Presidential Confidence in Crisis: Blame, Media, and the BP Oil Spill

Abstract

Recent studies find that voters regularly punish presidents for seemingly unrelated events, despite a clear understanding of how these issues become tied to the president. We contend that the media plays an important role in creating this link. Testing this, we examined how the 2010 BP oil spill shaped evaluations of President Barack Obama, paying particular attention to news coverage to isolate the event's applicability to the president. We estimate the causal effect of these different frames by matching respondents from a prespill control group to two separate treatment phases, finding that presidential confidence decreases once the media begins attributing political blame, but not before.

The political dynamics of voter retrospection and disaster responses

“…A reduction in public confidence in President Obama could be identified only after the media coverage went from descriptive journalism to a focus on accountability and blame. This led to the authors concluding that voters do not blindly attribute blame for a disaster; rather, media framing was the necessary intermediate variable translating the oil spill into actual voting behaviour (Johnston and Goggin, 2015, p. 468).…”

“…Compared to his popularity in unburned villages, Putin's popularity increased by about 15 percentage points (controlling for other factors) in the villages that he visited, despite them not having received any additional relief aid. Johnston and Goggin (2015) relied on temporal variation in their study of US voting behaviour after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that started in the Gulf of Mexico on 20 April 2010. According to the study, voters’ confidence in the Obama administration was unaffected at first by the oil spill itself (blind retrospection).…”

Environmental Conflict and Media Coverage of an Oil Spill in Trinidad

“…On the other hand, the media's framing of disasters can focus on blame. The public's attribution of blame toward the U.S. president has been linked to the media's framing of the 2010 BP oil spill (Johnson & Goggin, ). Using Weick's () sensemaking theory to analyze an organizational crisis in the 1992 Westray mining disaster, O'Connell and Mills (, p. 337) found that “In the case of Westray, the media authored an early tale of sorrow and loss and a later tale of blame and responsibility.…”

“…Over the last 50 years, we have come to know that the type of media (such as traditional mass and alternative) can influence the content of media coverage (Beresford, 1997;Chewning, 2015;Lee, 1993;Lyons, 2013;Molotch & Lester, 1975;Walton, Cooley, & Nicholson, 2012;Watson, 2014a), in thematically patterned or cyclical ways (Johnson & Goggin, 2015;Meissner, 2012;Miller, 1997), or in stages (Watson, 2014b) and can influence the impact of media coverage (Cheong, 2012;Ragas et al, 2014;Ritchie & Gill, 2008;Stinchcomb, 2011). Three main media framing patterns appear to have evolved over this period: nonconfrontational/privileged framing, adversarial/confrontational framing and the presentation of competing and contradictory parallel accounts.…”

Presidential Approval and the Inherited Economy

“…Other studies show voters reacting to changes in authority. For instance, during the Obama presidency,Johnston and Goggin (2015) find voters hold the president responsible for the BP oil spill disaster once media coverage begins to frame the president as responsible; Larsen…”