Publications

Tweet Study

Our Democracy Fund project was inspired by the question “how can we communicate about threats to elections without making them worse?” Our amazing research team (Bethany Albertson—UT, Katherine Haenschen—Northeastern) has a project on Tweets that just was formally published--https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20570473241270602 . We’ve talked about these findings before—if you want to tweet about a threat, tweet the threat AND the solution to avoid making the threat worse—but have not done a full media push (as we didn’t have “publication” link yet). Bethany has volunteered to respond to press questions on this if Strauss sees it as “on brand” and wants to push it. She is cc’ed above.

Reference: Haenschen, K., Albertson, B., & Jarvis, S. E. (2024). Tweet no harm: Offer solutions when alerting the public to voter suppression efforts. Communication and the Public, https://doi.org/10.1177/20570473241270602.

Solutions News Study 

A related project examined how people reacted to news that simply introduced a threat to elections versus news that addressed a threat and groups/government/individuals working to address the threat. These findings are now a chapter in an edited volume. The prescriptions are largely offered for journalists—most of us don’t have the audience of reporters—but the findings lean in the same direction as the tweet study above. Link to book: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666957501/The-Press-and-Democratic-Backsliding-How-Journalism-Has-Failed-the-Public-and-How-It-Can-Revive-Democracy . Abstract: “American journalists face a heightened challenge: how to report on threats to elections. Election threat stories are newsworthy due to their conflict, negativity, and potential implications for electoral outcomes. This chapter presents the results of two survey experiments that measure the effects of solutions content and partisan news source cues in coverage of threats to elections. Results show that solutions content increases positive emotions and decreases negative ones, in line with prior work. Yet we find limited effects on efficacy and interest, likely due to the structural or external nature of the problems. We find that solutions content tends to be most effective in an unsourced framework, calling into question how solutions journalism, a type of constructive journalism, works in the wild. Our findings speak to how the press can cover threats to American elections and raise new questions for the growing fields of solutions journalism research particularly in the arena of political news reporting.”

Reference: Albertson, B., Overgaard, C.S.B., Haenschen, K., & Jarvis, S. E. (2024). Reporting on risk using constructive journalism: The effects of solutions content and source in stories covering threats to American elections. In T. J. Johnson and A. S. Veenstra (Eds)., The press and democratic backsliding: How journalism has failed the public and how it can revive democracy (Chapter 10). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.