Days of the Week

News Routines and Expectations

Reporters follow news routines that make it easy report on the news. News routines include certain days of the week that are more apt to having hard political news stories than others. Hard political news stories are usually about Congress, the President, or other national political news. The media are only going to report on hard news stories when these politicians are active. Congress is often only in session on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The President often spends long weekends at Camp David or in Texas. Since politicians are mainly active during the middle of the week, there are going to be more hard news stories reported on in the middle of the week.

Weekly news routines are illustrated in Figure 1. I chose four random weeks in the past six months to study. I used LexisNexis to search The Washington Post and The New York Times for articles that contained the terms: “Congress” or “President Bush”. For each day, I recorded the number of stories that met the search criterion. Each week followed a similar pattern where Monday and Saturday had the least amount of hard news stories. Sunday appears to have the most number of hard news stories. This can be misleading because Sunday is a collaboration of the previous week's stories. During the week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday have the most hard news stories. Therefore, we expect that the days in the middle of the week (Tuesday thru Friday) are going to have more coverage for the presidential candidates.

Results

The coverage results are shown in the table below. Our expectations that the days in the middle of the week (Tuesday thru Friday) would have more coverage for the candidates were correct. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were all significant for at least one candidate in at least one of the issues. If it was the significant day, the amount of coverage that the candidate recieved increased. This is illustrated with predicted values in the table. For example, in National Security, when the day was Tuesday, the number of stories Kerry recieved was 1.26. This was an increase from .66 stories that occured when the day was not Tuesday.

The only candidates that the days were significant for were Dean, Edwards, and Kerry. This is probably the case because throughout our study (September 1, 2003 - March 3, 2004) Dean, Edwards, and Kerry were the frontrunners. Frontrunners have momentum, which is when candidates that are doing well in the polls receive more favorable coverage, and as a result do even better in the polls. Candidates that are doing better in the polls are going to have more coverage devoted to them in the middle of the week.

Day of the Week Results#

By Carrie Rafer

© Davidson College, 2004, Department of Political Science, Davidson College, Davidson, NC 28035
Send comments, questions, and suggestions to Patrick Sellers
Created: 4/27/2004. Last updated: 5/2/2004.