That's according to a new political science study published today, which looked at the effect news outlets have on public discourse. While the findings may seem intuitive, this group of scholars—who work at Harvard, M.I.T., and the Florida State University—were able to show that whatever the media chooses to focus on has a profound impact on what people discuss in their everyday lives.

"What we wanted to do," says Benjamin Schneer, a co-author and political science professor at Florida State University, "was figure out exactly what the effect of the media was on the national conversation." So the political scientists essentially teamed up with a group of small to medium-sized publications and coordinated coverage at set intervals of time. They then analyzed the social media conversations around those specific topics.

Proving Something That Intuitively Makes Sense

Everyone loves to mock academic studies that prove the obvious, so it should be emphasized that this is no small feat. Historically, it's proven very difficult for social scientists to quantitively show the media's effect. "It's actually really hard to measure how much of an impact the media has," says Schneer." For instance, if researchers are merely mapping what people are talking about, they are faced with a chicken versus egg problem. Which is to say, if simply looking at what's written compares to what people are talking about, it would be nearly impossible to disentangle whether media coverage follows public conversation or vice versa. To circumvent this issue, the team did something quite ingenious: they facilitated their own coverage. Since they created the topics written about, they could then track whether or not this new coverage created heightened social media conversation.

The methodology worked like this: Schneer and his colleagues teamed up with the Media Consortium–a network of independent publications–and recruited nearly 50 publications who agreed to tailor certain coverage around important subjects–including race, the environment, immigration, jobs, abortion, etc. Two to five outlets were told to write about the same subject and even asked to collaborate. The idea was to create a journalistic moment–one outlet may produce a story and another may write a follow-up to it. Or, they may work together on a series of stories focusing on the one subject. All the publications would work together to publicize the work. (Schneer compared these "packets" of coverage to the Paradise Papers.)

The outlets retained complete editorial control over the pieces, so long as they were about the given subject. But the researchers then requested that the articles be very specifically timed for publication. When they gave the green light, the news outlets would publish their stories and the political scientists analyzed all of Twitter to see if people were talking about the subject. They then compared the week the posts were published to a control week when there was no planned coverage of the subject to see if there was an increase in social dialogue.

And the findings were impressive: Schneer and his colleagues found that when a cluster of stories was published, the national conversation about that subject–at least on Twitter–increased by about 63%. Which is to say, what the media covers had a profound impact on what Americans are talking about online.