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Taking out the Trash: An Empirical Investigation of Strategic Timing of News Releases

Are political actors more likely to release bad news when it is least likely to be noticed? Former government and administration spokespersons claim they chose when to release information harmful to their cause when they were on the job (see Norris 2005); there are numerous anecdotes of negative news stories being released late on Friday (see Theimer 2009); and an episode of The West Wing suggests that the politicians try to release lots of bad news together on Friday, an act the fictional White House deputy chief of staff calls “taking out the trash.” Despite these popular accounts, there has been little systematic investigation of strategically timed news dumps. In this paper we look at the empirical record of Take out the Trash Day. We begin by outlining and building on the reasons that political actors would strategically release information, taking into account the mediating role that technology may play (Lee 2005). We then correlate the positivity and negativity of more than 12,500 Department of Defense news releases from October 1994 through September 2012 to their release days. We find mixed evidence for the hypothesis.