Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This study investigates how citizens select election news online. Voluntary national samples (n = 372) browsed a news website featuring four types of election news (horserace, candidates’ issue positions, campaign trails, and voters). Their online activities, including article selection and the length of exposure, were unobtrusively measured by behavior tracking software. The results revealed that participants tended to choose issue-based election coverage but avoided news stories about campaign trails. The horserace was not more popular than the other types of election news. The findings also supported negative bias by showing that participants preferred election news headlines that contained negative words.

Keywords

Campaign coverage election news horserace negativity selective exposure

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Ansolabehere

Iyengar

(1995) Going negative: How political advertisements shrink and polarize the electorate. New York: Free Press.

Berger

Milkman

(2012) What makes online content viral? Journal of Marketing Research 49(2): 192–205.

Brosius

Kepplinger

(1995) Killer and victim issues: issue competition in the agenda-setting process of German television. International Journal of Public Opinion Research 7(3): 211–231.

Bruns

(2005) Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, vol. 26. New York: Peter Lang.

Cappella

Jamieson

(1997) Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and the Public Good. New York: Oxford University Press.

Coe

Tewksbury

Bond

. (2008) Hostile News: Partisan Use and Perceptions of Cable News Programming. Journal of Communication 58(2): 201–219.

Costera Meijer

(2013) Valuable journalism: a search for quality from the vantage point of the user. Journalism 14(6): 754–770.

Couldry

(2001) The hidden injuries of media power. Journal of Consumer Culture 1(2): 155–177.

Donsbach

(1991) Exposure to political content in newspapers: the impact of cognitive dissonance on readers’ selectivity. European Journal of Communication 6(2): 155–186.

10.

Druckman

(2005) Media matter: how newspapers and television news cover campaigns and influence voters. Political Communication 22: 463–481.

11.

Farnsworth

Lichter

(2007) The Nightly News Nightmare: Television’s Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1998–2004. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

12.

Fico

Freedman

(2008) Biasing influences on balance in election news coverage: an assessment of newspaper coverage of the 2006 U.S. Senate elections. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 85(3): 499–514.

13.

Fiske

(1980) Attention and weight in person perception: the impact of negative and extreme behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38: 889–906.

14.

Fox

Angelini

Goble

(2005) Hype versus substance in network television coverage of presidential election campaigns. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 82(1): 97–109.

15.

Gaines

Kuklinski

Quirk

(2007) The logic of the survey experiment reexamined. Political Analysis 15: 1–20.

16.

Garrett

(2009) Politically motivated reinforcement seeking: reframing the selective exposure debate. Journal of Communication 59: 676–699.

17.

Haas

(2007) The Pursuit of Public Journalism. New York: Routledge.

18.

Hastall

Knobloch-Westerwick

(2013) Severity, efficacy, and evidence type as determinants of health message exposure. Health Communication 28(4): 378–388.

19.

Ito

Larsen

Smith

. (1998) Negative information weighs more heavily on the brain: the negativity bias in evaluative categorizations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75: 887–900.

20.

Iyengar

Kinder

(1987) News That Matters: Television and American Opinion. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

21.

Iyengar

Norpoth

Hahn

(2004) Consumer demand for election news: the horserace sells. The Journal of Politics 66(1): 157–175.

22.

Iyengar

Vavreck

(2012) Online panels and the future of political communication research. In: Semetko

Scammell

(eds) The SAGE handbook of political communication. London: Sage Publications Ltd, pp. 225–240.

23.

Jang

(2014) Seeking congruency or incongruency online? Examining selective exposure to four controversial science issues. Science Communication 36(2): 143–167.

24.

Jang

Hart

(2015) Polarized frames on “climate change” and “global warming” across countries and states: evidence from twitter big data. Global Environmental Change 32: 11–17.

25.

Jang

Pasek

(2015) Assessing the carrying capacity of Twitter and online news. Mass Communication and Society 18(5): 1–19.

26.

Johnson

Zhang

Bichard

(2011) Voices of convergence or conflict? A path analysis investigation of selective exposure to political websites. Social Science Computer Review 29(4): 449–469.

27.

Just

Crigler

Buhr

(1999) Voice, substance, and cynicism in presidential campaign media. Political Communication 16: 25–44.

28.

Kahn

Kenney

(2004) No Holds Barred: Negativity in U.S. Senate Campaigns. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

29.

Kahneman

Tversky

(1979) Prospect theory: An analysis of decisions under risk. Econometrica 47: 263–291.

30.

Katz

(1997) Democracy and Elections. New York: Oxford University Press.

31.

Kovach

Rosenstiel

(2001) Campaign lite: why reporters won’t tell us what we need to know. Washington Monthly. Available at: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0101.kovach.rosenstiel.html

32.

Lau

Sigelman

Rovner

(2007) The effects of negative political campaigns: a meta‚ analytic reassessment. Journal of Politics 69: 1176–1209.

33.

Lee

(2008) Effects of news deviance and personal involvement on audience story selection: a web-tracking analysis. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 85(1): 41–60.

34.

Lengauer

Esser

Berganza

(2012) Negativity in political news: a review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings. Journalism 13(2): 179–202.

35.

Lichter

(2001) A plague on both parties. The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 6(3): 8–30.

36.

Lichter

Smith

(1996) Why elections are bad news. The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 1(4): 15–35.

37.

Meffert

Chung

Joiner

. (2006) The effects of negativity and motivated information processing during a political campaign. Journal of Communication 56(1): 27–51.

38.

Napoli

(2011) Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences. New York: Columbia University Press.

39.

Neuman

Guggenheim

Jang

. (2014) Theorizing the dynamics of public attention: agenda setting theory meets big data. Journal of Communication 64(2): 193–214.

40.

Neuman

Park

Panek

(2012) Tracking the flow of information into the home: an empirical assessment of the digital revolution in the united states, 1960–2005. International Journal of Communication 6: 1022–1041.

41.

Patterson

(1993) Out of Order. New York: Knopf.

42.

Patterson

(2005) Of polls, mountains: U.S. Journalists and their use of election surveys. Public Opinion Quarterly 69(5): 716–724.

43.

Pennebaker

Francis

Booth

(2001) Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC): LIWC2001. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

44.

Pew Research Center (Pew) (2000) Campaign 2000 highly rated. Available at: http://www.people-press.org/2000/11/16/campaign-2000-highly-rated/ (accessed 16 November).

45.

Pew Research Center (PEW) (2004) Voters liked campaign 2004, but too much ‘mud-slinging’. Available at: http://www.people-press.org/2004/11/11/voters-liked-campaign-2004-but-too-much-mud-slinging/ (accessed 11 November).

46.

Pew Research Center (PEW) (2008) High marks for the campaign, a high bar for Obama. Available at: http://www.people-press.org/2008/11/13/high-marks-for-the-campaign-a-high-bar-for-obama/ (accessed 13 November).

47.

Pew Research Center (PEW) (2012) Low marks for the 2012 election: voters pessimistic about partisan cooperation. Available at: http://www.people-press.org/2012/11/15/low-marks-for-the-2012-election/ (accessed 15 November).

48.

Powell

(2000) Elections as Instruments of Democracy: Majoritarian and Proportional Visions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

49.

Prior

(2013) The challenge of measuring media exposure: reply to Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz. Political Communication 30(4): 620–634.

50.

Rinke

Wessler

Löb

. (2013) Deliberative qualities of generic news frames: assessing the democratic value of strategic game and contestation framing in election campaign coverage. Political Communication 30(3): 474–494.

51.

Rosenstiel

(2005) Political polling and the new media culture: a case of more being less. Public Opinion Quarterly 69(5): 698–715.

52.

Rosenstiel

Jurkowitz

Sartor

(2012) How the media covered the 2012 primary campaign. Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Available at: http://www.journalism.org/node/29184 (accessed 23 April).

53.

Ryfe

(2009) Broader and deeper a study of newsroom culture in a time of change. Journalism 10(2): 197–216.

54.

Shoemaker

(1996) Hardwired for news: using biological and cultural evolution to explain the surveillance function. Journal of Communication 46(3): 32–47.

55.

Shoemaker

Vos

(2009) Gatekeeping Theory. New York: Routledge.

56.

Sotirovic

McLeod

(2008) Media coverage of U.S. elections: persistence of tradition. In: Stromback

Kaid

(eds) The Handbook of Election News Coverage Around the World. New York: Routledge, pp. 21–40.

57.

Stroud

(2011) Niche News. New York: Oxford University Press.

58.

Sunstein

(2001) Republic.com. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

59.

Taylor

(1991) Asymmetrical effects of positive and negative events: the mobilization-minimization hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin 110: 67–85.

60.

Thorson

Wicks

Leshner

(2012) Experimental methodology in journalism and mass communication research. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 89(1): 112–124.

61.

Traugott

(2009) Changes in Media Polling in Recent Presidential Campaigns: Moving from Good to “Average” at CNN. Cambridge, MA: Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

62.

Valentino

Buhr

Beckmann

(2001) When the frame is the game: revisiting the impact of “strategic” campaign coverage on citizens’ information retention. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 78(1): 93–112.

63.

Wahl-Jorgensen

Williams

Wardle

(2010) Audience views on user-generated content: exploring the value of news from the bottom up. Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook 8(1): 177– 194.

64.

Weaver

Drew

(2001) Voter learning and interest in the 2000 presidential election: did the media matter? Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 78(4): 787–798.

65.

Zhao

Chaffee

(1995) Campaign advertisements versus television as sources of political issue information. Public Opinion Quarterly 59: 41–65.

66.

Zhu

(1992) Issue competition and attention distraction: a zero-sum theory of agenda setting. Journalism Quarterly 69(4): 825–836.

Getting attention online in election coverage: Audience selectivity in the 2012 US presidential election

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References