Jonathan M. Ladd

Jonathan Ladd is an associate professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy.

In 2026, he coauthored American Presidential Campaigns in the Attention Economy, which combined polling and media content data to show the power and limits of campaign strategies that dominate the attention economy. In 2020, he coauthored Words that Matter: How the News and Social Media Shaped the 2016 Presidential Campaign. His first book, Why Americans Hate the Media and How it Matters, examined the relationship of Americans' trust in the media with party polarization and technological change. It won the Goldsmith Book Prize from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

His current work focuses on the relationship between the loss of confidence in institutions and support for democracy.