This paper reports the results of a content analysis of election–related headlines in Canada's two English–language national newspapers, The Globe and Mail and The National Post, over the course of the 36–day 2000 federal election campaign. We found that the two national newspapers' headlines revealed differences in issue emphasis, leader portrayals and party assessment. Yet both newspapers embraced a game frame for election coverage–by focusing on the horse–race, leader personalities and campaign strategies–to the neglect of campaign issues and ideological distinctions between parties. These findings suggest that media game framing can result in troublesome consequences for constructive citizen engagement in election activities.

Our study examines the phenomenon of personalization in news coverage of candidates for the leadership of Canadian national political parties. Because the politicization of the personal through newspaper coverage of bodies and intimate lives has different meanings for women and men politicians, we argue that it is important to account for gender differences in levels of personalization. Our analysis of the Globe and Mail newspaper reporting of thirteen party leadership races held between 1975 and 2012 includes eleven competitive women candidates, four of whom won the leadership contest. Conducting a content analysis of 2,463 newspaper articles published over the course of this thirty-seven-year period facilitates comparison of the levels of personalized coverage over time, by leadership contest, and by candidate gender and success. Findings reveal that the amount of personal coverage did not increase over time, as the personalization literature hypothesizes. However, reporting was significantly more likely to "make it personal" for women candidates, as suggested by the literature on media coverage of women politicians. We argue that gendered mediation is largely driving the personalization of political reporting in the Canadian national context

Are women politicians who mount competitive campaigns for high political office as visible and prominent in news coverage of their candidacies as their male competitors? Few studies have systematically or longitudinally investigated the relationship between candidate gender, competitiveness, and media visibility during election or party leadership campaigns. Moreover, studies of media visibility tend to focus exclusively on the presence of candidates in news stories, as measured by one or more mentions per story. Examining six textual and visual elements in Globe and Mail reporting of eleven Canadian national leadership campaigns held between 1975 and 2012, we discover that it is candidate competitiveness and novelty and not candidate gender that influences the media visibility of party leadership hopefuls. Canada provides a useful case study when exploring the relationship between gender and media visibility because many women have sought, and four have won, the leadership of national parties.

Which leadership qualities are most likely to be emphasized in news reports about leadership competitions, and are they attributed differently to women and men candidates? To answer this question, we conducted content and discourse analyses of 2,463 articles published by theGlobe and Mailnewspaper on 10 women and 17 men seeking the leadership of Canadian political parties since 1975. Our results show that women candidates were subjected to more negative and gendered assessments of their communication skills, intellectual substance and political experience than were men candidates. We also found little evidence that gendered media discourses about political leadership have changed over time, especially in the case of women in the strongest position to become the country's first national party leader or prime minister.

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