ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how FoxNews.com and CNN.com reported on the tweets posted by the 2020 U.S. presidential and vice-presidential candidates between Labor Day and Election Day in 2020. The study examined how the top two partisan media outlets used the candidates’ tweets in their news coverage and what type of journalistic values and standards guided the coverage. A content analysis of the news stories that either embedded, quoted, paraphrased, mentioned, or linked tweets by the candidates was conducted. The study discovered that both organizations heavily relied on the conflict frame. About a third of all the sampled stories contained tweets with false information, with all such tweets attributed to Donald Trump. While CNN largely fact-checked those tweets, Fox News fact-checked in less than 20% of them. Fox News stories largely referenced Trumps’ tweets by directly embedding them in 91% of the Trump stories. In contrast, CNN used the embedding method for only 3% of the Trump stories. Not surprisingly, the tone of coverage toward candidates’ tweets fell across ideological lines. Further discussions about the study’s findings and suggestions for future studies are provided at the end of the chapter.
