Media (Mis)Representations of Education in the 2000 Presidential Election

Abstract

Because most voters increasingly use the media as their primary source of information, their role in electoral politics is key to the functioning of a democracy. One of the top issues in the 2000 presidential election campaign was the candidates' views of educational issues. Using discourse analysis, the author examined how the media coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign operated as an arena of discourse. The author's analysis of the major television, newspaper, and radio coverage showed that the media, at best, represent shallow depictions of educational issues, which tend to be tightly controlled by how candidates define educational problems. These representations of education in the media tend to reinforce and reflect public assumptions that America 's educational system is failing. Only rarely did the major news media report educators 'concerns about how educational problems were being represented or the concerns of minority groups. By excluding alternative viewpoints, the author asserts that media (mis)representations hinder democracy.

Education Coverage in Television News: A Typology and Analysis of 35 Years of Topics

“…News media can also influence how we think about topics through the many conscious and unconscious choices made in the production of news coverage: what is included and what is excluded, what is made salient and what is left in the background, and what narratives, frames, prototypes, and discourses are used to make sense of news topics (Fairclough, 1995;Haas & Fischman, 2010;Kumashiro, 2008). For example, education scholars in a number of countries have established that the news often portrays schools as being in a constant state of crisis and failure (e.g., J. L. Cohen, 2010;Gerstl-Pepin, 2002; O'Neil, 2012)-a trend that can trace its U.S. roots at least as far back as the 1983 publication of the A Nation at Risk report, which stoked fears that a failed education system was endangering U.S. competitiveness (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Much news coverage is dominated by a "discourse of derision" (Parker, 2011;Wallace, 1993) that portrays schools in a negative light and blames them for the effects of broader social and structural inequities (Stack, 2006;Ulmer, 2016).…”

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“…In her analysis of how the media covered education in the 2000 American federal election, Gerstl-Pepin (2002) uses Habermas's notion of the public sphere to argue that the media provides a 'thin public' in which opposing viewpoints are represented but there is no analysis or dialogue: political dialogue becomes akin to a horse race (Gerstl-Pepin, 2002). The media relies mostly on candidates, but also on reporters and political analysts, to explain complex educational problems.…”