The Winner-Loser Spiral in Political News Coverage: Investigating the Impact of Poll Coverage on Subsequent Party Coverage

Abstract

ABSTRACT One consistent finding within journalism research is the media’s heavy reliance on the so-called game frame when covering the political process. One main component of this frame is the frequent use of horse race polls, a tool that by its zero-sum nature provides journalists with immense opportunities to portray political actors as either winners or losers. While there is an extensive literature on how horse race reporting can influence opinion formation and political behavior among citizens, little is known about how such coverage affects journalists’ coverage of political parties. To remedy this, this paper investigates how the tone toward political parties in media’s poll coverage affects the subsequent tone toward political parties in general (non-poll related) news coverage. This is done by using time-series regression on a large dataset of daily Swedish top news stories (n = 7553), covering a period of 4 years (2014–2018). The main finding is that positively framed poll stories appear to affect the tone in subsequent coverage, while there does not appear to be a corresponding effect of negatively framed poll stories.