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

By combining news coverage and survey data from the BP oil spill of 2010, this study demonstrates how the media played an important role in connecting the disaster to President Obama. Rather than criticizing Obama from the outset, the spill reporting escalated from a period of event-based, factual coverage to a highly politicized phase of governmental blame attribution. We utilize a natural experiment by dividing respondents of the General Social Survey into a pre-spill control group and two treatment phases distinguished by the tone of the news coverage. Using matching, we then estimate the causal effect of the media’s frame on individual-level perceptions of the president. Without the media connecting responsibility to the Obama administration, the public’s confidence in the president was unaffected in the first month of the spill. However, once politicized media coverage escalated in the months following the spill, we find that confidence in Obama decreased significantly.