… The late 1980s and 1990s marked a high-water mark for a kind of giddy journalistic derangement over politicians’ adultery, drug use and draft avoidance — a somewhat arbitrary trio of offenses inflated into mortal sins. Candidates and nominees for various public positions were barraged with questions on these issues, […] Read more »
The 2020 Electorate
A durable finding from political science research is that people who self-identify as “Independent” but who admit to leaning towards one party or the other in a follow up question behave very similarly to their partisan counterparts. Increasingly, research is treating these Independent “leaners” as soft partisans and distinguishing “pure” […] Read more »
What makes Wisconsin swing?
… For the past seven years, our Communication and Civic Renewal research group has been studying contentious politics in Wisconsin. We are particularly interested in how the state’s communication ecology interacts with political, economic and social contexts to affect how people engage in politics. The graphs below show that people’s […] Read more »
For Local News, Americans Embrace Digital but Still Want Strong Community Connection
The digital era is making its mark on local news. Nearly as many Americans today say they prefer to get their local news online as say they prefer to do so through the television set, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of 34,897 U.S. adults conducted Oct. 15-Nov. […] Read more »
Journalism needs to practice transparency in a different way to rebuild credibility
Does the news business need a better definition of transparency? Shutterstock Michael Palanski, Rochester Institute of Technology and Andrea Hickerson, Rochester Institute of Technology Public trust in media continues to hover near all-time lows, driven by perceptions that the news industry is partisan and peddles inaccurate information (“fake news”), as […] Read more »
Stepping Inside the Fox Hole: The Media Echo-Chamber of Fox News
There is an alternate reality in American politics, and it plays an outsized role in the way many experience and form opinions on the most important issues facing the country. Progressives should be mindful of the challenge from the Fox News echo-chamber and how it skews public perceptions. At the […] Read more »