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The Long-lasting Effects of Newspaper Op-Eds on Public Opinion
Abstract
Do newspaper opinion pieces change the minds of those who read them? We conduct two randomized panel survey experiments on elite and mass convenience samples to estimate the e ects of five op-eds on policy attitudes. We find very large average treatment e ects on target issues, equivalent to shifts of approximately 0.5 scale points on a 7-point scale, that persist for at least one month. We find very small and insignificant average treatment e ects on non-target issues, suggesting that our subjects read, understood, and were persuaded by the arguments presented in these op-eds. We find limited evidence of treatment e ect heterogeneity by party identification: Democrats, Republicans, and independents all appear to move in the predicted direction by similar magnitudes. We conduct this study on both a sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and a sample of elites. Despite large di erences in demographics and initial political beliefs, we find that op-eds were persuasive to both the mass public and elites, but marginally more persuasive among the mass public. Our findings add to the growing body of evidence of the everyday nature of persuasion.
... From a theoretical viewpoint, a common pattern in the political persuasion literature is that one third to one half of the initial Average Treatment Effect (ATE) from an experiment will remain after one to two weeks. This is true of both general political persuasion (Coppock et al, 2018;2023) and climate persuasion specifically (Schneider-Mayerson et al. 2020;Goldberg et al 2022;Gustafson et al. 2022;Gustafson et al. 2025). However, we do not know how quickly the decay actually happens: prior studies have measured decay at around one to two weeks, but cannot tell how much of this decay is happening in the very short term and only being measured later. ...
... 6,516 participants took part in the first wave of the panel study and, consistent with the preregistration, individuals who were already maxed out on the main dependent variable (worry about the threat of extreme heat in the United States) prior to treatment were screened out. This was for external validity: one main goal of political persuasion is to focus on those who are persuadable (Coppock, Ekins, and Kirby 2018) and not to waste resources treating those who have already been maximally persuaded to the desired position. Doing so also significantly increased the study's statistical power, particularly important for detecting any residual effects after eight weeks. ...
... This question is not exclusive to this study design, and as such, we follow the guidance of similar studies in mitigating external validity concerns whenever possible. First, we follow the template created by other studies of political media (e.g., Broockman and Kalla 2024;Coppock, Ekins, and Kirby 2018) in that the radio messages used here are real and unmodified from how they were originally aired. In the words of Coppock et. ...
What affects the durability of political persuasion? This study evaluates the influence of two factors—the number of times an individual is treated, and the time between treatments—on persuasion around climate change. We conducted a five-wave panel study (N = 2,588), varying exposure to the number of persuasive messages (one versus three messages) and the length of interval between messages (two days or one week). We measure effect durability up to ten weeks after initial exposure. Repeated exposure to persuasive messages more than doubles their durability one week after treatment (from 32% to 83%), however, multiple treatments do not increase absolute persuasion compared to a single treatment. This difference in durability between one and three treatments closes after eight weeks, with 6%-8% of individuals remaining persuaded, with no evidence of backlash or partisan heterogeneity in effects. These findings help explain the role of repetition in the durability of political persuasion messages.
... To overcome the possibility of confounding in attitudes toward sources, we create a hypothetical news outlet and, in a preregistered experiment, attempt to manipulate participants' perceived credibility of this source, with stimuli that resemble the aforementioned attempts to highlight a source's objective characteristics. We then independently manipulate the political slant of this outlet by randomly assigning subjects to read op-eds attributed to the source's editorial board, in the tradition of research on persuasion (Coppock, Ekins, and Kirby 2018;Guess and Coppock 2018). In contrast to many previous studies, our three-wave design also allows for testing the persistence of treatments (cf. ...
... Much research has been devoted to the question of whether the media do, in fact, persuade (e.g., Dalton, Beck, and Huckfeldt 1998;Gerber, Karlan, and Bergan 2009;Jerit, Barabas, and Clifford 2013). We build on research studying persuasion at the article level, in which researchers expose subjects to either of two op-eds on some policy issue and then measure their attitudes on that issue (e.g., Cobb and Kuklinski 1997;Coppock, Ekins, and Kirby 2018). Several frameworks from psychology and political science suggest that persuasive messages are particularly likely to be effective for nonpartisan issues. ...
... Compared to the more nonpartisan issue of short-time work policies, effects could be somewhat weaker for partisan issues, which dual-processing theory predicts to meet more resistance among receivers. However, we expect persuasion to have some effect also for these partisan issues, as more recent studies show (e.g., Coppock, Ekins, and Kirby 2018;Guess and Coppock 2018). Given two treatments with opposite stances on each issue, we predict ...
Discussions around declining trust in the US media can be vague about its effects. One classic answer comes from the persuasion literature, in which source credibility plays a key role. However, existing research almost universally takes credibility as a given. To overcome the potentially severe confounding that can result from this, we create a hypothetical news outlet and manipulate to what extent it is portrayed as credible. We then randomly assign subjects to read op-eds attributed to the source. Our credibility treatments are strong, increasing trust in our mock source until up to 10 days later. We find some evidence that the resulting higher perceived credibility boosts the persuasiveness of arguments about more partisan topics (but not for a less politicized issue). Though our findings are mixed, we argue that this experimental approach can fruitfully enhance our understanding of the interplay between source trust and opinion change over sustained periods.
... In this capacity, Elyamany (2020) fittingly asserts the crucial role of newspapers with their op-ed sections, an important forum of intellectual debate that communicate views on salient public issues and help shape public opinion. Similarly, Coppock et al. (2018) find that op-ed columns in newspapers serve to persuade both the mass public and elites, as they offer a platform for expressing diverse viewpoints and influencing policy debates. ...
... Another potential reason for the narrow focus on political and social issues in the selected media may reflect the influence of each outlet's news agenda, spilling over into their op-ed sections. This aligns with Coppock et al's (2018) study indicating the agendasetting power of opinion pieces for both the mass public and elites in the media. This suggests that the emphasis on certain topics in news coverage likely influences the selection and framing of related issues in opinion sections of the media. ...
This study investigates the state of the public sphere in the Ethiopian media during the country’s 2018 political reform. It reports on an innovative print format that has proved to be a public sphere. Drawing on methodological insight from quantitative content analysis, the study examines the democratic potential of op-ed columns in the light of public sphere theory. Contrary to the original purpose of op-ed column, our findings indicate that Ethiopian op-ed columns fall short to fit to the principles of public sphere, such as a narrow range of viewpoints, a limited authorship diversity, and an absence of independent op-ed columns. The study further reveals that ownership structure and media’s orientation to the public sphere are factors that shape the features of op-ed columns in Ethiopian media. Qualitative analysis reveals contested framing of the 2018 Ethiopian political reform across the selected media outlets, with op-ed coverage presenting varying facts and evaluations. This contestant is evident in the use of individual- versus societal-level responsibility frames and pro- versus anti-reform binary frames.
... In this capacity, Elyamany (2020) fittingly asserts the crucial role of newspapers with their op-ed sections, an important forum of intellectual debate that communicate views on salient public issues and help shape public opinion. Similarly, Coppock et al. (2018) find that op-ed columns in newspapers serve to persuade both the mass public and elites, as they offer a platform for expressing diverse viewpoints and influencing policy debates. ...
... Another potential reason for the narrow focus on political and social issues in the selected media may reflect the influence of each outlet's news agenda, spilling over into their op-ed sections. This aligns with Coppock et al's (2018) study indicating the agendasetting power of opinion pieces for both the mass public and elites in the media. This suggests that the emphasis on certain topics in news coverage likely influences the selection and framing of related issues in opinion sections of the media. ...
This study investigates the state of the public sphere in the Ethiopian media during the country's 2018 political reform. It reports on an innovative print format that has proved to be a public sphere. Drawing on methodological insight from quantitative content analysis, the study examines the democratic potential of op-ed columns in the light of public sphere theory. Contrary to the original purpose of op-ed columns, our findings indicate that Ethiopian op-ed columns fall short to fit to the principles of the public sphere, such as a narrow range of viewpoints, a limited authorship diversity, and an absence of independent op-ed columns. The study further reveals that ownership structure and media's orientation to the public sphere are factors that shape the features of op-ed columns in Ethiopian media. Qualitative analysis reveals contested framing of the 2018 Ethiopian political reform across the selected media outlets, with op-ed coverage presenting varying facts and evaluations. This contestant is evident in the use of individual-versus societal-level responsibility frames and pro-versus anti-reform binary frames.
... Recent work has provided a general benchmark for expectations of durability. Two longitudinal experiments found a general pattern where initial persuasion effects decay in a "hockey stick" shape, such that there is a sharp drop followed by a plateau (Coppock et al., 2018;Gustafson et al., 2022). These two experiments found that about 50% of the immediate persuasive effect remains after about 1 to 2 weeks. ...
... At T3 (about 3 weeks after exposure to the message), the effects were at a similar level to those at T2, indicating that the pattern of decay of the treatment effects is an initial steep drop followed by a plateau. This pattern mirrors that of findings in prior research (Coppock et al., 2018;Gustafson et al., 2022). ...
Research shows that opinions rooted in moral justifications may be more stable over time. This suggests that communicators could create more durable persuasion by adding explicit moral claims (i.e., stating that the issue is a matter of right vs. wrong) to persuasive messages. Here, using animated videos about the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, we conducted a three-stage longitudinal experiment ( N = 4,488) to test whether messages with explicit moral claims have more durable persuasive effects than similar messages without. We replicated this test across two distinct moral dimensions: harm to innocent people and contamination of nature’s purity. Our findings show that all message versions had strong immediate persuasive effects relative to a control condition, and much of those effects remained after a 3-week period. However, there were no clear advantages—in immediate effects or in durability—from adding explicit moral claims to the messages.
... Andre ledende aviser, som The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune og The Los Angeles Times, fulgte etter og introduserte kronikker på debattsidene (Golan & Wanta, 2004). Tilsvarende, på den andre siden av Atlanterhavet, var britiske The Times, og ikke minst The Guardian, toneangivende i å utvikle de britiske avisenes meningssider fra 1980-tallet og utover (Coward, 2013, s. 45-46 (Coppock et al., 2018;Socolow, 2010). ...
... Aftenposten og Dagbladet i 1960 og 1988, der han fant at mens det i 1960 var 18 skribenter i hver avis som bidro med mer enn en tredel av kronikkene, var det i 1988 flere 5 Den moderne kronikken fikk på mange måter sin debut den 21. september 1970 da The New York Times lanserte kronikken. Samtidig finnes det i nordamerikanske aviser spor etter artikler som minner om den moderne op-ed helt tilbake til starten på 1900-tallet(Coppock et al., 2018). Noen eksempler er avisa Chicago Tribune som i 1912 hadde én side forbeholdt andres meninger. ...
I Norden har kronikken hatt en høy status helt siden starten i den danske morgenavisa Politiken i 1905. Kronikken fikk tidlig en prominent plass i avisene – gjerne i tilknytning til leder- og kommentarstoffet. I dag er kronikk- og debattstoff blant de mest populære innholdstypene i avisa – både på papir og på nett. Likevel er kronikken en sjanger som er lite studert i journalismeforskningen. Denne artikkelen undersøker hvordan kronikken som sjanger har endret seg i perioden 1970-2020. Tekstanalysen er avgrenset til 354 utgaver av de riksdekkende avisene Aftenposten, Dagbladet og VG i perioden 1970-2020. En multimodal analyse av kronikkens grafiske uttrykk over tid kombinerer paratekst- og layoutanalyse, og utgjør til sammen en formatanalyse av kronikkene i utvalget. Resultatene av tekstanalysen styrker antagelsen om at kronikken er en typisk elitesjanger, men at det i senere tid også er rom for en ny type eksperter, såkalte konsekvens-eksperter. Formatanalysen tyder på at kronikksjangeren har en høy status i avisa, og at den opptar stadig mer plass på avisenes meningssider.
[In the Nordic region, the op-ed has had a high status ever since its inception in the Danish morning newspaper Politiken in 1905. From early on the op-ed was given a prominent place in the newspapers – often in connection with the editorial and commentaries. In Norway, the op-ed and letters to the editor are among the most popular content types in newspapers – both in print and digital, not least during the last twenty years. Nevertheless, the op-ed is a genre that has received relatively little attention in journalism research. This article examines how the op-ed as a genre developed in Norwegian newspapers in the period 1970-2020. In addition, We try to find out what function the op-ed genre serves in today’s culture? The text analysis is limited to 354 issues of the national newspapers Aftenposten, Dagbladet and VG during the period 1970-2020. A format analysis of the selected op-eds was carried out through a multimodal analysis of the op-ed's graphical layout over time, combining paratext analysis and layout analysis. The results from the text analysis strengthen the assumption that the op-ed is a typical elite genre, but that, in recent times, there is also room for a new type of expert, the consequence expert. In addition, the format analysis indicates that the op-ed as a genre has maintained a high status, as it takes up more and more space on the newspaper's opinion pages.]
... Within increasingly competitive news environments, shrinking resources and accelerating time constraints, journalists tend to further depend on ready-made information provided by large organisations like government departments, corporations and well-funded organised interest groups (Hanitzsch et al., 2010;Strömbäck and Karlsson, 2011;Balčytienė et al., 2015). Beyond being perspective providers, elite sources also explicitly shape news coverage through privileged access to guest commentary and op-eds (Coppock et al., 2018;Elyamany, 2019). ...
... Looking more closely at the authors, we find that journalists are more negatively oriented towards wealth taxation (77% negative commentary) compared to guest authors (55% negative commentary). We also find that editorials, which are usually written by editors-in-chief or other leading journalists and have been shown to be influential in shaping public opinion (Coppock et al., 2018), are even more negative than commentary pieces by regular journalists (83% negative editorials compared to 73% other types of negative commentaries written by regular journalists). Again, we find considerable differences between the newspapers. ...
This study focuses on the Austrian media coverage of wealth taxes by conducting a content analysis of all commentary pieces published in 2005–2020 by five Austrian daily newspapers. We find (i) that the majority of commentaries take a negative position towards wealth taxation, (ii) that journalists write more negative comments than guest authors do and (iii) 50 argumentative patterns in five main categories. In light of these findings, we discuss several potential drivers of the predominantly negative wealth taxation coverage: the high degree of ownership concentration by wealthy families and institutions in the Austrian newspaper market, the importance of advertising to fund newspapers and the influence of elite institutions as providers of information. Finally, we embed our findings in recent literature and illustrate similarities and differences of the German and Austrian media coverage of wealth taxation.
... Publishers of columns which date back to 1912 when an American newspaper, The Chicago Tribune, dedicated a page to outside opinion (Coppock, Ekins & Kirby, 2018) have always claimed that they facilitate diverse expert opinions about key issues. In the 1920s, Herbert Bayard Swope, who edited the New York World wrote the paper's first article opposite the editorial page. ...
... Editorials have been a key component of newspapers for many centuries (Socolow, 2010: 283;Coppock, Ekins & Kirby, 2018). An editorial is credited with contributing towards the abolishment of slavery. ...
This paper examined South African politicians' (re)presentation in Tony Leon’s regular column, On the contrary, which appeared in The Times newspaper from 2012 to 2017. This period in South African politics is made interesting by the fact that it coincides with the time when there was mounting pressure for the then president, Jacob Zuma, of the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), to step down, especially between 7 January 2015 and 21 March 2017. Tony Leon, who also once served as a councilor for the Democratic Party (DA), one of the major opposition parties in South Africa is the columnist who at the time authors the on the contrary column. This creates interesting research on how the columnist and the newspaper are able or not to maintain ethical journalism. In conducting the study, this article employs the framing theory and critical discourse analysis (CDA) as research tools to assess the columnists’ objectivity and bias in his depiction of the then president and several prominent politicians during the examined period. Data analysis constitutes six newspaper articles which were purposively selected to obtain a representative sample. The results indicated that these articles were well-researched in respect of the information they presented. At the same time, biased tendencies were noted in favor of the political party aligned to the columnist.
... The self-selection of information can gradually coalesce into biased but firmly-held attitudes, making exposure to countervailing information important in truth discovery. Coppock et al. (22) randomly assigned participants to read opinion pieces and found long-lasting effects on beliefs that were similar across political parties. Likewise, Nyhan and Reifler (23) find that information treatments reduce mistaken beliefs and that the effects do not strongly depend on prior attitudes. ...
... A limitation of our research is that we do not follow participants over time to see how long these effects last. Yet, using similar techniques, Coppock et al. (22) finds evidence of long-lasting effects from the random assignment of longer texts. Another limitation is that we do not directly reserve consumer behavior, only self-reported intentions to engage in various behaviors. ...
We investigate the role of information exposure in shaping attitudes and behaviors related to the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic and whether baseline political affiliation and news diet mediate effects. In December 2020, we randomly assigned 5,009 U.S. adults to nine brief text-based segments related to the dynamics of the pandemic and the safety of various behaviors, estimating the effects on 15 binary outcomes related to COVID-19 policy preferences, expected consumer behavior, and beliefs about safety. Average effects reach significance (95% CI) in 47 out of 120 models and equal 7.4 ppt. The baseline effects are large for all outcomes except beliefs. By contrast, interaction effects by political party and media diet are significant for beliefs but rarely significant for policy and behavioral attitudes. These findings suggest partisan policy and behavioral gaps are driven, at least in part, by exposure to different information and that equalizing information sources would lead to partisan convergence in beliefs.
... Consider the persuasive effects of newspaper op-eds. Research shows that op-eds can have large persuasive effects on both laypeople and elites (Coppock et al., 2018). The theoretical framework proposed here makes clear that, although persuasive effects might be smaller among elites (Coppock et al., 2018), the real-world impact of op-eds is likely to be substantial both because elites are more likely to read op-eds, and because elites play an important role in influencing public discourse and opinion (Gabel & Scheve, 2007;McCombs & Shaw, 1972;Zaller, 1992). ...
... Research shows that op-eds can have large persuasive effects on both laypeople and elites (Coppock et al., 2018). The theoretical framework proposed here makes clear that, although persuasive effects might be smaller among elites (Coppock et al., 2018), the real-world impact of op-eds is likely to be substantial both because elites are more likely to read op-eds, and because elites play an important role in influencing public discourse and opinion (Gabel & Scheve, 2007;McCombs & Shaw, 1972;Zaller, 1992). ...
Decades of research on strategic communication campaigns has generated myriad insights. However, this valuable knowledge is often fragmented across many fields and topic areas, making it difficult for researchers and practitioners to distill this knowledge and map the key strategic considerations. In this article, we present an overarching framework for understanding the effects of strategic communication campaigns. We define the driving force as all the efforts, contexts, and systems that advance the campaign’s goals, and the restraining force as those that restrict the campaign’s goals. The total impact of any driving or restraining force can be understood as the product of its reach, effect, and durability. Reach refers to the proportion of people in the target population that are exposed to the corresponding driving or restraining force. Effect refers to the size of the impact of that force, among those who are exposed. Durability refers to the extent to which the effect of that force lasts over time and/or resists opposing forces. We highlight how this framework can be used to distill, connect, and interpret large amounts of extant research and theory, and how it can be used by researchers to design research programs and identify persisting knowledge gaps.
... Relatively little is known about the durability of these effects over time. Some recent work suggests that the effect of informational messages might have a persistent effect on public attitudes 31,32 . Building on this work, we explore the durability of framing effects in the context of renewable energy by measuring both the immediate framing effects and the longevity of those effects over a three-week period. ...
... A small review of a handful of longitudinal framing experiments found that a portion of the effect often remains past the immediate setting 31 . Additional insights are provided by recent work by Coppock et al. 32 , who found that in diverse topics, about 50% of the effect of informational messages remained after 30 days. To contribute insights on persuasion durability in the context of renewable energy, our study measures both the immediate framing effects and the longevity of those effects over a three-week period. ...
Effective communication can help increase bipartisan support for renewable energy. Prior research suggests that support for renewable energy may be determined, in part, by which of its benefits are emphasized. Here we use a three-stage, longitudinal experiment (N = 2,891) to compare the immediate and over-time effects of three informational frames of renewable energy’s benefits (cost savings, economy boost and global warming mitigation). We tested each message’s effects on US Democrats’ and Republicans’ beliefs about and support for renewable energy, and we compared the longevity of these effects over a period of three weeks. We find that cost savings was the most effective frame—both in terms of immediate effect size on beliefs and in the longevity of those effects—with negligible differences between political groups. The durability of all effects exhibited a consistent pattern: an initial steep drop in effect size followed by a plateau. Communication is an important tool in combating climate change and building support for new energy policy. Here Gustafson et al. measure the longitudinal effect of three message frames around the benefits of renewable energy on Democrat and Republican beliefs and support for such technology in the United States.
... changing their minds depending on the latest advertisement they saw' (2023,5). Like most other political communication experiments, we thus rely upon the logic that small effects observed in a survey experiment will accumulate over time (see Coppock et al. 2018 for a detailed discussion). ...
Populist rhetoric – presenting arguments in people-centric, anti-elite and ‘good v. evil’ frames – is said to provide populist parties and candidates with an advantage in electoral competition. Yet, identifying the causal effect of populist rhetoric is complicated by its enmeshment with certain positions and issues. We implement a survey experiment in the UK (n≈9,000), in which hypothetical candidates with unknown policy positions randomly make (non-)populist arguments, taking different positions on various issues. Our findings show that, on average, populist arguments have a negative effect on voters’ evaluations of the candidate profiles and no effect on voters’ issue preferences. However, populist arguments sway voters’ issue preferences when made by a candidate profile that voters are inclined to support. Among voters with strong populist attitudes, populist arguments also do not dampen candidates’ electoral viability. These findings suggest that populist rhetoric is useful in convincing and mobilizing supporters but detrimental in expanding electoral support.
... We examine the decision-making processes of legislators and the public on comparable tasks. Experiments in other political contexts that examine the public alongside elites often find that both groups respond similarly to new information (Green, Zelizer, and Kirby 2018;Coppock et al. 2018;Kertzer 2022). While there are unavoidable differences in surveying the two groups, we believe that the benefits of having a comparison group outweigh the costs of relying on non-parallel surveys. ...
Are legislators knowledgeable enough to make good public policy decisions? We examine three aspects of legislators’ decision-making: how much they know about the consequences of policy proposals, specifically their fiscal impact; how much they learn when provided expert research about these proposals; and how much their evaluations of these proposals reflect their consequences. We compare their performance on each of these tasks to a large sample of the public. Legislators’ beliefs about fiscal impacts are inaccurate and biased, but become more accurate and correlated with legislators’ policy positions in response to fiscal expertise. In terms of knowledge, learning, and incorporating information into their policy evaluations, legislators largely resemble the public. Legislators do not exhibit stronger reasoning skills. However, by the time legislators vote on bills, legislators do appear to base their decisions on accurate beliefs about policy. Our results suggest legislators cast informed votes because of legislative institutions and processes rather than any superior, pre-existing policy expertise or learning skills relative to the general public. These findings highlight the importance of designing legislative institutions with lawmakers’ decision-making constraints in mind.
... Furthermore, publicised works in newspapers, documentaries, film and television are said to be influential on public opinions in terms of moral panic (Walsh, 2020), fear of crime (Prieto Curiel et al., 2020;Nä si et al., 2021) and an unfamiliarity with important judicial theoretical and empirical developments (Pickett, 2019), amongst other influences. This is regardless of demographics and political standings (Coppock et al., 2018), but it is hypothesised that political parties can capitalise on this tendency to promote higher affiliations in the general public, especially prior to upcoming elections. Narratives built around those convicted of sexually motivated or sadistic murders use buzz words in popularised media to gain views and readership numbers (e.g. ...
Purpose
British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, recently introduced a “whole life order” sentence in response to sexually motivated or sadistic homicide offences (Gov.uk, 2023). Effectively, this condemns the recipient to the remainder of their life in incarceration and renders rehabilitative interventions redundant. The purpose of this paper is to explore the literature pertaining to public pedagogy, definitions and convictions, and rehabilitative interventions – all in relation to those considered to have committed sexuallymotivated or sadistic murders, with emphasis on the implications of such.
Design/methodology/approach
Through this commentary, this paper explores the following points in line with existing literature: (a) public knowledge of the criminal justice system and those who have committed homicide offences, (b) the manner of defining and convicting sexually motivated and sadistic murders and (c) current access to rehabilitation intervention programmes.
Findings
This paper closes by recommending future research initiatives to deliver forensic-specific education for the general public as well as qualitative studies into the discourse around retribution to enable a conjunction between public concern and academic underpinning. Wider implications concerning public understandings, convictions, rehabilitations and politics are discussed.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that explores the practical and theoretical implications of imposing a whole life order on those charged with sadistic or sexual-motivated murders.
... The opinion article is one genre of writing that expresses an individual's perspective and stance more explicitly and subjectively than other types of articles. Opinion articles have also been shown to have the potential to shape public opinion (Coppock et al., 2018). ...
The construction of crisis is realized through the language of those expressing their individual or group perspectives. In 2020, many nations faced multiple crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, which raised questions about how concurrent crises are interpreted and managed. Lebanon is an example of a country that experienced three concurrent crises in 2020: the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic crisis, and the Beirut Port explosion. This study focuses on Lebanon's crises by analyzing ten English-language opinion articles written by authors who view the crises from their own professional, social, or cultural lens. The articles were qualitatively analyzed for instances of attitudinal meaning as presented in the appraisal framework. Four constructions of the crises emerged from the analysis, showing that the effects of the crises are unequal but interconnected, crisis management emphasizes certain stakeholders' interests but not others, and a crisis has the potential to instigate change. Thus, analyzing diverse constructions of crises in the articles shows that they have been simultaneously constructed as victimizing and empowering, thus highlighting the role of power in shaping the effects and management of crises.
... The literature also presents some successes for deliberative conditions. Some studies examine the effect of longer rational prompts, such as op-eds, which appear to be effective at persuasion (Coppock et al. 2018), and university courses, which had some effect on meat consumption behavior but not on charitable giving ). In addition, a growing body of research examines the effect of arguments on donation behavior. ...
There is an ongoing debate about whether rational or emotional appeals have a greater influence on moral behavior. The opportunity to donate to a charity provides an applied case to test this influence. Previous studies confirm the power of emotional appeals. For rational appeals, the results are mixed. We present the results of a pre-registered experiment (N=1056) comparing how much participants donate via cash transfers when exposed to five conditions. Three are vignette-based: Narrative presents the testimony of an identified recipient, Argument presents a Singer-style argument for charitable giving, and Facts lists the results of an evaluation of a cash transfer program. The other two conditions are based on perspective-taking exercises with a reasonable donor or a suffering recipient. As predicted, the average amount donated was significantly lower in the control condition than in each of the other five conditions (all ps <.05). Narrative performed best, significantly better than all other conditions except Facts. The success of Facts is surprising given the poor performance of numerical information conditions in other studies. We discuss what features of our design may have contributed to its success, paving the way for a better understanding of how numerical information can influence altruistic behavior.
... From a political behavioralist angle framing is 'the process by which a communication source constructs and defines a social or political issue for the audience' (Nelson, Oxley and Clawson 1997, 221). People's overall attitudes toward specific policy issues are the result of the evaluation of perceived positive and negative aspects (Coppock, Ekins, and Kirby 2018). However, individuals attribute different value or weight to different dimensions of the same policy issue. ...
This article presents a quantitative method for mapping semantic spaces and tracing political frames’ trajectories, that facilitate the analysis of the connections between changes in ideas and socio-political phenomena. We test our approach in Spain, where the Catalan conflict fostered a competition in terms of decontestation of meanings of key political concepts. Using unsupervised machine learning, we track the salience, level of semantic fragmentation and fluctuations in meanings of 216 frames in the two largest Spanish newspapers, El País and El Mundo, throughout 8 years. This is achieved via the extraction, vectorization, and comparison of over 70,000 words. We apply Latent Semantic Analysis, an innovative methodology for the alignment of semantic spaces, and new institutional theory. Our exploratory study suggests that the evolution of many nationalism-related frames resembles a punctuated equilibrium model, and that political events in Catalonia, acted as critical junctures, altering the meanings reflected in the Spanish press.
... However, we expect editorials to be similarly more trusted and more convincing when published by local sources. Like news articles, editorials can change opinion on contentious issues (Coppock et al. 2018) and correct misperceptions (Wood and Porter 2019). However, the persuasive power of editorials is conditional on the credibility of the source (Howarth and Anderson 2019). ...
Highlighting the local impacts of climate change has the potential to increase the public’s awareness of and engagement with climate change. However, information about local impacts is only effective when delivered by trusted sources such as copartisan political leaders. Is information about climate change conveyed by local media sources similarly beneficial? We argue that local media are well positioned to communicate the local implications of climate change, thereby enhancing the public’s risk perceptions of climate change and willingness to take climate action. We further hypothesize that climate coverage by local media, the media type that is more trusted across party lines, will have a significant influence on Republicans’ climate attitudes. Using the case of Louisiana, we first demonstrate that local and national newspapers cover climate change in substantially different ways, with local media more consistently focused on local impacts. Our survey experiment of Louisiana residents reveals that Republicans viewed the coverage of a hurricane in the region more positively when it came from a local newspaper rather than a national newspaper. Furthermore, local newspapers’ climate coverage increased Republicans’ willingness to take action to mitigate climate change. These results provide insights into the effective communication of climate change to the public and the role of local media in mitigating partisan polarization.
... Whereas the public does not always perceive differences between 'news' and 'opinion' (Media Insight Project 2018), newspapers' Op-Eds have long-lasting effects on public opinion (Coppock et al. 2018). In Portugal, research on media representation of immigrants and minorities or 'internal others' (El Tayeb 2011)-that is, racialised people who are often read as non-Portuguese-namely immigrants, afro-descendants, and Roma people, has loomed since the 2000s (Cunha et al. 2004, Cunha andSantos 2008;ERC 2009;, focusing chiefly on press and television news. ...
This chapter analyses opinion articles on a case of police violence and racism, known as “the Alfragide Police Station Case”, in the Portuguese daily newspapers Público, Observador, and Correio da Manhã between 2015 and 2019. Drawing from critical discourse analysis, it showcases how processes of othering and deothering are put forward, chiefly the role of racialisation in said procedures, and the ways in which these operate in tandem with broader public debates. The chosen discursive event will be examined as both a moment where racism was normalised and reproduced by opinion-makers (othering) and as an instance where anti-racist activists and scholars fought against it and at times succeeded to counter these opinions, thus affirming anti-racist narratives (deothering) in the public realm.
... News articles, which could include op-eds, have been established to affect attitudes (Nelson et al., 1997), beliefs (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980;Zajonc, 1998), and elicit emotions (Nerb and Spada, 2001;Kim and Cameron, 2011;Cho and Boster, 2008). The emotions in news articles have also been demonstrated to increase memory (LeDoux, 2000).For op-eds specifically, they have been demonstrated to change reader opinions (Coppock et al., 2018). ...
The emotional tone of op-eds (N = 120) on Democratic Party primary candidates was examined to determine if the media is biased towards Bernie Sanders. Using the Dictionary of Affect (Whissell, 2009), article words (N = 114,606) between December 2019 and February 2020 were measured for their pleasantness, activation, and imagery for each candidate - Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Mike Bloomberg. Significant differences between Bernie Sanders and the other candidates were found for article pleasantness (p = .002), article activation (p = .002), and article imagery (p = .002). Op-ed articles written on Bernie Sanders were found to have less pleasant, less active, and more abstract words (low in imagery) than the other candidates. The results of this research demonstrated very similar conclusions to Newman (2022) on news articles, suggesting a pattern of media writing for Bernie Sanders compared to his Democratic primary opponents.
... 24 In fact, the power of opinion pieces not only sets the agenda of elite policy makers; we also have evidence about the fact that it influences the views of readers. 25 In terms of who makes up the writers of op-eds (contributions from figures that are not affiliated to the newspaper), while these vary country to country, in the Anglo-American world they are mostly elite pundits, 26 relatively close to government officials and business magnates. Since contributors are not beat reporters, the resource at stake is different: mostly, influence. ...
... Newspapers have launched op-ed pages to promote discussion and learning about salient public issues. Put it differently: op-ed pieces were designed to provide an intellectual arena to provoke new ideas and discussion on public issues, (Kirby et al., 2018;Maycroft and Sommer, 2008;Ciofalo and Traverso, 1994). Opeds appear in sections marked out with headings. ...
Using media democracy as its case, this article reports results of a study on the state of Ethiopian newspapers with op-ed commentaries. There is good reason to focus on newspaper op-ed column, because it is considered as a forum for democratic practice in a mediated setting. Thus, the study takes the perspective of op-ed forum as a public sphere where citizens articulate issues of public matters. Guided by two major research questions, the study empirically examines the salient features of media democracy focusing on op-ed articles published during the 2018 Ethiopian political reform period, which range in date from April 2, 2018 to April 1, 2019. The study employs a content analysis research method. Applying quantitative approach, the study employed a constructed week sampling method to select quantitative data from sample newspapers. The study focuses on op-ed content and source features, which have been taken as key characteristics of op-ed page to measure ‘what writers said’ and ‘whose voices were heard’ regarding the 2018 Ethiopian political reform. In terms of diversity, the study disclosed a limited diversity in terms of source and content. The study reported in this article shows that media democracy in the op-ed pages of Ethiopian newspapers, particularly in state-owned newspapers, were constructed to advance the newspapers’ editorial stance on the issues. Looking at the features of op-ed columns vis-à-vis editorial lines, the study finds that most op-ed commentaries bear similarity to editorials in state-controlled newspapers (coincide), and in private newspapers op-eds neither coincide nor collide with editorial lines the papers pursue.
... Political microtargeting relies on treatment effect heterogeneity-that is, different groups of people responding in different ways to different messages. Yet the results of prominent, large-scale investigations of political persuasion suggest that treatment effect heterogeneity is relatively uncommon and, where it is found, tends to be small; in general, political messages seem to influence the attitudes of different types of people to a broadly similar extent (24)(25)(26)(27). On this basis, one might expect-contrary to popular concern-that political microtargeting may not confer a meaningful advantage over nontargeted campaign messaging strategies. ...
Much concern has been raised about the power of political microtargeting to sway voters' opinions, influence elections, and undermine democracy. Yet little research has directly estimated the persuasive advantage of microtargeting over alternative campaign strategies. Here, we do so using two studies focused on U.S. policy issue advertising. To implement a microtargeting strategy, we combined machine learning with message pretesting to determine which advertisements to show to which individuals to maximize persuasive impact. Using survey experiments, we then compared the performance of this microtargeting strategy against two other messaging strategies. Overall, we estimate that our microtargeting strategy outperformed these strategies by an average of 70% or more in a context where all of the messages aimed to influence the same policy attitude (Study 1). Notably, however, we found no evidence that targeting messages by more than one covariate yielded additional persuasive gains, and the performance advantage of microtargeting was primarily visible for one of the two policy issues under study. Moreover, when microtargeting was used instead to identify which policy attitudes to target with messaging (Study 2), its advantage was more limited. Taken together, these results suggest that the use of microtargeting-combining message pretesting with machine learning-can potentially increase campaigns' persuasive influence and may not require the collection of vast amounts of personal data to uncover complex interactions between audience characteristics and political messaging. However, the extent to which this approach confers a persuasive advantage over alternative strategies likely depends heavily on context.
... 17 26 While social media and online news sites become increasingly relevant as a source of news, there is evidence to suggest that newspapers remain influential in the shaping of public opinion and policy. [27][28][29] We focus on identifying tobacco industry arguments in this paper as this information is most relevant to (Dutch) civil society in anticipating tobacco industry activity in opposing current and future policies. ...
Objectives
News media coverage can influence support for and implementation of tobacco control policies. This research aims to analyse and compare newspaper coverage of newly implemented policies: a substantial tobacco tax increase, point-of-sale display ban and plain packaging.
Design
We conducted a content analysis of articles covering the three policies from ten national Dutch newspapers. Articles published between November 2017 and November 2019 were coded for type and tone. The policy dystopia model was used to code arguments opposing the policies. Tobacco industry appearances in news articles were also analysed for frequency and type.
Results
A total of 134 news articles were analysed, of which the industry appeared in 28%. The majority of coverage was neutral in tone, although among articles that were coded as expressing a positive or negative tone, plain packaging and the point-of-sale ban were portrayed more negatively than positively. Negative coverage was predominantly accounted for by industry presence. Arguments opposing the policies focused on negative economic consequences, challenging the need for policy and adverse consequences for retailers for tax, plain packaging and the point-of-sale display ban, respectively. We identified six specific new arguments that fit within existing domains of the policy dystopia model.
Conclusions
The tobacco industry and its allies still appear in a substantial proportion of news articles in relation to tobacco policy. This study identifies contemporary industry arguments against tobacco control policies in Europe which, alongside the policy dystopia model, can be used to predict and counter the tobacco industry’s future attempts to oppose policies.
... This is especially true for climate change discourses because op-eds help to shape both public opinion and by extension government policy (Kowalchuk & McLaughlin, 2009). Traditional newspaper op-eds have been shown to be persuasive for not only the mass public but also elites (Coppock et al., 2018). This is an important consideration for not only traditional news gathering and reporting enterprises, but also those organizations contributing scientific data, original research, opinion leadership, and public relations materials to media outlets. ...
This study assesses the journalistic sources contributing to international climate change op-eds in tandem with narratives arising from this prominent platform for media elites and institutions. Through a theoretical lens of ecological modernization, this paper conducted a mixed methodological analysis featuring descriptive quantitative analysis and a subsequent narrative analysis. The authors first analyzed a dataset of 305 op-eds published by the New York Times and China Daily between January 2016 and October 2019. The authors also assessed the narratively-constructed themes embedded within selected op-eds leading up to the United States’ departure from the Paris Agreement. These narratives, which featured appeals to a global ecological modernization, are (1) Humankind's shared economic destiny; (2) The new globalization and diplomacy; (3) The looming climate catastrophe. While the New York Times and China Daily featured different op-ed contributors and climate topics, both publications helped to construct larger unifying narratives about the role of climate change in global politics, economy, and society.
... Foreign policy professionals are skilled in managing relations with different international partners, including ones who might not see eye to eye. But if broader societal debates develop about future priorities of Canada's transatlantic relations, involving, for instance, opinion leaders from civil society or prominent media pundits, this may create controversies within Canada that Canadian diplomacy may struggle to bridge (Coppock et al., 2018). Our objective in this study is to examine political commentary in Canadian news media to obtain an understanding of the ideas and arguments that have had the potential to influence Canada's foreign policy decision makers. 1 Our analysis is guided by three research questions. ...
Brexit has forced Canada to reconfigure relations with its European partners: the European Union (EU), on the one side, and the United Kingdom (UK), now on the other. This article examines whether this reconfiguration has led to debates in the Canadian news media that reassess the purpose and priorities of Canada’s transatlantic relationships. Did Canada-Europe relations after Brexit become a more prominent issue in Canadian newspaper commentary? Which policy aspects were highlighted? How did evaluations of Canada’s European partners change? Which new controversies and divisions emerged within Canadian discourse about transatlantic relations? The study is based on an analysis of almost 1,900 commentary articles from six Canadian newspapers between June 2014 and June 2021.
... To assess the South Korean public's attitudes towards the WHO, we analysed editorials published by domestic news agencies between 20 January 2020, when the first case of COVID-19 was reported in South Korea, and 18 October 2020. Although editorials are based on the authors' opinions, there is not only room for such pieces to influence public policy (Sommer and Maycroft 2008), but these can also act as a mechanism in shaping the agenda and public opinion (Coppock, Ekins, and Kirby 2018). Our study therefore assumes that the editorials represent public opinion to a certain degree. ...
... Finally, the Bayesian Learning Model suggests that attitude change occurs in a manner consistent with Bayes' rule, that is, individuals update their opinions by weighting new information according to the strength of their prior beliefs (Bullock, 2011;Gerber & Green, 1999). While Bayesian updating is compatible with a variety of predictions, recent experimental evidence shows that attitude change is durable, incremental, homogeneous, and in the direction of evidence (Coppock et al., 2018;Guess & Coppock, 2018). These individual-level patterns are consistent with a rational conceptualization of the U.S. public as a collectivity that holds understandable opinions about policy issues which change predictably when exposed to new information (Page & Shapiro, 1992). ...
Existing research has focused extensively on the role of emotions such as anger, fear, and enthusiasm in explaining public opinion, but less is known about the importance of disgust, an innate disease‐related emotion. To study the independent and joint effects of disgust and information, I draw on the case of the COVID‐19 pandemic. I demonstrate that experimentally induced incidental disgust and exposure to information about how to flatten the curve of the COVID‐19 cases have distinctive effects on political, racial, and health attitudes. Independently, exposure to information affects preferences only for restrictive policies to fight the spread of the virus. In contrast, the stand‐alone effect of incidental disgust, as well as its joint effect with exposure to information, are responsible for attitude change toward both pandemic‐relevant and irrelevant policies, Asian minorities, and prevention measures. Importantly, the study finds that citizens respond symmetrically to disgusting stimuli and information across degrees of political awareness, ideology, partisan affiliation, and trait authoritarianism. The results draw attention to the far‐reaching implications of disgust on public opinion under threatening conditions.
... Opinion and editorial contributions in newspapers can have long-lasting effects on public opinion and are deserving of study as a proxy for public views (Atanasova & Koteyko, 2017;Coppock, Ekins, & Kirby, 2018). The difference between large or elite newspaper opinion or editorial contributions (Izadi & Saghaye-Biria, 2007) and local and regional newspaper op-eds is that the latter represent more lay public opinions rather than professional, academic, or paid pundit viewpoints (Rasinger, 2010). ...
Background: Newspaper op-eds are an underexplored mode of communication that frame social, cultural, and political issues. Analysis: This article uses an unsupervised machine-learning approach called structural topic modelling to map changes in the content of a corpus of Canadian newspaper op-eds on freedom of information (FOI) law spanning a 20-year period. This makes it possible to investigate changes in the content of newspaper op-eds over time and to decipher trends in the kinds of topics that national, regional, and local newspapers publish. Conclusion and implications: Computational approaches to analyzing news texts are used, and recommendations are offered for future research on FOI and political communications.
... On the other hand, different messengers might hold different views on the same issue, thus who gets to speak out is an interesting topic due to the potential stronger impact on public perception from the dominant voice (Wang and Mumby, 2022). In terms of medium, studies have shown that media, such as reports from NGOs or non-peer-reviewed articles can both reflect and influence public perceptions, and that such influence can be long-term (Coppock et al., 2018;Shiffman et al., 2020). Furthermore, because the peer review process is not required, they can be responsive to changing events and potentially be published more quickly in comparison to peer reviewed scientific articles. ...
Wildlife trade is a multi-billion-dollar sector that impacts a wide range of species, and thus is of significant research and conservation interest. Wildlife trade has also become a prominent topic in the public-facing media, where coverage has intensified following the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic due to the potential connection between wildlife trade and the origin of the SARS Cov2 virus. Given the importance of the media in shaping public understanding and discourse of complex topics such as wildlife trade, this could impact the implementation of and public support for policy decisions. In this study, we followed a standardised protocol to extract wildlife trade-related discussion from 285 professional opinion pieces (NGO reports or articles in conservation-themed forums) and 107 scientific articles published in two time periods: “pre-COVID” (June 1–December 31, 2019) and “during-COVID” (January 1–May 31, 2020). We compared opinion pieces and scientific articles across the two time periods and to each other to investigate potential differences in the presentation of wildlife trade and associated speakers. We found a shift in the way that wildlife trade was discussed in professional opinion pieces between the periods, in that the discussion became less specific in terms of defining the legality and purpose of trade, and the animal groups involved in the “during-COVID” period. The generalised framing of wildlife trade in our dataset also coincided with an increased discussion of highly generalised management strategies, such as blanket bans on wildlife trade. We also found that publications included more quotes from researchers in the “during-COVID” period. In both professional opinion pieces and scientific articles, we found that quotations or research were often from speakers whose affiliation region was different to the geographic range of the trade they were speaking about. This highlights the importance of incorporating local knowledge and considering the diversity of speakers and interviewees in both research and the public-facing media about the wildlife trade.
This study investigates the perceived importance of regional partnerships and the extent of electoral interference by major powers in Czechia, Poland, and Slovakia. Grounded in Bauman’s liquid modernity, which emphasizes fluidity, instability, and fragmentation in modern societies, it explores how socio-demographic characteristics and political party preferences influence these perceptions. Using a comprehensive survey conducted by a professional agency, our unique data set includes responses from 3075 participants across the three countries. Regression analysis reveals that age and education significantly affect perceived partnership importance, while sex shows minimal variation. The study also identifies political parties with high and low odds of perceived electoral interference by major powers such as China, Russia, Germany, the United States and the European Union. The findings underscore the complexity of public opinion on foreign influence and the necessity for enhanced digital literacy to mitigate vulnerabilities in democratic processes. This research provides valuable insights for policymakers and experts in security.
Perceptions of school quality affect many aspects of education policy and politics. Using two randomized survey experiments, we studied the factors that individuals use to evaluate school quality. Our surveys included two novel components: text analysis of open-ended responses and videos highlighting different perspectives on assessing school quality. While we found that individuals respond most strongly to test scores, we also found that a video explaining how standardized testing imperfectly reflects student learning led attentive respondents to reduce reliance on achievement status and to increase attention to growth. The results suggest that informational interventions may affect how individuals interpret school performance data. Yet, we also found evidence of political polarization and preferences for school characteristics not in standard reporting.
In his foundational essay, Philip Converse (1964) alludes to a small class of political sophisticates who are influential in the social construction and diffusion of ideological belief systems. However, despite their importance to the nature of ideology in the public at large, there is little empirical research focusing on those select few involved in this process of “creative synthesis”—and work examining the rhetorical structures that cohere sets of plausibly independent issue stances is rarer still. I do so here using a novel dataset of tweets sent by roughly 1,000 of the most prominent political pundits in the United States from January through August of 2019. Using a combination of text and network-analytic techniques, I identify robust relationships between both how pundits discuss a wide range of political concepts and the extent to which this discussion is informative of their network-based preferences. I find that broad, organizing concepts such as partisan and ideological labels emerge as central in political discourse, facilitating indirect links between a wide range of issues. However, I also find that discussions of discrete policy issues and political concepts are highly informative of pundits’ latent preferences. This descriptive account of the discursive superstructure of ideology offers new evidence regarding how creative synthesis is conducted in practice.
Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples has been a named priority for many post‐colonial societies. In this context, in August 2018, Victoria City Hall in Canada removed the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada's first Prime Minister, from its grounds; similar events followed across Canada. Research on this issue is lacking but can offer useful insights to researchers and policymakers. To understand how non‐Indigenous Canadians respond to renaming or removing statues in the name of reconciliation, we qualitatively analysed online comments posted under news articles reporting the removal of Macdonald's statue (Study 1). Two narratives aimed at delegitimising renaming/removing emerged: depicting the actions as excessive ‘political correctness’ (PC) that represented the values of a powerful, but minority, outgroup of ‘liberal elites’; and depicting the actions as a symbolic threat to the ingroup through notions of ‘rewriting history’. In Study 2, with a Canadian community sample, we investigated anti‐PC attitudes and symbolic intergroup threat via rewriting history as predictors of support for reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Given the central role of ideological beliefs in intergroup attitudes, we examined RWA and SDO as predictors of anti‐PC attitudes, symbolic threat in the form of rewriting history, and support for reconciliation. Path analysis results showed that RWA and SDO indirectly predicted lower support for renaming/removing via higher anti‐PC attitudes and higher symbolic threat. Collectively, this research provides evidence that anti‐PC and symbolic threat are important constructs in relation to responses to reconciliation proposals in Canada with potential implications for other post‐colonial societies.
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, commentators in broadly accessible media have offered a surfeit of predictions about the future of higher education. Due to the absence of accountability mechanisms, however, the accuracy of these claims has been heretofore unknown. Research shows that op-eds and other forms of public scholarship influence public policy, heightening the significance of predictions. This paper asks who makes predictions about higher education, in what venues they issue them, on what topics they make predictions, and how accurate they are. It answers these questions by drawing from an original data set of 91 distinct predictions issued by 22 unique authors in 31 separate texts across a 19-month time span from March 2020 to October 2021. It finds that predictions most often appeared in op-eds written by senior academic white men in higher education trade journals. More than half of predictions could not be evaluated a year or more after they were first issued. Still, predictions with determinable outcomes tended to bear out accurately. Enrollment patterns and teaching modalities were the most common topics. Women and people of color were significantly under-represented among predictors. The paper concludes with suggestions for improving equity and performance.
There were three chemical attacks on Syrian civilians in 2013, 2017, and 2018. In 2013, President Obama proposed military action and it was rejected by Congress. President Trump ordered two airstrikes in 2017 and 2018, without congressional authorization. Investigating news reports and statements issued by the members of the House and Senate show that there were major criticisms among US officials in all three periods. In the month after the three foreign policy declarations (congressional vote in 2013, airstrikes in 2017 and 2018), the US press increased their reliance on US officials and followed the standpoint of powerful domestic officials in criticizing the military intervention policy – whether proposed or in action. They covered a significant amount of criticism in 2013 that officials voted a nay and raised their objections, and marginalized critical standpoints in times of forgoing democratic procedures and powerlessness of representatives to change the policy. This research also demonstrates the increasing role of NGOs and activists in picturing realities in Syria.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have raised the prospect of scalable, automated, and fine-grained political microtargeting on a scale previously unseen; however, the persuasive influence of microtargeting with LLMs remains unclear. Here, we build a custom web application capable of integrating self-reported demographic and political data into GPT-4 prompts in real-time, facilitating the live creation of unique messages tailored to persuade individual users on four political issues. We then deploy this application in a preregistered randomized control experiment ( n = 8,587) to investigate the extent to which access to individual-level data increases the persuasive influence of GPT-4. Our approach yields two key findings. First, messages generated by GPT-4 were broadly persuasive, in some cases increasing support for an issue stance by up to 12 percentage points. Second, in aggregate, the persuasive impact of microtargeted messages was not statistically different from that of non-microtargeted messages (4.83 vs. 6.20 percentage points, respectively, P = 0.226). These trends hold even when manipulating the type and number of attributes used to tailor the message. These findings suggest—contrary to widespread speculation—that the influence of current LLMs may reside not in their ability to tailor messages to individuals but rather in the persuasiveness of their generic, nontargeted messages. We release our experimental dataset, GPTarget2024 , as an empirical baseline for future research.
Americans systematically underestimate the popularity of climate policy. Researchers have speculated that correcting second-order misperceptions, or beliefs about what others believe, could translate into even broader support as action comes to be seen as more politically feasible. Using a two-wave experiment ( N≈1,600), we examine the effects of communicating the degree of policy support among Democrats, Republicans, or all Americans (i.e., norms). Republican and American norms increase perceived policy support from the relevant group; exposure to the Republican norm also increases policy support, and this effect is concentrated mostly among fellow Republicans. However, this effect does not persist over time.
Within the printed and online newspaper media in the UK, notions of ‘decolonisation’ referring to various contexts, such as historical, relating to museums and institutions, cultural decolonisation and in relation to modern independence discussions, can be traced. In this article, we have applied topic modelling and natural language processing methods to carry out a classification of, and sentiment analysis on, newspaper headlines and texts from leading British newspapers covering decolonisation over the past decade. The results show an abrupt change in the meaning of decolonisation starting in the middle of the 2010s with an increased focus on cultural and institutional matters, particularly in right-leaning media. Surprisingly, the editorial slant of broadsheets seemingly only had at best moderate effects on tone, while headlines in right-wing tabloids were significantly more negative. Articles covering cultural aspects of decolonisation were substantially more negative than those applying a more traditional, territorial definition of decolonisation. Given the influence of newspaper media on public and private opinions, we discuss the heritage implications of these findings and suggest avenues for further investigation.
Op-ed writing can be a powerful and accessible advocacy tool for physicians, but training is lacking in undergraduate medical education.
To train and engage first-year medical students in op-ed writing.
Midwestern research-intensive medical school.
All students in a required first-year health policy course in 2021 and 2022.
For their health policy course’s final assignment, students could opt to write an op-ed on a healthcare issue of their choice. All students received written instruction on op-ed writing. Additionally, they could access a seminar, coaching and editing by peers and faculty, and publication guidance.
Of 179 students over 2 years, 105 chose to write op-eds. Fifty-one attended the seminar, 35 attended peer coaching sessions, 33 accessed structured peer editing, and 23 received faculty assistance. Thirty-eight students submitted a total of 42 op-eds for publication. Twenty-two pieces were published in major outlets and 17 in the university’s health policy review. Of the 22 in major outlets, 21 received editing from either peers or faculty.
An op-ed writing curriculum can be integrated into an existing medical school health policy course, resulting in a high level of engagement and in published op-eds by medical students.
As a result of the human-induced ecological degradation that has become emblematic of the Anthropocene, we are now witnessing an increase in the frequency of (un)natural disasters. Such a period is bound to create opportunities for the analysis of how different sense-making systems—such as science and religion—shed light on the causes, consequences, and solutions to these traumatic events. Despite the historical antagonism between scientific and faith-based worldviews notwithstanding, how much of the public discourses of religion and science contrast (or not) in regard to interpreting more frequent occurrences of drought, flood, thermal extremes, thunderstorms, wildfires, and the like? In this chapter, we present a case study that examined how eight different religious authorities explain the role of God in natural disasters. Our analysis indicates that religious views on natural disasters do not negate the scientific understanding of the same phenomena. Indeed, the religions represented in our sample recognize the interdependence of all living things and affirm the necessity to adopt an ethic of compassion and responsibility for the Others—humans and nonhumans—as the way to a sustainable future. In times where displays of disagreement, dogmatism, and belief polarization abound, the common orientation of these two discourses strengthens current calls for urgent socio-ecological change and its implications for future science curriculum.
Two studies investigated students’ critique generation, an elaborated form of content evaluation wherein students identify information selectively, inaccurately, or incompletely presented in text(s) and consider where such selective presentation may stem from. Critique generation, as an important critical reading outcome, was examined here, within the context of students’ reasoning about two op-eds, presenting conflicting points of view on a controversial social issue — whether or not Amazon should replace local libraries. Study 1 catalogued the types of critiques that students generated. Study 2 linked critique generation with both students’ conceptions of what the task of critique entails and with students’ reports of strategy use, although not with a host of, expected to be relevant, individual difference factors (e.g., need for cognition, media literacy). Both studies found critique generation to be significantly associated with performance on an argumentative writing task. Contributions of these two studies include documenting critique types that may distinctively emerge when students are asked to reason about a controversial social, rather than scientific, issue and identifying learner-reported strategies that constitute promising paths for fostering critique generation in future work.
Language is not merely a means of expressing ourselves but is a tool of doing things also. Othering is one of such things that are done through language. We construct and propagate our identities and also assign and construe the identities of other people through language. Media, as an example of language in use, plays a crucial role in producing and establishing the reality. The study aims to document the othering process in Pakistani print media and in Pakistani society in general. The data for the study was gathered from columns of English newspaper i.e Dawn. The results and findings contribute to the literature regarding the process of Othering in Pakistani print media and also provide an insight to the trends in media and attitude of public through content analysis of two hundred and fifty-two (252) columns of one of the most leading English language newspapers of Pakistan. The main findings of the paper suggest that the process of othering occurs in the columns of Pakistani English newspaper to a great extent and is always deliberate and purposeful.
Newspapers write for a particular readership and from a certain ideological or political perspective. This paper applies various natural language processing methods to newspaper articles to analyse to which extent the ideological positioning of newspapers is reflected in their writing. Political bias is illustrated in terms of coverage bias and agenda setting by means of metrics, LDA topic modelling and word embeddings. Furthermore, article source discrimination is analysed by applying various classification models. Finally, the use of generative models (GPT-2) is explored for this purpose. These analyses showed several indications of political tendencies: disproportionate coverage of certain politicians and parties, limited overlap of political discourse, classifiable article source and divergence of generated text thematically and in terms of sentiment. Therefore, reading a newspaper requires a critical attitude which considers the intricate political tendencies of the source.KeywordsPolitical biasTopic modellingNewspaper agenda setting
During the Spring and Summer of 2020, college presidents across the United States undertook the difficult task of determining how best to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. An important aspect of leading through a crisis is messaging—that is, communicating about how the crisis is impacting one’s organization and how the needs of organizational constituents are being addressed. The purpose of this study was to analyze short opinion articles (op-eds) published by college presidents regarding higher education and the COVID-19 pandemic to understand how those publications functioned as public crisis communications. This study involved a content analysis of 40 op-eds that were authored or coauthored by college presidents between March and August 2020. Findings indicate that college presidents discussed their organizations’ implementation of public health matters, the importance of togetherness in a crisis, and how their institutions were helping the community during the public health emergency. College leaders’ desire to attain much-needed resources was also evident in many op-eds. This study illuminates how college presidents used public messaging via opinion pieces to communicate publicly during the early months of the pandemic and to attempt to secure resources for their organizations.
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