Jablow, Zachary, and Tianhong Yin. 2025. "Naming Violence in The New York Times: US Foreign Policy and the Politics of Genocide Recognition." Media, War & Conflict. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352251365425

Abstract: Genocide recognition has come to represent a major political battlefield since the term 'genocide' was coined in the 1940s, and the news media are one of the primary sites for contestation over how to categorize different acts of political violence. While scholarship has largely contradicted the popular notion of press independence in the US, previous studies that investigate Western media bias in genocide recognition often rely on single case studies and have sometimes been dismissed for being 'anecdotal'. With particular attention to six postwar cases of mass violence that have been widely identified in scholarship as genocides, the authors collect time series data spanning the start of each case to 2020. Their analysis explores systematic differences in the volume of coverage of each case and the proportion of articles that employ the term 'genocide' in The New York Times. Consistent with indexing and hegemony theories of press–state relations, the authors find that atrocities committed by US allies and clients receive less attention over time, and the term 'genocide' – as well as other contested categories of political violence such as 'massacre' and 'slaughter' – is more often withheld.

Jablow, Zachary, and Scott L. Althaus. "Reevaluating News and Opinion Dynamics in the Iraq War: New Evidence for Social Identification Effects." Forthcoming in Public Opinion Quarterly.

Abstract: What causes changes in popular support for American wars? Competing theories posit that either the tone and content of wartime news or social identity cues conveyed through mass media should play the larger role. We offer new evidence in this debate by analyzing a novel set of rolling cross-sectional opinion data collected continuously over 13 months during an early phase of the Iraq War and pairing it with data on news intensity and the evaluative tone of news coverage during that same period. Contrary to conventional information updating explanations of war support but consistent with a social identification process, we find that greater intensity of wartime news coverage is associated with increases in aggregate support even after controlling for the evaluative tone of that news coverage.

"Opinion That Matters: Bringing Behavior Back into the Study of Public Opinion" (with Scott L. Althaus and Buddy Peyton). In preparation.

Democracy, Politics, and the Media

Course description: This course explores the politics of mass communication with an emphasis on the United States. Special attention will be paid to the relationships between the public, media, and government; the institutional structure of the news media and recent changes to the communication system; and factors shaping the construction of the news such as journalistic routines, media economics, and interactions with political actors. Students will critically engage with contemporary political discourse and journalism. Political communication is a truly interdisciplinary field of study whose subject matter cuts across traditional academic divisions. In this course, we will primarily be focused on the social science tradition, reading mostly in the literatures of political science, communication, and sociology.

Consent of the Governed: Mass Opinion and Public Discourse

Course description: This seminar explores how governments maintain widespread consent to their rule, or, as David Hume described it, "the easiness with which the many are governed by the few." We will study the politics of mass opinion and perception; political language, propaganda, and dissent; and the formation of political identities, with an emphasis on democratic politics and the US in particular. The course includes a mix of empirical social science, theory, and fiction. The readings and activities are meant to provide students a broad and theoretically grounded understanding of political behavior and public opinion. We will be analyzing contemporary political issues and discourse through the lens of philosophical debates on the nature of mass opinion, coercion, and consent.

US Supreme Court

Intro to US Government and Politics

Politics and the Media

US Constitution

UIUC Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program