The Relationship between New and Traditional Media

• In Event: 106 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session I
  In Refereed Roundtable: A. Table 12. Critical Media Studies

Abstract

New media has been lauded as providing opportunity for more diversity of voices to be heard. However, whether this actually results in more diverse coverage of news has been called into question since highly unequal distributions of readership and attention still exist-- only a few blogs or other new media users become highly followed, thus limiting the diversity. While most bloggers do not often act as journalists by producing, uncovering, or reporting news, they may also play a large part in agenda-setting-- they draw attention to events by linking to reports in traditional media and/or by blogging about what they have seen or heard or read in traditional media outlets. In this study, we examine the relationship between traditional media outlets and new media to see if reliance on traditional media has changed and to understand how bloggers use information from traditional media. We analyze hyperlinking behavior in over 200 political blogs over four years and look at the difference in patterns between conservative-leaning and liberal-leaning blogs in reliance on different news sources and examine how they filter information from news sources. We find high stability and both high overlap and high polarization in information sources between the two groups—there is a core of “legitimate” major news sources that both groups link heavily to, and at the same time, each groups’ worldviews are bolstered with more partisan sites. This is suggestive of how political blogs maintain some unity of discourse while also staying polarized.

Authors

• Stephanie Lee, University of Washington

• Sean Munson, University of Washington