News Coverage : How the Press Failed ... and Perhaps Fails... Voters

 


2016 was the prime year for media and elections. The relationship between the two was forever altered by the 2016 election. The first interesting find of this research is the level of negativity revolving around both candidates. Neither candidate received an ounce of positive territory. Both the general election and full campaign percentages were well above 50% negative. These numbers were related to their tone that was presented by the press. Visibly you can see that these percentages reflected whether the general public trusted either individual. One could say that articles and scandals released during election season added on to the negative percentages. Another interesting research point is the campaign coverage by topic. The important topics such as policy standings were a record 10% while horserace was a whopping 42%. The media covered and put more focus on who was winning/losing due to the outlets operating their own polling. News polling became more popular because of the 2016 election year. You can see the evident shift from the 2008 election year to 2016. As Mr. Patterson stated, the polls presented new information to release hourly and daily to the public. It was more important than what the candidates were discussing about policies and what their leadership/experience was. 

Now the 2024 election is an even bigger ball game especially with news coverage. It is even bigger than the 2016 and 2020 election coverage. There seems to be a shift from horserace to leadership/experience, personal traits, and policy stands. Speeches given at different rallies are being dissected and discussed at round tables. Different forms of news outlets are getting information before mainstream news outlets which are generating more buzz and attention especially from those who do not watch the news regularly. Information is shared almost hourly but not by mainstream news outlets. If Professor Patterson were to run another experiment and transfer that data into a pie chart, maybe there would be a percentage difference from 2016 compared to 2024. 


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