For the Media

First off, I'd like to compliment Lynn and Ryan on their recent posts on why McCain is being damaged as a candidate by the current focus on the economy (Ryan|Lynn). Ryan correctly argues that McCain wants to postpone tomorrow's scheduled debate because he desperately wants to maximize the salience and impact of the foreign-policy centered debate. And Lynn notes that any time spent focusing on the economy now is only helping advantage Obama--a point that seems underlined by Obama's recent gains in the polls.

So why is McCain talking about the economy at all? Unfortunately for him, his campaign agenda is not truly under his control. Or rather, while McCain might prefer to be talking about something--anything--other than the economy right now, failing to address it would likely be more damaging than doing nothing at all (although maybe better than addressing it in a foolish way...). McCain is doing damage control and trying to ride out the crisis in order to fight another day.

The reason why McCain is being forced to talk about the economy, of course, is that McCain doesn't control events, the media, or very much else outside of his campaign bus. In the absence of any dominating story or event, McCain would have an opportunity to try to shift public attention to a topic of his choosing, but the current economic meltdown has changed that (at least for the immediate future). If McCain chose to make a major foreign policy speech today, he would be blasted for failing to address the "real" issue facing the country, and the speech itself would receive relatively little coverage (outside of attacks for having chosen to speak on the topic).

Turning once again to UCLA's Communication Studies Archive, let's see exactly how the news landscape has shifted under McCain's feet since the start of August. To give a quick sense of the change, I first search for mentions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Economy in our index of news and public affairs television programs (n=24,529 total mentions).

Daily Mentions of Afghanistan vs. Iraq vs. Economy in UCLA Index of TV News and Public Affairs Programs

A quick check of this chart shows the degree to which the economy had been pushed from the headlines until recently, and the degree to which it has come roaring back in the last 10 days.

To get a sense of the economic rhetoric associated with the current crisis, I then ran a search for mentions of "Recession" or "Depression" in the Archive's index.

As one can readily see, the use of these alarming terms has exploded in the last two weeks, with 90 mentions per day being common this week.

Finally, I ran a search of how often terms are being tied together in the media, either by journalists or the candidates themselves. To do so, I searched for instances where the words Obama or McCain appeared within 50 words of the terms Economy or Iraq.

The results again show that while Iraq was a major topic of concern for the candidates--particularly during the party conventions and shortly afterward, it has now been pushed away almost completely by coverage of the economy (note that the day after the L.A. Metrolink crash had no such stories and is blank on the chart).

Ultimately, McCain has no real choice here, at least in the short term: he can either talk about the economy (and try to appear to be doing something about it) or risk having other people talk about him AND the economy. "Riding the tiger" of economic news might not be the most fun for McCain, but he probably wouldn't enjoy being mauled, either.

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Riding the tiger: McCain and news about the economy

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