Who Gets into the Papers? Party Campaign Messages and the Media

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 281-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Meyer ◽  
Martin Haselmayer ◽  
Markus Wagner

Parties and politicians want their messages to generate media coverage and thereby reach voters. This article examines how attributes related to content and sender affect whether party messages are likely to get media attention. Based on content analyses of 1,613 party press releases and 6,512 media reports in a parliamentary, multiparty context, we suggest that party messages are more likely to make it into the news if they address concerns that are already important to the media or other parties. Discussing these issues may particularly help opposition parties and lower-profile politicians get media attention. These results confirm the importance of agenda setting and gatekeeping, shed light on the potential success of party strategies, and have implications for political fairness and representation.

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 412-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Haselmayer ◽  
Thomas M Meyer ◽  
Markus Wagner

The article studies whether and how negative campaigning is a successful strategy for attaining media attention. It combines extensive content analyses of party and news texts with public opinion surveys to study the success of individual press releases in making the news. The empirical analysis draws on 1496 party press releases and 6512 news reports in all national media outlets during the final 6 weeks of Austria’s 2013 general election campaign. We find that negative campaigning is a successful strategy to attract the attention of journalists and editors. It is particularly relevant for rank-and-file politicians, who lack the intrinsic news value of high public or party office, and for messages that focus on a rival’s best issues. These findings have broader implications for understanding party strategies and ‘negativity bias’ in the news.


2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob-Moritz Eberl ◽  
Markus Wagner ◽  
Hajo G. Boomgaarden

Media coverage can influence how citizens think about their political leaders. This study explores how three types of media bias (visibility bias, tonality bias, and agenda bias) affect voter assessments of politicians’ traits. Bias effects should be stronger for political traits (such as competence) than for nonpolitical traits (such as likability). Biases may also interact in their effects: Specifically, visibility bias should moderate the impact of tonality bias. Combining media, party, and survey data through manual content analysis of newspaper coverage ( N = 2,680) and party press releases ( N = 1,794), as well as a three-wave voter survey ( n = 927) during the 2013 Austrian election campaign, we find substantial effects of tonality bias and agenda bias on political trait perceptions. The effects are less clear for nonpolitical trait perceptions. Although visibility bias has no direct impact, there is evidence that it moderates effects of tonality bias on candidate perceptions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 741
Author(s):  
Katherine Hicks-Courant ◽  
Jenny Shen ◽  
Angela Stroupe ◽  
Angel Cronin ◽  
Elizabeth F. Bair ◽  
...  

Background: Given that media coverage can shape healthcare expectations, it is essential that we understand how the media frames “personalized medicine” (PM) in oncology, and whether information about unproven technologies is widely disseminated. Methods: We conducted a content analysis of 396 news reports related to cancer and PM published between 1 January 1998 and 31 December 2011. Two coders independently coded all the reports using a pre-defined framework. Determination of coverage of “standard” and “non-standard” therapies and tests was made by comparing the media print/broadcast date to the date of Federal Drug Administration approval or incorporation into clinical guidelines. Results: Although the term “personalized medicine” appeared in all reports, it was clearly defined only 27% of the time. Stories more frequently reported PM benefits than challenges (96% vs. 48%, p < 0.001). Commonly reported benefits included improved treatment (89%), prediction of side effects (30%), disease risk prediction (33%), and lower cost (19%). Commonly reported challenges included high cost (28%), potential for discrimination (29%), and concerns over privacy and regulation (21%). Coverage of inherited DNA testing was more common than coverage of tumor testing (79% vs. 25%, p < 0.001). Media reports of standard tests and treatments were common; however, 8% included information about non-standard technologies, such as experimental medications and gene therapy. Conclusion: Confusion about personalized cancer medicine may be exacerbated by media reports that fail to clearly define the term. While most media stories reported on standard tests and treatments, an emphasis on the benefits of PM may lead to unrealistic expectations for cancer genomic care.


2021 ◽  
Vol 251 ◽  
pp. 01021
Author(s):  
Fengyun Liang

Based on the background of informatization, the development and progress of science and technology has brought an immeasurable impact on the securities market. Therefore, this article uses python technology to crawl the number of individual stock news and study the influence of media attention on investor behavior under the constraint of heterogeneous beliefs. It is found that there is a significant positive correlation between the degree of media attention and the degree of investors’ heterogeneous beliefs, and investors are more likely to choose stocks that are frequently reported by the media; further research has found that media reports intensify the degree of investor’s heterogeneous beliefs, leading to stock transactions. The amount has risen abnormally. Therefore, while enjoying informatization, it is necessary to guard against the risks it bring.


Author(s):  
Yangkun Huang ◽  
Xiaoping Xu ◽  
Sini Su

Over the past decade, China has witnessed fast-paced technological advancements in the media industry, as well as major shifts in the health agenda portrayed in the media. Therefore, a key starting point when discussing health communication lies in whether media attention and public attention towards health issues are structurally aligned, and to what extent the news media guide public attention. Based on data mined from 73,060 sets of the Baidu Search Index and Media Index on 20 terms covering different types of cancer from 2011 to 2020, the Granger test demonstrates that, in the last decade, public attention and media attention towards cancer in China has gone through two distinct phases. During the first phase, 2011-2015, Chinese news media still held the key in transferring the salience of issues on most cancer types to the public. In the second phase, from 2016-2020, public attention towards cancer has gradually diverged from media coverage, mirroring the imbalance and mismatch between the demand of active public and the supply of cancer information from news media. This study provides an overview of the dynamic transition on cancer issues in China over a ten-year span, along with descriptive results on public and media attention towards specific cancer types.


Author(s):  
Matt Wade

By any measure, 2009 was a big year for news in India. And yet the safety of Indian students in Australia ranked among the major news events in India that year. The India-Australia Poll 2013 found 65 per cent of respondents believed the Indian media had accurately reported the problems faced by Indian students in Australia in 2009-10. That implies two-thirds of Indians accepted the Indian media’s mostly negative depictions of Australia. Those who believed the media reporting about Australia had been accurate were more likely to be from large cities, be tertiary educated and have relatively high-incomes. The poll found 62 per cent of respondents thought Australia was a dangerous place for Indian students and that 61 per cent believed attacks on Indian students were motivated by racism. The results suggest negative perceptions about Australia created by the media’s portrayal of the student attacks linger in the Indian community. The timing of the initial attacks, and the imagery associated with them, helped attract and sustain media attention on the issue. The diplomatic tensions created by the crisis highlighted the growing influence of the broadcast media on India’s foreign relations. But the episode also exposed a deep lack of understanding about India in Australia. Governments were slow to comprehend how much damage media coverage of student attacks could do to Australia’s reputation in India. 


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Van Aelst ◽  
Rosa van Santen ◽  
Lotte Melenhorst ◽  
Luzia Helfer

AbstractThis study on the role of media attention for the Dutch question hour answers three questions: to what extent is media attention a source of inspiration for oral parliamentary questions? What explains the newsworthiness of these questions? And what explains the extent of media coverage for the questions posed during the question hour? To address this, we present a content analysis of oral parliamentary questions and related press coverage in five recent years. The results show first that oral questions are usually based on media attention for a topic. Concerns about media influence should however be nuanced: it is not necessarily the coverage itself, but also regularly a political statement that is the actual source of a parliamentary question. The media are thus an important “channel” for the interaction between politicians. Second, our analysis shows that oral questions do not receive media attention naturally. Several news values help to explain the amount of news coverage that questions receive. “Surfing the wave” of news attention for a topic in the days previous to the question hour seems to be the best way to generate media attention.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nao Ueda ◽  
Ryoki Yokouchi ◽  
Taro Onoda ◽  
Atsushi Ogihara

UNSTRUCTURED Media coverage and reports have a major influence on individual vaccination and other health-related activities. People use the media to seek information and knowledge on health-related behaviors. They obtain health-related information from media such as television and newspapers, and they trust such information. While several studies have examined the relation between media coverage and individual health, there is a lack of studies that have analyzed media reports of health information. In particular, we have found no analyses related to cervical cancer (human papillomavirus [HPV]) vaccine. This study aimed to identify mentions of cervical cancer vaccine in Japan’s printed news media and to determine their characteristics. We used the archival databases of 2 Japanese newspapers, Yomiuri Shimbun (Yomidasu Rekishikan) and Asahi Shimbun (Kikuzo II Visual), for text mining. First, we created a database by extracting articles published between January 1, 2007, and December 31, 2014, that matched the terms “cervical cancer” AND “vaccination” in a keyword search. Then, we tallied the extracted articles based on the month of publication and number of characters in order to conduct a time-series analysis. We extracted a total of 219 articles. Of these, 154 (70.3%) were positive and 51 (23.3%) were negative toward HPV vaccination. Of the 51 negative articles, 4 (7.8%) were published before June 2013, when routine vaccination was temporarily discontinued due to concerns regarding side effects, and 47 (92.2%) were published since then. The negative reports commonly cited side effects, although prior to June 2013, these issues were hardly mentioned. Although foreign media reports mentioned side effects before routine vaccination was temporarily discontinued, fewer articles mentioned side effects than recommendations for vaccination. Furthermore, on June 13, 2013, the World Health Organization’s advisory body Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety issued a statement regarding the safety of HPV vaccines, but hardly any articles reported this statement. Rather, several articles were published about the side effects after June 2013. Since we consider media coverage to be a factor affecting human health behavior, the media should extensively report on the cost of not receiving cervical cancer vaccination, global trends concerning cervical cancer vaccination, and statements released by various agencies on the subject.


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-143
Author(s):  
Mads Damgaard

Abstract Through a content analysis of 8,800 news items and six months of front pages of three Brazilian newspapers, all dealing with corruption and political transgression, the present article documents the remarkable bias of media coverage toward corruption scandals. Said bias is examined as an informational phenomenon, arising from key systemic and commercial factors of Brazil’s news media: an information cascade of news on corruption formed, destabilizing the governing coalition and legitimizing the impeachment process of Dilma Rousseff. As this process gained momentum, questions of accountability were disregarded by the media, with harmful effects for democracy.


2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Piet Bakker ◽  
Peter L.M. Vasterman

Wilders and the role of the media Wilders and the role of the media Between 2006 and 2011 more than forty empirical studies were published about the Dutch populist Geert Wilders and the role of the media. This article examines which methods and theories are dominant in these studies, and which media and which aspects of the relationship between Wilders and the media coverage are the topics of these researches. We also ask what kind of conclusions can be drawn from this large amount of research. At first glance, journalism studies academics use a variety of methods and theories but further analysis shows skewedness within this variety with content analysis of print media forming the bulk of the research. There is also a preference for framing research. The media attention for Wilders shows a wave-pattern, with a strong focus on deliberately created incidents. Media, however, seem to be unable to ignore these events.


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