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John Edwards – The Husband and, Oh, Candidate, Too
Now in his second presidential campaign, John Edwards—the Democrats’ 2004 vice-presidential nominee—has had real trouble competing for media attention with the two celebrity candidates who have also been No. 1 and No. 2 in the polls, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The two sitting Senators were presented as locked in a two-way race. In most stories the primary focus was either Clinton or Obama (294 and 240 stories) and the secondary focus was also evenly split between Clinton and Obama (148 to 147). Edwards was way behind with only 71 primary and 49 secondary mentions.
As the major figure in only 4% of the campaign stories in the first five months of the year, Edwards ended up in the middle tier of candidates in terms of coverage. But even that number is in some ways deceptive. Were it not for the month of March, when Edwards’ wife Elizabeth announced that her breast cancer had recurred, the former North Carolina Senator would have been in the third tier of candidate coverage in the outlets studied. That lack of media attention came despite the fact that Edwards had been leading, for much of this time, in the polls in Iowa, and that he has consistently polled in the double digits in the national Gallup surveys.
While the tone of Edwards’ coverage was split (31% positive, 34% neutral, 35% negative), and thus more positive than Clinton’s and less positive than Obama’s, that is only part of the story.
The coverage began badly for him, with very little coverage in January, as his rivals were gearing up. And when the press did take more notice in February, the coverage was mostly negative (54%). He was largely invisible again in April. And in May, when he became a focus of attention again, 64% of the stories about him were negative and only 7% were favorable.
Elizabeth Edward’s illness made a measurable difference in how he was treated. March, when she announced her cancer’s return, was the only month of substantial media attention in which John Edwards’ favorable coverage outweighed his negative (45% vs. 12%). Elizabeth Edwards, in turn, got even more coverage than he did that month and none of it was negative.
Edwards’ coverage also varied noticeably by medium. On cable, negative stories outweighed positive by 2-to-1, thanks entirely to prime-time cable programming, both on Fox and MSNBC. It was evenly split in newspapers.
Topics of John Edwards’ Coverage
Percent of All Stories
Edwards All Coverage Political Topics 35.2 63.4 Personal Topics 42.3 17.3 Personal Health 31.0 5.1 Domestic Policy 14.1 7.2 Foreign Policy 7.0 7.5 Public Record 0 1.4 Electorate 1.4 1.1 Miscellaneous 0 2.0
By one measure, Edwards might have seemed more in control of his coverage than most other candidates. He or his campaign initiated most of the of the press coverage (56%), which was higher than the norm (46%). To some degree, the focus on Edwards may have been, if not where he would have liked, at least on topics that may have worked for him. Not surprisingly, far more coverage of Edwards was about his family’s health than was true for candidates overall (31% vs. 5%). And more coverage was about his ideas about domestic policy (14% vs. 7% generally), particularly his populism on taxes, health care and other social issues.
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