The Isolated Den of Fox News

news outlets and therefore were not included in the initial analysis.**123 articles (roughly a quarter of all in the database) linked to AP and 60 to ReutersApart from these two sources, though, the number of incoming citations seems to be correlated with popularity..For example, CNN and the New York Times (NYT) appear relatively large in the network and have the two highest popularity scores..I investigated this relationship and found a statistically significant (t < .01) positive correlation between number of incoming citations and popularity.Fig..3: Correlation between popularity (x-axis) and number of incoming citations (y-axis)Notably, though, Fox News does not fit well with this regression line..Despite being fourth in popularity with 78 million unique monthly visitors, Fox News was only cited by three stories in the 480 story database..This was the fourth lowest ranking out of the 16 sources, behind even Vox, which had roughly one third the popularity but more than twice as many incoming citations..Perhaps these results would be different if more conservative news outlets were included in the analysis..However, liberal sources were only selected due to their higher popularity scores.These results support findings by a Pew Research Center study which stated that liberals consistently name an array of main news sources (CNN, NYT, NBC, and NPR) while conservatives are more clustered around just one, Fox News..It would therefore appear that there are many popular liberal-leaning news outlets and mainly one popular source that leans right.The next network I created contained only edges which were between sources in the original list (fig. 1)..Using the cluster_walktrap algorithm from igraph R, I identified and highlighted communities within this network..This function attempts to find densely connected subgraphs within a graph..The results are shown in fig.. More details

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