Published Articles

1. Hochschild, Jennifer and David Beavers (2022). “Learning from Experience: COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories and Their Implication for Democratic Discourse.” Social Science: International Quarterly, 89(3), 859-886. doi:10.1353/sor.2022.0042

In this article, Jennifer Hochschild and I utilize a series of weekly cross- sectional surveys conducted by YouGov on behalf of the Economist to explore belief in conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We ask: How does local incidence of COVID-19 cases and fatalities affect support for conspiracy theories about the origins and causes of the pandemic? We find that, though noisy, the greater the impact that COVID-19 had on a respondent’s congressional district, the less likely she is to endorse the set of conspiracy theories. That this effect was most pronounced among respondents who were the least engaged with political discourse raises a troubling paradox for democratic polities.

You can hear more about this project in an interview for the Hopkins Press podcast.

2. Koliska, Michael, Erin Moroney, and David Beavers (2023). “Trust Through Relationships in Journalism.” Journalism Studies. doi:10.1080/1461670X.2023.2209807

In this conceptual paper, my coauthors and I argue that the narrow focus on cognitive and rational evaluations of journalistic content in the existing literature on trust in news media should be expanded to explicitly incorporate emotional and social factors undergirding relationships (real or perceived) between journalists and audiences. We posit that a scholarly focus on relational trust can both lead to a better understanding of why and how audiences trust (or distrust) news media as well as suggest strategies for journalists to regain credibility amidst dwindling public trust in a polarized era.

3. Beavers, David and Jennifer Hochschild. “Local Experience, National Media, and Misperceptions of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Conditionally accepted at Political Communication. 

In this second paper in our broader project, Jennifer Hochschild and I examine how local experience with the COVID-19 pandemic and national media attention to the pandemic interact to influence (mis)perceptions about the scale of nationwide fatalities. When media attention is high, belief accuracy increases with local incidence -- suggesting that media attention contextualizes local experience. But high media attention can also exacerbate misperceptions in areas that have yet to be severely impacted by the pandemic, complicating the job of public health professionals in emerging crises. 

Working Papers

1. Beavers, David and Kevin DeLuca. “Local News in the Crosshairs: Audience Perceptions of Algorithmic News Sites.” Submitted for review

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have brought about a host of algorithmic news sites purporting to cover local issues. Through a pre-registered survey experiment fielded through Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences, we test the efficacy of a digital media literacy intervention at improving discernment between algorithmic and human-produced news sites. 

2. Beavers, David. “Undermining the Fourth Estate: Elite Attacks on Media Credibility.”

Americans' trust in the news media has declined precipitously in the half-century that Gallup, the General Social Survey, and other firms have solicited perceptions on the fourth estate. To what degree has elite criticism driven this trend? By applying state-of-the-art natural language processing tools to a corpus of over 10.7 million congressional floor speeches, I systematically quantify elite rhetoric about the media over time and analyze its effects on public trust. 

3. Beavers, David. “Press Freedom and Boundary-Setting in the Interwar Period.”

Why did American journalism neglect to form the boundary-setting mechanisms -- licensing, degree requirements, and testing -- that undergird most other American professions and journalism in much of the rest of the industrialized world? I collect and analyze a corpus of primary source materials -- journalism trade publications, contemporaneous newspaper coverage, legislative journals, and more -- to examine journalism professionalization amidst a fluid conception of the First Amendment in the early 20th century. 

4. Beavers, David, António Câmara, and James M. Snyder. “Newspapers, Like Voters, Are Not Very Ideological.”

A large body of research assumes that media outlets have clear ideological or partisan biases. By comparing newspaper endorsements on statewide ballot measures to interest group endorsements and voting outcomes on these same ballot measures, we show that U.S. newspapers are less "ideological" than previously assumed.

5. Beavers, David. “Congress, Interest Group Politics, and Media Bias Claims.” Invited submission to The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Volume 11

How effective are media watchdog organizations at placing media bias on legislators' issue agendas? In this project, I combine text data from media watchdog events in the C-SPAN Archives with text data from congressional floor speeches to examine the relationship between media watchdog framing and legislators' rhetoric about the media. I pair a qualitative narrative analysis with a text-as-data approach, analyzing the semantic similarity between the two sets of speakers.

Other Works in Progress

1. Albanese, Eleonora and David Beavers. “Newspaper Bias in Poll Selection.”