By Denise-Marie Ordway, Photo: Clarence Alford/Pixabay, The Journalist's Resource, April 6, 2022
When journalists covering elections focus primarily on who’s winning or losing instead of policy issues — what’s known as horse race reporting — voters, candidates and the news industry itself suffer, a growing body of research has found.
Media scholars have studied horse race reporting for decades to better understand the impact of news stories that frame elections as a competitive game, relying heavily on public opinion polls and giving the most positive attention to frontrunners and underdogs gaining public support. It’s a common strategy for political news coverage in the U.S. and other parts of the globe.
Thomas E. Patterson, professor of government and the press at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, says election coverage often does not delve into policy issues and candidates’ stances on them. In fact, policy issues accounted for 10% of the news coverage of the 2016 presidential election, according to an analysis Patterson did as part of a research series that looks at journalists’ work leading up to and during the election. The bulk of the reporting he examined concentrated on who was winning and losing and why.
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