The Press' Effect on the 2010 MA Senate election

The following analysis of the 2010 MA Senate election is grounded in the principles concerning the media's agenda setting function as discussed on Kathleen Hall Jamieson's book "The Press Effect."

In Jamieson’s discussion about the media’s agenda setting function, she asserts that the press, in choosing what to report and how to report it, shapes the outcome of events. The more important the role public opinion plays in the progression of a political conflict, the greater the potential of journalists’ choices to move events (p. 95). This claim was overwhelmingly evident during the recent 2010 Massachusetts Senate election. The media relentlessly covered the Brown-Coakley Senate race as a referendum on national health care reform. Brown hitched his campaign very hard on the message that he would be the 41st vote against legislation in the Senate, and the media took the bait, successfully allowing Republicans to determine the frame. News coverage tirelessly echoed Brown’s campaign strategy, positioning the MA Senate election as a referendum on health care. This frame arguably created the climate that ultimately led to the unlikely Scott Brown victory.

Given that putting a Republican in a historically Democratic Senate seat would allow the GOP to block the increasingly unpopular health care bill, the media successfully transformed the local election in to a matter of national attention. In a state that already has near-universal coverage, the potency of the issue for Massachusetts’ voters was difficult to gauge relative to national concern for the measure designed to extend coverage to millions of currently-uncovered Americans (which the media did very little to acknowledge or measure.) Framing the MA Senate race as a referendum on health care drew nationwide attention and millions of dollars of outside spending to the race; supporting Jamieson’s claim that the more important the role of public opinion in the progression of a potential conflict, the greater the potential of journalists’ choices to move events.

Press coverage concerning the implications of a potential Republican victory forced other key issues such as national security, taxes, and spending/deficit to be secondary (if not obsolete) in the media’s discourse. The media created a strong current that captured national audiences, sensationalizing Scott Brown as the “vote to block the health care reform bill.” Echoing voter animosity and resentment toward Obama’s health care reform and his Presidential agenda, instead of Scott Brown “the candidate for Massachusetts Senate with XYZ position on XYZ issues,” according to the media, a vote for Scott Brown was equal to “a vote against Obama,” narrowly shaping Scott Brown as candidate for MA Senate.

Considering journalists shape our understanding of the world that we live in, ideally, the media would police themselves, “acting as stand-ins for citizenry” (p. 196). The media must play the role of custodian of fact, telling the public the truth, and giving the public what it needs (p. 196). Unfortunately for journalists, and the public, everyone’s definition of truth is different. Thus, the facts according to FOX News may be different than the facts according to CNN. In the face of media bias, inaccuracy, and unfairness, I believe that the trend is moving toward the power of the people with blogging and citizen participation edging the movement toward transparency. However, it is unlikely that the citizens will be able to make a substantial impact due to sheer lack of resources, access, and unity among non-mainstream media. We could always say “news networks must take responsibility and raise their standards of journalistic integrity, distancing itself from ‘infotainment.’” Much of the reason the media frames things a certain way (projecting their version of the ‘truth’) is that they believe a significant portion of the public will identify with that version of the truth…and that is what has come to matter: ratings and viewership. As long as media/journalism remains a for-profit industry, there will never be entirely fair and unbiased coverage.

As idealist as it sounds, I believe it then becomes the responsibility of the citizen to educate themselves, consuming media that presents both sides and making an ‘educated’ decision. As an embarrassingly ignorant American myself, I will admit this is more work than most Americans care to invest. However, I think that most Americans are underexposed to the idea of media framing. They have very little idea that media outlets are not fair, accurate, and unbiased. But, how can we expect Americans to be aware of the concept, when education is increasingly being filtered and censored? Perhaps introducing Americans to the idea of framed discourse early on would increase public skepticism and criticism of the media, conceivably forcing the media to be more cognizant of the “lenses through which the reporters themselves see events and the frames that structure the stories they tell about them” (p. 197).

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