There is a growing body of work suggesting that responses to positive and negative information are asymmetricthat negative information has a much greater impact on individuals' attitudes than does positive information. This paper explores these asymmetries in mass media responsiveness to positive and negative economic shifts and in public responsiveness to both the economy itself and economic news coverage. Using time-series analyses of U.K. media and public opinion, strong evidence is found of asymmetry. The dynamic is discussed as it applies to political communications and policymaking and more generally to public responsiveness in representative democracies. Asymmetric Responses to InformationThere is a growing body of work suggesting asymmetry in responses to negative versus positive informa-

This article contributes to the debate about the effects of ethnic diversity on social cohesion, particularly generalized trust. The analysis relies on data from both the ‘Citizenship, Involvement, Democracy’ (CID) survey in the US and the ‘Equality, Security and Community Survey’ (ESCS) in Canada. Our analysis, one of the first controlled cross‐national comparisons of small‐unit contextual variation, confirms recent findings on the negative effect of neighborhood diversity on white majorities across the two countries. Our most important finding, however, is that not everyone is equally sensitive to context. Individuals who regularly talk with their neighbors are less influenced by the racial and ethnic character of their surroundings than people who lack such social interaction. This finding challenges claims about the negative effects of diversity on trust – at least, it suggests that the negative effects so prevalent in existing research can be mediated by social ties.

This study examines the level of politicization and polarization in COVID-19 news in U.S. newspapers and televised network news from March to May 2020. Using multiple computer-assisted content analytic approaches, we find that newspaper coverage is highly politicized, network news coverage somewhat less so, and both newspaper and network news coverage are highly polarized. We find that politicians appear in newspaper coverage more frequently than scientists, whereas politicians and scientists are more equally featured in network news. We suggest that the high degree of politicization and polarization in initial COVID-19 coverage may have contributed to polarization in U.S. COVID-19 attitudes.

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