Obama's presidential election and the effects on confirmative action discussions in the US press

The main question here is whether discussions of affirmative action, race and racism in the US newspapers have changed with time and namely with the approaching of the US presidential elections and the successful candidacy of Barack Obama.

The main assumption is that, because of Barack Obama’s candidacy for a president and his success during the last months prior US elections, newspapers would maybe find discussions on affirmative action and racial injustice not that necessary.
The findings can also reveal the opposite assumption, namely that the success of Barack Obama in the pre-election months, contributed to an increase in discussions on affirmative action and racial injustice in the American press.

Main theoretical considerations for this assignment are that the candidacy for a president of an African-American man provides an explicit example of racial progress, which on its own could bring about a decreased concern for issues of racial injustice. Even though this candidacy implies racial progress, people shall also be reminded that often exceptions to the rule are merely used for reinforcing that same long-existent rule, more specifically that an African-American running for a president could be a sign of racial progress but it could also be a reinforcement of racial injustice by implying that after such personal achievement, it is no longer relevant to discuss racial inequality and discrimination. The results could be important for revealing what the journalists’ practices were and if there is a need for a change.

The materials which have been used are articles from the two leading newspapers in the USA, namely the New York Times and the USA Today, where these articles were published a few months before the US presidential elections, namely in August, September, October and November 2008.

As for the two sources, the USA today is a daily broadsheet, said to be the most widely-read newspaper in the United States with a readership of 4.3 million readers, and also known for synthesizing news down to easy-to-read-and-comprehend stories.

The New York Times is also a daily broadsheet, which is said to avoid sensationalism in order to appeal to cultured, intellectual readers. Having in mind that both newspapers are quality daily broadsheets, the sources which have been used do not seem to be much different from each other, which is a good for the validity of the results.

In order to find out whether discussions on race and affirmative action have increased or decreased in American newspapers with the approaching of the election of the new president of the USA, we will use the AmCAT software and would use the keywords “affirmative” and “racis*”.

Initially, the words which were used were “affirmative”, “action” and “race” but the use of these words turned out to be problematic for the software, since any time the word “action” was used in an article it was presented as a result, although it had nothing to do with affirmative action. Another problem with the initial search was that “race” was not a good keyword, since “race” can have a number of meanings, ranging from any contest or competition (especially prominent word during elections and election campaigns), to a group of persons related by common descent or heredity.

Thus, the decision which was made was to include “affirmative” as a main keyword, due to the fact that almost always when newspapers/journalists use this word, it is used in relation to “action” and it refers to affirmative action (see Appendix 1). The second keyword which was used was “racis*”, which would mean that the words which have been counted in the articles are the words “racism” and “racist”, thus excluding words such as race, racing etc. The name of Barack Obama was not included in the word-search, since his election as a president is more important for marking a certain time period for this type of research question. After all, the main focus is on whether there is a change in discussing/mentioning affirmative action and racial injustice with the approaching of the presidential elections and not really the connections/associations between these words and the president himself.

The results of this research showed that with the approach of the US presidential elections, especially in the months of October and November, and after the US presidential election on 4 Nov 2008, newspapers mentioned/discussed racism and affirmative action less often, when compared to the month of August for example.

affirmative Racis*
2008-8 14 21
2008-9 5 12
2008-10 3 26
2008-11 1 9
Count 23 68

Table 1.



Table 2.


Interesting is also the fact that, while for affirmative action the decrease over time is stable, for “racism” and “racist” this is not the case. A more detailed qualitative look at the 26 articles which include keywords “racis*” from the month of October clarifies the fact that during the month prior to the US elections both newspapers have published articles in which they’ve discussed the potential impact of racist sentiments among Americans for their electoral choice. Later this was found to be the case for the NY Times.

When we look at the distribution of articles per medium, The New York Times refers to these two keywords in 62 articles, while the USA today refers to them in 21. These findings could be indicative of the fact that overall, The New York Times is a newspaper which pays more importance to issues of racism and affirmative action than the USA Today. We can also imply that the newspaper with the most readership in the USA mentions issues of racism and affirmative action far less often when compared with the New York Times.



Table 3.

Additionally, while the trend of mentioning/discussing affirmative action and racism stably decreases throughout the months prior to the US elections in the USA Today newspaper, this is not the case of the NY Times, especially for the month of September.

To Conclude:

From the findings now, it is clear that the overall trend in news reporting is that with the approaching success of Barack Obama in the presidential election, journalists found it less important to mention/discuss racism and affirmative action, maybe due to the racial progress which Obama’s successful candidacy implied. This decreasing trend can be better seen for issues of affirmative action and mainly for the USA today.