ABSTRACT

Media producers experiments with hybridity; novel combinations of politics and play, information and entertainment. The news values of legacy journalism, in turn, make it a distinctly difficult environment for political communication. Affective polarization, in turn, gives rise to a socially motivated form of “tribalism” in which party identification is reframed as social identity rather than a consequence of issue positions. As the 2016 presidential election demonstrated, extreme partisan messages — some of which constitute misinformation — are widely distributed on social media sites. Different channels, in turn, reach different audiences, and so privilege different communication strategies, different forms of leadership, and ultimately different policies. Fueled by the horizontal, many-to-many networked nature of the digital world, legacy, partisan, digital, and entertainment media interact and blend in ways that make their unique influences difficult to isolate.