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Alternative Online Political Media (AOPM) have become increasingly important within international news landscapes, but their social media practices have received limited academic attention. Our large-scale content analysis (N = 14807) offers the first comprehensive study of how APOM in the UK use Twitter. Drawing on a pertinent model of social media use that enhances notions of "good" and "bad" journalism, and through our own sentiment analysis, we find Twitter norms closely aligned with those of legacy media, including a relatively limited online interaction with audiences. We conclude that while AOPM follow many social media logics consistent with mainstream news sites and add to the wider realm of political analysis, their highly partisan content means that their Twitter use cannot be considered balanced, neutral or objective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impartiality has been a core principle of public service broadcasting (PSB) in the UK for 100 years. However, it is under growing pressure as audiences increasingly rely on more opinion led content on television and especially online. The hostility towards PSB has been fuelled by politicians and commercial media undermining the value of regulation in the twenty‐first century. The UK regulator, Ofcom, has offered a flexible approach to oversight which the authors argue may have contributed to further confusion over what impartiality is, and its value in a competitive media environment. Greater independence, accountability and transparency—for both broadcasters and regulator—are suggested to be vital to maintaining the value of impartiality in PSB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How the news media report who's responsible for political decisions is fundamental to an informed citizenry. Our study develops a new way of examining political responsibility coverage by drawing on the concept of informational opportunities in order to explore how television news could enhance audience understanding. We examine how television news reported who was responsible for making policies across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland during the coronavirus pandemic. Drawing on a content analysis study of five UK television news bulletins (N = 181), we found that reporting did not regularly attribute political responsibility to all four governments of the UK at the start of the pandemic. Once the nations began to adopt different lockdown measures the clarity of reporting legislative decisions improved, but there were still missed opportunities to clarify which government was responsible for specific policies. By way of conclusion, we argue that scholars examining how the media report political responsibility need to find creative ways of theorising and empirically studying informational opportunities in order to enhance public understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fact-checking has been identified as a significant journalistic tool in the fight against disinformation. Relevant studies have focused on its emergence as a movement within journalism aiming at renewing the profession, as well as its effectiveness in challenging disinformation, especially during elections. However, little has been said about how audiences themselves understand fact-checking and employ it in their daily consumption of news. In this article, we answer these questions by drawing upon two sets of data. The first consists of fourteen focus group discussions in the UK, which included 52 participants, and were conducted online between April and May 2021. The second consists of two qualitative surveys that explored news consumers' understandings of fact-checking and their evaluations of current fact-checking practices of UK media during the same period. We conclude that the use of fact-checking remains largely peripheral, and its influence is minimal in people's news consumption. However, there is an appetite for more fact-checking in television news, as a way of holding politicians into account and helping the public better understand politics. In this context, we argue, if fact-checking is to play an important role in political discourse, it should become a regular part of broadcast journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Balance and impartiality are central principles in journalism, but this study argues their conceptual application in news reporting should be subject to more academic scrutiny. In the UK, the way "due impartiality" has been applied and regulated by broadcasters has raised concerns about promoting a 'she-said-he-said' style of reporting, which constructs balance but not scrutiny of competing claims. In this study, we analyse how the UK's "due impartiality" was applied by journalists in different political contexts by assessing how the BBC dealt with competing party-political claims. We develop a nuanced quantitative analysis of BBC journalist interactions (N = 967) with claims made by the four main party leaders during the 2019 UK and 2020 US elections. Overall, we found BBC reporting robustly challenged claims by US politicians, whereas coverage of UK politicians often only conveyed claims and counterclaims with limited journalistic intervention, particularly on television news. We argue that impartiality should be viewed more as a fluid than fixed concept given that the context shapes how it is applied. As concerns about misinformation have grown over recent years, we conclude that more finely tuned studies are needed to understand how journalists apply concepts about balance and impartiality in political reporting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The content and effects of disinformation have become a focal point in communication studies over recent years. But how media audiences themselves interpret the meaning of disinformation and mitigate the risks it poses to their understanding of the world have remained largely understudied. This article draws upon a UK-based focus group study that examines how people conceptualise disinformation, and the ways this informs their engagement with news media. Our findings revealed that common definitions of disinformation go beyond 'fake news' and conspiracy theories to include an array of phenomena, such as biased news, political spin and misrepresented information. Far from simply not trusting information sources or being passive recipients of disinformation, we argue that audiences have developed a pragmatic scepticism in their relationship with media across different platforms, which reflects a critical reading of news media both as texts and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a systematic content analysis of UK newspaper coverage of young anti-Iraq war protestors, I examine how young people's opinions were mediated before and during the war in Iraq. I explore the extent and nature of coverage, and ask whether newspapers encouraged young people to be active citizens in the public sphere. I argue that the UK press sought to legitimize young people's opinion before the war had started by stressing the consensual composition of the demonstrations. However, the dominant media frame shifted once the war had commenced, with young protestors portrayed as opportunistic truants rather than (as pre-war) active, engaged citizens. I conclude by discussing recent literature which interprets media coverage of protests positively by replacing the concept of the public sphere with the "public screen". While visually stimulating, I argue it is a rather hollow concept because it loses sight of the referent needed to make sense of the reasons why the UK decided to go to war. (Contains 1 figure, 6 tables and 9 notes.)

Alternative online political media (AOPM) have become increasingly prominent elements of the media system in many countries. In response, numerous academic studies have examined the nature of these newer forms of alternative media. In line with this recent scholarship, in this study we carry out a longitudinal and systematic content analysis of nine AOPM websites in the United Kingdom (UK) (N = 3452) between 2015 and 2018. Overall, we found a diversity of content, contrasting values and degrees of partisanship, which we develop into a typology of outlets. This includes four overlapping areas: electoral hyperpartisans, cultural partisans, political cycle specialists and vernacular macro-blogs. We conclude by recommending that scholars need to develop more detailed content analyses in order to better understand online alternative media, their interactions with the wider media system, and the system itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]