Half the news Americans are reading is never reported in the traditional media

A report on research out of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Half of the most popular news on Twitter is not covered by traditional news media sources.

Background

The study, carried out by researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, the IMDEA Networks Institute and NEC Laboratories, has just been published in the journal PLOS ONE. The analysis focuses on the “trending topics” of Twitter because they share some of the same characteristics as news, dealing with subjects that attract the attention of a large number of people. “They are events that a large number of users are interested in and, in this regard, we can say that they are news items selected democratically by Twitter users in a country,” the researchers noted.

To carry out the study, all the “trending topics” on Twitter were compiled from 35 countries over three months in 2013, and from over 62 countries (the maximum number that the functionality of Twitter allowed) over the same period in 2014. In total, more than 300,000 “trending topics” generated in different countries and at different times were obtained, which makes it possible to study the dissemination of this content among different countries and cultures.

A new methodology was employed for the second part of the study. Using the Google News service, it detects which “trending topics” appear in traditional media sources. In this case, the analysis focused on four countries (Canada, Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom) representative of the number of users of and activity on Twitter. “Approximately half of the events included in “trending topics” are also reported as news in the traditional media, while the other half are subjects that, despite attracting the attention of a large number of Twitter users, do not appear in the media,” said the researchers, who used the on-line version of each country’s main newspaper as a reference. In the case of Spain, 55% of the “trending topics” are about events that are reported in the traditional media.

The study also analyzes who reports the news first, comparing the publication date of the “trending topics” on Twitter with the related stories that run in the country’s main dailies. “If we look at the news that is reported by both sources, more than 60% of it appears first on Twitter, while less than 10% appears first in the traditional media (the rest usually appears the same day),” the researchers remarked. That does not mean, they explained, that there is a “tweet” that contains news, but that the subject attracts the attention of a certain number of users to qualify for the category of “trending topic” on the social network.

Of the four cases studied, Spain is the country where Twitter shows the lowest capacity to gather news ahead of the traditional media. Specifically, 60% of the news that becomes a “trending topic” appears first on Twitter, 10% appears first in the main on-line newspapers and the remaining 30% appears the same day on Twitter and in the traditional media. In the other three countries studied, at least 70% of the news appears first on Twitter.

All sort of caveats to this study: I don't know the reputation of the researching institution, I don't know who funded it, it is social sciences related which is always a big red flag, etc.

All that said, it is interesting for its implications.

In the US 70% of news appears on Twitter before it is reported in the mainstream media and 50% of trending news items in Twitter never appear in the mainstream media. I saw earlier today an example of this sort of issue, Prosecutors: Brendan Tevlin’s murder was an act of terror by Amy Miller. Apparently a summary style execution of an innocent civilian by an American Islamist that has not been covered at all by the mainstream media but which apparently was taken up in social media. I hadn't heard of it at all.

This research goes to an issue that I keep in mind regarding cognitive self-confinement. Two examples. I have a lot of interactions with people who, like me, love books. Whenever we get into intense conversations about any issue related to books, I occasionally bring to their attention that 50% of the population do no elective reading of books in a year and only 10% read more than half a dozen books. The intense interest and passion about books and their impact and trends in publishing etc. are substantially irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of people. Enthusiastic readers know that not everyone reads as much as they do but they often forget the numbers and are startled by how skewed the figures are.

Similarly, in my milieu of friends, I am guessing that some 60-90% routinely listen to NPR. Left-leaning and right-leaning both. It is not uncommon to hear conversations start "Did you hear that interview on NPR the other day . . . " with a realistic expectation that their counterpart will have heard it. 20-25 million people listen to something from NPR each week. However, their news programs hover around 10 million listeners.

So it is always astonishing to some of this milieu when I mention, as a frame of reference, that the single radio host Rush Limbaugh, has a weekly listenership of around 15 million. Now the Venn diagram of the overlap between NPR listeners and Limbaugh listeners is likely to be fairly vestigial. But that's my point. In my milieu of NPR listeners it is virtually inconceivable that a single conservative radio host whose worldviews are so diametrically opposed to their own commands an audience near the size of NPR. For enthusiastic NPR listeners, even those on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, if you only listen to NPR, you can dramatically overestimate the degree of consensus on what are the important issues and dramatically underestimate the range of issues that non-NPR listeners are concerned about.

While NPR, like most mainstream media, is very significantly skewed to the left end of the political spectrum, there is something more going on than simple ideological affiliation. NPR is also the platform of choice for the white collar, high income, high education attainment crowd. In other words NPR doesn't just represent a liberal worldview, they represent a high socioeconomic status worldview and it can be startling to them that that might not be the view shared by the other 275 million Americans who don't listen to NPR.

Back to the Spanish-Swiss study. A different way of couching this study's findings might be something along the lines of "Mainstream media decline to report half the stories Americans indicate they are interested in." It would be interesting to see this research replicated to validate it and then to see an analysis of the patterns of what is reported and what is not reported. What is the nature of the stories that the mainstream media is declining to report? I suspect that there might be such a pattern but who knows. Well worth asking though.