News Media Use and Perceived Threats to Political Performance

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Nicholas Robinson, who starts by challenging the idea that the relationships between news media and politics operate on a linear basis. Given the increasingly polarised nature of political discourse, and the ‘war on the news media’ now being waged by Donald Trump and other populists, this perception may need to be challenged.

Trump and others are openly hostile towards the media, and this may undermine the political apparatus. One possible reading is that as people perceive greater threats to political performance, their political interest declines; but at a closer look it appears that interest, engagement, and participation may be highest for people who perceive the lowest or highest threats to political performance, with lower values in the middle region. Some of this is also related to sociodemographic variables such as age, race, gender, or education, as well as to the news user’s underlying ideology, but the low and high threat groups are quite similar for many of these variables.

The relationships are therefore unlikely to be linear, and may instead be quadratic. Linear analyses remain useful, but the analytical toolbox needs to be expanded, while also avoiding the dangers of overfitting.