Bail, C. A. (2012). The Fringe Effect: Civil Society Organizations and the Evolution of Media Discourse about Islam since the September 11th Attacks. American Sociological Review, 77(6), 855–879. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122412465743
Bail proposes a novel approach to studying the ways in which public discourse about a specific topic changes over time. His approach involves a robust sampling of civil society organizations and their press releases, as well as the articles and transcripts from a selection of representative news media institutions from 2001-2008 all on the topic of Islam and Muslims. In order to develop a measure of influence, Bail used plagiarism detection software to measure the average number of similar words between press releases and news content. He then regressed these values on a set of predictors including distance in discursive space, as estimated by the Euclidean distance of institutions and press releases in a 5-topic space. He found that fringe groups benefited from using emotions like fear and anger, while more mainstream groups benefited from the use of their own capital. When put in the context of an evolutionary model of discourse, Bail finds that over time these influences contributed to the mainstreaming of fringe groups, which in turn affected the discursive field, creating new opportunities for and necessitating new strategies from all of the organizations and media institutions.This paper has clear applications to more general online discourse on platforms like Twitter and offers a methodology for a complex analysis of the flow and evolution of discourse over levels of communication.
