Indexing theory during an emerging health crisis: how U.S. TV news indexed elite perspectives and amplified COVID-19 misinformation

Muddiman, Ashley; Budak, Ceren; Murray, Caroline; Kim, Yujin; Stroud, Natalie Jomini

doi:10.1080/23808985.2022.2120521

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 46 publications

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“…Low-credibility media could be borrowing stories from traditional players with higher credibility levels, due to their limited resources to independently produce impactful news stories in the fierce attention battleground. Alternatively, past work also shows that traditional media can spread misinformation, especially by indexing political elite talking points (Muddiman et al 2022). High-credibility media might be loosening their journalistic standards in order to attract and retain their audience, generating stories of disputable issues that are easier to be re-packaged into low-credibility clickbaits, as we see in our results the significant proportions of attention devoted to "candidate controversies" rather than policy topics in highcredibility media.…”

Section: Conclusion and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 52%

Intermedia Agenda Setting during the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections

Chen,

Liu,

Singh

et al. 2024

ICWSM

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Intermedia agenda setting (IAS) theory suggests that different news sources can influence each other's agenda. While this theory has been well-established in existing literature, whether it still holds in today's high-choice media environment, which includes news producers of different credibility and ideology dispositions, is an open question. Through two case studies--the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections--we show that media are still largely aligned, especially in broad topics they choose to cover, and that the level of alignment along the credibility dimension is comparable to that along the ideology dimension. Furthermore, we find that the coverage of the Republican candidate is better aligned across different media types than that of the Democratic candidate, and that media divergence has increased along both dimensions from 2016 to 2020. Finally, we demonstrate that high-credibility media still plays a dominant role in the IAS process, yet with a cautious warning of its declining IAS power for the Democratic candidate over the course of four years.

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Section: Conclusion and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 52%

Intermedia Agenda Setting during the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections

Chen,

Liu,

Singh

et al. 2024

ICWSM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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A comprehensive review of recent advances in research on COVID in communication studies

Cyrek,

Peltonen

2024

Discov Public Health

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Background The COVID-19 pandemic initiated a great global crisis, during which media influenced society and social interactions affected media use. Researchers from various research fields have studied the pandemic both globally and locally. This study aims to summarize the research on COVID-19 pandemic within communication studies, taking into account 358 articles published in SJR best ranked journals in 2020–2022. Methods The study uses both qualitative and quantitative methods. Using manual coding and qualitative content analysis, we investigate articles’ distribution according to journals, time, accessibility (either open, free or restricted) and methodological approaches. We also provide a qualitative summary of trending research themes. Using quantitative social network analysis (SNA) we present the distribution of institutions and countries in articles’ affiliations, and the collaboration network at institutional and country level. Results Results show an in-time increase of COVID-related publications. Articles were affiliated with 490 institutions from 68 countries, with the USA having the greatest representation. There was an underrepresentation of African and South American countries, which reflects the core-periphery challenge in knowledge production. The network analysis revealed that very few of possible connections were actually achieved. There is an observable trend of using quantitative methods. A growth on the gap between qualitative and quantitative studies was observed each year. More than a half of articles using qualitative methods were published in restricted access. Our qualitative summary of the addressed topics and main findings in articles related to COVID-19, media and society revealed a wide research interest in pandemics impacts on news consumption, media use and journalism, as well as infodemic, conspiracy narratives, science mistrust and discrimination and inequalities increased by the pandemic. Conclusion To provide a wider perspective on the worldwide impact of pandemic, more studies from underrepresented countries are needed. The collaboration between institutions and countries requires strengthening. Qualitative studies were conducted considerably less than quantitative studies and they were usually published in restricted access, which leads to a methodological gap.

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Indexing theory during an emerging health crisis: how U.S. TV news indexed elite perspectives and amplified COVID-19 misinformation

Cited by 2 publications

References 46 publications

Intermedia Agenda Setting during the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections

Intermedia Agenda Setting during the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections

A comprehensive review of recent advances in research on COVID in communication studies

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