Spin doctors in the spotlight: Effects of strategic press and publicity coverage on perceptions of political PR

News media often engage in strategy framing when covering politics, including strategic press and publicity coverage coined to express the focus on the media’s role in the game of politics, as well as politicians’ calculated publicity and public relations efforts in relation to the media. This study examines the effect of strategic press and publicity coverage on perceptions of political PR once its practitioners and their publicity efforts have become the object of reporting. Drawing on data from two experiments (n=863), we showhowpolitical PR professionals have themselves little to gain from becoming part of the story. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Recent studies in political communication have shown that political journalism is increasingly laying bare the news media’s and communication professionals’ own role in political, strategic, and democratic processes such as election campaigns. Turning the spotlight inward, this form of news content, referred to as metacoverage, explicitly exposes the interdependent yet strained interactions between politics and the press (i.e., “press coverage”) as well as the media strategies that politicians and their communications staff and advisors employ in order to generate publicity, boost their images, and proor reactively manage the news (i.e., “publicity coverage”). Studies have signalled that journalists are prone to commonly apply a strategy frame when covering press and publicity processes in politics. Similar to the detrimental effects on political attitudes associated with so-called “generic” strategy frames, research has shown that strategically framed press and publicity news can indeed contribute to cynical attitudes towards political actors and the political process too. It is unknown, however, how metacoverage impacts on public perceptions of the political communication profession and its practitioners; the very group of actors that has become increasingly part of the media’s “restless searchlight.” The goal of this study, therefore, is to extend the research agenda to examine how generic strategy coverage, and strategic press and publicity metacoverage affect individuals’ level of cynicism about political PR. In two similarly designed experiments allowing for replication within a single study, we investigate how exposure to each strategy frame (i.e., generic, press, and publicity strategy) impacts on political PR cynicism when compared with exposure to issueframed news. ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +31 20 525 2426; fax: +31 20 525 3681. E-mail address: [email protected] (C.H. de Vreese). URL: http://www.claesdevreese.com (C.H. de Vreese). 0363-8111/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2009.03.001 C.H. de Vreese, M. Elenbaas / Public Relations Review 35 (2009) 294–296 295