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Although fact-checking websites for political news such as FactCheck.org, Politifact, and ProPublica are common in the United States, they are new in Mexico. Using textual analysis, this study examines the strategies used by Verificado 2018, a crowdsourced political fact-checking initiative generated during the largest election in Mexican history by news organizations, universities, and tech companies. Verificado 2018 emphasized legitimacy, collaboration, and critical humor to promote and engage users in fact-checking and viralizing reliable information.

Recommendations vary on sample sizes researchers should use to represent a year's worth of coverage from electronic databases. We use a keyword search to create two sampling frames of immigration news in 2009. We use LexisNexis to represent elite and regional news outlets and a keyword search of individual Arizona newspapers to represent state coverage. We examine the representativeness of themes, created and coded with IBM's Modeler program. We compare the efficiency of samples created with simple random sampling and constructed week sampling and conclude most variables are representative when sampling between 10 and 14 weeks.

Typeface use by political campaigns is itself a form of political communication intended to convey meaning. Through interviews with graphic design practitioners and a content analysis of 908 candidate logos used in the 2018 U.S. Midterm Elections, we demonstrate that typeface selection expresses information about candidates. Interviews explore the processes by which designers choose typefaces to convey personality traits while adhering to standards of legibility and consistency. A content analysis affirms the qualitative findings, demonstrating that partisanship, competitiveness, sex, and incumbency all predict variance in typeface family selection, with significant differences more common in first names. Republicans are likelier to use serif typefaces than sans serifs relative to Democrats, particularly as race competitiveness increases. Female candidates are likelier to use script or handwriting, and males are likelier to use slab serifs. Together, our findings offer empirical evidence of contemporary practices in political typography and graphic design activities.

The primary aim of this study was to evaluate the extent to which news story format (narrative vs. non-narrative) can initiate empathic processes that produce more favorable evaluations of stigmatized groups. Participants ( N = 399) read one of two versions of a story that described health care–related dilemmas for either immigrants, prisoners, or the elderly. Narrative-formatted stories produce more compassion toward the individuals in the story, more favorable attitudes toward the group, more beneficial behavioral intentions, and more information-seeking behavior.