Tweets, Polls, and Quotes: Gatekeeping and Bias in On-Screen Visuals During the Final 2012 Presidential Debate Kristen D. Landreville, Caitlin White, & Sam Allen This study content analyzed the on-screen visuals (i.e., candidate quotes, live Twitter feed, and poll results) displayed during the final presidential debate on the ABC News=Yahoo News live-streaming online coverage. Gatekeeping and research on political campaign coverage were used to provide rationale about the nature of the on-screen visuals. Results largely confirmed previous research into presidential campaign coverage: The on-screen visuals revealed a reliance on elite sources (media-related professionals and public figures), the on-screen visuals were largely neutral in nature for the candidates (although there was a slight pro-Obama advantage in the tweets and a slight pro-Romney advantage in the quoted material shown on-screen), and the on-screen visuals focused on horserace, strategy, and image at the expense of issue and policy discussion. Keywords: Mediated Communication; New Media; Political Communication Debates are a key element during presidential campaigns and are oftentimes the climax of a campaign that has spanned several years. Debates also attract millions upon millions of television viewers. The 2012 presidential debates were no different; the first debate reached an approximate 67.2 million viewers (Nielsen, 2012a), the second debate saw viewership drop slightly with 65.6 million viewers (Nielsen, Kristen D. Landreville is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Wyoming. Caitlin White is a master’s student in the Department of Journalism at the University of Memphis. Sam Allen is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. Correspondence to: Kristen D. Landreville, 425 Ross Hall, 1000 E. University Ave., Laramie, WY, 82071, USA. E-mail: klandrev@uwyo.edu Communication Studies Vol. 66, No. 2, April–June 2015, pp. 146–164 ISSN 1051-0974 (print)/ISSN 1745-1035 (online) # 2015 Central States Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/10510974.2014.930919