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Data de publicació electrònica: 29 de novembre de 2022 Data suggests that the majority of citizens in various countries came across ‘fake news’ during the COVID-19 pandemic. We test the relationship between perceived prevalence of misinformation and people’s worries about COVID-19. In Study 1, analyses of a survey across 17 countries indicate a positive association: perceptions of high prevalence of misinformation are correlated with high worries about COVID-19. However, the relationship is weaker in countries with higher levels of case-fatality ratios, and independent from the actual amount of misinformation per country. Study 2 replicates the relationship using experimental data. Furthermore, Study 2 demonstrates the underlying mechanism, that is, perceived prevalence of misinformation fosters the belief that COVID-19 is spiralling out of control, which in turn, increases worries. Our findings suggest that perceived prevalence of misinformation can have significant psychological effects, even though audience members reject the information as being false.

A widely believed claim is that citizens tend to selectively expose themselves to like-minded information. However, when individuals find the information useful, they are more likely to consume cross-cutting sources. While crises such as terror attacks and pandemics can enhance the utility of cross-cutting information, empirical evidence on the role of real-world external threats in selective exposure is scarce. This paper examines the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study to test the extent to which citizens were exposed to information from cross-cutting sources on traditional and social media after the outbreak. Utilizing a two-wave panel survey among 14,218 participants across 17 countries - conducted before and after the initial outbreak - we show that citizens concerned about COVID-19 were more exposed to cross-cutting information on traditional and social media. The positive relationship with cross-cutting exposure to traditional news was stronger in countries where governments adopted less stringent policy responses, and in countries with greater pandemic severity and weaker democratic institutions. Our comparative approach thus sheds light on the social and political contexts in which cross-cutting exposure can occur.

Although a growing body of research addresses the role of religion in the political engagement of Muslims, a dearth of studies scrutinizes whether intersecting power dynamics (i.e., gender and religion) shape Muslims' political participation. In this study, we apply an intersectional approach to study whether religious indicators (mosque attendance, religious salience, and religious discrimination) shape the (gendered) participatory patterns of Muslims. Drawing on ESS data of six countries (Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, UK, and France), we find religious attendance to dampen and religious salience to heighten Muslims' nonelectoral participation. Religious discrimination seems to have no effect. Although Muslims' religiosity is gendered, our study finds no effects hereof on political participation. Further research unraveling the motivations of Muslims' noninstitutionalized forms of participation is encouraged.

Party competition in Western Europe is increasingly focused on “issue competition”, which is the selective emphasis on issues by parties. The aim of this paper is to contribute methodologically to the increasing number of studies that deal with different aspects of parties’ issue competition and communication. We systematically compare the value and shortcomings of three exploratory text representation approaches to study the issue communication of parties on Twitter. More specifically, we analyze which issues separate the online communication of one party from that of the other parties and how consistent party communication is. Our analysis was performed on two years of Twitter data from six Belgian political parties, comprising of over 56,000 political tweets. The results indicate that our exploratory approach is useful to study how political parties profile themselves on Twitter and which strategies are at play. Second, our method allows to analyze communication of individual politicians which contributes to classical literature on party unity and party discipline. A comparison of our three methods shows a clear trade-off between interpretability and discriminative power, where a combination of all three simultaneously provides the best insights.

“Lifestyle politics” suggests that political and ideological opinions are strongly connected to our consumption choices, music and food taste, cultural preferences, and other aspects of our daily lives. With the growing political polarization this idea has become all the more relevant to a wide range of social scientists. Empirical research in this domain, however, is confronted with an impractical challenge; this type of detailed information on people’s lifestyle is very difficult to operationalize, and extremely time consuming and costly to query in a survey. A potential valuable alternative data source to capture these values and lifestyle choices is social media data. In this study, we explore the value of Facebook “like” data to complement traditional survey data to study lifestyle politics. We collect a unique dataset of Facebook likes and survey data of more than 6500 participants in Belgium, a fragmented multi-party system. Based on both types of data, we infer the political and ideological preference of our respondents. The results indicate that non-political Facebook likes are indicative of political preference and are useful to describe voters in terms of common interests, cultural preferences, and lifestyle features. This shows that social media data can be a valuable complement to traditional survey data to study lifestyle politics.

Throughout the current global health crisis, false and misleading content has proliferated on social media. Previous research indicates that users of social media primarily share information that contains attention-grabbing elements. Because sensationalist elements are prevalent in disinformation, this study examines the role of sensationalism in supporting disinformation. We conducted survey experiments in six countries (N = 7,009), presenting versions of a false claim that differed in their degree of sensationalism. We varied three contextual conditions for disinformation support: whether respondents grew up in a tabloid-oriented national news culture, whether they indicated individual usage preferences for tabloid and alternative media, and how they rated their situational uncertainty during the pandemic. Our results show a weak influence of tabloidized cultures, but people who frequently use tabloid or alternative media are more likely to agree with disinformation. Users who are uncertain about what is true and what is false are also more likely to agree with disinformation, especially when it is presented sensationally. The average user, however, is more likely to agree with disinformation that is presented neutrally. This finding is concerning, as disinformation presented in a sober manner is much harder to detect by those who want to fight the “infodemic.”

As newsrooms are increasingly using web analytics to monitor news behavior, journalism is likely to become increasingly “metrics-driven.” Research suggests that analytics are commonly used by web editors to decide on the distribution and promotion of news stories, but how does this affect the news practices of journalists? To what extent are audience metrics taken into account by individual journalists and reporters who work in a specific news beat? This paper explores this question through a survey of political journalists in Belgium. The study examines the level of access that political news journalists have to audience metrics, and to what extent their level of exposure to and use of metrics affects their attitudes toward analytics in news work. Results show that while three quarters of the political news journalists are nowadays exposed to audience metrics on a regular basis, more than half of them report to never make direct use of web metrics in their daily work. Younger journalists are more likely to be exposed and to use web metrics than their senior colleagues, but journalists working for commercial media do not use metrics more intensely than journalists from public service media. Journalists who actively use metrics themselves tend to hold more positive attitudes toward web metrics, whereas the passive exposure to metrics seems to make journalists more skeptical or negative about them.

The growing dissemination of conspiracy theories on social media has challenged the well-being of societies. This study aims to understand why individuals would engage with conspiracy theories and what role specific beliefs, but also individual factors such as personality traits play. To answer these questions, we conducted surveys in six countries (Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, France, the UK and the U.S.) and investigate three motivations (conviction, entertainment and reaction provocation) behind the dissemination of conspiracy content on social media. Our findings demonstrate that across issues, individuals who indicated they would engage with conspiracy theories do it mainly because they are convinced by the message. Political orientation and issue attitudes proof to be connected to individual engagement with conspiracy theories out of conviction, while dark personality traits such as narcissism and psychopathy are valid predictors for why individuals would disseminate conspiracy theories out of entertainment reasons or to provoke reactions.

Social media have offered politicians a way to reach a broader audience and citizens a dynamic way to respond and interact with politicians’ communication. In this study we focus on how two important dimensions of the social media messages of politicians impact different types of user engagement: the distinction between political and private posts and the degree of emotionality of the post. Additionally, we compare the amount and types of interaction between routine periods and election periods. Supported by automatic data gathering and coding we analyze all Facebook posts of 124 Belgian politicians for a period of more than two years (N=34,408). Our results indicate that different types of Facebook posts lead to different types of user engagement. Private posts generate more reactions, while political posts are more often shared and commented on. Additionally, Facebook posts with positive, and, negative emotional language garner more interaction than those with less emotionality. Finally, during election campaigns both politicians and citizens are more active. There is a proliferation of the amount of Facebook messages that politicians post, and these messages also score higher on engagement.

The transition from low- to high-choice media environments has had far-reaching implications for citizens’ media use and its relationship with political knowledge. However, there is still a lack of comparative research on how citizens combine the usage of different media and how that is related to political knowledge. To fill this void, we use a unique cross-national survey about the online and offline media use habits of more than 28,000 individuals in 17 European countries. Our aim is to (i) profile different types of news consumers and (ii) understand how each user profile is linked to political knowledge acquisition. Our results show that five user profiles – news minimalists, social media news users, traditionalists, online news seekers, and hyper news consumers – can be identified, although the prevalence of these profiles varies across countries. Findings further show that both traditional and online-based news diets are correlated with higher political knowledge. However, online-based news use is more widespread in Southern Europe, where it is associated with lower levels of political knowledge than in Northern Europe. By focusing on news audiences, this study provides a comprehensive and fine-grained analysis of how contemporary European political information environments perform and contribute to an informed citizenry.

Alternative news media are largely independent players in the news environment, which allows them to publish more alternative, and possibly more radical, news content. Do they utilise their independence to display actors that are underrepresented in the mainstream news? And does it affect the actor diversity in their news coverage and the journalistic environment as a whole? This study scrutinises the differences in actor diversity and actor presentation in articles published by alternative and mainstream news media to gauge if alternative media are more one-sided and if they contribute to the external actor diversity of the news environment. We analyse a sample of news articles on migration and social affairs published by two mainstream media and four alternative outlets. Despite limited differences in article-level actor diversity between alternative and mainstream news media, our findings highlight that right-wing and left-wing alternative media exploit their editorial independence differently to highlight other actor categories. Left-wing alternative news media present more civil society actors, while right-wing alternative news outlets pay more attention to right-wing politicians and parties. Thus, alternative news media are not that different in terms of internal actor diversity, but they modestly advance the external actor diversity in the news environment.

Communicative responsiveness of politicians to public opinion signals has become increasingly important for politicians’ electoral fate and citizens’ sense of feeling represented. Although politicians can communicate directly with the public via social media, little is known about the extent, conditions, and favorability of politicians’ responsiveness on social media to public opinion cues. This paper scrutinizes politicians’ responsiveness to one particular public opinion signal: street protest. Do politicians respond to street protest on social media? And if so, when, and how do they react? We address these questions by means of two datasets: (1) a protest event dataset of all protests staged in Brussels (Belgium) between July 2017 and June 2019 (N = 124); and (2) a social media dataset containing all Facebook messages (N = 36.323) and tweets (N = 142.596) by Belgian politicians (N = 236) in the days surrounding each protest. Results show that politicians do respond to protest and its issue; the lion’s share of social media messages supporting protesters. Protest that is large, (inter)nationally coordinated, and organized on socio-cultural issues is more frequently discussed by politicians; left-wing, opposition, and issue-owning politicians are more responsive as well. Whereas especially left-wing politicians endorse protests, right-wing politicians are more prone to discredit it. Responsiveness is thus asymmetric across the political spectrum. Our findings have implications for democratic representation and its challenges in hybrid media systems.

Exogenous shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic unleashes multiple fundamental questions about society beyond public health. Based on the classical concept of 'need for orientation' and the literature on the role of the media in times of crisis, we investigate to what extent the COVID-19 pandemic affected news consumption in comparative perspective. Based on a two-wave panel survey in 17 mostly European countries, our study targets the role of both legacy news brands (TV, radio, newspapers) and so-called contemporary news media (Internet-based and social media) during this global health crisis. Our results show an overall rise of news use across countries, but only for some types of news media. We find an increase of TV news consumption, and a higher reliance on social media and the Internet for news and information. This indicates that in times of crises and an unusually strong need for orientation, people mainly turn to news sources that are easily available and offer a more immediate coverage. Furthermore, we find the rise in news use to be mainly present among those who already have a higher level of trust in legacy media and among people that were more concerned about the impact of the pandemic.

One of the main functions of news media in democracies is informing the citizenry on day-to-day affairs. However, the way in which citizens gather news has changed as nowadays people have more opportunities than ever before to adapt their media consumption based on their preferences. One of the major game changers was the introduction of social media. This raises the question to what extent traditional media still contribute to people’s knowledge of current affairs. Using a time-diary study in the Flemish media context, we investigate the influence of different forms of news consumption on current news knowledge. We conclude that traditional (print and audiovisual) media, including popular outlets, continue to be the major contributors to people’s knowledge about current affairs and that social media hardly contribute at all.

Although immigration always has been an issue of political debate, the 2015 European migrant crisis led to an enormous increase in attention from policymakers and news media. Many studies already focused on the representation of the crisis in the news, but no systematic longitudinal research existed comparing coverage in crisis and non-crisis times. This study analyzes all television news items on immigration in Flanders (Belgium) from the two main broadcasters from the period 2003-2017. By doing so, we are able to study whether there are changes in immigration coverage before and during the crisis years. We focus specifically on the actors that get the opportunity to voice their point of view on immigration and on the issues related to immigration. Our results show that before the crisis, immigration news coverage on the commercial and public service broadcaster was relatively similar. However, during the crisis their approach changes. The commercial broadcaster criminalizes immigration more and focuses on political actors. The public broadcaster opts for a broader issue approach and gives the word more to citizens and immigrants during the crisis. We elaborate in the conclusion on how crises can change the nature of reporting.

The book How Political Actors Use the Media is the result of a long intellectual journey. Frustrated by the explosively growing work on media and politics and, especially, by our own inability to g...

One outlook, many perspectives? Diversity in Flemish news media and the perception of the audience A diverse range of actors and viewpoints can safeguard the quality of news reporting and the distribution of attention to different sides to a story. In this study, we look at the differences in content diversity between the news coverage on two (one socio-economic and one socio-cultural) cases in the Flemish news environment and how these differences translate into perceptions of diversity and bias with the audience. Despite limited differences in content diversity, we find that news items on the sociocultural and socio-economic case highlight different actors. Moreover, news items on the socio-cultural case are more neutral, while the coverage on the socio-economic issue contains more (balanced) viewpoints. These differences in content are largely translated into differences in perception. However, we find that a slight bias in perception of tone in the coverage on the socio-cultural issue is due to personal characteristics and issue-relevant attitudes.

Fact-checking has always been a central task of journalism, but given the ever-growing amount and speed of news offline and online, as well as the growing amounts of misinformation and disinformation, it is becoming increasingly important to support human fact-checkers with (semi-)automated methods to make their work more efficient. Within fact-checking, the detection of check-worthy claims is a crucial initial step, since it limits the number of claims that require or deserve to be checked for their truthfulness. In this paper, we present FactRank, a novel claim detection tool for journalists specifically created for the Dutch language. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first and still the only such tool for Dutch. FactRank thus complements existing online claim detection tools for English and (a small number of) other languages. FactRank performs similarly to claim detection in ClaimBuster, the state-of-the-art fact-checking tool for English. Our comparisons with a human baseline also indicate that given how much even expert human fact-checkers disagree, there may be a natural “upper bound” on the accuracy of check-worthiness detection by machine-learning methods. The specific quality of FactRank derives from the interdisciplinary and iterative process in which it was created, which includes not only a high-performance deep-learning neural network architecture, but also a principled approach to defining and operationalising the concept of check-worthiness via a detailed codebook. This codebook was created jointly by expert fact-checkers from the two countries that have Dutch as an official language (Belgium/Flanders and the Netherlands). We expect FactRank to be very useful exactly because of the way we defined check-worthiness, and because of how we have made this explicit and traceable.

Hoewel traditionele nieuwsmedia doorgaans op een zeer gelijkaardige en homogene manier berichten over issues en gebeurtenissen, zien nieuwsconsumenten geregeld een zekere vorm van bias of vertekening in nieuwsberichtgeving. Deze perceptie van vertekening, al dan niet gegrond, wordt vaak beïnvloed door vooringenomenheid bij de ontvanger of een verwachte vooringenomenheid bij de producent van de nieuwsberichtgeving. In dit onderzoek wordt er gekeken naar de diversiteit en de toon van de berichtgeving over twee specifieke prominente nieuwsonderwerpen in de periode van 23 april tot 5 mei 2018. Alle nieuwsitems die in die periode in de Vlaamse nieuwsmedia verschenen over de staking bij Lidl (een socio-economisch issue) en de incidenten met allochtone jongeren in de Brusselse wijk Peterbos (een socio-cultureel issue) werden verzameld en geanalyseerd om de inhoudelijke verschillen te bestuderen. Gelijktijdig werd een survey- en dagboekonderzoek uitgevoerd bij een steekproef van Vlaamse nieuwsconsumenten om hun (nieuws)mediagebruik nauwkeurig te registreren en hun attitudes en percepties te bestuderen. De resultaten tonen aan dat, ondanks beperkte verschillen in de mate van actor- en standpuntdiversiteit van de verschillende media, er relatief grote verschillen zijn in perceptie van de toon van de artikels. Vooral persoonlijkheidskenmerken zoals etnocentrisme, vertrouwen in de media en politieke kennis hebben een significant effect op de percepties van de onderzochte artikels.

While the role of social media in the spread of conspiracy theories has received much attention, a key deficit in previous research is the lack of distinction between different types of platforms. This study places the role of social media affordances in facilitating the spread of conspiracy beliefs at the center of its enquiry. We examine the relationship between platform use and conspiracy theory beliefs related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Relying on the concept of technological affordances, we theorize that variation across key features make some platforms more fertile places for conspiracy beliefs than others. Using data from a crossnational dataset based on a two-wave online survey conducted in 17 countries before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that Twitter has a negative effect on conspiracy beliefs—as opposed to all other platforms under examination which are found to have a positive effect.

The democratic functions of the media are at the center of discussions about the societal role of journalists (e.g., McNair 2009; Stromback 2005). These democratic functions, like the information, watchdog, and expression function are laid down in legal texts (Graber 2003) and ethical codes (Sonnenberg 1997) and are part of the core values of the occupational ideology of journalists (Kovach & Rosenstiel 2001).

Online disinformation is considered a major challenge for modern democracies. It is widely understood as misleading content produced to generate profits, pursue political goals, or maliciously deceive. Our starting point is the assumption that some countries are more resilient to online disinformation than others. To understand what conditions influence this resilience, we choose a comparative cross-national approach. In the first step, we develop a theoretical framework that presents these country conditions as theoretical dimensions. In the second step, we translate the dimensions into quantifiable indicators that allow us to measure their significance on a comparative cross-country basis. In the third part of the study, we empirically examine eighteen Western democracies. A cluster analysis yields three country groups: one group with high resilience to online disinformation (including the Northern European systems, for instance) and two country groups with low resilience (including the polarized Southern European countries and the United States). In the final part, we discuss the heuristic value of the framework for comparative political communication research in the age of information pollution.

This Research Note investigates party advertising in newspapers and on social media (Facebook) during the 2019 general elections in Flanders, the largest region of Belgium. The 2019 elections saw a marked increase in the use of social media advertising by parties, whereas newspaper advertising saw a decline. Prior research that compares multiple types of advertising, particularly advertising on social and legacy media remains limited. As such, based on a quantitative content analysis we investigate not just the prevalence of party advertising on both types of media, but also compare the level of negativity, presidentialisation, and issue emphasis. Our analysis reveals substantial differences: we find that not only the type of advertisements varies across the platforms, but also that social media ads tend to be more negative. Finally, parties’ issue emphasis varies substantially as well, with different issues being emphasized in newspaper and Facebook advertisements.

Do the mass media influence the issue priorities of politicians? This question has been present in the literature on the media and political agenda-setting since the mid-1970s when scholars first addressed it within the broader agenda-setting research. While only eighteen empirical pieces examined this topic until the mid-2000s (Walgrave & Van Aelst, 2006), in the last decade the number of studies on the media and the political agenda has expanded considerably (Van Aelst & Walgrave, 2016). In fact, in the last ten years (2005–2015), more than thirty studies focused on the media’s political agenda-setting power. The research now features a wider geographical scope, richer datasets, and more contingent factors have been investigated in detail. Studying the relationship between the media agenda and the political agenda has therefore become a flourishing subfield in political communication. In addition, it connects a community of political scientists interested in factors that influence public policy with communication scholars who work on the political influence of the mass media. info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

Traditionally, journalists had the autonomy to decide what is worthy enough to be considered news. However, the growing centrality of audience analytics in the news selection process warrants greater scrutiny in how these tools are likely to influence journalistic perceptions on which news stories the public is most interested in. Taking a quantitative approach, we conducted a survey-embedded experiment among political journalists in Belgium (n = 136). The journalists were asked to rank a set of five headlines from most to least prominent on a fictional homepage of a news outlet. Stories with positive analytics were genuinely ranked higher compared with stories in the control condition, whereas stories with negative analytics were ranked lower. Especially for soft news items, it seems that audience analytics can make a difference. However, for hard news, the effect was not significant. Furthermore, the effect of audience analytics remains limited compared with the impact of a traditional news value such as negativity. In this way, this study confirms, but also nuances, the impact of audience metrics.

Newsworthiness can be studied from different perspectives. Firstly, news values can be seen as cognitive ‘cues’ on the basis of which journalists and audiences can assess the newsworthiness of an event or item. Secondly, news values can also be considered as ‘angles’ through which journalists can tell and sell news stories to the audience. Thirdly, news values can be defined as ‘criteria’ used by journalistic gatekeepers to identify and select the news. Drawing on insights from these three approaches, this chapter reflects on how news value research can evolve in a digital and social media context. It is argued that future research should focus on how audience engagement with news affects both human and algorithmic decisions about the newsworthiness of a particular event or story.

In the current paper, we investigate how the Lampedusa shipwreck disaster in October 2013 affected newspaper coverage in three European countries (Belgium, Germany, and Italy). Based on data from a quantitative comparative content analysis, we conclude that Lampedusa can be regarded a key event for immigration coverage, but only in Italy, where journalists devoted a considerable amount of attention to the disaster. We also find that the structure and the general tone of immigration coverage changed after the event. However, those changes were only short-termed and immigration coverage quickly returned to its routine level.

Although elections are not won in the media, scholars agree that media visibility impacts politicians electoral success. This study examines what effect media visibility has on the individual electoral success of all political candidates competing in PR-list system elections. We focus on media effects during the short and long campaign and investigate how these effects vary between types of candidates. We position media attention in a broader framework of factors influencing electoral success. Our findings show that for top candidates long campaign media attention predicts their electoral success, whereas for ordinary candidates attention during the short campaign matters most. Candidates also differ regarding indirect media effects, which is reflected especially in the gender bias of the media. Therefore, future research ought to be aware of candidate differences and temporal dynamics when inferring the electoral effects of media coverage. Overall, our findings indicate that the choices journalists make to report about some politicians and not about others have an actual impact on the electoral outcome and political careers.

News media can be considered to fulfil their democratic role as a "marketplace of ideas" only if they present a diverse content that gives space to a wider range of ideas and viewpoints. But how can content diversity be assessed? And what determines actor and viewpoint diversity in the first place? By employing measurements of actor and viewpoint diversity at the article and newspaper level, this study provides a complete overview on the content diversity of immigration news, and it investigates factors that have an impact on content diversity of immigration newspaper articles in Belgium, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom (2013-2014). The results of a multilevel analysis indicate that both the articles' size and the elite character of a newspaper play a key role in enhancing news' multiperspectivalness. Also, the findings show that these two measurements of content diversity are different yet related to each other.

Intermedia agenda setting is a widely used theory to explain how content transfers between news media. The recent digitalization wave, however, challenges some of its basic presuppositions. We discuss three assumptions that cannot be applied to online and social media unconditionally: one, that media agendas should be measured on an issue level; two, that fixed time lags suffice to understand overlap in media content; and three, that media can be considered homogeneous entities. To address these challenges, we propose a “news story” approach as an alternative way of mapping how news spreads through the media. We compare this with a “traditional” analysis of time-series data. In addition, we differentiate between three groups of actors that use Twitter. For these purposes, we study online and offline media alike, applying both measurement methods to the 2014 Belgium election campaign. Overall, we find that online media outlets strongly affect other media that publish less often. Yet, our news story analysis emphasizes the need to look beyond publication schemes. “Slow” newspapers, for example, often precede other media’s coverage. Underlining the necessity to distinguish between Twitter users, we find that media actors on Twitter have vastly more agenda-setting influence than other actors do.

Studies have shown that parties selectively emphasize different issues to compete with each other to raise the salience for their preferred issues and to appear competent in handling them. This study applies the selective emphasis framework to individual politicians. We argue that politicians compete with both politicians from different parties and with their party members. We expect that issue ownership matters to competition with politicians from different parties and issue specialization to competition with politicians from their own party. We studied the individual issue agendas of 144 Belgian politicians for a period of 9 months on Twitter, in the news and in parliament. Our results show that issue specialization is a consistent driver of the three issue agendas of politicians, while the effect of issue ownership varies across agendas. This means that both factors are not mutually exclusive and that combining them can be an opportune strategy for politicians.

Who gets to speak in the news plays a crucial role in the shaping of the news. Consequently, the study of actors in the news is an enduring topic in journalism studies. However, little systematic knowledge exists about differences between news issues in the occurrence of speaking actors. Based on a new fourfold classification of actors in the news, we study differences in actor prevalence over time, between broadcasters and issues. To do so, we analyze the entire population of television news items in Belgium from the two main broadcasters for the period 2003 to 2016. While we do not find large changes over time, significant differences exist between issues in the actors that get to speak in the news. Moreover, the prevalence of speaking actors differs between the public service and commercial broadcaster, even when controlling for news issues.

This study focuses on Twitter use among economic journalists working for print media in Belgium. By looking into their tweeting and following behaviour, the article examines how economic journalists use Twitter for promotional, conversational and sourcing purposes. Based on an automated content analysis of what they tweet and a social network analysis of whom they follow, the results show that economic journalists mainly use Twitter to promote themselves and their news organization rather than to engage in public conversation on the platform. In addition, the study looks into their following behaviour to investigate which actors they consider as 'potential sources'. Here, the findings are consistent with previous studies among political and health journalists, indicating that journalists are more likely to follow institutionally affiliated rather than non-affiliated sources on Twitter. Furthermore, the social network analysis gives additional evidence of the media-centered of journalists' Twitter use, as media-affiliated actors maintain a dominant position in the economic journalists' Twitter networks.

How journalists perceive public opinion is important in democracies. These perceptions help journalists to construct meaningful stories and might influence news content. However, little is known about how accurate journalists' perceptions of public opinion actually are. Using a survey with Belgian (Flemish) political journalists, we analyze their perceptions of public opinion on concrete policy proposals, next to their general political leaning. We combine the estimates from journalists with evidence about "real" public opinion, collected through a parallel citizen survey. Further, our quantitative survey results are complemented with qualitative explanations offered by journalists themselves. We find that the surveyed political journalists perceive their outlets' audiences' political leaning as more right-wing than their own. Regarding specific policy issues, the political journalists perceive the public almost consistently as being more right-wing than they actually are. Right-wing journalists are better at correctly assessing public opinion. Moreover, the more experienced journalists are, the smaller the right-wing bias in their estimations. Journalists seem to be well aware of their own center-left leaning and overcompensate for, rather than project, their own leaning in their assessment of public opinion. In all, our study shows that looking into journalists' public opinion perceptions is a relevant and promising research track.

Political candidates in multi-member district proportional systems use different campaign strategies. Scholars have studied why some candidates focus on the party and run a party-centered campaign, while others highlight their own personal profile and merits by running personalized campaigns. However, it remains unclear how these different strategies influence the electoral success of candidates, especially in the context of proportional flexible list systems. To answer this question, we asked Belgian candidates to map out their campaign strategy and linked this to their election results. We find that especially investing personal money is an important predictor of success. Moreover, we find that candidates who aim to attract attention for themselves rather than the party also score better, but this effect is contingent on a candidates resources, list position, and political party.

This study on the role of media attention for the Dutch question hour answers three questions: to what extent is media attention a source of inspiration for oral parliamentary questions? What explains the newsworthiness of these questions? And what explains the extent of media coverage for the questions posed during the question hour? To address this, we present a content analysis of oral parliamentary questions and related press coverage in five recent years. The results show first that oral questions are usually based on media attention for a topic. Concerns about media influence should however be nuanced: it is not necessarily the coverage itself, but also regularly a political statement that is the actual source of a parliamentary question. The media are thus an important “channel” for the interaction between politicians. Second, our analysis shows that oral questions do not receive media attention naturally. Several news values help to explain the amount of news coverage that questions receive. “Surfing the wave” of news attention for a topic in the days previous to the question hour seems to be the best way to generate media attention.

Attention in the mass media is seen as crucial for electoral success. However, most ordinary candidates hardly get any attention in the news. With social media outlets becoming ever more popular, the question is whether the overall asymmetry in attention for candidates still holds today. Do candidates who dominate the traditional media during the campaign also dominate the social media? Or can candidates make up for a lack of mass media coverage by attracting attention on these new media platforms? This paper aims to answer these questions by pairing Twitter activity and Twitter popularity with newspaper attention for a large number of individual candidates in the 2014 Belgian election campaign. We expand the normalization versus equalization debate by not only looking at how much a new medium is used, but also at its success in terms of popularity and audience reach. Our findings show that the two platforms are indeed related, mainly because a small political elite dominates both old and new media. Twitter popularity and Twitter activity (albeit to a lesser extent) are higher among powerful politicians. We elaborate on why these findings are so much in line with the normalization hypothesis.

How do individual politicians use the news media to reach their political goals? The authors argue that this question can be best addressed by using an actor-centered, functional approach. The chapter develops the “Information & Arena” model to distinguish two essential functions the mass media have for political elites. The media are a source of information and politicians can profit from the momentum generated by media information. The media also are an arena elites need access to in order to promote themselves and their issues. These two functions offer certain politicians a structural advantage over others and are relevant for the power struggle among political elites. A systematic functional account allows comparison of the role of the media across politicians and political systems.

As the use of social media becomes more common, it is often claimed that a media environment arises in which traditional distinctions between concepts like online and offline, producer and audience, citizen and journalist become blurred. This studys purpose is to identify and explore the implications for contemporary news stories. Using a content analysis of Belgian election campaign coverage in 2014, we study the role of five newspapers, two daily television newscasts, seven current affairs programmes, radio news bulletins, three news websites, and a selection of Twitter accounts in creating and shaping news stories. We find that the analytical distinction between platforms still matters, since they have different roles in creating and shaping news stories, suggesting that different platform-specific logics are at play. Twitter is an important factor in launching and shaping news stories, but it tends to be dominated by establishment actors (journalists and politicians), whereas citizens only play a modest role.

Election campaigns are expected to inform voters about parties issue positions, thereby increasing voters ability to influence future policy and thus enhancing the practice of democratic government. We argue that campaign learning is not only contingent on voters characteristics and different sources of information, but also on how parties communicate their issue positions in election debates. We combine a two-wave panel survey with content analysis data of three televised election debates. In cross-classified multilevel auto-regression models we examine the influence of these debates in the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election campaign on voters knowledge of the positions of eight parties on three issues. The Dutch multiparty system allows us to separate voters ability to position parties from their accuracy in ordering these parties. We reach three main conclusions. First, this study shows that voters become more able and accurate during the campaign. However, these campaign learning effects erode after the elections. Second, whereas voters attention to campaigns consistently contributes to their ability to position parties, its effect on accuracy is somewhat less consistent. Third, televised election debates contribute to what voters learn. Parties that advocate their issue positions in the debates stimulate debate viewers ability to position these parties on these issues. In the face of the complexity of campaigns and debates in multiparty systems, campaigns are more likely to boost voters subjective ability to position parties than their accuracy.

Studies have shown that politicians follow the news media closely and react to news through their parliamentary activities. However, we know little about what kinds of information politicians look for in the media and actively use when being responsive to the media. Inspired by the uses and gratifications tradition, we ask what kinds of information politicians look for in the news and how these "informational media use motives" explain their media responsiveness. A survey of Finnish parliamentarians shows that most politicians use the news to learn about society and societal problems. Politicians also use the news to look for information about public opinion, and younger politicians especially search information about other political actors. Politicians who look for information about public opinion from the media are more reactive to media regarding symbolic agendas. Politicians who use the media to learn about other political actors are more responsive to media regarding substantial agendas.