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Younger and older generations are differently motivated in relation to news consumption and online political expression. In this paper, we suggest that different modes of citizenship characterize younger and older generations. To test the differential role of political interest in news consumption and online political expression, we use a survey of 3,210 people from the United States, 3,043 from the United Kingdom, and 3,031 from France. Our findings suggest that young citizens are more frequent users of online news overall and that the rank order of different news activities replicates cross-nationally. The frequency of online political expression is negatively related to age, with older people less likely to post online. Age moderates the relationship between political interest and news consumption as well as news consumption and online political expression. The correlations of these sets of variables are stronger for younger respondents compared to older respondents. These findings hold across the three countries under study. We explain these patterns in terms of changing citizenship norms and discuss the implications for democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The final days of the Trump presidency and its aftermath brought into sharp focus the issue of political lying. Politicians have historically employed rhetoric and rhetorical spin to embellish the truth and hide damaging information. However, outright lying has traditionally been deemed politically too risky, resulting in resignation and the undermining of public trust. In contrast, recent electoral successes —the 2016 Brexit Referendum and the 2019 general election in the United Kingdom, and Trump's victory in 2016 and his increased electoral support in 2020—point to an apparent growing tendency for politicians caught lying not to be punished at the ballot box. Using the U.K. Brexit referendum and the 2019 general election as its case study, this conceptual paper argues that strategic political lying has been designed as a priming device to set the news agenda. As an effective campaigning tactic "strategic lying" represents a development of political spin—first evident in the mass media era—that has been intensified by the increasing professionalization of political communications and the rise of social media. In doing so, the concept of "strategic lying" theorized here contributes to deepening our understanding of the ongoing evolution of "spin" in the digital era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of a larger European Union (EU)-funded project, this paper investigates the coverage of corruption and related topics in three European democracies: France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Based on Freedom House data, these countries are characterized by different levels of press freedom. A large corpus of newspaper articles (107,248 articles) from the period 2004 to 2013 were analyzed using dedicated software. We demonstrate that freedom of press is not the only dimension that affects the ability to and the way in which news media report on corruption. Because of its political partisanship, the Italian press tends to emphasize and dramatize corruption cases involving domestic public administrators and, in particular, politicians. The British coverage is affected mainly by market factors, and the press pays more attention to cases occurring abroad and in sport. The French coverage shares specific features with both the British and the Italian coverage: Newspapers mainly focus on corruption involving business companies and foreign actors, but they also cover cases involving domestic politicians. Media market segmentation, political parallelism, and media instrumentalization determine different representations preventing the establishment of unanimously shared indignation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a way for analyzing the structure of campaign communications within Twitter. The structure of communication affordances creates opportunities for a horizontal organization power within Twitter interactions. However, one cannot infer the structure of interactions as they materialize from the formal properties of the technical environment in which the communications occur. Consequently, the paper identifies three categories of empowering communication operations that can occur on Twitter: Campaigns can respond to others, campaigns can retweet others, and campaigns can call for others to become involved in the campaign on their own terms. The paper operationalizes these categories in the context of the 2015 U.K. general election. To determine whether Twitter is used to empower laypersons, the profiles of each account retweeted and replied to were retrieved and analyzed using natural language processing to identify whether an account is from a political figure, member of the media, or some other public figure. In addition, tweets and retweets are compared with respect to the manner key election issues are discussed. The findings indicate that empowering uses of Twitter are fairly marginal, and retweets use almost identical policy language as the original campaign tweets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the presence of interest organizations in political news in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands between 1990 and 2017. Previous research on organized interests in the media revealed (1) a consistent overrepresentation of business interests across countries, but (2) also that this overrepresentation has decreased over time in a European context. However, these studies are snapshots of interest group patterns with either cross-country or longitudinal variation, and important players such as corporations have been largely excluded by European scholars. We argue that including corporations affects previous conclusions as it reveals substantial differences across countries and an increasing role of business interests in the news. We use a data set of Dutch and British news articles, in which we identified 34,657 interest organizations. This endeavor highlights that the distribution of organized interests in the media is skewed toward business interests and has not become more diverse. This suggests that the important insider role of business interests translates to outsider venues, which tells us something about how the news media maintain these patterns through the construction of news stories. These findings interfere with ideas of representativeness and flourishing democracies with a diverse public debate in which many different voices are expressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the alleged conspiracy by the U.S. and U.K. governments to invade Iraq in 2003, the national security state in both countries has been subjected to intense scrutiny by news organizations around the world. This scrutiny has been fueled in part by what some describe as the development of a “networked fourth estate” (Benkler 2011) involving ad hoc alliances between professional journalists, citizen journalists, hackers, and leakers. On the surface, this attention challenges radical conceptions of a “power elite” remaining in the shadows and impervious to accountability exercised through the media. Amid cultural chaos (McNair 2005) and seemingly ubiquitous displays of adversarial journalism without fear or favor, how far are powerful interests still able to control the agenda and manipulate outcomes? The article presents findings in relation to a single case study involving critical coverage of the national security state and a particular aspect of containment that emerged. It concerns how the controversies were resolved through an apparent spectacle of accountability that suggested a resolution eschewing the need for further scrutiny or sanction. The paper further contends that this element of story “closure” warrants renewed attention in the study of news framing and ideological power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the roles of the media in the process of political agenda setting. There is a long tradition of studies on this topic, but they have mostly focused on legacy news media, thus overlooking the role of other actors and the complex hybrid dynamics that characterize contemporary political communication. In contrast, through an in-depth case study using mixed-methods and multiplatform data, this article provides a detailed analysis of the roles and interactions between different types of media and how they were used by political and advocacy elites. It explores what happened in the different parts of the system, and thus the paths to attention that led to setting this issue in the political and media agendas. The analysis of the case, a partial policy reversal in the United Kingdom provoked by an immigration scandal known as the "Windrush scandal" reveals that the issue was pushed into the agenda by a campaign assemblage of investigative journalism, political and advocacy elites, and digitally enabled leaders. The legacy news media came late but were crucial. They greatly amplified the salience of the issue and, once in "storm mode," they were key for sustaining attention and pressure, eventually compelling the government to respond. It shows that they often remain at the core of the "national conversation" and certainly in the eye of a media storm. In the contemporary context, characterized by fierce battles for attention, shortening attention spans and fractured audiences, this is key and has important implications for agenda setting and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media attention is a scarce, yet attractive, resource for interest groups. Existing studies show that media attention is concentrated on a relatively small number of well-resourced groups, often representing economic interests. However, the literature still struggles to disentangle the reasons behind this bias in media attention. Is it explained by media selection practices or uneven interest group activity? We cannot separate these two possible mechanisms by simply studying aggregate levels of media attention. In this study, we therefore compare the set of groups that lobby in specific policy areas with the groups that appear in the news on issues related to those same policy areas. The investigation is based on data from Denmark and the United Kingdom. First, we use survey data to identify the policy areas in which groups actively lobby. Second, we identify groups' media appearances in news stories related to those same policy areas. Third, we compare diversity among the groups actively lobbying with the groups actually appearing in the news and investigate possible biases. We find that even when the analysis of media appearances is narrowed down to only those groups active in a policy area, the news media allow more access to well-resourced groups. However, in contrast to previous findings, differences in media appearances across interest group types are not reproduced. These results imply that media selection biases are mainly produced by varying lobbying resources rather than discrimination based on the type of interests that groups represent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compare measures of the tone of parties' campaigns in the 2015 General Election in England, based on, respectively, coverage of parties' campaigns in six national newspapers, citizens' perceptions, and expert judgments. It is the most extensive study of such measurements outside the United States and one of very few to include expert judgments. We find that citizen perceptions and expert judgments are heavily affected by partisan bias. We show how these biases can be eliminated with a regression-based procedure. After such adjustment, seven of the eight resulting measures of parties' campaign tone (five based on newspapers, one on citizen perceptions, and one on expert judgments) are strongly correlated. The eighth measure (based on one of the newspapers) depicts the tone of parties' campaigns very differently owing to different criteria of what to cover in a campaign. Each of the three kinds of empirical information is adequate as a basis for measuring parties' campaign tone, but adjustment for partisan biases is essential for perception and judgment data. Common apprehensions about the "subjectivity" of citizen perceptions are not justified, while expert judgments are equally useful, as long as sufficient information is available to eliminate their partisan bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally, scholars have raised substantial concerns regarding unfavorable news coverage of female political candidates and representatives. However, prior research has scarcely considered the intersectional effects of political actors’ race and gender in this context. I investigate these dynamics through a case study of the U.K. 2010 general election, a breakthrough year for black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) women in British politics. Only three had previously been elected to parliament but a further seven joined their ranks that year. While headlines celebrated the possibility of a “small revolution” resulting in “the most diverse parliament ever,” the press also subjected BAME female candidates to exceptional scrutiny regarding their credentials and ability to “transform politics.” Employing a quantitative content analysis of national newspaper coverage, I find that the apparent newsworthiness of BAME women’s intersectional identity was a double-edged sword. While they arguably enjoyed a visibility advantage compared with white female candidates, their coverage was also exceptionally negative and narrowly focused on their ethnicity and gender. I argue that as national legislatures become increasingly diverse, single axis analyses of the effects of politicians’ race, gender, or other axes of identity are insufficient to capture their combined effects on press coverage of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic analysis of the growth and nature of political campaigning online has concentrated largely on textual interactions between politicians, parties, their members, and supporters, as well as voters more widely. In evaluating the shift from traditional to online campaigning techniques, the use of social media’s increasingly visual capabilities has been comparatively neglected in research. This article considers one type of online visual political communication, the online political poster, in terms of its strategic campaign functions relating to persuasive and organizational roles. The article uses a case study of an extensive data set of online political posters collected from political parties in the United Kingdom, on Facebook, between September 2013 through to and including the general election in May 2015, to try to understand how parties used online political posters and how audiences responded to them. The findings show that despite a clear emphasis on sharing images, very few received widespread attention, arguably limiting their persuasive role. However, their prevalence suggests a role relating to parties trying to maintain relationships with existing online supporters as a form of displaying virtual presence, credibility, and belonging, paralleling the function of traditional window posters and yard signs but in a social media setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the nature of debate on “below the line” comment fields at the United Kingdom’s Guardian, and how, if at all, such debates are impacting journalism practice. The article combines a content analysis of 3,792 comments across eighty-five articles that focused on the UN Climate Change Summit, with ten interviews with journalists, two with affiliated commentators, plus the community manager. The results suggest a more positive picture than has been found by many existing studies: Debates were often deliberative in nature, and journalists reported that it was positively impacting their practice in several ways, including providing new story leads and enhanced critical reflection. However, citizen–journalist debate was limited. The results are attributed to the normalization of comment fields into everyday journalism practice, extensive support and encouragement from senior management, and a realization that comment fields can actually make the journalists’ life a little easier. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]