Drowning Out the Message Together: Analysis of Social Media Comments on a Political Sex Scandal
Keywords:
gatekeeping, journalism, online comments, polarization, drowning effectAbstract
This study content analyzed online comments on Fox News and CNN’s YouTube platforms related to news stories on the 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate in Alabama. Republican candidate Roy Moore attracted widespread media attention one month prior to the election – after being accused of sexual misconduct for alleged relationships decades before his run for U.S. Senate. Comment threads were polarized on the two ideologically different forums (CNN and Fox News) as well as within these forums. The latter indicated a crossover effect or the tendency of social media users to leave comments on an ideologically opposing forum. Regardless of being “native” or crossovers, commenters tended to drown out reporters’ messages by introducing new discussion topics. Through the examination of the most popular comments, this study argues for the need for a more nuanced approach to understanding audience gatekeeping in today’s polarized media environment. The article highlights the importance of monitoring online comments to understand the power of the audience to exercise control over the direction of social media commentary.
References
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Bakshy, E., Messing, S., & Adamic, L. (2015). Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science, 348, 1130–1132.
Barberá, P., Jost, J. T., Nagler, J., Tucker, J. A., & Bonneau, R. (2015). Tweeting from left to right: Is online political communication more than an echo chamber? Psychological Science, 26, 1531– 1542.
Barnes, T., Beaulieu, E., & Saxton, G. W. (2018). Sex and corruption: How sexism shapes voters’ responses to scandal. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 8(1), 103-121.
Barzilai-Nahon K. (2009). Gatekeeping: A critical review. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 43, 433-478.
Barzilai-Nahon, K. (2008). Toward a theory of network gatekeeping: A framework for exploring information control. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59, 1493-1512.
Basinger, S. J. (2013). Scandals and congressional elections in the post-Watergate era. Political Research Quarterly, 66(2), 385–398.
Boczkowski, P. J., & Mitchelstein, E. (2012). How users take advantage of different forms of interactivity on online news sites: Clicking, e-mailing, and commenting. Human Communication Research, 38(1), 1-22.
Booker, B. (2017, December, 12). A timeline of plot twists and bombshells: How we got to Election Day in Alabama. NPR. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2017/12/12/569741642/a-timeline-of-plot-twists-and-bombshells-how-we-got-to-election-day-in-alabama.
Burgess, J., & Green, J. (2018). YouTube: Online video and participatory culture (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Chandler, K., & Peoples, S. (2017, December 13). Democrat Jones wins stunning red-state Alabama Senate. The Associated Press. Retrieved from https://www.apnews.com.
Charmaz K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Cohen, J. (1960). A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 20(1), 37-46.
DeSilver, D. (2017 December 13). U.S. Senate seats rarely have flipped to other party in recent special elections. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/12/13/u-s-senate-seats-rarely-have-flipped-to-other-party-in-recent-special-elections/.
Doherty, D., Dowling, C. M., & Miller, M. G. (2014). Does time heal all wounds? Sex scandals, tax evasion, and the passage of time. Political Science & Politics, 47, 357-366.
Druckman, J.N., Levendusky, M.S., & McLain, A. (2018). No need to watch: how the effects of partisan media can spread via inter-personal discussions. American Journal of Political Science 62(1), 99–112.
Erzikova, E., & Simpson, E. (2018). When the gated misbehave: Online reader comments on Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal. Journalism Practice, 12(9), 1148-1164.
Erzikova, E., Gandy, L., Hall, A., & Kuntz, K. (2016). The 2014 NFL Player Ray Rice Domestic Abuse Case: The Analysis of Factors that Contributed to Tweets Popularity during the Scandal. ECSM 2016 Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Social Media, 75-82.
Fürsich, E. (2009). In defense of textual analysis. Restoring a challenged method for journalism and media studies. Journalism Studies, 10(2), 238-252. DOI: 10.1080/14616700802374050
Gallup/Knight Foundation (2018). An online experimental platform to assess trust in the media.
Retrieved from https://knightfoundation.org/reports/an-online-experimental-platform-to-assess-trust-in-the-media.
Gandy, L., & Erzikova, E. (2017). Exploring Crisis Management via Twitter in the Age of Political Transparency. In L. Austin and Y. Jin (Eds.) Social Media and Crisis Communication, (pp. 321-334). New York: Routledge.
Graf, J., Erba, J., & Harn, RW. (2017). The role of civility and anonymity on perceptions of online comments.” Mass Communication and Society 20(4), 526–549.
Graham, T., & Wright, S. (2015). A tale of two stories from “below the line” comment fields at the Guardian. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 20(3), 317-338.
Gratton, G., Holden, R. &, Kolotilin, A. (2018). When to drop a bombshell. Review of
Economic Studies, 85, 2139–2172.
Hermida, A. (2012). Social journalism: Exploring how social media is shaping journalism. In Eugenia Siapera, Andreas Veglis (Eds.), The handbook of global online journalism, pp. 309-328. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Holton, A., Lee, N., & Coleman, R. (2014). Commenting on health: A framing analysis of user comments in response to health articles online. Journal of Health Communication, 19(7), 825–837.
Hong, S., & Cameron, G.T. (2018). Will comments change your opinion? The persuasion effects of online comments and heuristic cues in crisis communication. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 26, 173–182.
Iyengar, S., Lelkes, Y., Levendusky, M., Malhotra, N., & Westwood, S.J. (2019). The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States affective polarization. Annual Review of Political Science, 22, 129-146.
Kelly, J. P., & Solomon, P. J. (1975). Humor in television advertising. Journal of Advertising, 4(3), 31-35.
Klostermann, P. (2015). YouTube Comment Scraper. Web-based application. http://ytcomments.klostermann.ca/.
Lawrence, R. G., Radcliffe, D., & Schmidt, T.R. (2018). Practicing engagement. Journalism Practice, 12(10), 1220-1240. DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2017.1391712
Lee, E., & Tandoc, E. C. (2017). When news meets the audience: How audience feedback online affects news production and consumption. Human Communication Research, 43, 436-449. doi:10.1111/hcre.12123
Liu, J., & Shi, R. (2019). How do online comments affect perceived descriptive norms of e-cigarette use? The role of quasi-statistical sense, valence perceptions, and exposure dosage. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 24(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmy021
Manchester, J. (2019). GOP more likely than Democrats to forgive party member facing scandal, says polling editor. Retrieved from https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/432506-gop-more-likely-to-forgive-member-of-their-own-party-facing.
Matsa, K. E., & Shearer, E. (2018, September 10). News use across social media platforms 2018. Retrieved from http://www.journalism.org/2018/09/10/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2018/.
McCrummen, S., Reinhard, B., & Crites, A. (2017, November 9). Woman says Roy Moore initiated sexual encounter when she was 14, he was 32. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/.
Mills, M., Van de Bunt, G., De Bruijn, J. (2006). Comparative research persistent problems and promising solutions. International Sociology, 21(5), 619–631.
Papacharissi, Z. (2009). The citizen is the message: Alternative modes of civic engagement. In journalism and citizenship: New agendas in communication, In Z. Papacharissi, (Ed.), 29–43. New York: Routledge.
Pew Research Center (2018a, November 5). More now say it’s ‘stressful’ to discuss politics with people they disagree with. Retrieved from https://www.people-press.org/2018/11/05/more-now-say-its-stressful-to-discuss-politics-with-people-they-disagree-with/.
Pew Research Center. (2018b, March 20). Wide gender gap, growing educational divide in voters’ party identification. Retrieved from https://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/wide-gender-gap-growing-educational-divide-in-voters-party-identification/
Phillips, W. (2015). This is why we can’t have nice things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Puglisi R., & Snyder J. M. J. (2011). Newspaper coverage of political scandals. The Journal of Politics, 73(3), 931–950.
Reich, Z. (2011). User comments. The transformation of participatory space. In J. B. Singer, A. Hermida, D. Domingo, (eds.), Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers, pp. 96–117. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Remkus, A. (2017, November 13). New Roy Moore accuser, Beverly Young Nelson, claims he assaulted her in locked car when she was 16. Retrieved from https://www.al.com.
Richardson, J. E., & Stanyer, J. (2011). Reader opinion in the digital age: Tabloid and broadsheet newspaper websites and the exercise of political voice. Journalism, 12(8), 983–1003.
Sanfilippo, M., Yang, S., & Fichman, P. (2017). Trolling here, there, and everywhere: Perceptions of trolling behaviors in context. Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 68(10), 2313-2327.
Shoemaker, P. J., & Vos, T. (2009). Gatekeeping theory. New York, NY: Routledge.
Shoemaker, P. J., Johnson, P. R., Seo, H., & Wang, X. (2010). Readers as gatekeepers of online news: Brazil, China, and the United States. Brazilian Journalism Research, 6(1), 55-77.
Tucker, J.A., Guess, A., Barberá, P., Vaccari, C., Siegel, A., Sanovich, S., Stukal, D., & Nyhan, B. (2018, March). Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: A review of the scientific literature. William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Vollers, A. C. (2017, November 15). New Roy Moore accuser: 'He didn't pinch it; he grabbed it.’ Retrieved from https://www.al.com.
Wolfgang, J. D. (2018). Commenters as political actors infringing on the field of journalism, Journalism Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2018.1493949.
Ziegele, M., & Quiring, O. (2013). Conceptualizing online discussion value: A multidimensional framework for analyzing user comments on mass-media websites. Annals of the International Communication Association, 37(1), 125-153. DOI: 10.1080/23808985.2013.11679148
Bakshy, E., Messing, S., & Adamic, L. (2015). Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science, 348, 1130–1132.
Barberá, P., Jost, J. T., Nagler, J., Tucker, J. A., & Bonneau, R. (2015). Tweeting from left to right: Is online political communication more than an echo chamber? Psychological Science, 26, 1531– 1542.
Barnes, T., Beaulieu, E., & Saxton, G. W. (2018). Sex and corruption: How sexism shapes voters’ responses to scandal. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 8(1), 103-121.
Barzilai-Nahon K. (2009). Gatekeeping: A critical review. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 43, 433-478.
Barzilai-Nahon, K. (2008). Toward a theory of network gatekeeping: A framework for exploring information control. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59, 1493-1512.
Basinger, S. J. (2013). Scandals and congressional elections in the post-Watergate era. Political Research Quarterly, 66(2), 385–398.
Boczkowski, P. J., & Mitchelstein, E. (2012). How users take advantage of different forms of interactivity on online news sites: Clicking, e-mailing, and commenting. Human Communication Research, 38(1), 1-22.
Booker, B. (2017, December, 12). A timeline of plot twists and bombshells: How we got to Election Day in Alabama. NPR. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2017/12/12/569741642/a-timeline-of-plot-twists-and-bombshells-how-we-got-to-election-day-in-alabama.
Burgess, J., & Green, J. (2018). YouTube: Online video and participatory culture (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Chandler, K., & Peoples, S. (2017, December 13). Democrat Jones wins stunning red-state Alabama Senate. The Associated Press. Retrieved from https://www.apnews.com.
Charmaz K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Cohen, J. (1960). A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 20(1), 37-46.
DeSilver, D. (2017 December 13). U.S. Senate seats rarely have flipped to other party in recent special elections. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/12/13/u-s-senate-seats-rarely-have-flipped-to-other-party-in-recent-special-elections/.
Doherty, D., Dowling, C. M., & Miller, M. G. (2014). Does time heal all wounds? Sex scandals, tax evasion, and the passage of time. Political Science & Politics, 47, 357-366.
Druckman, J.N., Levendusky, M.S., & McLain, A. (2018). No need to watch: how the effects of partisan media can spread via inter-personal discussions. American Journal of Political Science 62(1), 99–112.
Erzikova, E., & Simpson, E. (2018). When the gated misbehave: Online reader comments on Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal. Journalism Practice, 12(9), 1148-1164.
Erzikova, E., Gandy, L., Hall, A., & Kuntz, K. (2016). The 2014 NFL Player Ray Rice Domestic Abuse Case: The Analysis of Factors that Contributed to Tweets Popularity during the Scandal. ECSM 2016 Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Social Media, 75-82.
Fürsich, E. (2009). In defense of textual analysis. Restoring a challenged method for journalism and media studies. Journalism Studies, 10(2), 238-252. DOI: 10.1080/14616700802374050
Gallup/Knight Foundation (2018). An online experimental platform to assess trust in the media.
Retrieved from https://knightfoundation.org/reports/an-online-experimental-platform-to-assess-trust-in-the-media.
Gandy, L., & Erzikova, E. (2017). Exploring Crisis Management via Twitter in the Age of Political Transparency. In L. Austin and Y. Jin (Eds.) Social Media and Crisis Communication, (pp. 321-334). New York: Routledge.
Graf, J., Erba, J., & Harn, RW. (2017). The role of civility and anonymity on perceptions of online comments.” Mass Communication and Society 20(4), 526–549.
Graham, T., & Wright, S. (2015). A tale of two stories from “below the line” comment fields at the Guardian. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 20(3), 317-338.
Gratton, G., Holden, R. &, Kolotilin, A. (2018). When to drop a bombshell. Review of
Economic Studies, 85, 2139–2172.
Hermida, A. (2012). Social journalism: Exploring how social media is shaping journalism. In Eugenia Siapera, Andreas Veglis (Eds.), The handbook of global online journalism, pp. 309-328. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Holton, A., Lee, N., & Coleman, R. (2014). Commenting on health: A framing analysis of user comments in response to health articles online. Journal of Health Communication, 19(7), 825–837.
Hong, S., & Cameron, G.T. (2018). Will comments change your opinion? The persuasion effects of online comments and heuristic cues in crisis communication. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 26, 173–182.
Iyengar, S., Lelkes, Y., Levendusky, M., Malhotra, N., & Westwood, S.J. (2019). The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States affective polarization. Annual Review of Political Science, 22, 129-146.
Kelly, J. P., & Solomon, P. J. (1975). Humor in television advertising. Journal of Advertising, 4(3), 31-35.
Klostermann, P. (2015). YouTube Comment Scraper. Web-based application. http://ytcomments.klostermann.ca/.
Lawrence, R. G., Radcliffe, D., & Schmidt, T.R. (2018). Practicing engagement. Journalism Practice, 12(10), 1220-1240. DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2017.1391712
Lee, E., & Tandoc, E. C. (2017). When news meets the audience: How audience feedback online affects news production and consumption. Human Communication Research, 43, 436-449. doi:10.1111/hcre.12123
Liu, J., & Shi, R. (2019). How do online comments affect perceived descriptive norms of e-cigarette use? The role of quasi-statistical sense, valence perceptions, and exposure dosage. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 24(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmy021
Manchester, J. (2019). GOP more likely than Democrats to forgive party member facing scandal, says polling editor. Retrieved from https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/432506-gop-more-likely-to-forgive-member-of-their-own-party-facing.
Matsa, K. E., & Shearer, E. (2018, September 10). News use across social media platforms 2018. Retrieved from http://www.journalism.org/2018/09/10/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2018/.
McCrummen, S., Reinhard, B., & Crites, A. (2017, November 9). Woman says Roy Moore initiated sexual encounter when she was 14, he was 32. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/.
Mills, M., Van de Bunt, G., De Bruijn, J. (2006). Comparative research persistent problems and promising solutions. International Sociology, 21(5), 619–631.
Papacharissi, Z. (2009). The citizen is the message: Alternative modes of civic engagement. In journalism and citizenship: New agendas in communication, In Z. Papacharissi, (Ed.), 29–43. New York: Routledge.
Pew Research Center (2018a, November 5). More now say it’s ‘stressful’ to discuss politics with people they disagree with. Retrieved from https://www.people-press.org/2018/11/05/more-now-say-its-stressful-to-discuss-politics-with-people-they-disagree-with/.
Pew Research Center. (2018b, March 20). Wide gender gap, growing educational divide in voters’ party identification. Retrieved from https://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/wide-gender-gap-growing-educational-divide-in-voters-party-identification/
Phillips, W. (2015). This is why we can’t have nice things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Puglisi R., & Snyder J. M. J. (2011). Newspaper coverage of political scandals. The Journal of Politics, 73(3), 931–950.
Reich, Z. (2011). User comments. The transformation of participatory space. In J. B. Singer, A. Hermida, D. Domingo, (eds.), Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers, pp. 96–117. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Remkus, A. (2017, November 13). New Roy Moore accuser, Beverly Young Nelson, claims he assaulted her in locked car when she was 16. Retrieved from https://www.al.com.
Richardson, J. E., & Stanyer, J. (2011). Reader opinion in the digital age: Tabloid and broadsheet newspaper websites and the exercise of political voice. Journalism, 12(8), 983–1003.
Sanfilippo, M., Yang, S., & Fichman, P. (2017). Trolling here, there, and everywhere: Perceptions of trolling behaviors in context. Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 68(10), 2313-2327.
Shoemaker, P. J., & Vos, T. (2009). Gatekeeping theory. New York, NY: Routledge.
Shoemaker, P. J., Johnson, P. R., Seo, H., & Wang, X. (2010). Readers as gatekeepers of online news: Brazil, China, and the United States. Brazilian Journalism Research, 6(1), 55-77.
Tucker, J.A., Guess, A., Barberá, P., Vaccari, C., Siegel, A., Sanovich, S., Stukal, D., & Nyhan, B. (2018, March). Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: A review of the scientific literature. William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Vollers, A. C. (2017, November 15). New Roy Moore accuser: 'He didn't pinch it; he grabbed it.’ Retrieved from https://www.al.com.
Wolfgang, J. D. (2018). Commenters as political actors infringing on the field of journalism, Journalism Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2018.1493949.
Ziegele, M., & Quiring, O. (2013). Conceptualizing online discussion value: A multidimensional framework for analyzing user comments on mass-media websites. Annals of the International Communication Association, 37(1), 125-153. DOI: 10.1080/23808985.2013.11679148
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2020-05-29
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