In a February 2025 televised interview with CBS Evening News, CCPP Director Erik C. Nisbet, Owen L. Coon Professor of Policy Analysis and Communication at Northwestern University, analyzed a familiar Republican communication strategy: framing opposition to federal programs around claims of fraud, waste, and abuse. At the time, Nisbet explained how the heavy repetition of
A recent WGN Investigates segment, “It’s Not Just National Political Figures Facing Fury — Local Leaders Also Under Threat,” featured insights from Erik Nisbet, Director of CCPP and Owen L. Coon Professor of Policy Analysis & Communication at Northwestern University. The news segment examines the growing number of threats, intimidation, and harassment targeting local officials
Congratulations to CCPP faculty affiliate Dr. Ayşe D. Lokmanoğlu, whose new co-authored article, “Topic Modeling of Video and Image Data: A Visual Semantic Unsupervised Approach,” has just been published in Communication Methods and Measures. The paper introduces VisTopics, an innovative computational framework for analyzing large-scale visual datasets by combining AI-powered image captioning, unsupervised clustering, and
On May 22, 2025, the Center for Communication & Public Policy and Northwestern University’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs hosted a campus conversation with esteemed historian and academic Nicholas J. Cull from the University of Southern California to explore his concept of “reputational security”—the idea that a nation’s safety and security are strengthened by its
Last week, Erik C. Nisbet, Owen L. Coon Professor of Policy Analysis & Communication and Director of the Center for Communication & Public Policy, presented his research “Pandemic Legacy: How the COVID Online Ecosystem of 2020–2021 Shaped Enduring Distrust in Public Health” at the Symposium on Science & Politics, hosted by the Center for Science
The International Journal of Public Opinion Research has released a special issue titled “Global Perspectives on Science, Polarization, and Populism,” co-edited by CCPP Director Erik C. Nisbet (Northwestern University) and Aysenur Dal (Bilkent University). The special issue brings together scholars from across the world to examine how political polarization and populism shape public opinion about
A new article in Science News spotlights groundbreaking research led by CCPP Graduate Student Affiliate Mowafak Allaham, co-authored by CCPP Faculty Affiliate Dr. Ayşe Lokmanoğlu (Boston University) and CCPP Director Dr. Erik C. Nisbet. The study, titled “Enhancing LLMs for Governance with Human Oversight: Evaluating and Aligning LLMs on Expert Classification of Climate Misinformation,” was
A new article co-authored by CCPP Director Erik C. Nisbet, along with R. Kelly Garrett and Robert Bond of The Ohio State University, has been published in the journal Political Communication. The study, titled “Self-Reported Exposure and Beliefs About Misinformation Across a U.S. Presidential Election Cycle: Expressive Responding and Motivated Reasoning,” investigates how Americans report
CCPP Director Erik C. Nisbet and CCPP affiliate faculty member Olga Kamenchuk have co-authored a new book chapter, “Unpacking the Psychology of State-Sponsored Disinformation Operations and Implications for Public Diplomacy Counterstrategies,” published in Handbook on Public Diplomacy edited by Sean Aday (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2025). The chapter challenges the dominant focus on technology in discussions
CCPP Graduate Research Affiliate Fatima Gaw, a PhD candidate in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern University, has co-authored a new article in Political Communication, one of the leading journals in the field. The article, titled “Towards the Comparative Study of Domestic Influence Operations: Cyber Troops and Elite Competition in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand,”
