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Theories of the public sphere—or more recently, of plural public spheres— are core elements of communication and media research. A lively and dynamic debate exists about the respective theories, and the approaches employed to do so have diversified in recent years. This special issue of Communication Theory aims to assess the role and future of public sphere(s) theory in digital societies: if, and where, are concepts of the public sphere(s) still useful and needed, which criticisms are (still) valid, which not, which new ones might be necessary, and which concepts need to be developed or elaborated to respond meaningfully to the digital transformation? This editorial introduces the topic of and contributions to the special issue as well as nine theses on the development of public sphere(s) theorizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By providing diverse news content, news media are key for a well-functioning public sphere. However, agreement on how to measure news content diversity is lacking. Research often refers to democratic theory as normative reference point, but different models of democracy understand news content diversity differently. Our study makes a unique, innovative contribution to this field: (1) We develop a methodological framework for measuring news content diversity, that is a set of comprehensive measuring instruments that derive different operationalizations of topic and actor diversity each from liberal and deliberative democratic theories. (2) Considering that a good public discourse requires more than diversity, we analyze news content diversity in the context of four other journalistic standards: neutrality, rationality, discursivity, and civility. (3) We prove the applicability of our measuring instruments by means of a standardized content analysis of six German news media as a case study. The different quality profiles of these outlets our analysis reveals are explained by their different functions in the media system. Our study shows how important a multi-perspectival normative approach to news content diversity is, both empirically and theoretically. Future studies on news content diversity should make their normative foundations transparent and derive their indicators purposefully therefrom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Referendum campaigns, which happen in many countries on the national or sub-national level, are highly important and special periods of political communication. Unlike elections, however, referendum campaigns are understudied phenomena. This thematic issue addresses patterns of referendum campaigns, which increasingly take place in digital and hybrid media environments, where political actors conduct campaigns through various channels, news media react to and shape debates on social media, and citizens receive a large share of political information from traditional and digital media. In this editorial, we provide a short overview of how research on referendum campaigns has evolved and how it has started to shift its attention away from news coverage and toward the role of campaign actors and the citizens who use (or engage with) search engines and social media platforms. The articles in this thematic issue reflect this shift but also show that news media remain important actors in referendum campaigns. Finally, we outline further research steps, which should include even more holistic analyses of the hybridity of referendum campaigns and hopefully more comparisons across cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of crisis, the spread of conspiracy myths increases since people seek answers to complex questions. Besides societal aspects, social media platforms, especially messenger services, have been identified as a positive driver for spreading conspiracy myths. Much research focused on whether right-wing populist attitudes correlate with belief in conspiracy myths resulting in inconsistent findings. We show that different anti-system attitudes and corresponding digital media usage can promote the affinity towards conspiracy myths apart from right-wing attitudes. With this paper, we first want to sharpen the terminology on 'conspiracy myths' and develop a scale to measure affinity towards conspiracy myths in different dimensions. We second use this scale to investigate different mindsets of conspiracy in the Swiss population. Third, we want to find out how the dimensions correlate with messenger usage. Based on data from a representative population survey in Switzerland from November to December 2020, we investigated different affinities towards conspiracy myths, represented by far-left, far-right, populist, anti-elitism, general anti-system attitudes and science skepticism. We then used the six dimensions in a cluster analysis and identified five typological mindsets. About 30% of the population accordingly have higher affinities towards conspiracy myths than the rest. Our study also highlights the potential role of messenger services in spreading conspiracy myths. To a certain extent, Facebook Messenger and Telegram usage show a robust correlation with the different dimensions of the affinity towards conspiracy myths. In contrast, WhatsApp usage does not show a robust correlation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-quality news is important, not only for its own sake but also for its political implications. However, defining, operationalizing, and measuring news media quality is difficult, because evaluative criteria depend upon beliefs about the ideal society, which are inherently contested. This conceptual and methodological paper outlines important considerations for defining news media quality before developing and applying a multimethod approach to measure it. We refer to Giddens' notion of double hermeneutics, which reveals that the ways social scientists understand constructs inevitably interact with the meanings of these constructs shared by people in society. Reflecting the two-way relationship between society and social sciences enables us to recognize news media quality as a dynamic, contingent, and contested construct and, at the same time, to reason our understanding of news media quality, which we derive from Habermas' ideal of deliberative democracy. Moreover, we investigate the Swiss media system to showcase our measurement approach in a repeated data collection from 2017 to 2020. We assess the content quality of fifty news media outlets using four criteria derived from the deliberative ideal (N = 20,931 and 18,559 news articles and broadcasting items, respectively) and compare the results with those from two representative online surveys (N = 2,169 and 2,159 respondents). The high correlations between both methods show that a deliberative understanding of news media quality is anchored in Swiss society and shared by audiences. This paper shall serve as a showcase to reflect and measure news media quality across other countries and media systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structural crisis of the news media and the according lack of resources for journalism has led to several types of concentration in most Western media markets. Not only is concentration of news media ownership increasing, but there is also more editorial cooperation between and within media companies and more reliance on external sources for content, such as from news agencies. Editorial cooperation and external source reliance have led to concentration processes on the level of content — a phenomenon insufficiently considered in existing research. This paper suggests an innovative method to measure media content concentration with automated one-by-one text comparisons. The procedure allows identifying similar media articles that appear in multiple media outlets and therefore adds to the current literature, which mostly measures media concentration on the basis of readership or audiences of outlets and their ownership. The longitudinal study combined automated text comparisons using Jaccard similarities with manually coded data using a text corpus of seven newspapers between 2012 and 2018 in Switzerland — a small and disrupted media market. The results showed an increase in media content concentration, especially in the coverage of international events with editorial cooperation and reliance on news agencies as the drivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Catholic Church receives much attention in the news media. In recent years news coverage about the Church most notably includes optimistic reports about Pope Francis as well as negative coverage about child abuse perpetrated by priests. Although religious organizations are highly relevant in modern mediated societies, there is little research on how media coverage influences public perceptions of the Church. This paper combines the concepts of news media repertoires and corporate reputation in analyzing how news media consumption patterns influence public perceptions of the Catholic Church. We conducted a representative population survey in Austria in the spring of 2017 (n = 1,035). We identified five distinct news media repertoires. The results show that News Avoiders evaluate the Church less positively than people with a Legacy Quality Media repertoire. The effects of media repertoires on reputation also relate to people who are highly engaged in the Church community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The concept of media reputation is a well-documented field in communication research. However, it often remains unclear how the process of reputation formation takes place exactly. The purpose of this paper is to analyze which stakeholder groups are the driving forces in the process of reputation constitution of the Swiss banking industry and how it was affected by the financial crisis in 2008. Design/methodology/approach – Given that mass media are the main source of information about an organization in crisis for the public, media reputation serves as a valuable concept for analyzing the effects of crises on organizations. This study is therefore based on a content analysis of Swiss newspapers published between 2004 and 2010. Findings – Data shows that the influence of political stakeholder groups on media reputation of Swiss banks is higher in times of crisis. In addition the focus in media coverage changes from economic topics in pre-crisis period to social topics in crisis period. The increased importance of political stakeholder groups and social topics in crisis lead to a more negative and less controllable media reputation. Originality/value – This study aims at a better understanding of the impact of stakeholder groups on corporate media reputation in crises. Instead of defining reputation as a single item this approach allows a more differentiated analysis of the process of reputation constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Social norms have great potential for mitigating crisis as people align their prevention behavior with the norms they perceive. However, there is insufficient knowledge of how normative perceptions are formed to exploit this potential. Drawing from agenda-setting theory, the present study examined norm-setting processes of media reporting on perceptions of vaccination norms during the COVID-19 pandemic. It combined data of a continuous content analysis of the salience and valence of the vaccination issue and a weekly repeated cross-sectional survey on perceived descriptive (i.e. perceived prevalence of willingness to get vaccinated) and injunctive vaccination norms (i.e. perceived approval of getting vaccinated) in the Swiss population, from February 2021 to February 2022. Time-series-based regression modeling did not support the hypothesized first-level norm setting—the transfer from issue salience in media to perceived descriptive norms in the population. However, we found evidence for second-level norm setting: Changes in issue valence predicted changes in perceived injunctive norms in the Swiss population. The findings provide unique insights into norm-setting processes and highlight the relevance of monitoring media reporting and public perceptions as a basis for evidence-based crisis communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern democracies, large societal crises like the COVID-19 pandemic are accompanied by intensified public discourse about which policies and strategies are adequate to fight the crisis. In such times, the public sphere switches to crisis mode with fundamentally different communicative dynamics compared to routinised periods. Data from social media platforms like Twitter offers new possibilities to study such dynamics. However, comprehensive studies on how crises affect discourse in distinct national publics are missing up to now. Based on 1,762,262 tweets referring to COVID-19 written between 1 January and 30 April 2020 by 56,418 validated Swiss users, we illustrate how the lockdown of public life in Switzerland affected the discourse in the Swiss Twitter-sphere. Based on public sphere theories, we identify four crisis-related dimensions for our analysis. We show that the pandemic led to a narrowing of the topic agenda and to a more inwardly oriented public sphere with increased Twitter activity by experts. Furthermore, actors from the social periphery were able to reach the centre of public discourse with their tweets. Overall our study shows how methodological innovation allows us to better connect an empirical analysis with the concept of a public sphere as a communication network., Competing Interests: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)., (© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.)