The gender dynamics of political discussion are important. These dynamics shape who shares their political views and how they share their views and reactions to these views. Using representative survey data from the United States and the UK, we investigate how social media platforms shape the gender dynamics of political posting. We find that on Facebook, gender does not predict political posting, whereas on Twitter, the gender gap is more pronounced. We also examine the concept of “mansplaining”—a term used to describe a patronizing form of communication directed at women by men. Firstly, we find that posting about political issues to Twitter is more likely to result in being an explainee but also being an explainer of political issues. Furthermore, posting to Twitter increases the likelihood of men reporting having been accused of mansplaining and women reporting having experienced it. In general, more than half of the women say they have experienced mansplaining, especially those who are younger, well educated, and left-leaning. We argue that the possibility of being mansplained affects who is willing to post their opinions online, and as such, caution should be exercised when using digital trace data to represent public opinion.

It is widely believed that the media has an important role to play in promoting development and in shaping economic policy. This is done partly by the media's framing of the issues for public debate and by educating consumers of news. Increasingly, economists have shown that the media has played a constructive role in promoting informed civil engagement on economic policy and even in promoting corporate governance. At the same time, the business press has been referred to as the weak link or 'step child' in an increasingly professional and knowledgeable news room. Among other critiques, business journalists are faulted for being ideologically captured, and so generally presenting a pro-business/market point of view. They are often accused of being not only biased, but too ill-informed to write in an analytical or critical way about economics. This article examines the US press coverage of the stimulus package over several months in 2009 to ascertain the validity of these hypotheses. We found that although there was robust discussion of the stimulus, it was mostly focused on the political process rather than the economic issues, there was little agenda setting and government and business sources -including many with a 'vested interest' -were overwhelmingly cited the most.

In recent years, a growing amount of scholarly interest has focused on the nature of the business/financial press and how it covers key economic events. Some of the literature examines the failings of the business press and its focus on narrow, short-term events instead of analytical writing that educates the public about macroeconomics, including long-term trends. Other studies have looked at how these tendencies affected press coverage before and during the 2008 financial crisis. As would be expected, the crisis caused an increase in writing about the business/financial press. Initially, the scholarship examined whether the media should have seen the crisis coming and questioned why journalists hadn't done a better job covering it. Other scholars, however, looked at the nature of the coverage itself vis-à-vis a larger discussion of how economic issues are framed. Much of the debate mirrored points made in previous analyses on the shortcomings of the business and financial press. They argue that more -or more accurateinformation necessarily changes outcomes and tend to make normative judgements about the quality of journalism coverage studied.

This introduction discusses the idea of 'media capture'. It argues that media capture is a useful concept for understanding today's state of the media. Media capture refers to a situation in which governments or vested interests networked with politics control the media. While traditional forms of prepublication censorship no longer exist in many parts of the world, the media are still not truly free. Political transition and digital technology, which were expected to free the media, did not. Instead, forms of control by government in tandem with business evolved along with changes in the media. This Special Issue explores recent cases of media capture and discusses how to update theories of media capture in light of transformations caused by digital technology and political transition.

The media are viewed as playing an important role in promoting economic development by educating the public, framing the agenda for discussion, serving as a watchdog and promoting corporate governance. This article examines some characteristics of the print coverage in Nigeria, Ghana and Uganda of oil, gas and mining, to see whether it lives up to these lofty goals. A content analysis was done of 788 articles that appeared in Nigerian, Ghanaian and Ugandan newspapers from 2007-2009 to determine how informative their coverage of the extractive sector was. Measurements included the use of jargon; the explanation of context and background; the number, type and range of sources. The conclusion was that much of the reporting was newsfocused and did not include substantial discussion about the effects of oil and gas extraction or the policy implications. Nor did the articles provide a balance of sources who could articulate a range of perspectives. Differences were more pronounced between periodicals than countries. Delineated are some ways in which press coverage could be improved.