When Politicians Attack: Party Cohesion in the Media

Abstract

The past two decades have seen a lot of creative scholarly thinking about the role of the news media in American politics. What makes this research area so vibrant is that authors have moved beyond earlier studies that explained the behavior of the political press by only emphasizing social norms, the structure of new organizations, or even the personal virtue of journalists. Despite being important advances in their time and interesting to read, this work produced a fairly static understanding of press behavior. Subsequent work, like research on “indexing” (e.g., Bennett 1990; Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston 2007), John Zaller’s “Theory of Media Politics” (1999), James Hamilton’s All the News That’s Fit to Sell (2004), Baum and Groeling’s War Stories (2010), and Groeling’s When Politicians Attack, has moved into exciting new territory. In different ways and to different degrees, this new research takes an approach that, for lack of a better term, we could label soft rational choice. Although these authors do not present formal game theoretic models of the interaction between journalists, politicians, and the public,1 they do consider how these actors struggle with one another to achieve their goals. Because these goals often conflict, each actor is constrained in ways that can produce predictable patterns. When Politicians Attack is one of the most important of these new works.

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