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As the media environment has fragmented over recent decades, scholars have paid increasing attention to the rise of alternative news and their relationship with mainstream media. This study enters into debates about the role and character of alternative media by examining recently launched left-wing sites in the UK, which explicitly define themselves in opposition to mainstream media. It carries out a large content analysis study of two sites – The Canary and Evolve Politics – between 2015 and 2019, examining 1284 articles and 3812 sources. Overall, the study found a strong editorial focus on criticising the government's right-wing policy agenda, as well as opposition towards mainstream media – notably BBC news – with political reporting perceived as reinforcing an establishment-led agenda. This opposition to mainstream media has ideological consequences for the UK's media system, with public service broadcasting the biggest casualty. The study recommends more theoretical and empirical attention should be paid to the systemic impact of alternative media on media systems given mainstream news is under attack across many countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the coronavirus pandemic, conspiracy theories and dubious health guidance about COVID-19 led to public debates about the role and impact of blatant acts of disinformation. But less attention has been paid to the broader media environment, which is how most people understood the crisis and how it was handled by different governments. Drawing on a news diary study of 200 participants during the pandemic, we found they easily identified examples of "fake news" but were less aware of relevant facts that might help them understand how the UK government managed the crisis. Our content analysis of 1259 television news items revealed broadcasters did not routinely draw on statistics to contextualise the UK's record of managing the coronavirus or regularly make comparisons with other countries. Given television news bulletins were the dominant news source for many people in the UK, we suggest the information environment gave audiences limited opportunities to understand the government's performance internationally. We argue that misinformation is often a symptom of editorial choices in media coverage—including television news produced by public service broadcasters—that can lead to gaps in public knowledge. We conclude by suggesting the concept of the information environment should play a more prominent role in studies that explore the causes of misinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public service media face an existential crisis. Many governments are cutting their budgets, while questioning the role and value of public service broadcasting because many citizens now have access to a wide range of media. This raises the question – do public service media supply a distinctive and informative news service compared to market-led media? Drawing on the concept of political information environment, this study makes an intervention into debates by carrying out a comparative content analysis of news produced by UK public service broadcasters and market-driven media across television, radio and online outlets (N = 1065) and interviewing senior editors about the routine selection of news. It found that almost all BBC news and commercial public service media platforms reported more news about politics, public affairs and international issues than entirely market-driven outlets. Online BBC news reported more informative topics than market-based media, which featured more entertainment and celebrity stories. The value of public service media was demonstrated on the United Kingdom's nightly television news bulletins, which shone a light on the world not often reported, especially BBC News at Ten. Most market-driven media reported through a UK prism, excluding many countries and international issues. Overall, it is argued that the influence of public service media in the United Kingdom helps shape an information environment with informative news. The focus of the study is on UK media, but the conceptual application of interpreting a political information environment is designed to be relevant for scholars internationally. While communication studies have sought to advance more cross-national studies in recent years, this can limit how relevant studies are for debates in national political information environments. This study concludes by recommending more scholarly attention should be paid to theorising national policy dynamics that shape the political information environments of media systems within nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study develops a multi-method approach to analysing political information environments, exploring how media and political systems help shape people's understanding of news. In doing so, we ask a question fundamental to democratic citizenship: how well do news media communicate political responsibility and policy differences across political systems? Our study examines the United Kingdom's political information environment, where significant power is devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with different political parties in control. Drawing on a content analysis of 17,765 news items, a representative survey of 3272 respondents and 15 semi-structured interviews, we examine the dominant information sources about UK politics by longitudinally tracing coverage of devolved issues from 2007 to 2016, and gauging how well it was understood by television news viewers. Our results suggest that while BBC news is more sensitive to communicating the devolved relevance of news than more commercial outlets, there remains a democratic deficit in the supply of political information and audience understanding of where power and responsibility lies. If news coverage more regularly communicated the relevance and context of devolved issues, we argue it could open up democratic opportunities for citizens to consider a wider range of policy options debated in all four political institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 2017 Austrian national election campaign, political parties that had traditionally focused on press releases and conferences to influence the media's agenda made extensive use of Twitter for the very first time. This study examines the impact of the parties' Twitter campaigns on the substantive issue agendas of five leading legacy media outlets. Compared with the impact of parties' news releases, the results show that, on an aggregated level, Twitter feeds significantly increase the parties' agenda-building power, but are not influenced by the media agenda – with the exception of the personal accounts of the top candidates (particularly the new leader of the winning conservative party), who follow the media agenda to a significant extent. On an individual level, incumbent parties are the most successful in using Twitter, while small parties suffer from interactions with other parties in communicating their issue priorities (which is in line with the 'normalisation thesis'). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While existing work explains how journalists use news values to select some stories over others, we know little about how stories that meet newsworthiness criteria are prioritized. Once stories are deemed newsworthy, how do journalists calculate their relative utility? Such an ordering of preferences is important as higher ranked stories receive more media attention. To better understand how stories are ordered once they are selected, we propose a model for rational journalistic preferences which describes how journalists rank stories by making cost-benefit analyses. When faced with competing newsworthy stories, such as in an election context, the model can generate expectations regarding news coverage patterns. To illustrate model utility, we draw on a unique case – the US 2016 presidential election – to explain how reporters order newsworthy stories (e.g. scandal and the horse race) by observing changes in the volume. Our content data captures coverage featuring Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump on major broadcast and cable networks over 31 weeks. We find that the rational journalistic preference model explains the imbalance of scandal coverage between the two candidates and the dominance of horse race coverage. In 2016, such preferences may have inadvertently contributed to a balance of news stories that favored Trump. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With most political journalism research focusing on Western elections, one tends to forget that mediatization exists in non-Western reportage too. Television news is still a powerful political tool, especially in developing democracies and particularly in South Africa – the case of this research. This article investigates the sources used on television news during five democratic South African elections, 1994–2014, and aims to shed light on the type of mediatized political reporting in and about a non-Western country. The main finding of this research is that news sources during the South African elections were made up increasingly of pundits and decreasingly of political leaders and citizens. The importance of 'listening' directly cannot be overstated, especially in developing democracies like South Africa. A solid link between journalist and politician as well as journalist and citizen is crucial to implement substantive information necessary to enable the media's democratic duty. When journalists ignore citizen voices in favor of interpretive and evaluative sources, this link is steadily degraded. This article suggests reasons for the drop-off of political and citizen sources in South African election reporting, and, on the eve of the sixth general election in May 2019, argues a case for more 'straight from source' voices in political journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion, as necessary a concept it is to the underpinnings of democracy, is a socially constructed representation of the public that is forged by the methods and data from which it is derived, as well as how it is understood by those tasked with evaluating and utilizing it. I examine how social media manifests as public opinion in the news and how these practices shape journalistic routines. I draw from a content analysis of news stories about the 2016 US election, as well as interviews with journalists, to shed light on evolving practices that inform the use of social media to represent public opinion. I find that despite social media users not reflecting the electorate, the press reported online sentiments and trends as a form of public opinion that services the horserace narrative and complements survey polling and vox populi quotes. These practices are woven into professional routines – journalists looked to social media to reflect public opinion, especially in the wake of media events like debates. Journalists worried about an overreliance on social media to inform coverage, especially Dataminr alerts and journalists' own highly curated Twitter feeds. Hybrid flows of information between journalists, campaigns, and social media companies inform conceptions of public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article not only identifies important achievements of comparative international research of election campaign communication but also highlights their challenges. Focusing in particular on content analyses, the article finds that comparative studies examine either the messages of the news media (and here, so far, only the reporting of traditional media is considered) or the messages of the candidates (here, their social media channels are preferentially studied). The combination of both, meaning election studies that are devoted to the interplay of traditional and new channels in an international comparison, are extremely rare and should be intensified. It is encouraging that our knowledge of campaign reporting in a country-by-country comparison has increased in recent years because content analyses have increasingly concentrated on an established set of relevant reporting features – as this articles illustrates with many examples. However, more collaborative, internationally linked comparative scholarship is needed, even if the demands placed on researchers further increase as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes 3 months of online debate during the electoral campaign for the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum. Through supervised sentiment analysis, we assess the extent of support for the referendum within the general public of Twitter users (Twittersphere) by analyzing the voting intentions expressed online in 2,369,333 tweets. Similarly, we exploit the practice of social TV and investigate the support for the referendum expressed by the 160,465 tweets posted by second screeners, that is, the subsample of Twitter users who watched and actively commented on nine political talk shows during the campaign. We compare the mentions and the attitudes of the Twittersphere and the second screeners by means of a lead–lag analysis to test whether the second screeners can act as influencers and trendsetters able to shape or anticipate attention and opinions toward an issue within larger audiences. The results reveal an inverse relationship between the Twittersphere and the second screeners whereby the reactions of the latter diverge from those of the general Twitter public. This finding has implications for the literature on echo chambers and the polarization of social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a unique content analysis of 100 years of national press coverage of UK General Elections and tests four claims about historical trends in election news reporting in democratic systems: (1) that coverage is becoming more focussed on political leaders at the expense of other political sources; (2) that reporting of the personalities and personal lives of politicians has expanded; (3) that editorial treatment of politicians has become increasingly negative and (4) that news coverage is increasingly obsessed with the conduct of politics rather than its substantive content. Through the detail of this analysis, we identify areas of historical continuity as well as change and challenge overly neat periodisations and simple histories of election news reporting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way political reporters understand their own role in election campaigns is changing, signalling a deeper shift in journalistic self-conception. In traditional discourses of journalistic identity, campaign reporters are positioned as playing a unique democratic role enabling citizens to make informed voting decisions. This article asks, 'How do campaign reporters understand and construct their own value and that of their work in an increasingly fragmented and crowded news environment?' It offers new empirical insight through a two-country study that both considers journalist perspectives and situates these within relevant theoretical debates. It analyses interviews with political reporters in the United States and Australia in 2017, guided by two conceptual frameworks that consider the ways journalists actively construct their own identity and authority: interpretive communities and metajournalistic discourse. This allows insight into the way political reporters reconsider the need to cover campaigns from 'on the bus' and defend the enduring value of being there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders – regulators, editors, party spin-doctors and politicians – supported by a systematic content analysis of television news during the 2015 UK General Election, this study makes an intervention into debates about how impartiality is understood and interpreted. Contrary to recent scholarly interpretations about 'due impartiality' being applied with some degree of quantitative precision – a stop-watch approach to balance – according to key stakeholders we interviewed the regulation of UK election news should be viewed as a qualitative judgement about the editorial merit of particular issues, parties or leaders throughout the campaign. Overall, we argue that the United Kingdom has moved from a political system shaping impartiality in recent years towards more of a news value–driven system reliant on editorial judgements. This raises, in our view, serious questions about the accountability of editorial decisions and how impartiality is safeguarded. News values, after all, are not politically neutral and – as our content analysis demonstrates – can lead to parties with a minor status gaining more coverage than some major parties. In order to remain relevant to regulatory and industry debates in journalism, we conclude by suggesting scholars should pay closer attention to how key stakeholders interpret and apply media policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]