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The news media use the logic of us-versus-them divide in covering politics and religion, but this case alone is insufficient a precondition to label the media as populist. Rather, it is the extensive and unchallenged accounts of official sources including populist politicians that reinforce the pro-populist tendency of media. The article examines the way the news media outlets cover the rhetorical exchanges between the Rodrigo Duterte administration and the church especially the Catholic Church in the Philippines. Based on textual analysis of news articles, the narratives of politics and religion are presented: "hypocritical church" mainstreams the conflict-centered pronouncements of the political leader against the church, "political church" covers the anti-populist but also the nostalgic oratory of the Catholic Church, and "alternative voice" underscores the views of faith-based formations on the fringe of dominant media sources. The narratives of politics and religion matter to the contentious relationship between journalism and democracy as they characterize the capability of news media to amplify, interrogate, and defy populist politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study analyzes the perceptions of US women political candidates about their local news coverage at a pivotal moment of change in both journalism and electoral politics. Through an intersectional approach, in-depth interviews with thirty-seven women who recently ran for office from 2016 to 2020 revealed findings in two areas of news research: local news declines and gender bias in political news. First, massive declines in local news capacities have trickled into local political communication, which, along with affordances of social media, point to a decline in relevance of local media to local campaigns. Second, participants perceived bias in their news coverage based on an identity intersecting with their gender, partisan affiliation, or both. Their experiences offered two potential ways forward for local news to reattain relevancy in local elections in countries of local news declines: through accountability journalism, and by diversifying staff to meet the needs of a diversifying electoral slate of candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the increasing number of studies examining the conflicts between the media and populist leaders, understanding how such clashes prompt shifts in journalism norms and practices remains to be thoroughly explored. Based on a literature review and the discussion of an extensive array of examples characterizing the Brazilian media setting, this article provides a qualitative assessment of how Jair Bolsonaro's rhetoric and actions have triggered a "critical incident" in our mainstream journalism. We consider four dimensions currently experiencing transformations: the media's (1) institutional responses and campaigns, (2) production of the news, (3) production of editorials, and (4) how media professionals have reacted to populist attacks. There is evidence that journalism has increasingly become a central topic in news texts. We have also cataloged changes in news production routines (e.g., the editors' hesitancy to send reporters to cover some political events), the use of editorials to reinforce metajournalistic discourses, and shifts in how professionals make sense of their work. Our findings contribute to the broader literature by investigating how traditional borders and values of journalism are renegotiated during institutional crises. In addition, our analytical framework can be applied to other media settings experiencing similar tensions and help underpin the construction of empirical variables to understand meaningful changes in the field. Lastly, this study considers the possible effects that change in norms, routines, and practices can have on the democratic roles of journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the persisting issue of women's underrepresentation in political news partly arises from biases in the social reality, journalism plays a crucial role in mediating these biases. This study proposes a multilayered framework of gendered influences in journalistic news production to understand how journalistic factors exacerbate or mitigate women's media representation. Drawing from a mixed-methods design (content analysis, survey, interviews), journalists' own gender emerges as the strongest predictor of gendered representations. Women's underrepresentation is also influenced by professional roles but not by organizations' gender guidelines. We explore how journalists perceive these influences and discuss conceptual and practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalists increasingly cite and/or embed social media posts in news articles. While social media posts have been found to be of little deliberative quality, we do not know whether this also affects the deliberative quality of the news. Against the background of a hybrid media system and deliberative news media standards, we answer this research question with a content analysis of news articles including or not including posts from X (formerly Twitter) in the twelve widest-reaching German news websites prior and after the German general election 2021. We were particularly interested in the differences inside and outside election campaigns as the interdependence of the mass media and the political sphere is particularly pronounced during campaign periods. Results show that posts are more often cited and/or embedded in news articles inside than outside election campaigns. Articles including posts feature a greater number of actors but are not more diverse as mainly actors from the political center are referenced. Moreover, articles with posts are associated with a higher position responsiveness but on the other hand a decreased civility of the represented political discourse. This pattern only emerged inside but not outside campaign periods. These findings add to our understanding of contemporary hybrid media systems and the nature of political journalism during contentious political periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European Union (EU) political actors have been heavily affected by the so-called disinformation crisis, leading to intense worries about how EU citizens may be guaranteed access to trustworthy information in the years to come. While there is increasing research on how EU officials, platforms, and political parties react to the threat of disinformation, less attention has been paid to how another crucial group of actors in Brussels copes with this threat: EU correspondents. This paper presents one of the first empirical observations of EU correspondents' perceptions of the disinformation crisis. We conducted a survey with Brussels-based correspondents ahead of a politicized 2019 European Parliament election campaign, and asked: What are (a) the concerns and (b) self-perceived competences these correspondents have in dealing with disinformation? Our study offers two main take-aways: First, we recommend further studying EU journalism as a complex organism whose concerns and competences are influenced by intra-European differences in press freedom and journalistic professionalisation. Second, disinformation studies in the EU context must no longer neglect the challenges professional journalism faces when aiming to stop false content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research aims to understand how Brazilian media outlets use electoral forecasting methods in journalistic articles within the scope of coverage of the 2022 presidential elections. The year 2022 was remarkable due to the launch of several poll aggregation tools by the press, which have been used as an alternative to traditional polls to reinforce the demanding electoral coverage. In this context, we collected data from journalistic articles of selected media outlets that cite their own poll aggregators from January 1, 2022, to July 31, 2022. The research maps the utilization of aggregators in newspapers and presents an analysis of the articles that use the poll aggregators. To do so, we classified the articles into three distinct categories, identified according to patterns found in the way they use the aggregator. Finally, it underlines the innovative character of the research on the use of poll aggregators by media outlets.

The underrepresentation of women politicians in the media is a persistent feature in many contemporary democracies. Gender bias in election coverage makes it harder for women to reach positions of power in politics. Drawing on the special circumstances in Austria during the 2019 election campaign which saw the first female top candidate of a major party and a caretaker government containing equal numbers of men and women and which was led by the country's first woman as chancellor, we examine the effect of these developments on women politicians' representation in campaign coverage. We draw on quantitative content analysis of Austrian newspaper articles (N = 16,125) during four national parliamentary election campaigns (2008, 2013, 2017 and 2019). We show that for women politicians the media ceiling is slowly lifting at best, but that positions of power provide the most promising ways to evade gendered media bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, European journalists show a preference for opinionated stories in a growing movement triggered by the acceleration of the political information cycle in the digital sphere. This research aims to analyze how reporting the EU meets quality standards, comparing the coverage of EU affairs in local media from Germany, the United Kingdom (UK) and Spain. We content-analyze all the published news items on European issues, collected over a one-year period (2018–2019). Local media are selected because of their relationship with democracy in nearby communities. Based on a corpus of 1093 news stories, the results show that the number of statements was high; meanwhile, we detected a negative bias in every media outlet of the sample, but some differences were also found linking to national contexts. Likewise, our study provides evidence on the shaping of low-quality news about the EU, arguing that this practice could boost a polarized climate. [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]

Copyright of Scientific Journal of the Institute for Women's Studies / Studiów Kobiece is the property of Humanica Publishing House and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Political Science Studies / Studia Politologiczne is the property of University of Warsaw and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Fact-checking journalism has become a common practice to counteract misinformation. This research analyzes the perceptions of fact-checkers in Ibero-America on the purposes, principles, and challenges of fact-checking. Specifically, we studied if there are differences in perception based on adherence to the International Fact-Checking Network's (IFCN) Code of Principles, how frequently fact-checkers perform fact-checks, as well as their experience and age. Data were collected through a questionnaire that received 122 responses from fact-checkers in 17 countries. Results indicate that journalists' experience appears to be a variable that can help understand the boundaries between fact-checking and political and social activism in Ibero-America. Less-experienced fact-checkers were more likely to consider activism to be a purpose of fact-checking. Age was a predictive factor for explaining reformist perceptions of the essence of fact-checking in Ibero-America, with younger fact-checkers more likely to state that the purpose of fact-checking is to uphold the ideals of journalism and serve as a commitment to information transparency. Pledging to adhere to IFCN's Code of Principles was found to facilitate the use and analysis of fact-checking tools. The implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the early phase of the Covid-19 crisis, televised speeches and press conferences were one of the preferred means of government communication. They emphasized the urgency and severity of the situation and allowed actors to lead news coverage. While in the immediate phase of the crisis these press conferences were also directed at the general public, their original function was, of course, to inform and influence media coverage. The article investigates how government press conferences were received in newspapers in the first phase of Covid-19, answering two research questions: Did a rally-around-the-flag effect occur among journalists during Covid-19? And how did government press conferences influence salience and sentiment in newspaper opinion pieces? To answer these questions, I draw on a unique dataset, including transcripts of all Covid-19 press conferences in five European countries between January and July 2020, as well as opinion pieces from tabloid and broadsheet newspapers. Based on a mix of automated and manual content analysis, the results reveal how factors such as country context, newspaper type, and the progress of a pandemic can influence how the government agenda is reflected in the media in times of crisis.

PPolitical journalism as a field of study under the banner of journalism study, needs to be explored deeper in the context of Indonesia. Indonesia is one of the biggest democratic countries in the world. The country has implemented the system of direct elections in every five years to elect regional leaders as well as president and vice president. This paper aims to shed light on the practice of political journalism in Malang Raya. Malang Raya is a region in East Java Province which is comprised of Kota Malang, Kabupaten Malang and Kota Batu. The writers conducted semi-structured interviews with 6 reporters. The findings of this research are: (i) journalist and contributors do not obtain a complete freedom in the process of gathering the news and writing the news; (ii) journalist and contributors have obeyed the Indonesian ethics of journalistic, and (iii) to some extent, there are some factors influencing political reporting, i.e.: the interests of media firms, local culture, and geographical locations. Furthermore, politics is an interesting and challenging issue to report. Journalists can face some challenges and problems in reporting politics, as it also happened to our informants. In general, media firms have capacity to interpret the politicians conduct, and influence voters behaviour. In return, politicians are also in need of media, in terms of disseminating their ideas and obtaining some information about the communities.

The Slogan Function of Titles in Dmytro Dontsov’s Political Journalism The aim of this article is to analyse the function of titles of Dmytro Dontsov’s works and to prove the validity of the hypothesis of their “slogan” nature. Dontsov (1883–1973) consciously used a number of linguistic devices for persuasive purposes. The polemical nature of his political writings was also reflected in the titles he gave to his texts. In Dontsov’s works, one can distinguish a number of lexically, semantically, phraseologically, or metaphorically marked titles, which allowed us to hypothesise that many of the examined titles play a role similar to that of a political slogan. The analysed titles contain elements that make it easier for the recipient to assimilate their condensed message. We notice the conciseness of the message and the deliberate use of a number of linguistic, eristic and stylistic means. This leads to the conclusion that such a construction of the title serves, similarly to advertising or political slogans, to mobilise and motivate the recipient-reader. Sloganowa funkcja tytułów w publicystyce politycznej Dmytra Doncowa Celem artykułu jest analiza funkcji tytułów utworów Dmytra Doncowa oraz udowodnienie słuszności hipotezy o ich „sloganowym” charakterze. Doncow (1883–1973) dla celów perswazyjnych świadomie wykorzystywał szereg środków językowych, przy czym polemiczny charakter pism politycznych Doncowa przejawiał się także w tym, jak tytułował swoje teksty. W jego twórczości można wyróżnić szereg tytułów nacechowanych leksykalnie, semantycznie, frazeologicznie czy metaforycznie, co pozwala postawić hipotezę, że wiele z nich pełni rolę zbliżoną do hasła politycznego. Analizowane tytuły zawierają elementy ułatwiające odbiorcy przyswojenie ich skondensowanego przekazu. W tytułach Doncowa zauważamy zwięzłość przekazu oraz celowe użycie szeregu środków językowych, erystycznych i stylistycznych. Prowadzi to do wniosku, że taka konstrukcja tytułu służy, podobnie jak ma to miejsce w przypadku sloganów, mobilizacji odbiorcy-czytelnika do politycznej aktywności.

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]

Scholarship has pointed to an artificial hierarchy between political and lifestyle journalism that is rooted in norms and values stemming from Western-liberal thought. Within this distinction, lifestyle journalism has been subordinated as occupying a marginal or peripheral position in the field. Yet, how journalists perceive this distinction has rarely been studied empirically. This study draws on concepts of 'boundary work' and 'othering' to examine how political and lifestyle journalists discursively reinforce and contest boundaries and hierarchies. Through semi-structured interviews with 22 lifestyle and 26 political journalists and editors in South Africa, we show that political and lifestyle journalists engaged in both intra-field (self-)expansion, and (self-)expulsion and (self-)othering, by evoking several boundary markers. Boundaries were reinforced through gendered discourses, autonomy ideals, claims to specialization and accessibility in news beats and presentation, beliefs about political journalism's preservation of humanity, and greater risks to safety of political journalists. Boundaries were challenged by politicizing lifestyle journalism and popularizing political journalism, providing a counter-narrative to political journalism's negativity, and treating lifestyle journalism as economically beneficial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A focus on political consensus in the United States in the early 1950s has created a false sense of a period of national unity and of the press in that period as a trusted institution. This article uses listener hate mail to radio reporters during a divisive moment—President Harry Truman's removal of General Douglas MacArthur from his command in the Korean War in April 1951—to identify a politically rancorous discourse, aimed at the press. This period of high emotion for Americans provides a case study in audience members' sometimes hostile relationship with journalists and does so at an early moment in the creation of a truly mass national news audience. I analyze hundreds of unpublished, archival letters, from a time when public opinion polling was relatively new and still problematic, to rethink what our baseline measurement is for media trust and better contextualize claims about its trajectory. I find three tropes that are especially resonant in the present day and became more visible parts of the public discourse with the presidency of Donald Trump: anti-press attitudes, isolationism, and antisemitism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose is to study the process of forming of historical knowledge about Ukrainian liberaldemocratic parties in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century in journalistic works of 1905--1917. The methodological basis is a historiographical analysis of political journalism of the given period based on the principles of historicism and objectivity. The scientific no velty lies in an attempt to reveal, first of all, the significance of the works of active participants of the Ukrainian national-political movement in the historiography of Ukrainian liberal-democratic parties that were formed and operated in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. Conclusions. From the formation of Ukrainian liberal-democratic parties in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century and by 1917, a relatively small number of works of a publicistic nature were published, in which certain aspects of the history of the UDP, URP, and UDRP were studied. Their historiographical analysis shows that, in contrast to some assessments established in historiography, the first noticeable results were already achieved in the coverage of the Ukrainian party liberal-democratic movement in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. In particular, quite successful attempts were made to single out the ideological, theoretical, and organizational origins and prerequisites for the creation of Ukrainian liberal-democratic parties, to determine the common and different points in the program demands of the Ukrainian liberal-democrats and Russian cadets, to identify the main party demands for reforming the state system of the Russian Empire, and to clarify the reasons for the unification of the UDP and URP. The publications gave an ambiguous assessment of the internal party position of the UDRP, the political and cultural and educational activities of the party, the tactics of the party during the elections to the State Duma, the role of the UDRP in the organization of the Ukrainian parliamentary club and defining its platform. In general, in the political journalism of 1905--1917, the authors formulated their assessments of the activities of the Ukrainian parliamentary club in the First and Second Dumas, a series of conclusions that have not lost their historiographical significance even today. However, some authors' assessments were affected by their political beliefs, and coverage of the activities of Ukrainian liberal-democratic parties was rather fragmentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As more journalists rely on social media platforms like Twitter to gather information and report the news, scholars have identified an increasing tension between traditional journalistic values and reporters' construction of online personas. Moreover, networked journalists build these mediated personas—following platforms' affordances—to better engage with fellow journalists and algorithmic audiences. Drawing on data from 15 in-depth interviews with Kosovar Albanian political journalists and editors, this article offers a unique perspective by examining the negotiation process between professional standards and journalists' online personas on Twitter. Via their online personas, influenced by the audience and the platforms' affordances and logic, journalists and editors have given rise to new role conceptions and standards in local political journalism. The results show that political journalists and editors in Kosovo view Twitter as a platform where they can display both professional and personal layers of their identity. Furthermore, they feel unrestricted by journalistic standards, taking on roles outside the traditional scope of journalism: as good citizens, they express opinions on political issues; as activists, they advocate for personally meaningful causes; but they also see themselves as mordant critics of political figures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the relationship between the mainstream press and right-wing protests in Brazil. Guided by the "protest paradigm" literature, my goal was to understand how reporters in the Global South cover conservative demonstrations. Protest paradigm scholarship found that news norms and routines lead to delegitimizing patterns of coverage, focusing on official viewpoints, spectacle, and violence. Here, I consider how the same practices can aid in the legitimization of right-wing movements. Through a mixed methodology combining content analysis and interviews with reporters from the analyzed outlets, findings revealed that when protesters' grievances and demands aligned with the preferences of anti-leftist elites, right-wing politicians subsidized information to journalists. The lack of clashes with the police and cohesive leadership also allowed for coverage to become more thematic. As a result, I argue three conditions lead to news legitimization of protests. First, the movement fitting within a broader political conflict between elites. Second, the movement being sympathetic to the state's repressive apparatus. Third, the movement having cohesive leadership and unified identity. These conditions, which favor right-wing demands, drove legitimizing coverage even when reporters viewed the movement with skepticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how mainstream news organizations in Brazil have tweeted about Jair Bolsonaro, investigating to what extent they may (voluntarily or not) amplify the visibility of populist leaders. We also scrutinize the levels of audience engagement with posts mentioning the President. Our empirical design comprises a content analysis of 128,096 tweets published throughout 2019 by Folha de S. Paulo, O Estado de S. Paulo, and O Globo. The results reveal that such newspapers focused on controversies and negative issues involving Bolsonaro, while posts addressing public policies did not achieve high visibility or engagement. The article also discusses to what degree the newspapers may be taking advantage of users' preferences for content with populist features to reinforce their watchdog role and boost audience ratings. Our findings also contribute to understanding how populist leaders and media organizations can build a mutually beneficial relationship, even though they publicly claim to oppose each other. Finally, the paper suggests new hypotheses to be explored, such as the argument that quality papers may be loosening the division between news and opinion when using social media to satisfy audience niches in polarized environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the struggle of Azerbaijani political journalism against ideological provocations and aggression by Armenian official circles and media against Azerbaijan and our people. Here, war and hate propaganda, which further inflames the conflict against regional security, is "morally disarmament" and exposed, the Armenian genocide in Khojaly, Armenian barbarism and vandalism, the criminal activities of Armenian bandits, Armenian terrorists are shown in the Azerbaijani media, the Second Karabakh War and post-war Armenia are included. The main part of the fake information is mostly fabricated or altered facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a lens of boundary work and role conception, this study seeks to understand how political journalists discursively construct the role of the newspaper editorial endorsement. Researchers conducted long-form interviews with political journalists in the United States (n = 64) to understand how journalists conducted boundary work relative to endorsements. Journalists argued that the 2016 election was a decisive event in which political news endorsements lost their original objective. Political journalists described laboring to discursively distance themselves from the endorsement process and viewed political endorsements not only as ineffective, but also as jeopardizing their news organizations' independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Election coverage is often assumed to be different to everyday political coverage. We argue that this depends on political institutions. In majoritarian countries, where elections choose governments, election coverage should decisively move towards political competition and away from policy. In consensual countries, where coalitions are based on policy negotiations, there should be a less pronounced shift towards political competition and away from policy. To test this argument, we use an automatic coding system to study 0.9 billion words in Die Welt for 12 years and in the Financial Times for 30 years. The results support our institutional hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties take advantage of the internet to disseminate their messages, particularly during election campaigns. In addition to the public, these messages reach journalists, who have turned these platforms into another tool for their professional work. The aim of this study is to reflect on how the nature of publications can affect the work of journalists who use this content as raw material to work with. In order to explore this more deeply, a quantitative approach is proposed, consisting of a metric analysis of 1,280 Facebook posts by 10 political forces and a survey of 1,004 people, representing the universe of the Spanish population. The results show that the parties disseminate unidirectional and propagandistic content on Facebook during campaigns, marginalising dialogue and interaction. This restricts journalists’ ability to converse with political parties through the social network, which at the same time is impacted by messages whose veracity is secondary to their objective of reaching as many internet users as possible.

A significant part of the interaction between journalists and their sources in political journalism is informal or not mentioned in the media content. Visibility/invisibility and formality/informality are tactical choices applied by journalists and sources. They influence agenda building in the short term and shared interpretations that dominate the public sphere in the long term. However, the extent to which informal and/or invisible sources participate, what their role is, and why have not been consistently measured. This paper offers a matrix model to map and compare the usage of formal/informal and visible/invisible interactions between journalists and their sources. The data consists of 475 journalist-source interactions in Lithuania and Sweden reconstructed by 33 political journalists. The results demonstrate how different interactions presuppose different source roles in the news process. Formal invisible sources act as gatekeepers, and informal invisible sources act as agenda setters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the Hybrid Media System (Chadwick, 2017) has changed the actor constellations between political journalism, active members of the audience, and sources. How journalism responds to activism, pressure from politics, and emerging forms of connective action around news events is an important theme in journalism research. This thematic issue brings together seven articles that look at these developments from different angles in a rapidly changing communication ecosystem. The focus is on journalistic authority and legitimacy, journalism and interpretive communities, and changes concerning journalistic roles and practices.

Copyright of Revista Pauta Geral is the property of Revista Pauta Geral and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Studia z Filologii Polskiej i Slowianskiej is the property of Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Slavic Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

News diversity is an important concern of journalism scholars, as its presence or absence can have a profound effect on democratic debate and the information available to citizens. Many have speculated that news diversity decreases over time, due to changing economic circumstances. This expectation especially applies to newspapers. Using nearly two decades of newspaper data from four European countries (Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, UK), we do not find this expected decrease in news diversity. When conducting pairwise, automated comparisons between articles published on the same day in the same country, we rather find a modest over time increase in diversity between newspapers. This result suggests that newspapers differentiate rather than converge in the content they offer, shedding a more positive light on the evolution of the press in our current high-choice media environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explores gendered representations in Belgian electoral news coverage. Compared to other Western countries, Belgium has consistently reported a small share of female politicians in the news, offering limited insights into the ways they are portrayed. Starting from the observation that the (mainly Anglo-Saxon) body of work on women politicians' representation has reported mixed findings, the study intends to provide a more comprehensive analysis by taking political and contextual factors into account. By means of a quantitative content analysis, we monitored news content prior to the 2019 Belgian elections, resulting in a sample of 981 television, newspaper, radio and web-based news items. The findings confirm the persistence of gendered patterns in Belgian news content, regardless of a candidate's political characteristics. Women were less often represented and their gender, appearance and family life were more often highlighted. Whereas a candidate's political power provided additional insights into gendering, some differences in coverage between candidates could not be explained by either sex or political characteristics. Lastly, differences between media were limited, though web-based news was more negative in tone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political journalism is a major player and one of the democratizing pillars of the fourth estate. The metaverse opens new frontiers to the so-called immersive journalism. The article addresses with this incipient narrative in order to verify its hypothetical penetration and viability within Communication. The research questions whether virtual reality in its advanced version, the so-called metaverse, is perceived by the press sector as a valuable resource and whether it will have an impact on forms and styles related to politics or, on the contrary, is the result of the technophilia inherent in hypermodernity. The methodology generates a state of the art through case studies and/or experimental situations presented as journalistic sources. To resolve the frictions of the case studies, a heuristic Likert-based focus group is convened. Lines such as platform capitalism and other issues related to the validity of virtual reality as a political cybersource converge in the discussion. The conclusions reveal the informational potential of this promising discourse with the necessary qualities to mutate this field, social action and even the political space, just as the Internet has already done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article observes how developments in politics, society, the media, and journalistic ethos impact political journalism content in Finland between 1995 and 2015. The focus is on three newspapers: the dailies Helsingin Sanomat and Aamulehti, and the tabloid Iltalehti. Using a coding scheme developed by Benson and Hallin (2007) and utilizing earlier findings by Kunelius and Väliverronen (2012), the analysis indicates two different approaches to politics at story level: a neutral and policy-oriented style in the two dailies, and a more diverse take by Iltalehti. Within stories, journalistic interventionism increases in all papers until 2010 and then diminishes. Differences emerge between the dailies and Iltalehti in journalistic presence, reporting patterns and sources used. Notably, in recent years, Iltalehti's approach has become more reminiscent of the dailies both at story level and within stories. The findings highlight the impact of the general journalistic ethos and the differing market considerations on the journalistic content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audience expectations of journalism are a crucial dimension not only to understand journalism's public legitimacy and institutional character but also its economic foundations in terms of consumers' prospects. Although we see a critically growing disconnect between the audience and journalism, we know little about what the audience actually expects from journalism and what explains audience expectations. Using data from an online survey among the audience (n = 2775) as well as professional journalists (n = 818), this study compares audience expectations of journalism with journalists' role orientations in Austria. Furthermore, multivariate analyses particularly aim to explore the role of political parameters for the understanding of audience expectations of journalism. Results show both congruencies and discrepancies between citizens' and journalists' perception of specific functions of journalism and that – besides media use – political attitudes may very well play an important role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the Hybrid Media System (Chadwick, 2017) has changed the actor constellations between political journalism, active members of the audience, and sources. How journalism responds to activism, pressure from politics, and emerging forms of connective action around news events is an important theme in journalism research. This thematic issue brings together seven articles that look at these developments from different angles in a rapidly changing communication ecosystem. The focus is on journalistic authority and legitimacy, journalism and interpretive communities, and changes concerning journalistic roles and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study investigates to what extent specific features of news articles about election campaigns impact reader engagement and civility in news comments. Using content analysis of articles (N = 830) and comments (N = 29,421) published during the 2015 Portuguese Legislative elections, we test the impact of negative coverage, issue coverage and game coverage (politics as a game) on the number of comments that an article receives and the level of civility thereof. Additionally, we explore how affective polarisation of a commenter may moderate the effects on incivility. Findings show that negativity towards political actors in an article is tied to both an increase in the number of comments and their level of incivility. Game coverage only led to a significant increase in the number of comments, while actor-related positivity was also related to an increase in incivility. Issue coverage had neither positive nor negative effects. The results inform newsrooms and academics about the implications of different types of election reporting, while accounting for features of news articles that are typically not integrated in a single study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fact-checking alliances emerged worldwide to debunk political disinformation in electoral contexts because of social concerns related to information authenticity. This study, thus, included the Latin American context in fact-checking journalism studies as a journalistic practice to fight political disinformation. Through analyzing RedCheq, the first fact-checking journalism alliance in an electoral regional context led by Colombiacheck, 11 in-depth interviews were conducted to identify the perceptions of regional fact-checkers regarding the usefulness of this journalistic practice, its achievements, and the key aspects for incorporating fact-checking into the regional media ecosystem. The study results revealed that RedCheq achieved the goal of fighting disinformation, and that fact-checking developed as transformational leverage for the regional media. Regional journalists perceived fact-checking as an element that restores credibility and social trust in regional media as the epistemology of this journalistic practice neglects the power pressure and dissemination of official narratives. Finally, this study highlighted how fact-checking journalism contributes to the democratic quality and civic empowerment in silenced and polarized environments. In addition, it discussed the need to expand fact-checking journalism’s coverage to new geographical areas and improve journalists’ professional competencies and training, thereby enabling them to function as using verification tools based on regional journalists’ requirements.