Search

The spread of (hyper)partisan alternative media has sparked renewed scholarly interest in their political role, but the relation between these outlets and political parties has only recently received scholarly attention. This study explores this relationship using a novel design that directly compares the news agendas and source balances of two Danish alternative media to those of two national dailies, and to the political agendas of two political parties the alternative media have ties to. In total, 576 news articles and 1012 social media posts were analyzed. The study identifies four ways in which the alternative media favor the political parties but finds that the favoritism is markedly more pronounced in one of them. The case study contributes with the general theoretical insight that within the group of partisan alternative media it might be fruitful to distinguish between party-political and ideological partisanship and that alternative media can be more or less party-politically or ideologically partisan. The study concludes with a recommendation that future studies empirically investigate whether such distinctions are also relevant in other media systems as this is important for understanding the political roles different alternative media can play in the media and political systems they enter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media systems where political parallelism co-exists with political clientelism have contradictory influences on journalistic practices. Journalists are encouraged to actively defend a cause and influence public opinion while expected to remain subservient to their political masters. The media studies literature has analyzed the impact of political parallelism and clientelism separately, without reflecting on the tensions that emerge when they operate together. The article examines journalism under instrumentalized political parallelism and argues that it plays out in a field defined by both horizontal and vertical conflicts. We add an elite-grassroots analytical perspective to the inter-elite tensions associated with a polarized public sphere. Political parallelism in non-democratic contexts seemingly leaves little room for journalistic agency, as the politically powerful tend to instrumentalize media outlets. However, by looking closely at the case of Lebanon, we argue that journalists are still able to act independently of and contrary to the elite's intentions. The empirical analysis shows how journalists navigate vis-à-vis the politicians by playing the relations game, exploiting internal contradictions in the system and connecting with popular grievances. The article contributes new knowledge about journalists' resilience to instrumentalization in a context of media/politics connections that is commonly found outside the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of Scandinavian journalism research this article discusses the changing political roles of news organizations and journalists after the fall of the party press and the dissolution of broadcasting as a state-controlled monopoly. Given these institutional changes, we ask the following: what new roles, if any, are news organizations and journalists playing in the political system? What are the characteristics of these new roles, and how do news organizations use their newfound political power? We address these questions in the context of an institutional approach to the news coupled with Hallin and Mancini's analysis of media systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]