Lance Bennett | University of Washington (original) (raw)

Papers by Lance Bennett

European Journal of Communication, 2023

In recent years, many once stable democracies have experienced various degrees of disruptive comm... more In recent years, many once stable democracies have experienced various degrees of disruptive communication, along with the erosion of core institutions such as the press, elections, courts, and the rights of citizens. We propose a framework to compare the logics of illiberal and liberal democratic communication and contrast traditionally dominant communication norms of tolerance, civility, responsiveness, and reasoned resolution of differences in liberal democracies with transgressions of those norms by illiberal rightwing movements, parties, leaders, and voters. We suggest that unlike 'counter publics' that seek inclusion in liberal democratic systems, engagement with illiberal communication creates "transgressive publics" that attempt to exclude others in the process of promoting ethnic and religious nationalism. This framework offers a corrective to recent scholarship on democratic public spheres that focuses mainly on why the ideals of more inclusive and egalitarian communication are ever more remote. We shift the focus to the systematic disruptions of mainstream public communication and the authority of public institutions. Our analysis develops a broader theoretical context in which interactions between illiberal leaders and publics occur, with the aim of understanding national variations in how communication systems contribute to democratic erosion.

The gold standard for discussing public spheres has long been established around mass media, with... more The gold standard for discussing public spheres has long been established around mass media, with the prestige print press given a privileged place. Yet when it comes to a European public sphere, the mass media are also problematic, or at least incomplete, in several ways: relatively few EU-wide issues are replicated in the national media of EU countries, the discourses on those issues are dominated primarily by elites (with relatively few civil society voices included in the news), and public attention is seldom paid to EU issues beyond a select few (money, agriculture, political integration, scandals), creating a distant ‘gallery public.’ At the same time, many important political issues such as trade and economic justice, development policy, environment and climate change policy, human rights, and military interventions, among others, are being addressed more actively by networks of civil society actors both within and across EU national borders. These networks utilize the Intern...

Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 2011

Based on three series of protest surveys across nations, issues, and time, this study examines to... more Based on three series of protest surveys across nations, issues, and time, this study examines to what extent the use of digital media permits activists to sustain multiple engagements in different protest events and different movement organizations. We find that digital media use stimulates multiple activisms. Through information and communication technologies (ICTs), activists can maintain multiple engagements and manage weak ties with diverse protest and movement communities. The data also suggest that these multiple engagements and overlapping activisms effectively provide linkages to and integration within social movement networks. Core activists who are closely linked to protest organizations rely more on ICTs to manage their multiple commitments. Even activists less closely tied to core protest organizations can link to more diverse communities through Internet use. These basic patterns systematically hold across nations, across issues, and across time.

European Journal of Communication, 2018

Many democratic nations are experiencing increased levels of false information circulating throug... more Many democratic nations are experiencing increased levels of false information circulating through social media and political websites that mimic journalism formats. In many cases, this disinformation is associated with the efforts of movements and parties on the radical right to mobilize supporters against centre parties and the mainstream press that carries their messages. The spread of disinformation can be traced to growing legitimacy problems in many democracies. Declining citizen confidence in institutions undermines the credibility of official information in the news and opens publics to alternative information sources. Those sources are often associated with both nationalist (primarily radical right) and foreign (commonly Russian) strategies to undermine institutional legitimacy and destabilize centre parties, governments and elections. The Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in the United States are among the most prominent examples of dis...

Perspectives on Politics, 2014

Perspectives on Politics, 2009

Ellen Mickiewicz has done an excellent job of presenting the key elements of our argument and emp... more Ellen Mickiewicz has done an excellent job of presenting the key elements of our argument and empirical analysis about why the mainstream press proved incapable of independent news framing at critical junctures in the Iraq War. She then raises a series of excellent broader questions: What about the responsibility of government institutions to hold those in power accountable? What about the independent force of public opinion? Were earlier administrations as able to spin the press as successfully as the Bush administration? Each of these questions might well fuel a book. I can only address them briefly in this response.

Politik in der Mediendemokratie, 2009

Two interesting dimensions emerge from investigations of press-state relationships in the western... more Two interesting dimensions emerge from investigations of press-state relationships in the western democratic nations: consistently strong norms favoring press freedom and independence at the journalistic level, contrasted with markedly different media cultures defining the social responsibility of the press and its positioning vis-à-vis audiences and public officials (Hanitzsch 2007). These different dimensions of the public interest role of the press may explain why some observers (e. g. Deuze 2005) see marked similarities across democratic media systems, while others (Esser 1998; Donsbach/Patterson 2004; Hallin/Mancini 2004) tend to see important differences. Thus, Deuze (2005) concluded that journalists across many different systems embrace common norms of autonomy, fairness, and accuracy, while Donsbach (1995) compared U.S. and German newsrooms and concluded that they represent two very different worlds in terms of how reporters and editors approached stories. Hanitzsch (2007) offers a useful typology for thinking about similarities and differences in journalism cultures. One prominent category in his framework involves how the market orientation within a media system affects how publics are addressed in news content. He contrasts two markedly different conceptions of news audiences: "In journalism cultures that give priority to the public interest, the audience is clearly addressed in its role as citizenry. It is assumed that the primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing" (Hanitzsch 2007: 374). "When market orientation is high journalism gives emphasis to what the audiences want to know at the expense of what they should know. Journalism cultures on this pole of the [market] dimension champion the values of consumerism; they focus on everyday life issues and individual needs. Audiences are not addressed in their role as citizens concerned with the social and political issues of the day but in their role as clients and consumers whose personal fears, aspirations, attitudes, and emotional experiences become the center of attention" (Hanitzsch 2007: 375).

Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI EA '11, 2011

We designed, built, and deployed ConsiderIt to support the Living Voters Guide, a website where a... more We designed, built, and deployed ConsiderIt to support the Living Voters Guide, a website where any voter could participate in writing a voters' guide for the 2010 election in Washington. ConsiderIt is a new method of integrating the thoughts of many into a coherent form, while nudging people to consider tradeoffs of difficult decisions with an intuitive interface.

Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work - CSCW '12, 2012

We present a novel platform for supporting public deliberation on difficult decisions. ConsiderIt... more We present a novel platform for supporting public deliberation on difficult decisions. ConsiderIt guides people to reflect on tradeoffs and the perspectives of others by framing interactions around pro/con points that participants create, adopt, and share. ConsiderIt surfaces the most salient pros and cons overall, while also enabling users to drill down into the key points for different groups. We deployed ConsiderIt in a contentious U.S. state election, inviting residents to deliberate on nine ballot measures. We discuss ConsiderIt's affordances and limitations, enriched with empirical data from this deployment. We show that users often engaged in normatively desirable activities, such as crafting positions that recognize both pros and cons, as well as points written by people who do not agree with them.

Political Communication, 2000

Political Communication, 2003

This introduction to a special issue of Political Communication discusses changes in the politica... more This introduction to a special issue of Political Communication discusses changes in the political content of news and introduces the concerns of the three articles in this symposium regarding the autonomy of the press in setting the political agenda. While considerable agreement exists about the shrinking space for hard news and the rise of sensationalism and infotainment formats, there is less scholarly agreement about whether the remaining hard news space is less subject to the news management efforts of public officials and ...

Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 2012

Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its very natur... more Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its very nature. This has raised the normative concern that users may opt to encounter only political information and perspectives that accord with their preexisting views. This study examines the different ways that voters appropriated a new, purpose-built online engagement platform to engage with a wide variety of political opinions and arguments. In a system aimed at helping Washington state citizens make their 2010 election decisions, we find that users take significant advantage of three key opportunities to engage with political diversity: accessing, considering, and producing arguments on both sides of various policy proposals. Notably, engagement with each of these forms of participation drops off as the required level of commitment increases. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results as well as directions for future research.

Journal of Communication, 2010

In our earlier article (Bennett and Iyengar, 2008) we argued that because news audiences are incr... more In our earlier article (Bennett and Iyengar, 2008) we argued that because news audiences are increasingly self-selected, communications scholars will be increasingly hard pressed to document media-induced persuasion effects. The critique by Holbert, Garrett and Gleason does not address the fundamental problem of endogeneity and instead proposes attitude reinforcement as a substitute for persuasion. But the problem of endogeneity applies equally to reinforcement and attitude change research. Our critics go

Journal of Communication, 2011

The narratives that flow through networks can shed light on their organization. This analysis loo... more The narratives that flow through networks can shed light on their organization. This analysis looks at the elaboration of fair trade networks in the United States and the United Kingdom, with a focus on the narrative control exercised by key gate-keeping organizations. Structural properties of the two networks reflect differences in centralization as measured through distance, closeness and betweenness in relations among organizations. The analysis suggests that once a dominant story or entrenched opposing stories become established in a network, structural dynamics involving narrative choices, conflicts, and strategies can lead comparable networks to diverge even as they espouse the same cause. These differences affect the capacities of networks to mobilize for various kinds of activities.

Information, Communication & Society, 2014

Information, Communication & Society, 2003

Many observers doubt the capacity of digital media to change the political game. The rise of a tr... more Many observers doubt the capacity of digital media to change the political game. The rise of a transnational activism that is aimed beyond states and directly at corporations, trade and development regimes offers a fruitful area for understanding how communication practices can help create a new politics. The Internet is implicated in the new global activism far beyond merely reducing the costs of communication, or transcending the geographical and temporal barriers associated with other communication media. Various uses of the Internet and digital media facilitate the loosely structured networks, the weak identity ties, and the patterns of issue and demonstration organizing that define a new global protest politics. Analysis of various cases shows how digital network configurations can facilitate: permanent campaigns, the growth of broad networks despite relatively weak social identity and ideology ties, transformation of individual member organizations and whole networks, and the capacity to communicate messages from desktops to television screens. The same qualities that make these communication-based politics durable also make them vulnerable to problems of control, decision-making and collective identity. Bennett Communicating Global Activism 2

Citizenship Studies, 2009

How can civic education keep pace with changing political identifications and practices of new ge... more How can civic education keep pace with changing political identifications and practices of new generations of citizens? This paper examines research on school-based civic education in different post-industrial democracies with the aim of deriving a set of core learning categories that offer a starting point for thinking about how to address changing citizen identity styles and learning opportunities in various online and offline environments. The preponderance of school-based civic education programs reflects traditional paradigms of dutiful citizenship (DC) oriented to government through parties and voting, with citizens forming attentive publics who follow events in the news. The authors expand upon these conventional learning categories by identifying additional civic learning opportunities that reflect more self-actualizing (AC) styles of civic participation common among recent generations of youth who have been termed digital natives. Their AC learning styles favor interactive, networked activities often communicated through participatory media such as videos shared across online networks. The result is an expanded set of learning categories that recognize the value of different citizenship styles and emerging online environments that may supplement or supplant school civics.

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2012

This article proposes a framework for understanding large-scale individualized collective action ... more This article proposes a framework for understanding large-scale individualized collective action that is often coordinated through digital media technologies. Social fragmentation and the decline of group loyalties have given rise to an era of personalized politics in which individually expressive personal action frames displace collective action frames in many protest causes. This trend can be spotted in the rise of large-scale, rapidly forming political participation aimed at a variety of targets, ranging from parties and candidates, to corporations, brands, and transnational organizations. The group-based “identity politics” of the “new social movements” that arose after the 1960s still exist, but the recent period has seen more diverse mobilizations in which individuals are mobilized around personal lifestyle values to engage with multiple causes such as economic justice (fair trade, inequality, and development policies), environmental protection, and worker and human rights.

This study examines the ways in which youth engagement sites (such as Rock the Vote) and election... more This study examines the ways in which youth engagement sites (such as Rock the Vote) and election campaign sites (for house, senate and governor) appeal to young voters and offer them pathways for involvement in the electoral process. We examined archival web records of candidate and youth engagement sites in the 2002 elections for the nature and frequency of appeals to young citizens on various issues, as well as interactive communication features that enable visitors to different sites to communicate and stay ...

Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its very natur... more Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its very nature. This has raised the normative concern that users may opt to encounter only political information and perspectives that accord with their preexisting views. This study examines the different ways that voters appropriated a new, purpose-built online engagement platform to engage with a wide variety of political opinions and arguments. In a deployment aimed at helping Washington state citizens make their 2010 election ...

European Journal of Communication, 2023

In recent years, many once stable democracies have experienced various degrees of disruptive comm... more In recent years, many once stable democracies have experienced various degrees of disruptive communication, along with the erosion of core institutions such as the press, elections, courts, and the rights of citizens. We propose a framework to compare the logics of illiberal and liberal democratic communication and contrast traditionally dominant communication norms of tolerance, civility, responsiveness, and reasoned resolution of differences in liberal democracies with transgressions of those norms by illiberal rightwing movements, parties, leaders, and voters. We suggest that unlike 'counter publics' that seek inclusion in liberal democratic systems, engagement with illiberal communication creates "transgressive publics" that attempt to exclude others in the process of promoting ethnic and religious nationalism. This framework offers a corrective to recent scholarship on democratic public spheres that focuses mainly on why the ideals of more inclusive and egalitarian communication are ever more remote. We shift the focus to the systematic disruptions of mainstream public communication and the authority of public institutions. Our analysis develops a broader theoretical context in which interactions between illiberal leaders and publics occur, with the aim of understanding national variations in how communication systems contribute to democratic erosion.

The gold standard for discussing public spheres has long been established around mass media, with... more The gold standard for discussing public spheres has long been established around mass media, with the prestige print press given a privileged place. Yet when it comes to a European public sphere, the mass media are also problematic, or at least incomplete, in several ways: relatively few EU-wide issues are replicated in the national media of EU countries, the discourses on those issues are dominated primarily by elites (with relatively few civil society voices included in the news), and public attention is seldom paid to EU issues beyond a select few (money, agriculture, political integration, scandals), creating a distant ‘gallery public.’ At the same time, many important political issues such as trade and economic justice, development policy, environment and climate change policy, human rights, and military interventions, among others, are being addressed more actively by networks of civil society actors both within and across EU national borders. These networks utilize the Intern...

Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 2011

Based on three series of protest surveys across nations, issues, and time, this study examines to... more Based on three series of protest surveys across nations, issues, and time, this study examines to what extent the use of digital media permits activists to sustain multiple engagements in different protest events and different movement organizations. We find that digital media use stimulates multiple activisms. Through information and communication technologies (ICTs), activists can maintain multiple engagements and manage weak ties with diverse protest and movement communities. The data also suggest that these multiple engagements and overlapping activisms effectively provide linkages to and integration within social movement networks. Core activists who are closely linked to protest organizations rely more on ICTs to manage their multiple commitments. Even activists less closely tied to core protest organizations can link to more diverse communities through Internet use. These basic patterns systematically hold across nations, across issues, and across time.

European Journal of Communication, 2018

Many democratic nations are experiencing increased levels of false information circulating throug... more Many democratic nations are experiencing increased levels of false information circulating through social media and political websites that mimic journalism formats. In many cases, this disinformation is associated with the efforts of movements and parties on the radical right to mobilize supporters against centre parties and the mainstream press that carries their messages. The spread of disinformation can be traced to growing legitimacy problems in many democracies. Declining citizen confidence in institutions undermines the credibility of official information in the news and opens publics to alternative information sources. Those sources are often associated with both nationalist (primarily radical right) and foreign (commonly Russian) strategies to undermine institutional legitimacy and destabilize centre parties, governments and elections. The Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in the United States are among the most prominent examples of dis...

Perspectives on Politics, 2014

Perspectives on Politics, 2009

Ellen Mickiewicz has done an excellent job of presenting the key elements of our argument and emp... more Ellen Mickiewicz has done an excellent job of presenting the key elements of our argument and empirical analysis about why the mainstream press proved incapable of independent news framing at critical junctures in the Iraq War. She then raises a series of excellent broader questions: What about the responsibility of government institutions to hold those in power accountable? What about the independent force of public opinion? Were earlier administrations as able to spin the press as successfully as the Bush administration? Each of these questions might well fuel a book. I can only address them briefly in this response.

Politik in der Mediendemokratie, 2009

Two interesting dimensions emerge from investigations of press-state relationships in the western... more Two interesting dimensions emerge from investigations of press-state relationships in the western democratic nations: consistently strong norms favoring press freedom and independence at the journalistic level, contrasted with markedly different media cultures defining the social responsibility of the press and its positioning vis-à-vis audiences and public officials (Hanitzsch 2007). These different dimensions of the public interest role of the press may explain why some observers (e. g. Deuze 2005) see marked similarities across democratic media systems, while others (Esser 1998; Donsbach/Patterson 2004; Hallin/Mancini 2004) tend to see important differences. Thus, Deuze (2005) concluded that journalists across many different systems embrace common norms of autonomy, fairness, and accuracy, while Donsbach (1995) compared U.S. and German newsrooms and concluded that they represent two very different worlds in terms of how reporters and editors approached stories. Hanitzsch (2007) offers a useful typology for thinking about similarities and differences in journalism cultures. One prominent category in his framework involves how the market orientation within a media system affects how publics are addressed in news content. He contrasts two markedly different conceptions of news audiences: "In journalism cultures that give priority to the public interest, the audience is clearly addressed in its role as citizenry. It is assumed that the primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing" (Hanitzsch 2007: 374). "When market orientation is high journalism gives emphasis to what the audiences want to know at the expense of what they should know. Journalism cultures on this pole of the [market] dimension champion the values of consumerism; they focus on everyday life issues and individual needs. Audiences are not addressed in their role as citizens concerned with the social and political issues of the day but in their role as clients and consumers whose personal fears, aspirations, attitudes, and emotional experiences become the center of attention" (Hanitzsch 2007: 375).

Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI EA '11, 2011

We designed, built, and deployed ConsiderIt to support the Living Voters Guide, a website where a... more We designed, built, and deployed ConsiderIt to support the Living Voters Guide, a website where any voter could participate in writing a voters' guide for the 2010 election in Washington. ConsiderIt is a new method of integrating the thoughts of many into a coherent form, while nudging people to consider tradeoffs of difficult decisions with an intuitive interface.

Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work - CSCW '12, 2012

We present a novel platform for supporting public deliberation on difficult decisions. ConsiderIt... more We present a novel platform for supporting public deliberation on difficult decisions. ConsiderIt guides people to reflect on tradeoffs and the perspectives of others by framing interactions around pro/con points that participants create, adopt, and share. ConsiderIt surfaces the most salient pros and cons overall, while also enabling users to drill down into the key points for different groups. We deployed ConsiderIt in a contentious U.S. state election, inviting residents to deliberate on nine ballot measures. We discuss ConsiderIt's affordances and limitations, enriched with empirical data from this deployment. We show that users often engaged in normatively desirable activities, such as crafting positions that recognize both pros and cons, as well as points written by people who do not agree with them.

Political Communication, 2000

Political Communication, 2003

This introduction to a special issue of Political Communication discusses changes in the politica... more This introduction to a special issue of Political Communication discusses changes in the political content of news and introduces the concerns of the three articles in this symposium regarding the autonomy of the press in setting the political agenda. While considerable agreement exists about the shrinking space for hard news and the rise of sensationalism and infotainment formats, there is less scholarly agreement about whether the remaining hard news space is less subject to the news management efforts of public officials and ...

Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 2012

Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its very natur... more Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its very nature. This has raised the normative concern that users may opt to encounter only political information and perspectives that accord with their preexisting views. This study examines the different ways that voters appropriated a new, purpose-built online engagement platform to engage with a wide variety of political opinions and arguments. In a system aimed at helping Washington state citizens make their 2010 election decisions, we find that users take significant advantage of three key opportunities to engage with political diversity: accessing, considering, and producing arguments on both sides of various policy proposals. Notably, engagement with each of these forms of participation drops off as the required level of commitment increases. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results as well as directions for future research.

Journal of Communication, 2010

In our earlier article (Bennett and Iyengar, 2008) we argued that because news audiences are incr... more In our earlier article (Bennett and Iyengar, 2008) we argued that because news audiences are increasingly self-selected, communications scholars will be increasingly hard pressed to document media-induced persuasion effects. The critique by Holbert, Garrett and Gleason does not address the fundamental problem of endogeneity and instead proposes attitude reinforcement as a substitute for persuasion. But the problem of endogeneity applies equally to reinforcement and attitude change research. Our critics go

Journal of Communication, 2011

The narratives that flow through networks can shed light on their organization. This analysis loo... more The narratives that flow through networks can shed light on their organization. This analysis looks at the elaboration of fair trade networks in the United States and the United Kingdom, with a focus on the narrative control exercised by key gate-keeping organizations. Structural properties of the two networks reflect differences in centralization as measured through distance, closeness and betweenness in relations among organizations. The analysis suggests that once a dominant story or entrenched opposing stories become established in a network, structural dynamics involving narrative choices, conflicts, and strategies can lead comparable networks to diverge even as they espouse the same cause. These differences affect the capacities of networks to mobilize for various kinds of activities.

Information, Communication & Society, 2014

Information, Communication & Society, 2003

Many observers doubt the capacity of digital media to change the political game. The rise of a tr... more Many observers doubt the capacity of digital media to change the political game. The rise of a transnational activism that is aimed beyond states and directly at corporations, trade and development regimes offers a fruitful area for understanding how communication practices can help create a new politics. The Internet is implicated in the new global activism far beyond merely reducing the costs of communication, or transcending the geographical and temporal barriers associated with other communication media. Various uses of the Internet and digital media facilitate the loosely structured networks, the weak identity ties, and the patterns of issue and demonstration organizing that define a new global protest politics. Analysis of various cases shows how digital network configurations can facilitate: permanent campaigns, the growth of broad networks despite relatively weak social identity and ideology ties, transformation of individual member organizations and whole networks, and the capacity to communicate messages from desktops to television screens. The same qualities that make these communication-based politics durable also make them vulnerable to problems of control, decision-making and collective identity. Bennett Communicating Global Activism 2

Citizenship Studies, 2009

How can civic education keep pace with changing political identifications and practices of new ge... more How can civic education keep pace with changing political identifications and practices of new generations of citizens? This paper examines research on school-based civic education in different post-industrial democracies with the aim of deriving a set of core learning categories that offer a starting point for thinking about how to address changing citizen identity styles and learning opportunities in various online and offline environments. The preponderance of school-based civic education programs reflects traditional paradigms of dutiful citizenship (DC) oriented to government through parties and voting, with citizens forming attentive publics who follow events in the news. The authors expand upon these conventional learning categories by identifying additional civic learning opportunities that reflect more self-actualizing (AC) styles of civic participation common among recent generations of youth who have been termed digital natives. Their AC learning styles favor interactive, networked activities often communicated through participatory media such as videos shared across online networks. The result is an expanded set of learning categories that recognize the value of different citizenship styles and emerging online environments that may supplement or supplant school civics.

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2012

This article proposes a framework for understanding large-scale individualized collective action ... more This article proposes a framework for understanding large-scale individualized collective action that is often coordinated through digital media technologies. Social fragmentation and the decline of group loyalties have given rise to an era of personalized politics in which individually expressive personal action frames displace collective action frames in many protest causes. This trend can be spotted in the rise of large-scale, rapidly forming political participation aimed at a variety of targets, ranging from parties and candidates, to corporations, brands, and transnational organizations. The group-based “identity politics” of the “new social movements” that arose after the 1960s still exist, but the recent period has seen more diverse mobilizations in which individuals are mobilized around personal lifestyle values to engage with multiple causes such as economic justice (fair trade, inequality, and development policies), environmental protection, and worker and human rights.

This study examines the ways in which youth engagement sites (such as Rock the Vote) and election... more This study examines the ways in which youth engagement sites (such as Rock the Vote) and election campaign sites (for house, senate and governor) appeal to young voters and offer them pathways for involvement in the electoral process. We examined archival web records of candidate and youth engagement sites in the 2002 elections for the nature and frequency of appeals to young citizens on various issues, as well as interactive communication features that enable visitors to different sites to communicate and stay ...

Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its very natur... more Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its very nature. This has raised the normative concern that users may opt to encounter only political information and perspectives that accord with their preexisting views. This study examines the different ways that voters appropriated a new, purpose-built online engagement platform to engage with a wide variety of political opinions and arguments. In a deployment aimed at helping Washington state citizens make their 2010 election ...

The intentional spread of falsehoods – and attendant attacks on minorities, press freedoms, and t... more The intentional spread of falsehoods – and attendant attacks on
minorities, press freedoms, and the rule of law – challenge the basic
norms and values upon which institutional legitimacy and political
stability depend. How did we get here? The Disinformation Age
assembles a remarkable group of historians, political scientists, and
communication scholars to examine the historical and political origins
of the post-fact information era, focusing on the United States but with
lessons for other democracies. Bennett and Livingston frame the book
by examining decades-long efforts by political and business interests to
undermine authoritative institutions, including parties, elections, public
agencies, science, independent journalism, and civil society groups. The
other distinguished scholars explore the historical origins and workings
of disinformation, along with policy challenges and the role of the
legacy press in improving public communication. This title is also
available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The intentional spread of falsehoods -- and attendant attacks on minorities, press freedoms, and ... more The intentional spread of falsehoods -- and attendant attacks on minorities, press freedoms, and the rule of law -- challenge the basic norms and values upon which institutional legitimacy and political stability depend. How did we get here? The Disinformation Age assembles a remarkable group of historians, political scientists, and communication scholars to examine the historical and political origins of the “post-fact” information era, focusing on the United States but with lessons for other democracies. Bennett and Livingston frame the book by examining decades-long efforts by political and business interests to undermine authoritative institutions, including parties, elections, public agencies, science, independent journalism, and civil society groups. The other distinguished scholars explore the historical origins and workings of disinformation, along with policy challenges and the role of the legacy press in improving public communication. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.