Reactive and Asymmetric Communication Flows: Social Media Discourse and Partisan News Framing in the Wake of Mass Shootings

Marked by both deep interconnectedness and polarization, the contemporary media system in the United States features news outlets and social media that are bound together, yet deeply divided along partisan lines. This article formally analyzes communication flows surrounding mass shootings in the hybrid and polarized U.S. media system. We begin by integrating media system literature with agenda setting and news framing theories and then conduct automated text analysis and time series modeling. After accounting for exogenous event characteristics, results show that (a) sympathy and gun control discourses on Twitter preceded news framing of gun policy more than the other way around, and (b) conservatives on Twitter and conservative media reacted to progressive discourse on Twitter, without their progressive counterparts exhibiting a similar reactiveness. Such results shed light on the influence of social media on political communication flows and confirm an asymmetry in the ways partisan media ecosystems respond to social events.

Does media slant polarize compliance with science-based public health recommendations? Effects of media consumption patterns on COVID-19 attitudes and behaviors in the United States

Has political polarization undermined the media’ informational role during the COVID-19 pandemic? Recent studies show that politicized reporting from conservative media discouraged compliance with COVID-19 guidelines in the U.S. However, greater attention to the 24-hour news cycle may make high-consumption viewers better factually informed regardless of the source. We examine how the extent of media consumption affects people’s emotions, attitudes, and behaviors toward the pandemic. With an online survey of 1128 respondents, we found a strong convergence in anxiety and health-protective behaviors in more avid media viewers regardless of media outlet while finding a divergence in attitudes toward specific mitigation strategies.

The Legacy of Rush Limbaugh Will Always Be Tied to Donald Trump

This article explores Rush Limbaugh’s efforts to tribalize American politics through his racially divisive, falsehood-ridden portrayal of President Obama. By playing and preying on white anxiety, the host laid the groundwork for the election of a president who essentially adopted his view of the Obama presidency. Limbaugh’s rhetoric about Obama serves as a case study whereby the most influential part of the conservative media during those years represents the whole. “How did we get here?” is the essential question right now in American politics. How did we go from a society that relatively easily elected Barack Obama twice to one that, popular vote loss aside, elected Donald Trump, and came within a small popular vote shift in three states from doing so again in 2020? Analyzing how Limbaugh ginned up white racial anxiety about a Black president helps us understand the rise of Trump, who began his White House campaign by serving as the nation’s birther-in-chief and who, in his reaction to the white nationalist terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, to name just one example, demonstrated his reliance on white identity politics. As Jamelle Bouie wrote: “You can draw a direct line to the rise of Trump from the racial hysteria of talk radio—where Rush Limbaugh, a Trump booster, warned that Obama would turn the world upside down.”

Proselytization vs Education

This paper argues for the importance of religious literacy in the American public education system in relation to Islam, a religion that is not only growing in relevance that is also subject to various misconceptions in American society. The author outlines what an appropriate lesson plan about Islam would look like in the context of a secular classroom while pointing out limitations and shortfalls in current lesson plans. Additionally, the multiple controversies raised by teaching about Islam in public schools, particularly on behalf of conservative media outlets, are highlighted to emphasize the difference between proselytization - which is unconstitutional - and religious literacy - which is key to providing a well-rounded education to American students.

The New York Daily News and the History of Conservative Media

The media outlets usually identified as building blocks of New Right are niche ideological journals (such as National Review) and radio broadcasts. As crucial as these outlets were, other mainstream publications propagating similar ideas had a far greater reach—foremost among them the New York Daily News, the highest-circulation newspaper in the country. From the 1940s through the 1960s, the Daily News espoused a conservative populism further right than National Review, binding its readers into a community based on anti-elitism and white working-class identity.

DECLARATIONS OF INTERDEPENDENCE: HOW MEDIA LITERACY PRACTICES ARE DEVELOPED, NEGOTIATED, REJECTED, AND EXPLOITED ACROSS SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

The primary goals of media literacy are laudable: active and critical thinking about the messages we receive and the messages we create. In practice, media literacy standardizes limited ways of knowing and normalizes built-in biases. Subsequently, its narrow emphasis on skill development, particularly the role of fact-checking, content creation, and independent research are all practices that can be exploited, oftentimes leading to the amplification of misinformation. Homogeneous media literacy also assumes that platforms are neutral – codifying a dominant, neoliberal, racist lens as a competency. Social media literacy in particular assumes the norms of proprietary algorithms, arming users with the skills determined by Silicon Valley’s corporate, individualist, white supremacist values. Contemporary high school curricula teaches students to ably brand and promote themselves; adept meme creators are rewarded for racial appropriation and fungible performances of Blackness; vanity metrics foster reputation anxiety in social media’s ‘success theatre’; personal data protection is an arguably futile lesson in privacy that preaches paranoid gated communities; fascist media pundits easily exploit conservative media literacy practice of “doing your own research” to naturalize misinformation. What are the implicitly raced, classed norms of reading "correctly"? What are mundane emancipatory reading practices? What alternative literacy practices do users deploy to reject these individualistic, racist standards? What does interpretive media literacy look like? This panel offers a portrait of what’s missing in media literacy and explores visions of interdependent practices that offer alternative methods of active and critical thinking about the messages we receive and the messages we create.

THE DISINFECTANT DIVERSION: FRAMING STRATEGIES OF PARTISAN MEDIA IN INTERPRETING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Following the rise of Donald Trump leading up to the 2016 US presidential election, political communication scholars have turned a critical eye towards the role of conservative media outlets in the construction of an overarching meta-narrative, largely referred to in the existing literature as the “deep story” (Hochschild, 2016). The aim of the present study to extend this seminal work to analyze how mainstream, conservative, and liberal outlets rely on meta-narratives to construct meaning in their coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing qualitative methods, we analyze the coverage that six American news outlets afforded the April 23rd 2020 Coronavirus Task Force news briefing, where President Trump insinuated injections of disinfectant could be a useful way to fight COVID-19. Our analysis includes 115 news articles, 41 Facebook posts and 87 television clips from these outlets. Our results reveal that both the left and right wing media systems employed overarching narratives in their coverage. The left-wing media heavily emphasized the tendency to deny or argue scientific fact among conservatives. In contrast, we observed that the right-wing media constantly used similar framing strategies in an attempt to vilify the left-wing media and liberals. Considering the existing literature (Kreiss, 2018: Poletta & Callahan, 2019), we observed many instances where right-wing pundits and journalists relied on previously established heuristics, cuing audiences to perceive the left-wing media as elitist out to discredit Trump. Our findings provide an in-depth analysis of how partisan media relies on meta-narratives to convey meaning to their audiences.