David Beavers (APRW)
Date and Time
Location
Zoom link below.
Today's speaker
David Beavers, "Undermining the Fourth Estate: Elite Attacks on Media Credibility"
Abstract
Americans' trust in the media has declined precipitously since the 1970s, outpacing the decline in trust in other political institutions and the decline in media trust in other Western democracies. To what extent does elite criticism about the media drive this trend? In this project, I employ various automated text analysis and natural language processing tools to a corpus of 10.7 million floor speeches from the Congressional Record to create an over-time measure of politicians' rhetoric about the media between 1939 and 2023. Descriptive results show that Republicans and Democrats in Congress have diverged in their rhetoric about the media since the 1970s, with more conservative members becoming significantly more critical over time. Next, I relate this over-time measure of politicians' rhetoric about the media to a pair of time-series surveys of Americans' trust in the media from the General Social Survey and Gallup. Statistical results show that increases in Republican elite criticism of the media predict subsequent declines in copartisans' trust in the press, controlling for individuals' generalized institutional trust.
The American Politics Research Workshop (Gov 3004) meets all academic year, Tuesdays, 12:00–2:00 PM, in CGIS K354. This workshop presents an opportunity for graduate students and Harvard faculty to present and receive feedback on their current research. The workshop highlights key theoretical and empirical findings from Harvard affiliates on topics related to American politics.
All interested Harvard affiliates are invited to attend.