The most recent work of the Mass Communication Research Center’s Media and Politics Group has focused on media effects in the context of political scandal.

The goal of this graduate student and faculty collaborative is to integrate scholarship from communications, political science, psychology and sociology to investigate the effects of mass media on political judgment and reasoning. This working group has a long history in the school, where it has been a center of research activity focusing on media and politics for over 35 years.

Most recently, we have drawn from multiple perspectives to conduct experimental studies to investigating how message framing and priming, televised civility and incivility, political fact checking, gender, social class and political party identity shape attitudes and behavior.