Emily Thorson

CHANGING PATTERNS OF NEWS CONSUMPTION AND PARTICIPATION

This study examines how the prevalence of news recommendation engines, such as the most-emailed stories list on the front page of the New York Times website, could change patterns of news consumption. The top five most-emailed articles from the New York Times website were collected for two 23-day periods. The content of the most-emailed list was found to differ both from the articles cued by editors in a traditional newspaper format and from patterns of individual online news browsing. Opinion, business and national news articles appear most frequently on the most-emailed list, and more than half of the total articles appeared on the list for multiple days. Counter-intuitive articles and articles that offered advice about life issues were significantly more likely to remain on the list for multiple days. The data suggest that the most-emailed list, part of a larger family of news recommendation engines (NREs), acts both as an aggregator of individual actions and as a new way for online users to navigate online information. In this second capacity, NREs demonstrate a public endorsement of particular content. This endorsement may both affect the articles to which news consumers are exposed and change their attitude towards these articles. NREs thus have the potential to change patterns of news consumption by allowing readers to communicate both with each other and, indirectly, with news institutions themselves.

Belief echoes: The persistent effects of corrected misinformation

Across three separate experiments, I find that exposure to negative political information continues to shape attitudes even after the information has been effectively discredited. I call these effects “belief echoes.” Results suggest that belief echoes can be created through an automatic or deliberative process. Belief echoes occur even when the misinformation is corrected immediately, the “gold standard” of journalistic fact-checking. The existence of belief echoes raises ethical concerns about journalists’ and fact-checking organizations’ efforts to publicly correct false claims.

The Economy and the Dynamics of the 2008 Presidential Campaign: Evidence from the National Annenberg Election Study

Abstract This paper considers the impact of economic perceptions on vote intention in the 2008 presidential campaign with data from the two components of the National Annenberg Election Survey. It addresses a controversy over whether the collapse of Lehman Brothers and its aftermath altered the terms of competition, and produced the late‐campaign widening of Barack Obamas lead and his comfortable victory. Detailed attention to the chronology of the campaign, made possible by the structure of NAES data collection, indicates that the timing of key shifts is inconsistent with a simple economic interpretation of vote‐intention dynamics. Multivariate analyses indicate that the economy‐vote link weakened at the critical point.

Beyond Opinion Leaders: How Attempts to Persuade Foster Political Awareness and Campaign Learning

The number of Americans who report engaging in interpersonal persuasion during elections has drastically increased over the past decade. While past studies have demonstrated the impact of such proselytizing on vote choice, the author finds substantial evidence that it may also have larger democratic benefits, both for those attempting to persuade and for those whom they choose to target. Data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey suggest that (a) attempting to persuade contributes to people’s ability to give reasons in support of both their own preferred candidate and the opposing candidate, and (b) persuasive conversation is a powerful channel for the spread of political information from the more engaged to the less engaged.

Correcting Political and Consumer Misperceptions: The Effectiveness and Effects of Rating Scale Versus Contextual Correction Formats

While fact-checking has grown dramatically in the last decade, little is known about the relative effectiveness of different formats in correcting false beliefs or overcoming partisan resistance to new information. This article addresses that gap by using theories from communication and psychology to compare two prevailing approaches: An online experiment examined how the use of visual “truth scales” interacts with partisanship to shape the effectiveness of corrections. We find that truth scales make fact-checks more effective in some conditions. Contrary to theoretical predictions and the fears of some journalists, their use does not increase partisan backlash against the correction or the organization that produced it.

The Economy, the Candidates, and the 2008 Campaign

We claim that although the economy was an important factor it is hard to relate the evolution of vote intentions to the financial crisis. When the crisis reached voters’ consciousness, the vote shift was already under way. Already on the scene was Sarah Palin. Not only was her candidacy unraveling by this time but its continued deterioration tracked that of John McCain’s support with uncanny precision. We show that the dynamics of opinion on her were not epiphenomenal. We also show that her impact was extraordinary, twice as great as for any other recent Vice-Presidential candidate. We speculate on why this was so and ask what this reveals about contingent elements in campaigns.