Regina G. Lawrence

Game-Framing the Issues: Tracking the Strategy Frame in Public Policy News

Scholars and journalists have argued that the game frame reporting politics primarily in strategic terms is predominant in mainstream news reporting of politics. Game-oriented reporting is problematic, according to its critics, because it crowds out issue-based reporting. But as of yet we know little and have theorized little about the specific contexts in which the game frame is likely to be reporters primary emphasis. While numerous studies have documented the predominance of the game schema in election news, the empirical record on public policy news is quite limited. Accordingly, the content of national news about the issue of U.S. welfare reform during 1996 is analyzed to illustrate three theoretical propositions about game-framed news coverage: that the game frame is most likely to be applied to public policy issues when they are discussed in national election news, that the game frame is also particularly likely to be applied when Washington policymakers are engaged in conflict that promises a clear outcome (i.e., the passage or rejection of legislation) over key issues in electoral politics, and that the game frame is less likely to be applied to public policy issues when they are discussed in news about state-level political debates and the implementation phase of policy-making.

Rethinking Media Politics and Public Opinion: Reactions to the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal

In one of the great political ironies of modern times, Bill Clinton weathered a year-long sexual and obstruction of justice scandal and became only the second president in U.S. history to be impeached, while maintaining some of the most impressive public approval ratings of any modern president. In a phenomenon at first curious and then truly remarkable, public support for Clintons performance steadfastly held in the mid-60 percent range and occasionally surpassed 70 percent in some polls even as the House of Representatives voted to impeach him and the Senate conducted an impeachment trial. This public response was not well predicted by dominant models of public opinion and political communication, leading to considerable scholarly headscratching. Ultimately, many political scientists have drawn two conclusions: the media coverage of the scandal did not matter to public opinion nearly as much as nonmedia influences; and the public responded to the scandal in relatively thoughtless ways, relying on simple heuristics like the state of the economy to decide whether the president should be impeached. For example, writing in the early months of the scandal, public opinion scholar John Zaller argued that the publics continued support for Clinton in the face of the Monica Lewinsky story could be accounted for by reference to three a priori variables not subject to media influence: peace (the lack of serious

What Predicts the Game Frame? Media Ownership, Electoral Context, and Campaign News

While scholars have often bemoaned journalists’ heavy use of game-framed and “horse-race” coverage of elections, the contexts most likely to produce game-framed news have not yet been well identified. Our data collection across three election cycles (2004, 2006, 2008) and various levels of elective office (candidates for governor and U.S Senate), and across multiple media markets and types of news organizations allows us to examine the extent to which all three classes of contextual variables—the internal news-making context, the media economic market context, and the electoral political context—influence the provision of game-frame election coverage. We find that news organizations’ choices to rely heavily on game-frame election stories are dependent on both news-making and political contexts. These findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the relationship of media ownership to news quality, tempered by firm evidence that news outlets of all kinds tend to focus on the “game” of politics when electoral contests are close.

Personalization, gender, and social media: gubernatorial candidates’ social media strategies

ABSTRACT This study focuses on the ‘self-personalization’ of campaign politics, marked by candidates highlighting their personal lives over their policy positions. The rise of social media may be accelerating this shift. Applying Strategic Stereotype Theory [Fridkin, K. L., & Kenney, P. J. (2014). The changing face of representation: The gender of U.S. senators and constituent communications. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.], which holds that women politicians try to deactivate stereotypes that associate men with agentic leadership traits while capitalizing on stereotypes that associate them with warmth, we assess what role gender plays in candidate self-personalization on social media. A large-scale computerized content analysis of social media posts by gubernatorial candidates in 2014 suggests that male candidates may see more and female candidates see less strategic benefits in personalizing, but this effect does not persist in the face of electoral contextual variables like competitiveness. We also find qualitative differences in the ways male versus female candidates personalize through social media.

In Their Own Words: Political Practitioner Accounts of Candidates, Audiences, Affordances, Genres, and Timing in Strategic Social Media Use

This study inductively develops a new conceptual framework for analyzing strategic campaign communications across different social media platforms through an analysis of candidate social media strategies during the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle. We conducted a series of open-ended, in-depth qualitative interviews with campaign professionals active during the 2016 presidential cycle. Our analysis revealed that scholars need to account for the ways that campaigns perceive their candidates in addition to the audiences, affordances, and genres of different social media platforms, as well as the timing of the electoral cycle, in order to effectively study strategic social media communication. Our findings reveal that campaigns proceed from perceptions of their candidates’ public personae and comfort with engagement on social media. Campaigns perceive that social media platforms vary according to their audiences, including their demographics and other characteristics; with respect to their affordances, actual and perceived functionalities; the genres of communication perceived to be appropriate to them; and the timing of the electoral cycle, which shapes messaging strategies and the utility of particular platforms. These factors shape how campaigns use social media in the service of their electoral goals. We conclude by developing these findings into an analytic framework for future research, arguing that researchers should refrain from automatically generalizing the results of single-platform studies to “social media” as a whole, and detailing the implications of our findings for future political communication research.

What We Should Really Be Asking About Media Attention to Trump

In her piece for the November 2016 issue of The Forum, “How the News Media Helped to Nominate Trump,” Julia Azari contends that the media played a crucial coordination function for Donald Trump’s rise. In the absence of a coherent Republican party response to the Trump insurgency, Trump’s campaign messages were widely disseminated despite his campaign’s lack of expertise and organizational strength. Indeed, Azari argues, 2016 demonstrates that “the media’s main institutional role comes from repeating, rather than challenging, [campaign] promises, frameworks and narratives.” Other research from the 2016 campaign seasonwould seem to agree that Trump infiltrated the media system. As Wells and colleagues illustrate in their November Forum piece, “How Trump Drove Coverage to the Nomination,” Trump appeared to have played the media expertly, with a combination of staged and unscheduled appearances and a vigorous social media presence. Specifically, their findings point to Trump’s success in running a hybrid media campaign (Chadwick, 2013)—driving news coverage through conventional (public relations) tactics and through newer/less conventional methods (Twitter). The authors conclude their examination of Trump’s media presence with a compelling provocation: “Journalists should reflect on what prompts their attention to Trump as we head into the general election and beyond” (p. 675). We join the conversation by positing, first, that journalists and political communication scholars alike are, in fact, fairly cognizant of what prompts attention to Trump. Theories from news values to evolutionary biology support the idea that Trump’s entertaining, sensational, inflammatory words and actions make him the kind of phenomenon we just can’t look away from. Second, we believe even more important is a follow-up question, the answer to which could benefit scholarship and democracy alike: How—if at all—has mainstream media coverage of Trump really mattered?

Celebrities as Political Actors and Entertainment as Political Media

This chapter advocates a more inclusive approach to how we define “political actors” and “the media”. The authors highlight the importance of celebrity entertainers as political actors, both within entertainment formats and within the traditional media arena. Additionally, they point to the ways in which entertainment can function as political media. They argue that increasingly blurred boundaries between “entertainment” and “news” have opened pathways for entertainers to enter and shape the political field, and for political actors of all stripes to use (and be used by) entertainment media. They illustrate their argument with the case of Donald Trump, discussing how Trump was able to gain such high public support in part because the media treated him as an entertainer as much as a candidate.

Personalization and Gender: 2014 Gubernatorial Candidates on Social Media

On June 25, 2013, the Senate chamber of the Texas state capitol became the scene of a remarkable political showdown. For 13 hours, citizens at the capitol—along with over 100,000 viewers via a live web stream and thousands more on Twitter—watched and waited for the conclusion of a contentious filibuster of Senate Bill 5 (SB 5), which would impose numerous restrictions on abortion access and clinic facilities. Standing at the center of the filibuster showdown, state senator Wendy Davis became a national political celebrity literally overnight. Her pink running shoes, worn to withstand hours in which she could not relinquish the podium, quickly became an online meme.

Practicing Engagement: Participatory journalism in the Web 2.0 era

In recent years, the rapid expansion of Web 2.0 tools has opened new possibilities for audience participation in news, while “engagement” has become a media industry buzzword. In this study, we explore approaches to engagement emerging in the field based on in-depth interviews with editors at a range of news outlets from several countries, and we map these approaches onto the literature on participatory journalism and related innovations in journalism practice. Our findings suggest variation in approaches to engagement that can be arrayed along several related dimensions, encompassing how news outlets measure and practice it (e.g. with the use of quantitative audience metrics methods), whether they think about audiences as more passive or more active users, the stages at which they incorporate audience data or input into the news product, and how skeptically or optimistically they view the audience. Overall, while some outlets are experimenting with tools for more substantive audience contributions to news content, we find few outlets approaching engagement as a way to involve users in the creation of news, with most in our sample focusing mostly on engaging users in back-end reaction and response to the outlet’s content. We identify technological, economic, professional, and organizational factors that shape and constrain how news outlets practice “engagement.”

Doris A. Graber’s Contributions to Political Communication

Doris Graber was a trailblazer, in several senses. Those who knew her can recount truly amazing stories of her intrepid world travels to every continent. According to one account, she “hiked in Tibet, dived on the Great Barrier Reef, canoed the Amazon river, traveled on a barge in China, and camped throughout Europe and parts of Asia” (McLeod, 1996, p. 171). As a scholar, she blazed trails in our understanding of how the news really matters for the people on the receiving end. The subtitle of the first edition of her book Processing Politics (2001) offered an evocative metaphor: “How People Tame the Information Tide.” Rather than assuming that citizens are either overwhelmed or bamboozled by the news, Graber studied how individuals actually perceive, retain, and make cognitive use of the news. As a 2012 study citing her work observed, Graber’s research became a cornerstone for scholars interested in “constructionist media effects.” “Rather than overload,” these authors wrote, research like Graber’s “emphasizes the audience’s evolved skills in engaging a sophisticated mix of attention and inattention” (Hargittai, Neuman, & Curry, 2012, p. 161). That same instinct to give the public credit for its ability to make sense of the complex political landscape also led to a limitation of her work, in my view: a tendency to see the status quo of news production and public reception as democratically satisfactory. In one of her last major works, On Media: Making Sense of Politics, Graber insisted that “citizens’ civic IQ, individually and collectively, is functioning adequately, despite scholars’ damning verdict” (Graber, 2012, p. 30). Graber’s emphasis on an intelligent and active audience may nonetheless be more needed than ever in our current era of panicked attention to “fake news.” And Graber’s metaphor is certainly more apt than ever, as the information tide has become a tidal wave of swirling currents of news, information, disinformation, pop culture, citizen journalism, memes, video clips, and all other manner of content. I wish we could ask Doris, who stubbornly contended through multiple editions of Processing Politics (Graber, 2001) and in On Media (Graber, 2012) that the American public is better informed than we often think, what she makes of the post-Trump era.