The topic of this episode is, “How does media affect our perceptions of Congress?”
As listeners no doubt know, Americans are down on Congress. Public approval of Congress has averaged about 20 percent over the past 20 years, according to Gallup. Certainly, the people on Capitol Hill are partly to blame. We have legislators who behave as if they are on a reality television show and who spend a lot of time starting fights on social media. Congress also has hurt its reputation by failing to address major public policy issues, like immigration and the soaring national debt. And then there are the occasional scandals that disgust the average American.
Yet, Americans’ dour opinion of Congress also is fueled by media coverage.
To talk more about this I have with me Rob Oldham, who is a Ph.D. candidate in politics at Princeton University. This year he will be an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, and will be spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill. His published papers investigate the relationship between supermajority rules and bipartisan policymaking. His dissertation considers congressional policymaking in response to crises during the era of polarization.
And importantly and especially relevant for this podcast is that Rob is the coauthor (along with James M. Curry and Frances Lee) of a fascinating, recent article titled, “On the Congress Beat: How the Structure of News Shapes Coverage of Congressional Action.” This article was recently published by Political Science Quarterly.
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.
And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I am your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.
Rob, welcome to the program.
Rob Oldham:
Hi, Kevin. Thanks for having me on.
Kevin Kosar:
Let’s start with what the scholarly community has learned about media coverage of Congress, and then we’ll pivot to the finding of you and your coauthors. So, in short, what does the scholarly literature say?
Rob Oldham:
The long and short of it is that there is an overwhelming focus on conflict when it comes to media coverage of congressional policymaking. The media is sometimes believed to have a liberal bias, but as Newt Gingrich once said, the real bias—or at least the strongest bias—is towards a dramatic story.
For the most part, that drama is not going to be focused on the policy details or finer points of legislative procedure. It is going to be human conflict, and increasingly partisan conflict. This is a familiar narrative: there are two opposing sides locked in a battle, and this is making our politics—and particularly Congress—worse and more dysfunctional.
Scholars have identified two reasons why we get these types of stories. The first is the economic incentives of the largely for profit media companies in the United States. Our news media tend to rely on subscriptions or advertising, which are more lucrative when people are reading your content. People are more willing to read or click on news articles that are selling this kind of familiar and entertaining narrative of conflict, and this explains why we get so many political stories about elections and the horse race rather than policymaking; unlike elections, policymaking does not necessarily have conflict. In fact, almost all successful policymaking is bipartisan, or at least consensual, due to the large number of veto points in our system and the separation of powers.
So to cover Congress in a way that readers find compelling, the media tends to gravitate towards policymaking efforts that do have conflict. What you get from this is policy stories that end up looking more like election stories: Democrats versus Republicans or disputes within the parties. The media is not really going out of its ways to tell stories about policymaking efforts where everyone is voting “Yes.” That is not the image of politics that most people hold in their minds, and it is not going to sell the same way.
The second reason for the conflict focus is journalism norms. We have all heard that journalists should cover both sides of a story; there should be neutral, balanced, nonpartisan coverage. That approach is often going to result in conflict-oriented coverage because you are essentially presenting a viewpoint and then highlighting disagreement with that viewpoint. The most famous example of this, of course, is climate change. Journalists in the 1990s and 2000s who were trying to be balanced would highlight the views of scientists who disagreed that climate change was a threat or caused by humans. People in climate advocacy argue that the scientific consensus about climate change is very strong, and that highlighting a contrarian point of view for the sake of balance is really just creating false appearance of conflict where one does not really exist.
These are the two primary arguments in the literature. But if you follow Congress, you also know that members themselves, particularly party leaders who are trying to win national elections, have strategies that both exacerbate and play off the media’s appetite for conflict. Members can get more coverage by engaging conflict, which, tends to reinforce the conventional narrative that conflict is the main thing that is happening in our political institutions.
It is probably even worse given how competitive and highly fragmented the modern media environment is. If members want to break through, then there is an incentive for them to say something that readers want to consume, and that tends to be conflict.
Kevin Kosar:
It is indeed very tough for the media. You mentioned the criticism they got in the 1990s and 2000s. During the pandemic, interestingly, we saw a phenomenon going in the opposite direction, where the media initially spoke with a monolithic voice, and dissenting voices from the consensus were quickly dismissed as a ridiculous or conspiratorial.
But I was guest-teaching a class of college students sometime back, and I asked them to name a person in the House of Representatives, and I got a lot of responses saying “AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez],” “Marjorie Taylor Greene,” “Kevin McCarthy,” etc. Then I asked them to name the Chair of the Appropriations Committee, and nobody knew the person who had so much sway over the trillions of dollars that are being spent. It was a great moment to teach the class that much of what we know representatives in government is influenced by what the media decides to cover and with how closely. That Chair doesn’t get the headlines, but if you happen to go past CNN, or look in your news feeds, you can be sure Marjorie Taylor Greene is showing up there, and it certainly helps her fundraising.
Now let’s pivot over to the paper that you wrote with Professors Curry and Lee, where you look at the beat coverage of Congress by media and its effect on the public perception that Congress is really racked by conflict. Tell us, what did you find, and how did you study this?
Rob Oldham:
To say the finding up front, we find evidence that the conflict focus and policymaking coverage is not just being driven by economic incentives and journalistic norms. We do not disagree with those arguments, but we think that the conflict coverage is coming from something else as well. And this is the fact that Congress is one of the few political institutions that journalists are covering as a beat. What this means is that if you are a journalist on the Congress beat, your primary assignment is going to be producing a near constant or at least daily stream of articles about what is happening in the institution.
This is different from how the media would cover other institutions, like foreign governments. Those reporters are typically not writing daily articles. They are coming in to cover the big picture news events: a war, a coup, a mass protest. For an institution with beat coverage, there is going to be a larger share of articles that are going to be about the routine processes and behavior that we see in the institution, rather than just the big picture moments.
For Congress, the typical story is going to be about conflict—conflict like we’re probably going to see in any representative institution as members constantly struggle with each other for political advantage, even if those struggles are ultimately not that important relative to the big picture moments like policy enactment. For example, we often see coverage of members criticizing the other party in order to gain leverage in negotiations or to score political points. If you were following a policymaking effort, you would probably see dozens of articles about tactics like these, sometimes with members who are not even that involved in the negotiations in the first place.
The beat reporter is just simply doing his/her job here. He/she telling you about what is happening in Congress on that day. However, this means that when the enactment itself happens—assuming there is one—that is usually going to come together pretty quickly, particularly at the end of the process. This is increasingly true in the modern Congress where we have more omnibus policymaking. We have more leadership driven negotiations. And so when this happens, it is not really going to see that much additional coverage relative to these daily conflict stories. They are ultimately just going to be covered as another article about what happened in Congress on a given day.
And so the enactment of what could be pretty significant policy is going to receive less emphasis than it probably deserves, compared to all the fighting and negotiating that led up to it. Curry, Lee, and I identified this tendency by studying a series of enactments that Congress passed in response to the COVID pandemic in 2020 and 2021.
We chose COVID for our case study because it was a perfect example of consequential bipartisan policymaking that close observers of Congress know happens all the time, but in this case, it actually received a lot of news coverage. The pandemic was highly salient and the COVID bills that passed were extremely important, particularly the $2 trillion CARES Act that passed in March 2020 with nearly unanimous support in the House and the Senate.
This enactment basically saved our economy from complete devastation during the early days of the pandemic. It prevented millions of people from falling into poverty and businesses from going bankrupt, so given the policy success and the widespread bipartisan support for these enactments, we thought that if there’s ever going to be a policymaking effort where the main story should not be conflict, it should be this one.
We collected all articles from major newspapers about COVID relief from February 2020 to March 2021. We figured that national newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal should be the most likely to produce high quality, accurate news coverage that captures the real story about what’s going on in Congress, especially when compared to other types of media like cable news and social media. We worked with some fantastic research assistants to read the articles and see whether the main focus was related to Congress making progress towards an achievement, or alternatively, whether the focus was on conflict and stalemate.
And what we found was that even in this best case scenario, where the policy making was consequential, highly publicized and bipartisan. Over half of the articles focused on conflict and stalemate, while only about a third focused on legislative progress and achievement.
Why was this the case? We did find some evidence that was consistent with prior scholarship—papers tended to systematically prioritize content about conflict. But the more significant pattern seemed to be that the papers were really just churning out constant articles about COVID relief efforts, regardless of what Congress was actually doing, and this led to more emphasis on the routine conflict. So, you started off with a bunch of major enactments in March and April 2020 that were providing trillions of dollars in relief.
These were all well covered and overall the beat reporters got the story right. More of these articles are about progress and achievement than about conflict and stalemate. This is the same with another relief bill that passed in December 2020, and then with President Biden’s stimulus in March 2021. Both were very well covered, and the focus was more on the action that happened than the conflict. But if we look across the entire period, the overall emphasis is still conflict, and this is because beat reporters were still consistently writing articles about COVID relief, in the middle of 2020 (between about April and November). This was when the institution was bogged down in negotiations and partisan conflict that seemed to be highly related to the upcoming presidential election. Even though Congress was not really doing much, the stalemate was being covered in the same way as the other major enactments. Even though—in our view, at least—the biggest story of this period was not that Congress had this temporary impasse in the midst of injecting trillions of dollars into the economy, the most common article that a reader would have seen would still have been about Congress being bogged down and failing to take action.
To confirm that the beat structure of newspaper coverage had this consequence, we also looked at nightly news coverage of COVID relief efforts from ABC, CBS, and NBC, none of which used the BEAT model to cover Congress, and thus are more likely to focus on these big picture moments rather than everyday conflict. And indeed, we did observe a major decline in coverage of COVID relief efforts during the mid-2020 stalemate compared to these periods where Congress was enacting major bills. Even though television news still has the same economic incentives and the same norms that are pushing them to highlight conflict, we found that about 45 percent of their stories were focused on action and progress compared to about 35 percent that were focused on conflict. So the main pattern we saw in the newspaper coverage was basically flipped for network television because it had a bigger picture and less consistent coverage of Congress, leading to fewer stories about members that were posturing ahead of the 2020 elections and more about them actually taking major action.
Kevin Kosar:
Can you elaborate a little bit more on how TV is different?
Rob Oldham:
Yeah, so if you’re working has a journalist covering Congress for a newspaper, you spend your days in the Capitol, finding out what’s going on, sniffing out the big picture story, and you’re under pressure to publish it most days if not throughout the week. Your job is to provide consistent coverage of Congress.
If you’re a producer for a broadcast news network, though, you have a lot more options to choose from. Your job is not to cover Congress, but to cover all aspects of United States—society, culture, etc.—so you are not just thinking, ‘What’s Congress doing today? What can we find out about what Congress did so that we can put content in front of readers?’ You might be choosing between some exciting story that happened in Congress or something Oprah or some new study that came out—there are just a lot of different options.
And even if we think about the nightly news as primarily covering politics, I think a lot of what we see is more coverage of the president in that case. One of the findings that we do not highlight as much in the paper is that you see an over-emphasis on what is happening with the president during COVID relief—lots of stories about President Trump’s press conferences, for example. This is where a lot of the nightly news coverage was oriented compared to what you were seeing in the newspapers.
Kevin Kosar:
I have to wonder if audience factors are also at work.
I am old enough to remember when National Journal and Congressional Quarterly were big in the coverage of Congress. These were very expensive subscription model magazines—the only reason I could ever afford them is when I got a job at the Library of Congress and we got them through work—for the real professionals in Washington D.C., and their coverage was very in the weeds. You would get a reporter who would sit in a subcommittee hearing and writing up a report looking at the substance of the issues—e.g., whether or not they should expand eligibility for a Small Business Administration loan program, what points were being made, when the chairman’s mark would be produced. This was very geeky stuff.
It is still beat coverage, but because they are writing for a different kind of audience compared to The New York Times, the substance of the coverage is different.
Rob Oldham:
Yeah, essentially—not that The New York Times now doesn’t have a pretty impenetrable paywall—but this is the paywall media. They have the information that I think lobbyists are looking for a lot of the times, especially these policy details.
I think the model that Politico has maps onto this well, where you have the Politico that I read—because I don’t have $10,000 to buy Politico Pro—and a lot of it is conflict coverage. A lot of it is about what’s going on in Congress, the maneuverings of Speaker Johnson versus Chuck Schumer versus President Biden, etc. But once you pay your $10,000 subscription and switch over to Politico Pro, then you can really get, the information about what’s going on in tax policy. What is Jason Smith really thinking he is going to do with the reauthorization of the tax cuts in 2025? There is a difference in that economic model compared to the general readership model that publications like the Times or the Post are going after.
Kevin Kosar:
I think there are those of us who lament the fact that there is so much focus on the conflict and the treatment of conflict from the coverage as a negative thing. Congress is regularly getting things done, often on very niche, unexciting issues, sometimes on very important, pressing issues. People who take that closer look will be surprised to learn that it’s not just all gridlock in Capitol Hill.
For the people who are trying to figure out what’s going on in Washington, D.C., what should we take away from this? Should we just like consume less media? Should we be more suspicious? Should we hope that Political Pro lowers its price to something more affordable? Or are we just stuck in this condition, where conflictual media coverage is what we live with?
Rob Oldham:
Yeah, so I will outline our view on what some of the consequences of this coverage model are, and then I’ll talk a little bit about some of the solutions from both the reader and the journalist side.
We do think that the paper at least suggests that the emphasis on conflict is likely distorting our view of Congress. Regardless of whether you are a scholar or a political junkie, reading news that tends to overemphasize the importance of routine conflict and under-emphasize achievement is going to affect how you think about Congress, how you think about our politics. You might even think that Congress is more dysfunctional than it actually is—that it gets less done than it actually does—because the average thing you’re reading about is stalemate (even if the stalemate is temporary and a national part of lawmaking that any representative institution—regardless of where you look in the country or across the world—is going to have to travail).
We present some data in the appendix that shows that people who are more educated and more interested in politics actually think less of Congress than those who are not. We cannot really prove a causal relationship here—not without additional study—but we suspect that this greater negativity is probably a consequence of more exposure to elite news sources that simply cover Congress too well and give the average reader too much information. Overall, they are probably causing us to miss the forest for the trees when it comes to assessing what the institution is actually getting done.
In terms of solutions, I think that some of the burden should be on the reader—the reader needs to be able to step back and think a little bit more carefully about the importance of any single story and the reasons why it was written. Is this conflict actually important, or is it just more typical behavior in a legislature and being covered because the reporter needs something to write about?
In line with this, we should also be cognizant about the quality of the information that reporting produces and the opportunity costs that we endure by giving it regular attention instead of going over to the Politico Pro subscription that we asked for for Christmas and are now being able to access some more high quality information. I would garner that most people probably did not really benefit from reading hundreds of articles about the mid-2020 stalemate on COVID relief, especially given that the relief that Congress had already authorized was actually making pretty substantial progress in stabilizing the economy. Instead of giving more context and emphasizing this achievement, readers were probably just getting the impression that Congress was gridlocked during COVID, and did not really do anything. You have probably talked to people who believe that; I do all the time, even though I think that was pretty clearly not the case.
So I think more awareness on the reader’s part is important.
To be clear, I have a lot of respect for beat journalists. I think these are extremely talented people who are putting out high quality information. I have nothing but respect for someone who is dedicating himself or herself to understanding a complex institution.
I think that if they’re going to cover the legislative process on a daily basis, the best they can probably do is try to provide better context for where policy making efforts are headed, rather than giving the conflict more credit than it deserves. For example, if you are covering the appropriations process, you might try to put more emphasis on the fact that these efforts often do involve a lot of partisan posturing, but they almost necessarily are going to lead to enactments at the end of the day, even if there is a government shutdown or two across the way. I think more context and history about similar policymaking efforts would be useful for readers.
Another suggestion from someone who does not make a living selling papers is that journalists can try to provide better information about the policies that Congress have considered, or at least putting them a little bit higher in the article. We noticed while reading the COVID relief articles that the policy details were often buried pretty deep in the articles, even though these details are ultimately going to be a lot more important than something like what kind of negotiating tactics did the members use. Again, it is not my job to sell newspapers, and I understand that most people probably do not really care about the details of how something like the Paycheck Protection Program worked. They would rather read about the drama that resulted in its enactment—frankly, sometimes I would too. But it seems that journalists can probably make some adjustments here depending on their economic model and their audience.
Kevin Kosar:
You just underscored something that has long been true about journalism, which is that it tries to tell the story in the headline and the first paragraph. Readers often just start a story and then they do not want to go more than a couple of paragraphs in—they just do not have the appetite for it. If that top paragraph is really focused on the conflict, and the actual achievement of the policy or the substance of what is being discussed is buried 7 paragraphs later, that’s unfortunate and certainly seems like something that is correctable.
I will say, I have been pleased that over the course of the last 10 years, there has been a lot more media coverage of Congress, and in discussing its problems, instead of focusing on personalities or parties or polarization, they’ve been mentioning capacity, which is something that we have been working on a lot down here, trying to raise this as a salient factor for consideration when asking, why is Congress perhaps not performing as it should.
All right. Rob Oldham, we have reached the end of our time. Thank you very much for helping us better appreciate how media coverage of Congress works, why it focuses heavily on conflict, and how it affects our perceptions.
Rob Oldham:
Thanks so much for having me on, Kevin. Enjoyed the conversation.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on Twitter and tagging at AEI. Once again, thank you for listening, and have a great day.
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