Pub Date : 2023-03-21DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2193146
Philipp Müller, Chung-hong Chan, Katharina Ludwig, Rainer Freudenthaler, Hartmut Wessler
ABSTRACT News coverage plays a crucial role in the formation of attitudes toward ethnic and religious minority groups. On the attitudinal level, it is an established notion that individuals’ explicit and implicit judgments of the same groups can vary. Yet, less is known about the prevalence of implicit group judgments in news coverage. Focusing on a large variety of ethnic and religious minority groups in Germany, the present study sets out to fill this gap. We use semi-supervised machine learning to distinguish explicit and implicit stigmatization of ethnic and religious groups in German journalistic coverage (n = 697,913 articles). Findings suggest that groups that are associated with less wealthy countries, and with culturally more distant countries, face more stigmatization, both explicitly and implicitly. Yet, the data also show that groups associated with Islam and groups with large refugee populations living in the country of study are implicitly, but not explicitly stigmatized in news coverage. We discuss these and other resulting patterns against the backdrop of sociological and psychological intergroup theories and reflect upon their implications for journalism.
{"title":"Differential Racism in the News: Using Semi-Supervised Machine Learning to Distinguish Explicit and Implicit Stigmatization of Ethnic and Religious Groups in Journalistic Discourse","authors":"Philipp Müller, Chung-hong Chan, Katharina Ludwig, Rainer Freudenthaler, Hartmut Wessler","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2193146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2193146","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT News coverage plays a crucial role in the formation of attitudes toward ethnic and religious minority groups. On the attitudinal level, it is an established notion that individuals’ explicit and implicit judgments of the same groups can vary. Yet, less is known about the prevalence of implicit group judgments in news coverage. Focusing on a large variety of ethnic and religious minority groups in Germany, the present study sets out to fill this gap. We use semi-supervised machine learning to distinguish explicit and implicit stigmatization of ethnic and religious groups in German journalistic coverage (n = 697,913 articles). Findings suggest that groups that are associated with less wealthy countries, and with culturally more distant countries, face more stigmatization, both explicitly and implicitly. Yet, the data also show that groups associated with Islam and groups with large refugee populations living in the country of study are implicitly, but not explicitly stigmatized in news coverage. We discuss these and other resulting patterns against the backdrop of sociological and psychological intergroup theories and reflect upon their implications for journalism.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49099951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-11DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2188499
R. Wouters, J. Lefevere
ABSTRACT Media attention is both an important outcome and a resource for protest groups. This paper examines media-movement dynamics using television news coverage of 1,277 protests in Belgium (2003–2019). We situate protest coverage in media issue attention cycles and scrutinize whether features of protest or rather media issue attention fluctuations are key for protest’s agenda-setting effect. Our results show that while most protests fail to alter the attention cycle, a considerable share of protests is followed by a significant increase in media issue attention, especially when surfing issue attention already on the rise. Overall, media issue attention cycles rather than protest features affect protest’s agenda-setting effect, suggesting that protest agenda-setting is more a matter of exploiting discursive opportunities than of forcing one’s issue on the media agenda by signaling newsworthiness. These findings have serious implications for our understanding of protest group agency in news making and agenda-setting.
{"title":"Making their Mark? How protest sparks, surfs, and sustains media issue attention","authors":"R. Wouters, J. Lefevere","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2188499","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2188499","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Media attention is both an important outcome and a resource for protest groups. This paper examines media-movement dynamics using television news coverage of 1,277 protests in Belgium (2003–2019). We situate protest coverage in media issue attention cycles and scrutinize whether features of protest or rather media issue attention fluctuations are key for protest’s agenda-setting effect. Our results show that while most protests fail to alter the attention cycle, a considerable share of protests is followed by a significant increase in media issue attention, especially when surfing issue attention already on the rise. Overall, media issue attention cycles rather than protest features affect protest’s agenda-setting effect, suggesting that protest agenda-setting is more a matter of exploiting discursive opportunities than of forcing one’s issue on the media agenda by signaling newsworthiness. These findings have serious implications for our understanding of protest group agency in news making and agenda-setting.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48726638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-08DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2187496
Matthew P. Motta, Dominik A. Stecuła
ABSTRACT Some might expect the promise of ending a global pandemic via vaccination to interrupt conventional partisan media effect processes. We test that possibility by bringing together sentiment-scored COVID vaccine stories (N > 17,000) from cable and mainstream news outlets, N > 180,000 Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports, and six original surveys (N = 6,499), in order to investigate (1) whether partisan news outlets covered COVID vaccination in different ways, and (2) if differences in coverage increased vaccine hesitancy. We find that Fox News’ (FXNWS) coverage was significantly more negative than that of other cable and mainstream sources, and is associated with increased negative public vaccine sentiment. In the aggregate, adverse event reports tended to increase following periods of heightened negativity on FXNWS. At the micro-level, self-reported FXNWS exposure is associated with increased vaccine refusal. Collectively, the results provide new insights into the public health consequences of vaccine politicization.
{"title":"The Effects of Partisan Media in the Face of Global Pandemic: How News Shaped COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy","authors":"Matthew P. Motta, Dominik A. Stecuła","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2187496","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2187496","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Some might expect the promise of ending a global pandemic via vaccination to interrupt conventional partisan media effect processes. We test that possibility by bringing together sentiment-scored COVID vaccine stories (N > 17,000) from cable and mainstream news outlets, N > 180,000 Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports, and six original surveys (N = 6,499), in order to investigate (1) whether partisan news outlets covered COVID vaccination in different ways, and (2) if differences in coverage increased vaccine hesitancy. We find that Fox News’ (FXNWS) coverage was significantly more negative than that of other cable and mainstream sources, and is associated with increased negative public vaccine sentiment. In the aggregate, adverse event reports tended to increase following periods of heightened negativity on FXNWS. At the micro-level, self-reported FXNWS exposure is associated with increased vaccine refusal. Collectively, the results provide new insights into the public health consequences of vaccine politicization.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45855120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-06DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2185332
Josephine Lukito, Jacob Gursky, Jordan M. Foley, Yunkang Yang, Katie Joseff, Porsmita Borah
ABSTRACT As digitally organized, conspiratorial extremist groups gain more attention in the United States, researchers face increasing calls to better understand their in-group and out-group communication strategies. Using the QAnon conspiracy community as a case study, we use data from news coverage, social media, and ethnographic field work surrounding a prominent QAnon conference to analyze the uptake and aftermath of a controversial comment made by a public figure at the event. Our mixed methods analysis finds that QAnon’s efforts to use retroactive doublespeak produced mixed results, persuading some members to re-interpret the comment; however, there was a limit to its effectiveness. Our findings contribute to the literature on political extremism and digital media by elucidating how anti-publics within the QAnon movement reconstruct events and thread the rhetorical needle to reconcile contradictory messages. In particular, we highlight the factors that precede anti-publics’ use of retroactive doublespeak and discuss its use to negotiate the tension between in-group and out-group interpretations of events.
{"title":"“No Reason[.] [I]t /Should/ Happen here”: Analyzing Flynn’s Retroactive Doublespeak During a QAnon Event","authors":"Josephine Lukito, Jacob Gursky, Jordan M. Foley, Yunkang Yang, Katie Joseff, Porsmita Borah","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2185332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2185332","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT As digitally organized, conspiratorial extremist groups gain more attention in the United States, researchers face increasing calls to better understand their in-group and out-group communication strategies. Using the QAnon conspiracy community as a case study, we use data from news coverage, social media, and ethnographic field work surrounding a prominent QAnon conference to analyze the uptake and aftermath of a controversial comment made by a public figure at the event. Our mixed methods analysis finds that QAnon’s efforts to use retroactive doublespeak produced mixed results, persuading some members to re-interpret the comment; however, there was a limit to its effectiveness. Our findings contribute to the literature on political extremism and digital media by elucidating how anti-publics within the QAnon movement reconstruct events and thread the rhetorical needle to reconcile contradictory messages. In particular, we highlight the factors that precede anti-publics’ use of retroactive doublespeak and discuss its use to negotiate the tension between in-group and out-group interpretations of events.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41841880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2181896
M. Germann, Fernando Mendez, Kostas Gemenis
ABSTRACT Voting advice applications (VAAs) are online tools that provide voters with personalized information on the extent to which their policy views match those of political parties or candidates. These tools have proliferated across advanced democracies in recent years and become integral parts of electoral campaigns, especially in multi-party systems. However, it remains unclear to what extent voters actually make use of VAAs to inform their voting preferences. We present new field-experimental evidence on the short-term effects of VAAs on party preferences from five European countries. We find consistent evidence that exposure to VAA advice leads voters to update their party preferences in line with the information provided. Furthermore, we find partial evidence that VAAs more strongly influence less politically interested and undecided voters. Overall, our results point to the potential value of VAAs as a mechanism to strengthen democratic representation and accountability.
{"title":"Do Voting Advice Applications Affect Party Preferences? Evidence from Field Experiments in Five European Countries","authors":"M. Germann, Fernando Mendez, Kostas Gemenis","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2181896","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2181896","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Voting advice applications (VAAs) are online tools that provide voters with personalized information on the extent to which their policy views match those of political parties or candidates. These tools have proliferated across advanced democracies in recent years and become integral parts of electoral campaigns, especially in multi-party systems. However, it remains unclear to what extent voters actually make use of VAAs to inform their voting preferences. We present new field-experimental evidence on the short-term effects of VAAs on party preferences from five European countries. We find consistent evidence that exposure to VAA advice leads voters to update their party preferences in line with the information provided. Furthermore, we find partial evidence that VAAs more strongly influence less politically interested and undecided voters. Overall, our results point to the potential value of VAAs as a mechanism to strengthen democratic representation and accountability.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44012884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-28DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2175398
Yilang Peng, Yingdan Lu, Cuihua Shen
ABSTRACT Today’s political misinformation has increasingly been created and consumed in visual formats, such as photographs, memes, and videos. Despite the ubiquity of visual media and the growing scholarly attention to misinformation, there is a relative dearth of research on visual misinformation. It remains unclear which specific visual formats (e.g., memes, visualizations) and features (e.g., color, human faces) contribute to visual misinformation's influence, either on their own or in combination with non-visual features and heuristics, and through what mechanisms. In response to these gaps, we identify a theoretical framework that explains the persuasive mechanisms and pathways of visual features in lending credibility (e.g., as arguments, heuristics, and attention determinants). We propose a list of relevant visual attributes to credibility perceptions and a research agenda that integrates methods including computational visual analysis, crowdsourced annotations, and experiments to advance our understanding of visual misinformation.
{"title":"An Agenda for Studying Credibility Perceptions of Visual Misinformation","authors":"Yilang Peng, Yingdan Lu, Cuihua Shen","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2175398","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2175398","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Today’s political misinformation has increasingly been created and consumed in visual formats, such as photographs, memes, and videos. Despite the ubiquity of visual media and the growing scholarly attention to misinformation, there is a relative dearth of research on visual misinformation. It remains unclear which specific visual formats (e.g., memes, visualizations) and features (e.g., color, human faces) contribute to visual misinformation's influence, either on their own or in combination with non-visual features and heuristics, and through what mechanisms. In response to these gaps, we identify a theoretical framework that explains the persuasive mechanisms and pathways of visual features in lending credibility (e.g., as arguments, heuristics, and attention determinants). We propose a list of relevant visual attributes to credibility perceptions and a research agenda that integrates methods including computational visual analysis, crowdsourced annotations, and experiments to advance our understanding of visual misinformation.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42665653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2168322
E. Knudsen, Åsta Dyrnes Nordø, M. H. Iversen
ABSTRACT In this study, we extend the literature on the rally ‘round the flag phenomenon, that is, that international crises tend to cause an increase in citizens’ approval of political institutions. We advance this literature and highlight its relevance for political communication research in three ways: 1) by theorizing and empirically testing two arguments for why rally effects should extend to trust in the news media on the institutional level, 2) by providing empirical evidence on how rally effects on trust in the media develop over time during an international crisis, and 3) by theorizing and testing the conditions under which rally effects on media trust are more likely to occur by studying heterogeneous effects. Through a panel design with a pre-crisis baseline of Norwegian citizens’ trust in news media, we find evidence to suggest that the compound effect of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis caused a long-lasting increase in trust in the news media in Norway, and that the degree of increase varied by citizens’ education and whether they belonged to a “high-risk” group. We also provide evidence to suggest that rally effects on news media trust are contingent on how important the news media is as a source of information about the crisis and the “trust nexus” between media trust and political trust. These insights extend our current understanding of how times of crisis affect trust in the news media.
{"title":"How Rally-Round-the-Flag Effects Shape Trust in the News Media: Evidence from Panel Waves before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis","authors":"E. Knudsen, Åsta Dyrnes Nordø, M. H. Iversen","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2168322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2168322","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this study, we extend the literature on the rally ‘round the flag phenomenon, that is, that international crises tend to cause an increase in citizens’ approval of political institutions. We advance this literature and highlight its relevance for political communication research in three ways: 1) by theorizing and empirically testing two arguments for why rally effects should extend to trust in the news media on the institutional level, 2) by providing empirical evidence on how rally effects on trust in the media develop over time during an international crisis, and 3) by theorizing and testing the conditions under which rally effects on media trust are more likely to occur by studying heterogeneous effects. Through a panel design with a pre-crisis baseline of Norwegian citizens’ trust in news media, we find evidence to suggest that the compound effect of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis caused a long-lasting increase in trust in the news media in Norway, and that the degree of increase varied by citizens’ education and whether they belonged to a “high-risk” group. We also provide evidence to suggest that rally effects on news media trust are contingent on how important the news media is as a source of information about the crisis and the “trust nexus” between media trust and political trust. These insights extend our current understanding of how times of crisis affect trust in the news media.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44194884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-21DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2172492
Kirill Bryanov, R. Kliegl, Olessia Koltsova, T. Lokot, Alexandre Miltsov, Sergei Pashakhin, A. Porshnev, Yadviga Sinyavskaya, Maksim Terpilovskii, Victoria Vziatysheva
ABSTRACT Research on news credibility and susceptibility to fake news has overwhelmingly focused on individual and message-level factors explaining why people view some news items as more credible than others. We argue that the consistency of the message’s content with the dominant mainstream narrative can have a powerful explanatory capacity as well, particularly in the domain of international news. We test this hypothesis experimentally using a sample of 8,559 social media users in three post-Soviet countries. Our analyses suggest that the consistency with the dominant narrative increases the perceived credibility of foreign affairs news independently of their veracity. We also demonstrate the moderating role of international conflict, government support, and news language in some national contexts but not others. Finally, we report how the effects of these factors on credibility vary according to whether the news items are real or fabricated and discuss the societal implications of our findings.
{"title":"What Drives Perceptions of Foreign News Coverage Credibility? A Cross-National Experiment Including Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine","authors":"Kirill Bryanov, R. Kliegl, Olessia Koltsova, T. Lokot, Alexandre Miltsov, Sergei Pashakhin, A. Porshnev, Yadviga Sinyavskaya, Maksim Terpilovskii, Victoria Vziatysheva","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2172492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2172492","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Research on news credibility and susceptibility to fake news has overwhelmingly focused on individual and message-level factors explaining why people view some news items as more credible than others. We argue that the consistency of the message’s content with the dominant mainstream narrative can have a powerful explanatory capacity as well, particularly in the domain of international news. We test this hypothesis experimentally using a sample of 8,559 social media users in three post-Soviet countries. Our analyses suggest that the consistency with the dominant narrative increases the perceived credibility of foreign affairs news independently of their veracity. We also demonstrate the moderating role of international conflict, government support, and news language in some national contexts but not others. Finally, we report how the effects of these factors on credibility vary according to whether the news items are real or fabricated and discuss the societal implications of our findings.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49152317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-20DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2175399
N. Usher
ABSTRACT While “news deserts” are rhetorically powerful, we argue the concept is deeply problematic due to its normative presumptions and its descriptive fuzziness. The concern over the loss of local journalism in the U.S. has become a moral panic. While US local journalism is in market failure, at least when conceptualized as a professional, commercial newspaper enterprise, current scholarship and public discourse about “news deserts” and the loss of local news has three major problems, all of which reinforce a false nostalgia for the role of local newspapers in communities and focus on saving local newspapers as they are rather than reimagining what local news could be. If scholars wish to fetishize the existence of a local news outlet in a community as essential to democratic life and civic connection, it might be helpful to think more critically about whether a local news outlet actually has content specific to that community. Similarly, declines are often unobservable in places that have already been limited in their local news provision because the starting point was already deeply problematic. The “news desert” deficit framing obscures historical news deserts, or areas that have long lacked access to professional, geographically specific news about their communities. We propose an approach that focuses on place-based specificity and argue that scholars may need to acknowledge that the availability of local news and information may play less of a role in overall political knowledge, social identity, and cultural cohesion in a hybridized, deeply polarized democracy.
{"title":"The Real Problems with the Problem of News Deserts: Toward Rooting Place, Precision, and Positionality in Scholarship on Local News and Democracy","authors":"N. Usher","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2175399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2175399","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT While “news deserts” are rhetorically powerful, we argue the concept is deeply problematic due to its normative presumptions and its descriptive fuzziness. The concern over the loss of local journalism in the U.S. has become a moral panic. While US local journalism is in market failure, at least when conceptualized as a professional, commercial newspaper enterprise, current scholarship and public discourse about “news deserts” and the loss of local news has three major problems, all of which reinforce a false nostalgia for the role of local newspapers in communities and focus on saving local newspapers as they are rather than reimagining what local news could be. If scholars wish to fetishize the existence of a local news outlet in a community as essential to democratic life and civic connection, it might be helpful to think more critically about whether a local news outlet actually has content specific to that community. Similarly, declines are often unobservable in places that have already been limited in their local news provision because the starting point was already deeply problematic. The “news desert” deficit framing obscures historical news deserts, or areas that have long lacked access to professional, geographically specific news about their communities. We propose an approach that focuses on place-based specificity and argue that scholars may need to acknowledge that the availability of local news and information may play less of a role in overall political knowledge, social identity, and cultural cohesion in a hybridized, deeply polarized democracy.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48509423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-09DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2172117
Guadalupe Madrigal
ABSTRACT What role do children play in media coverage of immigration, and what might this tell us about coverage of (and attitudes about) immigration more broadly? This study examines U.S. newspaper coverage of immigration from 1990 to 2020. Using multiple content analytic approaches, I find that newspaper coverage of immigration that includes mentions of children: (a) tends to be more positive in net sentiment, (b) tends not to focus on topics of politics and violence, and (c) tends to correlate with topics about family, education, religion, and community. Threat is found to be a regular feature of this news coverage; however, threat language does not vary systematically with the language of childhood or race. In all, these findings point to the salience of (positive) language about community in coverage about immigrant children. These findings are discussed as they relate to the impact of childhood representation in news coverage about immigration in the U.S., and how cueing community, such as family, when evaluating immigrants has the potential to produce more pro-immigrant attitudes amongst the American population.
{"title":"Community Matters: Content Analysis of Children in Immigration Media Coverage, 1990-2020","authors":"Guadalupe Madrigal","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2172117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2172117","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT What role do children play in media coverage of immigration, and what might this tell us about coverage of (and attitudes about) immigration more broadly? This study examines U.S. newspaper coverage of immigration from 1990 to 2020. Using multiple content analytic approaches, I find that newspaper coverage of immigration that includes mentions of children: (a) tends to be more positive in net sentiment, (b) tends not to focus on topics of politics and violence, and (c) tends to correlate with topics about family, education, religion, and community. Threat is found to be a regular feature of this news coverage; however, threat language does not vary systematically with the language of childhood or race. In all, these findings point to the salience of (positive) language about community in coverage about immigrant children. These findings are discussed as they relate to the impact of childhood representation in news coverage about immigration in the U.S., and how cueing community, such as family, when evaluating immigrants has the potential to produce more pro-immigrant attitudes amongst the American population.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49631829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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