TY - JOUR AU - Wong, Wai Lam AU - Trilling, Damian PY - 2023/02/23 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - The Interplay between Right-Wing Alternative Media, Mainstream Media, and Republican Political Elites in the United States JF - Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media JA - JQD VL - 3 IS - SE - Articles DO - 10.51685/jqd.2023.001 UR - https://journalqd.org/article/view/3775 SP - AB - <p><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">Right-wing anti-establishment sentiment has enabled the mainstreaming of al</span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">ternative media outlets across Europe and the United States. Earlier research </span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">has quantified the public recognition of these media actors through web traffic </span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">rankings, direct social media engagement (e.g., reactions, comments, shares), </span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">and topic overlap with establishment counterparts. We demonstrate a comput</span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">ationally scalable approach which (1) sharpens the analytical unit from topic </span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">(e.g., “immigration”) to specific news event (e.g., “migrant caravan traveling </span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">from Honduras”) and (2) enables the temporal ordering of the same news event </span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">appearing among media and politicians.</span> <span dir="ltr" role="presentation">Our method uses a combination of </span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">URL matching, word embedding similarity metrics, and network-based event</span><br role="presentation" /><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">detection techniques.</span> <span dir="ltr" role="presentation">We draw two main findings from a dataset of articles </span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">from 13 U.S. right-wing media outlets and (re-)tweets by congressional Repub</span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">licans from 2016 to 2020. First, we identify a clear shift in politicians’ media </span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">consumption from left- to right-wing outlets.</span> <span dir="ltr" role="presentation">While established-right outlets </span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">made the largest gains (30% to 42% of all (re-)tweets), alternative-right outlets </span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">also grew from 2% to 5%.</span> <span dir="ltr" role="presentation">Second, we identify increasing content alignment </span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">among established- and alternative-right outlets as the URL-to-dyad ratio is </span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">almost halved over the time period. Finally, we present a proof-of-concept for </span><span dir="ltr" role="presentation">detecting media outlets’ indirect political alignment.</span></p> ER -