Partisan selective engagement: Evidence from Facebook

Garz, Marcel; Sörensen, Jil; Stone, Daniel

doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2020.06.016

Cited by 35 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…The political position of German news outlets has been measured before; recent approaches include Dallmann et al (2015), Dewenter et al (2016), and Garz et al (2020). In this section, we demonstrate that the results from our novel approach are similar to the findings from these papers, which supports the validity of our analysis.…”

Section: Comparison To Existing Measuressupporting

confidence: 83%

“…Moreover, the measures agree on the direction of biases in nine out of eleven cases; exceptions are Stern and Welt. While Garz et al (2020) also find that Stern is positioned in the center of the political spectrum, they obtain a different sign for its position. Moreover, the authors classify Welt as positioned in the center of the political spectrum, while the news outlet is clearly positioned on the right of the political spectrum in our analysis.…”

Section: Comparison To Existing Measuresmentioning

confidence: 77%

“…First, our approach to measure the political position of news outlets contributes to the literature on political media bias (see Groeling, 2013;Gentzkow et al, 2016;Puglisi and Snyder, 2016, for surveys). It is especially close to papers that develop alternative methods to measure political bias of news outlets in the US (e.g., Groseclose and Milyo, 2005;Ho and Quinn, 2008;Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2010) and in Germany (e.g., Dallmann et al, 2015;Dewenter et al, 2016;Garz et al, 2020). We contribute to this literature by presenting a novel approach to determine the political position of news outlets that is easy to implement, straightforward to interpret, and applicable to multi-party democracies and small datasets.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 86%

“…First, while our approach can assess whether a news outlet is positioned on the left or on the right, it is agnostic about the type of 39 Dallmann et al (2015), for instance, use more than 130,000 articles with over 62,000,000 words; Garz et al (2020) downloaded more than two million Facebook posts. Both approaches involve additional information from party manifestos; Garz et al (2020) also employ a sentiment dictionary for German political language. 40 The approach by Dewenter et al (2016) is, for instance, based on tonality data from MediaTenor.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Garz et al (2020) construct an index of media outlets' political position that is based on comparing the language of the Facebook posts of a news outlet with the language of the election programs of Germany's main political parties. Here, too, the index lies in the interval [−1, 1], where negative values indicate a bias to the left and positive values indicate a bias to the right.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Selective sharing of news items and the political position of news outlets

Freitag

Kerkhof

Münster

2021

Information Economics and Policy

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We present a new measure for the political position of news outlets based on politicians' selective sharing of news items. Politicians predominantly share news items that are in line with their political position, hence, one can infer the political position of news outlets from the politicians' revealed preferences over news items. We apply our measure to twelve major German media outlets by analyzing tweets of German Members of Parliament (MPs) on Twitter. For each news outlet under consideration, we compute the correlation between the political position of the seven parties in the 19th German Bundestag and their MPs' relative number of Twitter referrals to that outlet. We find that three outlets are positioned on the left, and two of them are positioned on the right. Several robustness checks support our results. We also apply our procedure to nine major media outlets from the USA and find that two outlets are positioned on the right, five are positioned on the left of the political spectrum.

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Section: Comparison To Existing Measuressupporting

confidence: 83%

Section: Comparison To Existing Measuresmentioning

confidence: 77%

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 86%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Selective sharing of news items and the political position of news outlets

Freitag

Kerkhof

Münster

2021

Information Economics and Policy

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Competing for attention on digital platforms: The case of news outlets

Meyer,

Kerkhof,

Cennamo

et al. 2024

Strategic Management Journal

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Research SummaryPlatforms are often assumed to benefit firms, especially smaller ones, by facilitating access to a broader consumer base and increasing visibility. However, this logic relies on platforms” ability to match consumer preferences to complement characteristics. In addition to this matching mechanism, we posit that platforms also broker consumer attention towards complements, which then compete for this attention. We propose that this attention mechanism is particularly prominent in settings where complement characteristics cannot be observed ex‐ante, and argue that complementors' with larger scale and broader scope are better positioned to capture attention than smaller and less broad ones. We formalize and test this intuition in the context of news aggregators, highlighting the significance of complementors' ability to draw attention in evaluating their benefits from platform participation.Managerial SummarySmall firms are often assumed to benefit most from joining a platform to expand their market reach and visibility. However, this will only be the case if the main function of platforms is to match consumer preferences to product characteristics. We argue that platforms also direct attention towards some products at the expense of others on the platform. This “attention mechanism” is particularly important whenever product characteristics cannot be observed prior to consumption, and we propose that in such settings, larger scale and broader scope of products drive attention towards specific firms on the platform. We test these predictions in the context of online news aggregators, which feature news content by newspapers of different sizes and with different range of articles. We find that indeed large and generalist newspapers benefit most from being on a news aggregators, while small and focused newspapers perform better when they are not featured on the news aggregator at all.

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