But the mainstream media only describes roughly half the media landscape. The other half of the media is a right-wing messaging apparatus that makes no effort to follow traditional journalistic norms. Republicans communicate to their base through a media that functionally operates as part of their party, while Democrats communicate to their base through a media that still exerts substantial independence.
Conservatives often gloat about the ratings dominance of right-wing infotainment:. The other half of the media is simply a vehicle for partisan propaganda. And whatever its failings, the last week has amply demonstrated once again that the nonconservative mainstream media is not that.
This is not necessarily to deny that the mainstream media has some kinds of liberal bias. I would simply maintain that liberal bias is not the only determinant of media coverage. Above all else, it treats bad news as more important than good news. And so, while mainstream media often covers Republican presidents critically, it metes out the same treatment to Democratic presidents.
Traditional journalistic norms may have weakened, especially in subjects like culture and sports, but they remain intact in most newsrooms, and especially in political coverage. Those norms enshrine a certain definition of objectivity that implicitly favors, in addition to social liberalism, hawkish foreign policy, deficit reduction, and bipartisanship.
Most Democratic voters will experience Democratic administrations as a mixed bag, at best. Republican voters, who mostly absorb the news through party-aligned media, will experience Republican administrations as an unmitigated triumph. Even the most dishonest, incompetent, and scandal-ridden Republican presidency imaginable — which more or less describes the one we just had — will still have a media environment divided almost equally between scorching criticism and obsequious fawning.
That is the kind of comprehensive media hostility Trump never had to worry about. Democrats, however, were somewhat more generous in their answers. The divide in the United States is wide, and one indication of that is how difficult our question proved for many thoughtful citizens.
I cannot even wrap my mind around any reason they would be good for this country. Also, just to follow what others are doing. And third would be just because they hate Trump so much.
But her answer seems to lack the animus of many. Democrats struggled just as much as Republicans. One possibility is that Republicans simply care less about editorial standards of fair and objective reporting. As fake news is not constrained by reality or editorial standards, such material can be excessive in their negative portrayal of political opponents, a feature that will likely attract partisans who demand partisan news and do not place much weight on objectivity anyway.
However, a competing explanation highlights differences in the supply of politically useful news content. Suppose that Republicans and Democrats are equally motivated to share news that confirm their political beliefs, but—and this is the critical assumption—most mainstream media outlets publish news articles that aligns with a Democratic worldview.
Under this scenario, Republicans scanning the internet for political information to share must turn to fake news sources to find material that satisfies their partisan goal of derogating Democrats. On the flip side, Democrats fueled by the same partisan drive can stop their search at posts linking to mainstream media outlets since these publish news that are consistent with their political views.
To examine these alternative explanations, we subjected the headlines of the articles shared by participants to an automated sentiment analysis—essentially coding whether the tone of the headline was positive or negative—and identified the partisan affiliation of the politicians mentioned in those headlines. These data paint a picture of the most in-demand headlines among our users.
To see whether these in-demand headlines are representative of headlines supplied by the news media, we scraped more than , news article headlines that had appeared between and on the front pages of some of the most popular news outlets in each category we study. We subsequently subjected these headlines to the same sentiment analysis. This allowed us to examine whether different news outlets portray politicians more or less negatively, depending on whether the politicians are members of the Republican or the Democratic Party.
The figure below shows the results of this headline sentiment analysis. The left side of the figure shows the negativity of news headlines shared on Twitter by the participants, depending on whether the headlines mention Republican or Democratic politicians. The right side of the figure provides the sentiment of headlines scraped from the front pages of news sites. The horizontal axes show different types of news outlets while the vertical axes show the headline sentiment, with higher values indicating more negative sentiments.
The figure reveals three interesting findings. First, political news published by centrist and pro-Democratic mainstream media describe Republican elites more negatively than Democratic elites. Second, pro-Republican mainstream media cover Republicans and Democrats equally negatively. Third, and most importantly, news articles from pro-Republican fake news sources are the only ones that consistently publish news that portray Democrats more negatively than Republicans.
We suspect this explains why Republicans find fake news more appealing than do Democrats. To get a steady supply of news that caters to their political tastes, Republicans must turn to more extreme news sources, including those known to publish falsehoods. Democrats, in contrast, will have to look no further than to centrist and pro-Democratic mainstream news sources to fulfill their partisan goals.
If correct, this conclusion has important ramifications. It suggests that Republicans and Democrats are not so different after all: Both groups want to share politically congruent information, but an asymmetry in the supply of politically useful news means that Republicans end up sharing more fake news.
As such, fake news sharing is partisan business-as-usual and reflects a search for information to denigrate political opponents in a highly polarized political system. It is important to note that this latter set of findings does not necessarily imply that the mainstream media system suffers from a liberal bias. Our data collection took place during an unusual time in American politics e.
The immediate reaction to our findings may be one of relief. Fake news may not be a huge problem after all. Consistent with other studies e.
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