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Political Campaigns, the Press, and Platforms

Sat, September 1, 8:00 to 9:30am, Marriott, Salon I

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In the past ten years, the field of political communication has produced significant scholarship detailing how campaigns and advocacy groups have developed and adopted new digital strategies and tactics. What is missing from many of these accounts is the way that these strategies are also deeply intertwined with concurrent changes to practices of political journalists and notions of publicity and attention.

This panel highlights the intertwined relationship between political campaign organizations, journalists and public attention, and social media platforms, asking what traditional practices of election reporting look like in a partisan digital environment, how journalists report on seemingly new digital strategies and messages, and how advocacy groups use new platforms in ways that bypass journalistic and other public attention.

In doing so, it blends traditional concerns of political communication—such as deciding what makes the news and how groups mobilize supporters—with questions about how new strategies regarding social media, data, and analytics are executed by campaigns and advocacy groups, and then covered (or not covered) by journalists.

Our panelists also bring together a variety of methodological approaches, including survey experiments of journalists and editors, interviews with journalists, activists, and campaign staffers, content analyses of news stories, and analyses of the affordances of social media and analytics platforms.

Jesse Baldwin-Philippi investigates how journalists have mythologized the tactics and strategies associated with digital and analytic-based campaigning, ultimately constructing the practices of digital campaigning as simultaneously mystical and empirical. She shows how early journalistic accounts of digital campaigning in 2008 and 2012 relied on tropes traditionally associated with hacker culture, and ultimately presents the digital campaign with a combination of mysticism and empiricism that enables routine and/or ineffectual tactics to be passed off as surefire oracles.

Kathleen Searles, Samara Klar, Yanna Krupnikov, and John Barry Ryan argue that in light of recent critiques of the alleged left-leaning bias in media, and the existence of the “media bubble” in which reporters live and work in mostly Democratic communities along the coasts, questions about the effects partisan identities, news values, and perceived audience demands have on the news selection process are particularly relevant. Conducting a survey experiment on journalists and editors, they illuminate the degree to which reporters order the partisanship of their audience versus their own partisan identities in making decisions.

Shannon McGregor examines how social media manifests as public opinion in the news, how these practices shape journalistic routines, and how this emergent form of public opinion is particularly susceptible to manipulation. She finds that the press reports on non-representative online sentiments and trends as a form of public opinion that services the horserace narrative, and that campaigns actively worked to shape what public opinion looked like on social media, problematizing the idea that political expressions on social media are organic.

Emily Van Duyn investigates online groups, like Pantsuit Nation, that make use of the affordances of social media platforms to remain secret, and hidden from public view and journalistic attention. She finds that these groups engage in hierarchical mobilizing and perform similar functions for its members as other forms of political organizing, but for a different kind of member: one reticent to disclose their political beliefs to others in their online and offline network, but eager to engage with like-minded others.

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