Abstract

We study media representations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In particular, we train models of semantic memory on a large number of news media outlets that published online articles during the course of the election. Based on the structure of word co-occurrence in these media outlets, our models learn semantic representations for the two presidential candidates as well as for widely studied personality traits. We find that models trained on media outlets most read by Clinton voters and media outlets most read by Trump voters differ in the strength of association between the two candidates’ names and trait words pertaining to morality. We observe some differences for trait words pertaining to warmth, but none for trait words pertaining to competence.

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