• DOI:10.2307/2130782
• Corpus ID: 154834781

Congress and the Presidency as News in the Nineteenth Century

@article{Kernell1987CongressAT,
  title={Congress and the Presidency as News in the Nineteenth Century},
  author={Samuel Kernell and Gary C. Jacobson},
  journal={The Journal of Politics},
  year={1987},
  volume={49},
  pages={1016 - 1035}
}

• S. Kernell, G. C. Jacobson
• Published 1 November 1987
• History, Sociology, Political Science
• The Journal of Politics

However successful some recent presidents have been in exploiting their newsworthiness to define the national agenda and promote their politics before Congress, the available evidence suggests that presidents have enjoyed an advantage in press coverage over Congress throughout the twentieth century. The research reported here extends the comparative study of news about these institutions back into the early nineteenth century. A content analysis of 3,335 news articles in the Cleveland press for ten selected years from 1820 to 1876 reveals that the president did not always enjoy such an advantage. Rather, news during this era tended to be bifurcated, with presidents receiving most of the election-related reporting and Congress most of the news on the daily affairs of government. Congress's predominance in this latter realm persisted even as the volume of news about national affairs increased sharply in the 1870s. We conclude with the speculation that changes in the pattern of news coverage early in this century reflected the particular character of modernization of Congress and the presidency.