What is the Audience Role in News Coverage?
Jon Tester (D) a serious Democrat challenger took on Montana Senator Conrad Burns in a Debate last Sunday afternoon in Hamilton, MT. For the newspapers the dominant player in the debates was not Tester or Burns, but rather the audience.
The newspaper coverage in Montana while more diverse than three sources is nonetheless dominated by three: The Great Fall Tribune, the AP Capital Bureau and the Lee Newspapers (Billings, Helena, Butte, Missoula, etc.).
The pattern was a bit different for this debate with the Missoulian writing a long piece about the debate, being the newspaper of record for the Bitterroot Valley, whose heart is Hamilton. The Great Falls Tribune also ran a long piece and the Lee newspapers picked up the AP reporter's story.
I read the newspapers with interest, looking for indications that the debate was influenced by the day-before-coverage predicting that it would focus on US Policy in Iraq. Other than one truncated exchange buried both in follow-up reporting and the debate itself, the press predictions failed to materialize
