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For those of you interested in the US election, I can highly recommend Thomas Patterson's 1980 book The Mass Media Election: How Americans Choose Their President (no link included as the book is out of print - but you can find it at well-stocked libraries) still remains one of the best and most relevant studies of US electoral politics and how media cover elections (this is not to detract from Patterson's many other books, which are also excellent). In this book, Patterson posits that there are two types of election coverage: of "the issues" and of "the game". The issues are self-explanatory: where do the candidates stand, what are their policies, how do they intend to achieve these policies etc. The game, on the other hand, is coverage of the election as an event or process in itself: coverage of the game means coverage of electoral gains and losses, presents analysis of the candidates in terms of electoral tactics, attempts to predict the outcome of the election etc. Another word for "the game" might be "the horse race" - reporting that attempts to answer the questions of who will win and how, rather than what the candidates stand for, how feasible their policies are, or critically analysing their platforms. Coverage of the game is not problematic per se, of course - if fair and free elections are a cornerstone of democracy, then coverage of the election as a process and the electoral strategies of the candidates is important to citizens. The problem, according to Patterson, is when game coverage significantly outweighs issue coverage - which it clearly did in his 1980 study, and which it does even more today. Not only does this make voters less well-informed about policy issues, but it also (argues Patterson) fosters cynicism and disappointment in the political process because candidates are almost universally portrayed as calculating strategists, willing to say anything to get the vote - the race is all-important, the issues a distant second. Some would perhaps argue that politicians of today actually primarily are calculating, vote-grabbing strategists, and that journalism merely reflects the realities of the contemporary US political landscape. One thing is clear, however: the game remains the overarching frame for the coverage of US elections, as demonstrated by a recent study from The Joan Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy (where Patterson is Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press) and the Project for Excellence in Journalism - 63 per cent of the coverage of the recent US primaries was about the game, and 15 per cent about the issues (17 per cent of the coverage was about the personal backgrounds of the candidates). And I think we should take Patterson's warnings seriously: the coverage is clearly not written with citizens' concerns in mind, as only 12 per cent of stories mentioned how citizens will be affected by the elections - the majority of coverage, 86 per cent, focused on how the election will impact on the candidates or on the parties. In other words, the coverage is almost wholly centered on what the election means for politicians, rather than for citizens. Read more about the report here, or better yet, read the full report here.