The Effect of the Media on the Invisible Primary

Abstract

What is the role of media in shaping public opinion? Popular accounts often portray the news media as an all-powerful force, determining the outcome of elections by providing or withholding coverage to candidates. There is, however, no scientific consensus on whether and to what degree media coverage influences elections. We investigate the role of media using evidence from the 2012 and 2016 Republican presidential primary elections. We compare three theories of media behavior derived from existing literature: media as a driver of public opinion, media as a marketplace that responds to public interest, and media as event-driven journalism that reports on changes in support. To test these theories, we use time series models appropriate for endogenous processes and original media data collected from television closed captions. Our results indicate that changes in media coverage are consistently significant and substantively important for explaining support and public interest during primary elections. We also find evidence of an endogenous relationship by which media responds to changes in public interest. In contrast, we find that changes in candidate support via public opinion polls have little explanatory power.