Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Department of Political Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA.
Science. 2017 Nov 10;358(6364):776-780. doi: 10.1126/science.aao1100.
We demonstrate that exposure to the news media causes Americans to take public stands on specific issues, join national policy conversations, and express themselves publicly-all key components of democratic politics-more often than they would otherwise. After recruiting 48 mostly small media outlets, we chose groups of these outlets to write and publish articles on subjects we approved, on dates we randomly assigned. We estimated the causal effect on proximal measures, such as website pageviews and Twitter discussion of the articles' specific subjects, and distal ones, such as national Twitter conversation in broad policy areas. Our intervention increased discussion in each broad policy area by ~62.7% (relative to a day's volume), accounting for 13,166 additional posts over the treatment week, with similar effects across population subgroups.
我们证明，接触新闻媒体使美国人更频繁地对特定问题表明立场，参与国家政策讨论，并公开表达自己——所有这些都是民主政治的关键组成部分。在招募了 48 家主要的小型媒体机构之后，我们选择了其中一些机构来撰写和发表我们批准的主题的文章，日期则是我们随机指定的。我们估计了对近端指标的因果效应，例如网站页面浏览量和文章特定主题的 Twitter 讨论，以及远端指标，例如广泛政策领域的国家 Twitter 对话。我们的干预措施使每个广泛政策领域的讨论增加了约 62.7%（相对于一天的量），在治疗周期间增加了 13166 条以上的帖子，在人口亚组中也有类似的效果。
