Race, Republicans, and the Return of the Party of Lincoln

4. A Different Spin: The Media’s Framing of the 2000 Republican National Convention

4 A Different Spin The Media’s Framing of the 2000 Republican National Convention WHEN ATTEMPTING TO reshape their images in voters’ minds, parties must remain cognizant of potential sources of countervailing information . Encountering information that contradicts the party’s newly projected image enables citizens to de›ect partisan appeals. For this reason, it is important to examine not only a party’s campaign communication but also how other institutions in the information environment respond to the campaign. With respect to the Republican Party’s attempt to reshape its image along racial lines, one such institution to consider is the media. Studies (e.g., Steeper 1978) have found that although campaign events may have little effect on public opinion, subsequent news coverage of those events does. The probability of attending a political convention or witnessing other political events is very small, but the presence of a multitude of mass media outlets capable of relaying such events to broad audiences increases the likelihood of encountering political information. As Graber (1989) explains, news stories “provide the nation with shared political experiences, such as watching presidential election debates or congressional investigations, that then form a basis for public opinions and for uniting people for political actions” (3). Dalton, Beck, and Huckfeldt (1998) argue that media coverage of political events becomes especially important during elections: Few voters attend a rally or have direct contact with the presidential candidates or their representatives. Instead, information presented in the media provides people with cues about the policy positions, qualities, and abilities of the candidates. From this infor84 mation, as well as other sources, the public forms its images of the candidates and its voting choices. (111) As a result, the media play an important role in political elites’ ability to convey their messages. First, in determining that an event is newsworthy, the media decide the event’s level of signi‹cance. Newspeople determine what is “news”—which political happenings will be covered and which will be ignored. Their choices affect who and what will have a good chance to become the focus for political discussion and action. Without media attention the people and events covered by the news might have no in›uence, or reduced in›uence, on decision-makers. (Graber 1989, 6) The voters are the decision makers during the election cycle, and the media weight the importance of such events for subsequent electoral decisions by covering (or not covering) a political event (see also Iyengar and Kinder 1987). Second, the media not only serve as vehicles through which elites speak to members of the electorate but also act as interpreters of the message being sent. In their framing of political events, the media clarify and translate what political elites attempt to transmit to would-be constituents. According to Graber (1989), “Most incidents lend themselves to a variety of interpretations, depending on the values and experiences of the interpreter. The kind of interpretation that is chosen affects the political consequences of media reports” (10). In other words, the political rami‹cations of a campaign event are somewhat contingent on the frames the media use to discuss it. The effect of media coverage during campaigns also includes press coverage of campaign ads. Media coverage of campaign ads may have either a reinforcing effect (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1995) or a diminishing effect (Cappella and Jamieson 1997). Neuman, Just, and Crigler (1992) explain the process: Sources (government spokesmen, public affairs people, campaign managers, candidates, and of‹cials) interpret news for reporters. They give the story a “spin” congenial with their goals, and hope to see their construction of reality incorporated into the news story. Journalists reconstruct reality for the audience, taking into account their organizational and modality constraints, professional A Different Spin 85 judgments, and certain expectations about the audience. Finally, the individual reader or viewer constructs a version of reality built from personal experience, interaction with peers, and interpreted selections from the mass media. (120) This process suggests that the ‹ltering of information to the public is two tiered and that any analysis of political information should include not only the original source of the message (in this case, party elites) but also the mediators of this message—the media. Subsequent coverage of the 2000 Republican National Convention is especially important to examine given individuals’ limited ability to experience the convention as it occurred. Only a tiny fraction of voting -age citizens attended the convention in...