Seminar
Reading Twitter in the Newsroom: Web 2.0 and Traditional-Media Reporting of Conflicts
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Series
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Speaker(s)Ekaterina Zhuravskaya (Paris School of Economics, Frannce)
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FieldOrganizations and Markets
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LocationOnline
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Date and time
October 04, 2021
12:00 - 13:00
User-generated
online content changes traditional-media news on conflicts. Online posts by
citizen journalists — first-hand witnesses of conflict events — change the
extent, tonality, and content of traditional-media reporting of conflicts.
Using an exogenous and excludable variation in online posts in Israel and
Palestine, driven by internet outages as a result of lightning strikes and
technical failures, we show that, when the internet in the conflict zone is not
muted by outages, conflict news stories on US TV are more numerous and longer.
Text analyses reveal that these stories have higher emotional intensity and
focus more on the suffering of civilians and less on the role of US foreign
policy or elections. They also cite social media sources more. The results
suggest that social-media-driven democratization of the conflict news, i.e.,
the shift of focus from information provided by war gatekeepers to information
from ordinary people, helps the narrative on the side of the conflict that has
more civilian casualties.To participate, please register here