The Campbell collapse: How the failure of the earned media strategy triggered the electoral downfall of Canada's oldest political party

Political scientists agree election campaigns in western industrialized democracies are largely media events.;As a consequence, the impact of media coverage on voter intentions has been the subject of academic analysis for more than 50 years. Paul Lazarsfeld's self-selective school of the late 1940s with its two-step flow of communication theory was the dominant paradigm for media studies through the early decades.;In recent years, however, a third stream of thought has emerged between the selective attention and magic bullet schools. Inspired by the writings of Walter Lippman in the 1920s and sociologist Todd Gitlin, Shanto Iyengar and Donald Kinder make the argument that television news is news that matters; not because it tells people what to think, but more precisely because it tells people what to think about; that media has an impact on public opinion through its "agenda-setting," "priming" capabilities.;Building on a study of the 1988 election that concluded campaigns matter, this paper examines the "earned" media component of the Progressive Conservative Party's 1993 campaign to determine if media coverage of campaign events impacts on voter intentions.