Political Communication's E-Portfolio

1.      Identify and discuss the significance of three key concepts you learned this semester

I think one of the most important concepts I learned about this semester was framing. Framing is something that is done by political campaigns, political parties and the media. I learned that a political campaign can be framed by the media in at least four ways: Conflict, Horserace, Issue and Candidate Attribute.

There is a popular assumption that candidates focus most on being likeable – on their attributes. This assumption held up when I coded the campaign website for Governor Martin O’Malley back in January. O’Malley was very concerned with being seen as the lifelong democrat, having “15 years of executive experience” and being part of an “Irish Rock band”. But when the governor did talk about issues, it was seen that he took more of a negative approach, focusing on what was broken instead of how he would fix it. O’Malley framed his discussion of issues through the use of fear.

In this piece from March 21 I took a brief look into framing and how it practically plays out in the news coverage of a presidential election. In this blog post I quoted a clip that said that, “No poll in the upcoming states [Arizona, Utah and Idaho] shows Sanders winning by enough of a margin.”

Senator Sanders won Idaho by 78%-21% and won Utah by 79%-20.%, losing Arizon 57%-39%.

One of the first things I did as a part of this class was to parse out exactly what political communication is and what it means in a practical and theoretical sense. As a communication major my overall perspective on this is influenced by my background in communication. I wrote for my first blog post this semester:

“Political communication is first and foremost the academic pursuit of an interdisciplinary understanding of the ways in which studies of political science (and the applied ‘politics’) interact with studies of communication (and applied fields including but not limited to ‘journalism’, ‘public relations’ and ‘advertising’).”

One thing I have found fascinating about the 2016 presidential election is the adoption of the use of the social media application Snapchat. Governor Lincoln Chafee was an early adopter of Snapchat, though it did not ultimately help him in his attempts to secure the Democratic nomination. Back in June only seven candidates for president had a Snapchat account, and all of them have since dropped out, with the most recent drop out being Senator Marco Rubio. I am very interested on a retrospective piece on the role of Snapchat (and all social media apps and platforms) in this election, and I wonder if there will be any theorizing that the presence of indomitable candidates such as Secretary Clinton and Donald Trump make it impossible to truly gauge the effectiveness of ever-evolving technology.

Very similar to framing are narratives. Every campaign and each candidate, attempts to weave a specific narrative about themselves, their campaign and the country. Back in February I investigated the narratives of “Donald Trump the Winner and Marco Rubio ‘The Republican Obama’”.

It was kind of pre-mature to observe the first narrative of Donald Trump as a winner back in early February. But two-and-a-half months later and the narrative has not only been continued in the media, but has been proven true by the voters.

Figure 1:  50% of these results show Donald Trump as a winner, even going as far as to say that he will be the nominee.

Trump has won twenty-two contests, twice as many as Senator Ted Cruz his closest contender. Trump has also one 2.3 million more votes than Senator Cruz. Trump and the media have constantly driven home the narrative of Trump as a winner, and so far that narrative has proven actually true.

            The narrative of Senator Rubio as ‘The Republican Obama’ have not held up, however. Arguably it was a weak narrative to begin with, seeing as Marco Rubio was the establishment candidate in comparison to some of his opponents (Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and even fellow senator Ted Cruz) and seeing as he never could get the race down to just being between him and one other opponent. Additionally, if the GOP ever had an inevitable candidate in 2016, that candidate was nothing similar to Senator Clinton in 2008. Rubio withdrew from the race for the presidency on March 15 and two days later on March 17 he announced he would not be running for reelection for senate. In fact it is thought now that Rubio is shifting from electoral politics toward a private life.

2.      Describe each of the journalism and research projects you worked on this semester, including a specific description of your role in each

a.      Content Analysis #1

For the first content analysis my group and I looked at the campaign websites of Governors O’Malley and Christie and hoped to answer two research questions: RQ1: “How do Governors Christie and O’Malley use positive and negative messaging on their websites and in their discussions of national security and criminal justice reform?” and RQ2: “How do Governors Christie and O’Malley’s discussions of national security and criminal justice reform compare?”

I had a hand in creating the proposal and influencing the direction our content analysis took. Specifically, I wanted to find a way to not focus on Clinton, Trump or any other front-runners, and eventually through group brainstorming the group decided on the Mid-Atlantic governors from opposite sides of the aisle who were both doing poorly in the polls. After that I did research into the subject of “What Do Voters Care About?” – trying to understand any similarities or differences New Jersey and Maryland voters had with each other or with the nation in general.

I then had to collect screencaps of O’Malley’s campaign website. Once our proposal for the content analysis had been approved, it was close to the date of the Iowa Caucus and we didn’t want to lose the primary source of the website if the governor dropped out (and subsequently took down his site). It may be worth noting that the site is still up.

Once I had the screencaps, it was time to begin combing through the site to code the data. Once I had finished coding data relevant to the two research questions I sent my coding off to my group members, who checked the coding to ensure inter-coder reliability. Similarly, I checked the coding of Christie’s site ensure inter-coder reliability. From there I contributed writing to the ‘Introduction’ section as well as the ‘Findings’ section. I also contributed to editing as the project reached its due date.

b.      News Story #1

For the first news story my group and I had to cover a political event. We chose to travel down to Atlanta to Morehouse College to cover a rally that Senator Sanders was having there. For this I conducted interviews, collected campaign materials and took pictures. I conducted six interviews over the course of the evening and listened to the speeches of the senator and all of his surrogates. I contributed to the writing and editing of the news story. As the only journalism student in my group working on this particular story, it fell to me to make sure that the story was formatted correctly and met AP-guidelines.

c.       News Story #2

For the second news story of the class we were charged with covering another political event. We chose to compare and contrast a town hall held by Governor John Kasich and a rally held by Donald Trump. I contributed reporting from a town hall Governor John Kasich held at Kennesaw State University. I conducted four interviews, recorded the town hall on a tape recorder and took notes and pictures.

d.      News Story #3

For the third news story my group and I had to do a retrospective on the Georgia Primary and Super Tuesday, and to obtain interviews with experts and those involved in campaigns to get their opinion on those elections and the elections to come. I interviewed the president of KSU for Bernie, Zach McDowell. I also took pictures of McDowell and contributed to the writing and editing.

e.       Field Research Project

For the field research project the group decided to analyze the research question: “How does Bernie Sanders’ rhetoric work to mobilize African American support?”

I contributed my notes and interviews from the Sanders events, respectively. I also contributed writing, editing and graphic-making.

I contributed the following analysis:

“Despite all of his efforts Senator Sanders has had a difficult time appealing to black voters. In South Carolina he won 14% of black voters to Secretary Clinton’s 86%. He did better in Nevada, where he received 22% of the Black vote to Clinton’s 76%. In Alabama Sanders won 6% of the black vote. In Arkansas he won 10% of the black vote. In Georgia Sanders won 14% of the black vote (and 41% of the white vote) to Clinton’s 85% of the black vote (and 58% of the white vote). In Oklahoma Sanders won 27% of the black vote. He won 10% in Tennessee, 15% in Texas, 16% in Virginia, 28% in Michigan and 11% in Mississippi.”

            It would be interesting to continue to track this trend and see how it has played out through to the most recent races. In fact, this is what that would look like:

f.        Content Analysis #2

For the second content analysis the group I worked with decided to collect a convenience sample of twenty-five articles from the Los Angeles Times and twenty-five articles from CNN. We collected our sample from Monday, March 28 to Friday, April 1. I collected the articles from the Los Angeles Times and I checked my groupmate’s coding for inter-coder reliability. I also contributed to key findings, analysis and editing.

3.      Upload at least one visual from the course projects (photos, audio/video from interviews, charts from content analysis/field research projects, etc.) with a description.

See above.

4.      Discuss and elaborate on how you did or did not successfully accomplish each of the four expressed learning objectives (listed below) for the course.

a.      Demonstrating the ability to produce high quality research projects relating to political communication in American elections

Though I’ve already taken two research methods classes (Communication and GWST/Interdisciplinary), I think that my ability to produce research in political communication in the future could benefit from a course in Political Science Research Methods. Obviously my time in this course has given me a degree of training that has improved my ability, but it was very much learn-by-doing. Given my grades in the course, I would say that my ability to produce research projects is above-average, but still has a way to go before becoming ‘high quality’.

b.      Accurately describing and providing critical perspectives on the intersection between political communication and American elections

I think that I have excelled most in this area. Already having been rather fascinated with American elections and communications, I had a vested interest in the intersection in question. I believe that my blogs throughout this course demonstrate my ability to provide the aforementioned critical perspectives.

c.       Producing high quality political journalism on the theme of American elections

I faltered on this in the beginning of the course, but I do believe that this course has helped me better my ability to produce this type of journalism in a high-quality manner. My interviews for the second and third news stories were much better than they were for the first one.

d.      Respectfully observing American political communication processes in practice.

‘Respectfully’ is highly subjective, but yes, I believe that I have been able to observe the political communication process in the United States with a respectful honesty. I attended two campaign events, interviewed many people and conducted many nights of live-tweeting, with various conversations interspersed, and I have always tried to keep decorum throughout all of it.