The Negative Effects Of Horse-Race Journalism

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Horse-race journalism and its effects on informing citizens has been something many Political scientists have been trying to understand since its rise in popularity in the 70s. The question that is contested is how well this type of news coverage can inform citizens into making decisions that are in their self-interest. The purpose of this paper is to investigate that question by analyzing news articles to determine how well horse-race coverage informs citizens. My results suggest that most of the news articles are in fact horse-race coverage and important information is not being delivered to the citizens. Introduction “Poll gives Schauers light edge over Snyder” This is the title of an article covering 2014 Michigan gubernatorial race …show more content…

The article presents data that suggest that horse race coverage does not report on the issues that are complex or contested ideas (Anthony pg520). Also it shows data on how journalist focus on public perceptions of events, image, character, and polls which are all important parts of the whole candidate but I argue that that does not make a more informed voter do to the lack of covering issues and policy they support (Anthony pg521). His conclusion finds that horse-race coverage can make voters focus on irrelevant aspects of a campaign, Pseudo effect of what actual is happening in campaigns partial do to them analyzing polls and explaining its effects on the campaigns and complex, significant issues are passed over for exciting ones (Anthony …show more content…

The perfect race to analyze is the gubernatorial race in Michigan. Due to its high profile many news organizations will be covering it and I will not have a shortage of data. I narrowed the search of articles between 5/28/2013 - 10/03/2014. The significance of 5/28/2013 is the day Schauers officially announced his run for governor. It was the logical choice because Snyder was already sitting governor and was almost guaranteed he would run for another term. I collected a sample of 35 articles from a population of 124 articles. What was critical was getting the proper search key to get the best results, through trial and error I discovered that gubernatorial was more effective the governor and that I had to include the last name of the candidates in the search. To ensure representative sample of the total population I used a random integer generator to determine which articles I looked at. I also choice newspaper publications due to that category having the most available population to sample. To keep the evidence as pure as possible I had to throw out 9 articles do to the irrelevancy of the articles. For example on was talking about Mitt Romney and only one time mentioned 2014 gubernatorial. Then I used a codebook to count up which coding values apply why

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