Dr. Jonathan Morris, with Dr. David Morris , presented “Partisan Media Exposure, Polarization, and Candidate Evaluations in the 2016 General Election” at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association in San Juan, Puerto Rico, January 11, 2020.
From the abstract: This paper examines the influence of Republican and Democratic partisan television news on attitudes toward the candidates for president immediately following the 2016 general election. Using two waves of the 2016 American National Election Study, we examine feelings toward Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton before and after the election. Our findings indicate that exposure to Republican partisan media did have a significant negative effect on feelings toward Hillary Clinton, even when controlling for party identification, ideology, and feelings toward Clinton before the election. Consumption of Democratic partisan television, however, had no influence on feelings toward Donald Trump. We discuss the implications.