Consumer Demand for Cynical and Negative News Frames ∗

Commentators regularly lament the proliferation of both negative and/or strategic (“horserace”) coverage in political news content. The most frequent account for this trends focuses on news norms, and/or the priorities of news journalists. Here, we build on recent work arguing for the importance of demand-side, rather than supply-side, explanations of news content. In short, news may be negative and/or strategy-focused because that is the kind of news that people are interested in. We use a lab experiment to capture participants’ news selection biases, alongside a survey capturing their stated news preferences. Politically-interested participants are more likely to select negative stories. Interest is associated with a greater preference for strategic frames as well. And results suggest that behavioral results do not conform to attitudinal ones. That is, regardless of what participants say, they exhibit a preference for negative news content. Literature on political communication often finds itself concerned with two related themes in media content: (1) negative news frames that generally cast politicians and politics in an unfavourable light, and (2) cynical strategy coverage that focuses on the “horserace” and conflictual aspects of politics. The two themes may be related, insofar as strategic coverage implies that politicians are motivated only by power, not the common good (e.g. Capella and Jamieson 1997). Regardless of their relation, the body of work on these frames makes two assumptions: first, that they are bad for society; and second, that their root cause lies in the actions of journalists. ∗Paper prepared for delivery at the Annual Conference of the Political Science Association, June 2013, Victoria BC. †Email: marc.trussler@mail.mcgill.ca ‡Email: stuart.soroka@mcgill.ca. 1 We rely here on Capella and Jamieson’s (1997) definition of strategy coverage: “(1) winning and losing as the central concern; (2) the language of wars, games, and competition; (3) a story with performers, critics and audience (voters); (4) centrality of performance, style, and perception of the candidate; (5) heavy weighting of polls and the candidates” (31). In this way it includes both the “game” schema and “horserace” coverage which often become muddled in the literature. We seek here to question the second assumption through a simple supposition: that the content of any given media environment, both on the personal and systemic level, is determined by some interplay between what media sources supply, and what consumers demand. Instead of looking at particular processes and norms inherent in the news-making process which may generate these themes (Sabato 1991; Patterson 1994; Lichter and Noyes 1995; Farnsworth and Lichter 2007), we instead focus on the additional role that demand plays in their provision. Put simply, we argue that the proliferation of negative and/or strategic content is at least in part a function of individuals’ (quite possibly subconscious) preferences. This is to our knowledge the first exploration of news selection biases outside the US context, and/or outside the context of an election campaign. It is in part an extension of existing work focused on consumer interest in horserace stories (e.g., Iyengar et al. 2004), or in negative content (e.g., Meffert et al. 2006), although it is the first to simultaneously consider both. It does so using a new lab-experimental approach that we believe has some advantages where both internal and external validity are concerned. It also provides a rare opportunity to compare actual news selection behavior with answers to survey questions about participants’ preferences in media content. We find, in sum, that individuals tend to select negative and strategic news frames, even when other options are available, and, moreover, even when their own stated preferences are for news that is less negative and/or strategic. Results thus support past work suggesting that participants are more likely to select negative stories rather than positive ones, though we find that this is particularly true for strategic stories. We also find evidence, in line with past work, that participants expressing high levels of political interest show a greater attraction to strategic stories. (This is true for citizens versus non-citizens as well.) Our own interpretation of these results draws on work in psychology, biology, economics, and political science on the “negativity-bias.” But even a thin reading of our findings emphasizes a too-often overlooked aspect of new content: it is the way it is not just because of the nature of the supply of news, but also the demand. The Cynical Media and their Audience That the media are negative and cynical about politics and politicians is widely agreed upon in the literature. (For a recent review see Soroka 2012.) Most scholars see this trend as a product, or perhaps a mutation, of the media’s role as the watchdog “Fourth Estate.” Patterson (1994: 79) argues that journalist’s understanding of what this role entails has evolved in a way that has caused them to shift from “silent skeptics” to “vocal cynics.” Indeed, the great deal of literature surrounding For a useful distinction of demandversus supply-side accounts of media content, see (Andrew 2007).