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Public Opinion: Tone & Audience of Social Media

Assignment Directions

For this assignment, you will contrast the tone and audience of news conveyed through social media with that or traditional news media.

You should find and link to TWO recent social media posts (within the last three months) related to a recent political topic of interest to you, and contrast them with ONE traditional new article (from a major “objective” news source) on the same topics.  Please use the following guidelines for social media posts:

You should address the following questions about each of the two posts, in no more than 2 pages:

This assignment was submitted on November 19th, 2023.

Tone & Audience of Social Media

The day after Election Day here in Virginia, Dave Rexode, the Chairman of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s PAC Spirit of Virginia, had spun Republicans losing both their majority in the House of Delegates and failing to flip the State Senate into a win by noting that Republicans had won several districts that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 (he may not have 10,000 followers but still is an important figure). He however mistakenly included HD-41, HD-64, and HD-66 as Biden-won districts in his tally when according to the Voting and Election Science Team, CNalysis, and DailyKos Elections using GIS data calculations all three of these districts voted for Trump in 2020. Conservative Washington Post columnist Ramesh Ponnuru similarly echoed the spin Rexode and other Youngkin allies have peddled citing the Biden numbers in the districts being an encouraging sign for Virginia Republicans despite coming up short (even using my own works yet excluding my many tweets on how presidential results are vastly different from state legislative results).

 

My favorite quote of all time is attributed to Mark Twain (though he wasn’t the one who came up with it): “There are three types of lies. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.” This is a classic manipulation of a statistic by conservatives to cover their asses in the case of Rexode or provide some sort of hope for Republicans on the issue of abortion in the case of Ponnuru. Rexode’s thread reads like a Youngkin victory lap, with misleading quotes such as “Virginia has moved back into a battleground toss-up state,” noting how Republicans fell “just” a few thousand votes short of winning majorities in both chambers while leaving out that if Democrats got similar vote boosts in their races they would’ve significantly expanded their majorities, and insisting the Republican early vote program was a massive success despite there being clear evidence that Republicans simply cannibalized their election day vote in most races. Ponnuru’s post and article which has circulated through political Twitter tries to assuage his readership by cherrypicking data and misreading its usefulness. Rexode, like Ponnuru, is also trying to assuage conservatives, but he’s trying to assuage ones that see Youngkin as a failure after Tuesday, and there seem to be some that are believing him judging by the quote tweets. The Ponnuru article’s comment section is liberal, but conservatives were eating up his framing as well.

 

Kyle Kondik at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, a nonpartisan election forecasting group for political junkies across the political spectrum, had a great summary of the 2023 elections in Virginia and correctly points out that it’s standard that Republicans win districts on the state legislative level in Virginia that voted for the most recent Democratic nominee for President. In fact, despite the popular vote estimate being slightly more Republican compared to 2019, Democratic candidates still ran behind Biden’s performance by about as much as they did in 2019 when they rode a lot of anti-Trump resentment. Kondik’s impartiality with presentations of arguments in favor of both sides being able to see this election as a good result for them toward the end of his Virginia section is the most credible, coherent argument I’ve seen that illustrates how Republicans can claim they had an impressive performance this year.

Notes on the State of the 2023 Elections