Inside the Echo Chamber? The Co-evolution of Newspapers, Fox News, and Tea Party Blogging

• In Event: 510 - Section on Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Paper Session. Media Sociology

Abstract

A growing body of literature points to a conservative media echo chamber, where a small number of outlets extensively cover issues in ways that benefits the Republican Party. One beneficiary of this echo chamber has been the Tea Party, which received extensive positive media attention from conservative sources, particularly Fox News. Little research, however, has compared the production and content of media attention to the Tea Party by conservative and non-conservative outlets, nor examined how movement generated media replicates or differs from these sources. Using a sample of 28,123 blog posts drawn from three Tea Party umbrella groups, 70,834 newspaper articles covering the Tea Party, and 33,189 references to the Tea Party on Fox News, we estimate topic models to analyze the substantive content of movement discourse and media coverage between 2009 and 2014. The results show that not only do different types of media vary in the overall frequency of content production, each source also follows a sharply distinct topical emphasis as well. Estimates from a time series negative binomial regression analysis further indicates that although to some degree the various types of media shape the frequency of content production of each other, the larger attention cycles are quite distinct across sources, indicating that, surprisingly, Tea Party blogs operate largely outside the conservative media echo chamber. We suggest that this is linked to Tea Party dissatisfaction with the Republican Party, and the widespread fragmentation of local chapters organizing under the Tea Party banner.

Authors

• Patrick Rafail, Tulane University

• John D. McCarthy, Pennsylvania State University