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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]

The increasing volume of images published online in a wide variety of contexts requires communication researchers to address this reality by analyzing visual content at a large scale. Ongoing advances in computer vision to automatically detect objects, concepts, and features in images provide a promising opportunity for communication research. We propose a research protocol for Automated Visual Content Analysis (AVCA) to enable large-scale content analysis of images. It offers inductive and deductive ways to use commercial pre-trained models for theory building in communication science. Using the example of corporations' website images on sustainability, we show in a step-by-step fashion how to classify a large sample (N = 21,876) of images with unsupervised and supervised machine learning, as well as custom models. The possibilities and pitfalls of these approaches are discussed, ethical issues are addressed, and application examples for future communication research are detailed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stakeholders debate issues of public interest in global online issue arenas, but political decision makers decide on these macro issues at national and supranational levels. A better understanding of the role of organizations in forming and monitoring such issue debates is necessary, given the influence of public affairs activities and media debates on politicians' and public opinion. However, such a macro perspective is largely missing. This study analyzes the debate around the use of the pesticide glyphosate when the European Union decided on a license renewal in 2017. To uncover emerging salient topics and their relations with organizations, the online global coverage of the issue from the GDELT database (N = 1677) was analyzed using inductive automated content analysis (LDA topic modeling). Only three topics were salient in the arena, most prominently the carcinogenicity of glyphosate, thereby sidelining other relevant aspects. Furthermore, online issue arenas reach globally and are converged communicative spaces where a variety of media participate. Thus, the article develops and tests a typology of online news media for issue arena research. Advancing theory on organizations' roles and strategies in these online issue arenas, a new classification of actors based on their visibility and communication strategy is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the field of strategic communication has been criticized for lacking a coherent theoretical synthesis. Recognizing that strategic communication is a sub-discipline of communication science, we study how the field is anchored in the corpus of established communication theories – including social science, interpretative, and critical approaches. To describe the use, development, and context of communication theories in strategic communication publications, we analyzed all articles published in ten public relations/ corporate communication/ organizational communication/ strategic communication journals over twenty years (N = 4,027). While the vast majority of articles did not refer to one of the 91 communication theories, the share of references to these theories has been increasing. Overall, we found a high diversity of approaches – with considerable differences among journals – indicating a broad discourse. However, we also found a growing relevance of the social science paradigm. We argue that a stronger focus on communication theories may facilitate a consilient synthesis and increase the relevance of the field, academically and practically. We therefore propose to strengthen the communication science perspective in strategic communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As researchers pursue connections between strategic communication and management, they need to critique practices to develop norms that increase strategic communication’s long-term contribution to society. Norms of strategic communication are shaped by socially constructed standards of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and guide how strategic communication fosters organization-public relationships (OPR). Such norms are particularly important regarding deliberative strategic communication, which uses political CSR to guide corporations’ political role. Although principles of OPR and political CSR should foster more ethical strategic communication, some practices weaken such standards. To make that case, this article (1) reviews the historical foundations of deliberative discourse, (2) examines principles of OPR and political CSR, and (3) applies normative principles of deliberative discourse (4) to critique three cases of strategic political communication, known as astroturf lobbying, a deceptive lobbying practice that undermines and fakes grassroots movements. We conclude by integrating the findings into theory building that shifts CSR outcomes from advantaging individual organizations adding value to society. This theme uses ‘creating shared value’ to advocateshared strategic communication. This notion includes the normative claims of political CSR (open discourse, participation, transparency, accountability) to arrive atshared strategic communicationthat supports the ‘good’ organization and society simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]