FRAME: Strategy/Conflict

How bad have things gotten when it comes to substantive coverage and discussion of the presidential election? Pew finds that at the end of August, just 2% of total news coverage focused on issues rather than the day-to-day strategies and conflicts between the two candidates (graph above). Scholars have long recognized this trend in journalism towards a singular focus on the horse race to the exclusion of a substantive focus on the issues. In a forthcoming entry in the Encyclopedia of Survey Research I review this research and discuss its links to the growing over-abundance of daily tracking…

Scholars have long warned about the increasing sound bite nature of our media and political system, but overlooked is the visual nature of this trend. A new study in the Journal of Communication is the first to systematically track and contextualize this troubling tendency of the American public sphere: Taking Television Seriously: A Sound and Image Bite Analysis of Presidential Campaign Coverage, 1992-2004 This study updates and builds on Hallin's landmark investigation of sound-bite news by documenting the prevalence of candidate image bites, where candidates are shown but not heard (as…

In a lengthy column at today's Washington Post, media reporter Howard Kurtz pulls no punches in criticizing the horse race coverage that has defined the primary races: "The series of blown calls amount to the shakiest campaign performance yet by a profession seemingly addicted to snap judgments and crystal-ball pronouncements. Not since the networks awarded Florida to Al Gore on Election Night 2000 has the collective media establishment so blatantly missed the boat." Here's how Kurtz describes the factors contributing to the news media's overwhelming fascination with polls and hyped…

As I wrote yesterday, the key indicator following Obama's expected win in New Hampshire tomorrow night will be the distance that he has closed in the subsequent national polls. If he pulls even or ahead, it's over for Clinton. In fact, according to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll, Obama has already made up what was once a 25 point difference, pulling even with Clinton. As former Kerry strategist Bob Shrum writes in today's NY Daily News, Hillary is the KO'd Kid. Meanwhile, the Gallup poll shows that Huckabee has taken the lead by five points nationally among GOP voters.

Did you know that while an Illinois Senator that Barack Obama successfully passed major bills on crime, ethics, campaign finance reform, and low wage work? And that these accomplishments reveal his experience and ability in working across party lines to craft solutions to complex problems? The reason you don't know these things things is in part a function of the horse race coverage that has dominated this presidential race at a historically unprecedented level. Charles Peters, the founding editor of the Washington Monthly, makes this exact point in an op-ed published at the Washington…

At the History News Network, my American University colleague Lenny Steinhorn teams up with his brother Charles, a professor of Mathematics at Vassar College, to point out the misleading nature of the framing of evolution in presidential coverage. As they argue, political reporters overwhelmingly tend to describe evolution as a "belief" akin to believing in Virgin birth or miracles. Lenny Steinhorn, author of The Greater Generation, a defense of Baby Boomers, is one of the most sought out strategists in Washington. [Of interest to readers, his work and teaching was recently profiled in the…

At Time magazine, a focus on who will break out of the pack?! As the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary approaches, it's all horse race all the time in the news media with an almost exclusive focus on "insider" coverage of campaign strategy and a fascination with who's ahead and who's behind in the polls. Lost in the media spectacle is any careful coverage of issues and policy proposals, or serious discussion of candidate background. In fact, it seems there's never been a time in 2007 where issues have taken primacy over the sports game of political coverage. Consider that an analysis by…

As I have detailed in past studies and as we write in the cover article at The Scientist, the dominant frame that appears when science turns political is the "strategy" frame. This is a journalist driven package that ignores the substance of the scientific issue or debate and instead employs an election-like emphasis on personalities, tactics, and who's ahead in winning the policy battle. Often this package becomes prominent when coverage shifts from the science beat to the political beat. It is under these conditions that "false balance" is most likely to appear in coverage of science. The…

In a cover story at this week's NY Times magazine, Gary Taubes digs deep into the world of epidemiological research on diet and health. It's an important topic to call attention to, but the article is framed in disastrous and irresponsible ways. Instead of telling a detective story hung around just how amazingly complex it is to figure out the linkages between diet, drug therapies, and human health, Taubes and his editors go the unfortunate route of defining the article in terms of conflict, drama, and public accountability. They readily translate their preferred interpretation by way…

First John McCain was against embryonic stem cell research, now he's for it. First Mitt Romney was for embryonic stem cell research, now he's against it. If either of these GOP candidates win the nomination, given their track record on stem cell research and a host of other issues, it will be difficult for them to push the traditional "flip flopper" attacks on the Democratic nominee. Over at the NY Times' "The Caucus" blog, Michael Luo details a memo released by the McCain campaign describing Romney's flip-flopping statements on stem cell research over the years. It's a great read. The…

With action on Iraq and major domestic initiatives such as immigration stalled, Congressional Dems have lost the sense of approval and optimism that greeted them in January. The gap in public approval, according to a recent Pew poll, has reached 15 percentage points. Action on climate change and stem cell research were also part of the Dems' promised package of policies to put in place this year. Unfortunately, it looks like the juggernaut issues of Iraq, immigration, the 2008 Horse Race, and a growing number of oversight investigations will derail any meaningful science policy until…

With the semester finally winding down, over the weekend, I updated the tabs "What is Framing?" and "Popular Science vs. Framing." These new sections of my blog explain in detail research on framing and media influence and also present a generalizable typology of frames that re-appear across science debates. Both tabs include bibliographies of recommended literature.

Everywhere you look, polarized views from the tail ends of the bell curve of opinion on climate change are being picked up by the media. Indeed, only at a few outlets like the NY Times, WPost, or NPR can Americans get that "invisible middle" of views on the issue. Unfortunately, these are not the outlets that reach the wider public. Consider the stories linked to at the Drudge Report today, one of the major agenda-setters, especially for cable news and political talk radio. From a Vanity Fair article excerpting the script of Leonardo DiCaprio's upcoming documentary The 11th Hour (see note…

Scientists and environmental advocates will watch with excited anticipation on Friday as the policymakers' summary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is released in Paris, France. The IPCC reports are designed to be the most important events in climate science and policy, gathering world experts to craft an authoritative summary of the state of human understanding. Yet here in the United States, if past trends are predictive, the IPCC report is unlikely to make a major dent in the news or public agenda, much less shift public opinion. As the Pew analysis (pictured above) of…

Brace yourself for the 2008 You-Tube election. When it comes to presidential campaigns, many Americans make up their minds about candidates not based on the issues, but rather based on "low information" signals about the candidate's personal narrative and character. For example, in 2004, the Bush campaign stuck to a very successful internal theme in plotting external message strategy: Who would you rather have a beer with, Bush or Kerry? Not only is the candidate's perceived likeability important, so is their appearance of competence in handling the many dynamics and unexpected turns of…

At the Washington Post today , Juliet Eilperin and Michael Grunwald report on the diverging priorities of House speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic chairmen John Dingell and Henry Waxman, conflicts that might stall or even derail meaningful legislation on climate change. Last week, in a new column on Science & Policy at the journal Nature, David Goldston shared the news article's outlook, but added that similar personal rifts in the Senate might also delay a bill for a "couple Congresses." According to the Washington Post report, Dingell's ties to industry and labor unions means that…

Something's rotten in Denmark. Conservatives once again have sprung a media trap on Al Gore, but this time overseas. At the Wall Street Journal , "skeptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg and Danish journalist Flemming Rose complain that Gore, while touring Denmark, backed out of a scheduled interview. According to the duo, the newspaper Jyllands-Posten set up an "investigative interview" between Gore and culture editor Rose. To maximize conflict, the paper invited Lomborg to participate. Rose and Lomborg claim that Gore agreed to the terms of the interview, but then pulled out at the…

The game is afoot to define the presidency of Gerald Ford. The dominant narrative from the mainstream media is that Ford was the "Great Healer," an extinct species of bi-partisan statesman who guided the country through the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and the pullout from Vietnam. The lead to this front page story by Peter Baker of the Washington Post represents the dominant media narrative of "bi-partisan healer": A nation deeply polarized by war and partisanship came together yesterday to mourn Gerald Rudolph Ford as a healer during a previous era of division, while Washington…

Parita Shah from the Center for Genetics and Society has an interesting op-ed in the Mercury News reflecting on the campaign tactics used by both sides this last election cycle to argue their case on stem cell research. Here's an excerpt from the Mercury News op-ed. Whether or not the issue factored into this year's election results, voters heard a lot about it. Typically, this would be all to the good. Stem-cell research is complex and important. Unfortunately, the campaign treatment of stem-cell research also demonstrated that such a complex issue gets simplified and distorted beyond…

It's year six of your presidency, and historians are already debating whether you are the worst U.S. leader in history. Can a new communication strategy help repair your reputation? At the Washington Post, Douglas Brinkley, Eric Foner, Vincent Cannato, Michael Lind, and David Greenberg place George W. Bush in historical context, while a crack team of crisis communication experts offer advice on how W. can turn it around.