Abstract
This study explores the relationship between political ideology and integrative complexity in terms of COVID-19 news coverage. Briefly, integrative complexity is a psycholinguistic construct that examines cognitive structure. Based on a sample of COVID-19 news articles sourced from liberal, moderate, and conservative news networks, the results show liberal and moderate networks displayed higher complexity scores than conservative networks. The results further confirm a complexity pattern seen in previous research — liberals and moderates tend to demonstrate more complex rhetoric than conservatives. Moreover, the conservative networks’ lower scores may be explained by the predominance of misinformation in their coverage of COVID-19.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. As Tetlock (Citation1986) explains, “differentiation refers to a variety of aspects or components of an issue that a person recognizes” (p. 819), and “integration refers to the development of conceptual connections among differentiated characteristics” (p. 819). As such, “this means a complex speaker acknowledges the different perspectives of topic and meaningfully explains their connections, while a simplistic speaker does neither” (McCullough, Citation2019a, p. 2; see also, Wasike, Citation2017).
2. Examples of integrative complexity research in the domain of communication studies include Demeter (Citation2007) and Robertson, Aiello, and Quercia (Citation2019).
3. In the domain of political psychology, integrative complexity, for example, has been used to study terrorism (e.g., Conway & Conway, Citation2011; Smith, Suedfeld, Conway, & Winter, Citation2008), war and peace (e.g., Conway, Suedfeld, & Clements, Citation2003; Conway et al., Citation2001), attitude formation (e.g., Conway, Dodds, Hands Towgood, McClure, & Olson, Citation2011; Conway et al., Citation2008; Tetlock, Citation1986), elections (Conway et al., Citation2012), and political leadership (e.g., Ballard, Citation1983; Thoemmes & Conway, Citation2007; Wasike, Citation2017).
4. In terms of media studies, integrative complexity has been used to study film awards (McCullough & Conway, Citation2018a), fanfiction (McCullough, Citation2020), video games (McCullough, Citation2019b, Citation2021b), horror films (McCullough, Citation2019a), British novelists (Porter & Suedfeld, Citation1981), and the psychological differences between fiction and reality (McCullough & Conway, Citation2018b).
5. The AllSides Media Bias Chart’s goal is to provide an easy resource people can use to help identify political bias within news sources. According to the website, “Knowing the political bias of media outlets allows you to consume a balanced news diet and avoid manipulation and fake news. Everyone is biased, but hidden bias misleads and divides us” (AllSides Media Bias Chart, Citationn.d., para. 1). The placement of individual news networks and outlets is based on a list of over 800 bias ratings and data that “is gathered from people across the political spectrum – not just one biased individual,” which includes “Blind Bias Surveys, Editorial Reviews, independent reviews, and third party data to assess bias” (para. 4).
6. All of the random selections/samplings in this study were accomplished via an online random number generator (https://www.random.org/integers/). The relevant information was given a number and the generator made the final determination. The same method of random selection was utilized in McCullough and Kalsher (Citation2019).
7. To be certified as an integrative complexity scorer/coder, “would-be scorers must take a short training course on scoring integrative complexity, at the end of which they must pass a test set at a very high standard” (Conway et al., Citation2014, p. 607). It is typically expected that would-be scorers/coders achieve a correlation of .85 with expert, certified integrative complexity coders in order to pass the certification test. This high standard maintains and establishes a strict level of reliability across different studies and works of integrative complexity research (Baker-Brown et al., Citation1992).
8. The articles from the liberal news networks broke down to 428 chunks and averaged 1,045 words per articles, the articles from the moderate news networks broke down to 422 chunks and averaged 1,034 words per article, and the articles from the conservative networks broke down to 172 chunks and averaged 398 words per article.
9. These mean scores align with the averages witnessed within previous complexity research, which has typically shown that generally people’s average levels of integrative complexity tend to be around a score of 2 (for examples, see Jost et al., Citation2003; McCullough, Citation2021a, Citation2019a; Thoemmes & Conway, Citation2007).
10. It is also important to acknowledge the substantial differences in the average word length for each type of network and the ultimate number of chunks that were analyzed for each: the articles from the conservative news networks were markedly shorter than those from moderate and liberal networks. While methodologically article length isn’t an explanation for why a group displays higher or lower scores than another, the difference does highlight a further distinction between conservative news networks and moderate/liberal news networks; not only did moderate and liberal networks write more complexity about COVID-19, they also wrote on the topic more in general. According to Baker-Brown et al. (Citation1992), a greater amount of forethought and/or planning is associated with the generation of higher complexity scores. In conjunction, the higher complexity scores and the longer article length suggests that moderate and liberal networks allot more cognitive resources, time, and effort in their production and communication of news than conservative networks.
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Notes on contributors
Hayley McCullough
Hayley McCullough earned a Ph.D. in Communication & Rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2021 and currently works in the CLASS Department at New Mexico Tech.
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