Please join the American Politics Workshop as they host Hye Young You, associate professor in the Department of Politics and School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
Abstract: Journalists shape news by selecting sources, historically guided by the balance norm, which emphasizes objectivity and diverse perspectives. However, shifts in newsroom revenue models, staff demographics, and Trump’s attacks on the media have challenged this norm. This paper examines how journalists’ adherence to the balance norm in source citations has evolved in climate change articles across six major U.S. newspapers from 2012 to 2022. Leveraging large language models, we construct a comprehensive dataset of news source citations and assess balance based on source categorization and political orientation. Our analysis reveals a significant decline in balanced articles. While younger, less experienced journalists are more likely to write unbalanced articles, we find no evidence that journalist replacement drives this trend. Instead, a within-journalist analysis shows that much of the decline stems from existing journalists becoming less likely to produce balanced articles after 2016. We suggest that Trump’s presidency heightened the salience of the balance norm, prompting editors and journalists to relax their adherence to it.
Hye Young You is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Her research interests are political economy, interest groups, lobbying and campaign contributions, and American political institutions. You is co-author of Hearings on the Hill: The Politics of Informing Congress: Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions (Cambridge, 2024), with Pamela Ban and Ju Yeon Park.
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