It has been suggested that transparency will change the way journalism is being produced as well as increase its credibility. However, little research has been conducted to assess the connection between transparency and credibility. This study utilizes an experimental setting with 1320 respondents to measure what impact transparency has on source and message credibility from a user perspective. The results reveal an almost total absence of any transparency effect on either source or message credibility, although some small significant effects could be observed primarily regarding internal hyperlinks, comments and contextual information. Although further research is needed in this area, the study suggests that transparency does not affect the credibility of journalism in the eyes of the contemporary audience and thus has limited appeal as a new norm in journalism.
According to previous research, two characteristics of online news as opposed to traditional news are interactivity and immediacy. However, most research in this area has focused on the news site-level of analysis, and there are only a few studies on how interactivity and immediacy affect online news on the news story-level of analysis. The main reason for this appears to be that the very nature of online news makes observation by traditional research methods, such as quantitative content analysis, problematic. Against this background, the overall purpose of this paper is to explore methodological approaches for the study of interactivity and immediacy on the news story-level of online news. The paper develops a three-pronged strategy for freezing the flow of online news to enable systematic content analyses of interactivity and immediacy, and tests this strategy in a comparative analysis of the online news sites Guardian.co.uk in Britain and Aftonbladet.se in Sweden.
Grounded in an agenda-building theoretical perspective, this study explored in depth the relationships between political campaign information subsidies and elite national news media coverage. Specifically, this investigation examined three levels of agenda-building linkages (object, attribute, and network connections) simultaneously during the 2012 US Presidential Election pre-convention period between Barack Obama (Democrat) and Mitt Romney (Republican). A total of 2655 campaign information subsidies and 345 news stories were content analyzed. The results suggest solid support for all three levels of agenda building. Our findings indicate the strongest linkages were at the third level for stakeholder network associations and at the second level for substantive issue frames. Campaign blog posts, press releases, and issue platforms were the most effective agenda-building tools at this phase of the election campaign. The theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Political satire is an elusive hybrid genre that through its evolution over the past two decades has gained both media and scholarly interest. Inspired by American TV shows like Last Week Tonight, a new wave of more journalistic news satire has spread across the world. Studies have scrutinized its contents and effects, but the production side has remained largely uncovered. This study applies the concepts of genre and boundary work to analyze how advocates of this practice relate themselves to news journalism and previous satire. Based on qualitative interviews with 16 key production team members of four topical satire programs, we investigate how Nordic news satirists interpret their aims and work routines. We argue that both Finnish and Swedish news satirists embrace some of the traditional values of journalism such as striving for factuality, political relevance, and monitoring the powerful while they simultaneously aim for more emotional, opinionated, and exaggerated expression than in regular news reporting. The implications of this hybrid, “neomodern” ethos are examined.
The study explores how the content of the social ties between journalists and their sources, and the multiplexity of the ties in particular, is reflected in the news discovery practices in the political beat. Some of the news ideas come from publicly available channels while others derive from journalists’ unique networks of social contacts (often to some degree informal). The sources connected to journalists via single vs. multiplex social ties achieve a discursive power (Jungerr et al. 2019) in different ways. The study is based on reconstructed news discovery situations (n = 162) from two different political journalism environments: Lithuania and Sweden, and combines quantitative and qualitative questions. First, it measures the prevalence of the multiplex social ties between journalists and the sources. Second, it analyzes how the multiplexity of these ties is reflected in the process of the news discovery and, third, the outcome—the news content. The results show that the prevalence of multiplex social ties, and the social network behind them, is reflected in what news journalists can access and select as newsworthy. Process-wise, multiplex social ties work as a shortcut but require a balance between maintaining the access to the network and distance to the source.
This comparative study investigates news coverage of climate change in the United States and Sweden. The main research question concerns the extent to which news coverage of climate change is influenced by domestic political elite discussion or the scientific consensus surrounding the issue. While there has been a widespread consensus in Sweden that climate change is (partly) caused by human activity and that there is an unquestionable need to take countermeasures, there has been substantial debate about the causes and the necessity of political action in the United States. Based on an extensive content analysis of 1785 articles over a 10-year period, as well as an intensive analysis of news coverage of the Kyoto and Bali summits, results show that media coverage is strikingly similar in these two countries, indicating a weak influence of national political elites on how climate change is framed in news coverage. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
In recent years, a number of studies have suggested a positive linkage between public service broad- casting and public knowledge about current affairs. Most studies are, however, based on aggregate, cross-sectional data. On the individual level they fall short of establishing any causal linkage between TV news exposure and public knowledge. In addition, studies which investigate whether the intensity of the political information environment matters for learning effects from watching TV news, are missing. Against this background, this study compares knowledge effects from watch- ing public service and commercial TV news in three contexts that vary in the intensity of the political information environment: a national election campaign, a European parliamentary election cam- paign and a non-election period. Among other things, the results show stronger knowledge effects from watching public service than commercial TV news.
The literature discussing the impact of media and journalism upon democracy, typically criticizes both media and journalism for their content and their negative effects on some aspects of democracy. In turn, this raises the question of identifying news standards by which the quality of news journalism might be evaluated. But neither the proposed news standards nor the criticism levelled against them specify with sufficient clarity the model of democracy to be used as a normative departure. This article argues that the question of proper news standards cannot be addressed in isolation from the question of different normative models of democracy. In order to discover news standards by which the quality of news journalism can or should be evaluated, it analyzes four normative models of democracy and their demands upon citizens: procedural democracy, competetive democracy, participatory democracy and deliberative democracy. Building upon that analysis, the article asks: What normative implications for media and news journalism follow from the distinctive perspectives of procedural, competitive, participatory and deliberative democracy?
One of the key concepts related to the media's increasing political influence is mediatization. It has even been described as a meta-process, on a par with other social change processes such as globalization and individualization. Despite the fact that the concept has been used for several decades, it remains however a concept referred to more often than properly defined and used to guide systematic empirical research. Against this background and based on the conceptualization of mediatization as a multi-dimensional concept, the purpose of this article is to investigate perceptions of the media's political influence among members of parliament and political news journalists at major national and regional media in Sweden. The results show that both groups attribute great influence to the media, in particular TV, newspapers and radio, and that both groups perceive TV and radio as influential as even the prime minister in terms of how often they manage to place a new issue highest on the political agenda. The results of the study are discussed in light of the theory of an ongoing mediatization of politics.
While there is a large body of research on news values and news selection, most research does not clearly distinguish between the concept of news and news selection, on the one hand, and news values and criteria of newsworthiness on the other. These concepts are often treated as synonymous. This is problematic, as there may be many other factors aside from news values or criteria of newsworthiness that determine what becomes news, and as there may be differences between what journalists think should be, and actually is, important when deciding what’s news. Against this background, this study investigates what Swedish journalists think is, and should be, important event properties when deciding what’s news, and whether there are differences across journalists working for different kinds of media and depending on whether they work with online publishing. The results show that there are significant differences between the perceived normative and actual importance of investigated event properties when deciding what’s news.
Election campaigns in advanced democracies are highly mediated events. Thus, the electorate has come to depend upon the media for information regarding the election, the parties and their policies. At the same time, research indicates that the news coverage of elections tends to be structurally biased, in the sense that the media coverage is episodic rather than thematic and that it is focused on the horse race and the political strategies of the competing parties rather than on the issues at stake. However, comparative studies of election news coverage in different countries are still somewhat lacking. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to compare the election news coverage in Britain and Sweden, two countries that are part of different models of media and political systems. The study investigates the election news coverage in two major broadsheets and one major tabloid in each country, during the last three weeks before the Swedish Election in 2002 and the British Election in 2005. The results show several significant differences between the Swedish and the British election news coverage.
One of the key democratic functions of the media is to provide people with the kind of information they need to be free and self-governing. This is equally important when it comes to the coverage of opinion polls. Thus far, there is however only limited research on the quality of the media’s coverage of opinion polls, including factors that might help to explain variation in the quality of opinion poll coverage. Against this background, the purpose of this study is (1) to investigate the extent to which news media take statistical uncertainties into account when covering opinion polls and making causal interpretations based on opinion polls, and (2) to explore some factors that might help to explain variation in the quality of opinion poll coverage. Among other things, the results show that journalists very often fail to take statistical uncertainties into account and that they, in about half of the cases, provide explanations for changes that are within the margin of error. The results also show that the quality of opinion poll coverage varies between different types of media organizations and between election campaigns and off-election periods.
Local news is a crucial source of information, as well as a force for cohesion and an arena for debate in local societies. Consequently, it is important to reveal the transformation processes happening among local news audiences. All Western countries are facing a newspaper crisis. It is not, however, entirely obvious whether the crisis is a business model crisis for newspapers in general or only a local news crisis. Our aim is to analyse the consumption of newspapers and other local news media in the light of generational changes, through an annual, longitudinal survey conducted since 1986. The findings indicate that there is neither a print crisis, nor a local crisis, but a general newspaper crisis. The readership for both print and online newspapers is decreasing even as local broadcast news exhibits a rather more stable audience. Free daily newspapers seem to have faced the same kind of challenge as the paid-for daily newspapers, but the critical turning point occurred later and for different reasons. When analysing the transformation processes from a generational perspective, it is evident that the youngest generation in our society is abandoning newspapers, regardless of the form in which they are published, and the rate of decline has increased.