Structural Pluralism, Corporate Newspaper Structure, and News Source Perceptions: Another Test of the Editorial Vigor Hypothesis

1998 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 572-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
David K. Demers
Keyword(s):  
Social Systems ◽  
Structure Theory ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Police Chiefs ◽  
Corporate Structure ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Corporate Form ◽  
News Source ◽  
Alternative Methodology

A recent content analysis of newspaper editorials and letters to the editor disputes the conventional wisdom that newspapers become less vigorous editorially as they acquire the characteristics of the corporate form of organization. However, many scholars remain skeptical. This study tested the editorial vigor hypothesis using an alternative methodology: a national probability survey of mainstream news sources (mayors and police chiefs). The data provide partial support for the corporate structure theory - the more structurally complex the newspaper, the more news sources perceived that paper as being critical of them and their institutions. Drawing on previous research and these findings, the author argues corporate newspapers are more critical because they are more likely to be located in pluralistic communities, which contain more social conflict and criticism of dominant groups and value systems, and because they are more insulated from local political pressures. From a broader perspective, the results may be interpreted as supporting theories which hold that the pace of social change quickens as social systems become more structurally pluralistic.

scholarly journals Story character, news source or vox pop? Representations and roles of citizen perspectives in crime news narratives

Journalism ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146488492199406
Author(s):  
Kobie van Krieken
Keyword(s):  
Multiple Roles ◽  
Inside Information ◽  
Societal Values ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Crime Narratives ◽  
News Source ◽  
Crime News ◽  
Story Character ◽  
News Events ◽  
Over Time

This study analyzes citizen representations in a corpus of 300 Dutch newspaper narratives published between 1860 and 2009. Results show that citizen perspectives are more frequently represented than authority perspectives, although the perspectives of authorities have become somewhat more frequent over time. In-depth analyses of the citizen perspectives show that citizens may fulfil multiple roles in the crime narratives, leading up to a functional typology of citizens as (1) story characters experiencing the news events, (2) news sources providing inside information about the events, and (3) vox pops expressing opinions and evaluations of the events. The variety of citizen perspectives included in crime news narratives and the multitude of roles they fulfill may help audience members to become informed as well as engaged and to explore their personal emotions, which may ultimately reinforce moral, cultural and societal values.

scholarly journals A Study of a Sample of Facebook Users Finds They Do Not Seek Political News through Facebook But Are Exposed to Political News through This Medium

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-38
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Margaret Stovold
Keyword(s):  
Online Survey ◽  
Online News ◽  
Social Utility ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Political News ◽  
High School Degree ◽  
News Sources ◽  
News Source ◽  
Tv News ◽  
The Mean

A Review of: Schaferm, S., Sulflow, M., & Muller, P. (2017). The special taste of snack news: an application of niche theory to understand the appeal of Facebook as a source for political news. First Monday, 22(4-3). http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i4.7431 Abstract Objective – To investigate Facebook as a source of exposure to political news stories and to compare the reasons for using Facebook as a news source and the gratifications obtained, compared with other news sources. Design – Survey questionnaire. Setting – Facebook. Subjects – 422 German Facebook users. Methods – An online survey was developed to investigate the use of Facebook as a news source compared with other sources. Specific research questions were informed by the ‘theory of niche’ (Dimmick, 2003) which examines the coexistence and competition between different media outlets by examining the breadth, overlap and superiority of one platform over another. The survey was distributed using a ‘snowball’ technique between July and August 2015. The survey was shared by 52 student research assistants on their Facebook profiles. They asked their friends to complete the survey and share it with their own networks. Main results – The mean (M) age of the 422 respondents was 23.5 years (SD=8.25). The majority were female (61%) with a high school degree (89%). TV news and news websites were the most frequently used sources of political news. Facebook ranked third, ahead of newspapers, search engines, magazines, email provider websites, and Twitter. The mean score for the importance of Facebook as a news sources was 2.46 (SD=1.13) on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is low and 5 is high. This fell in the middle of the range when compared with the top ranked source assessed by importance (TV news, M 4.40, SD=0.88) and the lowest (email providers, M 1.92, SD=0.97). Users rarely visited Facebook with the purpose of finding news (M 1.59, SD=0.73). However, they estimated around 24% of the posts they see were concerned with political news, and when encountered, these stories are frequently read (M 3.53, SD=1.18). However, the level of interaction as measured by liking, commenting, sharing or status updates was low (M 1.94 SD=1.09; M 1.37, SD=0.79; M 1.51, SD=0.85 and M 1.4, SD=0.78 respectively). The ‘gratification’ categories where Facebook as a news source scored the highest were for killing time (M 2.97, SD=1.29), entertainment (M 2.92, SD=1.05), and surveillance (M 2.77, SD=1.01). When compared to newspapers and TV news, it was found that Facebook has a lower score for niche breadth, meaning that it serves a specific rather than general news function. Facebook also had a lower overlap score when compared with the other media, thereby performing a complementary function, while TV news and newspapers perform similarly. TV news scored better for providing balanced information, surveillance and social utility while Facebook scored highest for killing time. There was no difference in the category of entertainment. There was a similar picture when comparing Facebook with newspapers. Conclusion – The authors conclude that while users do not actively seek political news through Facebook, they are exposed to political news through this medium. Respondents did not consider the news to be well balanced, and that currently Facebooks’ niche is restricted to entertainment and killing time. The authors note that this may be disappointing for news organisations, but there is potential to expose large audiences to political news when they are not actively seeking it. The findings represent a specific time point in a changing landscape and future research will need to take these changes into account. Comparisons with other online news sources and the use of objective measures to validate self-reported data would be valuable areas for future research.

News Sources and Framing of Responsibility on Devolution in Kenya, 2013–2017

2022 ◽  
pp. 107769902110665
Author(s):  
Jimmy Ochieng
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Newspaper Coverage ◽  
Attribution Of Responsibility ◽  
News Sources ◽  
News Source ◽  
Official Sources

The present research examines two aspects of newspaper coverage of devolution during a 4-year period between March 27, 2013, and May 28, 2017: first, through the lens of attribution of responsibility, who the news media most blamed for problems facing devolution; second, whether reliance on official sources in reporting of devolution mirrors the indexing hypothesis. Findings show that the most-blamed actor and dominant news source on devolution is the county executive. Journalists continue to rely on the elite as their main news source and as a result they shape the discourse on devolution.

scholarly journals Top Two News Words (By Hour)

Media-N ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Valentin
Keyword(s):  
Online News ◽  
Simple Concept ◽  
News Sources ◽  
News Source ◽  
Online Archive ◽  
Continuous Sheet ◽  
Trending Topics

The Top Two News Words project began in 2007 as a gallery piece featuring a computer and dot matrix printer linked to an online parsing routine which gathered headlines from fifteen major news sources hourly, and analyzed and reduced these headlines to the two most frequently occurring words. The resulting pairs were printed each hour on a continuous sheet of computer paper, creating a linear document of the 24/7/365 news cycle. Since 2008, the online component of the piece has been running automatically, without its physical half, publishing hourly word pairs via RSS and on Twitter and building an online archive of nearly 90,000 hours of news. Top Two News Words has consistently evoked questions of bias from its audience: “Why only these sources? Why only sources in English? Who are you to decide what is a major news source?” This is, of course, one of the desired outcomes of the project. A deeper question, which is reflected in the recent controversy and surprise over Facebook’s use of human curators for trending topics, is why don’t we investigate for bias in supposedly neutral online news aggregators such as Google? And, is it even possible to filter news programmatically without bias? I seek to use this project to illustrate the simple concept that curation, bias and reduction are not the antithesis of awareness in a world of continuous, direct news but are an essential part of navigating and understanding this world.

What is Fox News? Partisan Journalism, Misinformation, and the Problem of Classification

2021 ◽  
pp. 193124312110604
Author(s):  
A.J. Bauer ◽  
Anthony Nadler ◽  
Jacob L. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Research Design ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
Fox News ◽  
News Sources ◽  
News Source ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Journalism Research ◽  
Scholarly Inquiry

Fox News is one of the most popular news sources in the United States. Yet, there are those who reject the idea that Fox should be considered a news source in the first place, claiming it should be considered something more akin to propaganda. This article uses the ambiguity surrounding Fox News’ classification as an opportunity to explore how news sources get defined and categorized within journalism research and practice. It discusses three approaches that can be utilized to understand and categorize partisan media—producer-focused, audience-focused, and critical/normative. It explores the benefits and limitations of these perspectives and the need for scholarly inquiry that transverses and synthesizes them. We argue that an increasingly variegated news landscape calls for scholars to develop a richer vocabulary for distinguishing key features of partisan news outlets and greater reflexivity in research design that acknowledges the challenges inherent in translating meaning and values between producers, audiences, and scholars.

scholarly journals Distortions of political bias in crowdsourced misinformation flagging

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (167) ◽  
pp. 20200020
Author(s):  
Michele Coscia ◽  
Luca Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Item ◽  
Real World Data ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Political Bias ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
News Source ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Current Content

Many people view news on social media, yet the production of news items online has come under fire because of the common spreading of misinformation. Social media platforms police their content in various ways. Primarily they rely on crowdsourced ‘flags’: users signal to the platform that a specific news item might be misleading and, if they raise enough of them, the item will be fact-checked. However, real-world data show that the most flagged news sources are also the most popular and—supposedly—reliable ones. In this paper, we show that this phenomenon can be explained by the unreasonable assumptions that current content policing strategies make about how the online social media environment is shaped. The most realistic assumption is that confirmation bias will prevent a user from flagging a news item if they share the same political bias as the news source producing it. We show, via agent-based simulations, that a model reproducing our current understanding of the social media environment will necessarily result in the most neutral and accurate sources receiving most flags.

scholarly journals Social Studies Teacher Perceptions of News Source Credibility

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 262-272
Author(s):  
Christopher H. Clark ◽  
Mardi Schmeichel ◽  
H. James Garrett
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
Teacher Perceptions ◽  
News Media ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Source Credibility ◽  
Social Studies Teachers ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Secondary Social Studies ◽  
News Source ◽  
News Credibility

Politically tumultuous times have created a problematic space for teachers who include the news in their classrooms. Few studies have explored perceptions of news credibility among secondary social studies teachers, the educators most likely to regularly incorporate news media into their classrooms. We investigated teachers’ operational definitions of credibility and the relationships between political ideology and assessments of news source credibility. Most teachers in this study used either static or dynamic definitions to describe news media sources’ credibility. Further, teachers’ conceptualizations of credibility and perceived ideological differences with news sources were associated with how credible teachers found each source. These results indicate potential inconsistencies in how news credibility is defined and possible political bias in which sources social studies teachers use as exemplars of credibility.

Corporate Newspaper Structure, Editorial Page Vigor, and Social Change

1996 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 857-877 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Demers
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
Bottom Line ◽  
Daily Newspapers ◽  
Information Diversity ◽  
Editorial Page

Many critics contend that corporate newspapers are less vigorous editorially than entrepreneurial newspapers because they are more concerned about the bottom line than about information diversity. This study, which involves a national probability survey of daily newspapers, fails to support that belief. Corporate newspapers publish more local editorials and letters to the editor, and a larger number and proportion of editorials and letters that are critical of mainstream groups and institutions. From a broader perspective, these findings may be interpreted as supporting theories which hold that the pace of social change quickens as social systems become more structurally pluralistic.

scholarly journals Social and Material Status of Teachers from The Perspective of Teacher Education Students

2021 ◽  
pp. 257-270
Author(s):  
Filduza Prušević Sadović ◽  
Sefedin Šehović
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Teaching Staff ◽  
Human Society ◽  
The Public ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The Social ◽  
Teacher Education Faculty ◽  
Developed World

The social status and position of teachers have changed throughout history and is conditioned by the development of human society. In the developed world, the teacher is a highly positioned member of society, part of the intellectual elite and a positive model of behavior. We are witnesses that the period of media development, the inflow of information, the collapse of previous value systems, led to a change in the evaluation and position of teachers in Serbia and the surrounding countries. Teachers are experiencing one of the most difficult periods. They are usually poorly paid, insufficiently valued, unmotivated. The paper describes positive examples of the attitude of social systems in the world towards teachers, where teachers are still part of the elite and where, thanks to a positive and encouraging attitude towards educators, societies experience prosperity in economic, cultural, material and other aspects of development. In this way, the assumption is confirmed that a society that invests in education and teaching staff, is profitable in the long run and has positive results in development. Also, the paper presents the results of research conducted by surveying students of the Teacher Education Faculty in Belgrade, in which we wanted to find out the attitudes, motives, and views of students about the position of teachers in society, and the projections of their future occupation. The results of the research show that students are motivated to work as teachers and that they like working with children and young people, but at the same time, they are aware of the unfavorable position of teachers in society and hope that this position can be improved by raising to make the public aware of the importance of teaching at the earliest age of students and stricter criteria when enrolling and selecting future teachers at faculties and schools.

scholarly journals Pertunjukan Wayang Dalam Era Global

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
SOETARNO
Keyword(s):  
Social Systems ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Global Era ◽  
C Value ◽  
Shadow Puppetry

Shadow Puppet Performances in Global Era. This article discusses the changes of shadow puppetry inrelation to the changes of society in global era. Some relevant changes are in the fi elds of: (a) communicationtechnology; (b) social systems; and (c) value systems. To anticipate these changes, puppet masters have also madesome changes in their performances. The shadow puppet performances and society cannot stand alone but theyhave mutual interactions. Each of them may act as an object or as a subject. Thus, in transitional or developingsociety, the infl uences of social and shadow puppetry are mutual. Shadow puppet performances reveal socialtendencies while society show infl uences on the development of shadow puppetry world.

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