Media Coverage of Elections: Lessons Learnt from the 2014 Presidential Campaign in Romania

Media coverage of presidential elections might affect people's perceptions, attitudes towards the candidates and the elections in general, thus explaining voting behaviour and voting results. Based on the agenda-setting and framing theories, we propose an analysis of the TV coverage of 2014 Romanian presidential elections. Therefore, our aim is to investigate the way the media set the priorities of the election campaign and the way the most visible topics were framed, in order to provide possible explanations for both the turnout and outcome of a presidential campaign. To this end, we conducted a content analysis of all prime-time newscasts broadcasted on the public TV channel (TVR1) and two most viewed private TV channels in Romania at the time (PROTV and ANTENA1), during the entire presidential campaign (October 3rd to November 16th, 2014) (N=2990 news stories). This study focuses solely on the political news related to the election campaign (N=218). We argue that the way media chose the most important topics on the agenda (i.e. the diaspora vote) had an important impact on both turnout and outcome of the election. At the same time, the way the media framed the diaspora vote (mostly in terms of morality and attribution of responsibility) had serious, yet rather surprising implications for the increased turnout, mainly among young people, and also for the elections outcome, arguably deciding a "last minute swing" effect, based on the results of the polls published during the election campaign.