Workshop Proceedings of the 15th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
Workshop: Mediate 2021: News Media and Computational Journalism
DOI: 10.36190/2021.62Content from Twitter has been largely used as source material in news articles, journalists may use tweets to support a claim or to estimate public opinion. Such content often features in news articles in the form of embedded tweets. Despite the prominence of Twitter in journalism, little work has been done towards characterizing the use of tweets in news articles. We present a study to describe the utilization of tweets by news sources of different credibility levels. Specifically, we show the differences in tweets embedded by reliable and unreliable sources in terms of quantity and quality, the topics they cover, and the individuals they cite. Our results exhibit quantitative differences between the sources of distinct credibility. They also point to discrepancies in the narratives that arise around the same tweet due to the different intentions of each news source.