Accuracy and Gender Differences in the Media Coverage of Governors'' Policy Agendas

We plan to examine media coverage of governors' state of the state addresses. We expect that comparatively few people listen to those speeches live. Rather, what the public knows about the content of the speeches and therefore the policy priorities of their state's top executive comes from media coverage – specifically newspaper articles. In order for the public to get an accurate sense of the content of the speech, the media needs to accurately portray that content. Yet, there is evidence from the media coverage of gubernatorial campaigns suggesting that the media inappropriately relies on policy stereotyping when reporting on female candidates (Kahn, 1994). We intend to compare media coverage of state of the state speeches to the speeches themselves to see if such distortions continue into the governing phase. The data for this analysis are the United States governors' state of the state addresses from 2000 through 2010 and news stories about the state of the state addresses from the Associated Press for the same period. To efficiently and reliability code more than 500 speeches and news stories we use a computer aided technique for our content analysis. Once this analysis is completed we will have examined the accuracy of media portrayals of governors' policy agendas, and whether there are gender differences in the accuracy of those portrayals