The Jackson Presidential Campaign: Setting the Public Agenda.

Print news media coverage of Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign was analyzed to determine whether publishers followed their roles as liberal, moderate, or conservative publications in their coverage. It was hypothesized that print media coverage would be similar across publications regardless of editorial slant, because of the dominance of the race factor in American society. Analysis of the tendencies or patterns of news coverage of the Jackson campaign included three newspapers ("USA Today," the "Wall Street Journal," the "New York Times,") and four magazines ("Time,""New Republic," the "Nation," and "National Review"). Assertions produced by the different news sources were screened sentence-by-sentence to develop a list containing all basic propositions advanced by each publication in the series of articles appearing between October 10, 1983, and April 10, 1984. The resulting data, indicating differences across publications, did not support the hypothesis. Coverage of the Jackson campaign appeared to have followed the dictates of tradition in that publishers did not allow considerations of race to alter significantly their traditional roles as liberal, conservative, or moderate publications. (HTH)