Under Trump, the Official White House Newsletter was transformed into a feedback loop with conservative news producers
In a new article for Information, Communication, and Society, Francesca Tripodi and Yuanye Ma reveal the important role electoral communication plays in framing current events and the extent to which email is an essential node in the right-wing media ecosystem. By analyzing both topics and topic absences, Dr. Tripodi and Ms. Ma demonstrate how the Trump administration leveraged the Official White House Newsletter to accentuate topics deemed most important by conservative voters, while resituating negative events and favoring sources from an information ecosystem rife with conspiracy theories and speculative claims:
By encouraging their readers to ‘do their own research’ but providing them the hyperlinks directly, the White House emails reveal an intricate structure whereby conservative news producers work in tandem with elected officials, bouncing signals throughout their information networks.
Performing spiritual leadership is more fraught in times of political polarization
Bridging scholarly perspectives across disciplines and within communication subfields on spirituality, civil religion, and storytelling in political discourse, Eddy argues that the U.S. president performs as a spiritual leader in ways scholars have generally overlooked – not necessarily by invoking a traditional ideology, but by summoning a moral language of solidarity through a compelling, unitary vision and uniquely “American” values. Drawing on a multimethod design combining a qualitative content analysis of six U.S. presidents’ speeches during times of crisis (N = 19) with survey data (N = 374), this research first assesses how modern presidents have employed a language of spiritual leadership over time and then examines public perceptions of these performances, exploring the roles of identity and partisanship in these perceptions. Results show the performativity of spiritual leadership may fail, to some extent, because of growing partisanship: In a “post-sorting” America with fewer cross-cutting identities, appeals to the “sacredness” of the presidency may no longer be able to take root. This research offers a framework for examining the language and performance of spiritual leadership in a variety of political and discursive contexts.
The gaps and inconsistencies in the Foreign Agent Registration Act are highly problematic for defending democracy
In this study, the authors map the legal work seven U.S. digital consultancies and public relations firms undertook across social media and digital platforms of behalf of four foreign governments. They find that these firms used a range of different strategies on social and digital media, very few of which featured legally required disclosures linking the content to their country of origin. Firms targeted journalists and other elites, but exactly how is not clear. Our most powerful findings regard what is absent. Our study reveals as much about the inconsistencies and inadequacies of the current FARA disclosure process and gaps in tech firms’ ad archives as it does about the content and strategies of the messages themselves. We conclude with a series of recommendations for technology firms and the Department of Justice for enforcing FARA regulations as they relate to social and digital content.