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
6. Discussion
The results of this study point to significant homophily
throughout political journalists’ interaction networks
during the US and UK election campaigns, offering key insights
into the emergence of common Twitter practices
among political journalists in two of the “Liberal Media”
countries (Hallin & Mancini, 2004); and providing further
evidence of the continuing normalization of Twitter in
the hybrid media environment. The results show that
political journalists in both the US and the UK are significantly
more likely to engage with other political journalists
during election campaigns and that the extent of
such homophily can be affected by factors like news organization,
types of news organization (print; broadcast;
digital or wire) and gender. However, while the findings
point to overall homophily there are some marked differences
between the two countries and between the two
types of interactions as discussed below.
To answer the first two research questions, the study
shows a pronounced degree of homophily in both countries
in retweets and replies with higher rates of homophily
in retweets. While the US journalists are more
likely to be more homophilous overall, the political reporters
in both countries formed distinct journalismcentered
bubbles—with political journalists the single
largest group—and “other” non-journalism voices significantly
marginalized. Taking retweets first, the US political
journalists paid more attention to other political
reporters than their UK counterparts with 82 percent
against 64 percent. However, the political reporters in
both countries retweeted very high percentages of journalists
overall with 93 percent in the US and 84 percent
in the UK. The difference in types of journalists and the
higher UK retweeting rates of non-journalist accounts
(16 percent to 7 percent in the US) could be attributed to
the suicide bombing in Manchester during the UK election
campaign which caused 23 deaths and led to the
24-hour suspension of the campaign. While content analysis
was beyond the scope of this article, examining the
content of the retweets would help in determining if the
difference around retweeted users could be explained by
the effect of this major news story which dominated the
news cycles for days in the UK. The findings on replies
may also have been impacted by the May 22 suicide
attack. The percentage of political-journalist-to-politicaljournalists
replies in both countries were roughly similar
(US: 70 percent; UK: 68 percent) which suggests some significant
similarities in the cross-national trend, but there
were also quite marked differences: UK reporters sent
more than three times the number of replies than the US
reporters and the higher number of replies were used to
engage with a higher percentage of non-journalists with
22 percent against 16.5 percent in the US. Again, content
analysis would be useful in understanding if the differences
are linked to a major news story that disrupted the
UK election campaign rather than emerging differences
in journalism practice in two similar media systems.
The second two research questions explored the degree
of homophily in retweets and replies across a set
of shared characteristics and found that news organization,
types of news organization (print, broadcast, digital
or wire) and gender play a role in the homophily observed
in both countries. The study shows similar patterns
in both countries, particularly around gender, with
significant levels of homophily in male political journalists’
interactions. While both male and female journalists
are more likely to use replies to interact with their
own gender; the effects are small to medium-sized for
females and more pronounced for males. The impact
of gender in retweets is striking with both male and female
political journalists in the UK and US more likely
to retweet male political journalists than female political
journalists. However, given that the amplification most
often benefits male political journalists, the gender findings,
while initially suggestive of homophily, may in fact
be more reflective of the political journalism gender inequities
highlighted by Usher et al. in 2018. Indeed, the
findings here almost exactly mirror those from Hanusch
and Nölleke (2018) whose work on Australian reporters
found only mild gender-based heterophily within female
retweet networks. The lack of gender diversity among
political journalists, particularly in the UK parliamentary
press lobby, has been highlighted in recent years (Tobitt,
2018) and these findings suggest that male political journalists’
voices are amplified by Twitter journalism engagement
practices in both countries.
Interestingly, the analysis of news organizations
showed political journalists in both countries were more
likely to retweet political journalists from outside their
organizations than inside, echoing Vergeer’s 2015 finding
that Dutch national news journalists were more likely
to connect with those outside their own news organizations.
While news organization was not seen as a major
factor in Twitter homophily, types of news organization
did emerge as a significant factor, in particular the US
broadcast sector and the UK newspaper sector, findings
which may point to a linkage between political bias and
Twitter homophily as these are the two media sectors
generally regarded as more politically biased than other
types of news organizations in their respective countries
(Hallin & Mancini, 2004).
Overall, homophily is clearly visible in the political
journalists’ sustained Twitter interactions as they repeatedly
train their attention on other political journalists in
retweets and replies and re-create their legacy pack networks
online. While homophily itself does not become
more, or less, apparent during election campaigns, these
time-frames were chosen to explore the most frequent
discussion partners chosen by political journalists during
a period when the public is paying more attention to politics
and to explore how journalists sort themselves into
the kinds of homophilous groups, or filter bubbles, which
can amplify the general consensus and shape the types
of news that develop (Carlson, 2017). Much is known
about homophily in legacy journalism practice but research
into similar behavior on Twitter has been slow to
emerge, even as studies have frequently pointed to high
rates of journalist-to-journalist interactions on Twitter.
The very speed with which journalists have adopted
Twitter and integrated it into their work routines may
have helped create the kinds of homophilous macro processes
revealed in this study, processes which are difficult
to detect or prevent at the individual journalist level
(Vergeer, 2015). Studies such as this can perhaps help educators
and newsrooms alike in creating more education
and awareness around engagement and interaction on
platforms like Twitter, which offer a myriad of opportunities
for journalists to interact with other information
sources, and thus avoiding the intra-journalistic activity
and pack journalism identified here.
The significant differences in gender warrant more research.
It is beyond the scope of this article to determine
whether or not the political journalists were deliberately
or inadvertently focusing on male political journalists, but
these interaction patterns deserve greater inquiry and the
findings again speak to the pressing need for increased education
around diversity in Twitter interactions.
Finally, while concerns have been raised around the
propensity of citizens to receive information via filter
bubbles on social media, the results of this study suggest
that perhaps more attention should be focused on
journalists rather than individuals as a journalist’s filter
bubble can have a far more powerful effect on the news
agenda. This tendency of political journalists to form
close-knit networks on Twitter is particularly worthy of
scrutiny as political journalists are essential in explaining
campaign policies and platforms and helping voters
understand the issues under discussion. Moreover, the
power to set the agenda remains concentrated with actors
who “enjoy power and visibility both on and off
Twitter,” (Siapera, Boudourides, Lenis, & Suiter, 2018)
and this study shows that political journalists, despite the
almost limitless opportunities to do otherwise, continue
to confer such power and visibility on other political journalists,
particularly male political journalists, as they remain
tethered, albeit virtually, to the journalism packs of
the legacy media era.
6.1. Limitations
While the results show that US and UK political journalists
restrict the range and diversity of voices chosen as
discussion partners, there are limitations to this study.
For example, while the journalists generated a sizeable
number of tweets the population size itself was kept relatively
small to allow for manual coding and analysis.
A larger population size could have explored these issues
in more detail, but this would have entailed more coders
and/or machine analysis. Content analysis would have
helped in exploring some of the issues, particularly the
cross-national difference observed in replies.
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
Abstract: Journalists have for considerable time been criticized for living in their own bubbles, a phenomenon industry commentators have referred to as groupthink, while in scholarship the tendency of individuals to connect with people who are like them is termed homophily. This age-old process has come under scrutiny in recent times due to the arrival of social network sites, which have been viewed as both working against but also leading to more homophily. In journalism scholarship, these processes are still little understood, however. Focusing on the social network site Twitter and drawing on a large-scale analysis of more than 600,000 tweets sent by 2908 Australian journalists during one year, this study shows that journalists continue to live in bubbles in their online interactions with each other. Most journalists were more likely to interact with journalists who have the same gender, work in the same organization, on the same beat or in the same location. However, the study also demonstrates some notable exceptions as well as the importance of differentiating between types of interaction.
Keywords: homophily, interactions, journalist, social media, Twitter, groupthink, bubble
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