"Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy." -Walter Cronkite

Q: To what extent does the press influence public discourse?

Experimental Protocol

  1. Pick topic on policy (e.g. abortion, water policy, education)
  2. Pick a "pack" of 2-5 news outlets that have some experience in this area, have them publish a story on it.
  3. Have each pack member publish a story on the subject at a time chosen by researchers.
  4. Monitor national expression (social media) for some time before, during, an after publication.
  5. Avoid interfering with outlets' standard procedures.

"...we do not reveal the specific articles in our experiment, which outlet published each article, or any potentially identifiable individual-level aspects of the data we collected."

"...good communication kept [undesirable processes] to a minimum."

"As far as we could tell, they followed the same practices for articles in our experiment as those they ran ordinarily."

"To the best of our knowledge, no outlet received any reader communications about an article or practice that seemed unusual or out of place. "

Causal Model