Behind the Headlines, It's a Different Story? Variations in the Supply of Mass-Mediated Political Information
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This paper examines how news headlines about politics represent the stories they lead. Four hypotheses are developed to test the proposition that headlines distort the political information supply they are selected from. Using a unique dataset from the 2006 Canadian federal election campaign, the paper compares the supply essential political information (cognitive heuristics) in headlines and stories. All election headlines and stories published by seven major Canadian dailies and five Internet news websites are included in the analysis. Results fit with previous work on this topic, demonstrating that mass media headlines convey predictably different cues about politics than the stories they introduce (Andrew 2007). This study, however, also finds consistent differences between the content of online election headlines and those printed by large-circulation newspapers. In short, this paper offers further evidence that people who rely on media-generated shortcuts such as headlines are exposed to a fundamentally different stream of information about politics than those who pay closer attention.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".