Partisan Audiences Research Articles

Becoming a Target: Journalists’ Perspectives on Anti-Press Discourse and Experiences with Hate Speech

ABSTRACT In many parts of the world, journalists work in increasingly hostile environments. To better understand the characteristics and implications of hostility against the press in a hybrid regime, this study explores how journalists in Serbia perceive and experience anti-press hate speech. Based on 20 interviews with diverse reporters, we describe hate speech against journalists as an ad hominem attack triggered by the very nature of journalistic conduct. We discuss two identified mechanisms of hate speech propagation. The first, machinery of hate speech, refers to orchestrated attacks on independent journalists by ruling party officials, pro-government news outlets, and troll armies. In contrast, the lone-wolf-haters mechanism refers to authentic and sporadic expressions of hate by extreme partisan audiences to which all journalists are susceptible, regardless of their affiliation. Describing their personal experiences, the participants report various responses to encountering hate speech, ranging from immediate emotions to less immediate psychological reactions to physical health problems. To prevent hateful acts from interfering with their journalistic performance, they rely on a variety of coping strategies and mechanisms, including psychological and professional strategies, as well as social and institutional support.

Quantifying partisan news diets in Web and TV audiences.

Partisan segregation within the news audience buffers many Americans from countervailing political views, posing a risk to democracy. Empirical studies of the online media ecosystem suggest that only a small minority of Americans, driven by a mix of demand and algorithms, are siloed according to their political ideology. However, such research omits the comparatively larger television audience and often ignores temporal dynamics underlying news consumption. By analyzing billions of browsing and viewing events between 2016 and 2019, with a novel framework for measuring partisan audiences, we first estimate that 17% of Americans are partisan-segregated through television versus roughly 4% online. Second, television news consumers are several times more likely to maintain their partisan news diets month-over-month. Third, TV viewers’ news diets are far more concentrated on preferred sources. Last, partisan news channels’ audiences are growing even as the TV news audience is shrinking. Our results suggest that television is the top driver of partisan audience segregation among Americans.

Institutional Design, Information Transmission, and Public Opinion: Making the Case for Trade

Domestic debates about trade have increased the salience of international economic cooperation among the public, raising the question of whether, and how, domestic support can be rallied in support of international trade agreements. We argue that institutional features of trade agreements provide important cues to domestic audiences that shape support, particularly the membership composition and voting rules for multilateral deals. We use two survey experiments to show that the US public is more supportive of trade when it is negotiated with like-minded countries. We also find that the voting rules shape support for trade agreements, but differently across partisan audiences. Republican voters strongly favor the home country having veto power, whereas Democrats prefer agreements with equal voting rules. These differences are largely driven by perceptions of the agreement’s benefit for the nation and the public’s trust of the negotiators and perceived fairness of the rules.

Political audience diversity and news reliability in algorithmic ranking.

Newsfeed algorithms frequently amplify misinformation and other low-quality content. How can social media platforms more effectively promote reliable information? Existing approaches are difficult to scale and vulnerable to manipulation. In this paper, we propose using the political diversity of a website's audience as a quality signal. Using news source reliability ratings from domain experts and web browsing data from a diverse sample of 6,890 US residents, we first show that websites with more extreme and less politically diverse audiences have lower journalistic standards. We then incorporate audience diversity into a standard collaborative filtering framework and show that our improved algorithm increases the trustworthiness of websites suggested to users-especially those who most frequently consume misinformation-while keeping recommendations relevant. These findings suggest that partisan audience diversity is a valuable signal of higher journalistic standards that should be incorporated into algorithmic ranking decisions.

Blogging as Digital Citizen Participation

Abstract This article analyses the political blogging of the Malagasy diaspora as part of their transnational political participation. It focuses on three aspects of the blogs: the most frequent topics addressed, how are the topics addressed, and the political bloggers. To do this, a Thematic Content Analysis based on four categories (‘soapboxes’, ‘transmission belts’, ‘conversation starters’ and ‘mobilisers’) of four of their most active and influential political blogs was conducted. The analysis revealed that (i) the blogs are mostly “soapboxes” that consist of commenting the political issues in Madagascar, (ii) their contents were mostly focused on the coup d’ état in 2009, and (iii) the bloggers are involved in direct political participation in parallel offline. This paper shows the role of the studied blogs as tribunes of opinions that gather a partisan audience discussing the Malagasy political issues, and as judgment tools contributing to the braking or fuelling of Madagascar’s international relations.

Experimental Effects of Tweets Encouraging Social Distancing: Effects of Source, Emotional Appeal, and Political Ideology on Emotion, Threat, and Efficacy.

Public health officials and celebrities use social media to provide guidance to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Messages apply different promotional strategies to motivate behavior change, likely yielding divergent reactions from partisan audiences. The Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM) suggests that perceived threat for a negative outcome should impact perceived need for the advocated health behavior, which should be more appealing to an audience if perceived it to be efficacious and feasible. This study examines the interactive effects of Tweet source, message emotional appeal, and audience political affiliation on US adults' perceptions of COVID-19 threat and social distancing efficacy during early months of the pandemic. This online survey experiment applies the EPPM to assess US adults' reactions to tweets encouraging social distancing. The experiment tests 3 emotional appeals (fear, humor, and neutral) and 2 sources (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] and celebrity) on adults' emotional reactions and perceptions of COVID-19 threat and social distancing efficacy. The final sample included 415 US adults (242 Democrat and 173 Republican) recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Outcome measures were adapted from the EPPM and include perceived susceptibility to and severity of COVID-19, and response efficacy and self-efficacy regarding social distancing. Each was measured through the survey on a 7-point response scale. Humor and fear appeal messages evoked less fear and guilt responses than a neutral tweet from the CDC. Fear and guilt emotions predicted greater perceived threat, while hope and pride predicted efficacy constructs in relationships moderated by political ideology. Public health messages targeting a bipartisan audience through social media may increase perceived threat by inducing fear of COVID-19 infection. EPPM theory suggests boosting efficacy is also critical to message acceptance and behavior change; thus, inducing feelings of hope and pride in addition to fear may be particularly effective.

What’s in a Label? Negative Credibility Labels in Partisan News

Concern about partisan audiences blindly following partisan news brands while simultaneously being unable to distinguish the credible news from hoax news dominates media criticism and theoretical inquiries. Companies and media literacy advocates have suggested credibility labels as a solution. This experiment tests the effectiveness of credibility labels at the intersection of partisan news brands and partisan news stories. Using news credibility theory and Partisan Media Opinion hypothesis, it investigates the effects credibility labels have on partisan audiences, partisan news brands, and partisan news stories. It finds that credibility labels may be an effective news literacy tool, and that credibility is enhanced when the news story’s ideological perspective does not match the ideology of the news brand.

Brett Kavanaugh’s Self-Defense: A Case Study in Hyper-Partisan Apologia

ABSTRACT Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle challenges traditional rubrics for evaluating apologia. In cases of hyper-partisan apologia aimed at convincing a partisan audience, an alternative framework is needed. We argue that Kavanaugh salvaged his confirmation by conducting hyper-partisan apologia and identify three elements of this strategy. This essay demonstrates the importance of differentiating audiences in analyses of apologia and proposes the existence of a sub-genre of hyper-partisan apologia.

Brett Kavanaugh’s Self-Defense: A Case Study in Hyper-Partisan Apologia

ABSTRACT Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle challenges traditional rubrics for evaluating apologia. In cases of hyper-partisan apologia aimed at convincing a partisan audience, an alternative framework is needed. We argue that Kavanaugh salvaged his confirmation by conducting hyper-partisan apologia and identify three elements of this strategy. This essay demonstrates the importance of differentiating audiences in analyses of apologia and proposes the existence of a sub-genre of hyper-partisan apologia.

Faking Alternative Journalism? An Analysis of Self-Presentations of “Fake News” Sites

Scholars have come to understand fake news as content packaged to look like mainstream news but which is deceptive and low in facticity. This study focuses on the textual self-representations of 50 prominent sites labelled ‘fake news’ following the 2016 US election campaign, with an eye to understanding their stated values and how such sites might mimic other journalistic forms. Findings from a qualitative textual analysis reveal an open commitment to ideological, activist and value-driven reporting by the sites. Outlets openly disclose their biases, attack the mainstream media and privilege truths from subjective perspectives, appealing to partisan audiences disillusioned with the mainstream press. In light of our analysis, we argue that fake news producers should be understood as hybrid actors mimicking features of both mainstream and alternative journalism in a manner that results in interpretive partisan news communities.

Auditing Partisan Audience Bias within Google Search

There is a growing consensus that online platforms have a systematic influence on the democratic process. However, research beyond social media is limited. In this paper, we report the results of a mixed-methods algorithm audit of partisan audience bias and personalization within Google Search. Following Donald Trump's inauguration, we recruited 187 participants to complete a survey and install a browser extension that enabled us to collect Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) from their computers. To quantify partisan audience bias, we developed a domain-level score by leveraging the sharing propensities of registered voters on a large Twitter panel. We found little evidence for the "filter bubble'' hypothesis. Instead, we found that results positioned toward the bottom of Google SERPs were more left-leaning than results positioned toward the top, and that the direction and magnitude of overall lean varied by search query, component type (e.g. "answer boxes"), and other factors. Utilizing rank-weighted metrics that we adapted from prior work, we also found that Google's rankings shifted the average lean of SERPs to the right of their unweighted average.

Partisan audience polarization: Beyond selective exposure

ABSTRACTThe proliferation of available media outlets provides unprecedented access to specialized content. This dynamic media environment facilitates the emergence of partisan selective exposure at the individual level. When aggregated, these selective choices can materialize as partisan audience polarization, defined by the use/nonuse of so-called “Red” and “Blue” news media. The present study extends this line of inquiry beyond selective exposure. The author uses metered exposure data to explore patterns of loyalty and avoidance using single-source, cross-platform data from Nielsen’s TV/Internet Convergence Panel. The results are mixed, suggesting that audiences of partisan news outlets exhibit high levels of loyalty, but also that they do not avoid news of a different slant.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival: 24–29 November 2015

Roughly midway through this year's Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, a solo recital performance by the glissando flautist Erik Drescher somehow managed to capture simultaneously much of what makes today's hcmf// both interesting and infuriating. Drescher's choice of four pieces, obviously severely limited by the finite number of works scored for his unusual instrument, managed to forge divisions even through what seemed a somewhat partisan audience. Pairing the by-now somewhat familiar and perhaps predictable stylings of Salvatore Sciarrino's Il pomeriggio di un allarme al parcheggio with his fight to be heard over the wall of blasting electronic noise featured in Dror Feiler's Questions and Stones 3, and then again against the subtle simplicity of Alvin Lucier's Double Himalaya meant that most left in parts satisfied and in parts irritated.

Why Do Partisan Audiences Participate? Perceived Public Opinion as the Mediating Mechanism

The bulk of current literature on partisan media explores its various detrimental influences on the democratic sphere. This study highlights a possible positive outcome of partisan media consumption: enhanced political participation. It is hypothesized that consumption of congruent partisan media will tilt perceptions of opinion climate so that it is viewed as more supportive of one’s views, while consumption of incongruent partisan media is viewed as less supportive. Consequently, consumers of congruent partisan media will participate more, and vice versa. The hypotheses are tested using two panel studies: the first conducted during the 2012 U.S. presidential elections ( N = 377) whereas the second, during the 2013 Israeli election ( N = 340). In the Israeli case, survey data are supplemented with behavioral measures. All hypotheses are supported except the one regarding the effects of incongruent partisan media exposure. The results are discussed in light of the spiral of silence theory and the selective exposure hypothesis.

Mass Administrative Reorganization, Media Attention, and the Paradox of Information

AbstractHow does media attention influence government decisions about whether to terminate independent administrative agencies? The authors argue that an agency's salience with partisan audiences has a direct effect, but a high media profile can disrupt normal government monitoring processes and obfuscate termination decisions. This argument is evaluated in the context of a recent mass administrative reorganization by the British coalition government using probit and heteroscedastic probit regression models. The evidence suggests that termination is less likely for agencies salient in newspapers popular with the government's core supporters but not those read by its minority coalition partner. We also find that agencies with greater overall newspaper salience as well as younger agencies have a higher error variance.

All News is Bad News: Newspaper Coverage of Political Parties in Spain

Spain has a highly partisan media system, with newspapers reaching self-selected partisan audiences and espousing explicitly partisan editorial preferences. Do the newspapers of the left and right differ in how they cover politics in ways that can be predicted by their partisan leanings? We review theories of issue ownership, journalistic standards, and information scarcity and test hypotheses derived from each. We find that the parties converge substantially in virtually every aspect of their coverage. Few differences emerge when we look at what topics are covered or in the dynamics of which topics gain attention over time. However, we confirm important differences across the papers when they make explicit reference to individual political parties. Journalistic norms result in a surprising focus on the faults of one’s enemies, however, rather than the virtues of one’s allies. Our assessment is based on a comprehensive database of all front-page stories in El País and El Mundo, Spain’s largest daily newspapers, from 1996 through 2011.

The Influence of Tone, Target, and Issue Ownership on Political Advertising Effects in Primary Versus General Elections

The conventional wisdom in the literature about political advertising effects—e.g., going negative risks backlash, stick to issues your party owns—has been derived from studies of general elections. Much less attention has been paid to primary elections, in which a partisan audience may be receptive to attacks on the opposing party and may judge most issues to be handled better by their own party. This experiment (N = 223) sets out to investigate the roles of tone (positive versus comparative), target (none, primary opponent, or general election opponent), and issue ownership (party-owned issue or unowned issue) in responses to political advertising during primary versus general elections. As predicted, partisans in primary election conditions had lower ad and sponsoring candidate evaluations for comparative ads attacking a primary opponent than for positive ads or comparative ads attacking the eventual general election opponent, but there were no differences between the latter two. Independents in the general election conditions responded more positively to positive ads than comparative ads. Issue ownership had no main effects.

The Opinion Factor: The Effects of Opinionated News on Information Processing and Attitude Change

The recent growth in opinionated cable news, in which the anchor expresses a clear political point of view, has aroused concerns about its potential polarizing effects on public opinion. Key to uncovering opinionated news' impact on public opinion is an understanding of how partisan audiences process opinionated news: Do the overt partisan cues in opinionated news stimulate biased processing, thereby enhancing attitude polarization among opposing partisans relative to non-opinionated news? Or are opinionated news messages processed uniformly by partisans, contributing to direct persuasion? Two online experiments tested the effects of news opinionation—and interactions with individual political partisanship—on information processing and attitude change. Results from both studies most clearly support a model of direct persuasion. Message processing and attitude change follow the direction of the news' opinionation, with little variation by partisanship, offering no evidence that opinionated news intensifies attitude differences among partisans relative to non-opinionated news. Implications for theories of political information processing and democratic politics are discussed.

Gender differences in cooperation with group membership

We study experimentally how males and females differ in the way same-gender peers observing their action affects their social behavior. In our experiment, people play a Prisonerʼs Dilemma game with a partisan audience watching the choice. Two groups participated in each session; these groups could be both all-male, both all-female, or one all-male and one all-female. Groups were separated into two rooms. Each person in the group played the game once with an audience of the same group and once with audience of the other group. Behavior is significantly affected by the interaction of gender and place: males cooperate substantially less often when observed by their peer group, while females cooperate substantially more often. We discuss a possible explanation for this pattern: Males and females wish to signal their in-group peers, but males wish to signal their formidability and females wish to signal their cooperativeness.

"Strange People" in the Politburo: Institutional Problems and the Human Factor in the Economic Collapse of the Soviet Empire

Egor Gaidar, Gibel' imperii: Uroki imperii dlia sovremennoi Rossii [Collapse of an Empire: Lessons of the Empire for Modern Russia]. 448 pp. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006. ISBN 5824307598. To the chagrin of Egor Gaidar's many admirers among the liberal intelligentsia, the former premier is not at all popular in today's Russia (as they say in Moscow, the Garden Ring). fact, the party that he led until 2004, called Russia's Democratic Choice from 1993 to 2001 and then the Union of Right Forces, consecutively lost every election, both when it was actually in power (1993) and, especially, when it was in opposition. The reputation of the father of shock therapy, who robbed many Sberbank customers, remains amazingly resilient, even as many heroes and anti-heroes of the first years of independent Russia have long ago been totally forgotten. (1) The reason for this is due largely to the self-representation of the former prime minister. Even Gaidar's faithful supporters, while eager to acknowledge his unusual intellect and personal civic courage, realize the unconvincing nature, to put it mildly, of his attempts to communicate his views beyond the all-understanding and almost all-forgiving community of liberals. To this day, he is remembered for a pre-election video clip of the party leader, alone and purposeful, walking along the railway tracks. The need to justify himself for 1992 to those who do not need this justification, and to advance arguments for his position to those who do not want to engage him in any kind of discussion, is obviously weighing on Gaidar. His new book, published in a run of 8,000 copies by the well-known humanities publisher ROSSPEN, is no doubt aimed at a wide range of members of Russia's class and falls somewhere between a political manifesto and a research study. attempt at dialogue is, however, no more persuasive than was the video of yore. His book, Collapse of an Empire, is poorly written, shows little regard for the reader, and will be difficult even for a specialist who is well-disposed toward the author. It is difficult to imagine that it will be read, let alone accepted, by a politically partisan audience without specialized training in economics. Gaidar's book is dedicated to a search for logical reasons that led to the collapse of the Soviet empire. This book is not a memoir but an attempt to analyze what leads to the disintegration of empires and the problems that empires engender (14), the author writes in the preface. He then states something like a postulate that he means to refute: In Russian public opinion today the following picture of the world is dominant: (1) 20 years ago, there existed a stable, growing, mighty country--the Soviet Union; (2) strange people (possibly agents of foreign intelligence) attempted political and economic reforms; (3) the results of these reforms were catastrophic; (4) in 1999-2000, people came to power who were concerned with the state interests of the country; (5) after this, life started to get better.... [T]he aim ... of this book is to show that this picture of the world does not correspond to reality (19). Actually, points 4 and 5 are not discussed in the book at all. The problems indicated in point 3, which are characterized in the book as catastrophic, form the subject of a good half of the work. Mostly, what the book calls to mind is not a memoir--there are no reminiscences anywhere--but rather the notebook of an earnest student who writes down whatever he sees that relates to his topic. According to Gaidar himself, When one tries to dispute common sense, one should not skimp on finding supporting evidence (194). is what permits him not only to spend entire pages quoting from the minutes of meetings, thereby reducing his own text to only 15 percent or so of some chapters (as occurs in chapters 5-8), but also to counter the postulates of his imaginary critic in points 1 and 2 by appealing to dozens of facts from different historical periods that are taken out of context and are supposed to substantiate his views. …