Seminar in Media and Politics

This seminar covers recent and classic empirical research on the relationship between 'the media' (broadly understood) and politics. Some of the canonical questions we explore include the power of media messages to persuade; the extent to which media outlets are ideologically slanted, and how to objectively evaluate claims of bias; how censorship and propaganda work; and the role of new information technologies and social media on societal pathologies such as mass polarization. This seminar focuses on relatively recent work that is quantitative in nature.