Oplæg af professor Stuart Soroka fra UCLA

Professor Stuart Soroka from UCLA will be visiting the department on November 11-14. He will give a talk on “Negativity and Misinformation” on November 12 (see talk abstract below).  

All are welcome. No registration is needed.

Note: Stuart will have some time for individual/group meetings for anyone interested. If you would be interested in meeting with Stuart between November 11-14, please write Lene Aarøe (if possible, no later than Friday, November 1 at noon) and she will try to fit you into his schedule.

Talk abstract:

“Negativity and Misinformation”: There are large and growing bodies of work highlighting inaccuracies in news coverage. In this paper, we suggest that negativity biases in news account for a substantial portion of longstanding inaccuracies (or “misinformation”) in coverage of a broad range of social, medical, environmental, political, and economic domains. As an illustrative example, we use automated content analyses of over 20 years of television news transcripts merged with macroeconomic data to measure the accuracy of coverage of unemployment across the six major US broadcasters (ABC, CBS, NBS, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC), and then examine the degree to which variation in accuracy is associated with variation in the tendency to overweight negative information relative to positive information. Results reveal a connection between inaccuracy and negativity biases, a finding that we interpret as it relates to our understanding of misinformation in the news.

Short bio:  Stuart Soroka is Professor in the Departments of Communication and Political Science at UCLA. His research focuses on political communication, political psychology, and the relationships between public policy, public opinion, and mass media. He has been particularly interested in negativity (and positivity) in news coverage, and the role of mass media in representative democracy. Soroka is the author of Negativity in Democratic Politics: Causes and Consequences (Cambridge Studies in Public Opinion and Political Psychology, Cambridge University Press, 2014) and most recently Information and Democracy: Public Policy in the News (Cambridge University Press, 2022, co-authored with Christopher Wlezien) and The Increasing Viability of Positive News  (Cambridge Elements in Politics and Communication, Cambridge University Press, 2021, co-authored w. Yanna Krupnikov). Soroka’s research has also been published in leading academic journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, PNAS and Journal of Communication. He received his PhD from University of British Columbia in 2000. Read more here: https://www.snsoroka.com