Overview

In the culminating weeks of the 2000 presidential race, the press coverage was strikingly negative, and Vice President Al Gore has gotten the worst of it, according to a new study released today by the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

Gore’s coverage was decidedly more negative, more focused on the internal politics of campaigning and had less to do with citizens than did his Republican rival.

In contrast, George W. Bush was twice as likely as Gore to get coverage that was positive in tone. Coverage of the governor was also more issue-oriented and more likely to be directly connected to citizens.

These are some of the key findings of a major new study of press coverage in newspapers, television and on the Internet during key weeks in September and October.

Overall, nearly a quarter of all Bush dominated stories were clearly positive in nature, while that was true of only 13% of Gore stories, according to the study. Bush was also less likely to receive negative coverage than Gore.

One reason for the hard time for Gore may be the penchant of the press to focus coverage around strategy and tactics.

The study produced, for the Committee by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Princeton Survey Research Associates, examined 1,149 stories from 17 news publications, programs and websites.

The study captured a time that some observers consider one of the most substantive moments of the campaign, the period of the debates. Yet the press assessed the debates not on the basis of where the candidates stood or their character but overwhelmingly through a tactical lens—especially as performances. Roughly seven-in-ten debate stories were about performance (53%) or strategy (12%). As the debates went on, coverage of political themes increased and coverage of issues and character declined.

In particular, stories assessing the debates tended to focus on performance (53%) and strategy (12%) rather than on the philosophical differences between the candidates. Fewer than one-in-ten were about their policy differences, perhaps fueling the perceptions among voters that there is little difference between them.

This may have particularly hurt Gore, the more experienced debater and the one expected to get the best of the encounters. In short, the data makes clear the press was playing the expectations game.

The study examined the weeks of September 23-29, October 7-13, and October 14-20, which included the run up to the first debate coverage before, during and after the second and third debates. It also included assessments of the vice presidential face off.

Among other key findings:

• Neutrality has gone by the wayside in coverage of Campaign 2000. Less than a third of all stories were neutral in tone. The majority (51%) was negative, and the press was almost three times more likely to be negative than positive.¹ 
• The press did write stories in a way that showed how the topic would affect citizens a good deal more than it did during the primary season. In all, 27% of stories were written in a way that made the connection to citizens clear, compared with 17% during an earlier study this year. That number, however, may still strike the electorate as frustratingly low. 
• For all the talk of health care & elderly and taxes as deciding issues of the campaign, these two themes made up only 11% of all the stories studied. 
• There was remarkably little coverage of the character of the candidates—only 13%—even though polling research suggests that these were one of the reasons so many voters were either undecided or soft in their support of Gore and Bush. 
• Internet stories, especially those produced just for web, tended to be far less neutral—and much more negative—than traditional broadcast or print news organizations.

1 These tallies do not include roughly 30% of the stories, which were strictly factual accounts of breaking.

This study, our fourth of the campaign, focused on those stories that were recurring or major themes during the period from the last week of September until the third week of October. It deliberately captured any story that appeared twice or more in an attempt to identify the major stories threads in these critical days.

Out of the more than 1,100 stories studied, we found 61 recurring themes. These were then grouped into 11 broad categories to identify the nature of the coverage.

As was true in our first study this year, the coverage was overwhelmingly (57%) about internal politics of campaigning.²

Just one in three (29%) dealt with issues and 13% dealt with the candidates’ character and record.

The four most popular themes were all related to the politics of campaigning: the most popular (22%) was assessments of the debates, both before and after those events. Second was coverage of battleground states (15%). Next came campaign strategies (12%), followed by momentum and media (8%).

Only then did we find themes relating to policy or character. Foreign policy, driven by the crisis in the Middle East, and Bush’s character (especially as it related to his record in Texas) each accounted for 7% of stories.

The next three themes were also character or policy related, comprising 6% each of stories: Gore’s character, health care & elderly and various domestic issues.

These were followed by the themes of taxes and energy, both of which made up 5% of stories.

Footnotes

2. The three earlier campaign 2000 studies produced by the Committee were as follows:

• In the Public Interest: A Content Study of Early Press Coverage of the 2000 Presidential Campaign, February 3, 2000
• ePolitics: A Study of the 2000 Presidential Campaign on the Internet, April 9, 2000
• A Question of Character: How the Media Have Handled the Issue and How the Public has Reacted, July 27, 2000

The number one story during these critical weeks was the debates. Seven-in-ten stories assessing the debates focused on political matters, rather than where the candidates differed on issues, where they proposed to take the country, or questions of character, record and veracity.

In particular, the majority of the pre-and-post-debate analysis (53%) was framed around the candidates’ performance. Another 12% were framed as tactics and strategy.

Fewer than one-in-ten of these stories considered policy differences between the two candidates; 3% were framed around the veracity of a campaign and a mere 1% focused on where the candidate would take the country.

Interestingly, just 14% of these pre-and-post debate stories were straight news accounts, outlining what the candidates said.

What is the result of framing the coverage this way? The vast majority of the debate stories (74%) were written in a way that mostly impacted candidates and their campaigns. Interestingly, they were twice as likely to impact Gore’s candidacy as they were to impact Bush’s.

Citizens were left out. Only 15% of the debate stories were written in ways that made clear the impact on citizens.

When the press decided to write debate stories mostly about one candidate or another, that candidate was usually Gore. In all 20% of debate stories were Gore-dominated pieces, versus 9% for Bush. Either Gore’s performance, or the higher expectations of his abilities, led the press to give him increased scrutiny.

What also emerged, in debate coverage and elsewhere, was a clear predilection toward negativity. More than half of all stories contained twice as many negative assertions as positive. This finding stands out especially because during this election cycle, citizens have repeatedly told the media they are tired of the negative nature of campaigns. Further, studies of press coverage in general rarely find such great disparity between positive and negative coverage.

For a story to be considered anything but neutral, the positive or negative statements within it must outnumber each other by at least two-to-one. For example, in a story assessing how a candidate performed in a debate, there would have to be eight negative statements for every four positive for the story to be considered negative.

For this study, the 29% of stories considered straight news accounts of the candidates’ actions or statement were not measured for tone, though a sample test suggested that they, too, were not particularly neutral. Nevertheless, even if all of these straight news stories were added to the neutral column, the number of negative stories would still be extraordinarily high and outweigh positive by nearly three to one.

Interestingly, the negative coverage did not simply occur because both candidates have struggled to pull ahead. The press was actually more negative when covering the candidates’ character (77% negative) and policy issues (51%) than when covering campaign internals (45%).

Perhaps one reason is that this study, unlike many in the past, includes the Internet—which accounted for nearly a third of the stories—and many web sites are far harsher in their coverage than traditional print and broadcast outlets. For instance, the three Internet sites studied that include mostly web-only content—National Review Online, Slate and Salon—were notably more negative than average. At least six-in-ten of their stories carried a negative tone (63% for Slate, 61% for the National Review, 60% for Salon). Contrast that to 41% for televisions and 53% for newspapers.

Bush and Gore received roughly the same amount of coverage, with Bush dominating 24% of the stories and Gore 29%. Another 47% were equally about both candidates. This was true across print, television and the Internet.

But the parity ends quickly. As we found in two of the earlier studies, Bush continues to benefit more than Gore from press coverage. As outlined above, 24% of Bush stories were positive, nearly double the 13% for Gore.

In contrast, the coverage of Gore was more negative. A full 56% of the Gore stories had a negative tone, compared to 49% for Bush. The remaining stories were neutral.

Stories that focused equally on both candidates were more neutral in tone, but the critical treatment of Gore still emerged. Twelve percent were negative toward Gore, while only 8% more were negative toward Bush.

In addition, while the numbers are small, Bush was twice as likely to enjoy positive coverage in these comparative stories, 7% versus 3% for Gore.

These findings are consistent with patterns we found earlier in the campaign. In a study of primary coverage leading up to the conventions, we found the press far more likely to cover the subjects Bush wanted to run on-such as the idea that he was a different kind of Republican-than it was to cover the subjects that Gore wanted to run on-such as his knowledge and experience.

There were differences this time too in the major themes devoted to each candidate.

Bush stories were more likely to be issue related (37% versus only 28% for Gore.)

Gore stories were more likely to be about the internal politics of his campaign—such as strategies for winning the battleground states. In all, 50% of Gore stories were political matters versus 44% for Bush. Given that Gore was failing to pull ahead, these stories were not particularly helpful to the Vice President.

Specifically, three themes made up half of all the Bush stories: The battleground states (18%), his record and command of the facts (17%) and domestic issues other than health care & elderly and taxes (15%).

For Gore, on the other hand, the three most popular themes were all campaign related. Most, 18%, related to strategy, 15% were pre-and-post-debate analysis (compared with only 9% of Bush stories), and 14% focused on the battleground states.

The one issue that Gore seemed to dominate was health care & elderly, which made up about one-in-ten Gore stories (9%) compared to only one-in-thirty-three Bush stories. But as we will see later, coverage of health care & elderly was extremely negative in tone.

During the monitored time frames, the candidate’s tax plans had clearly lost steam, at least in journalists’ eyes. This theme made up only 4% of Bush stories and 3% of Gore stories.

As was true in a Committee study conducted on the eve of the conventions, Gore’s coverage was more than twice as likely to be about his problems with the truth or with campaign fundraising (10%) than Bush’s was to be about his record and lack of knowledge (4%).

In the second and third weeks—as the debates began to dominate coverage—journalists tended to write more stories that looked at the two candidates comparatively rather than writing stories that were predominantly about Gore or Bush alone. These comparative stories eventually made up nearly half of all the coverage.

Interestingly, these pieces, often editorials or columns, were more likely than news stories to make clear how the subject matter actually impacted citizens (30% versus 21% of Gore dominated stories and 27% of Bush stories). Even then, seven-in-ten of these comparative stories were about politics rather than policy or character. Only 5% of them were character related, and 26% policy related.

Comparative stories were also much more likely than single-candidate stories to be written around broader concepts such as the nature of the electorate (18% versus 4% of Bush stories and 6% of Gore stories).

Whether a citizen gets his or her news from the newspaper, the Internet or television, this study suggests, could have a great influence on the views they form about the candidates and the election as a whole.

Television tended to cover campaign themes more than any other medium—68% compared with 56% on the Internet and 53% in newspapers. Television was especially inclined to produce pre-and-post-debate analysis (32% versus 22% overall), suggesting that the made-for-TV event makes easy TV news. Television was much less inclined than other mediums to produce stories about the candidates’ characters (5% versus 16% of Internet and 15% of print).

When it came to who television covered, it was much more likely than average to cover both candidates equally within a story (63% versus 47% overall). This suggests that the ever-increasing pressure to make stories shorter and to cut hard news time, leads journalists to squeeze coverage of both candidates into one short piece. Perhaps as a result of the minimal coverage, their stories were more likely than print or Internet to be neutral in tone (38% for TV versus 32% for Internet and 28% for print).

But when it came to how stories were framed and who they impacted, television fell into the same old trap of covering politics over policy. It was the most likely medium to frame stories around internal politics (50% versus 36% for print and 43% for Internet) and was the least likely to produce news that impacted citizens (20% versus 32% for print and 23% for Internet.)

Newspapers, on the other hand, stood out as the medium most likely to write stories that impacted citizens (32%), though nearly six-in-ten print stories still mainly impacted politicians. Interestingly, a big reason is because editorials and Op-ed columns were more likely than other news accounts to connect the campaign directly to their impact on citizens.

In the newspaper coverage studied, stories about Gore were about twice as likely as those about Bush to make it one page one (14% for Gore versus 8% for Bush), though the two did receive roughly equal treatment in the editorial and op-ed pages (about a fifth each).

One interesting difference between the national and regional papers was in their coverage of character themes. Regional papers were almost three times less likely than the nationals to cover Bush’s character (4% versus 11% in national papers).

Regional papers were much more likely than nationals to write stories that compared the two candidates (51% versus 39%) and were less likely to be negative in tone (43% versus 58%), with a quarter of their stories offering a positive tone. Finally, a third of all regional stories impacted citizens, compared with only a quarter of national print stories.

The Internet stood out in that it seemed to be more driven by stories that came from campaign operatives (12% versus 8% of television and 7% of print). Perhaps the Internet still sees itself as speaking to a more targeted audience, the “political junkie,” and therefore provides more of an insider view.

The Battleground States

The press was quick to recognize the crucial importance of key battleground states in deciding the election. News organizations covered key states early and revisited them often. While predictably framed around political internals such as tactics and strategy, (47% of the time) there was also a great deal of focus on broad issues such as the state of the electorate (24%). Only 1% of battleground stories, or two stories in all, mostly considered policy differences between the candidates and not a single story looked mostly at where the candidate would take that particular state or the country.

In addition, these stories were much more evenly divided between Bush (29%) and Gore (26%). Again, these stories were most often initiated by the press (55%), and were highly analytical.

More than any theme studied other than momentum stories, these battleground stories were written in a way that impacted politicians (77%). Only 21% dealt with matters impacting citizens in those states, with 18% specially focusing on one state or demographic group and 3% focusing on citizens in general.

Campaign Strategies

The third most common theme, accounting for 12% of stories, was the strategies inside each of the two campaigns, such as reaching undecided voters or campaign advertising. Nearly half of it (48%) occurred in the first week of the study.

Interestingly, through most of October and late September, it was Gore strategy, not Bush, that attracted the press. More than four-in-ten (44%) of these stories concerned Al Gore and his campaign, compared with only slightly more than two-in-ten (24%) about George Bush. Those numbers might have been different earlier in September, when Bush’s campaign was perceived to be in disarray.

Momentum & Medium

The momentum and media treatment of the candidates was the fourth most common story theme in October, again ahead of any policy or character theme. These stories were more likely to touch on broad themes about the nature of politics and the press. They were nine times as likely as the average story to consider the nature of the press (18% versus 2% overall) and were twice as likely written around the nature of politics (7% versus 4%).

Ironically as the debates kicked in, coverage of policy themes declined drastically, from 48% in Week One leading up to the first debate to 30% in Week Three.

As the election got closer, the press favored the “race” over the issues.

In all, about three-in-ten of the stories we studied related to policy themes. While the press still initiated most (47%) of these stories, they were much more likely than average to come from the candidates themselves (43% versus 28% overall). This would suggest a chance to commend the candidates, except that roughly half of that initiation was by way of accusatory statements from one or both.

Again, Bush had an edge over Gore on the issues. These stories were more likely than average to be mostly about George Bush (31% versus 28% overall).

As would be expected, issue related themes were most often written around policy explanation (32%). The policy related frames of these stories lead directly to a dominate impact on citizens or stakeholders (59% versus 32% overall).

Nevertheless, even the issue related themes did not escape the negative tendencies of the press in this election period. More than half of the issue themes carried a negative tone.

Foreign Policy

The policy issue that received the most coverage was foreign affairs (7% of all themes), driven by the crisis in the Middle East and the bombing of the USS Cole.

Much more so than any other theme studied, foreign policy stories were written with citizens in mind. Nearly two-thirds (63%) were written in a way that showed how the topic impacted them or the nation as a whole—three times the average.

In particular, these stories examined the candidates’ relations with world leaders (29%). Both the press and the candidates seemed to treat these tragic events delicately. Nevertheless, voters may well have gained some important knowledge from the resulting stories.

The Internet and television shied away from the issue of foreign policy. In particular, the New York Times accounted for a quarter of all foreign policy stories, compared with only 16% of all the coverage. Much more than average, foreign policy themes were found on the op-ed and editorial pages (43% versus 25% overall).

Energy

Stories about tapping the nation’s oil reserve and the candidates’ connections to oil were the next most common issue story, comprising 5% of all stories studied—mostly in the first week of the study. They were more likely to appear in print (53% versus 45% of all stories) and less likely to appear on television (12% versus 20% overall).

Cross accusations made by the candidates comprised a full third (34%) of all the oil stories compared to 10% overall.

Nearly half (46%) of all the oil stories were straight news accounts and only one-in-seven were framed around internal politics.

Health Care & Elderly and Taxes

For all the talk of health care & elderly and taxes as being the deciding issues of the campaign, these two themes made up only 11% of all the themes studied. Only three-in-fifty stories studied (6%) covered the issue of health care & elderly, most of which fell in the first week of the study. When the press did address the issue, it had a strong tendency to do so with a negative tone, as nearly two-thirds of these stories were negative. Add to that the fact that Al Gore and his campaign were the subject of more than 40% of these stories compared with only 11% about Bush, one can assume that the health care issue has not worked out well for Al Gore.

The issue of taxes & economics, on the other hand, which picked up steam in the final week of our study, was mostly covered by comparing the two candidates (59%); otherwise these stories focused on Bush and Gore in equal amounts.

Even before the two major party candidates had been determined, the 2000 presidential election was referred to as one that rested on character and record. But, in the final month of the campaign, only 13% of the major themes were about character (7% about Bush’s character and 6% about Gore’s). Television, in particular tended to avoid this issue. Only 8% of all the character stories appeared in television, compared with 20% of coverage as a whole.

The most noteworthy elements of these two themes were how each tended to be framed. The bulk of both Bush and Gore character stories focused on internal politics (36% each) and straight news (30% Gore and 26% Bush) tended much more than the average story to be framed around the candidate’s fitness for office (24% Bush, 30% Gore and 6% overall). But 12% of stories on Bush’s character examined policy, while not a single Gore story carried this focus.

It appears that Gore did have some success in raising questions about Bush’s record in Texas after the second debate. The vast majority (75%) of stories about Bush’s character and record fell in weeks two and three. Stories on Gore’s record and character, on the other hand, dropped off in the final week studied.

The study identified what “triggered” something to become a story—was it a campaign event? Newsroom initiative? An accusation by a candidate? Or something from outside the campaign?

The answer is journalists, for the most part, decide what is news in campaigns. More than half of all stories, 56%, were initiated by journalists deciding to pursue a certain subject. For newspapers, four-in-ten of these pieces were editorial and op-ed columns, but the bulk of it was still news coverage.

Candidates and their campaigns succeeded in triggering a little more than a third (37%) of the stories.

These numbers, incidentally, are virtually identical to what we found in the primaries.