Understanding news engagement on social media: A media repertoire approach

Did the public attribute the Flint Water Crisis to racism as it was happening? Text analysis of Twitter data to examine causal attributions to racism during a public health crisis

The Flint Water Crisis (FWC) was an avoidable public health disaster that has profoundly affected the city's residents, a majority of whom are Black. Although many scholars and journalists have called attention to the role of racism in the water crisis, little is known about the extent to which the public attributed the FWC to racism as it was unfolding. In this study, we used natural language processing to analyze nearly six million Flint-related tweets posted between April 1, 2014, and June 1, 2016. We found that key developments in the FWC corresponded to increases in the number and percentage of tweets that mentioned terms related to race and racism. Similar patterns were found for other topics hypothesized to be related to the water crisis, including water and politics. Using sentiment analysis, we found that tweets with a negative polarity score were more common in the subset of tweets that mentioned terms related to race and racism when compared to the full set of tweets. Next, we found that word pairs that included terms related to race and racism first appeared after the January 2016 state and federal emergency declarations and a corresponding increase in media coverage of the FWC. We conclude that many Twitter users connected the events of the water crisis to race and racism in real-time. Given growing evidence of negative health effects of second-hand exposure to racism, this may have implications for understanding minority health and health disparities in the US.

Coping with Covid: Exploring reconfigurations of Flemish news repertoires in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic

As we are now rounding up our second year with COVID-19, studies have provided insight into the pandemic's impact on news practices around the world. However, most of these accounts describe data from the early months of the outbreak. Further research is needed to explore the shapes that news repertoires might have settled into in the wake of the pandemic. By comparing data from a Latent Class Analysis of news repertoires using the Digital News Report 2020 and 2021, this paper contributes to extant knowledge of the pandemic's impact on news use in Flanders. We find that users were significantly more likely to adopt Casual rather than Limited news repertoires in 2021, pointing to a potential growth in news habits of users with a previously limited repertoire.