Pub Date : 2022-08-04DOI: 10.1177/19401612221117106
M. Chan, Jingjing Yi, Dmitry Kuznetsov
Much research has shown that online news engenders greater political participation, but less attention has been paid to how the relationship can be suppressed by government online surveillance and censorship, especially as Internet freedoms continue to decline in many parts of the world. Drawing from 2017–20 World Value Survey and Varieties of Democracy project data, we conducted multilevel analyses across forty-four countries from seven continents that have different political and media systems. Results showed that online news and online surveillance were positively related to political engagement while online censorship was negatively related. Cross-level interactions also showed some support for the informational theory of repression, whereby the relationships among online news, surveillance, and engagement were conditioned at different levels of online censorship. The results suggest that while country-level online surveillance and censorship is highly correlated, varying levels can engender or suppress political engagement in different ways, which have implications for future studies on the dynamics of government digital repression and citizen participation in politics from a global comparative perspective.
{"title":"Government Digital Repression and Political Engagement: A Cross-National Multilevel Analysis Examining the Roles of Online Surveillance and Censorship","authors":"M. Chan, Jingjing Yi, Dmitry Kuznetsov","doi":"10.1177/19401612221117106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221117106","url":null,"abstract":"Much research has shown that online news engenders greater political participation, but less attention has been paid to how the relationship can be suppressed by government online surveillance and censorship, especially as Internet freedoms continue to decline in many parts of the world. Drawing from 2017–20 World Value Survey and Varieties of Democracy project data, we conducted multilevel analyses across forty-four countries from seven continents that have different political and media systems. Results showed that online news and online surveillance were positively related to political engagement while online censorship was negatively related. Cross-level interactions also showed some support for the informational theory of repression, whereby the relationships among online news, surveillance, and engagement were conditioned at different levels of online censorship. The results suggest that while country-level online surveillance and censorship is highly correlated, varying levels can engender or suppress political engagement in different ways, which have implications for future studies on the dynamics of government digital repression and citizen participation in politics from a global comparative perspective.","PeriodicalId":47605,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Press-Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44696436","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}
Though news representations of protest have been studied extensively, little is known about how media audiences critique such representations. Focusing on TikTok as a space for media criticism, this article examines how users employ the app to respond to representations of protest in mainstream news media. Content collected in the spring of 2021 illuminated two very distinct foci of discussion about news representations of protest: the Black Lives Matter movement and the Capitol riot. Our qualitative content analysis of TikTok videos and their related comments demonstrates how users employed TikTok’s creative affordances to dissect specific news representations, critique the media apparatus, and expand news narratives. These findings shed light on the complex role of TikTok as a platform for media criticism—one that can be used for both democratic and non-democratic ends.
{"title":"Protesting the Protest Paradigm: TikTok as a Space for Media Criticism","authors":"Ioana Literat, Lillian Boxman-Shabtai, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik","doi":"10.1177/19401612221117481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221117481","url":null,"abstract":"Though news representations of protest have been studied extensively, little is known about how media audiences critique such representations. Focusing on TikTok as a space for media criticism, this article examines how users employ the app to respond to representations of protest in mainstream news media. Content collected in the spring of 2021 illuminated two very distinct foci of discussion about news representations of protest: the Black Lives Matter movement and the Capitol riot. Our qualitative content analysis of TikTok videos and their related comments demonstrates how users employed TikTok’s creative affordances to dissect specific news representations, critique the media apparatus, and expand news narratives. These findings shed light on the complex role of TikTok as a platform for media criticism—one that can be used for both democratic and non-democratic ends.","PeriodicalId":47605,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Press-Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44798841","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 : 2022-07-14DOI: 10.1177/19401612221112572
Antonis Kalogeropoulos, Benjamin Toff, R. Fletcher
The watchdog role has been one of the most widely discussed normative functions of the press. In this study, we examine the public’s attitudes toward the news media’s watchdog performance and how they correlate with trust in news and news avoidance, two important phenomena for democracy and the health of the public sphere. We further examine how individual predispositions (e.g. political interest, ideology) and contextual variables (e.g. press freedom) moderate these relationships. Based on data from the 2019 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, and controlling for a range of factors, we find that across 38 countries, watchdog performance evaluations are positively associated with trust in news but that they are also positively associated with higher levels of news avoidance. Last, we find that evaluations of media in other functions like helping citizens understand the most important topics of the day and choosing relevant topics were more strongly associated to trust in news and lower news avoidance levels than watchdog performance evaluations.
{"title":"The Watchdog Press in the Doghouse: A Comparative Study of Attitudes about Accountability Journalism, Trust in News, and News Avoidance","authors":"Antonis Kalogeropoulos, Benjamin Toff, R. Fletcher","doi":"10.1177/19401612221112572","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221112572","url":null,"abstract":"The watchdog role has been one of the most widely discussed normative functions of the press. In this study, we examine the public’s attitudes toward the news media’s watchdog performance and how they correlate with trust in news and news avoidance, two important phenomena for democracy and the health of the public sphere. We further examine how individual predispositions (e.g. political interest, ideology) and contextual variables (e.g. press freedom) moderate these relationships. Based on data from the 2019 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, and controlling for a range of factors, we find that across 38 countries, watchdog performance evaluations are positively associated with trust in news but that they are also positively associated with higher levels of news avoidance. Last, we find that evaluations of media in other functions like helping citizens understand the most important topics of the day and choosing relevant topics were more strongly associated to trust in news and lower news avoidance levels than watchdog performance evaluations.","PeriodicalId":47605,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Press-Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41621670","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 : 2022-07-11DOI: 10.1177/19401612221112003
A. Shehata, Mats Ekström, Per Oleskog Tryggvason
New political cleavages are reshaping the political landscape in established democracies. The classic left-right ideological dimension that has structured politics for decades is increasingly challenged by a sociocultural value dimension. At the same time, growing opportunities for media choice open for new forms of selective news exposure along political lines. We argue that previous research has too narrowly focused on traditional ideological cleavages, neglecting the increasingly important sociocultural value dimension of politics. Using four waves of panel survey data collected in Sweden during 2020 and 2021, this study analyses ideological selective exposure, audience composition, and reinforcing spirals across a range of mainstream and alternative news outlets. Findings show (1) that the sociocultural value dimension is more important than the socioeconomic dimension for explaining news choices, (2) that it structures news audiences in uniquely distinct ways, and (3) that these relationships are highly stable over time—reflecting patterns of de facto selective exposure and ideological maintenance, rather than reinforcement. These findings bring new insights to research on selective news exposure, political polarization, and changing ideological cleavages in Western democracies.
{"title":"Selective Exposure and New Political Cleavages: Media Use and Ideological Reinforcement Over Time","authors":"A. Shehata, Mats Ekström, Per Oleskog Tryggvason","doi":"10.1177/19401612221112003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221112003","url":null,"abstract":"New political cleavages are reshaping the political landscape in established democracies. The classic left-right ideological dimension that has structured politics for decades is increasingly challenged by a sociocultural value dimension. At the same time, growing opportunities for media choice open for new forms of selective news exposure along political lines. We argue that previous research has too narrowly focused on traditional ideological cleavages, neglecting the increasingly important sociocultural value dimension of politics. Using four waves of panel survey data collected in Sweden during 2020 and 2021, this study analyses ideological selective exposure, audience composition, and reinforcing spirals across a range of mainstream and alternative news outlets. Findings show (1) that the sociocultural value dimension is more important than the socioeconomic dimension for explaining news choices, (2) that it structures news audiences in uniquely distinct ways, and (3) that these relationships are highly stable over time—reflecting patterns of de facto selective exposure and ideological maintenance, rather than reinforcement. These findings bring new insights to research on selective news exposure, political polarization, and changing ideological cleavages in Western democracies.","PeriodicalId":47605,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Press-Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43704204","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 : 2022-07-11DOI: 10.1177/19401612221112014
Atle Haugsgjerd, Rune Karlsen
We investigate how inequalities in political media use develop throughout election campaigns, and in particular whether social media use helps counterbalance traditional news consumption gaps. Using a four-wave individual-level panel survey of the Norwegian 2017 national election campaign, we run a series of latent growth models to investigate whether differences in news consumption based on gender, age, education, and political interest increase or decrease during campaigns. We find that news consumption gaps are either stable or converge throughout the campaign. Importantly, social media provides political information to those groups that use traditional media channels the least and thereby reduce overall gaps in political media consumption. In this way, election campaigns, to some extent, equalize inequalities in political news consumption when it matters the most.
{"title":"Election Campaigns, News Consumption Gaps, and Social Media: Equalizing Political News Use When It Matters?","authors":"Atle Haugsgjerd, Rune Karlsen","doi":"10.1177/19401612221112014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221112014","url":null,"abstract":"We investigate how inequalities in political media use develop throughout election campaigns, and in particular whether social media use helps counterbalance traditional news consumption gaps. Using a four-wave individual-level panel survey of the Norwegian 2017 national election campaign, we run a series of latent growth models to investigate whether differences in news consumption based on gender, age, education, and political interest increase or decrease during campaigns. We find that news consumption gaps are either stable or converge throughout the campaign. Importantly, social media provides political information to those groups that use traditional media channels the least and thereby reduce overall gaps in political media consumption. In this way, election campaigns, to some extent, equalize inequalities in political news consumption when it matters the most.","PeriodicalId":47605,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Press-Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44214784","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 : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1177/19401612221110741
Jessica Baldwin-Philippi
Joshua Scacco and Kevin Coe’s The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times presents a wellhistoricized account of how the office of the U.S. presidency and those who have held it since the 1980s have attempted to gain, shift, and navigate attention under changing technological conditions and a changing relationship between audience and speaker. The authors’ framework of the overarching contexts of any ubiquitous presidency (personalization, accessibility, and pluralism) and the particular goals of any presidency in a ubiquitous era (visibility, adaptation, and control) will continue to be useful as the conditions of ubiquity dominate the coming presidencies. While this book certainly influences the study of the presidency and presidential address, it also, thankfully, offers a broader approach that illuminates elements of digital political communication in a wider arena. As the authors argue in their conclusion, it can be extrapolated to better investigate and understand political elites outside of the particular office of the U.S. Presidency. Although the authors give examples of national leaders across a range of countries, I was struck by the potential usefulness of this lens to explore lower-level national office holders in the United States (senators and highprofile members of congress) whose campaigns and administrations have recently harnessed or made use of the conditions of ubiquity. As Coe and Scacco trace the past 30 years of the presidency and shifts in media attention and use by presidents, the historical development of ubiquity is where this book truly shines. By untangling ubiquity from the digital contexts in which we often see the term deployed, Scacco and Coe’s intervention of studying spaces that garner public attention that does not always get defined as “news” and are often not considered political, including The Hollywood Reporter, Consumer Reports, who a president grants a medal of freedom, sports programs, and entertainment programmings like appearances on late-shows or MTV. Impressively, throughout the book, Book Review
约书亚·斯卡科（Joshua Scacco）和凯文·科（Kevin Coe）的《无处不在的总统任期：动荡时代的总统沟通与数字民主》（The Ubiquitous Presidence:Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times，并在不断变化的技术条件和观众与演讲者之间不断变化的关系下引导注意力。作者对任何无处不在的总统任期的总体背景（个性化、可访问性和多元化）以及无处不在时代任何总统任期的特定目标（可见性、适应性和控制力）的框架将继续有用，因为无处不在的条件将主导下一任总统。虽然这本书肯定会影响对总统任期和总统演讲的研究，但值得庆幸的是，它也提供了一种更广泛的方法，在更广泛的领域阐明了数字政治传播的要素。正如作者在结论中所说，可以推断出这一点，以更好地调查和了解美国总统府特定办公室之外的政治精英。尽管作者列举了一系列国家领导人的例子，但我被这个镜头的潜在有用性所打动，它可以探索美国较低级别的国家官员（参议员和知名国会议员），他们的竞选活动和政府最近利用或利用了无处不在的条件。随着科和斯卡科追溯过去30年的总统任期，以及总统对媒体关注和使用的转变，无处不在的历史发展才是这本书真正闪光的地方。Scacco和Coe通过将普遍性与我们经常看到的使用该术语的数字环境分开，对吸引公众关注的空间进行了干预，这些空间并不总是被定义为“新闻”，通常不被视为政治性的，包括《好莱坞报道》、《消费者报告》、，以及娱乐节目，如在晚间节目或MTV上露面。令人印象深刻的是，整本书，书评
{"title":"Book Review: The ubiquitous presidency: Presidential communication and digital democracy in tumultuous times by Joshua M. Scacco & Kevin Coe","authors":"Jessica Baldwin-Philippi","doi":"10.1177/19401612221110741","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221110741","url":null,"abstract":"Joshua Scacco and Kevin Coe’s The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times presents a wellhistoricized account of how the office of the U.S. presidency and those who have held it since the 1980s have attempted to gain, shift, and navigate attention under changing technological conditions and a changing relationship between audience and speaker. The authors’ framework of the overarching contexts of any ubiquitous presidency (personalization, accessibility, and pluralism) and the particular goals of any presidency in a ubiquitous era (visibility, adaptation, and control) will continue to be useful as the conditions of ubiquity dominate the coming presidencies. While this book certainly influences the study of the presidency and presidential address, it also, thankfully, offers a broader approach that illuminates elements of digital political communication in a wider arena. As the authors argue in their conclusion, it can be extrapolated to better investigate and understand political elites outside of the particular office of the U.S. Presidency. Although the authors give examples of national leaders across a range of countries, I was struck by the potential usefulness of this lens to explore lower-level national office holders in the United States (senators and highprofile members of congress) whose campaigns and administrations have recently harnessed or made use of the conditions of ubiquity. As Coe and Scacco trace the past 30 years of the presidency and shifts in media attention and use by presidents, the historical development of ubiquity is where this book truly shines. By untangling ubiquity from the digital contexts in which we often see the term deployed, Scacco and Coe’s intervention of studying spaces that garner public attention that does not always get defined as “news” and are often not considered political, including The Hollywood Reporter, Consumer Reports, who a president grants a medal of freedom, sports programs, and entertainment programmings like appearances on late-shows or MTV. Impressively, throughout the book, Book Review","PeriodicalId":47605,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Press-Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41274204","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 : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1177/19401612221082074
Kelley Cotter, Kjerstin Thorson
In this paper, we explore U.S. young adults’ strategies for evaluating news and information value within the rapidly changing, increasingly digitalized media environment. We draw on interviews with U.S. young adults conducted between April and November 2020. Based on our findings, we develop the concept of information cacophony to characterize young adults’ experience of the contemporary information environment. Information cacophony is characterized by the jarring noise of many, discordant voices offering up information, under conditions of low media trust and an absence of a pre-defined epistemic hierarchy of sources. We illustrate how the volume and discordance of voices circulating content online makes it difficult for young adults to know what to believe, and show that young peoples’ strategies for evaluating information are deeply entangled with the sociality and emotionality of the experience of information cacophony. We argue that existing theory is not yet well-developed to account for content evaluations and effects resulting from the novel complexities of navigating information cacophony. Existing work remains focused primarily on news exposure and effects, which misses the broader informational context within which young adults find themselves, and evolving strategies for evaluating information.
{"title":"Judging Value in a Time of Information Cacophony: Young Adults, Social media, and the Messiness of do-it-Yourself Expertise","authors":"Kelley Cotter, Kjerstin Thorson","doi":"10.1177/19401612221082074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221082074","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we explore U.S. young adults’ strategies for evaluating news and information value within the rapidly changing, increasingly digitalized media environment. We draw on interviews with U.S. young adults conducted between April and November 2020. Based on our findings, we develop the concept of information cacophony to characterize young adults’ experience of the contemporary information environment. Information cacophony is characterized by the jarring noise of many, discordant voices offering up information, under conditions of low media trust and an absence of a pre-defined epistemic hierarchy of sources. We illustrate how the volume and discordance of voices circulating content online makes it difficult for young adults to know what to believe, and show that young peoples’ strategies for evaluating information are deeply entangled with the sociality and emotionality of the experience of information cacophony. We argue that existing theory is not yet well-developed to account for content evaluations and effects resulting from the novel complexities of navigating information cacophony. Existing work remains focused primarily on news exposure and effects, which misses the broader informational context within which young adults find themselves, and evolving strategies for evaluating information.","PeriodicalId":47605,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Press-Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41801923","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 : 2022-06-19DOI: 10.1177/19401612221106405
Kaiping Chen, Amanda L. Molder, Zening Duan, Shelley Boulianne, C. Eckart, Prince Mallari, Diyi Yang
Twitter enables an online public sphere for social movement actors, news organizations, and others to frame climate change and the climate movement. In this paper, we analyze five million English tweets posted from 2018 to 2021 demonstrating how peaks in Twitter activity relate to key events and how the framing of the climate strike discourse has evolved over the past three years. We also collected over 30,000 news articles from major news sources in English-speaking countries (Australia, Canada, United States, United Kingdom) to demonstrate how climate movement actors and media differ in their framing of this issue, attention to policy solutions, attribution of blame, and efforts to mobilize citizens to act on this issue. News outlets tend to report on global politicians’ (in)action toward climate policy, the consequences of climate change, and industry's response to the climate crisis. Differently, climate movement actors on Twitter advocate for political actions and policy changes as well as addressing the social justice issues surrounding climate change. We also revealed that conversations around the climate movement on Twitter are highly politicized, with a substantial number of tweets targeting politicians, partisans, and country actors. These findings contribute to our understanding of how people use social media to frame political issues and collective action, in comparison to the traditional mainstream news outlets.
{"title":"How Climate Movement Actors and News Media Frame Climate Change and Strike: Evidence from Analyzing Twitter and News Media Discourse from 2018 to 2021","authors":"Kaiping Chen, Amanda L. Molder, Zening Duan, Shelley Boulianne, C. Eckart, Prince Mallari, Diyi Yang","doi":"10.1177/19401612221106405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221106405","url":null,"abstract":"Twitter enables an online public sphere for social movement actors, news organizations, and others to frame climate change and the climate movement. In this paper, we analyze five million English tweets posted from 2018 to 2021 demonstrating how peaks in Twitter activity relate to key events and how the framing of the climate strike discourse has evolved over the past three years. We also collected over 30,000 news articles from major news sources in English-speaking countries (Australia, Canada, United States, United Kingdom) to demonstrate how climate movement actors and media differ in their framing of this issue, attention to policy solutions, attribution of blame, and efforts to mobilize citizens to act on this issue. News outlets tend to report on global politicians’ (in)action toward climate policy, the consequences of climate change, and industry's response to the climate crisis. Differently, climate movement actors on Twitter advocate for political actions and policy changes as well as addressing the social justice issues surrounding climate change. We also revealed that conversations around the climate movement on Twitter are highly politicized, with a substantial number of tweets targeting politicians, partisans, and country actors. These findings contribute to our understanding of how people use social media to frame political issues and collective action, in comparison to the traditional mainstream news outlets.","PeriodicalId":47605,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Press-Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42024637","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 : 2022-06-09DOI: 10.1177/19401612221103144
Ruth A. Palmer, Benjamin Toff
Scholars have long argued that incidental news exposure (INE) is a potentially valuable way citizens gain political information and learn about current affairs. Yet growing scholarship on news avoidance suggests many people still manage to consume little news, and algorithmic curation may decrease the likelihood that they will be exposed to it incidentally. In this article, we put the literatures on INE, news avoidance, and political talk into dialogue with one another. Then, by inductively analyzing over a hundred in-depth interviews conducted from 2016 to 2020 with news avoiders in the UK, Spain, and the United States, we explore how they encounter news incidentally and to what extent they feel the news is accessible and available to them. Our audience-centric approach highlights that interviewees often did not make a clear distinction between direct encounters with professional news (“firsthand news”) and discussions of news (“secondhand news”), especially online. When they did make a distinction, the latter was often more salient for them. We also find that just as news consumers have repertoires of news sources on which they habitually rely, news avoiders have repertoires of sources for incidental exposure to news to stay informed about major events and anything that might affect them directly. And yet, those repertoires catch only the biggest and most sensational stories of the day and do little to help them contextualize or understand the news they encounter, contributing to their sense that news is neither entirely absent nor ambient in the way scholars have theorized.
{"title":"Neither Absent nor Ambient: Incidental News Exposure From the Perspective of News Avoiders in the UK, United States, and Spain","authors":"Ruth A. Palmer, Benjamin Toff","doi":"10.1177/19401612221103144","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221103144","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars have long argued that incidental news exposure (INE) is a potentially valuable way citizens gain political information and learn about current affairs. Yet growing scholarship on news avoidance suggests many people still manage to consume little news, and algorithmic curation may decrease the likelihood that they will be exposed to it incidentally. In this article, we put the literatures on INE, news avoidance, and political talk into dialogue with one another. Then, by inductively analyzing over a hundred in-depth interviews conducted from 2016 to 2020 with news avoiders in the UK, Spain, and the United States, we explore how they encounter news incidentally and to what extent they feel the news is accessible and available to them. Our audience-centric approach highlights that interviewees often did not make a clear distinction between direct encounters with professional news (“firsthand news”) and discussions of news (“secondhand news”), especially online. When they did make a distinction, the latter was often more salient for them. We also find that just as news consumers have repertoires of news sources on which they habitually rely, news avoiders have repertoires of sources for incidental exposure to news to stay informed about major events and anything that might affect them directly. And yet, those repertoires catch only the biggest and most sensational stories of the day and do little to help them contextualize or understand the news they encounter, contributing to their sense that news is neither entirely absent nor ambient in the way scholars have theorized.","PeriodicalId":47605,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Press-Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2022-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47163132","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 : 2022-06-06DOI: 10.1177/19401612221104740
Tobias Heidenreich, Jakob-Moritz Eberl, Petro Tolochko, F. Lind, H. Boomgaarden
Political actors play an increasingly important role in the dissemination of political information on social media. However, relatively little is known about the mechanisms why specific news items are shared with the support base instead of others. For a timespan between December 2017 and the end of 2018, we combine the analysis of Facebook content from 1,022 politicians associated with 20 political parties from Germany, Spain, and the UK, with an automated content analysis of media coverage from 22 major online news outlets, and survey data in a multilevel binomial regression approach. By comparing news items that have been shared by one or several political parties with news items that have not been shared by any of them, we overcome the selection biases of previous studies in the field of news dissemination. Findings show that a news item's likelihood to be shared by a politician increases (1) if that politician's party is mentioned in the news item, (2) the more salient their party's owned issues are in the news item, and (3) the more party supporters tend to read the news outlet in which the news item is published. We contextualize these findings in light of political actors’ multi-faceted motivations for news sharing on social media and discuss how this process potentially reinforces an information bias that may contribute to the polarization and fragmentation of audiences.
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