Conspiracy Obsession in the US News Cycle
It seems like we’re drowning in conspiracy in this country. It feels like every time we turn on the news, it’s some shadowy organization this, foreign collusion that. It’s feels exhausting. But is conspiracy exhaustion an objective fact, or just a feeling shared by both the left AND the right?
Based on an analysis of news chyrons from Fox, CNN, MSNBC (and BBC for comparison), more than 53% of our broadcast news has been dominated by conspiracy themes. How did I come up with those numbers? Let me show you why we’re not simply paranoid about conspiracy, and how we can begin questioning the news media landscape.
At first blush, conspiracy seems like it’s a very subjective thing. One person’s ‘conspiracy theory’ is another person’s “confirmed truth that Nancy Pelosi is a member of the Lizard People.” Perhaps conspiracy theory follows the Supreme Court’s definition of porn: I know it when I hear it. That makes it seem impossible to define ‘conspiracy’ in a way that data science can begin to churn through it.
But appearances are deceiving. Conspiracy is what sociologists call a social fact — there are a group of experts that discuss this social phenomenon using a specialized vocabulary, even if people in general don’t agree on its boundaries. To describe conspiracy in the most consistent (and authoritative) way, I turned to these experts of conspiracy thinking: the denizens of r/Conspiracy.
Analyzing data from the past three months of r/Conspiracy posts, I created a concept corpus of the top 100 two-word and three-word phrases that appear on r/Conspiracy (cleaned of all punctuation and linguistic fluff — articles, etc.).
How do we consistently and objective-ish-ly decide if the news is talking about a conspiracy theme? We ask if it lines up with what the r/Conspiracy experts are talking about.
This is clearly an imperfect method. We slurp up a lot of r/Conspiracy stuff that doesn’t seem at first blush to be conspiracy-related. To understand why that doesn’t matter, we might turn to two key theories in media effects: agenda setting and priming. But, keep in mind, airtime creates currents of conspiracy: while the Las Vegas shooting was in the news for non-conspiracy reasons, the agenda-setting function of absolutely conjectural and frequently inaccurate breaking news reports of gun-related incidents in the US (“We are waiting to hear if this is a terror-related incident”) creates an air of conspiracy around events — “terror” is, in essence, always a conspiracy crafted by external non-/faux- actors attempting to “overthrow” America ideologically or politically.
How much conspiracy? Much.
With the rosetta stone of conspiracy-thinking in hand (or memory as is the case), I analyzed the percentage of screen time that conspiracy held across three American networks: Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. I analyzed BBC for an international, American-concerned perspective.
I did so using the Television Archive’s chyron database. Chyrons are the lower-third part of news broadcasts, where text “frames” newspeak in a particular way, “priming” viewers to think one way or another about what is being said or read in the on-screen captioning. The Television Archive’s Third Eye Camera takes a photo of news screens every minute for each of the networks, and tweets out the text any time when the screen text has changed.
Using the chyrons from November 2017 to February 2018, I used python to examine what percentage of news chyrons primed viewers and framed topics using two-word and three-word phrases from r/Conspiracy. The results were pretty surprising.
More than 53% of our total news is engaged with conspiracy-related topics as defined by the fine folks at r/Conspiracy. Fox News, typically bludgeoned for its conservative-tending-to-outlandish theories of how Government works, only spent 43% of its time talking about conspiracy. Meanwhile, liberal news networks drove their dislike of this administration home by talking about conspiracy-related topics almost 60% of the time. Compare that to the BBC, who is dedicating just over 25% of their screen time to American conspiracies (or conspiracies that connect the US and UK, like evil George Soros).
Talk conspiracy to me, News.
So more than half of our news is conspiracy related. But what conspiracy(s) are they talking about? Here again, we can use python to pull out some insights. I leaned on Latent Dirichlet Allocation. LDA “reads” over a set of data a specified number of times, learns about the relationships between words-transformed-into-numbers from each reading, and creates clusters of topics that appear together — this is what we call unsupervised machine learning algorithm, as the algorithm “learns” to structure our data based on the data itself. With a bigger computer, we could plug this into a neural net for deep learning across unfathomable live data from third eye and reddit simultaneously… but I’d need a bigger computer.
LDA first creates a set of all of the news stories that contain conspiracy-related terms (as defined by the r/Conspiracy dictionary that I built). It then goes through each of those stories multiple times (5 passes, which is both resource intensive and a small number), and creates what I asked for: 50 topics and their key terms (too many topics). This whole thing can be cleaned up significantly, which I’ll work on as I continue this project. For now, it gives us an interesting view of the news discourse.
Now, the data scientists are going to say “WTF are you keeping things like ‘GOP’ in there?!” I explain this in my forthcoming article “Conspiracy Talk in the United States: The Case for Big <-> Thick Description.” The short version: because those words trigger conspiracy anxieties for audiences based on depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. In the interim, you can check out Katie Rawson’s and Trevor Muñoz’s piece “Against Cleaning,” which describes why cleaning up text beyond stopwords may not be the best choice for data-drive social research. I’ll admit as I did above, I need to go back in and pull out stuff like “r” (the indicator for cross-referencing other subreddits).
One of the important things to notice is how, in the past three months, far and above all else, Nunes’ FBI memo dominated the news cycle. The memo itself was part of a larger discourse about the so-called “deep state” and the surveillance apparatus it controls. And it was more politically effective as a black box of state secrets — once released, it simply fell flat. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t serve its purpose: audiences are now primed to think about the FBI in a negative light, and will do so regardless of the situation, the case, their evidence, or their actions. In other words, for those who paid attention, the memo was a flop; for audiences already primed to perk up when conspiracy is mentioned, the priming has created an infinite frame that FBI intelligence and action will have to battle for a long time coming.
This leaves us with more questions than answers: why do the left-leaning broadcast stations obsess with conspiracy? Is it their dis-satisfaction with this administration? Is it political economic motivation? Or is it a star system itself primed by the awards surrounding Watergate, which drives journalists to act on entangled senses of justice and professional prestige? Who knows… all that I can tell you is that you’re ok for feeling exhausted with conspiracy.
