ABSTRACT
While journalists view the chief goal of their profession as informing the audience, they labor under the necessity of attracting their attention. As Walter Lippmann remarked, journalists face “the economic necessity of interesting the reader quickly, and the economic risk involved in not interesting him at all” (Lippmann 1965 [1922], 217). Attention-grabbing news helps to maximize audience size and hence the revenues of media outlets in the highly competitive marketplace (McManus 1994; see also Gans 1979; Just 2007; Thompson 2000, 80–81). Researchers have pointed to various news biases or frames that attract audience attention, particularly soft news topics (Baum 2003), and dramatize the story or focus on persons rather than abstract ideas (Bennett 2012). The prominence of news coverage of political scandals can be explained by their inherent drama, personalization, and likelihood of attracting audience attention. These are criteria that fit well with widely shared news values in market-driven American media.
