@article {608515,
	title = {New Media and the Polarization of American Political Discourse},
	journal = {Political Communication },
	year = {2009},
	abstract = {Scholars of political communication have long examined newsworthiness by focusing on the {\textquotedblleft}gatekeepers,{\textquotedblright} or organizations involved in newsgathering (Lewin 1947, White 1950, Sigal 1973, Gans 1979). However, in recent years these gatekeeper organizations have increasingly been joined or even supplanted by {\textquotedblleft}new media{\textquotedblright} competitors, including cable news, talk radio, and even amateur bloggers. The standards by which this new class of gatekeepers evaluates news are at best partially explained by prior studies focused on {\textquotedblleft}professional{\textquotedblright} journalists. In this study, we seek to correct this oversight. We do so by content analyzing five online news sources {\textendash} including wire service, cable news, and blog sites {\textendash} in order to compare their gatekeeping decisions in the four months prior, and approximately three weeks immediately following, the 2006 midterm election. To determine each day{\textquoteright}s major political news, we collected all stories from Reuters{\textquoteright} and AP{\textquoteright}s {\textquotedblleft}Top Political News{\textquotedblright} sections. We then investigated whether a given story was also chosen to appear on each wire{\textquoteright}s Top News page (indicating greater perceived newsworthiness than those that were not chosen) and compare the wires{\textquoteright} editorial choices to those of more partisan blogs (from the left: DailyKos.com, and from the right: FreeRepublic.com) and cable outlets (FoxNews.com). We find evidence of greater partisan filtering on the latter three web sources, and relatively greater reliance on traditional newsworthiness criteria on the news wires.\&nbsp;You can download this article, in pdf format,\&nbsp;here.},
	url = {https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/fs/mbaum/documents/BaumGroeling_PolComm.pdf},
	author = {Baum, Matthew A. and Tim Groeling}
}
