political campaigning in referendums_0

8/12/2019 Political Campaigning in Referendums_0

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Part III

The campaign in thenewsPolls, personalities, and themulti-faceted issue of the euro


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campaign, a bias towards strategic and opinion poll-oriented news cover-age, and neutral or negative evaluations of key campaign actors. Weidentify the differences among specic news outlets and discuss the rele-vance of this pattern of visibility to referendum outcomes in other

national contexts. We examine how key features of journalism operateand we assess the impact of the journalistic approach on the newscoverage.

EUrope in the news

Previous research on media coverage of aspects of European integrationhas largely focused on elections for the European Parliament or key EUevents. The study of the rst European Parliamentary elections in 1979

(Blumler 1983) showed that European topics did not surface on the televi-sion agenda before the nal weeks of the campaign. In relation to sub-sequent European elections, it has generally been noted that while the rstelections received some media coverage because of the novelty of theevent, already from the second elections in 1984 and thereafter, the cam-paign was already nothing special (Leroy and Siune 1994: 5253). Onecomparative study of the 1989 European election campaign concluded thatthe elections were given low priority in the news and that most of the newscoverage was of a domestic nature, with only little reference to the Euro-

pean dimensions of the issues in question (Leroy and Siune 1994).In 1999 national television news programs such as, for example, theBBC and ITN in Britain, NOS and RTL in the Netherlands, TVE andAntenna3 in Spain, and RaiUno and Canale5 in Italy spent between 2percent (the Netherlands) and 8 percent (Italy) of their news programs onthe elections during the nal two weeks prior to the June 1999 elections(de Vreese et al . 2004). On average, the main national news programs inthe EU member states devoted 8 percent of the news to the elections.Belgium, Britain, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Spain stand out

for devoting less than 5 percent of the news to the elections duringthe campaign. In Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, andSweden, between 8 percent and 13 percent of the news dealt with theEuropean elections in the nal two weeks before election day.

A second group of studies deal with key EU events , such as the recur-ring EU summit and, for example, the introduction of the euro. One studyfound that media attention to EU affairs is cyclical which meant that newsabout the euro vanished in the immediate aftermath of the launch. Thecoverage of the euro replaced other political and economic issues in the

period around the introduction so that the volume of political and eco-nomic news stayed constant during the launch period and in a routineperiod (de Vreese et al . 2001). This suggests that major EU events havethe ability to enter the national news agendas, but this does not increasethe proportion of political and economic news overall. A similar pattern

66 The campaign in the news


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was found in studies of EU summits in which the summit entered the newsagenda, dominated it for the period of the summit, and vanished in theimmediate aftermath (Semetko and Valkenburg 2000; de Vreese 2001b).

A recent study investigated the coverage of EU affairs during a routine

period , that is during times when there are no elections or prescheduledimportant events (Peter and de Vreese 2003). This study showed in mostof the countries studied, EU politics is marginal in national television newsand EU ofcials are virtually absent from the news. However, when theEU is covered, EU politics tends to be more prominently presented thanother political news.

It is against this backdrop of previous studies that we can assess themedia coverage of a referendum on a European integration topic. Weknow that there is considerable cross-national variation in terms of the vis-

ibility of European news. We know that the coverage tends to be cyclic,that is almost invisible and then, following a short peak, vanishing in theimmediate aftermath of an event.

EUrope in the newsroom

Journalists play an important mediating role in shaping public opinionabout European integration. By choosing to cover some topics and notothers journalists and news organizations play an active role in the cam-

paign process. Moreover, inclusion of one perspective above another orthe use of certain sources or viewpoints can affect the framing of a newsstory. In addition, critical comments and sarcastic remarks can affect thevalence of the news. Obviously, however, journalists do not operate intotal freedom in terms of their choices. They are constrained by a numberof factors.

A distinction can be made between factors internal and external to jour-nalism that shape and inuence news content (de Vreese 2003). Externalfactors include, for example, the political system of a country whether

political conicts and battles are fought in a two-party system or in amulti-party system. Additionally, in the case of the EU, it may matterwhether or not a country is generally pro-European or rather EU-skeptic.Factors internal to journalism include the editorial policy of a news organi-zation, the journalistic effort invested in covering an issue/event in termsof staff and resources, and the application of news selection criteria.

Editorial approach . Formally dened organizational and editorialapproaches shape news content. In studies of national elections in primar-ily Britain but also the U.S., a theoretical distinction between a sacerdotal

and a pragmatic approach to campaign coverage has been applied(Blumler 1969 in Blumler and Gurevitch 1995; Semetko et al . 1991). Thedistinction refers to the status attributed to elections and campaign news.In a sacerdotal approach, elections are perceived as the fundament of democracy and campaigns are considered newsworthy per se . The attitude

The campaign in the news 67


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towards politicians is respectful, cautious, and reactive. In a pragmaticapproach campaign news is evaluated against conventional news selectioncriteria and is not automatically given special attention.

The pragmatic orientation implies that the amount of time or space

allocated to [political events] will be determined by strict considerations of news values, in competition with the newsworthiness of other stories(Semetko et al . 1991: 6). In one study journalists at the BBC were found tobe prudential and cautious, concerned about ensuring that television

journalism was, and would appear to be, politically beyond reproach perhaps even politically innocuous (Semetko et al . 1991: 53). In compari-son it was suggested that journalists at the U.S. network NBC were moreanalytic and committed to a conventional journalistic approach lookingfor events to report that would be laced with drama, conict, novelty,

movement and anomaly (Semetko et al . 1991: 55).In a study of British, Danish, and Dutch news organizations approachto and role in reporting the 1999 European elections, it was found thatthough all news programs had the intention to cover the elections exten-sively, this was adjusted considerably during the campaign. Advance plan-ning concerning the initiation of specic issues was often not implementedin the actual coverage. A commonality between the news programs wasthe pragmatic approach to the elections implying that politics (includingthe elections) was not newsworthy per se , but that political events and

issues competed against other topics in the allocation of time in the news.The event was not considered to have sufcient intrinsic importance orinterest and the European Parliament was evaluated critically and did notenjoy any privileges as a political authority. In general, the elections werenot up-graded and events in the campaign were mostly evaluatedaccording to normal news selection criteria (de Vreese 2003).

Though all news programs during the 1999 European Parliament elec-tions were pragmatic in their approach, this had different implications.Some news programs chose to neglect the elections due to an editorial

assessment of the event as non-newsworthy (for example, Dutch NOS Journaal and RTL Nieuws ), while others set their own agenda withoutpaying attention to the political party agenda (for example, Danish DRTV-Avisen). Yet other news programs opted to make the anticipatedvoter apathy a key theme in the coverage (for example, British BBC andITN, and Danish TV2). These ndings suggest that the approach taken bytelevision journalists in the coverage of European affairs has changed con-siderably since the rst EP elections in 1979. Nol-Aranda (1983) con-cluded that broadcasters during the 1979 campaign were cautious and

adhered largely to the agenda put forward by politicians. This was nolonger an appropriate description when assessing the approach taken bybroadcasters in the 1999 elections.

News selection criteria . A second aspect of journalism that shapes newsis the application of news selection criteria. An important indicator is



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whether standard criteria for evaluation of the newsworthiness of eventsand issues are applied or whether special criteria are applied for evalu-ation of campaign stories. While news values are not organizationallydened, as suggested by, for example, Galtung and Ruge (1965), the news

organization is the place where these are manifest and translated into dailyproduction routines. Shoemaker and Reese (1996) synthesize work onnews values and suggest: a) prominence/importance, b) human interest, c)conict/controversy, d) the unusual, e) timeliness, and f) proximity as themost important news values to be distilled from both journalistic practiceand literature about journalism.

During the 1999 European Parliamentary campaign, the different newsprograms varied in the degree to which they adapted the political agenda.In Britain, the agenda of the political parties was important for the build-

ing of the news agenda. Most notably, the Conservatives received exten-sive coverage and their slogan In Europe, not run by Europe wasinuential. Dutch NOS Journaal chose to almost entirely ignore the elec-tions. This was a deliberate editorial choice not to dene the elections asnewsworthy. Danish TV-Avisen covered the elections rather extensivelyand assumed a clear agenda-setting prole in the networks focus on thefraud issue (de Vreese 2003).

The elections were most visible in Denmark and Britain and invisible inthe Netherlands. The low visibility of the European elections in the Dutch

news is in line with observations made about the 1979 campaign. For the1979 election, it was suggested that the Netherlands was the only countryin which neither broadcasters nor parties felt very concerned about pro-moting a European consciousness through television which is one expla-nation for the absence in coverage (Nol-Aranda 1983: 92). The argumentput forward by Nol-Aranda (1983) suggests that news coverage of anissue on which there is widespread consensus will be only marginal. Thisseems like a plausible explanation and it is in line with other research on,for example, news values. Studies in different countries have suggested

that presence of conict in an issue is an important common criterion forselecting news (for example, Eilders 1997; McManus 1994; Shoemaker andReese 1996).

Editorial approach and the application of news selection criteria bothfactors internal to the news organization inuence the visibility and pri-ority given to an event/issue in the news. The dimensions also give direc-tion to the news agenda . Agenda-setting addresses the relationshipbetween political actors, the news media, and the electorate (see Chapter6 for an investigation of media agenda-setting in a referendum campaign).

Although the majority of studies on agenda-setting have focused on therelationship between the media and the public agenda, an equally import-ant, but relatively neglected area is the dynamics of how the media agendais formed, agenda-building, and the role news organizations and journal-ists play in this process. Lang and Lang (1981: 278) concluded that the



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whole question of how issues originate is side-stepped, nor is there anyrecognition of the process through which agendas are built. One reasonfor the less central role of this strand of research is reluctance on the partof news organizations to open up their newsroom and share experiences

and insights with communication scholars. Access is a crucial factor whichmay have limited the volume and impact of this type of research (Blumlerand Gurevitch 1998; Holtz-Bacha 1999; Semetko 1996a).

Previous studies of national election campaigns across Europe in the1970s (for example, Asp 1983; Siune and Borre 1975) and 1980s (forexample, Blumler and Gurevitch 1989; Hjarvard 1999; Semetko et al . 1991)suggested that European broadcasters have traditionally covered electionsin a respectful and cautious way, adhering largely to the agenda of partiesand politicians. While this role may be labeled agenda-sending, a refer-

ence to the media passing on the priorities of news sources; in the case of elections, these are often candidates, party leaders or party spokespersons.Research based on elections in the 1990s and more recently suggests thatthis may no longer be the case (see, for example, Blumler and Gurevitch1998; Hjarvard 1995; Norris et al . 1999; de Vreese 2001a). As in the 1999European Parliament elections, news organizations have been found to bemore pro-active in their coverage of politics and to exert more discretionwhen choosing which stories to bring and how to cover these issues. Thisrole may be more appropriately labeled agenda-setting, a reference to

the medias primary role in shaping the news agenda.The role of journalists and news organizations is unexplored territory inrelation to referendums about European integration. We build on previ-ous research in relation to national and European elections to investigatethe journalistic approach to a referendum and its effect on news coverage.

Key questions

This chapter addresses the coverage of a referendum in the media and the

journalistic approach applied to this coverage. The rst part of the analysisinvestigates the visibility of the referendum issue in the media. There areno comparable studies to assess whether the visibility of this referendumexceeds or falls below the standard amount of coverage that a referendumgenerates. We do know that other studies suggest that the EU is periph-eral in national television news, with occasional peaks (de Vreese 2002;Norris 2000). Nothing is known, however, about the visibility of a referen-dum campaign on an issue of European integration.

The second part of the analysis deals with the presence and depiction of

actors in the news. Actors are broadly understood as persons, organi-zations, institutions, political parties, candidates, etc. The visibility of political actors in the news is a necessary condition for the functioningof political representation in national democracies and this has beenaddressed in studies of national election campaigns (for example, Kleinni-



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jenhuis et al . 2001; Norris et al . 1999; Schnbach et al . 2001). We know littleabout the visibility of EU actors (de Vreese 2002). There is only limitedevidence of how visible EU actors are or whether they are more or lessvisible than other (domestic) political actors (see de Vreese et al . (2004)

for an EU-wide analysis of the visibility of actors during the 1999 Euro-pean elections), and we know even less about the presence of politicalactors in the news during a referendum campaign.

We go beyond investigating the mere visibility of the different actors inthe news to also assess the tone of the news coverage of these actors. Thisis potentially crucial for the public evaluation of these actors (see Chapters8 and 9). Evaluations of politicians have been investigated in contentanalyses of national politics (for example, Herr 2002; Kepplinger 1998;McCombs et al . 2000; Semetko et al . 1991). Moreover, many of these

studies suggest that the news coverage of candidates may signicantlyaffect audiences perceptions of these candidates (for example, Kiousis et al . 1999; McCombs et al . 2000) and under certain conditions also affectvoting preferences and behavior (Herr 2002). Evaluations in the news are,when predominantly and permanently negative, considered to contributeto a decrease of citizens participation in democratic processes (forexample, Kepplinger 1998). Recent research has focused specically onthe evaluation of EU representatives in news. It suggested that EU repre-sentatives are generally depicted neutrally, but when they are evaluated

this tends to be in a negative direction (Peter et al . 2003; de Vreese 2002).This pattern, moreover, is similar to the evaluation of domestic politicalactors (de Vreese 2002).

The third dimension of the content analysis deals specically with therole that opinion polls play in the news coverage of the referendum. Elec-tion time is poll time. In the content analysis we investigate the visibility of polls and assess the quality poll reporting in the news media coverage of the referendum campaign. We draw on a number of indicators for thequality of poll reporting that pertain to the presence of methodological

information such as provision of question wording, population denition,sample size, interview method, and data collection eld dates.Finally, we address the organization and journalistic approach to the

referendum campaign as discussed above. We address the factors internal and external to journalism that shape and inuence news content that werediscussed at the outset of this chapter.

The visibility of the campaign in television and newspapers

To gain an initial idea of the volume of the coverage of the referendumduring the campaign we rst take a look at television news. Drawingon our content analysis of 5,000 news stories from the outset of the cam-paign in March until Election Day in September 2000, we found that thereferendum, on average, occupied about 10 percent of the news, albeit



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somewhat less during the summer months in the middle of the campaign(see Figure 4.1). In the nal month of the campaign the visibility of refer-endum increases to take up more than one-quarter of the news.

The analysis suggests that the 2000 referendum campaign was visible in

the news media. Compared to, for example, the 1999 European elections,the referendum was highly visible. During the nal two weeks leading upto the 1999 European elections, about 10 percent of the news in Denmarkwas devoted to the elections (de Vreese 2002). In the comparable twoweeks leading up to the 2000 referendum, this gure was higher than 30percent. Media attention of this magnitude to a referendum suggests theimportance of the topic and the potential domestic political implications.

To get a general idea of the news environment during the campaign, weturn to the overall television news agenda in the period from March

September. As Figure 4.1. shows, the euro issue increases from about 10percent of the news early in the campaign to around 25 percent in the nalmonth (see also second row in Table 4.1). The economy took upbetween 510 percent of the news throughout the campaign and otherpolitical news varied from 22 percent (TV1 September) to 40 percent(TV1 July) (see Table 4.1).

Did the referendum increase the overall percentage share of newsdevoted to political and economic topics? Or did other political and eco-nomic news get bumped off the screen when the referendum became more

visible, so that the overall percentage share the news devoted to politicaland economic topics remained the same? A previous study found that


Figure 4.1 Visibility of the referendum in television news.NotePercentage of news stories about referendum on TV1 DR 9 oclock news and TV2 7 oclocknews. A total of 4,953 stories are analyzed (TV1 n 2,578; TV2 n 2,375) between Marchand September 2000.

% o

f n e w s s t o r i e s a b o u

t e u r o r e

f e r e n d u m

/ E U 30

25

20

15

10

5

0

TV1 (DR)TV2

SeptemberAugustJulyJuneMayAprilMarch


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T a b l e 4 . 1 T e l e v i s i o n n e w s a g e n d a d u r i n g r e f e r e n d u m c a m p a i g n

M a r c h

A p r i l

M a y

J u n e

J u l y

A u g u s t

S e p t e m b e r

T V 1

T V 2

T V 1

T V 2

T V 1

T V 2

T V 1

T V 2

T V 1

T V 2

T V 1

T V 2

T V 1

T V 2

( n

2 6 8 ) ( n

2 7 8 ) ( n 3 8

2 ) ( n

2 8 3 ) ( n

3 8 5 ) ( n

3 0 1 )

( n

4 0 2 ) ( n

3 6 4 ) ( n

3 4 0 ) ( n 3 7 7 ) ( n

3 8 1 ) ( n

3 6 5 ) ( n

4 0 2 ) ( n

3 9 5 )

E u r o / E U

9 . 8

8 . 6

9 . 4

8 . 8

1 1 . 9

8 . 6

1 0 . 9

7 . 7

7 . 4

5 . 3

7 . 3

8 . 2

2 6 . 1

2 3 . 8

E c o n o m y

6 . 3

5 . 4

1 0 . 2

6 . 4

8 . 1

3 . 7

7 . 7

6 . 3

1 . 8

6 . 6

5 . 2

3 . 3

7 . 7

9 . 9

P o l i t i c s

3 6 . 7

3 7 . 4

2 9 . 6

2 9 . 3

3 6 . 0

3 6 . 9

3 1 . 1

3 2 . 1

4 0 . 3

2 8 . 6

3 0 . 7

2 7 . 4

2 3 . 9

2 2 . 0

U n e m p l o y m e n t

0 . 3

0 . 4

1 . 6

1 . 1

2 . 1

3 . 0

2 . 2

0 . 3

1 . 8

2 . 7

1 . 8

0 . 0

2 . 0

0 . 0

W e l f a r e

3 . 1

4 . 3

3 . 1

2 . 8

2 . 9

1 . 7

1 . 5

1 . 1

3 . 8

3 . 4

3 . 7

2 . 7

2 . 0

1 . 5

E n v i r o n m e n t

2 . 8

1 . 8

3 . 4

0 . 0

1 . 0

1 . 7

2 . 5

1 . 6

6 . 2

6 . 9

3 . 4

3 . 0

4 . 0

2 . 5

I m m i g r a t i o n

3 . 1

0 . 4

2 . 9

1 . 4

0 . 5

1 . 0

1 . 0

1 . 9

0 . 6

1 . 1

2 . 6

4 . 9

2 . 2

6 . 6

N o r m s / v a l u e s

0 . 0

0 . 0

1 . 8

0 . 0

1 . 0

1 . 7

1 . 7

0 . 3

0 . 3

0 . 3

4 . 2

0 . 3

1 . 5

0 . 3

A c c i d e n t / d i s a s t e r s

4 . 5

4 . 0

4 . 2

4 . 9

2 . 1

3 . 0

2 . 7

4 . 7

7 . 6

8 . 5

8 . 7

9 . 6

5 . 0

2 . 5

C r i m e

1 6 . 4

1 5 . 5

1 1 . 0

1 6 . 3

1 3 . 5

1 4 . 0

1 9 . 2

2 0 . 9

1 3 . 8

1 4 . 6

1 5 . 7

1 5 . 9

9 . 7

9 . 4

H u m a n i n t e r e s t

2 . 8

1 0 . 4

8 . 9

1 3 . 1

6 . 8

9 . 0

7 . 7

8 . 2

6 . 2

5 . 8

5 . 0

8 . 8

2 . 5

3 . 5

S p o r t

0 . 0

0 . 0

0 . 5

0 . 7

2 . 3

2 . 7

2 . 0

3 . 0

0 . 9

1 . 3

0 . 8

1 . 1

3 . 2

6 . 1

W e a t h e r

7 . 3

7 . 2

7 . 3

9 . 2

7 . 8

8 . 0

7 . 5

7 . 4

8 . 2

8 . 0

7 . 1

7 . 9

6 . 5

7 . 6

O t h e r

6 . 6

4 . 7

6 . 0

6 . 0

3 . 6

5 . 3

2 . 2

4 . 4

1 . 2

6 . 9

3 . 7

6 . 8

3 . 7

4 . 3

T o t a l

1 0 0 . 0

1 0 0 . 0

1 0 0 . 0

1 0 0 . 0

1 0 0 . 0

1 0 0 . 0

1 0 0 . 0

1 0 0 . 0

1 0 0 . 0 1 0 0 . 0

1 0 0 . 0

1 0 0 . 0

1 0 0 . 0

1 0 0 . 0

N o t e

B a s e i s a l l t e l e v i s i o n n e w s b e t w e e n M a r c h a n d

S e p t e m b e r 2 0 0 0 . C e l l e n t r i e s a r e p e r c e n t a g e o f a l l s t o r i e s , n 4 . 9 5 3 ) .


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when the euro was introduced, the event itself was visible in the news butthis news displaced coverage of other political and economic topics, so thatthe overall share of the program devoted to political and economic newsremained constant (de Vreese et al . 2001). In Figure 4.2 we illustrate the

percentage share of news about the referendum, other political and eco-nomic news, and news about topics such as crime and human interest, onthe two television channels in the nal two months during the campaign.

We clearly see that the share of news about the referendum as well asother political and economic news increased from around 40 percent inboth news programs in August to about 55 percent in both programs inSeptember. The share of economic and political news remained stablein both programs thus suggesting that the increase was accounted for bythe increase in the coverage of the referendum, indicated by the black bars

in Figure 4.2. In the 2000 euro referendum then, we see the unusual resultthat the overall percentage share of political and economic newsincreased.

The press

Turning to the content analysis of the newspaper coverage, we identied3,201 items dealing with the referendum during the campaign. We distin-guish among front-page articles, regular articles, newspaper features

and reportages, letters to the Editor, Editorials and Commentaries,advertisements as well as information boxes and cartoons. Table 4.2 sum-marizes the distribution of these more than 3,000 items dealing with thereferendum.


Figure 4.2 Share of news topics on television in August and September 2000.

%

100

50

40

30

20

10

0TV2

SeptemberTV2

AugustTV1

SeptemberTV1

August

90

80

70

60

Human interestCrimePoliticsEconomy

Euro/EU


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In total more than 150 references to the referendum were found on thefront pages of the ve dailies included in the sample in the nal month of the campaign. The number of regular news articles totaled more than 800

which means that each newspaper, on average, carried one article aboutthe referendum each day during the entire period from when the referen-dum was called in March until election day in September. The number of Letters to the Editor (876) and editorials (323) was also very high, which isan indication of the high salience of the topic also to the electorate whichengaged in considerable public debate. To gain an initial idea about thetopics and the tone of the newspaper coverage, we collected key headlinesfrom newspapers during the nal month of the campaign (see Table 4.3).

The number of front-page headlines varied signicantly between the

different newspapers. Politiken, Berlingske Tidende , and JyllandsPostenare all broadsheet quality newspapers while EkstraBladet and BT aretabloid with a format comparable to the popular British tabloid the Sun .The front pages of the broadsheet newspapers were dominated by the ref-erendum in the entire month leading up to the referendum. The headlinescentered around four themes:

1 Contradictory announcements of the costs of a Yes or a No,2 Human interest headlines about key campaign leaders,

3 The exchange rate and strength of the euro,4 Disagreement on Yes side.

The announcements of the costs of a Yes or a No were found in severalnewspapers and spread throughout the campaign. They ranged from


Table 4.2 Visibility referendum in daily newspapers

Politiken Berlingske Jyllands- B.T. Ekstra-Tidende Posten Bladet

(Yes) (Yes) (Yes) (Yes) (No)

( n 842) ( n 779) ( n 771) ( n 367) ( n 523)

Front page article/ bullet 47 43 49 7 13

Inside the paper Article 256 246 248 72 84Reportage/analysis 13 31 8 1 1Portrait/interview 40 43 43 8 35Letter to the Editor 150 128 216 159 223Editorial/commentary 80 81 55 30 77Advertisement 72 73 62 47 42

Information box/quiz 78 80 45 13 13Other (e.g., cartoon, 129 84 70 30 35bullet, graphs)

NotePeriod is August 28September 27, 2000. Cell entries are counts.


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T a b l e 4 . 3 K e y n e w s p a p e r h e a d l i n e s d u r i n g t h e c a m p a i g n

D a t e E k s t r a B l a d e t

B . T .

P o l i t i k e n

B e r l i n g s k e T i d e n d e

J y l l a n d s P o s t e n

2 8 / 8

U n d e c i d e d v o t e Y e s a f t e r

A B a n k e r s a y s n o

N o c a m p : N o m o r e U n i o n

d e l i b e r a t e p o l l

2 9 / 8

I n a t i o n t o o h i g h i n

D e n m a r k t o j o i n t h e e u r o

3 0 / 8

N o w i l l c o s t 5 b i l l i o n

E u r o N o w i l l c o s t b i l l i o n s

3 1 / 8

E U d e f e n s e p l a n s : f u l l s p e e d

a h e a d

0 1 / 9

E u r o h i t s r o c k - b o t t o m .

D a n i s h P e o p l e s P a r t y l o w -

p r o l e c a m p a i g n n o t t o s c a r e

N o v o t e r s

0 2 / 9

L e a d e r D a n i s h P e o p l e s P a r t y :

M a y b e e u r o o n e d a y

0 3 / 9

L a w y e r s : I n f o r m a t i o n o n t h e

e u r o i s b i a s e d

0 4 / 9

B r i t o n s s u p p o r t N o

D e a d r a c e o n t h e e u r o

B r i t s r o w o v e r s u p p o r t t o

c a m p a i g n

D a n i s h N o c a m p a i g n

0 5 / 9

A Y e s i s t h r e e t i m e s m o r e

e x p e n s i v e t h a n a N o

0 6 / 9

0 7 / 9

E u r o t a k e s a n o t h e r d i v e

E x p e r t s : N o r d i c w e l f a r e

w i l l s u r v i v e t h e e u r o


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0 8 / 9

J e l v e d

( E c o n o m y M i n i s t e r

)

E m e r g e n c y a i d t o t h e e u r o

p r o m i s e s s t r o n g e u r o

0 9 / 9

1 0 / 9

1 1 / 9

1 2 / 9

A u s t r i a c a s e a f f e c t s P r i m e

G a l l u p : A N o i s e m e r g i n g

T i e t m e y e r

( P r e s i d e n t G e r m a n

M i n i s t e r

B a n k ) : N o t p o s s i b l e t o l e a v e

e u r o o n c e y o u a r e i n

1 3 / 9

1 4 / 9

M o e l l e r ( D i r e c t o r

A b o r i n g c a m p a i g n s a y s

D e n m a r k s l a r g e s t c o m

p a n y

) p o l i t i c a l a n a l y s t s

s a y s Y e s

1 5 / 9 M i n i s t e r s e u r o -

D u i s e n b e r g r e j e c t s U n i t e d

Y e s s i d e j o i n f o r c e s t o s e c u r e a

b o m b : P e n s i o n

S t a t e s o f E u r o p e ; Y e s

Y e s

i n d a n g e r !

p a r t i e s j o i n i n c o m m o n

c a m p a i g n

1 6 / 9

F o r e i g n M i n i s t e r : N o s i d e i s

P e n s i o n g u a r a n t e e d a f t e r

P a n i c o n t h e Y e s s i d e

d i s h o n e s t ; D a n i s h K r o n e

e u r o

u n d e r p r e s s u r e ; N o o v e r t a k e s

Y e s i n t h e p o l l s

1 7 / 9

N y r u p

( P M ) : A Y e s

N y r u p s ( P M ) t r i e s t o s e c u r e H a r s h c r i t i c i s m o f N y r u p s ( P M )

s e c u r e s D a n i s h w e l f a r e

p e n s i o n

p e n s i o n g u a r a n t e e

c o n t i n u e d


16/43

T a b l e 4 . 3 c o n t i n u e d

D a t e E k s t r a B l a d e t

B . T .

P o l i t i k e n

B e r l i n g s k e T i d e n d e

J y l l a n d s P o s t e n

1 8 / 9 B r u t a l P r i m e

M e m b e r E U

N y r u p

( P M ) d e m a n d s

P r e d i c t i o n s o f c l e a r N o

G u a r a n t e e d p e n s i o n

M i n i s t e r d e l i v e r s P a r l i a m e n t :

S o c i a l i s t P a r t y t o j o i n i n o n

h a r s h c r i t i c i s m o f e x c e s s i n g r e e d :

t h e p e n s i o n g u a r a n t e e

L e a d e r S o c i a l i s t 6 0 d a y s E X T R A

P a r t y

v a c a t i o n

1 9 / 9

E u r o p o l i t i c i a n s

H a r s h c r i t i c i s m o n p e n s i o n

F o g h

( L i b e r a l l e a d e r ) :

A c a m p a i g n o n e m o t i o n s ;

a l e r t : K a r e n

g u a r a n t e e

N y r u p

( P M ) h a r m s Y e s

Y e s s i d e g u a r a n t e e : P e n s i o n i s

( d o m e s t i c a f f a i r s

s i d e ; W h e r e t o g o a f t e r

s e c u r e

m i n i s t e r ) w o r s e

a N o

t h a n H a i d e r !

2 0 / 9 F o r m e r F o r e i g n

N y r u p s ( P M ) c a m p a i g n

A N o w i l l c o s t 2 0 . 0

0 0 j o b s ;

N y r u p

( P M ) g i v e s u p o n l e t t e r

S e c r e t a r y : P r i m e

h e a v i l y c r i t i c i z e d

N y r u p

( P M ) f o r c e d t o

t o o t h e r E U c o u n t r i e s t o s e c u r e

M i n s t e r i s t o

c h a n g e s t r a t e g y

p e n s i o n

b l a m e f o r N o t o

t h e e u r o

2 1 / 9 L e a d e r D a n i s h

A N o w i l l c o s t 2 0 , 0

0 0 j o b s

T o t a l d i s a g r e e m e n t b e t w e e n C r i t i c i s m : N o s i d e c a m p a i g n

P e o p l e s P a r t y :

Y e s p a r t i e s

b a s e d o n l i e s a n d

T h a n k s f o r

e x a g g e r a t i o n s

h e l p i n g o u t P o u l

( P M )

2 2 / 9

D i s a g r e e m e n t o n t h e c o s t s

N e w s t r a t e g y i n t h e n a l

E a s t E u r o p e a n c o u n t r i e s : T i r e d

o f a N o

h o t p h a s e : E U c a n b e u s e d

o f t h e D a n i s h N o v o t e r s

t o i m p r o v e e n v i r o n m e n t


17/43

2 3 / 9

N y r u p s c h a o s

B a n k s i n t e r v e n e t o s t o p

S u p p o r t f o r w e a k e u r o

T r a d e U n i o n : A N o w i l l b e

m a n a g e m e n t

e u r o f r e e f a l l i n g

c o s t l y ;

W o r l d B a n k b u y s e u r o t o s a v e i t

2 4 / 9

D e a d r a c e : Y e s

N o t c l e a r h o w t o p r o c e e d

i n

Y e s g a i n s s u p p o r t : A d e a d

D e a d r a c e o n t h e e u r o

s i d e 3 p e r c e n t

c a s e o f a N o

r a c e

b e h i n d N o s i d e

2 5 / 9 L e a d e r S o c i a l i s t

Y e s s i d e i m p r o v e s i n t h e

Y e s s i d e : n a n c i a l c u t s i f

A N o c a n s p l i t t h e E U i n t w o

P a r t y : S p e a k

p o l l s

i t s N o

t h e t r u t h N y r u p

( P M )

2 6 / 9 N y r u p

( P M ) i s

E U s c o m p e t e n c e a n d p o w e r I n t e r e s t r a t e w i l l g o u p i f N o N o s i d e : M a y b e e u r o l a t e r

u n c l e a r a b o u t

m u s t b e c l e a r

P o l l : D a n i s h Y e s w i l l g i v e

D a n i s h

E U

S w e d i s h Y e s

p o l i c y i n c a s e

o f N o

2 7 / 9

Y e s , B . T .

H a r d n a l d e b a t e : B e h a v e

N e w e u r o r e f e r e n d u m a g a i n

r e c o m m e n d s ,

p l e a s e !

s o o n i f i t i s a N o

D e n m a r k M U S T

b e i n

2 8 / 9 Y e s c a n d i d a t e s

F i n a l p o l l :

Y e s o r N o : T o d a y D e n m a r k

T o d a y t h e D a n e s d e c i d e ;

E x i t p o l l n o t p o p u l a r

p r e p a r i n g f o r a

4 7 p e r c e n t

d e c i d e s i f t h e K r o n e i s t o b e

G a l l u p : M o s t e x c i t i n g r a c e

l o s s : R e a d y t o

4 7 p e r c e n t

r e p l a c e d b y t h e c o m m o n

i n d e c a d e s

f a c e a N o

c u r r e n c y


18/43

A No will cost 5 million ( Politiken , August 30, 2000), via A No will cost20,000 jobs ( Berlingske Tidende , September 20, 2000) to Nordic welfarewill survive the euro ( Berlingske Tidende , September 7, 2000). The head-lines pertaining to the performance of the campaign leaders were primar-

ily found in the tabloid newspapers and centered around Poul NyropRasmussen, then Prime Minister: Brutal Prime Minister ( EkstraBladet ,September 18, 2000), Thanks for helping out Poul ( EkstraBladet , Sep-tember 21, 2000), and Speak the truth Poul ( EkstraBladet , September25, 2000). The strength of the single currency and the exchange rateagainst the U.S. dollar emerged in headlines such as Euro hits rock-bottom ( Politiken , September 1, 2000), First aid to the euro ( Jyllands-Posten , September 8, 2000), and Bank intervenes to stop euro freefalling(Politiken , September 23, 2000). Finally, the campaign style and strategy of

the Yes camp hit the headlines with stories such as Yes side joins forcesto secure Yes ( JyllandsPosten , September 15, 2000) and Nyrops chaosmanagement ( B.T. , September 23, 2000).

The centrality of polls

We now turn to a more substantive aspect of the campaign coverage: the useof opinion polls in news. Polls are the essence of campaigning. The questionof who is ahead, which camp, which party, which candidate is at the core.

News coverage of U.S. election campaigns is saturated with polls andexpressions of public opinion and the use and importance of polls has grownexplosively (Lavrakas and Traugott 2000). Kerbel (1994) described thenetwork coverage of the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign as a poll orgy.

Polls are a prominent feature of election news reporting and togetherwith people-on-the-street-reporting, they are the two most commonexpressions of public opinion which drive horse race news coverage(Larson 1999, 2000). Patterson (1993) points to the increasing importanceof indicators of who is ahead in the political race to give form to news of

politics as a strategic game in his analysis of the evolution of presidentialcampaign news coverage since 1960. Given the centrality of polls andmedia coverage of public opinion in campaigns, two questions arise: Howimportant are polls to campaign coverage? To what extent are pollsreported in a way that enables citizens to judge the quality of the poll andthe interpretations derived from it?

Many critics claim that poll coverage is supercial and inaccurate. Theempirical evidence for this claim, however, is missing as only very fewsystematic studies of poll coverage have been published (Smith and

Verrall 1985: 59). In one study of television election coverage Smith andVerrall (1985: 77) concluded that simplication was achieved by omittingmethodological details, reporting results in general terms, and committingthe errors of overgeneralization, ambiguous comparison, and evaluativedescription.



19/43

Brettschneider (1997) echoed this in an investigation of the news mediareporting of poll results and comments on public opinion prior to nationalGerman elections from 1980 to 1994. Drawing on indicators for both thequantity and formal and substantial quality of the press coverage of the

polls, he concluded that the quantity of reports on public opinion hadincreased over the years, but that the formal quality leaves much to bedesired. Similarly, a study of the television and newspaper reporting of pre-election polls in the 1997 Canadian elections examining both theemphasis given to polls and the quality of reporting of methodologicalinformation similarly found that the media relied heavily on polls to chartthe dynamics of the campaign, but that polls were often reported withlittle or no information about methodology (Andersen 2000).

We investigate the visibility of polls and assess the quality poll reporting

in the news media coverage of the referendum campaign. We draw on anumber of indicators for the quality of poll reporting. These indicators arepartly derived from Smith and Verrall (1985) and pertain to the presenceof methodological information in reports of poll results such as provisionof question wording, population denition, sample size, interview method,and data collection eld dates.

The overall conclusion from the analysis of the ve largest and mostwidely read daily newspapers as well as the two most widely viewed mainevening news programs from the public and the private broadcasters is

that polls and expressions of public opinion played an important role inthe referendum campaign coverage. More than one-third of the storiesreferred to polls and the Yes and No sides standing (see Table 4.4).With many news organizations joining forces with renowned pollsters in


Table 4.4 Visibility and quality of reporting of polls

Television Newspapers

TV1 (DR) TV2 Broadsheet ( n 76) ( n 79) ( n 160)

Stories mentioning a poll 32.9 36.7 34.4Stories referring to specic poll 17.1 15.2 23.1

Of the stories dealing with a specic poll Pollster identied 92.3 75.0 94.6Population identied 15.4 16.6 2.7Sample size identied 15.4 61.5 91.9Data collection method identied 7.6 8.3 83.8Error margin identied 23.1 25.0 83.8

Field work dates identied 38.5 33.3 86.5Question wording mentioned 0.0 38.5 86.5

NoteTelevision and Newspapers, August 28September 27, 2000. n is number of stories about thereferendum on TV1 and TV2 and on the front pages of the broadsheet newspapers.


20/43

conducting regular, some even daily, polls, the poll coverage has become anews beat of its own (Kagay 2000). However, while polls may seem tohave been a prominent feature of the coverage, comparatively speakingthe share of the coverage focused on the horse race aspect of the referen-

dum is much less than what was found in, for example, the 2000 U.S. elec-tion campaign where more than 70 percent of the news mentioned thehorse race (Patterson 2002).

In terms of the quality of poll reporting, newspapers did a better jobthan television in providing methodological information. This nding hasresonance in previous analyses of the features and quality of poll reportingwhich also found newspapers to be superior to television (Hardmeier1999). By applying simple layout tools such as adding high-densityinformation boxes to the poll, Danish newspapers were able to provide

elaborate technical information. Comparatively speaking, Danish newsmedia overall, however, seemed to do well in providing information aboutthe poll which is required to evaluate the quality of the information andthe accuracy of the conclusions drawn. In most cases all news outlets, bothtelevision and the press, provided some methodological information whichis a far better record than what an analysis of the Australian televisionelection poll coverage found (Smith and Verrall 1985).

There was considerable awareness and anxiety about poll-driven cover-age, also on the side of the news organizations. Given the close race of the

referendum, minor sample biases and question wording differences at thedifferent pollsters, led to contradictory poll outcomes about who wastaking the lead in the referendum. TV1 issued an internal memo to the

journalists covering the campaign warning to be cautious when reportingpolls. This memo also included a short section on how to critically evaluatepolls, including the ones commissioned by the network itself.

This caution was echoed at TV2 where there was considerable fear of reporting awed polls. TV2 played an important role with respect to pollsin the referendum. The network decided to release two exit polls during

Election Day when the voting stations were still open. This decision is inaccordance with Danish law, but it was a breach of the previous gentle-mans agreement not to publish exit polls before the closing of all votingbooths. The intention to publish these polls led to questions in Parliamentand an initiative, in vain, to prohibit the publication. The Editor-in-Chief of TV2, responsible for the decision to go ahead and publish the exit poll,referred to the situation in the U.S. when the exit polls from the EastCoast were published prior to closing time on the West Coast. In additionhe emphasized the potentially mobilizing effect of publishing exit polls

with the polling stations still open:

If there is any effect of this [publishing the exit polls], it will only be toanimate some people to go out and vote. And that should not be aproblem. The idea that people are affected by the poll suggests that



21/43

people are so stupid and easy to inuence that they turn out to voteNo, even though they support a Yes, just to adjust the current stand-ing. It does not work like this.

The awareness of the pitfalls of poll reporting in a close race did nottranslate into modesty in terms of the number of used polls. As discussedabove, polls were a substantial part of the referendum coverage in thenews. While the literature is divided on the issue of whether polls inu-ence voter mobilization and vote choice (see de Vreese and Semetko(2002b) for a summary of this literature), we investigate in Chapter 7 howthe proliferation of polls in the news affected citizens perceptions of thecampaign.

The importance of personalities: visibility of party leaders inthe campaign

The literature on campaigning and the media consistently points out theimportance of individual politicians and candidates in the news. We there-fore analyzed the presence and depiction of party leaders and othercandidates in the coverage of the referendum campaign. The presence of political actors is necessary for a viable concept of political representation.While the visibility and evaluation of actors in the news in national elec-

tion campaigns has been studied often, the presence of political actorsduring a referendum campaign, however, is unexplored territory.As Table 4.5 shows the Prime Minister and other members of his Social


Table 4.5 Political actors in the news

Political actor Frequency actor in the news

Prime Minister Poul Nyrup 78Other members of the Social Democrats 105

Finance Minister Marianne Jelved 19Other members of the Liberal Democrats 16

Anders Fogh Rasmussen 31Other members of the Liberals 20

Bendt Bendtsen 13Other members of the Conservatives 22

Socialist Peoples Party 74Danish Peoples Party 66Christian Peoples Party 26June Movement 29Peoples Movement 7EU-level actor 30Total 536

NoteTelevision news, MarchSeptember, both channels.


22/43

Democratic Party were the most visible actors in the news. Other highlyvisible actors included members from the No parties, including the Social-ist Party and the Danish Peoples Party. As argued above, the potentialadvantage of visibility in the news for a political candidate is conditional

upon the tone of the coverage. After all, it is only an asset if the coverageis not negative. A news story may portray an actor either neutrally (noevaluations), favorably, mixed, or unfavorably. Based on investigations of the evaluation of politicians in content analyses of news about domesticpolitics, we expect that evaluations are primarily absent (i.e. the news isneutral), but when evaluations are present we expect to nd that they aremostly negative. For each actor the visibility and average tone wasassessed by adding the number of negative evaluations subtracted by thenumber of positive evaluations divided by the total number of

evaluations.1

In the nal month of the campaign, the analysis of the visibility and theevaluation of the most important political candidates and actors in thenews showed that all actors received either neutral or negative coverage(Table 4.6). On the scale ranging from 1 to 1, most actors received abalanced mixture of positive and negative evaluations (resulting in a meanaround zero) or a slightly negative overall evaluation (ranging from 0.10to 0.30).

The government as an entity, the two key actors representing the

government, Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen and Finance Minster,Marianne Jelved, and other members of their political parties all receivednegative coverage in every media outlet. The most negative coverage of these actors appeared in the press and on TV2 news while the least unfa-vorable (albeit still negative) evaluations appeared on TV1. Othermembers of the Yes camp such as Anders Fogh Rasmussen (Liberal) andBendt Bendtsen (Conservatives) were less visible in the news andreceived, on average, neutral coverage in all outlets.

Members of the No camp were less visible than government actors in

the nal month of the campaign. No camp actors received modestly negat-ive news coverage, but this was signicantly less negative than the cover-age of the Yes camp actors. For example, on TV2 Prime Minister NyropRasmussen received a mean evaluation of m 0.26 and Pia Kjaersgaard,leader of the Danish Peoples Party and the most visible No camp cam-paigner received a mean evaluation of m 0.13.

Covering the euro referendum: a challenge for political journalism

To get an impression of the constraints and challenges that journalists facewhen covering a referendum, interviews were held with Editors-in-Chief and key political reporters at the two national television news programs.The visibility of an election in the news as well as the choice of topics and



23/43

news sources are, at least in part, attributable to the ofcial policy of newsorganizations, the daily logistic challenges, the application of news selec-tion criteria, and the approach to politics (Blumler and Gurevitch 2001).Above we outlined how the application of news selection criteria may

differ from news outlet to news outlet and between elections. Additionallywe summarized recent research from national elections that suggests thatbroadcasters today are less sacerdotal that is less cautious and reactive and more pragmatic that is selective and proactive in their coverage. Weinvestigated the news production process by analyzing the editorialapproach to the referendum, the news organizations application of newsselection criteria, and the implementation of balance in the reporting of the referendum. We rst turn to the organization of the news coverage.

Organization . In the case of the referendum on the introduction of the

euro, none of the news programs implemented a special segment in theirbulletin which has been tradition during, for example, national electioncampaigns. The referendum was covered within an already existing triadicstructure of political and economic EU coverage. The studio headquartersand central newsroom cooperated with the political units in the Parlia-ment, Christiansborg in the center of Copenhagen, and the news organi-zations Brussels desk. However, a number of additional initiatives weretaken. Both news programs made additional funding available for the ref-erendum news coverage. TV1 conducted a number of surveys that in

addition to identifying public support for the euro also assessed whichissues the public considered important in relation to the referendum. TV2created a euro group that consisted of journalists from the Parliament-ary unit and journalists from the domestic desk.

News executives at TV1 produced an internal document outlining theguidelines for its journalists in the coverage of the referendum. This docu-ment dened the journalistic approach to the referendum and listed anumber of criteria for news stories to fulll. One criterion dened by thenews executives was a rather classical information-provisional one.

According to the Editor-in-Chief of TV1:

We acknowledge the rather substantial need for basic informationfrom our audience. We therefore prioritize content more than forexample who is ahead in the coverage.

A similar approach was found at TV2 where there was a short daily itemwith audience members posing questions about the referendum and theeuro to a senior political editor. This rather old-fashioned and pedagogical

television item was a conscious editorial choice.Editorial approach . The two news programs differed slightly in theirapproach to the referendum. TV1 assumed a more pro-active policy. Itconducted its own surveys and played an initiating role in contributing tothe agenda of the referendum. The Editor-in-Chief:



24/43

T a b l e 4 . 6 V i s i b i l i t y a n d e v a l u a t i o n o f p o l i t i c a l a c t o r s i n t h e n a l m o n t h o f t h e c a m p a i g n

T V 1

T V 2

N e w s p a p e r s

( n

7 6 )

( n

7 9 )

( n

7 9 )

N u m b e r o f M e a n

N u m b e r o f M e a n

N u m b e r o f

M e a n

m e n t i o n s

e v a l u a t i o n

m e n t i o n s

e v a l u a t i o n

m e n t i o n s

e v a l u a t i o n

Y e s a c t o r s

G o v e r n m e n t

7

0 . 4 3

P r i m e M i n i s t e r , P o u l N y r u p R a s m u s s e n

1 7

0 . 1 8

1 9

0 . 2 6

2 7

0 . 4 4

O t h e r m e m b e r s o f t h e S o c i a l D e m o c r a t s

2 7

0 . 1 1

1 5

0 . 2 0

2 1

0 . 2 9

M i n i s t e r o f E c o n o m y , M a r i a n n e J e l v e d

3

0 . 0 0

8

0 . 2 5

1 3

0 . 2 3

M i n i s t e r o f F o r e i g n A f f a i r s , N

i e l s H e l v e g

P e t e r s e n

2

0 . 0 0

2

0 . 0 0

7

0 . 0 0

O t h e r m e m b e r s o f t h e R a d i c a l L i b e r a l s

0

2

0 . 0 0

2

0 . 0 0

L e a d e r o f t h e

L i b e r a l P a r t y , A n d e r s F . R a s m u s s e n

6

0 . 0 0

4

0 . 0 0

7

0 . 0 0

O t h e r m e m b e r s o f t h e L i b e r a l P a r t y

5

0 . 0 0

1

0 . 0 0

6

0 . 0 0

L e a d e r o f C o n s e r v a t i v e s , B e n d t B e n d t s e n

3

0 . 0 0

1

0 . 0 0

4

0 . 0 0

O t h e r m e m b e r s o f t h e C o n s e r v a t i v e s

1

0 . 0 0

5

0 . 0 0

7

0 . 0 0

N o a c t o r s


S o c i a l i s t P e o p l e s P a r t y , H o l g e r K . N

i e l s e n

1 0

0 . 1 0

1 7

0 . 1 8

1 8

0 . 1 6

O t h e r m e m b e r s o f t h e S o c i a l i s t s P e o p l e s P a r t y

0

5

0 . 2 0

7

0 . 1 4


P e o p l e s P a r t y , P i a K j a e r s g a a r d

6

0 . 0 0

8

0 . 1 3

4

0 . 2 5

O t h e r m e m b e r s o f t h e P e o p l e s P a r t y

5

0 . 2 0

7

0 . 0 0

7

0 . 1 4


C h r i s t i a n P e o p l e s P a r t y , J a n n S j u r s e n

1

0 . 0 0

0

2

0 . 0 0

O t h e r m e m b e r s o f t h e C h r i s t i a n P e o p l e s P a r t y

2

0 . 0 0

0

0


25/43


U n i t y L i s t , F r a n k A a e n

0

4

0 . 0 0

1

0 . 0 0

O t h e r m e m b e r s o f t h e U n i t y L i s t

0

2

0 . 0 0

2

0 . 5 0


J u n e M o v e m e n t , J e n s P e t e r B o n d e

2

0 . 5 0

5

0 . 2 0

3

0 . 0 0


J u n e M o v e m e n t , D r u d e D a h l e r u p

1

0 . 0 0

1

0 . 0 0

4

0 . 2 5

O t h e r m e m b e r s o f t h e J u n e M o v e m e n t

2

0 . 0 0

0

0


P e o p l e s M o v e m e n t , O l e K r a r u p

0

0

2

0 . 5 0

O t h e r m e m b e r s o f t h e P e o p l e s P a r t y

0

0

0

E u r o p e a n i n s t i t u t i o n s

E u r o p e a n C e n t r a l B a n k

3

0 . 3 3

0

3

0 . 0 0

E u r o p e a n P a r l i a m e n t

0

0

2

1 . 0

0

E u r o p e a n C o m m i s s i o n

1

0 . 0 0

0

1

0 . 0 0

E x p e r t s

1 5

0 . 0 6

1 1

0 . 0 0

3 5

0 . 0 2

V o t e r s a n d c i t i z e n s

2 5

0 . 0 0

4 7

0 . 0 0

2

0 . 0 0

N o t e

M e a n e v a l u a t i o n o f t h e a c t o r s i s b a s e d o n a s c a l e r a n g i n g f r o m 1 . 0

0 ( c o n s i s t e n t l y n e g a t i v e ) 0 ( n e u t r a l

) t o

1 . 0 0 ( c o n s i s t e n t l y p o s i t i v e ) . A n a c t o r i n a n e w s

s t o r y i s d e n e d

a s a p e r s o n / i n s t i t u t i o n i n t h e s t o r y w h o i s m e n t i o n e d a t l e a s t t w i c e

( n e w s p a p e r s ) o r m e n t i o n e d a n d s e e n a t l e a s t o n c e

( t e l e v i s i o n

) .


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We wanted to set an agenda that had as a starting point some of thethemes that we know are important to the voters, the Danes, our audi-ence. These themes may not necessarily be at the top of the politi-cians agenda. We have implemented this to some extent, though

obviously we have at times followed the political agenda if majorissues surfaced on a particular day.

This approach resembles TV1s approach to the European electionswhere the news agenda was partially inuenced by the outcome of asurvey dening the audiences priorities in relation to the election (deVreese 2003a). According to the Editor-in-Chief, the approach was con-siderably different though:

In the European election campaign we chose to put a very criticalfocus on one particular topic: fraud and corruption. That resulted in aperhaps negative depiction of the system which the electorate wasnow voting for. For the referendum, our surveys meant that weaddressed a wider range of issues, such as the EU enlargement and thewelfare state.

The two news programs differed in their approach to initiating topics.While TV1 was rather pro-active, there was reluctance towards this atTV2. Both the Senior Political Editor who said,

We are not here to create news, but to report it.

and the Editor-in-Chief of TV2 agreed on this:

We have not dened the agenda. I do not believe it is our task to do soeither. [. . .] Our agenda-setting efforts are little more than trying totranslate what we believe the public wants to hear about.

In terms of the application of news selection criteria, the two news pro-grams hardly differed and both devoted extra attention to the referendumby default. TV1 gave the referendum extra attention through, for example,bringing reports from its international network of correspondents. TV2gave the referendum no extra attention until about a month prior to theelection when it was upgraded in the selection. The TV2 Editor-in-Chief commented on this upgrade in the nal weeks:

The use of criteria in election is difcult. The criteria applied daily are

dissolved when you enter an election or referendum time. [. . .] Someof that is just news regardless of whether we like it or not. We some-times bring stories that almost require that people saw the news yes-terday. We would not accept that outside the election moment, butnow we have to do it.



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Indeed when looking at the visibility of the referendum in both news pro-grams during the campaign (Figure 4.1) there is a sharp increase in thenal weeks.

In the coverage of a referendum news programs are challenged to adapt

the notion of impartial and balanced coverage. Potential biases in newsduring general elections are avoided, for example, by providing equalaccess to the news of different political parties or access proportional tothe representation in Parliament (Semetko 1996a). However, in the case of a referendum where political parties and leaders may run in the campaignwithout being represented in parliament, this interpretation of the bal-anced reporting is inappropriate. Under such circumstances, equal accessto the Yes and No camp could be a more appropriate measure. In theDanish case, for example, more than 80 percent of the candidates in Par-

liament favored a Yes which could bring in to question whether a 5050access to the news represents balanced coverage. Based on our contentanalysis during the six-month long campaign, we assessed the visibility of actors in the news from the Yes and No camps.

Figure 4.3 shows that Yes actors made up 60 percent of all actors in thenews about the referendum while No actors made up 40 percent. Editorsand journalists from both news programs expressed anxiety about strikinga balance. All agreed that balanced reporting was more likely to beachieved when looking at a number of stories rather than within each indi-

vidual news story. The Editors-in-Chief both emphasized the politicalpressure to report impartially. The TV2 Editor said that the politicianscall us after the bulletin and the TV1 Editor stressed an example of a


Figure 4.3 Share of actors from the Yes and No camps.NoteBase is total number of actors ( n 506) in television news, MarchSeptember 2000.

60%Yes actors

40%No actors


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news story about the enthusiasm for the euro in Italy that led politiciansfrom the Yes and the No camp to both feel that their arguments had beendisadvantageously presented in the news.

In sum, the journalistic approach to the referendum was characterized

by elements of both the sacerdotal and pragmatic. The referendum wasupgraded and given extra attention in the news which indicates a rathersacerdotal approach. However, the news programs, and most evidently soTV1, were rather pro-active and initiated topics of their own that wereunrelated to the agenda of political parties. The results corroborate recentresearch that suggests that nowadays in news not even the public TVbroadcasters can be described, in Blumler and Gurevitchs words, as react-ing to and reporting the campaign in a sacerdotal manner (de Vreese2001a).

Discussion

The news agenda was strongly inuenced by the events of the referendumcampaign, in particular in the nal month leading up to the vote. Ourcontent analysis of television news showed that the share of political andeconomic news rose by about 15 percent in the nal weeks due to a sharpincrease in the amount of news about the referendum. In the last fourweeks of the campaign, more than 800 newspaper items were devoted to

the referendum. The headlines focused on the contradictory predictions of the costs and gains of either a Yes or a No, human interest stories aboutkey campaign leaders, the fall of the euro against the U.S. dollar duringthe campaign, and the internal disagreement in the Yes camp.

Our content analysis of the coverage also showed a strong presence of polls and reference to public support for the single currency. More thanone-third of the stories referred to polls and the Yes and No sides stand-ing. This emphasis on polls in the news was not in line with the intentionsfor the coverage as formulated by the journalists and Editors in our inter-

views. However, Danish media tended to perform comparatively well inproviding methodological information enabling the audience to assess thepoll.

Turning to our analysis of actors in the news, we saw the importance of key campaign leaders. In the news coverage of the referendum a limitednumber of key gures from different political parties dominated the cover-age. Visibility, however, is only one dimension of media coverage. Evalua-tions in the news are at least as important. A pattern emerged from ourcontent analysis that showed that the incumbent government, and in

particular the Prime Minister, was highly visible in the news, but at thesame time was also seen handling the referendum issue poorly, thus theconsistently negative evaluations these actors received in the news.

We also identied a number of differences and similarities in the jour-nalistic approach to the campaign. Both television news programs pre-



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pared coverage of the referendum campaign in advance and allocatedextra budgetary means and staff to cover the referendum. The news pro-grams differed in their approach. While TV2 was somewhat more reluct-ant towards pursuing a pro-active role in setting its own agenda, TV1 was,

consciously, more assertive and focused on a number of topics based onpolls they had carried out among their viewers. There was little variationin terms of the application of news selection criteria. Both programsdevoted extra attention to the referendum, i.e. applied a somewhat sacer-dotal set of criteria in which election time is news time. None of the pro-grams, however, implemented a special referendum segment in the newson a daily basis which has been common practice during, for example,national elections.

There are only limited possibilities to put our ndings about the cover-

age of the referendum in an appropriate comparative perspective giventhe lack of data from other referendums. There is evidence from nationalelections in several countries and some benchmarking can be made againstelections for the European Parliament. We found the referendum on thefront page of most national newspapers almost daily during the nal weeksof the campaign and the referendum took up about 25 percent of nationaltelevision news in the last month leading up to the referendum which, onaverage, means about four to ve news stories daily. Compared to the1979 and 1999 European parliamentary election campaign, the 2000 refer-

endum was much more visible in the news (Blumler 1983; de Vreese et al .2004). Danish news spent about 10 percent of the news in the nal twoweeks leading up to the European elections in 1999 while this was morethan 25 percent in the case of the 2000 referendum. This suggests that thereferendum was quite visible in the news.

This chapter has assessed a number of key features of the news cover-age, including the visibility of the referendum, the visibility and evaluationof political actors, and the journalistic approaches taken by broadcasters incovering the campaign. The next chapter shows that visibility of the cam-

paign in the news is only one dimension of the medias coverage of a refer-endum campaign, and points to the importance of the interaction betweennews media and political elites in framing the issue in the news.



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The notion of framing has historical antecedents in psychology, oneobvious predecessor being the series of Asian decease-studies by Kah-neman and Tversky (e.g., 1983). Though their framing manipulation altering the wording of a medical scenario was appropriate to explore

the psychological process, this denition of framing is rather narrow.Simple wording differences that reverse information are not easily com-patible with more complex political and economic issues. Therefore abroader denition of a frame is appropriate, both when looking at politicsand news about politics.

Indeed most issues political and social cannot be meaningfullyreduced to two identical scenarios. Political, economic and social eventsand issues are presented to citizens as alternative characterizations of acourse of action (Sniderman and Theriault 2002). When conceiving of, for

example, oil drilling, citizens may be presented with frames such as eco-nomic costs of gas prices, unemployment, environment, U.S. dependencyon foreign energy sources (Zaller 1992). Frames are parts of political argu-ments, journalistic norms, and social movements discourse. They arealternative ways of dening issues, endogenous to the political and socialworld.

A typology of news frames

While newsmakers may employ many different frames in their coverage of an issue, scholars agree that this abundance in choice in how to tell andconstruct stories can be captured in analyses as certain distinctivecharacteristics and particular frames recur. In order to synthesize previousresearch and the different types of news frames that have been suggested,we apply a more general typology with reference to the nature and contentof the frame. Certain frames are pertinent only to specic topics or events.Such frames may be labeled issue-specic frames . Other frames transcendthematic limitations and can be identied in relation to different topics,

some even over time and in different cultural contexts. These frames canbe labeled generic frames (de Vreese 2002).An issue-specic approach to the study of news frames allows for a pro-

found level of specicity and details relevant to the event or issue underinvestigation. This advantage, however, is potentially an inherent disad-vantage as well. The high degree of issue-sensitivity makes analysesdrawing on issue-specic frames difcult to generalize and compare.Moreover, such frames have led researchers to too easily nding evid-ence for what they are looking for and to contribute to one of the most

frustrating tendencies in the study of frames and framing [being] the tend-ency for scholars to generate a unique set of frames for every study(Hertog and McLeod 2001: 150151).

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Issue-specic news frames

Studies of issue-specic news frames have been in the arenas of inter-national relations, politics, labor disputes, and the economy. One study of issue-specic news frames focused on U.S. national budget decits(Jasperson et al . 1998). Drawing on a content analysis of several majornewspapers four frames were identied, and these were labeled talk,ght, impasse, and crisis. The four frames reected the chronologyof the development of the issue in the news and were issue-sensitive. Inthe realm of elections, Shah et al . (2002) identied three frames recurrentin the news during the nal stages of the Clinton presidency. They identi-ed Clinton behavior scandal, Conservative attack scandal, andLiberal response scandal. In the same vein, other studies of frames inthe news have investigated the presence of frames that pertain to theparticular issue in question.

Generic news frames

One group of studies of generic frames concentrates on the coverage of politics, in particular election campaigns. A second group focuses ongeneric news frames that are structural and inherent to the conventions of

journalism. In the rst group, Cappella and Jamieson (1997) investigated

the consequences of strategically framed news on political cynicism. Stra-tegic news is dened as news that (1) focuses on winning and losing, (2)includes the language of war, games, and competition, (3) contains per-formers, critics and audiences, (4) focuses on candidate style and percep-tions, and (5) gives weight to polls and candidate standings (Jamieson1992). According to Cappella and Jamieson (1997), strategic news domi-nates American news coverage of not only election campaigns, but also of policy issues. The focus on winning and losing and polls bears closeresemblance to Pattersons (1993) discussion of the use of game schema

in election news. Game refers to strategies and (predictions of) electoralsuccess, emphasizing candidates positions in the electoral race. Patterson(1993) provides evidence of the historical increase in the use of the gameor horse race frame in the press coverage of U.S. elections from 1960 until1992.

A second group of studies link news frames to more general features of news coverage such as journalistic conventions, norms, and news values. Inan analysis of the U.S. network coverage of social issues such as poverty,crime, and unemployment from 1981 to 1986 Iyengar (1991) found that

daily news coverage was strongly biased towards an episodic interpretationin which news depicts social issues as limited to events only and not placedin a broader interpretation or context (the thematic frame). Iyengar (1991)suggested that norms and standards within news organizations and newsproduction reinforce episodic framing. This practice simplies complex



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issues to the level of anecdotal evidence (Iyengar 1991: 136137) andinduces a topical, disorganized, and isolated, rather than general and con-textual, understanding of public affairs and social issues.

Neuman et al . (1992) in their exploratory study identied human

impact, powerlessness, economics, moral values, and conict ascommon frames used by the media and the audience. The human impactframe focused on descriptions of individuals and groups affected by anissue. The powerlessness frame referred to the dominance of forces overweak individuals or groups (1992: 67). The economics frame reectedthe preoccupation with the bottom line, prot and loss (1992: 63). Themoral values frame referred to the often indirect reference to morality andsocial prescriptions by, for example, including certain quotations or infer-ences. The conict frame referred to the journalistic practice of reporting

stories of clashing interpretation and it was found to t well with newsmedias game interpretation of the political world as an ongoing series of contests, each with a new set of winners and losers (1992: 64). Theseframes were found in relation to different issues which suggest that theframes are more generally applicable than issue-specic news frames.

Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) developed this line of research andidentied an approach to measuring ve news frames: conict, humaninterest, attribution of responsibility, morality and economic con-sequences. The conict frame emphasizes conict between individuals,

groups, institutions, or countries. The human interest frame brings ahuman face, an individuals story, or an emotional angle to the presenta-tion of an event, issue, or problem. The responsibility frame presents anissue or problem in such a way as to attribute responsibility for causing orsolving to either the government or to an individual or group. The moral-ity frame interprets an event or issue in the context of religious tenets ormoral prescriptions. The economic consequences frame, nally, presentsan event, problem, or issue in terms of the economic consequences it willhave on an individual, group, institution, region, or country. The study

found that in political reporting the attribution of responsibility frame wasthe most commonly used followed by the conict and economic con-sequences frames, based on an analysis of national print and televisionnews in a European country during a major EU event involving heads of state (Semetko and Valkenburg 2000). These frames are generic in nature.

Key questions

In this chapter we rst look specically at the news framing of the referen-

dum in terms of conict, consequences, and strategy. These frames havebeen identied in several studies as prominent during election campaigns(Cappella and Jamieson 1997) and in relation to the topic of Europeanintegration in general (de Vreese 2002) and the euro in particular (deVreese et al . 2001). Second, we look at the issue-specic framing and

Elite framing of the issue 95


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frame building process by analyzing the interaction between the newsmedia and the political realm with reference to framing the referendumtopic. To do so we rst turn to the sub-issues within the broader topic of the referendum. We analyze those aspects of the referendum issue that the

media focused on and towards the end of the chapter we relate that to thesub-issues emphasized by the political parties (see Chapter 3). By doing sowe can assess the success of the parties and movements in spinning thesub-issues in to the media coverage.

The referendum in the news: campaign conduct,consequences, and the strength of the euro

In the previous chapter we saw how the visibility of the referendum

increased in the media during the campaign. In this section we movebeyond our indicator of the visibility of the referendum to ask the perti-nent question: which sub-issues within the broader context of the referen-dum were covered by the media?

Turning rst to the television coverage of the referendum, we see(Table 5.1) that the news about the campaign and how it was conducted bythe different political parties and leaders took up, on average, about 50percent of the news about the referendum. These stories dealt with howthe politica

political campaigning in referendums_0

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