Horse Race Journalism

The Dominance of Horse Race Journalism

Over the past 40 years, the rise in horse race journalism has been called by Thomas Patterson the “quiet revolution” in U.S. election reporting. Patterson's now classic analysis finds that coverage focusing on the game schema that frames elections in terms of strategy and political success rose from 45% of news stories sampled in 1960 to more than 80% of stories in 1982. In comparison, coverage focusing on policy schema, which frame elections in terms of policy and leadership, dropped from 50% of coverage in 1960 to just 10% of coverage analyzed in 1992.

Other analyses confirm the contemporary dominance of the horse race interpretation in election [Page 314]coverage. In one study of the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, strategy coverage accounted for more than 70% of the TV stories at the major news networks. The most recent available analysis conducted by the Pew Center—tracking the first 5 months of 2008 presidential primary coverage—found that horse race reporting accounted for 63% of print and TV stories analyzed compared to just 15% of coverage that focused on ideas and policy proposals and just 1% of stories that focused on the track records or past public performance of candidates.

In the United States, not only has horse race strategy come to define elections, but the approach also increasingly characterizes more simplified coverage of what were originally considered complex and technical policy debates. First observed by Joseph Capella and Kathleen Jamieson in their analysis of the early 1990s debate over health care reform, when coverage of policy debates shifted from specialty news beats to the political pages, the strategy frame has been tracked as the dominant narrative in reporting of issues as diverse as stem cell research, climate change, food biotechnology, the Human Genome Project, and the teaching of evolution in schools.

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