How Traditional Media Elevates Social Media Negativity

• In Event: The Negative Effects of Traditional Media

Abstract

While the bulk of elites’ social media messages are positive or neutral in tone, the negative messages that comprise a comparatively smaller percentage of messages receive a disproportionate share of attention among users and the public more generally. Consistent with the extant literature on negativity bias and the role of emotion in message diffusion, negative social media messages are shared much more often. A distinct but related group of studies investigates negativity bias among traditional news outlets, like newspaper articles or stories on television. For example, research demonstrates that coverage of COVID-19 was overwhelmingly negative, even when some good news might otherwise have merited more coverage (e.g., some misinformation about treatments received more coverage than the development of vaccines). While we know about the role of negativity on these distinct platforms, we know little about the ways in which traditional media may have amplified the attention that negative social media messages received.

The current study fills this gap in the existing literature by examining how negativity in elite social media messages affects the extent to which they are covered in more traditional media outlets. Specifically, we examine whether and how the tone of elite social media messages affected whether those messages we covered (and in most cases quoted verbatim) in some traditional news outlets. To test this question, we first link every tweet from several American political elites to articles about those tweets in the New York Times (if the tweets received any coverage at all). After determining the tone of these tweets, we then test whether than how the level of negativity in a tweet affects whether (and how many times) the tweet is covered in a highly-circulated U.S. newspaper. We find that negative tweets from political elites are significantly more likely to be covered in the New York Times, even when controlling some other factors that might draw news coverage. Our results suggest that newspapers and other more traditional outlets might be complicit in the spread of negativity from social media.

Authors

• Jeffrey A. Fine, Clemson University

• Riley Stotzky

• Madeleine Maylath, American University

• Leah Jane Terry, Clemson University