The Media Makes the Winner: A Field Experiment on Presidential Debates

To evaluate how perceptions of presidential debates are structured by the media, we describe a three-wave field experiment in which subjects were incentivized to watch portions of a presidential debate and post-debate television coverage. We find that post-debate coverage has strong effects on candidate evaluations, with subjects’ perceptions moving in the direction of the ideological slant of the channel they were assigned to watch on. Though these effects evolve over time, with subjects across conditions coming to express beliefs in line with the media consensus, they do not disappear altogether; indeed, they are still apparent a week later. The study offers novel field experimental evidence for the literatures on presidential debates and campaign effects. 1 We thank Frank Sesno for his support. The study was reviewed by the IRB at George Washington University, study 091619. All errors and mistakes are our own.