Ideological classification of informational sources: political parallelism in the analysis of the multiparty media attention model in Brazil

Abstract

This paper contributes to political communication research by proposing an ideological classification of informational sources according to multiparty attention in Brazil. To this end, we replicate the methodology for classifying multiparty media attention on Twitter (Benkler; Faris; Roberts, 2018; Giglietto et al., 2019). We extracted an original database of 2.95 million tweets posted between 2019 and 2020 by 1,346 users. The results demonstrate a reality more complex than described by the classic concept of political parallelism. Most informational sources distribute attention among various party groups. Insular sites are less cited and reproduce broader political-ideological identities, without exclusive alignment or audience of one party. In conclusion we discuss the implications of the results for the theory of political parallelism.

communication; hybrid media system; political parallelism