Is There a Distinct Quebec Media Subsystem in Canada? Evidence of Ideological and Political Orientations among Canadian News Media Organizations

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 638-657 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Thibault ◽  
Frédérick Bastien ◽  
Tania Gosselin ◽  
Colette Brin ◽  
Colin Scott
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media System ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
Media Organizations ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
Western Media

AbstractIn their much-quoted typology of Western media systems, Hallin and Mancini (2004) associate Canada's media system with what they call the “Liberal model,” given its strong professionalization and limited politicization. They also hypothesize the existence of a more professional and more politicized media subsystem in Quebec. This article tests their hypothesis with data from a 2018 survey of 209 experts across Canada. The findings do not support the hypothesis of a media subsystem in Quebec. However, they show a diversity of ideological and political orientations among news media organizations, which has important empirical and theoretical implications for the study of political communication in Canada.

Demagogic populism and media system: A preliminary articulation

2021 ◽  
pp. 026732312199953
Author(s):  
Paul K Jones
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Systems Approach ◽  
Public Communication ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
System A ◽  
Media System ◽  
Modern Media ◽  
Media Systems

Political communication studies has a long tradition of ‘crisis talk’ regarding the fate of public communication. Now, however, the field itself faces a kind of existential crisis as its core assumptions of ‘normal’ political communication are daily undermined. This ‘liberal normalcy’ shares much with orthodoxies in populism studies, most notably a tendency to bracket out demagogic communication, both in historical fascist regimes and democracies. Yet correcting these failings is not simply a matter of rejecting liberal models for left-populist ones. Rather, both fields need to broaden their historical parameters and deepen their theoretical frameworks. The article draws on the Weberian conception of modern demagogy and its revision in the wake of 'modern media' by Shils and Adorno. It further argues that a critical reworking of Hallin and Mancini’s media systems approach could benefit both fields. For Hallin and Mancini’s socio-historical use of Weberian ideal-typification complements Worsley’s never-completed plan for an ideal-typification of modes of populism and demagogic leadership.

scholarly journals Defining and Measuring News Media Quality: Comparing the Content Perspective and the Audience Perspective

2021 ◽  
pp. 194016122199966
Author(s):  
Philipp Bachmann ◽  
Mark Eisenegger ◽  
Diana Ingenhoff
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Content Quality ◽  
Media System ◽  
Evaluative Criteria ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Multimethod Approach ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
Measurement Approach

High-quality news is important, not only for its own sake but also for its political implications. However, defining, operationalizing, and measuring news media quality is difficult, because evaluative criteria depend upon beliefs about the ideal society, which are inherently contested. This conceptual and methodological paper outlines important considerations for defining news media quality before developing and applying a multimethod approach to measure it. We refer to Giddens' notion of double hermeneutics, which reveals that the ways social scientists understand constructs inevitably interact with the meanings of these constructs shared by people in society. Reflecting the two-way relationship between society and social sciences enables us to recognize news media quality as a dynamic, contingent, and contested construct and, at the same time, to reason our understanding of news media quality, which we derive from Habermas' ideal of deliberative democracy. Moreover, we investigate the Swiss media system to showcase our measurement approach in a repeated data collection from 2017 to 2020. We assess the content quality of fifty news media outlets using four criteria derived from the deliberative ideal ( N = 20,931 and 18,559 news articles and broadcasting items, respectively) and compare the results with those from two representative online surveys ( N = 2,169 and 2,159 respondents). The high correlations between both methods show that a deliberative understanding of news media quality is anchored in Swiss society and shared by audiences. This paper shall serve as a showcase to reflect and measure news media quality across other countries and media systems.

scholarly journals Political Agenda Setting in the Hybrid Media System: Why Legacy Media Still Matter a Great Deal

2020 ◽  
pp. 194016122092502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Ines Langer ◽  
Johannes B. Gruber
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
News Media ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Investigative Journalism ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Media System ◽  
Hybrid Dynamics ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Government

This article examines the roles of the media in the process of political agenda setting. There is a long tradition of studies on this topic, but they have mostly focused on legacy news media, thus overlooking the role of other actors and the complex hybrid dynamics that characterize contemporary political communication. In contrast, through an in-depth case study using mixed-methods and multiplatform data, this article provides a detailed analysis of the roles and interactions between different types of media and how they were used by political and advocacy elites. It explores what happened in the different parts of the system, and thus the paths to attention that led to setting this issue in the political and media agendas. The analysis of the case, a partial policy reversal in the United Kingdom provoked by an immigration scandal known as the “Windrush scandal” reveals that the issue was pushed into the agenda by a campaign assemblage of investigative journalism, political and advocacy elites, and digitally enabled leaders. The legacy news media came late but were crucial. They greatly amplified the salience of the issue and, once in “storm mode,” they were key for sustaining attention and pressure, eventually compelling the government to respond. It shows that they often remain at the core of the “national conversation” and certainly in the eye of a media storm. In the contemporary context, characterized by fierce battles for attention, shortening attention spans and fractured audiences, this is key and has important implications for agenda setting and beyond.

scholarly journals Political parallelism in Iceland

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (s2) ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
Birgir Guðmundsson
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Lower Degree ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Media System ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
High Degree ◽  
National Local

Abstract My main objective in this article is to examine the importance of political parallelism in Iceland through establishing the extent to which political parallelism is perceived to char-acterise political communication in Iceland by politicians and voters. Political parallelism is one of the defining elements of Hallin and Mancini's typology of media systems. Based on candidate surveys from five elections and a voter survey, indexes of perceived political parallelism are configured for politicians and voters. The analysis suggests a high degree of perceived political parallelism and that the perceptions are reflected in partisan ideological views of individual media outlets. The same – or at least similar – perceptions about political parallelism in the media system seem to penetrate the system irrespective of age and at the national, local, and individual level of politics. However, voters and candidates of social democratic and liberal internationally oriented parties perceive a significantly lower degree of parallelism than others.

scholarly journals Similar Politicians, Different Media

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (19) ◽  
pp. 161-179
Author(s):  
Laura Cervi
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Media System ◽  
Sex Scandals ◽  
American Model ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
Qualitative Methodologies ◽  
Silvio Berlusconi

The article analyzes the media treatment of two sex scandals: the “Stormy Daniels scandal”, which involved the current US President Donald Trump in 2018 and the “Ruby scandal”, which involved Silvio Berlusconi in 2010, while he was Italy’s Prime Minister. By combining both quantitative and qualitative methodologies the aim is to discover whether the media treatment is different, as we can expect since the two countries belong to two different media systems, or if, following the theory of Americanization of political communication, the Italian media will tend to emulate the American model. Furthermore, another aim of this study is to detect whether a shift towards a more Polarized Pluralist model can be identified in the USA, as some authors have started foreseeing. The results will show that both countries’ media behave coherently with the traditional feature of their media system, the Polarized Pluralist and the Liberal.

scholarly journals Media Use and Misperceptions

2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toril Aalberg ◽  
Zan Strabac
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
European Social Survey ◽  
Tv Viewing ◽  
Social Survey ◽  
Media System ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Tv News ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Watching Tv

Abstract There is considerable evidence that many people generally misperceive the size of the immigrant population in their country, and that this may have essential political implications. In studies of political knowledge, the news media are typically said to be one important source of information that can help make people more knowledgeable. In the present article, we investigate whether there is a relationship between TV viewing, media system variations and knowledge about immigration. We base our analysis on highly comparable data from the 2002-2003 wave of the European Social Survey (ESS) and an American replication of the ESS. The results indicate that TV viewing in general is associated with lower levels of knowledge, while there is a positive but non-significant relationship between watching TV news and knowledge about immigration. Differences in the levels of knowledge between the countries are fairly large, with residents of Nordic countries being most knowledgeable and residents of the UK, US and France tending to be least knowledgeable. Aggregate explanations for variations in media influence (share of public service TV and “media systems”) do not prove to be of much value in explaining differences in knowledge about the sizes of immigrant populations.

Trump, Twitter, and news media responsiveness: A media systems approach

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 659-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Wells ◽  
Dhavan Shah ◽  
Josephine Lukito ◽  
Ayellet Pelled ◽  
Jon CW Pevehouse ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Systems Approach ◽  
The United States ◽  
Relative Advantage ◽  
Presidential Primary ◽  
Media System ◽  
American Media ◽  
Media Systems

How populists engage with media of various types, and are treated by those media, are questions of international interest. In the United States, Donald Trump stands out for both his populism-inflected campaign style and his success at attracting media attention. This article examines how interactions between candidate communications, social media, partisan media, and news media combined to shape attention to Trump, Clinton, Cruz, and Sanders during the 2015–2016 American presidential primary elections. We identify six major components of the American media system and measure candidates’ efforts to gain attention from them. Our results demonstrate that social media activity, in the form of retweets of candidate posts, provided a significant boost to news media coverage of Trump, but no comparable boost for other candidates. Furthermore, Trump tweeted more at times when he had recently garnered less of a relative advantage in news attention, suggesting he strategically used Twitter to trigger coverage.

scholarly journals Is There a Nordic News Media System?

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-35
Author(s):  
Kim Christian Schrøder ◽  
Mark Blach-Ørsten ◽  
Mads Kæmsgaard Eberholst
Keyword(s):  
Systems Theory ◽  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
Online News ◽  
Nordic Countries ◽  
News Consumption ◽  
Media System ◽  
Digital News ◽  
Country Study ◽  
Media Systems

AbstractIn media systems theory, the Nordic countries are often held to constitute a specific media system (Brüggemann et al., 2014). In this article, we put this claim to the test in the area of news consumption. Based on findings about the four Nordic countries Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland in the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report (Newman et al., 2019), and inspired by previous studies of the audience dimension of media systems (Hölig et al., 2016; Peruško et al., 2015; Van Damme et al., 2017), we undertake a descriptive empirical analysis of the 2019 data of this 38-country study. Our study compares news audience practices in the Nordic countries with those of countries belonging to other supranational media systems. We find that while there are some internal differences within the Nordic media system, there are salient news consumption commonalities that are specific to the Nordic countries, such as preferred sources of news, pathways to news, paying for online news, and trust in the news.

scholarly journals Google, Facebook and what else? Measuring the hybridity of Italian journalists by their use of sources

2020 ◽  
pp. 026732312094091
Author(s):  
Marco Delmastro ◽  
Sergio Splendore
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Soft News ◽  
Media System ◽  
Temporal Structures ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
Media And Communication

The contemporary media systems present hybrid logics and features that imply an increasingly interdependence among actors, media and communication formats. The hybrid media system approach underlines that legacy news media and non-elite media actors construct flows of news through different media technologies and according to complex temporal structures. A media environment arises in which traditional distinctions between concepts like ‘online’ and ‘offline’, ‘producer’ and ‘audience’, ‘citizens’ and ‘journalists’ become blurred. The emphasis appears to be on change more than continuity, and on difference more than similarity. Although the hybrid media approach is appreciated by numerous contemporary media scholars, hybridity in media often remains an all-encompassing concept and few attempts have been made to measure it. This article assesses the level of hybridity by investigating journalists’ uses of sources. It considers mainly journalists’ use of sources by the medium for which they work (from newspapers to web or radio) and the kinds of news that they produce (hard or soft news, business/finance, tech/science). The assumption is, therefore, that, within a homogeneously hybridized media system, journalists use the same sources regardless of the medium for which they work and the topics with which they deal. This objective is pursued by analysing the data collected via a survey conducted by means of structured interviews with a sample of 1424 Italian journalists between October and November 2016. The findings show that the analytical distinction among platforms for which journalists work still matters in terms of sources. Except for the use of Facebook and Google, journalists have still very defined paths to collect sources according to the medium they work for. The article has implications also for the literature on journalists’ authority and expertise.

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