Behind the Headlines, It's a Different Story? Variations in the Supply of Mass-Mediated Political Information

Abstract: This paper examines how news headlines about politics represent the stories they lead. Four hypotheses are developed to test the proposition that headlines distort the political information supply they are selected from. Using a unique dataset from the 2006 Canadian federal election campaign, the paper compares the supply essential political information (cognitive heuristics) in headlines and stories. All election headlines and stories published by seven major Canadian dailies and five Internet news websites are included in the analysis. Results fit with previous work on this topic, demonstrating that mass media headlines convey predictably different cues about politics than the stories they introduce (Andrew 2007). This study, however, also finds consistent differences between the content of online election headlines and those printed by large-circulation newspapers. In short, this paper offers further evidence that people who rely on media-generated shortcuts such as headlines are exposed to a fundamentally different stream of information about politics than those who pay closer attention