The Politics of Parenthood: Causes and Consequences of the Politicization and Polarization of the American Family

Chapter 4: The Rise of Politicized Moms and Dads: Media Coverage of Parenthood

49 4 The Rise of Politicized Moms and Dads Media Coverage of Parenthood The last chapter revealed that parenthood and the family have gone from being essentially non-political and non-partisan issues—rarely being mentioned in platforms, major speeches, and presidential campaigns—to providing a fundamental frame for the broad domestic policy agendas of both parties and providing the basis for new policy initiatives explicitly directed toward parents. In this chapter, we turn to the news media, a central actor in contemporary elections and the main source of political information for the American public. To make our analysis of the news media as parallel as possible to our analysis of elite political communications documented in the previous chapter, we analyze news coverage of elections from 1952 through the present, systematically documenting the media’s use of parent-family labels in their election coverage. We also explore the policy focus of all the news articles using parent-family frames. The results build a rich picture of not only how much, but also how the news media have talked about parents and families in their political coverage. While a few studies have examined the use of one particular parent-family theme in one particular election year, such as “family values” in 1992 or “Soccer Moms” in 1996, this chapter provides the first systematic exploration of the media’s use of all parent-family language over the last half century. 50 The Politics of Parenthood The Politicization of Parenthood and the Family in the Media The first goal of the media analysis was to explore whether the news media have “politicized” parenthood and the family over the last half century. In other words, have the news media increasingly used parents and families as frames in their election coverage? To answer this question we conducted a content analysis of two print news sources from 1952 through the 2008 election. The primary source for our media analysis is the New York Times, although we conduct a parallel analysis using Time magazine. We chose to use these two news sources because they are widely read, influential sources of information (Jamieson and Waldman 2003, 96–97), and on a practical level, they have been in existence in a fairly consistent format across the long time period of our study and have searchable archives going back through 1952. Additionally, the New York Times and Time have been used by other scholars in their content analyses of political and election news coverage (Carroll 1999, 2008; Gilens 1999; Patterson 1993; Wattenberg 1998). Although it is hard to make the case that any one or two sources are representative of all news media, scholars have pointed out that there are more similarities than differences in presidential election coverage across media platforms and sources (Graber 2006, 232; Kerbel, Apee, and Ross 2000). Following Susan Carroll’s approach (1999, 2008) in her content analysis of the media’s use of the terms “Soccer Moms” during the 1996 election and “Security Moms” in the 2004 election, we searched news archives across the time period of July 1 through November 30 in each presidential election year from 1952 through 2008. This time frame captures news coverage of both major party conventions as well as wrap-up coverage after the election, but avoids primary coverage, which might be weighted more heavily toward one party or the other depending on which side had a more competitive or drawn-out contest. Using the Proquest Historical archive of the New York Times and Lexis/Nexis, we identified all articles that had the keywords “presidential election(s)” along with one or more of the following: “parent(s),” “mother(s)/mom(s),” “father(s)/dad(s),” “family/families,” and “children/kid(s)” in the article headline or lead paragraph. We conducted a parallel search 51 The Rise of Politicized Moms and Dads and analysis using Time magazine. Articles in which references to parent-family terms were made offhandedly or in a non-political context were discarded. For example, articles referring to the candidates’ parents were not coded for this study. Articles were included in our analysis only if parents, families, and/or children formed a major focus or frame in the article’s discussion of politics, elections, and/or policy. Letters to the editor as well as transcripts of debates or speeches were eliminated, but editorials were kept as these are some of the most widely read and...