Strategic News Coverage and its Effects on Political Cynicism: A Meta-Analysis

• In Event: Covering Politics: New Political Journalism Research

Abstract

The journalistic coverage of politics usually focuses on the competition between political actors, their strategies for gaining public support and their positions at the polls. The conventional wisdom is that this tendency – usually referred to as strategic, horse race or game coverage – has a negative impact on the electorate, specifically by increasing political cynicism among citizens. While many studies examined this question in varying countries and periods and while using different operationalizations, it remains unclear whether the effect holds across different contexts and under what conditions. The current study investigates these questions by conducting a meta-analysis on 24 effect sizes from 17 studies. Results show that strategic news coverage significantly increases political cynicism across studies and contexts. There was no evidence that this effect is moderated by system-level, media-level, context-level and measurement-level variables. Implications of this relatively stable effect on the relationship between the public and its representatives are discussed.

Author

• Alon Zoizner, Hebrew U of Jerusalem