Headlines as networked language : a study of content and audience across 73 million links on Twitter

How different, in a precise sense, is The New York Times from Fox News? Or - Fox from NPR, NPR from CNN, CNN from Breitbart? If we think of news organizations as producers of language, as "speakers" - how similar or different are the voices? This question of the distance between news sources is fundamental to concerns about fragmentation and polarization in the news ecosystem. A number of studies have measured the proximity between outlets in terms of overlap at the level of audience, and then defined content-level differences in terms of the underlying audience composition - for example, the fraction of the readership who have shared content from particular political candidates. The "content graph" of the news ecosystem - the set of similarities and differences at the level of the actual coverage - is often assumed to be tightly linked to the "audience graph"; and the two are even defined in terms of each other.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• McClure, David(David W.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Deb Roy.

• Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/121838

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/121838