Visible and invisible candidates: A case study in “competing logics” of campaign coverage

The article presents a case study of the coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign of Democrat Larry Agran. Agran's background and experience made him less than a “major” candidate yet more than a “minor” candidate. Agran's anomalous status, along with his exclusion from most televised campaign debates and his inclusion in some, helped make visible some of the normally implicit journalistic decisions concerning campaign coverage. An analysis of the patterns of coverage and noncoverage of his campaign, interviews with local and national journalists, and discussions with average citizens suggests that there are at least three different ways to think about whether and how a presidential campaign should be covered: national journalistic logic, local journalistic logic, and public logic. These logics vary along a number of dimensions, including perception of news‐gathering resources, what a presidential campaign is all about, whose perception of candidates is most important, how to react to signs that a candidate who has not been covered is gaining ground, in what arena a presidential campaign is waged, and how to cover minor candidates at major events. The article concludes that the greatest gap exists between national journalistic logic and public logic and that the public deserves to know more about how national journalists' news judgments are made.