File this away under: Things that anyone with two eyeballs could have told you.
A recent study of Washington, D.C., journalists’ Twitter usage found that those who cover the federal government have locked themselves away in “microbubbles” where they primarily talk only to each other. The study suggests that reporters in the nation’s capital “may be even more insular than previously thought,” says its authors, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign professors Nikki Usher and Yee Man Margaret Ng.
This obviously raises “additional concerns about vulnerability to groupthink and blind spots,” they add.
“Political journalists in D.C. are people who use Twitter all day,” said Usher. “And so the question is what does that do to how they think about the world. And generally … it seems to me that it can make things worse.”
The study identified nine specific clusters of journalists, or “communities of practice,” as Illinois News Bureau’s Craig Chamberlain helpfully explains.
The largest grouping in the study is the “elite/legacy” cluster, which includes roughly 30% of all the journalists reviewed for the experiment. The “elite/legacy” reporters work for a range of major publications, including the Washington Post, NBC News, National Public Radio, and the New York Times. A separate grouping focusing on congressional journalism accounts for about 20% of all the journalists included in the study. Other clusters focused on CNN, foreign affairs, and general political news, among others.
Usher explained the point of the study was to investigate “the contours of what political journalism in Washington,” and what “making news” looks like in the nation’s capital. Naturally, Twitter seemed like the best medium to use to measure these things.
“Most of the time, what happens on Twitter does not reflect the real world. But in the case of political journalism and political elites, generally speaking, what happens on Twitter is reality,” Usher said.
She adds, “So this was a particularly potent way of looking, at scale, at how ideas are exchanged, how people are making sense of things.”
Ng, meanwhile, explained the specifics of measuring journalists’ social media usage.
“With more than 2,000 journalists in this study, we could not observe each of them individually in real life. So we used their digital life as a way to understand how they interact with their peers,” Ng said.
What they found should not surprise anyone.
The “elite/legacy” cluster was also “among the most insular” of the groupings, said Usher. In fact, of the journalists included in that cluster, which includes some of the most well-known and viral reporters in D.C., more than 68% of their Twitter interactions are with other journalists in that same grouping.
In other words, they primarily talk only to each other.
Also of note is that the study found that CNN employees in its “CNN” cluster talk mostly about CNN employees and CNN issues.
“CNN is telling a story about what is happening with CNN, and that is worrisome,” said Usher. “Maybe that’s an organizational branding strategy, but I think it potentially has deleterious effects for public discourse.”
Journalists talking almost exclusively about journalists? Unthinkable!
More seriously, though, in case you were wondering why we seem to cycle through the exact same “tipping point,” “walls closing in,” “beginning of the end,” and “Trump is isolated” news narratives every other week, look no further than this study’s findings. As it turns out, D.C. journalists keep saying the same things because they only talk to other D.C. journalists on the social media platform on which they play all day.
