Perceptions of Partisanship in Local Television News

People turn to local media for information during crises such as the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). What factors impact media consumers’ decisions about which local television news broadcast to watch? This study argues that media consumers infer the partisanship of local television affiliates — judging local Fox and NBC news broadcasts to be right and left slanted, respectively, based on their perceived associations with Fox News and MSNBC. Using the results from a representative survey of Americans (N = 5,461), the study demonstrates that local Fox and NBC viewers are significantly more likely to watch Fox News or MSNBC. As a result, watching local Fox is associated with less coronavirus risk because media consumers choose local Fox believing that it will align with their existing conservative views. This study demonstrates the importance of the perceptions of local news partisanship in influencing the consumption of critically important local crisis news.

Book Review: Hate, Inc.: Why today's media makes us despise one another by Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi's “Hate, Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise Each Other” (OR Books 2021) might make you angry, but it will make you think. Taibbi's takedown of commercial media, now updated in a post-election edition, offers a striking critique of the news media's slow but steady slide toward polarization “…skewed by a toxic mix of political and financial considerations” (20). Taibbi convincingly argues, using both historical and modern examples along with personal experience, that the press sells people on a simplified worldview where the two political parties are in a constant and perpetual conflict about everything. While Taibbi does offer some advice for independent-minded journalists seeking to navigate the current media landscape, audiences are left with little in the way of solutions, other than to stop reading (and watching) the news.

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

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.

Online Opinion Expression about Women Serving as Judges among University Students in Egypt and Kuwait: An Integrative Study of the Spiral of Silence and Uses and Gratifications

This study integrates the Spiral of Silence and Uses and Gratifications theories to examine the willingness of university students to express on Twitter their opinions about a controversial issue, women serving as judges in Kuwait and Egypt. The analysis of a survey of 640 respondents showed that they used Twitter for information seeking, opinion formation, opinion reinforcement, and social utility in discussions, and for its democratizing capability. Democratization was the only motive to predict the expression of opinion online. When the Kuwaiti and Egyptian samples were analyzed separately, the democratization motive predicted opinion expression for the Kuwaiti students but not for the Egyptian students. Interaction effects between motivations and size of the respondent's social network on Twitter were found to predict the online expression of opinion. For example, the variable assessing the size of a respondent's social network interacted with information seeking motivation and also with opinion reinforcement to predict opinion expression online.

Politics, Power and a Pandemic: Searching for Information and Accountability During a Twitter Infodemic

During the early weeks of the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic, society was battling an infodemic–defined as a “tsunami” of online misinformation. Through the lens of mediatization theory, this article examines 800,000 tweets to understand social media information and misinformation related to the COVID-19. Through multi-layered analysis, this article details prominent key words discussed on Twitter connected to pandemic trending hashtags in early-to-mid March 2020: #Covid19 and #Coronavirus. The most prominent word themes included: novelty of this virus and associated uncertainty and the spread of misinformation; severity and widespread reach of the virus; call for collective action; and expectations relative to government action. The article explains these findings through mediatization theory, applying how technology influences social media discussions.

Mastering Metrics: The Impact of Social Media on the Routines and Values of Broadcast Journalists

Social media use is essential for success in today's television news industry. Broadcast journalists use social media platforms to gather and disseminate news in more efficient ways. Broadcasters are also using social media to engage with news consumers in innovative ways. This study employs a mixed-method approach to better understand how social media impacts broadcast journalists’ routines and values and explores the role of gender in broadcasters’ social media strategies. Qualitative in-depth interviews with top broadcast journalists and a social media discourse analysis of their Twitter pages produces this study's findings. Findings suggest that in many television newsrooms social media have become more important than traditional platforms like evening newscasts, and social media metrics are being used to gauge journalists’ success. Additionally, women broadcasters are disadvantaged by the current social media practices in many newsrooms. Implications are discussed.

Not on air, but Online: The Labor Conditions of the Digital Journalist in U.S. Local Television Newsrooms

As American news preferences shift from broadcast to digital platforms, corporate-owned local television stations have hired digital teams to keep a growing array of mobile, social, web, and over-the-top platforms updated with revenue-generating and audience-friendly information. Yet, these workers are currently missing from the labor literature. Therefore, this exploratory study uses a political economy framework with a labor focus to begin to understand the day-to-day working conditions of these employees. Interviews outline workload issues including long hours of multitasking and nearly-constant connectivity even when off the clock, sped-up production expectations with a commodified information focus, and limited worker protections. The findings here aim to provide a starting point for digital journalism labor studies moving forward.

Television Infographics as Orienting Response: An Eye-Tracking Study of the Role of Visuospatial Attention in Processing of Television News

This experimental study ( N = 77) examined the role of infographics in orienting viewer's attention in television news. The results of pupil dilation measurements using the eye-tracking method showed that when used in the over-the-shoulder format, visual representation of numerical data triggers an orienting response and directs the viewer's attention to that part of the screen. The study also showed that bar graphs were more successful in holding viewer's attention than the simple tabular presentation of information, with a significant covariate of video viewer size, and that the presence of infographics and individuals’ quantitative ability both positively predicted information recall.