News Media

This study examines how local television news coverage affects voter knowledge and reduces the nationalization of U.S. elections.

This research asks whether and how politicians’ public criticisms of information providers change which sources their supporters find credible and how that alters opinion formation. Using two linked survey experiments, the authors investigate whether elite discrediting of a news outlet leads partisans to avoid that outlet, view it as biased, and discount its subsequent coverage — processes the paper frames as an indirect means of elite influence over public opinion.

This study assembles a new quantitative dataset drawn from New York Times coverage to examine whether Democratic and Republican National Committees consistently pursue "party branding" across the postwar period. The author frames the project as a response to qualitative histories that argue national committees matter for party brand building but lack consistent cross-time quantitative measures. Using monthly references of committee activities in the Times for 1953–2012, the research tests whether branding activity changes with parties' control of the White House.

This guide walks through the consequential decisions required before producing automated measures from news text, combining theoretical discussion with empirical tests. A running example—measuring the tone of New York Times coverage of the economy—illustrates how everyday choices reshape the data and the inferences researchers draw from it.

New findings challenge simplistic views of partisan media consumption.

This article examines how China handles domestic terrorist incidents through its official media outlet, The People's Daily. By analyzing a comprehensive dataset of Uyghur terrorism cases and the CCP's public responses, we demonstrate that the party strategically acknowledges these events only under favorable political conditions. This finding challenges simplistic assumptions about autocratic information control by revealing it must balance short-term stability against long-term legitimacy gains—a complex calculus unique to China.

This study investigates gender differences in media portrayals of political leadership, focusing on leader stereotypes. Using automated content analysis of Dutch national newspapers from 2006 to 2012, it finds that male politicians receive more coverage on leadership traits overall, but these gender biases are less pronounced during election campaigns compared to routine periods. This nuanced finding suggests that media dynamics change significantly during political campaigns.