Framing the 2009 Presidential Elections Electoral Campaign Coverage in Opinion Articles

Abstract.The 2009 presidential elections from Romania were preceded by an electoral campaign with a strong conflicting character. The characteristics of the campaign produced numerous controversies regarding the practices and strategies used both by the mass media and the political actors. Generally speaking, the discussions about political programs passed into the background while huge spaces were conferred to the conflicts and misunderstandings which often degenerated in ad-hominem attacks between candidates. Another characteristic of the 2009 presidential campaign was related to the role assumed by the mass media, which, in most cases, seemed to disregard the requisite of impartiality while presenting the political actors and events.This research assumes as purposes to substantiate that the electoral campaign received a high visibility in the written press and to investigate which were the coverage strategies used in framing the electoral event. My study starts from a content analysis of the opinion articles written during the entire campaign in three of the most important (both as printed version circulation, and as number of online visitors) generalist newspapers, namely Evenimentul Zilei (Daily Event), Gandul (The Thought) and Jurnalul National (The National Journal). Using an approach related to agenda setting, framing and priming studies, the research assumes as purpose to prove that mass media offered mainly a negative interpretation - attack/conflict type - to the electoral campaign and focused mainly on secondary themes, related rather to the candidates' moral conducts and characters than to their political programs.Keywords: framing, priming, 2009 Romanian presidential elections, opinion articlesI. Mass media effects: from agenda setting to framing and primingMass media influences the public opinion by canalizing attention towards topics and themes that they consider to be important. The approaches mass media uses regarding these themes can induce specific effects in their evaluation by the public, mass media trying actually to deliver the interpretation frames for the issues that they propose to the public.Starting from Walter Lippmann's theory regarding the formation of public opinion, agenda-setting model addresses the manner in which mass media influences public opinion by creating certain hierarchies between the tackled issues. Emerged in a period when the limited effects theory reached its complete formulation, the agendasetting paradigm underlined that the doubts regarding mass media's capacities to actually form or change opinions and attitudes regarding a specific subject are legitimate, but also stressed that, unquestionably, mass media can guide attention upon different topics by offering to these the needed prominence. Bernard Cohen asserted that mass media "may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about" (Cohen, 1963: 13). The first study to consider agenda setting hypothesis was realized by the American professors Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw while investigating the 1968 electoral campaign from the perspective of mass media effects upon forming election options in the town Chapel Hill (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). In its initial form, "agendasetting has studied how the salience of «objects» in the news is transferred from the news media to the public" (McCombs & Reynolds, 2002). In addition, the agendasetting presupposes "an on-going competition among issues proponents to gain the attention of professionals, the public and policy elites" (Rogers & Dearing, 1996: 1-2). Subsequently, the theory supported different transformations, especially when discussing the emergence of public agenda and the role mass media occupies in the equation. Cobb & Elder (1972) referring to the concept of agenda building, an extension of agenda-setting model, argued that public agenda is actually a result of the interactions between mass media, political actors and public which negotiate in order to impose their own agenda. …