All the Tweets Fit to Print: The Connection Between Congressional Twitter Use and Media Coverage

Members of Congress are spending more of their finite resources on communicating than ever before, often at the expense of legislative staff (Lee 2016). While existing research has considered what members get for this investment, one relationship remains under-explored: does tweeting lead to greater coverage in local media? To investigate this relationship, we collected the universe of Congressional tweets (~1.5 million tweets) from May 2021 through July 2023, as well as 1.4 million news articles at the local and national level that mention sitting members of Congress. Using a member-week panel, with fixed effects, we test whether Twitter activity is associated with contemporaneous news coverage. We find that Twitter activity is strongly, robustly, and positively correlated with national news coverage, but not at the local level. These findings have important implications for representation, the decline in local news, and the role platforms play in our politics.