Washington journalists may be operating in even smaller, more insular microbubbles than previously thought, raising additional concerns about vulnerability to groupthink and blind spots

Sharing Knowledge and “Microbubbles”: Epistemic Communities and Insularity in US Political Journalism. Nikki Usher, Yee Man Margaret Ng. Social Media + Society, June 30, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120926639

Abstract: This article examines the peer-to-peer dynamics of Washington political journalists as Communities of Practice (CoPs) to better understand how journalists connect to and learn from each other and establish conventional knowledge. We employ inductive computational analysis that combines social network analysis of journalists’ Twitter interactions with a qualitative, thematic analysis of journalists’ work histories, organizational affiliations, and self-descriptions to identify nine major clusters of Beltway journalists. Among these are an elite/legacy community, a television producer community inclusive of Fox producers, and CNN, as its own self-referential community. Findings suggest Washington journalists may be operating in even smaller, more insular microbubbles than previously thought, raising additional concerns about vulnerability to groupthink and blind spots.

Keywords: media elites, political journalism, Communities of Practice, epistemic communities, Twitter, social network analysis

Discussion

This project offers two interventions to augment our understanding about the news production processes of elite political journalists. First, it introduces the productive potential of a CoP approach, which can illuminate not just how peer-to-peer dynamics influence social learning, consensus, and shared practices, but also provides an entry-point for critical inquiry into the consequences of powerful actors inhabiting insular epistemic communities. Second, the article suggests a way to use big (or biggish) data from social media platforms in ways that can be conducive to more qualitative, humanistic questions of the kind we have asked here. Indeed, research questions approached from this perspective do not have to have definitive answers resolved by the case.

Our approach shows how loosely distributed networks of powerful political journalists self-organize in different CoPs (RQ1) and then explores the different logics for these CoPs (RQ2) to consider what kinds of knowledge-generation and shared practices might emerge (RQ3). Our findings suggest even smaller, more insular communities of journalism that function as silos or even “microbubbles” with their own sets of concerns. We know from existing research that these journalists are engaging in story ideas, joking around, and burnishing their own careers (Kreiss, 2016; Mourão, 2015). They are doing so, however, within even smaller communities of like-minded journalists that have been previously considered. If journalists are talking to even smaller groups of journalists who share similar orientations, there is a real concern about the limitations of these epistemic communities in generating knowledge and information for the public. In these insular epistemic communities, newness is controlled and incorporated within these power domains (Barnes, 2005), and critique that veers outside the norm of general banter or the emerging consensus may be disregarded. Indeed, these microbubbles risk folding in on themselves, as Knorr Cetina (1999) suggests. In particular, it is concerning that CNN journalists are tweeting mostly to other CNN journalists about CNN. Even if this is an organizational mandate, it nonetheless serves as a powerful echo chamber that leaves CNN’s internal sense about what news matters unchecked and reconfirmed by those who work there. On Twitter, a platform absolutely integral to the political journalism news production process, CNN journalists have limited engagement with other Beltway journalists.

Previous research has suggested that journalists care more about their own branding than their organization’s; this self-branding tactic is a hedge against the precarity of the news industry (Molyneux, 2015; Usher, 2014). However, across all clusters, we find that top mentions are often referential to the top media organizations represented in each cluster, which suggests Beltway journalists prioritize branding the organization they work for. Organizational affiliation is not a sufficient enough explanation for the heterogeneity of the communities, but these organizational ties provide an important counterpoint for previous presumptions about self-branding practices among journalists.

Would these communities look different given a different temporal slicing of the data? Perhaps. While the specific concentrations of the makeup of journalists might change, the underlying rationale for each epistemic community’s practice orientation around specific knowledge production would likely be consistent, given what we have observed based on the biographical details of Twitter bios, the range of organizations represented, and thematic consistencies among hashtags and mentions. Here, we focused on a single network in isolation, but the triangulation of several network structures (e.g., of follower networks) might illuminate other insights. We acknowledge our normativity in suggesting that media diversity in Washington should be desirable. However, these patterns on Twitter may be suggestive of an even more self-reinforcing journalistic experience than research has previously acknowledged.

Normativity aside, this research reveals that Washington journalism is far more nuanced than it might seem. In addition to the sub-communities of journalists, the epistemic foundations for their clusters suggest the importance of remembering there are multiple audiences and multiple stakeholders outside the generally accepted waterfall schematic of press–politics–audiences (Entman, 2004). These sub-clusters within Washington may be less immediately visible but they are not necessarily less important, and their potential influence on political actors and other journalists, not to the public, deserves our attention.

This research calls for more detailed analyses of media elitism in the United States and elsewhere. The dangers of journalists having limited perspectives are real. While this study does not purport to show possible worsening over time, it does provide support that shows siloed communities of journalists and thus offers an important, empirically grounded caveat about their vulnerability to groupthink and blind spots. While political journalists have been traditionally explored as part of the source-journalist “tango” (Gans, 1979) and examined within a broader political communication structure (cf., Entman, 2004), to stretch a metaphor, we argue it is important to consider what happens when journalists are dancing with other journalists, who they pick as partners, and the songs they dance to.