Mark D. Watts

TL;DR: This paper found that economic candidate coverage, although accounting for only a fraction of content, strongly and consistently predicts variation in presidential preference during all four elections, suggesting that voters gain sociotropic criteria for evaluating candidates from news media coverage of campaigns.

TL;DR: This article examined whether news media were biased in coverage of the candidates or issues during the 1996 U.S. presidential campaign, as Republican Party candidate Bob Dole and others claimed, and used an ideodynamic model of media effects to examine whether the quantity of positive and negative news coverage of candidates was related to the public's preference of either Bill Clinton or Dole, finding that a candidate's level of support at any time is a function of the level of previous support plus changes in voters' preferences due to media coverage in the interim.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify four dominant frames present in media coverage of the 1996 U.S. federal budget and argue that a model combining the theories of agenda setting and framing provides a better explanation for the shifts in aggregate opinion than either theory on its own.

TL;DR: This article found evidence that sustained support for Clinton can be explained as a complex counter-response to the framing of the scandal in terms of the strategic motives of conservative elites, and that news media emphasis upon and framing of certain issue regimes, specifically, coverage of the economy, general policy performance, and scandal, explained changes in mass evalu- ations of Clinton throughout his presidency.