58. What does it mean to win a debate?
Put yourself in the shoes of a Politico reporter during a debate. Your readers look to you to know who won — and what you say matters, a lot. If you say a candidate bombed, that campaign will take a huge hit.
But as your readers look to you, you look to them. What does it mean to win a debate? Presumably the winner is the one whose poll numbers increase most as a result of the debate — and that’s determined by the readers themselves.
But you have no time to conduct a poll — your readers want to know who won right away, even before the debate is over. Worse yet, you can’t look to the polls in the days to come to determine in hindsight if you were right, because your call will affect the polls.
How often does the media get this right? And what happens when it doesn’t? Did Hillary win the first debate because her support was going to go up, or did her support go up because the media said Hillary won the debate?
How should Politico determine who won a debate? What happens if its reporters disagree with each other? To what extent is Politico influenced by other media outlets, as opposed to independently making its own call and then leading the pack? Should Politico be looking to insiders to determine who won?
This is a specific application of an earlier question of the week, pasted below.
31. Which comes first, the news or the coverage of the news? Journalists try to cover only what’s newsworthy. But oftentimes newsworthiness is determined by coverage. Can something not newsworthy be made newsworthy by receiving a lot of coverage from journalists who overestimate its newsworthiness?
What does it mean for Politico to “drive the conversation”? Does Politico drive conversations after they begin, or does it spark conversations as well? Do newsmakers spark and drive conversations using Politico, or does Politico itself do the sparking and driving? Does something appear in Playbook because it’s newsworthy, or is it newsworthy because it appeared in Playbook?
The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media
By Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw (The Public Opinion Quarterly)
1972
In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position. In reflecting what candidates are saying during a campaign, the mass media may well determine the important issues — that is, the media may set the “agenda” of the campaign.
By Columbia Journalism Review (Gal Beckerman)
October 9, 2007
What leads to what? Does a presidential candidate’s popularity in the polls lead to more media coverage or does media coverage lead to popularity in the polls? Of course, the candidate, who believes wholeheartedly that everyone would support him if only his ideas could get more attention, thinks the media is responsible for whether his numbers go up or down. The journalist, on the other hand, invested in her role as objective observer, does not want to feel implicated in the process of choosing the president, and usually believes that it’s the polls that determine who she covers. It’s a conversation that usually happens behind the scenes with candidates lamenting that their numbers won’t go up unless they get more air time and journalists responding that they would get more air time if their numbers went up.
