Because of their ever-growing importance, elite actors from the political sphere and news media have integrated social network sites and especially Twitter into their communication strategies. However, the extent of these adaptation processes is not yet fully understood. This article presents lists of U.S. actors from politics, news media and government. As an exploratory analysis, the influenc...

We identify general trends in the (in)civility and complexity of political discussions occurring on Reddit between January 2007 and May 2017 – a period spanning both terms of Barack Obama’s presidency and the rst 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency. We then investigate four factors that are frequently hypothesized as having contributed to the declining quality of American political discourse ...

This paper addresses the patterns of influence between the news media and the public, by specifically targeting breaking stories, or shocks, to a news system. Specifically, we assess media agenda setting and selective exposure by looking at the relative public attention spans to hard and soft news (as measured by query volume), in comparison with the volume of news coverage (in print, broadcast...

Media reporting shapes public opinion which can in turn influence events, particularly in political elections, in which candidates both respond to and shape public perception of their campaigns. We use computational linguistics to automatically predict the impact of news on public perception of political candidates. Our system uses daily newspaper articles to predict shifts in public opinion as...

Several scholars, most notably Matt Baum, have recently argued that soft news formats contribute to democratic discourse, because they attract viewers who would otherwise not be exposed to news at all. I extend Baum’s approach in two ways. First, Baum’s theory postulates that people’s appreciation of entertainment is one of the factors determining news exposure and, by extension, attention to p...

Social news aggregator services generate readers’ subjective reactions to news opinion articles. Can we use those as a resource to classify articles as liberal or conservative, even without knowing the self-identified political leaning of most users? We applied three semi-supervised learning methods that propagate classifications of political news articles and users as conservative or liberal, ...

This study compares the effects of consuming news preference online or offline on political participation. It also examines the variation in these effects between young and older adults. Given that young adults are disproportionately more intensive users of the Internet, Internet use may have varying effects on people’s political participation by their age. Secondary analysis of Pew data found ...

Using self-reported survey data (N = 281), the present study explores the structural relationships among mobile users' perceptions of the suitability of two types of mobile news (political feature news and entertainment news), users' motivations for mobile news usage, and their behavioral patterns. Our findings show that two types of perceived suitability for mobile news, particularly for polit...