Misinformation

Quantifying the “misinformation beat”: 38 years of coverage in major U.S. daily newspapers

About the Project

Media have made misinformation conversations part of daily life. With Computing, Culture, and Society PhD students Bryce Greene and Brian Pleasants Harper, we looked at nearly four decades’ worth of news stories about misinformation to see exactly what this coverage looked like. We searched five major U.S. daily newspapers for articles containing the misinformation-related terms – disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theory, fake news, and propaganda – then extracted words in proximity to these key terms to identify associative patterns. Propaganda was the dominant term used by major newspapers prior to 2016, when term frequency and variety increased, peaking in 2020. Since 2016, newspaper usage of these terms focused primarily on Donald Trump, Russia, social media, and U.S. elections. 

Publications

• Greene, B., Harper, B. P., & Nippert-Eng, C. E. (2026). Quantifying the “misinformation beat”: 38 years of coverage in major U.S. daily newspapers. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-200

Cable News Coverage of Misinformation during the COVID-19 Pandemic

About the Project

Brian Harper, Bryce Greene and I continue to work on our shared interests in misinformation by analyzing transcripts from major shows on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC to see how pandemic-related news was and was not framed as “misinformation”, broadly defined, from 2020-2022.