The Oprah Effect

By Meg Sullivan

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has appeared five times on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" since announcing his campaign on the late-night gabfest in 2003, and U.S. Senator Barack Obama says that if he ever runs for president, he'll announce his candidacy on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." If "soft" news coverage is—as its critics maintain -- dumbing down political discourse, why do politicians pop up on them so often?

Because it works—for some viewers, at least, who might not otherwise heed a candidate's plea for consideration. Call it "The Oprah Effect."

That's the name Matthew Baum, associate professor of political science at UCLA, uses to describe the phenomenon in a new study. "Soft news coverage of political candidates turns out to be surprisingly effective in reaching a certain type of voter. For politically inattentive individuals, watching political coverage in such soft news outlets as "The Oprah Winfrey Show" can make the difference between voting one's convictions and not."

With sociology graduate student Angela Jamison, Baum looked at the 2000 presidential election, in which four daytime talk shows, including Oprah's, interviewed major party candidates. Based on a survey of 40 scholars of American politics and a thorough analysis of every campaign statement made by the candidates, Baum and Jamison were able to estimate where the presidential candidates stood on a variety of issues, ranging from social and political values, like the role of government in society, to specific policy issue areas, like national defense.

As they report in this month's issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Politics, the researchers then looked at a sample of voters drawn from the American National Election Study, the longest-running national survey of citizen political attitudes and voting behavior in the United States.

Baum and Jamison determined whether each individual voted for the candidate that was closest to him or her on the issues, and especially the issues the voter considered important.

Finally, they compared the voting records of individuals who watched daytime TV talk shows, like Winfrey's, with those who did not watch such shows.

Baum and Jamison found that politically inattentive voters who watched daytime talk shows were nearly 25% more likely to vote according to their own values and preferences than their counterparts who did something else with their afternoons.

"Inattentive voters are less likely to devote significant time and energy to ensuring that they vote consistently," said Baum, the author of "Soft News Goes to War: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy in the New Media Age" (Princeton University Press, 2003). "For them, the choice is frequently not whether to consume hard or soft news, but whether to consume soft news or no news at all."

In fact, "The Oprah Effect" had more than twice as strong an impact on the voting patterns of politically unengaged voters as traditional news coverage had on the patterns of the politically engaged.

"Because highly engaged voters already possess substantial political knowledge, exposure to campaign coverage via either the soft or hard news media is likely to have a limited effect on their voting choices," he said. "They're wading through party mailers, visiting candidates' websites, debating issues with friends and maybe even attending candidates' forums. They've got information coming at them from all directions, so no one source is overwhelmingly influential."