Bringing the Sociology of Media Back In

In political communication research, news media tend to be studied more as a dependent than independent variable. That is, few studies link structural characteristics of media systems to the production of journalistic discourse about politics. One reason for this relative silence is the inadequacy of prevalent theories. Influential scholars in sociology and political communication such as Jürgen Habermas, Manuel Castells, and William Gamson provide only sketchy, institutionally underspecified accounts of media systems. Likewise, models in the sociology of news have tended to either aggregate societal level influences (chiefly political and economic) that are analytically and often empirically quite distinct or overemphasize micro-level influences (news routines, bureaucratic pressures). In between such micro- and macro-influences, the mezzo-level "journalistic field" represents an important shaping factor heretofore largely ignored. As path-dependent institutional logics, fields help ground cultural analysis; as interorganizational spatial environments varying in their level of concentration, they explain heretofore undertheorized aspects of news production. Drawing on the sociology of news and field theory (Bourdieu and American new institutionalism), this essay offers a series of hypotheses about how variable characteristics of media systems shape news discourse. Since variation at the system level is most clearly seen via cross-national comparative studies, international research is best positioned to build more generalizable theory about the production of journalistically mediated political discourse.     

Why Conceptual Models and "Big" Institutions Matter: A Response to David Altheide,Nina Eliasoph,William Gamson,and Todd Gitlin

The two cases analyzed here demonstrate a new journalistic practice of interviewing enemy leaders at times of war. We argue that whereas traditionally journalists had accepted the principle that when the nation is under threat, patriotism precedes professionalism, in the new media environment, with the domestic public exposed to international TV channels, this is no longer an option. As a result, journalists act more independently, even when this entails public resentment and government disapproval. We demonstrate how in interviewing enemy leaders, journalists play the part of politicians once diplomatic negotiations have ceased. Although such interviews provide high ratings and amplify the relevance of journalism at times of war, the irregular settings in which they are conducted undermine the journalists' endeavor. From the interviews we examined, it emerges that the cross pressures on the interviewers lead to a questioning style that deviates significantly from normative news interviews. Interviewers tend to be dragged to one of the extremes of hostility or deference. Finally, we show how the ways in which domestic governments respond to these interviews serve as additional evidence of their controversial character.     

Listening and the ambiguities of voice in South African journalism

Political theorists like Bickford (1996) and media theorists like Couldry (2006) have introduced the concept of listening as a complement to long-standing discussions about voice in democracies and in the media which serve the democratic project. This enhanced understanding of voice goes beyond just hearing into giving serious attention to, in particular, marginalised voices. This article reports on an investigation into the ways in which mainstream and community media in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, understand listening as an important part of their role as journalists. Interviews probed the attitudes of journalists and editors towards listening, and also interrogated their own understandings of their role in South Africa, particularly in relation to young people who are finding their political “voice”. The research showed that “listening” as a journalistic practice is seldom understood in anything more than common sense ways and is certainly not an organising principle of reporting and disseminating news. This results in journalism that is events focused, often sensationalist and whose agenda is set powerfully by political actions and actors in the environment. The power of being heard is almost solely in the hands of the journalists, who regard themselves as “the voice of the people”, without actively providing a space for listening to the voices of community members. But, within this generalised environment, there are two very interesting projects in which journalists and editors are actively listening to the issues and stories of citizens and letting them set agendas.     

The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism

The boundaries between news and entertainment, and between public affairs and pop culture, have become difficult if not impossible to discern. At the intersection of those borders sits The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a hybrid blend of comedy, news, and political conversation that is difficult to pigeon hole. Although the program often is dismissed as being “fake” news, its significance for political communication may run much deeper. This study first locates The Daily Show within an emerging media environment defined by the forces of technological multiplication, economic consolidation, and discursive integration, a landscape in which “real” news is becoming increasingly harder to identify or define. It then offers an interpretive reading of the program that understands the show not as “fake news,” but as an experiment in journalism. It argues that the show uses techniques drawn from genres of news, comedy, and television talk to revive a journalism of critical inquiry and advance a model of deliberative democracy. Given the increasing popularity of the program, this essay concludes that The Daily Show has much to teach us about the possibilities of political journalism in the 21st century.     

The Local News Story: Is Quality a Choice?

The conventional wisdom about local TV news is that quality journalism does not sell and that only by focusing on crime, disasters, and other “soft news” can newscasts get good ratings. Political scientists have decried the poor quality of TV news as a betrayal of the press's mandate to inform citizens of the important policy issues of the day so that they can hold government officials accountable. This study tests the proposition that audiences prefer low effort, tabloid journalism by looking at external measures of commercial success—the Nielsen ratings data. Utilizing data from a 5‐year study matching the content quality of 33,911 local news stories from 154 TV stations in 50 TV markets nationwide to corresponding ratings success, we show that solid reporting and a focus on significant issues actually produce better ratings than slapdash or superficial tabloid journalism. Additionally, we find that strategy-oriented coverage of political campaigns that focuses on the horserace does not build an audience. These surprising results have practical implications for democratic practice and local TV news production.     

Inside a News Item: A Dispute Over Framing

Trust in serious journalism is based on our belief in the professionalism of journalistic practice. We expect televisions evening news to select the most significant events of the day and tell them in a fair and accurate manner. Whereas academic research agrees that news value or newsworthiness should be the guiding principle for selectivity, the principle is rarely spelled out in detail. Occasional attempts to infer these values empirically from what gets published or from whats left on the floor conceal the process of negotiation and disagreement that goes on in the newsroom and between professional journalists and the interests of the channels private or public owners. The case study presented here uses inside information that emerged during the course of a public debate following the broadcasting of a news item on Israels Public Television featuring football fans at a victory celebration welcoming Prime Minister Netanyahu with racist shouts. The analysis demonstrates that the same event may evoke several competing frames and thus may be included or dropped, or appear at various spots in the lineup for different reasons. The paper raises the question of whether the authority of the news might not be enhanced on occasion by sharing competing frames with viewers.     

Presidential Influence of the News Media: The Case of the Press Conference

Can presidents influence news coverage through their press conferences? Scant research has explored this question leaving two possible answers. On the one hand, presidential news management efforts, combined with norms of journalistic professionalism and the cost of producing news, suggest that the nightly news will cover presidential press conferences. On the other hand, the costs of delivering press conferences espoused by some scholars insinuate that press conferences will have little impact on news coverage. To determine whether the press conference influences news coverage, I use plagiarism detection software to assess the propensity of television news to incorporate the president's rhetoric into stories that cover the president's press conferences. I find that news reports on the press conference rely heavily on the president's words, indicating that it is an important event for presidential influence of the news media and perhaps eventually the public.     

The interconnections of political power,psychotherapy, and world community

This study of the main evening television news programs in four European countries focuses on the framing of news surrounding a major European event, the January 1, 1999, introduction of the common European currency, the euro. We investigated the visibility of political and economic news in general and of the launch of the euro in particular. We found variations across countries in the emphasis on political and economic news, with the proportion of the newscast normally devoted to these subjects ranging from 45% to 60%. Journalists in all countries were more likely to emphasize conflict (rather than economic consequences) in framing general political and economic news. In the coverage of the launch of the euro, there was a greater emphasis on framing the news in terms of economic consequences. The findings are discussed in terms of influences on framing practices internal and external to journalism and the value of the cross-national comparative approach.     

Citizen journalism as a contestant in the history of journalism

This article looks at citizen journalism as a contestant in the history of journalism. It reports on a study that employed a qualitative research approach through a qualitative questionnaire and a focus group discussion (FGD). Through purposive sampling, the participants in the study were drawn from the citizen journalists contributing news content to the citizen journalism websites Sahara Reporters and Iindaba Ziyafika from a Nigerian and a South African perspective, respectively. For diversity purposes, other participants were drawn from the Global Voices online, which is popular for engaging citizen journalists from different parts of the African continent: Tanzania, Cameroon, Ghana, Mozambique and Kenya, to mention a few. The questionnaire was distributed through the technical teams of the websites for self-completion by the citizen journalists. The FGD participants were drawn from those who contributed news content to Iindaba Ziyafika in South Africa where the researchers are based. The questionnaire and the FGD were addressed in English. The study findings showed that mainstream journalism acknowledges the importance of the phenomenon of citizen journalism and the people involved, but it still stands firm that objectivity is a precondition of journalism. The study aimed to cultivate an appreciation of the relationship between traditional and citizen journalism as the field of journalism endures major transformations.     

From Contest to Content: The Impact of Public Journalism on New Zealand Election Campaign Coverage

Supporters of public journalism hope to reengage citizens with politics and overcome the shortcomings of contemporary political journalism. However, there has been little systematic study of how public journalism differs from mainstream journalism. During the 1996 general election campaign in New Zealand, the first under proportional representation, three newspapers, conscious of the challenges imposed by electoral changes, experimented with public journalism coverage. This presented an opportunity to study how coverage as a whole differed from coverage of the previous elections and what specific changes were the result of public journalism initiatives. The researchers analyzed 1,938 stories from a 12-day sample of the New Zealand general election campaign coverage in 1993 and 1996. A total of seven metropolitan and provincial papers were included. The results showed public journalism articles covered proportionally more policy issues and concentrated less on personality than conventional campaign stories. Public journalism stories also were less negative and more neutral in tone and were more inclined to be ''soft'' news, reflecting a tendency to cover issues rather than events. Public journalism articles also were less likely than conventional coverage to cover the campaign from a ''horse race'' angle. The findings provide support for the utility of public journalism in campaign reporting.     

Exploring contextual influences on the architectural structure of South African television news programmes This article is partly based on a paper presented at the International Broadcasting Content Regulation Conference,Johannesburg, 27–29 May 2005

Abstract

This article uses a qualitative textual analysis of in-depth interviews with senior news processors as a methodology to explore the unique contextual dimensions that may influence the architectural structure of South African television news programmes. The discussion rests on the basic assumption that news will always present a mediated and constructed version of reality. Six communicative frames categories have been selected to investigate operational processes and issues organising the production process of news: short, straight-forward, ‘objective’ news reports; single-sourced news items based on one major voice or main perspective; investigative news reports; marketable news chosen for financial potential; news items based on community and cultural events; and mythic tales. The findings indicate that the interface between contextual factors and journalistic practices contributes to the unique challenges facing the industry in South Africa. The article concludes with an appeal to news processors to reflect on the consequences and effects their programmes have on audiences’ perception of reality, and proposes recommendations to enable audiences to become more empowered and engaged viewers.     

A Matter of Context: A Comparative Study of Media Environments and News Consumption Gaps in Europe

Research has shown that individual-level characteristics such as socioeconomic status and political interest are becoming more important as predictors of news consumption in a rapidly changing media environment. Despite this general trend, this article argues that the importance of individual-level predictors of news consumption varies between national media environments. We use extensive survey data from 16 European countries and multilevel modeling in order to investigate both contextual-level and cross-level effects on news consumption. The results show that media environment characteristics have additional effects on news consumption beyond the effects of individual-level characteristics such as education and political interest, but also moderating impacts on these individual-level predictors of news consumption. More specifically, national media environments characterized by higher levels of newspaper-centrism are related to smaller gaps in newspaper reading between those with high and low levels of education and political interest. Lower degrees of newspaper-centrism are, on the other hand, related to a weaker “lower-class bias” of television news and larger gaps in news consumption between those with and without high political interest. These findings are discussed in light of previous research on news consumption, knowledge, and participation gaps as well as cross-national comparative research.     

Learning from the news: Experiments in media,modality, and reporting about star wars

This study explores what ordinary American adults learn from news reported in different communications modalities and media. In the first experiment, the text of news items about Star Wars is held constant but the communications modality varies. In the second experiment, news reports reflect the journalistic style of television, newspaper, and magazine reporting. In the modality experiment, subjects learned equally well from the audiovisual, audio, or print versions of the stories. In the media experiment, subjects in the magazine and television conditions gained substantially more information than those in the newspaper condition; but when subjects were asked to apply information to policy judgments about Star Wars, magazine readers were more dovish than television viewers. For Star Wars news, it appears that the content and characteristic style of a news medium have important effects on news comprehension, particularly for the least informed and least interested members of the public.     

The Method is the Message: The Current State of Political Communication Research

Formal journalism ethics, as laid out in codes of ethics by journalism associations and the like, is part of a wider debate on media ethics that has been triggered in the Middle East due to the advent of global media in the region. This study compares journalism codes from Europe and the Islamic world in order to revisit the widespread academic assumption of a deep divide between Western and Oriental philosophies of journalism that has played a role in many debates on political communication in the area. The analysis shows that there is a broad intercultural consensus that standards of truth and objectivity should be central values of journalism. Norms protecting the private sphere are, in fact, more pronounced in countries of the Near and Middle East, North Africa, and in the majority of Muslim states in Asia than is generally the case in Europe, although the weighing of privacy protection against the public's right to information is today a component of most journalistic codes of behavior in Islamic countries. Obvious differences between the West and many Islamic countries are to be found in the status accorded to freedom of expression. Although ideas of freedom have entered formal media ethics in the Middle East and the Islamic world, only a minority of documents limit the interference into freedom to cases where other fundamental rights (e.g., privacy) are touched, whereas the majority would have journalists accept political, national, religious, or cultural boundaries to their work. Despite existing differences between Western and Middle Eastern/Islamic journalism ethics and in contrast to the overall neoconservative (Islamist) trends in societal norms, formal journalism ethics has been a sphere of growing universalization throughout the last decades.     

革新时期的越南新闻教育:改革与探索

越南新闻本科教育起步于革新后,存在着设施、教材、师资等方面的不足,培养的人才尚不能适应实际工作的需求。目前,越南在坚持社会主义、爱国主义新闻教育理念的前提下,吸收现代新闻教育理念,对现有大学新闻教育模式进行改革和探索;同时重视对现有新闻队伍的短期培训。     

Sports Journalists and Corruption in Zimbabwean Football: Reflections on the Asiagate Scandal

Zimbabwe experienced a high-profile football match fixing scandal between 2007 and 2010, commonly known as the Asiagate scandal. The men’s senior national football team – the Warriors – reportedly fell victim to Asian betting syndicates. Three journalists from the statecontrolled media were sanctioned by the Zimbabwe Football Association (ZIFA) for allegedly participating in the scandal. Burgeoning literature on “brown envelopes” and freebies in journalistic practice in Africa at large, and Zimbabwe in particular, has under-theorised this phenomenon in Zimbabwe’s sports journalism fraternity. Focusing on the Asiagate scandal, this article reports on a study that used the “brown envelope journalism” theoretical lens to examine the subject and its repercussions on sports journalism practice, from the view point of sports journalists. In-depth interviews were conducted with selected sports journalists both from the publicly owned and privately owned media in Zimbabwe. The article avers that due to the deteriorating socio-economic environment, some journalists were “seduced” by “brown envelopes” and “recruited” into a “patronage” corrupt network by match fixers. Consequently, “patronised” journalists became pliant tools in hands of match fixers and failed to “bark” at the malpractices masterminded by their “benefactors”.     

Investigating Journalist Influences on Political Issue Agendas at Westminster

This piece investigates the role of news media and journalists in setting political agendas. It presents evidence to challenge the agenda-setting paradigm most often adopted in such research. Instead it argues for greater employment of methods and perspectives more usually employed in media sociology. It then presents findings from research on Members of Parliament (MPs) in Britain. The findings, based mostly on semistructured interviews with 40 MPs, offer some interesting perspectives on the relationship between political journalism and the political process at Westminster. The overall conclusion is that intense media attention on issues can shift political agendas and policy development, but not according to the simple stimulus-response model of agenda-setting commonly employed. More often, news content and journalists play a significant role in setting agendas because politicians use them, in a variety of ways, to promote or negotiate agendas and policy options among themselves. In other words, journalism and journalists have a significant social and cultural role in helping MPs, consciously or unconsciously, to reach agreed agendas and positions.     

Journalism as “Prostitution”: Understanding Russia's Reactions to Anna Politkovskaya's Murder

When the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in her apartment building in Moscow in October 2006, heads of Western governments and nongovernmental organizations hurried to make strong statements condemning the murder, and public rallies in Politkovskaya's honor were held in front of Russian embassies across the world. In contrast to this swift and unequivocal response, the reaction of Russian officials, journalists, and the public at large was delayed, lukewarm, or nonexistent, much to the incomprehension of Western observers. To understand why the majority of Russian citizens were unmoved by Politkovskaya's murder, this article will contend, we need to understand the specific history of media-political transformation in Russia over the past decade and a half. This includes (a) approaching Soviet journalism as a unique nexus of ethics and politics, (b) studying the centrifugal forces unleashed during Russia's media privatization in the 1990s, and (c) understanding how those forces (in tension with the centering pull under Putin) have been shaping the practices and meaning of journalism in post-Soviet Russia over the past decade and a half. Such context-sensitive and historically contingent exploration will, in turn, suggest new theoretical tools for thinking about journalistic action, or agency, in political contexts short of classical liberalism more broadly.     

Questioning the media and democracy relationship: the case of South Africa

This article addresses normative ideas around the role of journalism and the news media's links to the democratic process in South Africa and many other post-colonial societies in the Global South. In particular, the article addresses questions around the news media's role as the Fourth Estate and its claims to public representation, as well as the role that new media and social media in particular play in the media-politics nexus and in the strengthening of democracy (in its many guises). The article assesses the contextual factors that need to be considered in the analysis of media development and the roles and functions ascribed to the news media from within the context of the post-colony and young democracies in the Global South.     

“Journalism ideology” and its influence on the producers of Radio Sonder Grense radio current affairs

In the same way that people can have a political or a personal ideology, their professional identities and how they practise a craft or an occupation may be influenced by what can be labelled as a “professional ideology”. Through conducting interviews with the producers of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) Afrikaans radio programmes Monitor, Spektrum and Naweek-Aktueel, this article reports on research which showed that there is indeed such a thing as a “journalism ideology”. The interviews focused on how “internal influences” – such as a journalist's background and training, newsroom routines – and “external influences” – such as the audience – influenced the decisions they made in choosing news stories and producing content. This “journalism ideology” influences the producers and in turn the news content of these current affairs programmes that are listened to daily by almost two million listeners. The conclusion drawn from the study is that, although the participants’ “journalism ideology” largely determines the news stories for their programmes, structural forces, newsroom routines and organisational constraints often dictate their actions. Finally, although all the participants saw themselves as “watchdogs of democracy”, internal pressures within the SABC could endanger that role.