The emerging fault line of alternative news: Intra-party division in Republican representatives’ media engagement

Abstract

Intra-party factionalism and media fragmentation have emerged as two major trends in U.S. politics, especially on the right. We explore potential connections between these developments by analyzing Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives’ engagement with far-right alternative news media during the 116th Congress. We develop three discrete measures to scale representatives’ engagement using hyperlinks to news media on Twitter, demonstrating their validity against existing positional data: roll-call voting, ideological caucus membership, and political rhetoric. We then apply our scales empirically, showing that representatives with further-right media engagement became increasingly radical in their online communication during the Trump presidency. Representatives with more moderate media engagement did not radicalize in this way. These results suggest a dynamic relationship that reflects the ‘dual function’ of elite-media relations, where partisan elites serve as receivers of information and transmitters of intra-party signals in a fragmented media environment.