Spotlighting the Economy
Media Coverage and Mayoral Evaluations
Richard Burke (Hampden-Sydney College)
The decline of local media has received significant attention over the last few years. The combination of decreasing advertising revenue and a loss of subscribers has placed local newspapers in jeopardy. Once thriving newspapers in large cities have seen their budgets cut, their newsrooms emptied, and their circulation changed from daily to several times per week. This predicament is particularly troubling considering the growing body of social science research which shows that local media has important implications for political engagement and knowledge (Hayes and Lawless 2021), as well as the competitiveness of city elections (Rubado and Jennings 2020). For a full review of the implications of the loss of local media and potential solutions, I encourage readers to consider a report written by myself and my coauthors Robert Saldin and Kal Munis entitled, “Local Beats, National Consequences”, published by the Niskanen Center.
In my article, “Spotlighting the Economy: Media Coverage and Mayoral Evaluations,” I show that local newspapers are opinion leaders in the cities that they serve. I demonstrate that local newspapers help citizens hold their local governments accountable for economic performance. While a great deal of political science research has found that Americans hold their national government accountable for economic performance, only recently have scholars begun to examine the relationship between economic performance and citizens’ support for their city governments. Arnold and Carnes (2012) provided a groundbreaking study on this topic by examining the relationship between New York City’s local economy and the approval of the New York City mayor over a 25-year period. They found that as New York City’s misery index, which is a combination of inflation and unemployment, increased, New Yorkers’ approval for their mayor decreased. Specifically, they found in one of their analyses that a one-point increase in misery was associated with a .7-point decrease in mayoral approval. To examine the role media played in this process, I matched their data with data on media coverage of the New York City mayor provided by the New York Times between 1984-2009. Each month was classified as either “No Economic Coverage”, “Some Economic Coverage”, or “High Economic Coverage”, depending on the number of front-page stories about the New York City mayor that pertained to the economy. I found that when the Times provided high levels of economic coverage of the New York City mayor, a one-point increase in misery was associated with an approximately 2.5-percentage point decrease in mayoral approval. That is more than three times greater than the relationship between misery and mayoral approval detected by Arnold and Carnes. However, when the Times provided no economic coverage, or only some economic coverage, there was no statistically discernible relationship between changes in New York City’s misery and changes in the approval of the New York City mayor.
Obviously, the New York Times is no ordinary local newspaper, and New York City is no typical big city. In the second study of my article, I considered whether local media plays a moderating role in the relationship between local economic performance and mayoral approval in other cities. To answer this question, I used data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which asked respondents to evaluate their mayor. My analysis was confined to respondents who lived in the 51 largest cities, of which I could only gather data on local newspaper coverage for 40 of those cities. While I did not find a statistically significant relationship between a city’s unemployment and mayoral approval among all respondents, I did find that among respondents who read the newspaper and whose newspaper provided high economic coverage, increased unemployment was associated with lower levels of mayoral approval. This finding suggests that media coverage can be influential outside of a megacity like New York City.
When local newspapers covered the economy, citizens considered it when evaluating their mayors. When local newspapers did not cover the economy, citizens did not consider it when evaluating their mayors. My findings suggest that local media can shape the ways citizens think about city politics and evaluate their incumbents through the choices that it makes about coverage. The relationship between local media coverage and Americans attitudes toward local issues and incumbents is a topic ripe for future study. I hope that my article, which builds on an ever-expanding line of research on the importance of local media, will lead citizens, officeholders, and media owners to think about ways to address the persistent crisis that local media faces in the United States.
References
Arnold, R. Douglas, and Nicholas Carnes. "Holding mayors accountable: New York's executives from Koch to Bloomberg." American Journal of Political Science 56, no. 4 (2012): 949-963.
Hayes, Danny, and Jennifer L. Lawless. News hole: The demise of local journalism and political engagement. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Rubado, Meghan E., and Jay T. Jennings. "Political consequences of the endangered local watchdog: Newspaper decline and mayoral elections in the United States." Urban Affairs Review 56, no. 5 (2020): 1327-1356.
Richard J. Burke is an Assistant Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at Hampden-Sydney College. His research interests include American politics, public opinion, political psychology, and representation in state and local government.