Rachel Mourao

Michigan State University | MSU · School of Journalism

This study tests the impact of protest news frames on audience support for a civil rights movement. Using a 3 x 2 experimental design, we explored how frames and visuals affect audiences’ criticism of police and protesters, support for, and identification with the movement. Findings show that articles with a legitimizing debate frame increase suppo...

This study examines the individual and organizational level factors shaping Brazilian journalists’ use of social media. Results from a survey of 774 reporters show that individual factors influence awareness and reporting uses, while organizational factors are associated with branding. Results suggest no difference between groups of journalists, wh...

The field of journalism is experiencing intense diversification in form and message while trying to overcome widespread public disaffection by reinforcing professional norms. This study focuses on two forces—normalization and fragmentation—by observing them at work on social media. We analyzed content and interactions from mainstream and non-mainst...

Scholars have come to understand fake news as content packaged to look like mainstream news but which is deceptive and low in facticity. This study focuses on the textual self-representations of 50 prominent sites labelled ‘fake news’ following the 2016 US election campaign, with an eye to understanding their stated values and how such sites might...

This study examines audience relationships to fact-checking sites in the United States. Focus is placed on predictors of audience awareness of, attitudes toward, and visits to such sites within a stage model framework drawn from the persuasive message literature. Analysis of survey data from a U.S. sample shows that liberals and liberal/mainstream...

This study uses a media sociology approach to untangle how multiple influences shape the way journalists cover left- and right-leaning protests on social media. Several studies have investigated how reporters portray social movements, finding that news marginalizes protestors by focusing on spectacle and violent tactics to the detriment of their id...

Building on research analyses of Black Lives Matter media portrayals, this inquiry uses a two-wave panel survey to examine the effects news coverage has on the evaluation of the core ideas from the Black Lives Matter social movement agenda. Results show that conservative media use increases negative evaluations; models suggest this relationship wor...

In today’s media landscape, people are encouraged to verify the news and information they encounter. Using an online experiment, this study explores audience’s intent to verify a news headline by manipulating whether the headline is true or false, from a source that varies in credibility, and perceived to be congruent or incongruent with participan...

After the 2016 US presidential election, the concept of fake news captured popular attention, but conversations lacked a clear conceptualization and used the label in elastic ways to describe various distinct phenomena. In this paper, we analyze fake news as genre blending, combining elements of traditional news with features that are exogenous to...

This chapter describes the characteristics of environmental reporting in Brazil through a historical overview and an analysis of news coverage of the worst environmental tragedy in the country’s history: the 2015 Mariana dam collapse, which resulted in the death of 19 people and destroyed over five square miles of vegetation and wildlife along the...

The rise of the modern Black Lives Matter movement can be traced back to two key events, the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin and the 2014 death of Michael Brown. Research routinely showed that mainstream media’s narrative choices marginalize and delegitimize protesters and their causes, a pattern known as the protest paradigm. This study provides a lo...

Levels of news media trust have been steadily declining in the United States since the 1970s and frequent attacks against the press have characterized the first year of the Trump presidency. This study focuses on the relationship between media trust, news repertoires and support for Trump. Our goal was two-fold: first, we tested how individual pred...

In 2013, small demonstrations against bus fares evolved into a series of large protests expressing generalized dissatisfaction with leftist President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. Communication research has long examined the “protest paradigm,” a pattern of news coverage delegitimizing social movements. The Brazilian context provided a chance to assess...

This study investigates challenges faced by investigative journalists in Latin America, one of the most dangerous places in the world for reporters. Guided by the hierarchy of influences model, we analyzed answers from 1,543 journalists, journalism educators, and journalism students in the region. We identified both single and multilevel constraint...

The shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in August 2014 served as a pivotal case that pushed excessive use of police force against minority groups to the national spotlight. Guided by the scholarship on protest coverage, this article investigates the interplay between advocacy and journalistic framing in the coverage of the Ferguson...

Journalists are frequently doing some of their daily work on social media, spaces they did not create but have appropriated for journalistic purposes. Building on previous studies of how political journalists use social media, this study examines how news professionals and organizations are employing new affordances of the platform as they engage t...

In recent years, journalists, political elites, and the public have used Twitter as an indicator of political trends. Given this usage, what effect do campaign activities have on Twitter discourse? What effect does that discourse have on electoral outcomes? We posit that Twitter can be understood as a tool for and an object of political communicati...

As second screening becomes more widespread, this study addresses its mediating role on the impact of TV news in political participation online and offline, and how this impact varies across groups. We expand the existing line of research by assessing the moderating role of support for Donald Trump on the established mediated model. Through a cross...

Second screening is widespread worldwide, particularly in younger populations. We analyze a survey of college students in Brazil and the United States to compare second screening frequency, types, platforms, and motivations between the two countries. Despite lower Internet penetration, Brazilians second screen significantly more than Americans, a r...

In recent years, Latin Americans marched the streets in a wave of protests that swept almost every country in the region. Yet few studies have assessed how Latin Americans support various forms of protest, and how new technologies affect attitudes toward protest tactics. Using data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (N = 37,102), cluste...

As campaign discussions increasingly circulate within social media, it is important to understand the characteristics of these conversations. Specifically, we ask whether well-documented patterns of gendered bias against women candidates persist in socially networked political discussions. Theorizing power dynamics as relational, we use dialectic c...

The Tea Party has been identified by most mass media sources as a separate but related element of the Republican Party. This study adds to a new body of literature on the Tea Party by using polarization literature and survey data to (a) separate Tea Party Republicans (TPR), Tea Party Non-Republicans (TPNR), and Non–Tea Party Republicans; (b) identi...

On June 25, 2013, the Senate chamber of the Texas state capitol became the scene of a remarkable political showdown. For 13 hours, citizens at the capitol—along with over 100,000 viewers via a live web stream and thousands more on Twitter—watched and waited for the conclusion of a contentious filibuster of Senate Bill 5 (SB 5), which would impose n...

During the 2012 elections, several narratives built around humor, zingers, and gaffes blurred the lines between news and entertainment. This paper examines how political journalists used humor on Twitter during the first 2012 presidential election debate. This study also explores the character of such humor, how jokes relate to other forms of Twitt...

How do online news and social media use relate to public support for the European Union? To answer this question, this study compares the effect of institutional websites, news websites, online social networks, blogs, and video hosting websites on five important dimensions of public attitudes toward the EU: strengthening, performance, fear, efficac...

Results show that Brazil has consistently ranked first with respect to Internet connectivity in Latin America and the Caribbean. Analyses of national household surveys show an overall increase in microcomputers and Internet access between 2004 and 2009. Though geographic and socioeconomic disparities remained in 2009, the gap in Internet access bet...

During the 2012 presidential election, Twitter emerged as a key reporting tool for journalists on the campaign trail. Through a textual analysis of over 5700 tweets from 430 political journalists, this study sought to understand how the platform was used as a channel for community building during the first 2012 presidential debate. Building upon Ze...

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