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Twitter & Shifting Press-State Relations: How Journalists Use Presidential Tweets

Sun, September 1, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hilton, Tenleytown East

Abstract

A sizeable literature has examined how politicians use social media, including Twitter. As Twitter has become a key platform for presidential communication, what and how a president tweets to followers is an important question. But equally of interest is the cross-media interplay of Twitter messaging. Although traditional theories of press-state relations may be fundamentally challenged in a media environment no longer premised on presidential dependence upon the press corps, in this hybrid media era (Chadwick, 2013), how the news media pass along, suppress, amplify, or critique the president’s Twitter messaging remains consequential. Press coverage of presidential tweets opens a new window on an enduring question about press-state relations (i.e. Cook, 2005): Which presidential messages sent via Twitter do the news media amplify and which do they ignore, re-frame?

In pilot research (Lawrence & McGregor, 2018), we documented that Barack Obama and Donald Trump, the first two presidents of the Twitter era, tweeted in roughly similar amounts during their respective first 100 days in office. But Trump’s rate of tweeting was steadier than Obama’s and the tone significantly more negative, especially given how often Trump used Twitter to level attacks—particularly on the press. Moreover, the press paid markedly more attention to Trump’s Twitter feed than to Obama’s, focused mainly on Trump’s critical tweets, and amplified the president’s negative messaging—particularly with respect to the press itself.

In this study, we build on that pilot research to more fully document how these two presidents used Twitter, and conceptualize a framework for analyzing journalists’ treatment of presidential tweets. Working with researchers at MediaCloud (a joint project between MIT’s Center for Civic Media and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University), we developed a tool to track social media mentions in news stories, in this case matching Twitter metadata with information contained in news stories published online. Based on the full corpus of tweets sent by President Obama in the first year of his second term (N=2,212) and those sent by President Trump in the first year of his term (N=2,516), this tool allows us to query a wide array of media sources for specific presidential tweets.

Our first aim is to determine what kinds of presidential tweets journalists’ feature in news stories. We code the presidential tweets as to their tone (praise, criticism, or neutral) and for their primary focus – for example, policy statements, commentary, and attack. We then identify which kinds of tweets were most likely to become news. Next, we qualitatively examine how journalists utilize presidential tweets in their stories, including whether they embed the actual tweet within stories—a question that has potentially important implications for public opinion. This study helps us understand how the news media react to, amplify, and contextualize presidential tweets as part of the construction of political news.

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