Elite, Media, and Public Narratives about Trump around the 2020 US Election

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Lihan Yan, whose focus is on tweets in the 2020 US presidential election. She uses the perspective of narrative economics as a framework for interpretation here, combined with the cascading network activation model: this indicates how frames are activated by the elite, and disseminated through news media to affect the public’s political decision-making process.

From this perspective, elite narratives from one or another side of politics can influence media narratives, and this in turn influences public narratives; there is therefore likely to be a narrative competition between elites as they seek to influence media and public narratives. The present study examined this for tweets from mid-2020 to early 2021, identifying several narratives and their evolution over time.

This found that as elite narratives from elites opposing Trump became more negative, so media narratives did as well; this also significantly correlated with negative public expressions about Trump, and there is at least evidence of a Granger causality here. Such effects gradually declined over time, though.