Political journalists overwhelmingly interact with other journalists, particularly political ones, & their offline tendencies to form homogenous networks have transferred online

Exploring Political Journalism Homophily on Twitter: A Comparative Analysis of US and UK Elections in 2016 and 2017. Kelly Fincham. Media and Communication, Vol 7, No 1 (2019). March 21 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/mac.v7i1.1765

Abstract: The tendency of political journalists to form insular groups or packs, chasing the same angles and quoting the same sources, is a well-documented issue in journalism studies and has long been criticized for its role in groupthink and homogenous news coverage. This groupthink attracted renewed criticism after the unexpected victory of Republican candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election as the campaign coverage had indicated a likely win by the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. This pattern was repeated in the 2017 UK election when the Conservative party lost their majority after a campaign in which the news coverage had pointed to an overall Tory victory. Such groupthink is often attributed to homophily, the tendency of individuals to interact with those most like them, and while homophily in the legacy media system is well-studied, there is little research around homophily in the hybrid media system, even as social media platforms like Twitter facilitate the development—and analysis—of virtual political journalism packs. This study, which compares Twitter interactions among US and UK political reporters in the 2016 and 2017 national elections, shows that political journalists are overwhelmingly more likely to use Twitter to interact with other journalists, particularly political journalists, and that their offline tendencies to form homogenous networks have transferred online. There are some exceptions around factors such as gender, news organizations and types of news organization—and important distinctions between types of interactions—but overall the study provides evidence of sustained homophily as journalists continue to normalize Twitter.

Keywords: elections; groupthink; homophily; political journalism; Twitter, UK; US

Check also Journalistic Homophily on Social Media: Exploring journalists’ interactions with each other on Twitter. Folker Hanusch & Daniel Nölleke. Digital Journalism, https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2018/02/journalists-continue-to-live-in-bubbles.html

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The worst about this is not their constant sanctimoniousness when talking to the peasants, when they are bigger offenders and keep their membership in their echo chambers and sub-echo chambers in greater proportion that the great unwashed... It is that in journalism schools they are already told to be aware of their biases, and the very human need to be part of a pack (or herd?) and they forget it immediately after taking the exams.


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2. Literature Review
FromthetelegraphtotypewriterstotelevisiontoTwitter, successive technological innovations have transformed the norms and practice of journalism (Lasorsa, Lewis, & Holton, 2012) and each new technology has arrived amid much fanfare about its potential impact on political communication, particularly around election campaigns (Stromer-Galley, 2014). Ultimately however, the expectations and concerns about these potential utopias and dystopias have never been fully realized as the power structures of journalism and politics have instead normalized each new “new media” into their own practice (Singer, 2005). The potential power of digital media in election campaigns was first seen in the US in the 2004 Presidential campaign when it rocketed the relatively unknown candidate Howard Dean into the political and media stratosphere (Stromer-Galley, 2014) but as Margolis and Resnick had already argued in 2000, any of the digital advantages accruing to early adopters like Dean were soon eclipsed as the political and journalism elite folded these new technologies into existing practices when they recognized,a nd there by normalized, the “new” new media (Margolis & Resnick, 2000). Much of the research into Twitter journalism practice argues that journalists, seen as frequent, if not always skillful, Twitter users (Engesser & Humprecht, 2015) are well down the path of normalization, using Twitter in ways that conform to existing practice rather than using it to change journalism practice (see Lasorsa et al., 2012; Lawrence, Molyneux, Coddington, & Holton,2014; Lewis,2012; Molyneux & Mourão,2019; Nuernbergk,2016;Parmelee,2013). This is especially evidentinare as such as gatekeeping,wherejournalistshave long controlled whose voices make it through the editorial “gates” (Lasorsa et al., 2012; Singer, 2005), and Twitter gatekeeping can be seen in the “insider talk” and “regurgitation” of information flowing across Twitter (Lawrence et al., 2014; Parmelee, Roman, Beasley, & Perkins, 2019, p. 161) as journalists more frequently engage with other journalists or newsmakers—and even themselves—rather than interest groups, academics or citizens (Carlson, 2017; Molyneux & Mourão, 2019). While journalists can, and do, challenge normalization in other areas of journalism practice (see Broersma & Graham 2016; Molyneux & Mourão, 2019), this study’s sole concern is whether political journalists create homogenous packs on Twitter, thus supporting the idea of homophily, and by extension, normalization, even as the hybrid media system (Chadwick, 2013) theoretically presents alternatives to the pack model with a wider range of interaction partners and voices outside the bubbles. While some studies indicate more negotiation around normalization in newer affordances such as quote tweetsor areas such as monitoring, sourcing, publishing, promoting and branding (Broersma & Graham, 2016; Molyneux & Mourão, 2019; Tandoc & Vos, 2016), the research overwhelmingly indicates that journalists’ interactions are dominated by other journalists andthat these homogenous onlinenetworks resemblethosebuilt by journalists offline (Hanusch & Nölleke, 2018). However, despite the plethora of studies indicating that journalists’ Twitter networks are so homogenous as to suggest homophily there has been little research so far specifically into homophily in those interactions even as journalists themselves report low levels of citizen engagement. For example, Gulyas (2017) found journalist/ citizen interaction at 23 and 27 percent in the US and UK respectively, and Nuernbergk (2016) saw only rare interactions between German journalists and their Twitter followers, thus suggesting that political journalists still prefer to connect with each other in “journalism-centered bubbles” (Molyneux & Mourão, 2019; Mourão, 2015; Nuernbergk, 2016, p. 877). Additionally, researchers have noted evidence of bubbles within bubbles (Bentivegna & Marchetti, 2018) with political journalists seen as more likely to interact with other political journalists (Hanusch & Nölleke,2018); selfsegregating by gender (Artwick, 2013; Usheretal.,2018), and focusing on those inside their own news organization (Bentivegna & Marchetti, 2018; Larsson, Kalsnes, & Christensen, 2017) with Vergeer (2015) reporting that regional reporters were more likely to do this than national journalists. While these studies were broad in nature, Hanusch and Nölleke (2018) specifically considered thepotential impactofbeat, gender,organizational context and geographic proximity in an extensive inquiry into homophily among Australian reporters and found a high degree of homophily across those four sharedcharacteristics. Homophily, or the tendency of individuals to form groups with those most similar to themselves (McPhersonetal.,2001)wasintroduced as a concept in the 1950s when Lazarsfeld and Merton (1954) proposed that individuals were far more likely to build networks around shared values in areas like religion or sport or around shared status in areas such as race, ethnicity, sex, age, religion, education and occupation (Hanusch & Nölleke, 2018; McPherson et al., 2001). As an elite specialty within the wider occupational field of journalism, political journalists are perhaps more sensitive to the homophilous effects of these tight-knitgroups as they seek validation from “those to whom we compare ourselves, those whose opinions we attend to, and simply those whom weare aware of andwatchforsignals aboutwhat is happening in our environment” (McPherson et al., 2001, p. 428). The tendency for political reporters to focus on each other was first labelled as “pack journalism” during the 1972 US presidential election when Rolling Stone reporter Tim Crouse noted that the journalists’intentfocusoneacho therled to a shared groupthink about the day’s most important stories and created a pack dynamic so strong that “almost all the reporters will take the same approach to the story”, even though they were ostensibly competing against each other(Crouse,1973). As former Newsweek Bureau Chief Karl Fleming said: “Their (the reporters’) abiding interest is making sure that nobody else has got anything that they don’t have—not getting something that nobody else has”(Crouse,1973). While Crouse observed the political journalism network and the resulting groupthink from his physical seat on the campaign bus, researchers can now observe virtual political journalism networks from afar through the analysis of publicly-visible Twitter conversations and the use of affordances such as retweets, replies, mentions and followings. Retweet and mention networks (which include both replies and indirect mentions) are often seen as the strongest interaction markers (Hanusch & Nölleke, 2018) and several studies have reported differences in the way journalistsuseretweets and mentions with more homophily seen in mentions than retweets (Hanusch & Nölleke 2018; Molyneux & Mourão, 2019; Nuernbergk, 2016). However, indirect mentions can be also be used as a “shout out” (Usher et al., 2018) thus diluting their effectiveness as a distinct measure of interactive intent. Retweets, despite multiple Twitter disclaimers to the contrary (Hanusch & Nölleke, 2018), are most often viewed as an endorsement of content (Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013; Russell, Hendricks, Choi, & Stephens, 2015), but they also convey endorsement of the user and the link between the original and retweeting sender provides evidence of a pre-existing homophilous network of like-minded people (Bruns & Burgess, 2012; Hanusch & Nölleke, 2018). While some journalists use replies to thread longer posts together and circumvent Twitter’s 280-character count (Molyneux & Mourão, 2019, p. 257), specific replies (as against indirect mentions) are more typically interactive with some research indicating potential heterophily with studies showing “public/citizen” users receiving as high as 48 percent of the journalists’replies (Brems, Temmerman, Graham, & Broersma, 2017). However, these studies don’t mention if the accounts received more than one reply which would help us consider the nature and value of such interactions, a problem noted by Parmelee and Deeley in 2017, when they queried the use of simple counts arguing that such one-offs were inadequate ways to measure reciprocity. Such reciprocity is often absent in followings (Kiousis, 2002) and, as Ausserhoffer and Maireder reported in 2013, followings are not a reliable metricasthey can bepaid for or artificially enhanced by computer scripts. Subsequently, this study views the affordances of retweets and replies as more indicative of actual intent, highlighting the user’s value to the journalist (Conover et al.,2011; Molyneux, 2015). Frequency of interactions is also important. As McPherson et al .(2001) outlined, homophily can be seen in those whose “opinions we attend to” and given the concerns raised by Parmelee and Deeley (2017) around one-off replies, this study measures interactivity by focusing on the political journalists’ most-frequent discussion partners in replies and retweets to see which voices the journalists most frequently attend to. This research builds on the developing work into Twitter journalism homophily (see particularly Hanusch & Nölleke, 2018) and is important as it is the first to examine this issue in the context of social media election coverage, specifically on Twitter, and takes the analysis further by looking at media practice in two similar media systems. The importance of studies such as this, which examine these “new” types of interactions on social media, cannot be overstated as the work done by political journalists remains essential to a citizen’s ability to understand politics and election campaigns even in a digital and networked age (Harder, Paulussen, & VanAelst, 2016; Kuhn & Nielsen, 2014).


3.Research Questions
This study explores retweets and replies as two distinct affordances and explores them separately for the presence of homophily by asking the following two research questions:

RQ1: To what extent can homophily be identified in political journalists’ retweets on Twitterin an election campaign?
RQ2: To what extent can homophily be identified in political journalists’ replies on Twitter in an election campaign?

Drawing from the categories devised in Hanusch and Nölleke’s study (2018) the study then considers if organizational context, types of news organization or gender can be seen to play a role in homophily in political journalists’ retweets and replies, which leads to these research questions:

RQ3:Doshared characteristics such as news organizations; type of news organizations and gender play a role in homophily in retweets?
RQ4: Do shared characteristic ssuch as news organizations; type of news organizations and gender play a role in homophily in replies?