Candidates with Easy Access Get More Favorable Coverage

By decreasing the effort necessary for journalists to gather information, politicians can garner substantially more media attention for themselves. Evidence of this "information subsidy" effect has been thoroughly documented by scholars in journalism and communication, political science and public relations.1While the effect has been substantiated in the aggregate, there remains substantial variation at the individual level. Scholars have documented campaigns in which one candidate seems to benefit strongly from an information subsidy while the competing candidate is notably less able or even wholly unable to attract desired media coverage. That presents a significant but infrequently asked question: Why are some politicians more successful than others at translating their information subsidies into news coverage?This study suggests that an important component of campaign communication effectiveness is the access subsidy. By providing the media low-effort access to the candidate, an access subsidy increases the value of campaign information provided to the media and consequently reduces the cost in time required to assemble a newsworthy story. Because the candidates involved offer a stark contrast in their approaches to media access, we test this premise with content analyses of newspaper coverage of the primary races for Ohio governor in 2006.Information SubsidyOne of the primary challenges members of the media face in their daily work is gathering, integrating, shaping and sharing information with the efficiency required of the job.2 As Tuchman noted in her observations from inside the newsroom, for a journalist there is always too much to do.3 Toward that end, Fishman quotes one newspaper editor describing the potential stories a particular reporter might cover as "a bottomless pit....He never has enough time to write everything he might write."4Given the ever-present time constraints of the job, making information "available at something less than the cost a user would face in the absence of the subsidy" is a powerful inducement for media attention.5 Thus campaigns offer a steady supply of press releases, sound bites, speeches, tweets and other easily digested servings of information in hopes of attracting desired coverage.6And, in the main, they are successful. Numerous studies have found politicians and campaigns can attract additional coverage, and shape coverage to their needs, by providing information subsidies.7 In fact, there are documented examples in which what politicians are doing to attract coverage is a better predictor of how they are portrayed than is their actual performance in office. 8Although the effects of information subsidies are clearly apparent in studies of campaigns at the local, state and national level, the effectiveness of individual candidates in attracting desired attention varies markedly.9Several studies point to the 2000 presidential primary campaign of John McCain as an exemplar of effective media relations.10 Golan and Wanta found that McCain attracted double the volume of positive attention compared to Bush in the New Hampshire media in the weeks leading up to that state's primary.11 Tedesco's data suggest McCain not only outshone his Republican rival George W. Bush in attracting positive media attention, he was also substantially more successful than either Democratic candidate.12In his review of information subsidy scholarship, Dunn cogently captures what the corpus of work offers.13 Dunn wrote,Past research indicates that a fairly high number of candidate information subsidies will directly inspire stories in the news media and that there tends to be a high correlation between candidate and media agendas. Yet, left unaddressed is the question of why certain campaigns are more successful than others at influencing media agendas.14Access SubsidyConventional wisdom holds that granting access to the media was an essential catalyst for John McCain's positive campaign coverage. …