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Political Communication and Journalism Exam Study Guide
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Notes on all the necessary information for the 2020/2021 exam
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WEEK 1The introductory chapter of: Bennett, W. L. (2016). News: The politics of illusion. University of
Chicago Press. Retrievable via:
https://www.press.uchicago.edu/dam/ucp/books/pdf/course_intro/978-0-226-34486-
7_course_intro.pdf
Legacy media news sources: The Daily “us”
- Older generation
Personalized online sources and legacy news sources: The Daily “me”
- Newer generation
News: Important information delivered in a iely fashion to people who want to know it
What’s the problem with news?
- Much of the serious news in the digital sphere is produced by legacy news organizations
that are having trouble generating revenues as advertising money follows prime younger
demographics online.
- Advertising dollars that supported local news is now supporting digital platforms
that know how to target consumers in a more refined and personalized way.
- Quality of reporting is deteriorating, contributing to the growing numbers of
citizens who have stopped following news produced by conventional journalism
organizations
Negative Campaigning
- Haselmayer, M., Meyer, T. M., & Wagner, M. (2019). Fighting for attention: Media
coverage of negative campaign messages. Party Politics, 25(3), 412 - 423
, - Valli, C., & Nai, A. (2020). Attack politics from Albania to Zimbabwe: A large-scale
comparative study on the drives of negative campaigning. International Political SCience
Review, 0192512120945410.
Positive campaign: promoting one's own program, ideas, politics, records
WHAT is negative campaigning?
- The use of political attacks against the program, record, policies, or persona of opponents
during election campaigns
- Synonyms: attack politics, mudslinging
- It’s a characteristic of a message (NOT campaigning) therefore happens at a
communication level.
- It’s criticizing/attacking the opponent (target) on what they do, have done, character,
profile, ideas, policies, anything related to them.
- Negativity has a clear normative deficit: people don’t like negative messages
- Tone = direction of the message
Campaign is the big umbrella and they can be positive or negative depending on the proportion
of positive or negative campaigning messages
Negative ads can be
1. Policy attacks
2. Character attacks
False friends
- Incivility: explicit use of harsh, shrill, or pejorative adjectives describing candidates,
their policies, or their personal attacks
- Negative: emotional appeal, fear, anxiety inducing campaign messages
- Populism: anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism
- Be aware because negativity is attacking your opponent, not necessarily what you say (in
this context of negative campaigning). Therefore, intensity of negativity in this scenario
, is non-existent (either negative or positive, no in between). This has to be cleared up
because people’s perception of negativity may be different from the definition.
WHY negative campaigning?
- Majoritarian system (US)
- Advantageous as people who make the negative campaign have a high probability
of benefiting from it.
- Zero sum game (Either or)
- Proportional representation (NL)
- Not as advantageous because you don’t know if attacking one opponent, the
supporter will come to you or another party.
- CAREFUL: there might be a Backlash effect: target loses and you lose as well because
people don’t like negative campaigning.
WHO/WHEN to use negative campaigning?
- When you want media attention
- Even though people don’t like negative campaigning, the media loves it. It loves
drama and negativity..
- Haselmayer, M., Meyer, T. M., & Wagner, M. (2019).
- Aim: understand whether and how negative campaigning is a successful
strategy for attaining media attention.
- Methods: It combines extensive content analyses of party and news texts
with public opinion surveys to study the success of individual press
releases in making the news. The empirical analysis draws on 1496 party
press releases and 6512 news reports in all national media outlets during
the final 6 weeks of Austria’s 2013 general election campaign.
- Findings: We find that negative campaigning is a successful strategy to
attract the attention of journalists and editors. It is particularly relevant for
rank-and-file politicians, who lack the intrinsic news value of high public
or party office, and for messages that focus on a rival’s best issues.
, Conclusion: These findings have broader implications for understanding
party strategies and ‘negativity bias’ in the news.
- When you are a less powerful politician so you get more media attention. You have less
to lose as well.
- When you are the opposition candidate (less to lose)
- When you are behind the polls
- When there are few or no 3rd parties that might benefit from the attack
- When the issue being attacked is owned by other parties
- When others become negative so you’re just reacting (“He started it” type of situation)
- Late in the campaign (so the target cannot respond back) BUT not too late or not it seems
desperate
- Early in the campaign start attacking an issue if you can adopt it as your own and
campaign about the issue.
Findings of Valli and Nai (2020)
- Reasons why candidates in elections ‘go negative’
- negativity is more likely for challengers, extreme candidates, and right-wing
candidates.
- Women are not more (or less) likely to go negative on their rivals than their male
counterparts, but we find that higher numbers of female MPs in the country
reduces negativity overall.
- Women tend to go less negative in proportional systems and more negative in
majoritarian systems.
- Negativity is especially low for candidates on the left in countries with high
female representation, and higher for candidates on the right in countries with
proportional representation (PR).
HOW: to use negative campaigning?
- The issue you choose to attack is significant in the effectiveness
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