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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian-sponsored Internet Research Agency's (IRA) use of social media to influence U.S. political discourse is undoubtedly troubling. However, scholarly attention has focused on social media, overlooking the role that news media within the country played in amplifying false, foreign messages. In this article, we examine articles in the U.S. news media system that quoted IRA tweets through the lens of changing journalism practices in the hybrid media system, focusing specifically on news gatekeepers' use of tweets as vox populi. We find that a majority of the IRA tweets embedded in the news were vox populi. That is, IRA tweets were quoted (1) for their opinion, (2) as coming from everyday Twitter users, and (3) with a collection of other tweets holistically representing public sentiment. These findings raise concerns about how modern gatekeeping practices, transformed due to the hybrid media system, may also unintentionally let in unwanted disinformation from malicious actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Garnering coverage across the political spectrum is a major challenge for burgeoning social movements. The #MeToo movement stands out due to the volume of attention it generated. Yet, it is unclear how news media across the partisan spectrum covered the movement using different sexual violence language markers, latent topic, and word choices and which accusations and events drove media attention. To examine this, we used Media Cloud to extract 17,877 news articles from nine media outlets across the political spectrum, containing specific n-grams or co-occurrences of (1) "metoo," (2) "sexual misconduct," (3) "sexual harassment," and (4) "sexual assault" from October 2017 through February 2018. The analyses first examined whether language and attention differed across the ideological news ecology and then turned to time-series modeling of these discourses to examine what drove press coverage and structural topic modeling (STM) and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) analysis to understand latent topics and language usage. Findings reveal that (1) left-leaning media dedicated more relative attention across all topics—#MeToo, sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, and sexual assault—relative to centrist and right-leaning media. Moreover, across the right, left, and centrist media, the language markers "misconduct," "harassment," and "assault" decreased over the study period, while the mentions of #MeToo movement increased during the same period; (2) stories relating to entertainment and those accusing politicians, especially those belonging to the party in power at the Federal level, seemed to be by far the strongest driver of news media attention; and (3) we further observed partisan differences in topics of news coverage and language usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the roles of the media in the process of political agenda setting. There is a long tradition of studies on this topic, but they have mostly focused on legacy news media, thus overlooking the role of other actors and the complex hybrid dynamics that characterize contemporary political communication. In contrast, through an in-depth case study using mixed-methods and multiplatform data, this article provides a detailed analysis of the roles and interactions between different types of media and how they were used by political and advocacy elites. It explores what happened in the different parts of the system, and thus the paths to attention that led to setting this issue in the political and media agendas. The analysis of the case, a partial policy reversal in the United Kingdom provoked by an immigration scandal known as the "Windrush scandal" reveals that the issue was pushed into the agenda by a campaign assemblage of investigative journalism, political and advocacy elites, and digitally enabled leaders. The legacy news media came late but were crucial. They greatly amplified the salience of the issue and, once in "storm mode," they were key for sustaining attention and pressure, eventually compelling the government to respond. It shows that they often remain at the core of the "national conversation" and certainly in the eye of a media storm. In the contemporary context, characterized by fierce battles for attention, shortening attention spans and fractured audiences, this is key and has important implications for agenda setting and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deepfakes are perceived as a powerful form of disinformation. Although many studies have focused on detecting deepfakes, few have measured their effects on political attitudes, and none have studied microtargeting techniques as an amplifier. We argue that microtargeting techniques can amplify the effects of deepfakes, by enabling malicious political actors to tailor deepfakes to susceptibilities of the receiver. In this study, we have constructed a political deepfake (video and audio), and study its effects on political attitudes in an online experiment (N = 278). We find that attitudes toward the depicted politician are significantly lower after seeing the deepfake, but the attitudes toward the politician's party remain similar to the control condition. When we zoom in on the microtargeted group, we see that both the attitudes toward the politician and the attitudes toward his party score significantly lower than the control condition, suggesting that microtargeting techniques can indeed amplify the effects of a deepfake, but for a much smaller subgroup than expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]