Political Blogs and the Bloggers Who Blog Them - School of ...

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public opinion (i.e. responding to public opinion surveys), the hypothesis that the political blogosphere is an echo chamber has a great deal of evidence to support it. So is the political blogosphere an echo chamber? Although answering this question in its entirety would require assessing the relationship between blog content and media coverage on each of the three dimensions discussed above and is, therefore, well beyond the scope of this paper, I will address one dimension of this question here: what is the relationship between the amount of coverage an issue receives in the mainstream media and the amount of discussion the issue receives in the political blogosphere? The Predictions of the Echo Chamber Hypothesis According to the echo chamber hypothesis, there should be a strong relationship between the level of media coverage an issue receives and the amount of discussion on that issue that takes place in the political blogosphere. To be more precise, the echo chamber hypothesis makes four predictions. First, more mainstream media coverage of an issue should lead to more posts on that issue and less media coverage should lead to fewer posts on that issue. In other words, there should be a positive relationship between the amount of media coverage on an issue and the number of posts on that issue – meaning both the correlation coefficient (r) and the slope coefficient of the regression line (b) should be positive. Second, increases and decreases in media coverage on an issue should have a fairly direct and large impact on the number of posts. Indeed, according to the echo chamber hypothesis, political bloggers should blog about what they see when they see it so there should be a fairly strong relationship between the number of stories on an issue and the number of blog posts mentioning that issue. In other words, in regression analysis, the slope coefficients (b) for media stories should be closer to 1 than to 0 – meaning that one story on an issue in the media should produce about one post in a political blog. Third, the echo chamber hypothesis says that political blogs will not discuss issues that are not covered 8
in the media and, furthermore, political blogs will not ignore issues that are discussed in the media. In other words, there should be a tight relationship between media coverage and blog discussion – meaning that that the correlation coefficient (r) and, therefore, R² are high. Finally, the echo chamber hypothesis predicts that political bloggers will rely primarily on mainstream media sources for their information. As a result, the primary source of external links should be to the mainstream media and the number of mainstream media links should remain fairly constant over time (because the influence of media does not change). To summarize the predictions of the echo chamber hypothesis: P1: The correlation coefficient (r) and the slope coefficient (b) between the amount of media coverage on an issue and the number of posts on that issue should be positive. P2: The slope coefficients (b) for media coverage on an issue should be closer to 1 than to 0. P3: The correlation coefficient (r) and R² between media coverage and blog posts should be high (i.e. closer to 1 than to 0). P4: The majority of external links should be to mainstream media sources and the number of links to media sources should remain fairly constant over time. It is worth mentioning here that the predictions of the echo chamber hypothesis could be correct at the aggregate level even if political blogs are acting as media watchdogs instead of echo chambers. Indeed, if a significant number of political bloggers carefully followed media coverage on a number of high profile issues and frequently criticized the shortcomings of this coverage, the predictions of the echo chamber hypothesis – a positive relationship between media coverage and the number of posts, a slope coefficient near 1 and a high R² - would hold. In this case, however, it would clearly be a mistake to call the political blogosphere an echo chamber because media messages are being consistently criticized rather than echoed. It is for this reason that a more detailed content analysis – one that looks not only at the correlation between the amount of media coverage and the number of blog posts but also at how media 9
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