https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/33759251?show=full
Harvard recently studied on how online media covered the election, influenced each other, and how people shared it through social media. It's 140 pages and covers over 2 million stories by 70,000 sources between May 2015 and Election Day. The results will probably not be surprising to those of us posting here. Here are just a few highlights.
Interestingly, they find that Clinton supporters tended not to share stories from center-right or right news sources as much as Trump supporters shared stories from center-left or left sources, suggesting liberals are more insular than conservatives. Does this mean liberals are a bunch of babies sitting in their ideological echo chambers? Well:
I could spend all day posting graphs and data, go check it out.
Harvard recently studied on how online media covered the election, influenced each other, and how people shared it through social media. It's 140 pages and covers over 2 million stories by 70,000 sources between May 2015 and Election Day. The results will probably not be surprising to those of us posting here. Here are just a few highlights.
In this study, we analyze both mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 United States presidential election. We document that the majority of mainstream media coverage was negative for both candidates, but largely followed Donald Trump's agenda: when reporting on Hillary Clinton, coverage primarily focused on the various scandals related to the Clinton Foundation and emails. When focused on Trump, major substantive issues, primarily immigration, were prominent. Indeed, immigration emerged as a central issue in the campaign and served as a defining issue for the Trump campaign. We find that the structure and composition of media on the right and left are quite different. The leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices. On the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations steeped in the traditions and practices of objective journalism.
Understanding the role of immigration in the 2016 election is complicated by the many facets of the issue and the distinct frames used to describe the topic, each of which resonated with different subsets of the electorate. A review of the Breitbart immigration stories shared most often on Twitter suggests that fear of Muslims and Islam, expressed both in cultural and physical security terms, was their primary frame for immigration. The Breitbart stories also included economic arguments, such as that immigrants fill jobs that would otherwise go to U.S. citizens, or that immigrants place a burden on government services and often end up on welfare. An additional line of argument was that immigrants endanger the physical safety of U.S. citizens: the Breitbart stories argued that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes or acts of terrorism or introduce dangerous communicable diseases. A related but distinct assertion was that immigrants are coming in sufficient numbers that they will impose their customs, culture, and religion on the U.S. This fear appears to be highest in relation to Muslim immigrants, as seen in fears that large Muslim communities would institute Sharia law in the towns they inhabit.
Interestingly, they find that Clinton supporters tended not to share stories from center-right or right news sources as much as Trump supporters shared stories from center-left or left sources, suggesting liberals are more insular than conservatives. Does this mean liberals are a bunch of babies sitting in their ideological echo chambers? Well:
I could spend all day posting graphs and data, go check it out.
