Hal Roberts

Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda

[Commentary] The 2016 Presidential Election shook the foundations of American politics. Media reports immediately looked for external disruption to explain the unanticipated victory—with theories ranging from Russian hacking to “fake news.” We have a less exotic, but perhaps more disconcerting explanation: Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world.

This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.

[Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Ethan Zuckerman are the authors. Benkler is a professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard; Faris is research director at BKC; Roberts is a fellow at BKC and technical lead of Media Cloud; and Zuckerman is director of the MIT Center for Civic Media.]