Politicians on TV News: Getting attention in Dutch and German election campaigns

Abstract

Different strategies apply in the Netherlands and in Germany when TV channels have to decide how often politicians are mentioned or shown in the news during national election campaigns. Extensive content analyses in the 1990s suggest that Dutch political and media traditions promote a more equally distributed attention to different political positions. In Germany, TV news focuses almost exclusively on the incumbent candidate for the top function of the national government (the office of Chancellor) and his challengers. The likely causes are not only the political system and the particular circumstances of the 1990s (with the pre-eminence of Helmut Kohl), but also recent developments in the way in which German journalists define their task.

Gaining voice in the mass media: The effect of parties’ strategies on party–issue linkages in election news coverage

“…Consequentially, research analyzed why and which parties and politicians get into the news. This line of research looked mostly at general characteristics of parties and politicians such as whether a party is the incumbent (Schoenbach et al, 2001;Hopmann et al, 2011;Green-Pedersen et al, 2015), or whether a politician is the leader of a party (Tresch, 2009;Midtbø, 2011). However, this line of research has done little to explain a party's varying visibility across issues -an idea that is at the core of party-issue linkages.…”

The Incumbency Bonus Revisited: Causes and Consequences of Media Dominance

“…18 A first step is to recognize that professional journalistic norms may 9 Asp 2006;Brants and van Praag 2006;de Swert 2011;Hopmann, de Vreese, and Albaek 2011;Schoenbach, de Ridder, and Lauf 2001;Schulz and Zeh 2006;Semetko 1996;van Aelst and de Swert 2009;van Dalen 2011. 10 Harcup andO'Neil 2001;Shoemaker 2006.…”

“…10 Harcup andO'Neil 2001;Shoemaker 2006. 11 E.g., de Swert andWalgrave 2002;Hopmann, de Vreese, and Albaek 2011;Schoenbach, de Ridder, and Lauf 2001;van Dalen 2011. 12 Tresch 2009.…”

Understanding the dynamics of politicians' visibility in traditional and social media

“…As a consequence, not every candidate receives the same amount of media attention; their newsworthiness depends, for instance, on news values (e.g., Galtung and Ruge 1965;Shoemaker and Reese 1996;O'Neill and Harcup 2009). Following this rationale, journalists tend to report more prominently about those politicians who hold leadership positions or high political office (e.g., Schaffner and Sellers 2003;Midtbø 2011;Gattermann and Vasilopoulou 2015;Schoenbach, De Ridder, and Lauf 2001;Vos 2014), have more experience in office (e.g., Schoenbach, De Ridder, and Lauf 2001;Sellers and Schaffner 2007), or belong to the government and are thus considered powerful (Van Aelst et al 2008). Socio-demographic characteristics, including gender and age, also play a role: Female politicians tend to be underrepresented in television (Hooghe, Jacobs, and Claes 2015) and newspapers (e.g., Ross et al 2013), although Vos (2014) argues that such a bias might be spurious and others find mixed effects (e.g., Elmelund-Praestekaer, Hopmann, and Nørgaard 2011;Gattermann and Vasilopoulou 2015); younger politicians are also more likely to receive newspaper coverage (Vos 2014).…”

“…Further, and importantly with regard to the presence of visibility bias in the media (Eberl, Boomgaarden, and Wagner 2017), we also explore the conditionality of this dynamic relationship between traditional and social media agendas. Since attention towards individual politicians is selective both in traditional news (depending on the selection processes by journalists, Tresch 2009;Schoenbach, De Ridder, and Lauf 2001) and social media (depending on selection processes by audiences, Graf and Aday 2008), we also ask (RQ2): To what extent is the relationship between visibility in traditional and social media moderated by individual characteristics of the candidates such as status, seniority, party characteristics, gender, and age?…”