%0 Journal Article
%T Assessing the climate of public opinion in the user comments era: A new epistemology
%A Oren Soffer
%J Journalism
%@ 1741-3001
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1464884917714938
%X This article examines the role of user comments in evaluating the climate of public opinion. It aims to evaluate the relevance of quasi-statistical assessment of public opinion ¨C which was tailored to traditional media ¨C to the digital era. The article, based on 21 interviews with Israeli users of news websites, argues that comments-browsing on the Internet gives a new meaning to the notion of a quasi-statistical assessment of public opinion. The aggregation of different comments, each of which contains an implicit cue for the climate of public opinion, transforms them together into a direct cue. The effect of the merging of journalistic contents with user-generated contents side-by-side on the same website is also evaluated through the perspectives of persuasive press inference and exemplification theories
%K Epistemology
%K Israel
%K online news
%K public opinion
%K user comments
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1464884917714938