Good Intentions Make Bad News: Why Americans Hate Campaign Jouralism

This text outlines how campaign journalism has evolved since the 1970s, concluding that media partisanship plays a disproportionate role in determining electoral outcomes.

This book brings together the key findings from a large body of data on national political news that the authors accumulated from 1987 through 1995. It draws on this accumulated data from both campaigns, as well as personal interviews with journalists who covered them, to trace a shift in the national media's approach to election news. It argues that journalists' efforts to intervene more actively in the campaign process, which were intended to improve the quality of information available to voters, instead produced unintended consequences that proved detrimental to both journalism and the electoral system.