Who Is Congress in an Era of Nationalizing News?

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Communication

Abstract

The last two decades have seen the rapid decline of locally produced news and an accompanying nationalization of news consumption. A range of work has documented the effect of this shift on the volume and quality of coverage of local politics, and on political engagement. Less explored is the effect of this change on the image presented in the media of political institutions that transcend the national and local, such as the two major political parties. While the parties are relevant to both national and local politics, we expect different coverage priorities will lead national newspapers to give more coverage to ideologically extreme members of the two parties, while local papers provide a more balanced picture of the parties’ ideology.

We examine this question by examining the volume of coverage received by members of congress between 2003 and 2020 in four national and a wide range of local newspapers. We compare the association between members’ ideological extremity and the probability that they receive coverage as well as how this association changes over time. Preliminary results show that throughout this period national newspapers favor coverage of ideologically extreme members of congress, but local papers shift from a bias towards coverage of ideologically moderate members at the start of this period to a bias in favor of ideologically extreme members by the end of the 2010s.

Author

• C. Daniel Myers, University of Minnesota