The images cast across screens across the country on January 6, 2021, laid bare the fragility of American democracy as the steps and halls of the US Capitol were inundated by a violent band of insurrectionists. Fed by blatant lies, political anger, and racial animus, they sought to halt a procedure enshrined in the US Constitution and to overturn a freely and fairly run election. Meanwhile, efforts to obstruct, avoid, and misrepresent the subsequent investigation of the January 6th attack have continued apace.
With a relative dearth of work that centers historical and contemporary racial, ethnic, and power dynamics in the context of media, our interdisciplinary field was caught flat-footed, unprepared to respond to those who actively seek to undermine American democracy. This edited volume is a first step toward remedying that situation. Media and January 6th brings together a diverse group of leading scholars to help us more clearly understand the relationship between media and the attempted coup. The volume examines why and how January 6th came to be and the centrality of media to the event. It is organized around three key questions: How should we understand January 6, 2021? What should research look like after January 6, 2021? And how can we prevent another event like this?
(Summary by Katherine Furl)
What can social media users’ personalized information environments tell us about whether social media content is politicized and trustworthy? In “What’s in your PIE? Understanding the contents of personalized information environments with PIEGraph,” Deen Freelon, Meredith Pruden, Daniel Malmer, Qunfang Wu, Yiping Zia, Daniel Johnsons, Emily Chen, and Andrew Crist showcase the capabilities of PIEGraph, a software system they developed, to provide unique insight into the kinds of content users encounter on the platform.
Freelon and coauthors investigate social media users’ personalized information environments, or PIEs. These unique environments—for example, users’ social media feeds—are constructed through users’ expressed preferences and predictions from algorithms. As PIEs become increasingly integral to social media users’ everyday lives, researchers, policymakers, and social media users broadly have become concerned about information quality in these spaces.
To map out users’ PIEs, Freelon and coauthors developed the PIEGraph software system, and combined large-scale anonymized data collection from approximately 1,000 X/Twitter users with survey data detailing important information about participants’ demographics, mainstream media consumption, political leanings, and conspiracy belief. In doing so, Freelon and coauthors adopt a user-centric approach. In contrast to platform-centric approaches, which extract data directly from social media platforms, user-centric approaches instead employ user-interactive methods to approximate users’ PIEs.
Freelon and coauthors’ novel approach uncovered some unforeseen trends in the PIEs of X/Twitter users. For example, Freelon and coauthors note that while “previous user-centric studies have found that 2%–3% of content that participants view is political,” over 10% of hyperlinks in this study were politically relevant. Additionally, respondents reporting more mainstream media consumption had more political, right-wing, and lower-quality content in their X/Twitter PIEs—and unlike past research, respondents’ age did not play much of a role here.
Ultimately, Freelon and coauthors’ findings illustrate the need to track the potential risk of systemic exposure to low-quality content on platforms like X/Twitter over long periods of time. The authors stress government policies must protect researchers’ ability to map out these risks—without these protections, understanding the informational health of social media users’ PIEs becomes unnecessarily difficult.
(Research Summary by Katherine Furl)
Who in the United States consumes far-right news media, and what does this consumption mean for American democracy? In “CNN Can Kiss My As$,” Andrea Lorenz, Carolyn Schmitt, Shannon McGregor, and Daniel Malmer analyze survey responses from over 10,000 U.S. adults to determine the types of news they consume, how this consumption relates to political beliefs, and the implications of these trends for democracy in the United States.
Lorenz and coauthors distinguish between partisan media—which promote one political party over another and don’t adhere to journalistic norms of objectivity—and hyperpartisan media, which are more intensely partisan and often positioned outside mainstream media ecosystems. Though hyperpartisan media exist on both the political right and left, U.S. conservatives have moved toward the far right more than U.S. liberals have moved toward the far left. While far-right and far-left news media rely on populist narratives, far-right news media uniquely promote anti-Black racism, misogyny, and conspiracy theories endangering democracy; this relates to the ways partisan identities map onto other socially relevant identities and ideologies like race, religion, and anti-establishment beliefs. Content from far-right news media is also more likely to receive coverage from more mainstream outlets like Fox News than content from far-left news media, likely because “the U.S. boasts a more robust conservative media ecosystem than it does on the left.” These trends lead Lorenz and coauthors to investigate who in the United States is most likely to consume hyperpartisan, far-right media, and how that consumption may connect to potentially anti-democratic political beliefs in important ways.
Examining self-reported news consumption among over 10,000 U.S. adults in a representative survey, Lorenz and coauthors find:
- Only a small group of U.S. adults, roughly one in ten, self-report far-right or far-left news outlets among their top three preferred news sources. Within this small subset of the U.S. population, however, far-right outlets were about nine times more likely to be listed as preferred news sources than were far-left outlets.
- U.S. adults self-reporting far-right hyperpartisan outlets among their preferred news sources are demographically and ideologically homogenous. They are overwhelmingly white, male, aged 55 or older, and without a college degree; Christian, particularly either evangelical, born-again, or Mormon; ideologically conservative or Republican; and tend to live in rural areas. They are also more likely to hold anti-establishment beliefs than the general U.S. population, especially populist anti-establishment beliefs.
Lorenz and coauthors’ findings reveal how “patterns in hyperpartisan media usage demonstrate growing extremism, not polarization.” Consumption of hyperpartisan news is far from equivalently present along partisan lines. The tendency for far-right hyperpartisan outlets to spread disinformation, hate speech, and other content harmful to democracy—and for this content to be picked up by more mainstream, center-right news outlets broadcasting it to far wider audiences—must be considered when we think about the relationship between news media, consumers, partisanship, and the future or democracy.