Hybrid Systems and Hybrid Genres: Exploring U.S. Political Podcast Framing Tactics and Effects

Over the past five years, the medium of podcasting has continued to gain traction and increase in popularity both in the US and around the world. Millions of Americans regularly listen to podcasts and interact with numerous genres and content styles in the process. One particularly powerful and popular genre within this world are political news podcasts. Political news podcasts range in their ideological leaning and discussed topics, but they often blend informative news with some kind of softer stylistic or tonal elements, qualifying many of them as political infotainment that is similar to legacy media forms like conservative talk radio and late night talk shows. Scholars have long debated the merits and detriments of such softer news stylings, and in political spaces especially, this emerging hybridity of genre has potentially persuasive and polarizing consequences. To better understand those dynamics, this dissertation draws on theories of the hybrid media system, framing, persuasion and more. Ultimately, this research is an attempt to better identify which tactics of political news framing and agenda building in the podcast sphere are emerging as commonly held practice, and what some of their effects may be on political attitude and political knowledge for listeners. Research was conducted in two phases. The first involved a qualitative content analysis of rhetorical tactics used in popular US political podcasts. The second phase consisted of an online survey experiment (N=1,541) where two of the most popular frame groups were chosen for further study: humor and opinion. Findings from this research indicate that infotainment frames can have significant effect both on political attitude and political knowledge, and that, when compared to hard news, these infotainment frames are more persuasive and slightly more informative. Further discussion and suggestions for future studies are also included.