ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the harder presidential campaigns try to control what journalists report about their candidate, the harder journalists try to report something else instead. This is the rule of product substitution. The chapter proposes a theory of media politics to explain why this sort of product substitution occurs. It discusses political product substitution itself. The chapter reduces the complexity and drama of sixteen major-party presidential campaigns to numerical scores on a handful of variables, the most important of which are media-initiated negativity and news management style. Having thus measured the key concepts in theoretical analysis, it tests the extent to which they are statistically correlated with one another. The chapter defines media negativity as negative information or opinion that reporters themselves insert into the news. It sketches a theory of interactions between politicians, journalists, and citizens and examines a single testable implication of that theory, the rule of product substitution.
