Reading the Tea Leaves—the News about the News

Author(s):  
Khadijah Costley White

This chapter looks at how the media explained, critiqued, and reported on their own role in the branding and coverage of the Tea Party, and what that says about news media function and convergence in a headphone culture. Whether it was a “media war” on Fox News, a reporter’s rant at CNBC, or a defamatory online video triggering the dismissal of a high-ranking Obama appointee for “racism,” one thing was clear—at its core, Tea Party news narratives were also a story about modern journalism. This section of the book explains how members of the news media portrayed (implicitly and explicitly) their own roles, functions, and values as they advanced the Tea Party’s recognition, messaging, and growth through the logics, action, and discourse of branding.

The Forum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-346
Author(s):  
Sadie Dempsey ◽  
Jiyoun Suk ◽  
Katherine J. Cramer ◽  
Lewis A. Friedland ◽  
Michael W. Wagner ◽  
...  

Abstract Since the 2016 election, the relationship between Trump supporters and Fox News has gained considerable attention. Drawing on interviews with more than 200 people and a representative survey conducted in the state of Wisconsin, we dive deeper into the media habits of Trump supporters using a mixed methods analytical approach. While we do not refute the importance of Fox News in the conservative media ecology, we find that characterizing Trump supporters as isolated in Fox News bubbles obscures the fact that many are news omnivores, or people who consume a wide variety of news. In fact, we find that Trump supporters may have more politically heterogeneous consumption habits than Trump non-supporters. We find that 17% of our survey respondents who support Trump in Wisconsin are regularly exposed to ideologically heterogeneous news media. We also find that like other voters, Trump supporters are disenchanted with the divisive nature of contemporary media and politics. Finally, we analyze the media use of young Trump supporters and find an especially high level of news omnivorousness among them.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sari Klaczkowski

This MRP was inspired by my ongoing interest in the media’s role in educating the public about current events, specifically how the media’s coverage after the terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001 influenced their audience. The MRP focused on the broadcast news coverage the week after the terrorist attack and how the framing of the attack, influenced who the public’s understanding of who the enemy of the War on Terror. The MRP conducted a content analysis of FOX News and CNN’s 6:00 broadcast news coverage. The MRP found that the media had a tremendous influence over the public at this time and significantly contributed to their understanding of who the enemy was in the war. It also discovered the role that the Bush Administration had in framing the media’s agenda and they used broadcast television to push their own political agenda. The MRP will teach the reader about the overpowerful role the news media can have, especially in times of crises and how the media can shape and present news events to with significant bias. Winston Churchill once said that with great power comes greater responsibility. This MRP teaches about the great responsibility of the news media and how during the news coverage after the terrorist attack, they unfortunately, did not live up to.


Author(s):  
Khadijah Costley White

The news media focused on race, gender, and class in contentious narratives that pushed people to tune their “headphones” into stories about the Tea Party brand. Branding shapes consumers’ tastes, desires, and loyalties and creates profit through the invocation of these types of immaterial qualities. This chapter examines the ways in which the Tea Party news stories emphasized class, race, and gender as key “intangible values” that helped to produce and reify the Tea Party brand identity. It also theorizes the Tea Party’s brand logic* through an analysis of what the news stories tell us about modern conceptions of race, gender, and class identities in the media and politics.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sari Klaczkowski

This MRP was inspired by my ongoing interest in the media’s role in educating the public about current events, specifically how the media’s coverage after the terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001 influenced their audience. The MRP focused on the broadcast news coverage the week after the terrorist attack and how the framing of the attack, influenced who the public’s understanding of who the enemy of the War on Terror. The MRP conducted a content analysis of FOX News and CNN’s 6:00 broadcast news coverage. The MRP found that the media had a tremendous influence over the public at this time and significantly contributed to their understanding of who the enemy was in the war. It also discovered the role that the Bush Administration had in framing the media’s agenda and they used broadcast television to push their own political agenda. The MRP will teach the reader about the overpowerful role the news media can have, especially in times of crises and how the media can shape and present news events to with significant bias. Winston Churchill once said that with great power comes greater responsibility. This MRP teaches about the great responsibility of the news media and how during the news coverage after the terrorist attack, they unfortunately, did not live up to.


MedienJournal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Li Xiguang

The commercialization of meclia in China has cultivated a new journalism business model characterized with scandalization, sensationalization, exaggeration, oversimplification, highly opinionated news stories, one-sidedly reporting, fabrication and hate reporting, which have clone more harm than good to the public affairs. Today the Chinese journalists are more prey to the manipu/ation of the emotions of the audiences than being a faithful messenger for the public. Une/er such a media environment, in case of news events, particularly, during crisis, it is not the media being scared by the government. but the media itself is scaring the government into silence. The Chinese news media have grown so negative and so cynica/ that it has produced growing popular clistrust of the government and the government officials. Entering a freer but fearful commercially mediated society, the Chinese government is totally tmprepared in engaging the Chinese press effectively and has lost its ability for setting public agenda and shaping public opinions. 


Author(s):  
Khadijah Costley White

This chapter lays out the Tea Party’s history as a mass-mediated construction in the context of journalism, political communication, and social movement studies. It argues that the news coverage of the Tea Party primarily chronicled its meaning, appeal, motivations, influence, and circulation—an emphasis on its persona more than its policies. In particular, the news media tracked the Tea Party as a brand, highlighting its profits, marketability, brand leaders, and audience appeal. The Tea Party became a brand through news media coverage; in defining it as a brand, the Tea Party was a story, message, and cognitive shortcut that built a lasting relationship with citizen-consumers through strong emotional connections, self-expression, consumption, and differentiation.


Author(s):  
Yochai Benkler ◽  
Robert Faris ◽  
Hal Roberts

This chapter presents the book’s macrolevel findings about the architecture of political communication and the news media ecosystem in the United States from 2015 to 2018. Two million stories published during the 2016 presidential election campaign are analyzed, along with another 1.9 million stories about Donald Trump’s presidency during his first year. The chapter examines patterns of interlinking between online media sources to understand the relations of authority and credibility among publishers, as well as the media sharing practices of Twitter and Facebook users to elucidate social media attention patterns. The data and mapping reveal not only a profoundly polarized media landscape but stark asymmetry: the right is more insular, skewed towards the extreme, and set apart from the more integrated media ecosystem of the center, center-left, and left.


Author(s):  
Julia Partheymüller

It is widely believed that the news media have a strong influence on defining what are the most important problems facing the country during election campaigns. Yet, recent research has pointed to several factors that may limit the mass media’s agenda-setting power. Linking news media content to rolling cross-section survey data, the chapter examines the role of three such limiting factors in the context of the 2009 and the 2013 German federal elections: (1) rapid memory decay on the part of voters, (2) advertising by the political parties, and (3) the fragmentation of the media landscape. The results show that the mass media may serve as a powerful agenda setter, but also demonstrate that the media’s influence is strictly limited by voters’ cognitive capacities and the structure of the campaign information environment.


2021 ◽  
pp. 194016122110252
Author(s):  
Sebastián Valenzuela ◽  
Daniel Halpern ◽  
Felipe Araneda

Despite widespread concern, research on the consequences of misinformation on people's attitudes is surprisingly scant. To fill in this gap, the current study examines the long-term relationship between misinformation and trust in the news media. Based on the reinforcing spirals model, we analyzed data from a three-wave panel survey collected in Chile between 2017 and 2019. We found a weak, over-time relationship between misinformation and media skepticism. Specifically, initial beliefs on factually dubious information were negatively correlated with subsequent levels of trust in the news media. Lower trust in the media, in turn, was related over time to higher levels of misinformation. However, we found no evidence of a reverse, parallel process where media trust shielded users against misinformation, further reinforcing trust in the news media. The lack of evidence of a downward spiral suggests that the corrosive effects of misinformation on attitudes toward the news media are less serious than originally suggested. We close with a discussion of directions for future research.


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