How the News Media Amplify Negative Messages

The airing of campaign advertisements directly influences the attitudes and opinions of citizens who view them, but ads also indirectly influence citizens through news coverage of advertising. The news media, by covering advertising, amplify the messages contained in the ads. We also suggest that, given the news media’s institutional bias toward conflict, they are particularly likely to focus their coverage on negative advertising. This may lead audiences to believe that campaigns are more negative than they actually are. To examine the extent to which the news media amplify the messages in negative ads, we combined data on political ads aired in recent election campaigns in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States with coverage of those campaigns in several newspapers. This allows us to examine the volume of media coverage that follows from the airing of ads, and it allows us to examine whether negative ads receive more coverage than positive ads.