Related papers: Media Slant is Contagious
Social media are decentralized, interactive, and transformative, empowering users to produce and spread information to influence others. This has changed the dynamics of political communication that were previously dominated by traditional…
Media bias and its extreme form, fake news, can decisively affect public opinion. Especially when reporting on policy issues, slanted news coverage may strongly influence societal decisions, e.g., in democratic elections. Our paper makes…
News outlets are well known to have political associations, and many national outlets cultivate political biases to cater to different audiences. Journalists working for these news outlets have a big impact on the stories they cover. In…
Given the extremely large pool of events and stories available, media outlets need to focus on a subset of issues and aspects to convey to their audience. Outlets are often accused of exhibiting a systematic bias in this selection process,…
We first adopt a human-guided machine learning framework to develop a new dataset for hyperpartisan news title detection with 2,200 manually labeled and 1.8 million machine-labeled titles that were posted from 2014 to the present by nine…
Pink slime journalism is a practice where news outlets publish low-quality or inflammatory partisan articles, claiming to be local news networks. This paper examines the spread of pink slime sites on Facebook using public posts from Pages…
Digital news outlets rely on a variety of outside contributors, from freelance journalists, to political commentators, to executives and politicians. These external dependencies create a network among news outlets, traced along the…
What kinds of social media users read junk news? We examine the distribution of the most significant sources of junk news in the three months before President Donald Trump first State of the Union Address. Drawing on a list of sources that…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. By being flexible about the location or width of the center, this measure enables the researcher to analyze polarization…
Using nationally representative data from the 2020 and 2024 American National Election Studies (ANES), this paper traces how the U.S. social media landscape has shifted across platforms, demographics, and politics. Overall platform use has…
Social media is currently one of the most important means of news communication. Since people are consuming a large fraction of their daily news through social media, most of the traditional news channels are using social media to catch the…
We investigate how crises alter societies by analyzing the timing and channels of change using a longitudinal multi-wave survey of a representative sample of Americans throughout 2020. This methodology allows us to overcome some of the…
Social media has been a paramount arena for election campaigns for political actors. While many studies have been paying attention to the political campaigns related to partisanship, politicians also can conduct different campaigns…
News media has been utilized as a political tool to stray from facts, presenting biased claims without evidence. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, politically biased news (PBN) has significantly undermined public trust in vaccines, despite strong…
Over the past couple of years, the topic of "fake news" and its influence over people's opinions has become a growing cause for concern. Although the spread of disinformation on the Internet is not a new phenomenon, the widespread use of…
There is a broad consensus that news media outlets incorporate ideological biases in their news articles. However, prior studies on measuring the discrepancies among media outlets and further dissecting the origins of thematic differences…
A large body of literature in economics and political science examines the impact of democracy and political freedoms on various outcomes using cross-country comparisons. This paper explores the possibility that any positive impact of…
Social media, such as blogs, are often seen as democratic entities that allow more voices to be heard than the conventional mass or elite media. Some also feel that social media exhibits a balancing force against the arguably slanted elite…
The 2004 US Presidential Election cycle marked the debut of Internet-based media such as blogs and social networking websites as institutionally recognized features of the American political landscape. Using a longitudinal sample of all…
This paper aims to shed light on alternative news media ecosystems that are believed to have influenced opinions and beliefs by false and/or biased news reporting during the 2016 US Presidential Elections. We examine a large, professionally…