Later, Jerry Brown and Frank Church entered the race as liberal alternatives to Carter. Although Carter won New Hampshire by fewer than five thousand votes and had received barely more than a fourth of the total vote, Newsweek declared Carter to be “the unqualified winner.” In the period between New Hampshire and the ninth primary in Pennsylvania, Carter received as much news coverage as all of his Democratic rivals combined, who at that point threw in the towel. Buoyed with the media bonanza from his Iowa showing, Carter then narrowly won the New Hampshire primary, edging Morris Udall, who was competing with Birch Bayh, Fred Harris, and Sargent Shriver for the liberal vote. “He was the clear winner in this psychologically crucial test,” declared CBS News. The press ignored the undecided ballots and declared Carter the victor. In the Iowa caucuses, Carter got 26 percent of the vote, while 37 percent of the votes were cast for “undecided,” which voters were told was the way to cast a vote for Humphrey. But there was one of him, and four of them-plus one in the wings in the form of the undeclared Hubert Humphrey. A poll before the first primary found that any of the four liberal Democrats in a one-on-one matchup would easily defeat the one centrist, Jimmy Carter. It’s a version that can help, or hurt, a presidential hopeful’s chances of winning the party’s nomination.įew nominating campaigns illustrate that point more clearly than the 1976 race for the Democratic nomination. As New York Times columnist James Reston noted, journalism is “the exhilarating search after the Now.” The result is that the press’s version of a presidential campaign is a refracted one, shaped as much by news values as by political factors. The news, as Walter Lippmann noted nearly a century ago, is a story of obtruding events and not the social base from which they stem. The complex nature of the presidential primary system does not sit easily with news values. A state’s “losers” get a proportional share of its delegates. Finally, presidential primaries employ proportional representation-an electoral method rarely used in U.S. Nominations are decided by the results of fifty separate state contests spread out over several months. Whereas House and Senate primaries are conclusive, a presidential primary is not. The serial nature of presidential primaries is also distinctive. Rather than allowing voters to directly choose a nominee, as is the case with House and Senate primaries, they are indirect-the voters choose delegates who in turn select the nominees. Presidential primaries are unique in their form. New: News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters. News Coverage of the 2016 National Conventions: Negative News, Lacking Context. Pre-Primary News Coverage of the 2016 Presidential Race: Trump’s Rise, Sanders’ Emergence, Clinton’s Struggle. The study’s data were provided by Media Tenor, a firm that specializes in the content analysis of news coverage. The Shorenstein Center study is based on an analysis of news statements by CBS, Fox, the Los Angeles Times, NBC, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
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