Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
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Another truism of modern political campaigning is that any charge should not go unanswered lest it be believed. This has given way to the political black art of quick response: If your opponent says something about you, how effective are you at rebutting it? To some degree, campaigns judge their effectiveness today by the extent […]
While news coverage of the campaign gradually became so focused on news events that the major narrative themes about the candidates were often missing, that is not the case with the campaign ads. In their carefully constructed “paid media” messages, the candidates leaned hard on the themes about themselves–and each other–that we were studying. Overall, […]
The press coverage, for now, has focused far more on Bush than on Kerry. Seven out of ten (72%) of the character themes identified in the coverage were about the President. In part, this is a reflection of the fact that Bush dominates the news as the incumbent, whether he is governing the country or […]
Summary of Findings The presidential election is capturing the public’s attention much more now than it did at this point four and eight years ago. Nearly half of Americans (47%) say they are more interested in politics than they were four years ago, up from 38% who expressed that view in June 2000. Public attention […]
The most prevalent message about the character of the candidates in the news media is that President Bush is “stubborn and arrogant.” This is followed closely by the idea that Bush “lacks credibility.” The third most common message in the press, however, is a positive one about the President, the idea that he is a […]
Summary of Findings Sen. John Kerry enters the Democratic convention next week bolstered by a number of favorable trends in public opinion, although he remains locked in a statistical tie for voter support with President George W. Bush. His party is dominant on key domestic issues and at least competitive with the Republicans on every […]
Since March, the biggest change in the campaign character narratives is that they have been lost in news events. Instead of picking up the emphasis on campaign messages, as the candidates refined their rhetoric and the conventions and elections draw closer, the press has been moving away from it. And it is not that the […]
When stories did convey one of the narrative themes about the candidates, what was the evidence cited? The answer reveals the extent to which political reporting today is a game of interpretation as much as one of verification. Stories were nearly as likely to offer no evidence for these interpretative themes about the candidates as […]
The second phase of this study was a survey of the public by the Pew Research center for the People and the Press to see if the narrative themes about the candidates in the press were having an impact on public attitudes. While the public perceptions of the candidates character traits do not match precisely […]