Measuring the Convergence of News Media Consensus using Cultural Consensus Theory

• In Event: 2451 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 17. Organizational Change and Decision-Making

Abstract

News media have great influence upon the population they serve, rendering the production of news an important area of study for sociologists (Klinenberg, 2005). Researchers analyzing news production typically study which news stories are chosen to be covered. An equally important,but less studied, feature of news production is how news organizations come to agree upon a set of facts on a topic – referred to here as media consensus. A possible reason for this lack of scholarship on media consensus is measurement. Here, we adopt a method from anthropology– called Cultural Consensus Theory (CCT) – for measuring media consensus. CCT identifies which facts are generally accepted among news media, as well as the competence of each news organization in identifying these facts. Separate media ”cultures” can also be identified, by political bias or other factor. Using data we collected from news articles on the Ayotzinapa Kidnapping in Mexico, we find that a general convergence of media consensus occurred over time; generally, news organizations were slow to accept new facts, and once a fact became generally accepted, it was not retracted. Our research shows the efficacy for CCT in measuring media consensus.

Authors

• C. Ben Gibson, Army Research Lab

• Martin Jacinto, University of California, Irvine