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Replication Data for: The Rise of and Demand for Identity-Oriented Media Coverage

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: The Rise of and Demand for Identity-Oriented Media Coverage
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MK5PXM
 
Creator Hopkins, Daniel J.
Lelkes, Yphtach
Wolken, Sam
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description While some assert that social identities have become more salient in American media coverage, existing evidence is largely anecdotal. An increased emphasis on social identities has important political implications, including for polarization and representation. We first document the rising salience of different social identities using NLP tools to analyze all tweets from 19 media outlets (2008-2021) alongside 553,078 URLs shared on Facebook. We then examine one potential mechanism: outlets may highlight meaningful social identities - race/ethnicity, gender, religion, or partisanship - to attract readers through various social and psychological pathways. We find that identity cues are associated with increases in some forms of engagement on social media. To probe causality, we analyze 3,828 randomized headline experiments conducted via Upworthy. Headlines mentioning racial/ethnic identities generated more engagement than headlines that did not, with suggestive evidence for other identities. Identity-oriented media coverage is growing and rooted partly in audience demand.
 
Subject Social Sciences
Mass media
Political communication
 
Date 2024-01-11
 
Contributor Wolken, Sam