Here We Go: Presidential elections and the national media

Other articles suggest a winning image has more to do with the ways in which the campaign feeds information to the media. Because news outlets are businesses, which depends on revenue to survive, they are easily manipulated through the use of media routines. In Mary Stuckey’s report entitled: Here We Go: Presidential elections and the national media, she  explains that political coverage accounts for between 13 and 15 percent of the news stories during an election year. The problem with this is that many of the stories are numbingly homogenous. “Successful political campaigns are generally those that understand and use media routines and derive themes that resonate through them” (Stuckey, et al 2000:99). McCain’s recent campaign has shown incredible success at providing the media with information that can be used for thematic, objective new stories. “Campaign communication has always relied on image and has often been trivial, prurient, and downright shallow” (Stuckey, et al 2000:101).

Like any good competition, strategic communication campaigns continually create a dualistic environment for information to operate within. To this end, negative campaigning is a strategy used by McCain and many prior candidates. By directly attacking the opponents’ image and “going negative” McCain has indirectly proven that he can gain acceptance and possibly more votes. Often negative campaign strategies are executed by directly attacking an opponent’s position on an important issue. “Although it is often said to be new, or at least qualitatively different in recent times, there is considerable evidence that “going negative” is an old practice and has long involved personalization, distortion, and misinterpretation of issues” (Stuckey, et al 2000:101). In 1996 and 2000, Benoit and his team studied the news coverage of political debates. “In both years, the news coverage discussed attacks and defenses more frequently, and acclaims less often, than they occurred in the debates” (Benoit and Currie, 2001:38, 28-39). This helps to explain how emphasis often turns quickly from political discourse to a personal realm making it much easier for voters to clearly assign an image to each candidate, albeit and image constructed by the McCain campaign. For instance, McCain comparing Obama’s celebrity status to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears is completely unrelated to politics and only adds to the competition for coverage.
While pouring through the incredible amount of prior research on campaign image, we found the methods used to project and maintain your image, along with strategically attacking the opponent, critical to the success of any campaign. Further we found several studies that concluded; the ways in which individual members of the public obtain their media coverage along with the system the campaign uses to distribute information, considerably affects the credibility of what is being presented. Overarching themes, such as the ones we choose, along with a thematic context have proven very successful for McCain and many previous candidates. The tremendous amount of information gathered gave us a clear approach as to how we needed to codify, disseminate and compile our research.