Media Systems and Political Information Resources: An Empirical Study of Focus and Frames Across Countries and News Media Outlets

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toril Aalberg ◽  
Tove Brekken ◽  
Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
News Media ◽  
Information Resources ◽  
Political Information ◽  
Media Systems

Political Knowledge and Misinformation in the Era of Social Media: Evidence From the 2015 UK Election

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Kevin Munger ◽  
Patrick J. Egan ◽  
Jonathan Nagler ◽  
Jonathan Ronen ◽  
Joshua Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
News Media ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Political Information ◽  
The Political ◽  
Election Campaign ◽  
Social Media Platform ◽  
Media Platform

Abstract Does social media educate voters, or mislead them? This study measures changes in political knowledge among a panel of voters surveyed during the 2015 UK general election campaign while monitoring the political information to which they were exposed on the Twitter social media platform. The study's panel design permits identification of the effect of information exposure on changes in political knowledge. Twitter use led to higher levels of knowledge about politics and public affairs, as information from news media improved knowledge of politically relevant facts, and messages sent by political parties increased knowledge of party platforms. But in a troubling demonstration of campaigns' ability to manipulate knowledge, messages from the parties also shifted voters' assessments of the economy and immigration in directions favorable to the parties' platforms, leaving some voters with beliefs further from the truth at the end of the campaign than they were at its beginning.

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.

The Gatekeeping of Political Messages

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Shoemaker
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Mass Communication ◽  
Television News ◽  
Political Information ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Kurt Lewin ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
Blog Posts

Simply put, gatekeeping involves deciding which messages to send to others and how to shape them. Billions of events occur each day, many with political ramifications, but there are more events than the news media can cover or even know about. Political information competes with all other topics to pass through source and media gates. Politicians create forces that constrain or facilitate this passage, but making it through one gate is usually not sufficient. Multiple gates in source, media, and audience channels winnow messages until we have those few that become television news stories or blog posts. To explain this process, gatekeeping theory was proposed in the late 1940s by Kurt Lewin; it is one of the older theories applied to the study of mass communication.

From Information Availability to Factual Accountability

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas Graves ◽  
Chris Wells
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Political Information ◽  
The Political ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Information Availability ◽  
Information Order

Theories of democracy in communication studies have emphasized the importance of citizens encountering quality political information and incorporating that information into their views. These emphases on exposure tend to take the truth of the information being consumed for granted. Today, the problem of truth has become more visible, inviting reconsideration of how we expect truth to operate in democratic society. In this chapter, we suggest the need to consider not only the availability of information but also the conditions under which leaders and other communicators are held accountable for the veracity of their claims—a process we call factual accountability. We argue that members of the political elite, news media, and citizens each have roles to play in establishing factual accountability, but trends in each of these realms pose challenges to a truth-driven information order. We conclude with suggestions for reconstructing factual accountability as a basis for public conversation.

scholarly journals Who to Trust on Social Media: How Opinion Leaders and Seekers Avoid Disinformation and Echo Chambers

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512091399
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Dubois ◽  
Sara Minaeian ◽  
Ariane Paquet-Labelle ◽  
Simon Beaudry
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Political Information ◽  
Opinion Leaders ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Dependent Variables ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Information Verification ◽  
Low Levels

As trust in news media and social media dwindles and fears of disinformation and echo chambers spread, individuals need to find ways to access and assess reliable and trustworthy information. Despite low levels of trust in social media, they are used for accessing political information and news. In this study, we examine the information verification practices of opinion leaders (who consume political information above average and share their opinions on social media above average) and of opinion seekers (who seek out political information from friends and family) to understand similarities and differences in their news media trust, fact-checking behaviors, and likeliness of being caught in echo chambers. Based on a survey of French Internet users ( N = 2,000) we find that not only opinion leaders, but also opinion seekers, have higher rates across all three of these dependent variables. We discuss the implications of findings for the development of opinion leadership theory as well as for social media platforms wishing to increase trust.

Framing referendum campaigns in the news

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Dekavalla
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
News Media ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
Mediation Process ◽  
Media Frames ◽  
Frame Building ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
Scottish Independence ◽  
Depth Interviews

This book discusses the framing of referendum campaigns in the news media, focusing particularly on the case of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Using a comprehensive content analysis of print and broadcast coverage as well as in-depth interviews with broadcast journalists and their sources during this campaign, it provides an account of how journalists construct the frames that define their coverage of contested political campaigns. It views the mediation process from the perspective of those who participate directly in it, namely journalists and political communicators. It puts forward an original theoretical model to account more broadly for frame building in the context of referendums in Western media systems, using insights from this and from other cases. The book makes an original contribution to the study of media frames during referendums.

scholarly journals Review: How news media responded to India’s relationship with Britain

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 205
Author(s):  
Philip Cass
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
News Media ◽  
The Other ◽  
Communications Media ◽  
Andrews University ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Systems

Cass, P. (2015). How news media responded to India’s relationship with Britain. Pacific Journalism Review, 21(2): 205-207. Review of Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience, by Chandrika Kaul. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 278 pp. ISBN 978-0-230-57258-4Chandrika Kaul’s latest book begins and ends with what she regards as carefully stage-managed displays of British power designed to establish enduring images of imperial rule; in one, Indians and Britons bonded by their love of their King-Emperor and in the other, a noble, benevolent Britannia handing power to India as its civilising mission comes to a natural and peaceful end. Kaul, from St Andrews University in Scotland, has written or edited a number of books exploring imperial media systems and in this latest volume she explores how the media reacted to various stages in India’s relationship with Great Britain during the 20th century.

scholarly journals Understanding Accumulation: The Relevance of Marx’s Theory of Primitive Accumulation in Media and Communication Studies

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mattias Ekman
Keyword(s):  
Web 2.0 ◽  
News Media ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Communication Research ◽  
Primitive Accumulation ◽  
Accumulation By Dispossession ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Critical Media ◽  
Media Systems ◽  
Media And Communication

The aim of this article is to discuss and use Marx’s theory on primitive accumulation, outlined in the first volume of Capital, in relation to media and communication research. In order to develop Marx’s argument the discussion is revitalized through Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession. The article focuses on two different fields within media and communication research where the concept of accumulation by dispossession is applicable. First, the role of news media content, news flows and news media systems are discussed in relation to social mobilization against capitalism, privatizations, and the financial sector. Second, Marx’s theory is used to examine how communication in Web 2.0 and the development of ICTs could advance the processes of capital accumulation by appropriating the work performed by users of Web 2.0 and by increasing the corporate surveillance of Internet users. In conclusion, by analyzing how primitive accumulation is intertwined with contemporary expanded reproduction of capital, the article shows that Marx’s theory can contribute to critical media and communication research in several ways.

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