Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center Releases Comprehensive Report, Analysis of Online Media and Social Media Coverage of 2016 Presidential Campaign

From Harvard Law Today:

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University has released a comprehensive analysis of online media and social media coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign. The report, “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” documents how highly partisan right-wing sources helped shape mainstream press coverage and seize the public’s attention in the 18-month period leading up to the election.
“In this study, we document polarization in the media ecosystem that is distinctly asymmetric. Whereas the left half of our spectrum is filled with many media sources from center to left, the right half of the spectrum has a substantial gap between center and right. The core of attention from the center-right to the left is large mainstream media organizations of the center-left. The right-wing media sphere skews to the far right and is dominated by highly partisan news organizations,” co-author and principal investigator Yochai Benkler stated. In addition to Benkler, the report was authored by Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, and Ethan Zuckerman.
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The research used Media Cloud, an open-source dataset and suite of analysis tools jointly run by the Berkman Klein Center and MIT’s Center for Civic Media. An earlier version of the research appeared as a report in March in Columbia Journalism Review.

Read the Complete Summary Article
Direct to Key Findings and Additional Resources
Direct to Full Text Report: Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elect
140 pages; PDF.
Direct to Executive Summary
13 pages; PDF.

Direct to Dataset

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