. 92.  Fowler, Hodge, Kress, and Trew, Language and Control; Van Dijk, Discourse and Power. 93. Sykes, “Discrimination in Discourse”; Sykes, “From ‘Rights’ to ‘Needs.’” 94.  Van Dijk, Discourse and Power, 59. 95. Edwin Black, “The Second Persona,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56, no. 2 (1970): 109–­19. 96.  Philip Wander, “The Third Persona: An Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Theory,” Central States Speech Journal 35, no. 4 (1984): 197–­216. 97.  John Zaller, “The Rule of Product Substitution in Presidential Campaign News,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 560, no. 1 (1989): 111–­28; Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: Free Press, 1998); W. Lance Bennett and John Klockner, “The Psychology of Mass-­­Mediated Publics,” in The Psychology of Political Communication, ed. Ann Crigler (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 89–­109. 98.  Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1969); Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). 99. Roderick P. Hart, Sharon E. Jarvis, William Jennings, and Deborah Smith-­­ Howell, Political Keywords: Using Language That Uses Us (New York: Oxford, 2005); Sharon E. Jarvis, Maegan Stephens, and Soo-­­Hye Han, “Political Language in American

170    notes to pages 27–31 Political Campaigns,” in Praeger Handbook of Political Communication in the United States, ed. William Benoit (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2016), 3–­24. 100.  Fowler, Language in the News, 131. 101.  Ibid. 102.  Ibid., 110. 103.  Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, “The Structure of Foreign News: The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba, and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers,” Journal of International Peace Research 2, no. 1 (1965): 64–­91. 104.  Winfried Schulz, “News Structure and People’s Awareness of Political Events,” Gazette 30 (1982): 139–­53. 105.  Peter Golding and Phillip Elliot, Making the News (London: Longman, 1979); Tony Harcup and Deirdre O’Neill, “What is News? Galtung and Ruge Revisited,” Journalism Studies 2, no. 2 (2001): 261–­68; Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 106.  Barbie Zelizer, Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy (London: Sage, 2004), 55. 107. Deborah Potter, Handbook of Independent Journalism (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State Publication, 2008), 5. 108. Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (25th Anniversary Edition) (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2004); Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978); Leon V. Sigal, Reporters and Officials: The Organization of Newsmaking (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1973); Justin Lewis, Sanna Inthorn, and Karin Wahl-­­Jorgensen, Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us About Political Participation (London: Open University Press, 2005). 109.  Justin Lewis, Karin Wahl-­­Jorgensen, and Sanna Inthorn, “Images of Citizenship on Television News: Constructing a Passive Public,” Journalism Studies 5, no. 2 (2004): 153–­64; Lewis, Wahl-­­Jorgensen, and Inthorn, Citizens or Consumers? 110.  Lewis, Wahl-­­Jorgensen, and Inthorn, “Images of Citizenship,” 160. 111.  Ibid., 163. 112.  Gabriel Weimann, “The Obsession to Forecast: Pre-­­election Polls in the Israeli Press,” Public Opinion Quarterly 54, 3 (1990): 396–­408. 113.  Ian Ward, “Bringing the Voters Back In: A Canadian Model for Australia,” Australian Studies in Journalism 4 (1995): 29–­49. 114.  Ibid., 41–­42. 115.  Ibid., 48. 116. Stephanie Larson, “Public Opinion in Television Election News: Beyond Polls,” Political Communication 16, no. 2 (1999): 122–­45. 117. Stephanie Larson, “Network Differences in Public Opinion Coverage During the 1996 Presidential Campaign,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 44, no. 1 (2000): 16–­26. 118.  Merritt and McCombs, The Two W’s, 82. 119.  Ibid., 122. 120.  Ibid., 86. 121.  (Davis) Buzz Merritt, “Can Public Radio Journalism Be Re-­­invented?,” interview by Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, National Public Radio, December 30, 2001, http://​www​.npr​.org​ /yourturn​/ombudsman​/2001 /010705.html, accessed July 15, 2010. 122.  (Davis) Buzz Merritt, Public Journalism and Public Life (New York: Routledge, 1997); David K. Perry, Roots of Civic Journalism: Darwin, Dewey, and Mead (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Jay Rosen, What Are Journalists For? (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).

notes to pages 31–40    171 123. Rosen, What are Journalists For?. 124.  Leonard Witt, “Is Public Journalism Morphing into the Public’s Journalism?,” National Civic Review (Fall, 2004): 49–­57; Brian L. Massey and Tanni Hass, “Does Making Journalism More Public Make a Difference? A Critical Review of Evaluative Research on Public Journalism,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 79, no. 3 (2002): 559–­86. 125.  Michele Weldon, Everyman News: The Changing American Front Page (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008). 126.  Ibid., 18. 127.  Ibid., 27. 128.  Ibid., 3. 129.  V. O. Key, The Responsible Electorate (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 7. 130.  Pomper, Elections in America, 14–­15.

Chapter 2 1.  “G.O.P. Precinct Captain Hits Loss of Vote Machines,” Chicago Tribune, November 6, 1960, A10. 2.  “Integrity of Florida E-­­voting in Doubt,” AP-­­UPI Wire, October 22, 2004. 3. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 7; Robert Entman, Jorg Matthes, and Lynn Pellicano, “Nature, Sources, and Effects of News Framing,” in Handbook of Journalism Studies, ed. Karin Wahl-­­Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitszch (New York: Routledge, 2009), 177; Stephen Reese, “The Framing Project: A Bridging Model for Media Research Revisited,” Journal of Communication 57 (2007): 149. 4. Ray Williams, “Why We Love Bad News: Does the Current News Negativity Bias Reflect Media or Public Preferences?,” Psychology Today, November 1, 2014, https://​www​ .psychologytoday​.com​/blog​/wired​-­­­success​/201411​/why​-­­­we​-­­­love​-­­­bad​-­­­news/. 5.  Michael J. Robinson, “Two Decades of American News Preferences,” Pew Research Center, August 22, 2007, http://​www​.pewresearch​.org​/2007​/08​/22​/two​ -­­­decades​-­­­of​-american​ ­­­ -­­­news​-preferences​ ­­­ -2/. ­­­ 6. Shanto Iyengar, Helmut Norpoth, and Kyu Hahn, “Consumer Demand for Election News: The Horserace Sells,” Journal of Politics 66, no. 1 (2004):157–­75; Stuart Soroka, Negativity in Democratic Politics: Causes and Consequences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 7.  Marc Trussler and Stuart Soroka, “Consumer Demand for Cynical and Negative News Frames,” International Journal of Press/Politics 19, no. 3 (2014): 360–­79. 8.  Julian M. Pleasants, Hanging Chads: The Inside Story of the 2000 Recount in Florida (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Jeffrey Toobin, Too Close to Call: The Thirty-­­ Six Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election (New York: Random House, 2001). 9. Richard L. Hasen, The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Heather K. Gerken, The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System Is Failing and How to Fix It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 10.  W. Lance Bennett, “The Postmodern Election,” in Language, Symbolism, and Politics, ed. Richard Merelman (Lanham, Md.: Westview Press, 1992), 139. 11.  “Dewey Off on Last Trip of Campaign; Nominee Confident, Bids for Midwest Farm Vote,” Washington Post, October 23, 1948, A1. 12.  “Kefauver Makes Farm Vote Plea,” New York Times, October 12, 1956, A25.

172    notes to pages 40 –45 13.  “Meany Bids Labor Vote for Kennedy,” New York Times, September 8, 1960, A26. 14.  “President Urges Big Vote Turnout,” New York Times, October 29, 1964, A1. 15.  “Nixon’s Campaign at Crucial Point,” New York Times, October 29, 1956, A4; “Stevenson Pins Hopes on Key California Vote,” AP/UPI Wire, September 8, 1956, A6. 16.  “Johnson Calls for Landslide Victory: Asks Tens of Millions to Vote, Inflict Massive Defeat on Foe,” Los Angeles Times, November 3, 1964, A3. 17. The term vote was used as a verb 32.0 percent of the time in this analysis. The term vote was least likely of the three words under analysis to be cast as a being a problem in political life (role variable). 18.  “Barkley Urges Big Labor Vote,” AP/UPI Wire, September 23, 1948. 19.  “Truman Raps Republicans as ‘Gluttons of Privilege’ in Bid for Farm Belt Vote,” New York Times, September 9, 1948, A1. 20. Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: Fifty Essential Strategies for Every Writer (New York: Little, Brown, 2006), 134. 21.  Maria E. Grabe and Jesica Myrick, “Informed Citizenship in a Media-­­Centric Way of Life,” Journal of Communication 66, no. 2 (2016): 215–­35. 22.  W. Lance Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1988), 34. 23.  Bennett, News, 27, 28. 24.  John Zaller, “The Rule of Product Substitution in Presidential Campaign News,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 560, no. 1 (1989): 111–­28. 25. The data are drawn from the cross-­­tabulation of the context and potency variables and qualitative textual analysis of verbs linked to the terms voter and voters. 26.  Justin Lewis, Karin Wahl-­­Jorgensen, and Sanna Inthorn, “Images of Citizenship on Television News: Constructing a Passive Public,” Journalism Studies 5, no. 2 (2004): 153–­64. 27.  “Reagan Exploiting Young Voters, Mondale Says,” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 1984, A18. 28.  “Dole Is Imploring Voters to ‘Rise Up’ Against the Press,” New York Times, October 26, 1996, A1. 29.  Wendell W. Cultice, Youth’s Battle for the Ballot: A History of Voting Age in America (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992); Sylvia Engdahl, Amendment XXVI: Lowering the Voting Age (New York: Greenhaven Press, 2009). 30.  Wendy R. Weiser, “Voter Suppression: How Bad (Pretty Bad),” American Prospect, October 1, 2014, http://​prospect​.org​/article​/22​-states​ ­­­ -­­­wave​-­­­new​-­­­voting​-­­­restrictions​ -­­­threatens​-shift​ ­­­ -outcomes​ ­­­ -tight​ ­­­ -­­­races/. 31. National Conference of State Legislatures, “Voter Identification Requirements,” August 31, 2016, http://​www​.ncsl​.org​/research​/elections​-­­­and​-­­­campaigns​/voter​-­­­id​.aspx. 32.  “New Voting Restrictions in Place for 2016 Election,” Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, September 28 2016, http://​www​.brennancenter​ .org​/voting​-­­­restrictions​-first​ ­­­ -time​ ­­­ -­­­2016/; “Voting Laws Roundup,” Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, April 18, 2016, http://​www​.brennancenter​ .org​/analysis​/voting​-­­­laws​-­­­roundup​-2016/. ­­­ 33.  Lorraine Minnite, The Myth of Voter Fraud (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2010); Tova Andrea Wang, The Politics of Voter Suppression: Defending and Expanding Americans’ Right to Vote (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). 34. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 301. 35.  Gerald Pomper, Voters’ Choice: Varieties of American Electoral Behavior (New York: Dodd Mead, 1975), 12.

notes to pages 46–49    173 36. Toril Aalberg, Jesper Stromback, and Claes H. de Vreese, “The Framing of Politics as Strategy and Game: A Review of Concepts, Operationalizations, and Key Findings,” Journalism 13, no. 2 (2011): 167; Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen H. Jamieson, Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and the Public Good (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Claes H. de Vreese and Matthijs Elenbaas, “Media in the Game of Politics: Effects of Strategic Metacoverage on Political Cynicism,” Press/Politics 13, no. 3 (2008): 285–­309; Elenbaas and de Vreese, “The Effects of Strategic News on Political Cynicism and Vote Choice Among Young Voters,” Journal of Communication 58, no. 3 (2008): 550–­67. 37.  Cappella and Jamieson, Spiral of Cynicism; de Vreese and Elenbaas, “Media in the Game”; Elenbaas and de Vreese, “Effects of Strategic News.” 38.  Iyengar, Norpoth, and Hahn, “Consumer Demand”; Trussler and Soroka, “Consumer Demand.” 39.  V. O. Key, The Responsible Electorate (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 4. 40.  “Truman Sees Era of Fear in a Republican Victory; Says Labor is Threatened,” New York Times, September 7, 1948, A1. 41.  “40,000 in S. Carolina Capital Cheer as Ike, Byrnes Unite to Attack Truman,” Atlanta Constitution, October 10, 1952, A1. 42.  “President Eisenhower Will Speak to the Gathering Sept. 12, Probably in the Late Afternoon,” New York Times, September 5, 1956, A1. 43.  “At Rallies of Faithful, Contrasts in Red and Blue,” New York Times, October 30, 2008, A1. 44.  “Obama Again Stirs a Big Rally,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, 2008, A14. “At Rallies of Faithful,” A1. 45.  “Confident Obama Campaigns with Springsteen,” Chicago Tribune, November 3, 2008, A1. 46.  Gerald M. Pomper, Elections in America (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1968); Ivor Crewe, “Electoral Participation,” in Democracy at the Polls: A Comparative Study of Competitive National Elections, ed. David Butler (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1981), 216–­63. 47. Arthur Sulzberger and Dean Baquet, “To Our Readers, From the Publisher and Executive Editor,” New York Times, November 13, 2016, https://​www​.nytimes​.com​/2016​ /11​/13​/us​/elections​/to​-­­­our​-­­­readers​-from​ ­­­ -­­­the​-publisher​ ­­­ -and​ ­­­ -­­­executive​-­­­editor​.html; Peter Sterne, “A Measure of Vindication for Nate Silver,” Politico, November 9, 2016, http://​ www​.politico​.com​/blogs​/on​-­­­media​/2016​/11​/a​-­­­measure​-of​ ­­­ -­­­vindication​-­­­for​-­­­nate​-silver​ ­­­ -­­­231108/; Andrew Mercer, Claudia Deane, and Kyley McGeeney, “Why Polls Missed their Mark,” Pew Research Organization, November 9, 2016, http://​www​.pewresearch​.org​ /fact​-tank​ ­­­ /2016​/11​/09​/why​-­­­2016​-­­­election​-polls​ ­­­ -­­­missed​-their​ ­­­ -­­­mark/. 48.  “How the Media Missed Trump and What Comes Next for Journalism,” Poynter: A Global Leader in Journalism, November 10, 2016, http://​www​.poynter​.org​/2016​/how​ -­­­the​-­­­media​-­­­missed​-­­­president​-­­­trump​-­­­and​-what​ ­­­ -comes​ ­­­ -next​ ­­­ -­­­for​-­­­journalism​/438665/. 49.  Jeff Spross, “How Donald Trump Exploited the Rickety Foundation of the Obama Coalition,” Week, November 11, 2016, http://​theweek​.com​/articles​/661276​/how​ -­­­donald​-­­­trump​-exploited​ ­­­ -­­­rickety​-­­­foundation​-obama​ ­­­ -­­­coalition. 50.  Charlie Beckett, “What Does the Trump Triumph Mean for Journalism, Politics, and Social Media?,” Polis: Journalism and Society at the LSE, November 13, 2016, http://​ blogs​.lse​.ac​.uk​/polis​/2016​/11​/13​/what​-­­­does​-­­­the​-­­­trump​-­­­triumph​-­­­mean​-­­­for​-­­­journalism​ -­­­politics​-and​ ­­­ -­­­social​-­­­media/. 51.  Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 52.  “How the Media Missed Trump.”

174    notes to pages 49–56 53. Oscar Kaplan, “Prediction in the Social Sciences,” Philosophy of Science 7, no. 4, (1940): 492–­98. 54.  Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Philip Tetlock (@PTetlock), Twitter, March 20, 2018, 5:42 a.m., https://​twitter​.com​/PTetlock​/status​/976076409708871680. 55.  Beckett, “What Does the Trump Triumph Mean?” 56.  Marion R. Just, Ann N. Crigler, Dean E. Alger, Timothy E. Cook, Montague Kern, and Darrell M. West, Crosstalk: Citizens, Candidates, and the Media in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 240. 57.  Kevin Barnhurst and Diana Mutz, “American Newspapers and the Decline in Event Centered Reporting,” Journal of Communication 47, no. 4 (1997): 27–­53; ShantoIyengar, Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 58.  John Hibbing and Elisabeth Theiss-­­Morse, Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 59.  “1st Illinois Poll: Ford, Thompson Lead,” Chicago Tribune, September 12, 1976, A1. 60.  “President Meets Prominent Jews but Wins No Pledge for Support,” New York Times, September 9, 1980, A1. 61.  “Some Fear Ohio Will Be Florida,” Washington Post, October 26, 2004, A1. 62.  “Disenchantment Within Barrios Threatens Carter Drive in Texas,” New York Times, October 15, 1980, A1. 63.  “Crucial Florida Vote May Hinge on Burgeoning Latino Population,” Washington Post, October 16, 2004, A1. 64.  “Romney, Obama Try to Get Latino Voters Moving,” Los Angeles Times, October 3, 2012, A1. 65. Steven J. Rosenstone and John M. Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America (New York: Macmillan, 1993). 66. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, “A Desk Is a Dangerous Place from Which to View the World: Social Science and the 2016 Election,” November 9, 2016, https://​ rasmuskleisnielsen​.net​/2016​/11​/09​/a​-­­­desk​-­­­is​-­­­a​-­­­dangerous​-­­­place​-­­­from​-­­­which​-­­­to​-­­­view​ -­­­the​-world​ ­­­ -­­­social​-­­­science​-and​ ­­­ -the​ ­­­ -­­­2016​-elections/. ­­­ 67.  Ibid. 68. Stephen Coleman, How Voters Feel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 69.  Pomper, Voters’ Choice, 16. 70.  Key, The Responsible Electorate, 6. 71.  Pomper, Elections in America, 41; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006). 72.  Coleman, How Voters Feel, 19.

Chapter 3 1. David Ryfe, Can Journalism Survive? An Inside Look at American Newsrooms (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2012); Alex S. Jones, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (New York: Oxford, 2009). 2.  Jones, Losing the News, 147; Zizi Papacharissi, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics (New York: Oxford, 2010). 3.  Gaye Tuchman, “Telling Stories,” Journal of Communication 26, no. 4 (1976): 93–­ 97; Paul J. Deutschmann and Wayne Danielson, “Diffusion of Knowledge of the Major News Story,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 37, no. 3 (1960): 345–­55;

notes to pages 56–61    175 Jack Rosenberry, “Second Servings: Online Publication and Its Impact on Second-­­Day Leads in Newspapers,” Paper 7, Media and Communication Faculty Publications, 2005, https://​fisherpub​.sjfc​.edu​/commj​_facpub​/7/. 4.  Jones, Losing the News, 28–­29, 148–­49. 5. Daron Shaw and Bartholomew Sparrow, “From the Inner Ring Out: News Congruence, Cue-­­Taking, and Campaign Coverage,” Political Research Quarterly 52, no. 2 (1999): 323–­51; Stephen Reese and Lucig Danielan, “Intermedia Influence and Drug Influence: Converging the Cocaine,” in Communication Campaigns About Drugs: Government, Media, Public, ed. Pamela Shoemaker (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989), 29–­45; Guy Golan, “Inter-­­Media Agenda-­­Setting and Global News Coverage,” Journalism Studies 7, no. 2 (2006): 323–­33. 6. Robert Entman, Jorg Matthes, and Lynn Pellicano, “Nature, Sources, and Effects of News Framing,” in Handbook of Journalism Studies, ed. Karin Wahl-­­Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitszch (New York: Routledge, 2009), 177; Regina Lawrence, “Researching Political News Framing: Established Ground and New Horizons,” in Doing News Framing Analysis: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives, ed. Paul D’Angelo and James A. Kuypers (New York: Routledge, 2009), 265–­85; Michael Schudson, Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2008), 88. 7.  Gerald Pomper, Voters’ Choice: Varieties of American Electoral Behavior (New York: Dodd Mead, 1975), 12. For political scholars encouraging attention to history and context, see also Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Norton, 1970); Larry Bartels, “An Agenda for Voting Research,” in Election Studies: What’s Their Use?, ed. Elihu Katz and Yael Warshel (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2001), 59–­81. 8. Richard R. Lingeman, Don’t You Know There’s a War On? The American Home Front, 1941–­1945 (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1970). 9.  William Fielding Obgurn, American Society in Wartime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943). 10. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 508, 509. 11. Roderick P. Hart, Campaign Talk: Why Elections Are Good for Us (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 74. 12.  Putnam, Bowling Alone; Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 13.  Putnam, Bowling Alone, 17. 14. Schudson, The Good Citizen, 146. 15.  Ibid. 16.  “Hub Election Poll: How Will Irish Go,” Christian Science Monitor, October 12, 1956, A1. 17.  Ibid. 18.  “Kennedy Calls for Voting on Party Lines,” Chicago Tribune, November 5, 1960, A1. 19.  Ibid. 20.  “Nixon Again Takes Stand on Rights,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1960, A2. 21. Sharon E. Jarvis, The Talk of the Party: Political Labels, Symbolic Capital and American Life (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995). 22.  “Women Voters Form Brigade for Eisenhower,” Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1952, A2. 23.  “Caravan Scouts Voters,” Washington Post, October 19, 1964, C2. 24.  “Rebel Yells Salute Eisenhower Here,” Atlanta Journal-­­Constitution, September 3, 1952, A1.

176    notes to pages 62–68 25.  “Negro Drive Aids Johnson in South,” New York Times, October 19, 1964, A1. 26.  “Nixon Is Believed in Michigan Lead; Wallace Found Cutting Into Support for Humphrey,” New York Times, September 8, 1969, A8. 27.  Pomper, Voters’ Choice. 28.  Putnam, Bowling Alone, 267. 29.  Ibid., 113–­15. 30.  John Zaller, “The Rule of Product Substitution in Presidential Campaign News,” ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 560, no. 1 (1998): 111–­28. 31.  Jones, Losing the News. 32.  Larry Sabato, Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics (New York: Free Press, 1991). 33.  Philip Meyer, Precision Journalism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 2. 34.  Irving Crespi, “Polls as Journalism,” Public Opinion Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1981): 462–­76; David Paletz, Jonathan Y. Short, Helen Baker, Barbara Campbell, Richard Cooper, and Rochelle Oeslander, “Polls in the Media: Content, Credibility, and Consequences,” Public Opinion Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1980): 95–­513. 35.  “In the South, Morality Means Votes,” Chicago Tribune, October 15, 1980, A1. 36.  “Reagan, Muting Attack on Carter, Puts Forth His Vision of America,” Washington Post, November 3, 1980, A1. 37.  “GOP’s Hopes Tempered, but Reagan Holds Lead,” Washington Post, October 14, 1984, A1. 38.  “Bush Turns Attention to Middle Class,” New York Times, September 18, 2000, A1. 39.  “Disciplined Bush Run Follows Baker’s Recipe; Techniques Echo Past GOP Campaigns,” Washington Post, October 4, 1988, A1. 40.  “Bush Gaining with Pivotal Voter Groups,” Christian Science Monitor, September 16, 1988, A1. 41.  Gabriel Weimann, “The Obsession to Forecast: Pre-­­election Polls in the Israeli Press,” Public Opinion Quarterly 54, no. 3 (1990): 396–­408. 42.  “Bush Courts Usual GOP Bridesmaid California,” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 2000, A1. 43.  “Agnew, in Miss., Treads Tightope in Endorsements,” Washington Post, October 1, 1972, A1. 44.  “Home Stretch Puts Bush in a 2-­­Week Sprint,” Los Angeles Times, October 21, 1992, A1. 45.  “Voters Making Their Choice on the Men, Not the Issues,” Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1988, A1. 46.  “Ford Surges, Carter Clings, Survey Shows,” Christian Science Monitor, October 29, 1976, A1. 47. Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 48.  Ibid., 7. 49.  Key, Responsible Electorate, 5. 50. Help America Vote Act. United States Election Assistance Commission, http://​ www​.eac​.gov​/about​_the​_eac​/help​_america​_vote​_act​.aspx. 51.  “Voters to See Few Changes After Florida,” Chicago Tribune, October 12, 2004, A1. 52.  “Ruling Curbs Where Floridians Can Vote,” Los Angeles Times, October 19, 2004, A14. 53.  “Charges of Dirty Tricks, Fraud and Voter Suppression Already Flying in Several States,” New York Times, November 1, 2004, A1. 54.  Ibid.

notes to pages 68–71    177 55.  “Political Divide Tight Despite Rapid Growth,” Chicago Tribune, September 28, 2004, A1. 56.  “Election 2012: Voting Laws Roundup,” Brennan Center for Justice, October 11, 2012, https://​www​.brennancenter​.org​/analysis​/election​-­­­2012​-­­­voting​-­­­laws​-­­­roundup/. 57. Andrew Cohen, “Voting Rights: This is What a Strong Party Platform Would Look Like,” Atlantic, September 5, 2012, http://​www​.theatlantic​.com​/politics​ /archive​/2012​/09​/voting​-­­­rights​-­­­this​-is​ ­­­ -­­­what​-­­­a​-­­­strong​-­­­party​-­­­platform​-­­­would​-­­­look​-­­­like​ /261640/. 58.  “Tea Party Polices Voter Rolls; Activists Combining Ohio’s Rosters Have Sought to Remove at Least 2,100 Names,” Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2012, A1. 59.  “Court Says Ohio Can’t Restrict Souls to the Polls Voting,” Christian Science Monitor, October 6, 2012, A1. 60.  “Ohioans Embrace Early-­­Voting Option in Battleground State,” Washington Post, November 4, 2012, A1. 61.  “Candidates Make Last Pleas as Legal Skirmishes Begin,” New York Times, November 4, 2012, A1. 62. Harry Enten, “Americans’ Distaste for Both Trump and Clinton Is Record-­­ Breaking,” FiveThirtyEight, May 5, 2016, http://​fivethirtyeight​.com​/features​/americans​ -­­­distaste​-for​ ­­­ -­­­both​-­­­trump​-­­­and​-­­­clinton​-­­­is​-record​ ­­­ -breaking/; ­­­ Sarah Childress, “Election Coverage Skewed by Journalistic Bias,” Frontline, July 12, 2016, http://​www​.pbs​.org​ /wgbh​/frontline​/article​/study​-­­­election​-coverage​ ­­­ -skewed​ ­­­ -­­­by​-­­­journalistic​-­­­bias/; Arthur Sulzberger and Dean Baquet, “To Our Readers, from the Publisher and Executive Editor,” New York Times, November 13, 2016, http://​www​.nytimes​.com​/2016​/11​/13​/us​ /elections​/to​-­­­our​-­­­readers​-from​ ­­­ -­­­the​-publisher​ ­­­ -and​ ­­­ -executive​ ­­­ -­­­editor​.html. 63.  Jasmine C. Lee and Kevin Quealy, “The Upshot: The 289 People, Places, and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter,” New York Times, December 6, 2016, http://​www​.nytimes​.com​/interactive​/2016​/01​/28​/upshot​/donald​-­­­trump​-twitter​ ­­­ -­­­insults​ .html. 64. Henry Louis Gates, “Hating Hillary,” New Yorker, February 26, 1996, http://​ www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​/1996​/02​/26​/hating​-­­­hillary/; Megan Carpentier, “Why Do People Dislike Hillary Clinton? The Story Goes Far Back,” Guardian, October 18, 2016, https://​www​.theguardian​.com​/us​-news​ ­­­ /2016​/oct​/18​/hillary​-­­­clinton​-­­­why​-­­­hate​ -­­­unlikeable​-­­­us​-­­­election/; “Hating Hillary: America’s Next President is Deeply Reviled. Why?,” Economist, October 22, 2016, http://​www​.economist​.com​/news​/united​-­­­states​ /21709053​-­­­americas​-­­­probable​-next​ ­­­ -­­­president​-­­­deeply​-reviled​ ­­­ -­­­why​-­­­hating​-­­­hillary/. 65. Thomas Patterson, “Pre-­­primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race: Trump’s Rise, Sanders’ Emergence, Clinton’s Struggle,” Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, June 13, 2016, https://​shorensteincenter​ .org​/pre​-­­­primary​-news​ ­­­ -­­­coverage​-2016​ ­­­ -trump​ ­­­ -clinton​ ­­­ -sanders/; ­­­ = Patterson, “News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Primaries: Horse Race Reporting Has Consequences,” Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, July 11, 2016, https://​shorensteincenter​.org​/news​-coverage​ ­­­ -­­­2016​-­­­presidential​-­­­primaries/; Patterson, “News Coverage of the 2016 National Conventions: Negative News, Lacking Context,” Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, September 21, 2016, https://​shorensteincenter​.org​/news​-­­­coverage​-­­­2016​-­­­national​ -­­­conventions/; Patterson, “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed Voters,” Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, December 7, 2016, https://​shorensteincenter​.org​/news​-­­­coverage​-­­­2016​-­­­general​ -­­­election/. 66. Alexander Burns, “Trump’s Brand, Clinton’s Tone, and Sexual Harassment,” October 19, 2016, New York Times, A11.

178    notes to pages 71–77 67. Alan Rappeport, “Trump’s Fiery Immigration Speech Draws Backlash,” New York Times, September 2, 2016, A12. 68.  Mark Z. Barabak, “Disdain for Trump Shakes Mormons’ GOP Loyalty,” Los Angeles Times, October 21, 2016, A1. 69. Trip Gabriel, “Trump Is Given Thumbs Down in the Suburbs,” New York Times, September 28, 2016, A1. 70.  Greg Bluestein and Aaron Sheinin, “When You Don’t Like Trump or Clinton,” Atlanta Journal-­­Constitution, October 16, 2016, A1. 71.  Ibid. 72.  Chris Megerian, “Clinton Camp Makes Youth a Priority,” Chicago Tribune, September 15, 2016, A1. 73.  Bluestein and Sheinin, “When You Don’t Like”; Chris Cillizza, “The 2016 Race’s Last Leg is Here. This Is What We Know,” Washington Post, September 5, 2016, A2; David Lauter, “Voters Are Struggling to Commit; Clinton and Trump Have Left Them More Dissatisfied with Their Options Than Usual,” Los Angeles Times, September 8, 2016, A1. Gabriel, “Trump Is Given Thumbs Down.” 74.  Bluestein and Sheinin, “When You Don’t Like.” 75.  Ibid. 76. Dan Balz, “Counting on Colorado; McCain Camp Exudes Confidence in the Face of an Obama Blizzard,” Washington Post, October 26, 2008, A4. 77. Aaron Sheinin, “Both Parties Feel State Winnable,” Atlanta Journal-­­Constitution, September 19, 2008, A1. 78. Alec MacGillis, “Obama Camp Relying Heavily on Ground Effort,” Washington Post, October 12, 2008, A1. 79.  “McCain, Obama Dash Across Bush States,” Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2008, A1. 80. Tiffany Davenport, “Lessons from Recent GOTV Experiments,” GOTV: Get Out the Vote, Yale University Institute for Social and Policy Studies, December 18, 2008, http://​archive​.li​/BP7E3/. 81.  “Georgia Race Is All About Volunteers,” Atlanta Journal-­­Constitution, October 6, 2008, A6. 82.  “Game of Political Upmanship; Both Campaigns Target Ohio,” Los Angeles Times, November 3, 2008, A1. 83.  “Early Turnout Defies Trends; Voters Who Weigh in Before Election Day Usually Lean GOP. This Time, Obama’s Base Seems to Dominate,” Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2008, A1. 84.  “Black Turnout Could Determine House Races,” Washington Post, October 21, 2008, A1. 85. Robert Entman, Jorg Matthes, and Lynn Pellicano, “Nature, Sources, and Effects of News Framing,” in Handbook of Journalism Studies, ed. Karin Wahl-­­Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitszch (New York: Routledge, 2009), 175–­90; Paul D’Angelo and James A. Kuypers, Doing News Framing Analysis: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010). 86.  Zaller, “Product Substitution”; Sabato, Feeding Frenzy. 87.  Michele Weldon, Everyman News: The Changing American Front Page (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008). 88. Susan Herbst, Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 166. 89.  Lisbeth Lipari, “Voice, Polling, and the Public Sphere,” in Politics, Discourse, and American Society, ed. Roderick P. Hart and Bartholomew Sparrow (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 139.

notes to pages 77–83    179 90.  Ibid., 147–­48. 91.  (Davis) Buzz Merritt and Maxwell McCombs, The Two W’s of Journalism: The Why and What of Public Affairs Reporting (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 82. 92.  Ibid., 105.

Chapter 4 1. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development (New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1968). 2. Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (New York: MacMillan, 1933); Fritz Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson, Management and the Worker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939). 3.  Katherine Ellison, “Being Honest About the Pygmalion Effect,” Discover, October 29, 2015, http://​discovermagazine​.com​/2015​/dec​/14​-­­­great​-­­­expectations/. 4.  V. O. Key, The Responsible Electorate (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966); Gerald Pomper, Elections in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1968). 5. Ann Crigler, Marion Just, and Edward J. McCaffery, Rethinking the Vote (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 232. 6.  Ibid., 231. 7.  Ibid., 229. 8.  Ibid., 232–­33. 9.  Ibid., 232. 10.  Ibid., 233. 11. Throughout 2007, we observed how Barack Obama’s presence, message of “Hope,” and mobilization strategies seemed to shift how journalists were covering voters. In 2004, as chapter 3 addresses, the focus was on a flawed system. After Obama announced his candidacy in February of 2007, though, narratives began to feature a combination of the mobilization markers from 1948 to 1968 and a sense that one candidate, at least, really wanted people to participate (a story line that chapter 3 shows lasted until Election Day). 12.  C. Anthony Broh, “Horse-­­Race Journalism: Reporting the Polls in the 1976 Election,” Public Opinion Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1980): 514–­29; Shanto Iyengar, Helmut Norpoth, and Kyu Hahn, “Consumer Demand for Election News: The Horserace Sells,” Journal of Politics 66, no. 1 (2004): 157–­75; Stuart Soroka, Negativity in Democratic Politics: Causes and Consequences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 13.  Vincent Price, David Tewksbury, and Elizabeth Powers, “Switching Trains of Thought: The Impact of News Frames on Readers’ Cognitive Response,” Communication Research 24, no. 5 (1997): 481–­506. 14.  Focus groups were held to serve as a manipulation check between the three articles. Respondents saw distinct differences between them, noting how the mobilized-­­ participant condition addressed how voters make a difference in campaigns and how the isolated-­­spectator condition focused more directly on public opinion data. 15.  We contracted with Polimetrix, now YouGov, to conduct the experiment. This firm has an international reputation for conducting online research for academics and marketing professionals (see https://​today​.yougov​.com​/find​-­­­solutions/). 16. Renita Coleman and Esther Thorson, “The Effects of News Stories That Put Crime and Violence into Context: Testing the Public Health Model of Reporting,” Journal of Health Communication 7, no. 5 (2002): 401–­25. 17.  In total, 337 participants completed the experiment: 111 in the mobilized-­­ participant condition, 116 in the isolated-­­spectator condition, and 110 in the control

180    notes to pages 84–96 condition. Of these individuals, 265 responded to the open-­­ended prompt (88 in the mobilized-­­participant condition, 90 in the isolated-­­spectator condition, and 87 in the control condition). 18. All of the variables were coded dichotomously (yes or no). Responses were coded by two trained coders. Inter-­­coder reliability statistics (Cohen’s Kappa) show acceptable agreement across coding decisions (game language, .92; positive tone, .78; negative tone, .86; importance of voting/election, .80; citizen as actor, .83). 19.  John L. Sullivan and Eric Riedel, “Efficacy: Political,” in International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (New York, NY: Elsevier, 2001), 4353–­56. 20.  James Pennebaker, Roger J. Booth, Ryan L. Boyd, and Martha E. Francis, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count: LIWC2015 (Austin, Tex.: Pennebaker Conglomerates, 2015), 22. 21. The mobilized-­­participant condition featured the highest level of clout (x = 49.15; isolated-­­spectator x = 38.5; control condition x = 45.38; F = 3.27, 2(262), p. = .04, eta squared = .024). 22. Regina Lawrence, “Game-­­Framing the Issues: Tracking the Strategy Frame in Public Policy News,” Political Communication 17, no. 2 (2000): 93–­114; James Fallows, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (New York: Vintage Books, 1997); Kathleen H. Jamieson, Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy (New York: Oxford, 1993). 23. Self-­­reported intention to vote is considered to be susceptible to the social desirability bias—­i.e., participants tend to over-­­report their intention to vote simply because it is more socially acceptable—­see Robert F. Belli, Michael W. Traugott, Margaret Young, and Katherine A. McGonagle, “Reducing Vote Over-­­Reporting in Surveys: Social Desirability, Memory Failure, and Source Monitoring,” Public Opinion Quarterly 63, no. 1 (1999): 90–­108. 24. These results are based on an analysis of covariance with experimental condition as a factor and political interest and previous voting behavior as covariates. The reported p-­­values are one-­­tailed. 25.  (Davis) Buzz Merritt and Maxwell McCombs, The Two W’s of Journalism: The Why and What of Public Affairs Reporting (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 122. 26.  Ibid.,105. 27.  Michele Weldon, Everyman News: The Changing American Front Page (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 6. 28.  Joseph Cappella and Kathleen H. Jamieson, Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and the Public Good (New York: Oxford, 1997), 232. 29.  Ibid., 233.

Chapter 5 1. Donald J. Trump and Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004); Donald J. Trump and Bill Zanker, Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life (New York: Harper Business, 2007); Elizabeth Wagmeister, “‘The Apprentice’ Is Responsible for Donald Trump’s Success in Presidential Race, NBC Exec Says,” Variety, May 24, 2016, http://​variety​.com​/2016​/tv​/news​/donald​-­­­trump​-­­­celebrity​-­­­apprentice​ -­­­president​-nbc​ ­­­ -­­­paul​-­­­telegdy​-­­­1201782398/. 2.  Brian Stelter, “Donald Trump and the Disconnect; What Did the Media Get Wrong?,” CNN, March 27, 2016, http://​money​.cnn​.com​/2016​/03​/27​/media​/trump​ -­­­disconnect​-­­­viewer​-­­­email​/index​.html.

notes to pages 96–99    181 3.  Matt Taibbi, “President Trump: How America Got It So Wrong,” Rolling Stone, November 10, 2016, http://​www​.rollingstone​.com​/politics​/features​/president​-­­­trump​ -­­­how​-america​ ­­­ -­­­got​-­­­it​-­­­so​-­­­wrong​-w449783. ­­­ 4.  Kyle Pope, “Here’s to the Return of the Journalist as Malcontent,” Columbia Journalism Review, November 9, 2016, http://​www​.cjr​.org​/criticism​/journalist​_election​ _trump​_failure​.php. 5. Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of “CBS Evening News,” “NBC Nightly News,” “Newsweek,” and “Time” (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004); David White, “The Gatekeeper: A Case Study in the Selection of News,” Journalism Quarterly 27 (1950): 383–­96. 6. Seth C. Lewis and Stephen Reese, “What Is the War on Terror? Framing Through the Eyes of Journalists,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 86, no. (2009): 85–­102; Kimberly Meltzer, “The Hierarchy of Journalistic Cultural Authority,” Journalism Practice 3, no. 1 (2009): 59–­74. 7.  Lewis and Reese, “What Is the War?”; Renita Coleman, “Picturing Civic Journalism: How Photographers and Graphic Designers Visually Communicate the Principles of Civic Journalism,” Journalism 8 (2007): 25–­43. 8.  Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 9.  For a discussion of the forces influencing coverage, see Robert M. Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm,” Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 52; Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); William Gamson, Talking Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); William Gamson and Andre Modigliani, “The Changing Culture of Affirmative Action,” in Research in Political Sociology, ed. Richard Braungart (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1987), 137–­77; Gamson and Modigliani, “Media Discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach,” American Journal of Sociology 95 (July 1989): 1–­37; Robert Entman, Jorg Matthes, and Lynn Pellicano, “Nature, Sources, and Effects of News Framing,” in Handbook of Journalism Studies, ed. Karin Wahl-­­Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitszch (New York: Routledge, 2009), 175–­90; Paul D’Angelo and James A. Kuypers, Doing News Framing Analysis: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010). 10. Entman, Matthes, and Pellicano, “Nature, Sources, and Effects.” 11. Stephen Reese, “Finding Frames in a Web of Culture: The Case of the War on Terror,” in Doing Framing Analysis: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives, ed. Paul D’Angelo and James A. Kuypers (New York: Routledge, 2010), 18. 12.  Journalist 9. 13.  Journalist 17. 14.  Journalist 6. 15.  Journalist 6. 16.  Journalist 2. 17.  Journalist 10. 18.  Journalist 5. 19.  Journalist 21. 20.  Journalist 2. 21.  Journalist 2. 22.  Journalist 4. 23.  Pamela Cotterrill, “Interviewing Women: Issues of Friendship, Vulnerability, and Power,” Women’s Studies International Forum 15, nos. 5–­6 (1992): 593–­606; Maureen

182    notes to pages 99–104 Padfield and Ian Procter, “The Effect of Interviewer’s Gender on the Interviewing Process: A Comparative Inquiry,” Sociology 30, no. 2 (1996): 355–­66. 24. Shelly Rodgers and Esther Thorson, “A Socialization Perspective on Male and Female Reporting,” Journal of Communication 53, no. 4 (2003): 658–­75; Linda Steiner, “Gender in the Newsroom,” in Handbook of Journalism Studies, ed. Karin Wahl-­­Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzch (New York: Routledge, 2009), 116–­29. 25. Rodgers and Thorson, “A Socialization Perspective”; Steiner, “Gender in the Newsroom.” 26. Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1970), 17, 232. 27.  Gans, Deciding What’s News. 28.  Gans, Deciding What’s News; Stephanie Larson, “Public Opinion in Television Election News: Beyond Polls,” Political Communication 16, no. 2 (1999): 122–­45; Justin Lewis, Sanna Inthorn, and Karin Wahl-­­Jorgensen, Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us About Political Participation (London: Open University Press, 2005); Justin Lewis, Karin Wahl-­­Jorgensen, and Sanna Inthorn, “Images of Citizenship on Television News: Constructing a Passive Public,” Journalism Studies 5, no. 2 (2004): 153–­64. 29.  James Fallows, Breaking the News (New York: Vintage, 1997); Gans, Deciding What’s News; Schudson, The Power of News. 30.  Journalist 14. 31.  Journalist 4. 32.  Journalist 21. 33.  Journalist 1. 34. Edwin Black, “The Second Persona,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56, no. 2 (1970): 109–­19. 35.  Journalist 10. 36.  Journalist 1. 37.  Journalist 18. 38.  Journalist 22. 39.  Journalist 2. 40.  Journalist 22. 41. Thomas Patterson, Out of Order (New York: Vintage, 1994); Lawrence J. Goodrich, “Press Gets Blame for Public Cynicism,” Christian Science Monitor, May 30, 1995, http://​www​.csmonitor​.com​/1995​/0530​/30013​.html. 42.  Journalist 2, italics added. 43.  Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Macmillan, 1927). 44.  Gans, Deciding What’s News; Schudson, Power of News. 45. Don Heider, White News: Why Local News Programs Don’t Cover People of Color (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000). 46.  Jim Rutenberg, “How Journalists Failed to Predict Trump’s Victory,” New York Times, November 9, 2016, https://​www​.nytimes​.com​/2016​/11​/09​/business​/media​ /media​-trump​ ­­­ -­­­clinton​.html. 47.  Joe Pompeo, Peter Sterne, Hadas Gold, and Alex Weprin, “What Went Wrong? Eleven Takes from Media Veterans,” Politico, November 10, 2016, http://​www​ .politico​.com​/blogs​/on​-­­­media​/2016​/11​/what​-­­­the​-­­­media​-­­­missed​-­­­editors​-­­­executives​-­­­and​ -­­­journalists​-­­­weigh​-­­­in​-­­­231167. 48. Heather Bryant, “How Journalism Lost the Big Picture by Ignoring ‘Small’ Stories,” MediaShift​.org, November 22, 2016, http://​mediashift​.org​/2016​/11​/journalism​ -­­­lost​-­­­big​-­­­picture​-­­­ignoring​-small​ ­­­ -­­­stories/. 49.  Journalist 19. 50.  Journalist 1.

notes to pages 104–113    183 51.  Journalist 19. 52.  Journalist, 14. 53.  Journalist 13. 54.  Journalist 13. 55.  Journalist 1. 56.  Journalist 1. 57.  Journalist 1. 58.  Journalist 13. 59.  Journalist 24. 60.  Journalist 17. 61.  Journalist 16. 62.  Journalist 24. 63.  Journalist 20. 64.  Journalist 12. 65.  Journalist 9. 66.  Journalist 9. 67.  Journalist 4. 68.  Journalist 6. 69.  Kathleen H. Jamieson and Paul Waldman, The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories That Shape the Political World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Thomas Patterson, The Vanishing Voter: Public Involvement in an Age of Uncertainty (New York: Vintage, 2003). 70.  Journalist 12. 71.  Chris Cillizza, “Trump and the Ratings Presidency,” Washington Post, January 8, 2017, https://​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/politics​/trump​-­­­and​-­­­the​-­­­ratings​-­­­presidency​ /2017​/01​/08​/78adcf8c​-d5ba​ ­­­ -11e6​ ­­­ -­­­8505​-­­­8e7091d7cd98​_story​.html. 72.  For a discussion of how difficult it is to change an agenda once it has taken hold, see Roger Cobb, Jennie-­­Keith Ross, and Marc H. Ross, “Agenda Building as a Comparative Political Process,” American Political Science Review 70, no. 1 (1976): 126–­38. 73. Heather Bryant, “How Journalism Lost the Big Picture.” 74.  Charlie Beckett, “What Does the Trump Triumph Mean for Journalism, Politics, and Social Media?,” Polis: Journalism and Society at the LSE, November 13, 2016, http://​ blogs​.lse​.ac​.uk​/polis​/2016​/11​/13​/what​-­­­does​-­­­the​-trump​ ­­­ -­­­triumph​-­­­mean​-­­­for​-­­­journalism​ -­­­politics​-­­­and​-­­­social​-­­­media/; Jeff Jarvis, “Empathetic Journalism for the Right,” Buzzmachine.com, October 13, 2016, http://​buzzmachine​.com​/tag​/donald​-­­­trump/. 75.  Journalist 14. 76.  Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007). 77.  Journalists 9, 39, and 41. 78.  Journalists 1, 2, 22, 24, 40, and 46. 79.  Journalists 10, 16, and 19. 80.  Journalists 9, 14, 17, and 38. 81.  Journalist 1. 82.  Journalist 21. 83.  Journalist 14. 84.  Journalist 14. 85.  Journalist 10. 86.  Journalist 10. 87.  Journalists 5, 25, 27, and 47. 88.  Journalist 5. 89.  Pompeo et al., “What Went Wrong?”

184    notes to pages 114–119 90. Regina Lawrence, “Researching Political News Framing: Established Ground and New Horizons,” in Doing News Framing Analysis: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives, ed. Paul D’Angelo and James Kuypers (New York: Routledge, 2010), 282. 91.  Journalist 39. 92.  Journalist 21. 93.  Journalist 21. 94.  Journalist 1.

Chapter 6 1. David Leonhardt, “The Democrats’ Real Turnout Problem,” New York Times, November 17, 2016, http://​www​.nytimes​.com​/2016​/11​/20​/opinion​/sunday​/the​-­­­demo crats​-real​ ­­­ -­­­turnout​-­­­problem​.html. 2.  Barack Obama, “Remarks of Senator Barack Obama” (speech, Las Vegas, Nev., September 17, 2008), Campaign Mapping Project. 3.  Barack Obama, “Acceptance Address at the Democratic National Convention” (speech, Charlotte, N.C., September 6, 2012), Campaign Mapping Project. 4. David Nakamura, “After Ripping Republicans Obama Tells Las Vegas Crowd Don’t Boo. Vote,” Washington Post, August 22, 2012, https://​www​.washingtonpost​.com​ /politics​/after​-­­­ripping​-­­­republicans​-­­­obama​-­­­tells​-­­­las​-­­­vegas​-­­­crowd​-­­­dont​-­­­boo​-­­­vote​/2012​/08​ /22​/e166c1fe​-­­­ec81–­11e1–­9ddc-­­340d5efb1e9c_story.html. 5.  Leonhardt, “Democrats’ Real Turnout Problem.” 6.  Jann S. Wenner, “The Day After: Obama on His Legacy, Trump’s Win, and the Path Forward,” Rolling Stone, November 29, 2016, http://​www​.rollingstone​.com​/politics​ /features​/obama​-­­­on​-­­­his​-­­­legacy​-­­­trumps​-win​ ­­­ -and​ ­­­ -­­­the​-­­­path​-­­­forward​-­­­w452527/. 7. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, “A Desk Is a Dangerous Place from Which to View the World: Social Science and the 2016 Election,” November 9, 2016, https://​ rasmuskleisnielsen​.net​/2016​/11​/09​/a​-­­­desk​-­­­is​-­­­a​-­­­dangerous​-­­­place​-­­­from​-­­­which​-­­­to​-­­­view​ -­­­the​-­­­world​-social​ ­­­ -science​ ­­­ -­­­and​-­­­the​-­­­2016​-­­­elections/; Sam Wang, “Why I Had to Eat a Bug on CNN,” New York Times, November 18, 2016, http://​www​.nytimes​.com​/2016​/11​/19​ /opinion​/why​-­­­i​-­­­had​-­­­to​-­­­eat​-­­­a​-bug​ ­­­ -­­­on​-­­­cnn​.html. 8.  Jim Rutenberg, “How Journalists Failed to Predict Trump’s Victory,” New York Times, November 9, 2016, https://​www​.nytimes​.com​/video​/us​/politics​ /100000004758375​/how​-­­­journalists​-­­­failed​-­­­to​-predict​ ­­­ -trumps​ ­­­ -­­­victory​.html. 9. Rachel Schallom, “Stop Flying over the Flyover States,” Niemanlab, December 19, 2016, http://​www​.niemanlab​.org​/2016​/12​/stop​-flying​ ­­­ -­­­over​-­­­the​-­­­flyover​-­­­states/. 10. Andrew Clayton, Richard Sisson, and Chris Zacher, The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 66–­68. 11.  Katherine Cramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 5. 12.  J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016). 13. Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016). 14.  Jack Shafer, “Trump Was Not a Media Fail; The Press Succeeded in Exposing Who Trump Was; Voters Just Decided They Didn’t Care,” Politico, November 9, 2016, http://​www​.politico​.com​/magazine​/story​/2016​/11​/donald​-­­­trump​-­­­wins​-­­­2016​-­­­media​ -­­­214442/. 15. Arthur Brooks, “How Trump Filled the Dignity Deficit,” Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2016, A23.

notes to pages 119–127    185 16.  Martin Seligman, “Learned Helplessness,” Annual Review of Medicine 23 (1972): 407–­12; Seligman, Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death (San Francisco, Calif: W. H. Freeman, 1975). 17. Donald Heider, White News: Why Local News Programs Don’t Cover People of Color (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000); Teun A. van Dijk, Discourse and Power (New York: Palgrave-­­Macmillan, 2008). 18.  George F. Will, “In Defense of Nonvoting,” Newsweek, October 10, 1983, 96. 19.  V. O. Key, The Responsible Electorate (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966); Gerald Pomper, Elections in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1968). 20.  Gaye Tuchman, Making News (New York: Free Press, 1978), 209. 21.  Journalist 1. 22.  Journalist 22. 23.  Journalist 2. 24.  Journalists 1, 17, 22, and 42. 25. Tuchman, Making News, 138. 26.  Journalist 21. 27.  Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, “Hearing Too Much and Learning Too Little,” New York Times, November 17, 2000, A35. 28.  Ibid. 29. Rob Armstrong, Covering Politics: A Handbook for Journalists (Ames, Iowa: Blackwell, 2004), 122. 30. Rob Anderson, Robert Dardenne, and George M. Killenberg, The Conversation of Journalism: Communication, Community, and News (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994). 31. Armstrong, Covering Politics. 32.  Carolyn Marvin and Philip Meyer, “What Kind of Journalism Does the Public Need?,” in The Press, ed. Geneva Overholser and Kathleen H. Jamieson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 407. 33. See Armstrong, Covering Politics, 66. 34.  Geneva Overholser, “Making Voters Believers,” Nieman Reports, Spring 1991, 22, 23, 38. 35. Andrew Haeg, “The Year of Listening,” Niemanlab, December 19, 2016, http://​ www​.niemanlab​.org​/2016​/12​/the​-­­­year​-of​ ­­­ -­­­listening/. 36.  Jeff Jarvis, “Empathetic Journalism for the Right,” Buzzmachine, October 13, 2016, http://​buzzmachine​.com​/tag​/donald​-trump/. ­­­ 37.  Ibid. 38.  Journalist 9. 39.  (Davis) Buzz Merritt and Maxwell McCombs, The Two W’s of Journalism: The Why and What of Public Affairs Reporting (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 130. 40. Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 8. 41.  Ibid., 287. 42.  Ibid., 285, 287. 43. See Armstrong, Covering Politics, 256. 44.  Ibid. 45.  Journalist 31. 46. See Michele Weldon, Everyman News: The Changing American Front Page (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 75–­76. 47.  William Greider, Who Will Tell the People? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 304.

186    notes to pages 127–133 48. Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People for the People (Sebastapol, Calif.: O’Reilly, 2004). 49.  W. Lance Bennett, Regina Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 50.  Weldon, Everyman News, 64. 51.  Journalist 53; Kyle Pope, “Here’s to the Return of the Journalist as Malcontent,” Columbia Journalism Review, November 9, 2016, http://​www​.cjr​.org​/criticism​/journalist​ _election​_trump​_failure​.php. 52.  Journalist 2. 53.  Journalist 10. 54.  Phyllis Kaniss, Making Local News (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 2. 55.  Bob Franklin and David Murphy, What News? The Market, Politics, and the Local Press (London: Routledge, 1991), 7, 140. 56.  “Iowans Endorse Status Quo in Election,” Des Moines Register, November 6, 2001, http://​desmoinesregister​.com​/news​/stories​/c4789004​/19665585​.html. 57.  “Seeking Big Ideas to Break a Deadlock,” Washington Post, October 30, 2002, A1. 58. Sharon E. Jarvis, “The Game Frame(s) of Campaign 2012” (paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Convention, Chicago, Ill., 2014). 59. Sharon E. Jarvis, “Voting Rights vs. Partisan Might: How Sources Shaped Coverage of Electoral Participation in 1965 and 2013” (paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Convention, Las Vegas, Nev., 2015); Sharon E. Jarvis, “Are Voting Rights Newsworthy? How Sources Depicted Electoral Participation in 1965 and 2013” (paper presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Convention, San Francisco, Calif., 2015). 60.  Journalist 14. 61.  Journalist 24. 62.  Journalist 44. 63.  Peter B. Natchez, Images of Voting: Visions of Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 76–­77. 64.  Ibid., 77. 65.  V. O. Key, “The Politically Relevant in Surveys,” American Political Science Review 24 (Spring 1960): 54, 60. 66. Ann Crigler, Marion Just, and Edward McCaffery, Rethinking the Vote (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 229–­30, 232. 67.  Gregory Brunk, “The Impact of Rational Participation Models on Voting Attitudes,” Public Choice 35, no. 5 (1980): 549–­64. 68.  Jurg Steiner, “Rational Choice Theories and Politics: A Research Agenda and a Moral Question,” PS: Political Science and Politics 23, no. 1 (1990): 49. 69.  Paul R. Brewer and Lee Sigelman, “Political Scientists as Color Commentators: Framing and Expert Commentary in Media Campaign Coverage,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 7, no. 1 (2002): 32. 70. Roderick P. Hart, Robert E. Carlson, and William F. Eadie, “Attitudes Toward Communication and the Assessment of Rhetorical Sensitivity,” Communication Monographs 47, no. 1 (1980): 2; Roderick P. Hart and Don Burks, “Rhetorical Sensitivity and Social Interaction,” Speech Monographs 39, no. 2 (1972) 75–­91. 71.  Ibid., 77. 72.  Ibid., 83. 73.  Ibid., 86. 74.  Ibid.

notes to pages 133–139    187 75. Nate Silver, “Donald Trump Is the World’s Greatest Troll,” Fivethirtyeight, July 20, 2015, https://​fivethirtyeight​.com​/features​/donald​-­­­trump​-­­­is​-­­­the​-­­­worlds​-­­­greatest​ -­­­troll/. 76. Ryan Holliday, Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (New York: Portfolio, 2013). 77.  Kathleen H. Jamieson, Paul Waldman, and James Devitt, “Mapping the Discourse of the 1996 U.S. Presidential General Election,” Media, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (1998): 323–­28. 78. Hart and Burks, “Rhetorical Sensitivity,” 89. 79.  Ibid. 80. Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of “CBS Evening News,” “NBC Nightly News,” “Newsweek,” and “Time” (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004). 81. Nate Silver, “The Media Has a Probability Problem; The Media’s Demand for Certainty—­and Its Lack of Statistical Rigor—­Is a Bad Match for our Complex World,” Fivethirtyeight, September 21, 2017, https://​fivethirtyeight​.com​/features​/the​-­­­media​-­­­has​ -­­­a​-­­­probability​-­­­problem/. 82. Sharon E. Jarvis and Soo-­­Hye Han, “From an Honored Value to a Harmful Choice: How Presidential Candidates Have Discussed Electoral Participation (1948–­ 2012),” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 12 (2013): 1650–­62; Jarvis and Han, “The Mobilized Voter: Portrayals of Electoral Participation in Print News Coverage of Campaign 2008,” American Behavioral Scientist 55, no. 4 (2011): 419–­36; Jarvis, “The Game Frames”; Sharon E. Jarvis and Matthew Lamb, “Just Please Vote! How The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Advocates for Electoral Participation” (paper presented at the International Communication Association, Seattle, Wash., 2014). 83. Stewart served as host of the show from 1999 to 2015. For research debating his approach, see Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris, “The Daily Show Effect: Candidate Evaluations, Efficacy, and American Youth,” American Politics Research 34, no. 3 (2006): 341–­67; Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris, “Stoned Slackers or Super-­­ Citizens? The Daily Show Viewing and Political Engagement of Young Adults,” in The Stewart/Colbert Effect: Essays on the Real Impacts of Fake News, ed. Amarnath Amarasingam (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2011), 63–­78; W. Lance Bennett, “Relief in Hard Times: A Defense of Jon Stewart’s Comedy in an Age of Cynicism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 3 (2007): 278–­83; Robert Hariman, “In Defense of Jon Stewart,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 3 (2007): 273–­77; Roderick P. Hart and E. Johanna Hartelius, “The Political Sins of Jon Stewart,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 3 (2007): 263–­72. 84.  The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, season 13, episode 142, “Guest Doris Kearns Goodwin,” directed by Chuck O’Neil, aired on Comedy Central, November 3, 2008. 85.  The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, season 18, episode 19, “Guest Martha Raddatz,” directed by Chuck O’Neil, aired on Comedy Central, November 5, 2012. 86. Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style (New York: Penguin, 2014), 59. 87.  Ibid., 61. 88.  Ibid., 67, 64. 89.  Ibid., 67. 90.  Journalist 28. 91.  Walter Dean Burnham, Voting in American Elections: The Shaping of the American Political Universe Since 1788 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Academica Press, 2010), 46. 92. Douglas Ehninger, Thomas W. Benson, Ernest E. Ettlich, Walter R. Fisher, Harry P. Kerr, Richard L. Larson, Raymond E. Nadeau, and Lyndrey A. Niles, “Report of

188    notes to pages 141–144 the Committee on The Scope of Rhetoric and the Place of Rhetorical Studies in Higher Education,” in The Prospect of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd Bitzer and Edwin Black (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971), 208–­19.

Appendix 1.  Maxwell McCombs, Setting the Agenda: The Media and Public Opinion (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2004); Marilyn Roberts and Maxwell McCombs, “Agenda Setting and Political Advertising: Origins of the News Agenda,” Political Communication 11, no. 3 (July/September 1994): 249–­62. 2. The Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Journal merged in 1982. Examples prior to that year are referred to as Atlanta Constitution in our analysis; examples after the merger are referred to as Atlanta Journal-­­Constitution. 3. Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of “CBS Evening News,” “NBC Nightly News,” “Newsweek,” and “Time” (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004). 4. The Campaign Mapping Project (CMP) is a multiyear research project directed by Roderick P. Hart of the University of Texas and Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania and funded by the Ford and Carnegie Foundations. The Hart and Jamieson–­led research teams gathered six sets of discourse found between September 1 and Election Day for each of the presidential campaigns: speeches, television advertisements, print and broadcast coverage, debates, and letters to the editor. While the original project collected texts from 1948 to 1996, research teams at the University of Texas, guided by Hart, have continued to collect texts from 2000 to 2016 to extend the scope of this textbase. The current project presents a content analysis of the print news data from 1948 to 2016. 5. Roderick P. Hart, Sharon E. Jarvis, William P. Jennings, and Deborah Smith-­­ Howell, Political Keywords: Using Language That Uses Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jarvis, Talk of the Party: Political Labels, Symbolic Capital and American Life (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). 6.  Jan E. Leighley, Strength in Numbers? The Political Mobilization of Racial and Ethnic Minorities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Steven J. Rosenstone and John M. Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America (New York: Macmillan, 1993); Martin P. Wattenberg, The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952–­ 1996 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 7. Samuel Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1997). 8. Alan S. Gerber and Donald P. Green, “The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment,” American Political Science Review 94, no. 3 (September 2000): 653–­63. 9. Rosenstone and Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America, 228. 10. Ruy A. Teixeira, The Disappearing American Voter (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1992), 23. 11. Hart et al., Political Keywords; Jarvis, Talk of the Party. 12.  James Fallows, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (New York: Vintage Books, 1996); Regina G. Lawrence, “Game-­­Framing the Issues: Tracking the Strategy Frame in Public Policy News,” Political Communication 17, no. 2 (August 2000): 93–­114; Thomas E. Patterson, Out of Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

notes to pages 145–159    189 13. Henry R. Beekman, “An Act Making Voting Compulsory,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 1, no. 4 (July 1891): 613; William H. Riker and Peter C. Ordeshook, “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting,” American Political Science Review 62, no. 1 (March 1968): 25–­42. 14. H. B. Mayo, “A Note on the Alleged Duty to Vote,” Journal of Politics 21, no. 2 (May 1959): 319–­23. 15. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957); Morris P. Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Samuel L. Popkin, The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 16. Dennis Chong, Jack Citrin, and Patricia Conley, “When Self-­­Interest Matters,” Political Psychology 22, no. 3 (September 2001): 541–­70. 17. Donald R. Kinder and Roderick D. Kiewiet, “Economic Discontent and Political Behavior: The Role of Personal Grievances and Collective Economic Judgments in Congressional Voting,” American Journal of Political Science 23, no. 3 (August 1979): 495–­527. 18. Downs, Economic Theory of Democracy; Fiorina, Retrospective Voting; V. O. Key, The Responsible Electorate: Rationality in Presidential Voting, 1936–­1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966); Norman H. Nie, Sidney Verba, and John R. Petrocik, The Changing American Voter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); Popkin, Reasoning Voter; George E. Marcus, W. Russell Neuman, and Michael Mackuen, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 19. Roderick P. Hart, Deborah Smith-­­Howell, and John Llewellyn, “The Mindscape of the Presidency: Time Magazine, 1945–­1985,” Journal of Communication 41, no. 3 (September 1991): 6–­25. 20.  Inter-­­coder reliability scores (Cohen’s Kappa) ranged from .77 to .90 for all variables in the content analysis. 21. Robert F. Belli, Michael W. Traugott, Margaret Young, and Katherine A. ­McGonagle, “Reducing Vote Over-­­Reporting in Surveys: Social Desirability, Memory Failure, and Source Monitoring,” Public Opinion Quarterly 63, no. 1 (May 1999): 90–­108. 22. Richard A. Krueger, Moderating Focus Groups: Focus Group Kit 4 (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1997); Richard A. Krueger and Mary Anne Casey, Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research, 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2000); Richard A. Krueger and Jean King, Involving Community Members in Focus Groups: Focus Group Kit 5 (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1998). 23. Elliot G. Mishler, Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). 24. Sharon E. Jarvis, “Focus Group Research: Data Collection and Data Analysis,” in The Sourcebook for Political Communication Research, ed. Erik P. Bucy and R. Lance Holbert (New York: Routledge, 2011): 283–­99. 25. David L. Morgan, Focus Groups as Qualitative Research (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1988); David L. Morgan, The Focus Group Guidebook: Focus Group Kit 1 (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1998). 26. Thomas R. Lindlof and Bryan C. Taylor, Qualitative Communication Research Methods, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2002), 173. 27.  Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory (Chicago, Ill.: Aldine, 1967); Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin, Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1990). 28.  Lindlof and Taylor, Qualitative Communication Research Methods, 197. 29.  Grant McCracken, The Long Interview (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1988).

190    notes to page 159 30.  Lindlof and Taylor, Qualitative Communication Research Methods. 31.  Gans, Deciding What’s News, xxiii. 32. Seth C. Lewis and Stephen D. Reese, “What Is the War on Terror? Framing Through the Eyes of Journalists,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 86, no. 1 (March 2009): 85–­102. 33.  McCracken, Long Interview. 34.  Michael C. Patton, Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods (Newbury Park, Calif: Sage Publications, 2001).

Index

Abrams, Daniel, 72 Ailes, Roger, 65 Alexander, Andrew, 49 Alexander, Kim, 68 Alterman, Eric, 66–67, 125 AP and UPI wires, 7, 97, 141, 158 Armstrong, Rob, 126 associations variable, 6, 35, 39, 45, 58, 63, 142–43, 189 assumptions variable, 6, 35, 45, 64, 68, 142, 145, 189 Atlanta Journal–Constitution (Atlanta Constitution before 1982), 7, 61, 97, 141 Atwater, Lee, 64–65 Axelrod, David, 116 Baker, James III, 65 Ball, Lucille, 60 Barkley, Alben W., 41 Bartels, Larry, 5 Beckett, Charlie, 48 behavior variable, 6, 35, 45, 142, 146–47, 189 Bennett, Lance, 26, 41–42, 49, 90–91, 127 Benson, Ezra Taft, 40 Black, Charles, 65 Black, Edwin, 26, 44, 90, 101 Booth, Bobby, 72 Brennan Center for Justice, 3, 14 Brewer, Paul, 132 Broder, David, 124, 126–27 Brooks, Arthur, 118 Brown, Arthur, 61 Brown, Scott, 127 Brunk, Gregory, 132 Bryant, Heather, 103, 109 Burke, Kenneth, 26 Burks, Don, 132–34 Burnham, Walter Dean, 3, 12, 138 Bush, George H. W., 65–66, 134 Bush, George W., 2, 34, 36, 52, 64, 68, 73, 129 Byrne, James, 47 Callaghan, Karen, 23 campaign mapping project, 6–7, 9, 35, 141–42, 144

Cappella, Joseph, 94 Carroll, John S., 8 Carter, Jimmy, 2, 50–52 challenges variable, 6, 35, 68, 142, 145, 189 Chicago Tribune, 7, 97, 141, 158 Christian Science Monitor, 7, 97, 141, 158 Chyi, Iris, 8 civic education, 17, 50 Clark, Roy Peter, 22, 41 Clemons, Sandra, 74 Clinton, Bill, 43, 133–34 Clinton, Hillary, 2, 13, 43, 48, 70–72, 82, 88, 92, 116–17, 138 CMP. See campaign mapping project Cobb, Roger, 23 Colbert, Stephen, 136 Coleman, Stephen, 5, 53–54 constitution, United States, 3, 32, 43–44, 81–82, 90 content analysis, 6-9, 141–52 context variable, 6, 35, 42, 68, 71, 142, 144, 172, 189 Converse, Philip, 23 Cramer, Katherine, 118 Crigler, Ann, 79, 131 crowds, campaign, 13–14, 46–48, 104– 5. See also rally, campaign Cruz, Ted, 72 Dahl, Robert, 19, 38, 41, 46 Darman, Richard, 65 deliberation, 20, 29, 31 description, thick, 49, 118 Devine, Annie Bebe, 62 Devitt, James, 133 Dewey, John, 132 Dewey, Thomas, 1, 2 Dole, Robert, 43, 133 Dukakis, Michael, 65 Edelman, Murray, 11, 22 Edwards, John, 88, 89 Ehninger, Douglas, 139 Eisenhower, Dwight, 16, 43, 47, 58, 60–61

192   index elections instrument, blunt, 15, 32 legitimacy of, 6, 12–13, 19–20, 69, 121 respect for, 3–5, 32 threats to, 11–12, 34–35, 36–38, 67–72 electoral participation advocacy for, 15–17, 32 ambivalence about, 3–6 echo chamber surrounding, 4, 17, 44, 50, 86, 100, 119 protection for citizens, 53–54, 62 symbol of democracy, 3, 18–19, 32 turnout in the United States, 20–21 Entman, Robert, 22, 35 experiment isolated–spectator condition, 10, 78, 80, 82–94, 101, 107, 121, 153–54, 156–59, 179-80 mobilized–participant condition, 10, 78, 80–81, 83–94, 102, 121, 153, 156–57, 159, 179–80 stimuli, 81–83 protocol, 148, 153–57 Fenno, Richard, 16 fly–over states, 117–18 focus groups, 10, 22, 80–81, 90–93, 121, 123, 141, 148, 157, 179 Ford, Gerald, 50–51, 65–66 Foster, Roy, 61 Fowler, Roger, 27, 54, 95 frame variable, 6, 35, 45, 49, 64, 74, 142, 144, 189 frames changes in, 75–78 frame–building, 22 game–frame, 24–28, 80–83, 91–94, 101, 117, 132, 144 prediction, thick, 45–49, 118 public opinion polls in, 29, 64–66, 77 Franklin, Bob, 128 Fuller, Craig L., 65 Galtung, Johan, 28 Gans, Herbert, 100, 134 Ganz, Marshall, 73 Geertz, Clifford, 49 Gibbs, Robert, 116 Gillmor, Dan, 126–27 Gitlin, Todd, 22, 35 Giuliani, Rudy, 87 Gluck, Carol, 22 goals variable, 6, 35, 37–38, 42, 142, 145–46, 189 Gomillion, C. G., 61 Goodwin, Doris Kearns, 136 Gore, Al, 2, 36, 66, 73, 143, 147–48

Grabe, Maria, 41–42 grammar variable, 6, 41, 142, 146 Greider, William, 126–127 Hansen, John, 142 Harry Truman, 1, 40–41, 47 Hart, Roderick P., 6, 132–34, 141 Harvey, Sherryl, 74 Hawkins, Reginald A., 61 Heider, Donald, 102 helplessness, learned, 119 Helvey, Ed, 74 Henning, Arthur Sears, 1 Herbst, Susan, 77 Hershey, Marjorie, 15, 53 Hochschild, Arlie, 118 Hollander, Edward, 62 Holliday, Ryan, 133 Hood, Calvin A., 61–62 interviews, 10, 22, 97–115, 122–31, 137, 157–59 Inthorn, Sanna, 28, 43 Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, 6, 94, 133–34, 141 Jarvis, Jeff, 124 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 1, 6, 40, 60 Jones, Alex S., 63 Joseph, John, 22 journalism, precision, 63, 76, 119 journalism, public, 30–31 Just, Marion, 49, 79, 131 Kaniss, Phyllis, 128 Katz, Richard, 18 Kefauver, Estes, 40 Kelly, Alberta, 61 Kennedy, John F., 59 Kennedy, Ted, 127 Kerry, John, 34, 68 Key, V. O., 3, 23, 32, 54, 67, 79, 86, 104, 120, 131, 133 Keyssar, Alexander, 15 Kissell, Larry, 75 knowledge, curse of, 137 Kovach, Bill, 123 Kucinich, Dennis, 88 Kurtz, Howard, 5 Lake, James, 65 Lakoff, Robin, 23 Lang, Gladys, 6, 134 Lang, Kurt, 6, 134 language agency, linguistic, 6, 14, 24–28, 31, 35, 61, 66–67, 74, 89, 91, 94, 119, 129, 133, 138, 142, 146 knowledge, curse of, 137

index   193 roles, assigned by, 3, 6, 9–10, 14, 17–18, 24–27, 30, 32–33, 38, 44, 46, 51, 54, 56, 67, 73, 79–80, 82, 90, 101, 117, 119, 121, 138–39 sensitivity, rhetorical, 132–135 Larson, Stephanie, 29 Lasswell, Harold, 23 Lawrence, Regina, 114, 127 Lehrer, Jim, 65 Lewis, Justin, 28, 43 Lipari, Lisbeth, 77 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 19, 41, 46 Livingstone, Steven, 127 Los Angeles Times, 7, 97, 141, 158 Macedo, Stephen, 20 Madison, James, 20, 69 Manafort, Paul, 65 Maslin, Paul, 66 Mayo, Elton, 78 McCaffery, Edward, 79, 131 McCain, John, 16, 82 McCombs, Maxwell, 5, 30, 44, 77, 93, 125 Mead, George Herbert, 132 media, 24, 29, 117–18, 121, 133, 141, 143–44 assessments of, 88–94, 99, 101–3, 159 content, 36, 97 conservative, 90 earned, 13 effects, 94 elite, 1–2, 96–97 landscape, 55–56 liberal, 118 mainstream, 78, 102, 108, 136 portrayals, 9, 23, 43, 54 print, 28, 32, 54, 56, 81, 99, 106, 112, 114, 130, 133, 138, 141, 153, 158 regional, 7, 104, 126–30, 141, 158 right-wing, 70 social, 7–8, 13, 56 television, 5, 7–8, 13, 28–29, 56–57, 59, 65, 73, 96, 102, 104, 135, 141 trust, 10, 93–94, 153, 155, 158 Meese, Ed, 64 Merritt, Buzz, 5, 30, 44, 77, 93, 125 Mill, John Stuart, 20, 41, 46 Miller, Daniel, 75 Miller, Warren, 20 Millican, Seth, 71 mobilization agents variable, 6, 35, 60, 63, 73, 142–43, 189 model of product substitution, 15 Mondale, Walter F., 43 Monroe, Lori, 69 Moore, Ronnie, 62 Murphy, David, 128 Myrick, Jessica, 41–42

news media, changes to, 7–8, 56–57, 63, 114 news values, 28, 36–38, 48, 53, 75, 95 New York Times, 7, 14, 97, 129, 141, 158 Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis, 52–53 Nixon, Richard, 59–60, 66 Noonan, Peggy, 108 Obama, Barack, campaign 2008, 10, 47-48,  60, 72-76, 128, 136 campaign 2012, 16, 52, 70, campaign 2016 13–14, 138 news coverage of, 94, 105 voters, his respect for, 116–17, 130 O’Donnell, Guillermo, 19 Overholser, Geneva, 124 Palin, Sarah, 73 Palomarez, Javier, 71 partisan actors, 57–63, 67 identification, 155 legislation, 68 portrayal, 75–76, 80 programming, 135 voters, 50 party, Democratic,  campaign 2012, 16 campaign 2016, 71–72 demographics, 50–52, 58–62, 66, 68, 127, 129 nominees, presidential, 1–2, 16, 36, 41, 43, 59, 65, 68, 133 participation, barriers to electoral, 15, 34, 44, 70 voters, mobilization of, 73–75 party, Republican,  campaign 2016, 71–72, 96–97 demographics, 40, 47–51, 58, 60–61, 127 nominees, presidential, 1–2, 16, 36, 43, 47, 59, 133, 134 participation, barriers to electoral, 15, 34, 44, 69–70 platform, 2012, 69 strategists, 64–67, 133 Patterson, Thomas, 13, 71, 101 Pennebaker, James, 90 Perlmutter, Ed, 73 Perot, H. Ross, 134, 148 Perry, David, 30 Petrocik, John, 66 Phillips, Kevin, 65 Pinker, Steven, 136–37 Plouffe, David, 116 Polimetrix, 153, 156 Pomper, Gerald, 4, 19, 32, 41, 45–46, 53, 56, 79, 86, 104, 120, 133

194   index potency variable, 6, 35, 42, 67, 71, 74, 142, 146–47, 172, 189 Potter, Deborah, 28, 126 Putnam, Robert, 57, 63

Republican, 64–67. 133–35 trialogue, role in, 8–9, 76–77, 119, 138 Sullivan, Margaret, 48 Sykes, Mary, 25

quality variable, 6, 35, 50–51, 142, 146, 148, 189 Quayle, Dan, 65

Tate, Sheila, 65 Teeter, Robert, 65 Teixeira, Ruy, 143 Tetlock, Philip, 49 Thomas, Charles H., 61 Thompson, Fred, 87 time variable, 6, 35, 49, 142, 144, 189 Townsend, Mary C, 61 trialogue, campaign, 8–9, 14, 21, 32, 100, 121, 134 Trump, Donald, 2, 13, 31, 48, 70– 72, 96–97, 102–3, 109, 113, 116–19, 125, 128, 133 Tuchman, Gaye, 120, 122 Tutwiler, Margaret, 65

rally, campaign, 13–14, 46–48, 104–5. See also crowds, campaign Reagan, Ronald, 1, 6, 43, 64, 120, 146 Reese, Stephen, 35 rewards variable, 6, 35, 37–38, 42, 142, 145–46, 189 Ritter, Bill, 73 Rochefort, David, 23 role variable, 6, 35, 37–38, 42, 67, 71, 142, 146–47, 172, 189 Romney, Mitt, 16, 52, 82 Rosenstiel, Tom, 123 Rosenstone, Steven, 142 Rosenthal, Robert, 78 Rove, Karl, 64, 108, 129, Ruge, Mari Holmboe, 28 Rutenberg, Jim, 102, 117 Ryle, Gilbert, 49 Sabato, Larry, 63 Sanders, Bernie, 72 Schnell, Frauke, 23 Schudson, Michael, 13, 26, 44, 49, 58, 90–91, 98 Schulz, Winfried, 28 sensitivity, rhetorical, 132–35 Shafer, Jack, 118 Shanks, J. Merrill, 20 Sigelman, Lee, 132 Silver, Nate, 48, 134 Smith, Craig, 8 socialization, political, 21 sociolinguistics, 24–27 Springsteen, Bruce, 48 Stewart, Don, 61 Stewart, Jon, 135–37 Stone, Roger, 65 strategists, campaign, 9, 11, 42, 57, 62, 64–67, 72, 98, 106–7, 125 strategists, political, journalists, perceptions of, 101, 106–14, 119, 125–26, 137 news coverage, 11, 15, 42, 48-51, 62–72, 98, 129

Udall, Nathan, 71 Vagnozzi, Aldo, 2 van Dijk, Teun, 26 Vance, J. D., 118–19 vanden Huevel, Katrina, 102 voter democratic theory in, 18–31 demographic groups as, 51–53, 74–75 fraud, 10, 43, 69, 71–72, 146 identification requirements, 44, 69, 135 language in, 21–27 news coverage of, 28–31 personalization of, 9, 28, 36, 41–42, 44–45, 54 respect for, 44, 54, 79–80, 94, 103 spinning for, 122–39 Wahl–Jorgensen, Karin, 28, 43 Waldman, Paul, 133 Wallace, George, 62 Wander, Philip, 26, 44, 91 Ward, Ian, 29 Washington Post, 7, 14, 97, 129, 141, 158 Weimann, Gabriel, 29, 66 Weldon, Michele, 31, 76, 93, 127 Will, George, 120 Williams, Avon, 61 Williams, Hosea L., 62 Windle, Debbie, 71 Wirthlin, Richard, 64 Zaller, John, 15, 23, 26, 44, 49, 63, 90–91

D RD RHETORICANDDEMOCRATICDELIBERATION Other books in the series: Karen Tracy, Challenges of Ordinary Democracy: A Case Study in Deliberation and Dissent / Volume 1 Samuel McCormick, Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals / Volume 2 Christian Kock and Lisa S. Villadsen, eds., Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation / Volume 3 Jay P. Childers, The Evolving Citizen: American Youth and the Changing Norms of Democratic Engagement / Volume 4 Dave Tell, Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-­Century America / Volume 5 David Boromisza-­Habashi, Speaking Hatefully: Culture, Public Communication, and Political Action in Hungary / Volume 6 Arabella Lyon, Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights / Volume 7 Lyn Carson, John Gastil, Janette Hartz-­Karp, and Ron Lubensky, eds., The Australian Citizens’ Parliament and the Future of Deliberative Democracy / Volume 8 Christa J. Olson, Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador / Volume 9 Damien Smith Pfister, Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere / Volume 10 Katherine Elizabeth Mack, From Apartheid to Democracy: Deliberating Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa / Volume 11 Mary E. Stuckey, Voting Deliberatively: FDR and the 1936 Presidential Campaign / Volume 12 Robert Asen, Democracy, Deliberation, and Education / Volume 13 Shawn J. Parry-­Giles and David S. Kaufer, Memories of Lincoln and the Splintering of American Political Thought / Volume 14 J. Michael Hogan, Jessica A. Kurr, Michael J. Bergmaier, and Jeremy D. Johnson, eds., Speech and Debate as Civic Education / Volume 15 Angela G. Ray and Paul Stob, eds., Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century / Volume 16