ABSTRACT
Coverage on the evening news is a desirable outcome for candidates, campaigns are scheduled around television. A large portion of the candidate strategy involves trying to attract coverage, and an equally large amount of the media time involves projecting winners and losers against the backdrop of expectations created by earlier news stories. The implications of television coverage are the grist of much political science research, the bulk of which deals with political images in elections. Television coverage emphasizes who is going to win, how the candidates are doing and how their campaign reflects their capacity to govern. The typical way of measuring television news coverage has been to count the number of stories broadcast by the major networks for a certain period of time. In a presidential campaign the events of each campaign day, the appearances before select audiences and the themes of prepared speeches are all set with the local and national news shows in mind.
