Ann N. Crigler

Is Negative Advertising Effective for Female Candidates? An Experiment in Voters' Uses of Gender Stereotypes

Female candidates sometimes are discouraged from negative campaigning because they would risk voter backlash by defying gender stereotypes. In this experiment, a negative television campaign advertisement was manipulated to control for the candidates gender, issue content, and the character traits emphasized in the narration. The female candidates support was not diminished because of the attack upon her opponent. The findings show that in low-information contests, female candidates are assumed to be weaker on “male” issues. However, when the female candidate used a “male” issue as the basis of an attack upon her male opponent, she was judged more competent on the issue. This suggests that negative advertising could be an effective tool to neutralize the disadvantages caused by gender stereotypes.

The Three Faces of Negative Campaigning: The Democratic Implications of Attack Ads, Cynical News, and Fear-Arousing Messages

“Negative campaigning” is widely deplored by journalists and the public. Commonly, the term negative campaigning refers to critical statements or visuals of political candidates, institutions, processes, or policy issues that may occur during an election campaign. These negative messages are ubiquitous in campaigns. They are found not only in political advertisements, but also in the news, talk shows, Internet Web pages, and late-night TV comedians’ monologues. Negative campaigning ranges from personal attacks among candidates to cynical statements regarding the motives of candidates and the self-serving intentions of actors in the policy-making process.

Leadership Image-Building: After Clinton and Watergate

Leadership images are built collectively by leaders and their relevantconstituencies—elected officials, the news media, and the public. The process of buildingleadership image rests on prior expectations about the leader, policy outputs, the course ofevents, and the disposition of political resources. In building images of leadership, each of thethree constituencies puts more weight on some aspects of image-building than on others: Thepublic sees the president primarily in terms of his previous behavior, the media view thepresident through the lens of immediate events, and other elected officials focus on politicalresources. One of the presidents most important resources is his public image. It can helphim to maintain the loyalty of other officials, which in turn contributes to balanced newscoverage, even in times of crisis. President Clinton was able to preserve his public image throughthe impeachment debacle in large part because of low public expectations about his personalmoral behavior and satisfaction with his economic leadership. Conversely, President Nixon wasforced to resign because of high public expectations about his personal probity anddisappointment with his management of the economy.

The 2008 Media Primary Handicapping the Candidates in Newspapers, on TV, Cable, and the Internet

The press plays a crucial role early in the preprimary presidential campaign, determining which candidates appear viable to voters, contributors, and other media. This process necessarily benefits some candidates over others. We analyze how the press winnowed the candidate fields of both parties in the early 2008 preprimary campaign. We find coverage remarkably similar across a wide range of traditional and new media, including newspaper, radio, television, cable, legacy and web-native Internet news, and talk shows. The media ignored most candidates to concentrate on the Democratic contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama while paying less attention to the Republican race. Tone towards candidates was uniform except on partisan talk shows. The tone of Internet news was slightly more balanced than traditional outlets. Similar coverage across media results from journalistic preference for dramatic story lines, staffing constraints, and widespread speculation about candidate viability, which we describe as “handicapping the candidates.”

Learning from the news: Experiments in media, modality, and reporting about star wars

Abstract This study explores what ordinary American adults learn from news reported in different communications modalities and media. In the first experiment, the text of news items about Star Wars is held constant but the communications modality varies. In the second experiment, news reports reflect the journalistic style of television, newspaper, and magazine reporting. In the modality experiment, subjects learned equally well from the audiovisual, audio, or print versions of the stories. In the media experiment, subjects in the magazine and television conditions gained substantially more information than those in the newspaper condition; but when subjects were asked to apply information to policy judgments about Star Wars, magazine readers were more dovish than television viewers. For Star Wars news, it appears that the content and characteristic style of a news medium have important effects on news comprehension, particularly for the least informed and least interested members of the public.

Introduction: A Forum on Doris A. Graber in Political Communication

In keeping with the wise and ever-optimistic personality of our dear friend and mentor Doris A. Graber, also known as DAG to her family and inner circle, we are delighted to bring together in this special Forum a number of personal contributions from invited scholars to honor her contributions. The Forum features comments from eight individuals who worked closely with Doris at different times in their careers: