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This article examined how social media content has shaped the representation of countries for publics around the world. Based on world system theory, the study investigated the underlying predictors of country mentions on X (formerly Twitter) in 2018. It confirmed that countries with greater economic power – or higher status in the world system – received more mentions. Furthermore, countries with larger populations were mentioned more frequently as were countries that experienced major conflicts. The findings from structural equation modeling shed new light on the interrelationships that drive the social media representation of individual countries and delineated an integrated Model of Country Mentions on X. These findings have implications for global leaders, policymakers, and social media firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on theories of emotional contagion and affective priming, the study assesses the emotional impact of the U.S. partisan media's coverage of six leading political candidates' images during the 2020 New Hampshire Democratic Party presidential primary. Results show that the partisan media's representations of the candidates' facial expressions of emotions are associated with the voters' feelings toward the politicians in their desired directions. Additionally, the partisan-media-primed emotions among the voters consistently align with their voting decisions. Methodologically, the study combines state-of-the-art computer vision techniques and survey research conducted with a representative sample of New Hampshire voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the influence on international news coverage in 38 countries of (1) traits of nations, (2) magnitude of interaction and relatedness between nations, and (3) logistics of newsgathering. Finds trade volume and presence of international news agencies were the two primary predictors of the amount of news coverage. (NH)

This study investigates emotions conveyed in US presidential speeches and media coverage regarding the Iraq War and the Iran nuclear deal during 2003 and 2015. The researchers gathered and examined news stories about the two policies, all official speeches delivered by George W Bush and Barack Obama, and opinion polls conducted during the respective six-month period in those two years. Nine discrete emotions were coded to capture the valence and volume in the speeches and news media content. The study finds that emotions appear more frequently in the Iraq discourse than in the Iran counterpart. President Bush used more negative emotions while President Obama employed more positive emotions. Emotion in the media coverage is constant and stable across the two policy periods; yet negative emotions are more prevalent than positive counterparts in the media despite distinct foreign policies. The study also examines public opinion trends toward the two policies for inferring potential linkage. This article contributes to the conceptual nexus among emotional persuasion, journalism pattern, and foreign policy-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The findings from a comprehensive survey of US foreign correspondents conducted in 2001 are reported. Findings show that some trends such as Eurocentrism, relatively high degrees of education and the like, continue.

This content analysis in the Philadelphia Inquirer found that the portrayal was balanced overall, as both parties had a roughly equal percentage of positive, neutral and negative coverage., Reader complaints are as much a fact of life in newsrooms as are deadlines. Editors normally deal with these through well-established mechanisms such as publishing critics' letters or giving dissatisfied [...]

This study tracks the affective agendas in the media’s portrayals of the nonverbal behavior of the 2016 presidential candidates, and then shows how these media portrayals are related to voters’ emotional valence. It also gauges the relationship of disgust to voting intention, comparing it with anger, fear, hope, and pride, as well as other established demographic predictors and party affiliation. Findings show that valence-based emotions as conveyed via candidates’ nonverbal behaviors are associated with viewers’ emotional valence; that is, emotional-affective agenda setting has occurred. It also demonstrates that disgust predicts vote choice as well or better than anger and fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the network agenda setting (NAS) model with data gathered from Taiwan's 2012 presidential election. Networks of important objects and candidate attributes in the news were compared with the counterparts generated from public opinion. The overall correlation between the media and public network agendas was positive and significant, thus supporting the NAS model in a non-Western context. In addition, this study found that the NAS model offered more predictive power at the attribute than the object level. The effects of selective exposure in a partisan media system were also incorporated into the investigation. Results showed that partisan selective exposure did not lead to consistent findings about the accentuated association between like-minded media consumption and candidate evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the process by which local economic news coverage influences individual evaluations of the economy. We improve on prior research by capturing a wider range of news sources (including national network news, national newspapers, local television news, and local newspapers) and connecting the effects of this coverage on individual level attitudes. We find that current personal financial evaluations, personal financial expectations, and short-term (12-month) expectations for the U.S. economy are related to national network coverage. Local television coverage of the economy is related to personal financial evaluations but not short-term economic expectations and local print news is important in structuring expectations of future business conditions. Overall, the findings illustrate important differences in economic coverage across media outlets and the effects of these differences on economic expectations. Exposure to different sources of economic information have significantly different effects on economic perceptions-suggesting a more complicated and nuanced role for the news media in shaping economic perceptions than indicated by previous research.

This study examined the echo chamber phenomenon and opinion leadership on Twitter based on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Network analysis and 'big data' analytics were employed to analyze more than 50 million tweets about the two presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, during the election cycle. Overall, the results suggested that Twitter communities discussing Trump and Clinton differed significantly in the level of political homogeneity and opinion leadership, and that certain opinion leaders were responsible of creating homogeneous communities on Twitter. This study made a theoretical contribution to the literature by linking opinion leadership and Twitter's network structure and shedding light on what may have caused the echo chamber problem to happen in an emerging media landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of systemic determinants on International news flow between developed and developing nations is investigated. Traits that may embody the global system include trade, territorial size, cultural ties, communication resources and physical distance; all can be categorized under systemic factors.

An experiment was conducted to see the ways in which negative issue advertisements sponsored by different political entities affect people's assessment of the political candidates and voting decisions. These results suggest that even in the absence of express advocacy to vote for or against political candidates, soft-money negative issue advertisements could produce the intended detrimental impact boomerang effects.

This study investigates which countries were mentioned most on Twitter during 2013 and what factors--country attributes, communication and economic resources, and contexts--can explain country presence on Twitter. Tweet mentions from 210 countries were derived using full fire hose archival searches. We identify trends that differ from the patterns found in news flow literature. And the results suggest a new era of international communication via Web-based social networks. Although core and semiperiphery countries are mentioned more than periphery countries, mobile phone penetration and sociopolitical instability have reshaped the contours of country images, and only 28% of the 50 most-mentioned countries on Twitter were core countries. This study discusses the implications of evolving social media for traditional news media outlets, world politics, and international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]