Riding journalistic coattails: How presidents create newsmaking opportunities for political opponents

Prior studies of news are based on a model of individual sources seeking journalists’ attention. The potential for one newsmaker's actions to influence how journalists treat other sources has received relatively little attention. Using data from print and television coverage of 105 presidential press conferences from 1981 to 2009, I show that the scheduling of events can influence both journalists’ determinations of newsworthiness and the concentration of opinion in their stories. As journalists determine events to be more newsworthy, norms of objectivity and preferences for conflict are triggered, causing journalists to seek out more comments from other sources. When presidents attract major media attention, they create what I call “journalistic coattails”—added opportunities for other sources to get into the news as well. I argue that a broader theory of news production as an organizational field is necessary to understand how journalists often bind newsmakers to their rivals.

► Examines presidential press conference scheduling from 1981 to 2009. ► Scheduling strongly influences volume of coverage (particularly in NYT). ► Scheduling strongly influences concentration of opinions in coverage. ► As coverage volume goes up, opinions less concentrated on president. ► Journalists’ organizational norms bind prestigious newsmakers to other sources.