How the news media activate public expression and influence national agendas
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media-science.pdf
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140.31 KB
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Author(s)
King, Gary
Schneer, Benjamin
White, Ariel R.
Date Issued
November 2017
Journal
Science
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
King, Gary, Benjamin Schneer, and Ariel White. “How the News Media Activate Public Expression and Influence National Agendas.” Science 358, no. 6364 (November 9, 2017): 776–780.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
We demonstrate that exposure to the news media causes Americans to take public stands on specific issues, join national policy conversations, and express themselves publicly—all key components of democratic politics—more often than they would otherwise. After recruiting 48 mostly small media outlets, we chose groups of these outlets to write and publish articles on subjects we approved, on dates we randomly assigned. We estimated the causal effect on proximal measures, such as website pageviews and Twitter discussion of the articles’ specific subjects, and distal ones, such as national Twitter conversation in broad policy areas. Our intervention increased discussion in each broad policy area by ~62.7% (relative to a day’s volume), accounting for 13,166 additional posts over the treatment week, with similar effects across population subgroups.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao1100
