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How the news media activate public expression and influence national agendas

2017; American Association for the Advancement of Science; Volume: 358; Issue: 6364 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1126/science.aao1100

1095-9203

Gary King, Benjamin Schneer, Ariel White,

Electoral Systems and Political Participation

We demonstrate that exposure to the news media causes Americans to take public stands on specific issues, join national policy conversations, and express themselves publicly-all key components of democratic politics-more often than they would otherwise. After recruiting 48 mostly small media outlets, we chose groups of these outlets to write and publish articles on subjects we approved, on dates we randomly assigned. We estimated the causal effect on proximal measures, such as website pageviews and Twitter discussion of the articles' specific subjects, and distal ones, such as national Twitter conversation in broad policy areas. Our intervention increased discussion in each broad policy area by ~62.7% (relative to a day's volume), accounting for 13,166 additional posts over the treatment week, with similar effects across population subgroups.