Media logic and journalistic commercialism. A longitudinal analysis of frames in campaign coverage

Abstract

In recent years, election coverage has deemphasized the substance of politics (content related to issues or policy) to focus on a media logic treatment, as in the case of stories on human interest, conflict, and scandal. The latter has been connected to the increasing commercialism of news media, the printed press in particular; which - besides a constant decrease of readership, high competition from the Internet, and corporate acquisition - has tried to appeal to a less politicized market through that kind of treatment. In order to prove this assumption, we conducted a longitudinal content analysis of the last four Mexican presidential elections (1994, 2000, 2006 and 2012). The aim was to evaluate – on one hand - the presence of thematic meta-frames that represent the political substance, and – on other – the strategic frames, that manifest a media logic in action. The findings pointed out an increase only in the conflict frame, whilst the political process frame was steady across the elections, and higher than the issue frame. Our data does not allow us to establish neither a significant nor linear relationship between an ongoing commercialism of the press and the frames linked to media logic.