Search

The unprecedented power of Big Tech corporations and the complexity of regulating them requires considering the role of news media as a corporate accountability mechanism. The aim of this article is to examine news media's watchdog role through a performative lens, extending it to the corporate context by looking at three manifestations of performance: media visibility, way of coverage, and sourcing patterns. Based on a longitudinal quantitative content analysis of 920 news stories on Big Tech from four media outlets (2000–2021) in the United States and Germany, we explain variances in the watchdog role taking an over-time, cross-country, and cross-political leaning perspective. Our findings suggest that Big Tech corporations receive little but increasing media attention over the years that is driven by events. Similarly, news coverage contains an increasingly strong presence of a detached watchdog role performance. A more interventionist watchdog role is also on the rise – even though marginally – and political actors are increasingly given a voice in news coverage. From a comparative perspective, our results show that Big Tech corporations are more visible in the US and across right leaning news outlets. US journalists exhibit a more detached approach, while German journalists perform a significantly higher interventionist performance. Corporate sources are overall prominent in the media arena yet dominate more in the US. In conclusion, US and German news media are critical but passive observers over Big Tech corporations and can therefore be labeled a tame yet increasingly growling watchdog when it comes to holding Big Tech accountable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To advance our understanding of social media effects, it is crucial to incorporate the increasingly prevalent visual media into our investigation. In this article, we discuss the theoretical opportunities of automated visual analysis for the study of social media effects and present an overview of existing computational methods that can facilitate this. Specifically, we highlight the gap between the outputs of existing computer vision tools and the theoretical concepts relevant to media effects research. We propose multiple approaches to bridging this gap in automated visual analysis, such as justifying the theoretical significance of specific visual features in existing tools, developing supervised learning models to measure a visual attribute of interest, and applying unsupervised learning to discover meaningful visual themes and categories. We conclude with a discussion about future directions for automated visual analysis in computational communication research, such as the development of benchmark datasets designed to reflect more theoretically meaningful concepts and the incorporation of large language models and multimodal channels to extract insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various organizations employ framing in their public affairs strategies to influence public and political issue debates. However, how frames are built by actors before lobbying activities remains a black box. Thus, to outline the origins of strategic frames, we investigate perceptions and understandings of the frame-building process by public affairs (PA) professionals across corporations, public organizations, and interest groups. Besides framing theory and the hierarchical influence model, this study draws on a strategic communication and institutional theory perspective on PA as an organizational practice. By means of qualitative interviews with PA professionals from a diverse set of 24 Dutch organizations, we propose a model of perceived frame-building from issue emergence, the assessment of issue viability, via frame construction and alignment to legitimation. The model reflects aspects of the frame-building process as understood by PA professionals and categorized by the authors into individual, organizational, and routine factors, as well as context and timing. It enriches our understanding of the way PA professionals perceive organizational influence in framing contests and policymaking through their strategic frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]