About

Shannon C. McGregor is an associate professor and director of the Ph.D. program at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is also a principal investigator at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life and holds appointments with UNC’s department of political science and the School of Information and Library Science. Her research focuses on the role of media and social media in political processes, emphasizing the interplay of politicians, journalists, and the public, which are essential to a functioning democracy. McGregor’s interdisciplinary and mixed-method research has been published across fields including communication, political science, and sociology, and she is a co-editor of the book 'Media and January 6th,' published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. She frequently writes for the public press, with work appearing in outlets such as The Washington Post, Wired, and The Guardian.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Law
• Art history
• Public relations
• Social psychology
• Media studies
• Psychology
• Art

Selected publications

• Disinformation as Cultural Narrative: Conceptualizing Disinformation as Cross-Platform, Identity-Affirming, Cathartic Stories

  UNC Libraries · 2026-04-16

  articleOpen access

  Rather than framing disinformation as false facts which can be countered by true facts, we propose a model of disinformation as narrative by tracing three case studies of successful disinformation across Facebook and Twitter. As stories, disinformation disseminates throughout culture and exists at all levels of media and across genres. Using a dataset of content hosted on URLs shared widely on social media corresponding to U.S. left, right, and nonpartisan examples of disinformation, we examine how successful disinformation circulates as narratives across platforms and genres. We find that all three case studies meet the formal criteria of narrative, and that narrative is intrinsically emotional and moral, providing catharsis for those who share it. Understanding that successful disinformation narratives are enforced by cultural forces, are intrinsically linked to identity, and hold deep emotional resonance for those with whom they resonate has vast implications for responding to and countering them.

  PublisherDOI

• Disinformation as Cultural Narrative: Conceptualizing Disinformation as Cross-Platform, Identity-Affirming, Cathartic Stories

  Political Communication · 2026-03-04

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Dialogue on difference: Identity and political communication

  Communication Monographs · 2025-02-24 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Trump Goes to Tulsa on Juneteenth: Placing the Study of Identity, Social Groups, and Power at the Center of Political Communication Research

  UNC Libraries · 2025-10-28

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The increase in elites’ use of racial appeals has compelled some scholars of political communication to tell a more comprehensive story about political identity in the United States and elsewhere around the world . This occurred alongside the field of communication’s , and subfield of political communication’s , longstanding failures to develop a racial analytic – a clear reflection of the field’s overwhelming whiteness. In this forum essay, we contextualize and review some strains of new literature on identity in political communication, with a focus especially on the U.S. context and the intersection of race and political power. Our aim is to call attention to what we see as an emerging approach to centering power, identity, and social groups in the field. These works are diverse theoretically and methodologically, and their authors may or may not recognize themselves as doing work in political communication at all. But we see tremendous value in what they share analytically, substantively, and normatively, and aim to mark the emergence and – we hope – flourishing of this work.

  PublisherDOI

• No Better Than Soup? Comparing Null Experimental Effects of Political Facebook Ads Across Persuasive and Instrumental Measures of Effectiveness

  Social Media + Society · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Studies on digital advertising effects claim that the primary purposes of online ads are persuasive: They seek to change vote choice or voters’ attitudes toward candidates. But recent scholarship has noted that social media’s unique affordances encourage electoral campaigns to use them in specific ways, such as using Facebook’s ads for email list-building. We conceptualize such strategic campaign goals as instrumental purposes of advertisements. We develop novel measures to test these instrumental effects. In an online survey experiment using Facebook ads from the 2020 Biden and Trump campaigns, we test our theory with list-building, fundraising, and persuasion ads. In a factor analysis, we find that instrumental and persuasive effects are related, but distinct, aspects of candidate support. We also test the effects of these ads on persuasive and instrumental outcomes. Our control treatment was an ad for a can of Progresso soup. We found no main persuasive or instrumental effects of any advertisement type. These ads performed no better than soup.

  PublisherDOI

• Election Denial as a News Coverage Dilemma: A Survey Experiment with Local Journalists

  Political Communication · 2025-01-29 · 3 citations

  articleCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Presidential Authority and the Legitimation of Far-Right News

  UNC Libraries · 2025-04-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  What position do far-right news outlets occupy in contemporary U.S. politics, and how did Trump use the power of the presidency to contribute to their rise among Republican legislators and mainstream American media? We posit that Trump’s position as president, in conjunction with his populist communication style that favored far-right outlets, contributed to the legitimation of such outlets. We first analyze Trump’s tweets during his presidency (January 2017–January 2021) mentioning three far-right outlets (One America News Network, Newsmax, and Breitbart), conceptualizing these messages as authority signals that symbolically lend legitimacy to the media sources. We then provide rich descriptive information regarding subsequent mentions of the far-right outlets in four national mainstream newspapers as well as appearances by GOP (Republican) members of Congress in the far-right outlets. We find significant and positive correlations between Trump’s tweets and mainstream media coverage of One America News Network (OANN) and Newsmax, and significant and positive correlations between Trump’s tweets and GOP Congressional interviews on OANN and Newsmax. Together, these results represent an example of presidential authority signals that bolster far-right outlets and aid in their legitimization among legislators and the mainstream press. The findings shed light on the role of political leaders in the recent mainstreaming of the far-right across many democratic countries.

  PublisherDOI

• Let me be perfectly unclear: strategic ambiguity in political communication

  Communication Theory · 2025-02-19 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract While clarity is often upheld as a core element of successful communication, we argue that a lack of clarity can also benefit a speaker, a concept called strategic ambiguity. This concept has been used across disciplines for decades, but its definitions are often overly context-specific. In this article, we follow Chaffee’s (1991) framework for explication to survey the literature and provide a unified definition of strategic ambiguity as a rhetorical tactic in which a communicator creates a: (1) polysemic message with multiple reasonable interpretations supported by the text, that is: (2) aimed at audiences from varying interpretive communities; and (3) by which polysemy the communicator stands to gain some specific advantage. We offer methodological suggestions on the study of strategic ambiguity, accompanied by two case studies of strategic ambiguity, centering Congressional newsletters and conservative political satire. We close with suggestions for scholarships that could be informed by incorporating strategic ambiguity.

  PublisherDOI

• Dialogue on difference: Identity and political communication

  UNC Libraries · 2025-03-12

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Identity is a crucial force in every facet of contemporary politics, but political communication research has too often addressed it only superficially, excluded it from the subfield’s primary foci, and failed to acknowledge many dominant identities as forms of identity that circulate globally. Still, recent scholarly endeavors create space for deeper conversations about identity in communication research. This essay engages this conversation in the context of political communication research, arguing for the need to emphasize and more thoughtfully interrogate identity in its myriad forms. To make this case, we first review recent research in three domains (elite communication, journalistic norms/routines, and engagement) that productively engage with identity – or that would benefit from unraveling specific intersections and/or implications of identity. We then consider the path forward, providing strategies for scholars in political communication and beyond to productively center identity in their research.

  PublisherDOI

• Toward a group theory of political communication

  Journal of Communication · 2025-10-31 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Recent political communication scholarship finds that groups and identities play a central role in the crises faced by political and media systems globally, particularly in democracies. Yet an individualist orientation in the literature has resulted in key theoretical and conceptual limitations, preventing a broader group-centric theoretical framework from emerging. We synthesize disparate bodies of theory on groups, politics, and communication to offer three basic propositions underlying a group theory of political communication. First, it is the group—not the individual—that is the fundamental organizing unit of social and political life. Second, groups are constituted through communication, which is central to how they define their politics. Third, groups and politics are reciprocally influencing forces through political communication, oriented around power. We offer a framework for studying the role of groups in political communication at the micro, meso, and macro levels, providing a concrete agenda for the study of groups in political communication.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Daniel Kreiss

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  14 shared

• Regina G. Lawrence

  9 shared

• Magdalena Saldaña

  8 shared

• Rachel R. Mourão

  Michigan State University

  7 shared

• Gordon Pennycook

  University of Regina

  7 shared

• Andrew M. Guess

  Princeton University

  6 shared

• Carolyn Schmitt

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  5 shared

• Bridget Barrett

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  5 shared

Education

• PhD, School of Journalism

  The University of Texas at Austin

  2017

• MA, College of Journalism and Communications

  University of Florida

  2008

• BA, Communication

  Flagler College

  2005