3
In their reporting on election campaigns, meanwhile, journalists raise topics,
analyze and interpret candidate messages, evaluate strategies, and construct their own
narratives about candidates and the campaign (Just et al., 1996, p. 9). As election
campaigns have become more and more media-centered, more scholarly attention has
been paid to the questions of how powerful the news media are in shaping American
public opinion and voting behaviors, and in what ways. How the news media frame
candidate images among the public and, in so doing, influence subsequent political
behavior is of particular interest to this research.
The inquiries in the present study will be contextualized in terms of agenda
setting theory, which has provided a cogent model explaining the cognitive effects of the
news media since the early 1970s. Specifically, the interplays of candidate attributes in
political, policy, and personal dimensions will be examined to address the central axioms
of the agenda-setting theory, while the consequences of the interplays will be scrutinized
to explore the newest frontier of the theory.
The 2002 primary campaigns for Texas governor provide rich empirical data for
this research. While the current governor was the unopposed Republican candidate, the
Democratic gubernatorial primary was one of the closest races ever, involving two
Hispanic contestants. Some of the previous studies have documented considerable or
moderate agenda-setting effects of the paid advertising media or the news media in local
election settings within or outside the U.S. (Bryan, 1997; McCombs et al., 2000; Roberts,
1991, 1992; Roberts and McCombs, 1994). Yet most of them examine only the general
election campaigns. According to West (1994), the effects of campaigns can be stronger
in the nominating stage than in the general election, since the primaries involve no
Convention