Annenberg School for Communication postdoctoral fellow Baird Howland looks at prominent narratives in the news media and how they shape Americans’ worldviews.
2 min. read
Baird Howland arrived at the Annenberg School for Communication (ASC) five years ago, driven by big questions about the media’s influence on Americans’ political views. Why do some stories stick in the public consciousness, while others fade away? How do Americans’ particular media diets lead to different levels of political engagement and support? Is “fake news” as prominent as it seems?
Baird Howland is the George Gerbner Postdoctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication.
(Image: Courtesy of Annenberg School for Communication)
A former data scientist, Howland hoped to use data to look for answers in his doctoral program. “I wanted to think about and critique media systems and their role in politics, but do so in a data-driven, computational way,” he says. “With its interdisciplinary focus, Annenberg was the perfect place to be.”
He joined ASC Stevens University Professor Duncan Watts’s Computational Social Science Lab (CSSLab) and dove into investigating Americans’ media diets. With Watts, he analyzed the online and television news consumption of hundreds of thousands of Americans to investigate the phenomenon of political echo chambers, finding that cable TV news contributes to more partisan segregation in news audiences than any combination of far-right or far-left sites circulating on the internet. Howland also helped create the lab’s Mapping the (Political) Information Ecosystem Dashboard: a set of four interactive data visualizations that map where Americans get their news and the extent of political “echo chambers” in the U.S.
For his dissertation, he used LLMs to track narratives in political discourse, such as the surge of news stories about immigration in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. His main finding was that over the past decade, right-wing news outlets were more effective storytellers than mainstream media. Now, as the George Gerbner Postdoctoral Fellow at Annenberg, Howland is expanding the work he started as a student: looking at which stories are covered in the news and how.
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