No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Are watchdogs doing their business? Media coverage of economic news
Abstract
In the wake of the financial crisis, journalists were criticized for failing in their coverage of the economy: The claim was that they had failed in their duty as watchdogs. The aim of this article is to examine to what extent journalists fulfill their role as watchdogs when covering business news, in light of this criticism. Given the prevalence of the watchdog ideal in journalism and the lessons learned during the financial crisis, we expect journalists to act equally critically toward business and political news. Based on a systematic content analysis of business and political news in the five largest Danish newspapers, we find that politicians and business actors are covered with a similar tone. We conclude that journalists do fulfill their watchdog role when it comes to both business and politics. The differences in coverage and the implications of this adherence to the watchdog ideal are also discussed.
... The existing literature outlines the important monitoring role of the media, which is frequently referred to as one of its most important functions, especially in relation to economic system, financial market and banking activities (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2014;Houston et al., 2011;Miller, 2006;Brunetti and Weder, 2003;Djankov et al., 2003). ...
... Based on a systematic content analysis of business and political news in the five largest Danish newspapers, Kalogeropoulos et al. (2014) find that politicians and business actors are covered with a similar tone, concluding that journalists do fulfil their watchdog role when it comes to both business and politics. ...
... Mass media have been shown to be really powerful in monitoring the economic system, financial markets and banking activities (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2014;Houston et al., 2011;Miller, 2006;Brunetti and Weder, 2003;Djankov et al., 2003). Moreover, their watchdog role in the financial market is often referred to as one of their most important functions (Miller, 2006;Brunetti and Weder, 2003;Djankov et al., 2003). ...
The economic and financial crisis has highlighted the failure of banking authorities in capturing all the elements and information needed to ensure effective and sound regulation, supervision and risk management of the banking sector. Mass media are a potentially highly effective mechanism of external control on banking system. Our paper addresses a central question: do the media play a role in grabbing the banking risk-taking behaviour? Using the text-analysis technique, we develop two indices of risk coverage in relation to banking and economic issues for the EU-15 zone countries between 1998 and 2015. Then we 'test on field' both indices in relation to banking asset quality, and we find that for several countries, they are positively correlated with the financial stability indicator; on the other hand, we do not observe a widespread trend reversal which would reveal a 'watchdog' role of the media on banking riskiness.
... The existing literature outlines the important monitoring role of the media, which is frequently referred to as one of its most important functions, especially in relation to economic system, financial market and banking activities (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2014;Houston et al., 2011;Miller, 2006;Brunetti and Weder, 2003;Djankov et al., 2003). ...
... Based on a systematic content analysis of business and political news in the five largest Danish newspapers, Kalogeropoulos et al. (2014) find that politicians and business actors are covered with a similar tone, concluding that journalists do fulfil their watchdog role when it comes to both business and politics. ...
... Mass media have been shown to be really powerful in monitoring the economic system, financial markets and banking activities (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2014;Houston et al., 2011;Miller, 2006;Brunetti and Weder, 2003;Djankov et al., 2003). Moreover, their watchdog role in the financial market is often referred to as one of their most important functions (Miller, 2006;Brunetti and Weder, 2003;Djankov et al., 2003). ...
... Societal developments like citizen journalism (Allan and Thorsen, 2009) and crowdsourcing of news (Van Der Haak et al., 2012) have led to new feedback loops between news media and their audience (Kus et al., 2017). This process is accompanied by changing perceptions of journalists and journalism in the eyes of the public and certain stakeholder groups which is observable, for instance, in declining trust (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2015(Kalogeropoulos et al., , 2019. ...
... Furthermore, journalism's limited gatekeeping capacity to influence what gets disseminated as news is enabling corporations with greater media relations resources (e.g., skills, budgets and network-spanning) to win public debates played out in news coverage (Jung Moon and Hyun, 2014). Also, specifically trained business journalists, who are equipped to deal with and understand increasingly complex financial and economic processes, are increasingly rare in editorial departments (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2015). Consequently, journalists are turning to outside sources, such as media relations departments within organizations, to help them make sense of corporations' business affairs. ...
... Research on economic news has been dominated by a focus on its effects. Although the antecedents and content of such news have been studied too (see Sections 2 and 3, and also Damstra & Vliegenthart, 2018;Kalogeropoulos, Svensson et al., 2015;Kleinnijenhuis, Schultz & Oegema, 2015), this was often in relation with the effects it may have (e.g., Blood & Phillips, 1995;Soroka, 2006;. The interest in the effects of economic news is not surprising given the important societal consequences: Economic newsas mediated through its influence on the public opinionmay have wide-ranging economic (Kellstedt, Linn & Hannah, 2015) and political impacts (Hetherington, 1996). ...
... This current section zooms in on the influence of news coverage on citizens' attitudes toward firms. Corporations are important actors in economic news (Kalogeropoulos, Svensson et al., 2015), and media attention to firms has been growing (Graf-Vlachy et al., 2019;Pallas, Strannegård & Jonsson, 2014) in reaction to the ever-increasing influence of corporate power in the economic and political spheres (Scherer, Palazzo & Matten, 2014). One way to account for the attitudinal effects of news on citizens is via the construct of corporate reputation, which refers to the overall evaluation of a firm by the general public or expert stakeholders (Meijer & Kleinnijenhuis, 2006a). ...
... In this regard, Frig et al. (2018) argue that a general distinction should be made between watchdog and business press; that is, business journalism that works in the interest of corporations by spreading business ideas such as corporate responsibility and business journalism that controls, supervises and monitors businesses as a societal function. While financial journalists in Denmark and the US have more recently been identified to comply more or less with their watchdog and educator role (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2015), no research has investigated how financial journalists perceive their role with regard to the coverage of sustainability topics such as SF. ...
... Although research about financial journalism has picked up after the GFC, ranging from content analysis of coverage during global financial crises (Knowles et al., 2017), investigations of role perceptions (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2015;Usher, 2012), critical analyses of the interrelationships between financial journalism and the financial markets (Davis, 2005;Strauß, 2019) and news values theory (Boukes and Vliegenthart, 2017), the topic of sustainability has not reached the attention of financial journalism research. Financial journalism has generally been relegated to playing a marginal role in journalism practice (Arrese, 2017), and in communication research in particular (Lee, 2014). ...
Sustainable Finance (SF) has been identified as one of the biggest trends in the financial industry in the past years. By channeling capital into sustainable investments, it is hoped that finance can accelerate the transition towards a greener and more sustainable future. However, given that the discussion about SF lacks consistency and a common understanding of SF, the role of financial journalists in reporting about this trend and in enacting their role as watchdogs becomes of paramount interest. To do so, 33 semi-structured interviews with journalists who have covered SF in six countries (AT, BE, CH, DE, NL, UK) were conducted to find out about journalistic role perceptions and daily journalistic practices (such as sources, style of writing and role of the audience). Findings show that journalists mainly enact the role of a chronicler, informant and educator when writing about SF, but fail to fulfil an active watchdog role. Furthermore, the coverage of SF is predominately event-driven, directed at a financial elite, and has become highly professionalized at financial news outlets. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, journalists reported that they found themselves in a moral dilemma between enacting their professional role as a journalist on the one hand and providing a platform for unsubstantiated claims about SF (greenwashing) made by the industry, on the other hand.
... Frame complexity increased in later stages of the Eurozone crisis (Kleinnijenhuis, Schultz, and Oegema 2015;Picard 2015). Moreover, news about the financial crisis touched upon many issues (Salgado and Nienstedt 2016) and included a rich diversity of interviewed stakeholders (Kalogeropoulos, Svensson, et al. 2015). This coverage thus holds the potential to induce a cognitively complex understanding of the crisis. ...
... Accordingly, the content of news outlets in combination with the actual exposure to these outlets needs to be explored to assess whether news consumption, generally, or the actual exposure to issue-specific news stories increases cognitive complexity (see Eveland and Schmitt 2015). The media covered the financial crisis substantively from a variety of perspectives (Quiring and Weber 2012;Falasca 2014), with multiple actors (Kalogeropoulos, Svensson, et al. 2015), and an increasing level of complexity (Kleinnijenhuis, Schultz, and Oegema 2015). Exposure to such news may thus provide the necessary information to elaborate on the topic and increase the complexity of citizens' understanding of the crisis. ...
Cognitive complexity is a concept that allows scholars to distinguish unidimensional thinking from multidimensional thinking, which allows citizens to identify and integrate various perspectives of a topic. Especially in times of fake news, fact-free politics, and affective polarization, the news media would ideally foster such complex political understanding. The current paper introduces the method of cognitive mapping to measure cognitive complexity regarding citizens’ understanding of the financial crisis, one of the most pressing political issues of the past decades. Linking content-analytic data to panel-survey data, we examine how exposure to news about the crisis relates to cognitive complexity. A wide variety of news sources (print, television, and online) were analyzed to take the high-choice media environment into account. Results show that news consumption generally is related to a less cognitively complex understanding of the financial crisis. However, actual exposure to news about the crisis (combined measurement of content analysis and survey data) is positively related to cognitive complexity, particularly among less-educated citizens. In addition, the most prominent topics in news coverage were more frequently associated with the financial crisis, as reflected in the cognitive maps of less-educated citizens exposed to more crisis news. These findings demonstrate the potential of news media to increase citizens’ complexity of understanding, especially among the less educated.
... However, the 2015/2016 immigration crisis is expected to be different, as it was composed of multiple successive key events. Therefore, we argue in line with previous work on the financial crisis of 2008, that the migrant crisis can theoretically be seen as "a critical juncture" influencing the deep rooted patterns of migration coverage (Kalogeropoulos, Svensson, Van Dalen, De Vreese, & Albaek, 2015). The series of events related to migration might not only increase media attention (Chouliaraki & Zaborowski, 2017;Holmes & Castañeda, 2016), but more fundamentally change the routines and underlying values in how journalists cover the issue and who gets to speak. ...
... It thus seems that the migration crisis was a "critical juncture" influencing the deep rooted news routines, as was also found in previous studies focusing on other crises in the news (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2015). The crisis and related increase in media coverage led to changes in the way in which the broadcasters covered the events. ...
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.
... Economic news was found to be attending towards the more negative (Fogarty, 2005;Heinz & Swinnen, 2015;Ju, 2008). Political factors influence the tone and volume of economic news both on a micro and macro level: political events (Kalogeropoulos, Svensson, Van Dalen, De Vreese, & Albaek, 2015;Soroka, 2006), editorial partisan bias ( Zhu & Wang, 2017), economic structures and national policies (Wu, 2000) all have impacts on how and how much economic news got reported. ...
... Understanding previous literature of domestic economic news coverage is important for this study, as these previous studies provided a basis on which we can compare, imagine and substitute key components of domestic news coverage with important factors that may be present with regard to international economic news. The two traditions of research on domestic economic news are also present for international economic news: one focusing on international economic news reporting as a part of general international news and the factors influencing news about foreign economies, portrayal of international trades and organizations (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2015;Schaffner & Roche, 2016); the other one focusing on news about the performance of the global economy and the professional depiction of global market trends (Becker, Finnerty, & Friedman, 1995;Hardouvelis, 1988). ...
Current literature on economic news coverage mainly focuses on the economic news about domestic economy. This study asks a further question: will international economic news be accurately reflecting the economic performance of a foreign country? This study takes China as the target country and economic news coverage from other countries from the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone for this research and constructs a Poisson Lagged Regression model for news volume and compares autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model versus autoregressive integrated moving average model for economic news tone change. The results show that international economic news coverage is largely different from domestic news coverage, and the attention of foreign news on Chinese economy is negativity related to the performance of the Shanghai Stock Index. Moreover, the economic news tone about China's economy showed a seasonal pattern.
... De hecho, en los últimos años ha habido muchas investigaciones que han abordado distintas dimensiones de la cobertura mediática de la crisis, tanto desde perspectivas domésticas como en estudios comparados. Una de las ideas recurrentes que se deriva de esas investigaciones es que en los años previos a la crisis los medios periodísticos fueron incapaces de advertir y de alzar la voz de alarma sobre los riesgos existentes en el sector financiero, en el inmobiliario, etc. (Schiffrin, 2011;Usher, 2012;Starkman, 2014;Arrese y Vara, 2014;Kalogeropoulos et al., 2015;van Dalen et al., 2015;Mercille, 2016). Ya en medio de la crisis, los medios fueron a menudo criticados por su cobertura simplista y acrítica de la situación, que en muchos casos se tradujo finalmente en una visión excesivamente alarmista sobre los problemas económicos y financieros que se vivían en esos años (Tulloch, 2009;Arlt y Storz, 2010;Fahy et al., 2010;Uchitelle, 2011;Titley, 2012;Quiring y Weber, 2012;Arrese, 2015a;Knowles et al. 2017). ...
... De hecho, en los últimos años ha habido muchas investigaciones que han abordado distintas dimensiones de la cobertura mediática de la crisis, tanto desde perspectivas domésticas como en estudios comparados. Una de las ideas recurrentes que se deriva de esas investigaciones es que en los años previos a la crisis los medios periodísticos fueron incapaces de advertir y de alzar la voz de alarma sobre los riesgos existentes en el sector financiero, en el inmobiliario, etc. (Schiffrin, 2011;Usher, 2012;Starkman, 2014;Arrese y Vara, 2014;Kalogeropoulos et al., 2015;van Dalen et al., 2015;Mercille, 2016). Ya en medio de la crisis, los medios fueron a menudo criticados por su cobertura simplista y acrítica de la situación, que en muchos casos se tradujo finalmente en una visión excesivamente alarmista sobre los problemas económicos y financieros que se vivían en esos años (Tulloch, 2009;Arlt y Storz, 2010;Fahy et al., 2010;Uchitelle, 2011;Titley, 2012;Quiring y Weber, 2012;Arrese, 2015a;Knowles et al. 2017). ...
Este estudio analiza las opiniones de políticos y expertos publicadas en cinco diarios españoles (los tres principales periódicos nacionales -El País, El Mundo y ABC-, y los dos principales periódicos financieros -Expansión y Cinco Días-) antes y después de la explosión de la burbuja inmobiliaria española. La metodología básica del estudio es el análisis de contenido, cuantitativo y cualitativo, de informaciones publicadas en los diarios citados entre 2003 y 2013. El trabajo se centra en el análisis estadístico de coincidencias y divergencias en las declaraciones y opiniones de esas fuentes en torno a la naturaleza, causas y consecuencias de la burbuja. La hipótesis general de la investigación es que antes de la crisis, especialmente entre los políticos, no hubo un verdadero debate sobre la amenaza de una burbuja del sector inmobiliario, ni sobre sus posibles causas y consecuencias probables, con lo que dominó en la opinión autorizada un consenso “negacionista”.
... It is also thinkable that crisis labels are used for different purposes. For instance, the media can use it to alarm readers about an urgent topic or problem (Chadefaux, 2014;Kalogeropoulos et al., 2015). This could also be due to their professional self-concept as a watchdog (Hanitzsch, 2011), holding the powerful accountable (e.g., by calling out a government crisis). ...
The recent accumulation of crises has led scholars to diagnose that crises increasingly dominate news headlines. However, there is little empirical evidence for this diagnosis because previous research often misses the longitudinal perspective. To address this gap in research, we used automated content analysis to investigate to what extent five Swiss newspapers used the crisis label in their headlines between 1998 and 2020. In the next step, we applied topic modeling to the dataset of 10,458 articles with crisis labels in their headlines to detect which topics were covered under the crisis label. Finally, we used a qualitative content analysis to name and describe the automatically identified topics. Our exploratory longitudinal design calls into question the diagnosis of the increasing use of crisis labels in media reporting. Instead, the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic stand out as strong drivers of crisis labeling in headlines.
... Organizational factors may also impact news beat fluidity, as it observed a different performance of infotainment in elite versus popular newspapers in economic and hard news overall (Boukes & Vliegenthart, 2020). In hard and financial news in advanced (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2015) and transitional (Mellado & Lagos, 2014) democracies, infotainment is more prominent in popular news media who target a broad audience than in so-called elite news media or niche media. ...
p>Studies suggest that, at the routine level, news beats function as unique “micro-cultures.” Exploring this “particularist” approach in news content, we compare how the interventionist, watchdog, loyal, service, infotainment, and civic roles materialize across 11 thematic news beats and analyze the moderating effect of platforms, ownership, and levels of political freedom on journalistic role performance in hard and soft news. Based on the second wave of the Journalistic Role Performance (JRP) project, this article reports the findings of a content analysis of 148,474 news items from 37 countries. Our results reveal the transversality of interventionism, the strong associations of some topics and roles, and the limited reach of news beat particularism in the face of moderating variables.</p
... Organizational factors may also impact news beat fluidity, as it observed a different performance of infotainment in elite versus popular newspapers in economic and hard news overall (Boukes & Vliegenthart, 2020). In hard and financial news in advanced (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2015) and transitional (Mellado & Lagos, 2014) democracies, infotainment is more prominent in popular news media who target a broad audience than in so-called elite news media or niche media. ...
p>Studies suggest that, at the routine level, news beats function as unique “micro-cultures.” Exploring this “particularist” approach in news content, we compare how the interventionist, watchdog, loyal, service, infotainment, and civic roles materialize across 11 thematic news beats and analyze the moderating effect of platforms, ownership, and levels of political freedom on journalistic role performance in hard and soft news. Based on the second wave of the Journalistic Role Performance (JRP) project, this article reports the findings of a content analysis of 148,474 news items from 37 countries. Our results reveal the transversality of interventionism, the strong associations of some topics and roles, and the limited reach of news beat particularism in the face of moderating variables.</p
... Organizational factors may also impact news beat fluidity, as it observed a different performance of infotainment in elite versus popular newspapers in economic and hard news overall (Boukes & Vliegenthart, 2020). In hard and financial news in advanced (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2015) and transitional (Mellado & Lagos, 2014) democracies, infotainment is more prominent in popular news media who target a broad audience than in so-called elite news media or niche media. ...
Studies suggest that, at the routine level, news beats function as unique “micro-cultures.” Exploring this “particularist” approach in news content, we compare how the interventionist, watchdog, loyal, service, infotainment, and civic roles materialize across 11 thematic news beats and analyze the moderating effect of platforms, ownership, and levels of political freedom on journalistic role performance in hard and soft news. Based on the second wave of the Journalistic Role Performance (JRP) project, this article reports the findings of a content analysis of 148,474 news items from 37 countries. Our results reveal the transversality of interventionism, the strong associations of some topics and roles, and the limited reach of news beat particularism in the face of moderating variables.
... Crises also leave ample room for media and political elites to shape citizens' understanding of what they mean for their respective country (Kepplinger, 2015). The 2015-2016 refugee crisis can thus be seen as a critical juncture influencing the deep-rooted patterns of migration coverage in the region (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2014). ...
... In support of this, Knowles et al. (2017) demonstrate a decline in financial journalism standards as a consequence of economic pressures. Conversely, previous research has confirmed the media's watchdog role for economic news (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2015). Similarly, Furey et al. (2019) found that the media coverage of CSR has become less positive after the financial crisis. ...
This article reports the findings of a comparative study of the financial news produced by companies, financial analysts, financial newspapers and news agencies about the same news events, including data before and after the financial crisis. We ground this study in second-level agenda-setting, according to which news producers select substantive and evaluative attributes for the issues they cover. Using computer-assisted text analysis, we conduct pairwise comparisons of the evaluative tone of corporate quarterly earnings press releases and the corresponding analyst reports and news stories. Our overall hypothesis is that these actors produce news about the same events with an evaluative tone that furthers their own goals as well as the goals of those actors they are dependent on, which we find partial support for. We find a positivity bias in corporate earnings press releases and analyst reports, while financial journalists eliminate the corporate positivity bias, but do not add more negativity. The results also indicate differences in the tone of financial news before and after the financial crisis. Although all actors produce news in the period after the financial crisis that is less positive and less negative than before the crisis, the balance of positive and negative tone as well as relative differences among the actors suggest that news writing by financial journalists at financial newspapers and news agencies is more negative in tone after the financial crisis, thus providing also empirical support of their independence.
... Ряд исследований подтверждают, что экономические новости не выступают зеркалом реальности и могут существенно расходиться со значениями различных индикаторов, используемых для оценки ситуации (Fogarty, 2005;Goidel & Langley, 1995). Специализирующиеся в данной области журналисты регулярно сталкиваются с критикой, указывающей, что они не обеспечивают эффективный мониторинг кризисных процессов (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2014). Неточность и неполнота экономических новостей могут объясняться различными факторами, такими как недостаток знаний журналистов, характер их взаимоотношений с источниками (Manning, 2013), а также сложность рассматриваемых вопросов для аудитории, которая делает необходимым упрощение транслируемой информации и ее перевод на язык образов и метафор (Holbrook & Garand, 1996;Turner, 1993). ...
В статье представлен сравнительный анализ освещения пенсионной реформы на трех российских телеканалах, – Первом канале, Дожде и RT. Обсуждение пенсионного вопроса было проанализировано за период с 16 июня 2018 года, когда соответствующий законопроект был внесен в Государственную Думу, по 3 октября, когда он был подписан Президентом РФ и опубликован в окончательной редакции. Дискуссия о повышении пенсионного возраста на выбранных телеканалах имеет существенные различия. Первому каналу свойственно акцентирование внимания аудитории на преимуществах пенсионной реформы для населения, – до телеобращения Президента РФ депроблематизация более позднего выхода россиян на пенсию осуществлялась преимущественно федеральными чиновниками и «простыми людьми». После 29 августа в дискуссию включились представители регионов РФ, что отчасти может объясняться грядущими выборами. На Дожде, в отличие от Первого канала, активное участие представителей субъектов РФ в освещении пенсионной реформы не наблюдалось. Помимо обращения к «обычным людям» в дискуссию оказывается вовлечено экспертное сообщество, что, впрочем, также не гарантирует представленность альтернативных позиций ввиду преимущественно скептического отношения к законопроекту. Для ориентированного на внешнюю аудиторию RT характерна низкая интенсивность обсуждения пенсионного вопроса. В то же время телеканалом активно освещались общенациональные акции против повышения пенсионного возраста, что несвойственно ориентированному на поиск исключительно положительных сторон реформы федеральному каналу. Включение пенсионного вопроса в повестку дня на RT наблюдается в период выборов: низкая явка избирателей и поражение правящей партии в ряде субъектов РФ расценивается как результат повышения пенсионного возраста.
... The question remains to what extent the watchdog ideal is applicable to economic journalism. Kalogeropoulos et al. (2015) compare business news with political news and conclude that journalists fulfill a watchdog role in both areas. However, interview-based studies with financial journalists indicate that only a minority of them envision such a role for themselves (e.g. ...
Research on economic and financial journalism has left important questions unanswered. Most notably, what exactly are the mechanisms leading up to the well-documented negativity bias in economic news reporting, and to what extent are structural constraints, previously identified in research on financial news production, also relevant in the context of mainstream economic news that reaches out to a broad and lay audience? This study seeks to address these questions by conducting in-depth interviews with 12 economic journalists working for Dutch news outlets (print, online, and television). The findings suggest that negativity is driven more by news values than by journalistic role conceptions, as many interviewees refer to the abrupt temporal dynamics typical of negative events. Furthermore, journalists indicate that gatekeeping processes are increasingly influenced by audience preferences, as indicators such as aging readerships and number of clicks are carefully monitored.
... Existing research that operationalizes the tone of economic news can roughly be divided into four approaches; all of these are top-down approaches in the sense that they do not include supervised machine learning techniques (i.e., specifically training an algorithm based on manually coded data)and neither will our investigation. First, a considerable number of published works have manually coded the tone of economic news by trained coders (Boomgaarden, Van Spanje, Vliegenthart, & De Vreese, 2011;Boukes & Vliegenthart, 2017;Fogarty, 2005;Goidel & Langley, 1995;Goidel, Procopio, Terrell, & Wu, 2010;Hester & Gibson, 2003;Kalogeropoulos, Svensson, Van Dalen, de Vreese, & Albaek, 2015;Soroka, 2006). The coders read (or watch) a news item, and judge whether its tone is negative, neutral or positive. ...
This article scrutinizes the method of automated content analysis to measure the tone of news coverage. We compare a range of off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools to manually coded economic news as well as examine the agreement between these dictionary approaches themselves. We assess the performance of five off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools and two tailor-made dictionary-based approaches. The analyses result in five conclusions. First, there is little overlap between the off-the-shelf tools; causing wide divergence in terms of tone measurement. Second, there is no stronger overlap with manual coding for short texts (i.e., headlines) than for long texts (i.e., full articles). Third, an approach that combines individual dictionaries achieves a comparably good performance. Fourth, precision may increase to acceptable levels at higher levels of granularity. Fifth, performance of dictionary approaches depends more on the number of relevant keywords in the dictionary than on the number of valenced words as such; a small tailor-made lexicon was not inferior to large established dictionaries. Altogether, we conclude that off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools are mostly unreliable and unsuitable for research purposes – at least in the context of Dutch economic news – and manual validation for the specific language, domain, and genre of the research project at hand is always warranted.
... This is also in accordance with the literature on the watchdog-role of the press, which has noted that the news media system is generally highly focused on controlling state power and monitoring the common good (see, e.g. Kalogeropoulos et al. 2014). Additionally, the results strongly support the notion that B2C companies are more visible in the news than B2B companies. ...
To pass or not to pass through the news gates? That is a key question with respect to the relationship between large commercial firms and the journalistic outlets that publish news regarding them. Whereas previous research has considered how corporate communication affects media content, the focus of this study is on corporate characteristics (e.g. company size, age, location and ownership structure). Building on the gatekeeping approach, the study investigates the extent to which these characteristics affect corporate visibility in the news and tone of coverage. The characteristics of 100 large corporations in the Netherlands were combined with visibility and tone in Dutch online and print news throughout 2014 (N = 29,516). The results indicate that having more employees, being owned by the government and focusing on consumers add substantially to the explanation of corporate visibility. Furthermore, our results indicate that government-owned companies tend to be portrayed more negatively than listed firms and family businesses.
... Accordingly, the content of news outlets in combination with the actual exposure to these outlets needs to be explored to assess whether news consumption, generally, or the actual exposure to issue-specific news stories increases cognitive complexity (see Eveland and Schmitt 2015). The media covered the financial crisis substantively from a variety of perspectives (Falasca 2014;Quiring and Weber 2012), with multiple actors (Kalogeropoulos, Svensson et al. 2015), and an increasing level of complexity (Kleinnijenhuis, Schultz, and Oegema 2015). Exposure to such news may, thus, provide the necessary information to elaborate on the topic and increase the complexity of citizens' understanding of the crisis. ...
News media ideally help citizens to achieve a better political understanding. Political sophistication, accordingly, is a central concept in the media effects literature, but its operationalizations rarely align well with its theoretical definition. The current paper introduces the approach of cognitive mapping to measure how sophisticated citizens’ understanding of the financial crisis would be, one of the most pressing political issues of the past decades. Linking data obtained from a combination of content analysis (n = 7,130) and panel survey (n = 2,511), we examine how political sophistication has been affected by exposure to news about the crisis. The findings show that news consumption generally results in a less sophisticated understanding of the financial crisis. However, actual exposure to news items about the crisis (i.e., combined measurement of content analysis and survey data) had a positive effect on political sophistication—particularly among the lower educated citizens.
... Especially the financial crisis in 2008 has boosted the interest in this issue among both researchers (Lee 2014;Schiffrin 2015) and the general public (Schifferes and Coulter 2013). The emerging body of literature, however, focuses mainly on this financial crisis and studies different aspects of the economic breakdown, such as the failing role of the economic press as watchdog (Kalogeropoulos, Svensson et al. 2015;Manning 2013;Schiffrin 2015). ...
Digitalisation has changed journalistic sourcing techniques and affected the way journalists approach sources. This study examines how new information channels change the relationship between journalists and their (potential) sources in this evolving environment and analyses the role of these channels. We are not only interested in the sources that make it into the news, but study the broader networks of people and institutions journalists rely on to help them monitor and gather information. We combine online Twitter network analysis with in-depth interviews to create a detailed mapping of the professional source networks of 33 economic journalists in Belgium. Our results identify that the Twitter networks of economic journalists to a large extent reflect their broader sourcing practices. Overall, the same actor groups are important in both the online and the offline source networks with the exception of the more prominent presence of other journalists and media organisations in the Twitter network of journalists. We conclude that Twitter is implemented within existing sourcing practices without fundamentally changing the news production process.
... There have been many studies that have addressed some of the dimensions of this media coverage of the crisis, applying both domestic and comparative analysis. One of the recurring ideas is that in the years before the crisis, news organizations were more or less unable to warn of existing risks in the financial industry, about housing bubbles, etc. (Schiffrin, 2011;Arrese and Vara, 2012;Usher, 2012;Mercille, 2013;Starkman, 2014;Kalogeropoulos et al., 2015;van Dalen et al., 2015). Already in the middle of the economic crisis, the media was often criticised for its simplistic, acritical, or alarmist view of the economic and financial problems (Tulloch, 2009;Arlt and Storz, 2010;Fahy et al., 2010;Uchitelle, 2011;Titley, 2012;Quiring and Weber, 2012;Mercille, 2013). ...
Austerity has been a central issue in the discussions on how to implement public policies, both at a European and a national level, in response to the European sovereign debt crisis. There is an impression both in public opinion and the academic literature that this frame has been translated to the media coverage of the crisis in a very standardized and uniform way. This chapter examines whether this impression is correct or not, by studying the press coverage of the crisis in ten European countries, focusing on key news events related to the European sovereign debt crisis between February 2010 and July 2012. The study confirms that the austerity discourse has dominated the European press coverage on the short- and long-term solutions to the sovereign debt crisis. However, the chapter also shows that the concrete mix of economic policies, and the balance between austerity and growth frames, differs significantly between countries, between groups of countries with different economic circumstances (such as Northern and Southern Europe), and between newspapers with different editorial orientations.
... Traditionally, journalists are argued to fulfill a watchdog function in modern democracies; they scrutinize and control governmental powers, rendering it responsive and responsible (Kantola, 2007;Whitten-Woodring, 2009), a function that can also be deployed to control business actors (Kalogeropoulos, Svensson, Van Dalen, De Vreese, & Albaek, 2014). From this perspective, it is only logical that negative trends receive more attention than positive DAMSTRA ET AL. developments: To wake up the citizenry, jounalists should ring the "burglar alarm" when the economy moves in the wrong direction, so people can defend their interests in future elections (Zaller, 2003). ...
... We started with retrieving all articles that were published in NRC Handelsblad in the period of study from the LexisNexis database (N = 243,171) and subsequently narrowed down the sample to meet our requirements. First, we identified all articles that were published in the Economy section of the paper (N = 29,843) because news about corporations can be conceptualized as a sub-category of economic news (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2015). ...
This study on news coverage of highlys visible company types in a Dutch daily quality newspaper (NRC Handelsblad; N = 14,363), during the economic crisis (2007–2013), shows that attention to banks (and to a lesser extent also to the automobile and components industry) had a structural negative influence on media agenda diversity. The majority of the other salient company types had a significant positive impact on diversity. These results suggest that banks attracted attention at the expense of more varied, diverse coverage during the crisis. Our findings extend knowledge of agenda-building dynamics in relation to organizational news by considering characteristics of the broader media agenda. We discuss our findings in light of causes and consequences of media coverage of salient businesses. Keywords: Agenda building, company news, economic crisis, media agenda diversity, time-series analyses, zero-sum
... De acuerdo con esta primera clasificación genérica y tomando como referencia la clasificación de Hansen y Paul (2003), se podrían organizar las fuentes de información económica en los siguientes tipos: ...
... Thus, the study included El Nuevo Día The qualitative content analysis included civil and political human rights categories as operationalized by Ovsiovitch (1993), Caliendo and associates (1999) and Malinkina and McLeod (2000). Furthermore, categories were established for hard news and soft news based on existing literature to assess the main themes as it related to the coverage of Puerto Rico in El Nuevo Herald, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times (Bonini and Morello 2014;Humphries 1981;Kalogeropoulos et al. 2014;Straubhaar, LaRose and Davenport 2012;Rowe 2007;Hanusch 2010;Brodie et al. 2003;Major 2004;Scott and Goebetz 1992;Acevedo 2010). According to Straubhaar, LaRose and Davenport (2012), hard news are stories about politics, economy and recent events such as accidents and crime. ...
Ethnic minorities rely on news outlets to promote their causes. Nevertheless, human rights
issues about United States territories are seldom addressed in national news media. This
qualitative content analysis of news stories about the campaign for release for Puerto Rican
political prisoner Oscar López Rivera studies the portrayal of this domestic human right
issue in elite and local Spanish language news media. This case study revealed that coverage
about Puerto Rico in national media showcases culture and entertainment, as well as sports
topics. However, they showed lack of interest in the human rights issues of US territories.
Communication scientists have come up with a host of criteria to gauge the quality of journalistic output. However, covering the economy and business comes with additional challenges. The issues this type of journalism deals with are rather abstract and, at times, detached from everyday experience. Problems tend to build up slowly and unnoticed. Economic interests are strong, as are outside influences trying to sway editorial boards, reporters and publishers, while the power to do so is unevenly distributed. This chapter conceptualizes quality with regard to economic journalism. It stresses different dimensions of editorial independence. And it proposes a system of news values for economic journalism, the ESSF formula.KeywordsMedia QualityPublic sphereNews valuesAgenda settingAttention cyclesRent seekingJournalistic independence
Eine konstruktive Beschreibung des Spannungsverhältnisses beider Berufsfelder
Technologische ökonomische und praktische Aspekte werden anhand von zahlreichen Praxisbeispielen veranschaulicht
Die Autor*innen erläutern konkrete Beispiele für Konvergenz und Konkurrenz aus verschiedenen Perspektiven
Der digitale Wandel unterwirft sowohl den Journalismus als auch die Unternehmenskommunikation fundamentalen Veränderungen. Diese Veränderungen wirken sich auch auf das vielfach beschriebene Interdependenzverhältnis beider Branchen aus. Klassische Medienkanäle verlieren allmählich an Bedeutung. Aus medienökonomischer Sicht ist insbesondere die Abwanderung von Werbeerlösen hin zu den großen Internetplattformen existenziell gefährdend, mit entsprechenden Folgen für die publizistische Vielfalt und Qualität. Die Schwächung ihres klassischen “Gegenspielers” ist für die Unternehmenskommunikation jedoch mitnichten von Vorteil. Vielmehr bleibt sie auf die Reichweite und die Glaubwürdigkeit journalistischer Medien angewiesen. Die Bedeutung dieses Aspektes lässt sich auch daran erkennen, dass Unternehmen in sog. “Newsrooms” inzwischen vielfach selbst pseudo-journalistische Inhalte produzieren und verbreiten. Zugleich liegt es im ureigenen Interesse von Unternehmen, dass journalistische Vielfalt und Qualität nicht weiter sinken. Sie selbst können dazu über eine verantwortungsbewusste Steuerung von Werbegeldern einen Beitrag leisten.
While ample scholarly attention has focused on how, through commemorative journalism during anniversaries, deaths or retirement, the journalistic community mobilize past accomplishments to bolster their cultural authority, very limited attention has been paid to how the journalistic community can mobilize negative memories in dealing with problematic situations that are similar to past journalistic scandals or shortcomings. Examining how financial journalists made sense of accusations that they missed the 2008 Global Financial Crisis story, this study analyzes how the journalistic community makes use of past shortcomings to negotiate its understanding of a new case from its breaking moment to its anniversary a decade later. The study finds that reporters relied on previous moments’ incidents to explain and contextualize the Global Financial Crisis coverage as another missed story and use it as an opportunity to restate how they should refine their practice going forward.
Economic news uses fiscal experts to construct discourse about government deficits, debt, spending, and services. Most previous studies have assumed that knowledge and understanding are key to the construction of economic expertise in news. This study undertakes a quantitative analysis to discover how the British press represents three high-profile fiscal experts: the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the National Audit Office (NAO), and the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). It analyses 21,515 articles published in the Financial Times, Independent, Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and Times between May 2010 and December 2016. Surprisingly, the results show that explicit constructions of knowing, understanding, or even being expert are rarely associated with the experts themselves. Markers of social position—being “independent” or “respected”—are much more prominent than indicators of technical knowledge or deep understanding of government finances. Discourses of economic expertise in news are less technical and more social than one would assume from previous scholarship. Journalists use expert sources in the text not to confront complexity, but rather to invoke the experts’ networked positions. Press text constructs expert judgments as superior by representing the experts as properly positioned to judge, not by representing their judgments as being better informed.
The paper considers the asymmetry of information waves and the relation of their news trails with market indicators and exchange rates. It draws on the crises of 1998, 2008 and 2014. The relationship between information waves and scenarios for the development of economic crises is established by comparing the frequency characteristics of certain phrases in the media and the group of financial indicators. A comparative and content analysis shows that the representation of crises in the Russian media coincides with the real state of the national economy only at the initial stage, after which the crises cease to be reflected in economic thinking in accordance with their significance. Thus, the paper concludes that the scale of economic crises is predictable in terms of the size of the information waves’ acute phase generated by these crises.
Over the past decade, financial, business, and economic news coverage has been in the spotlight of a public and academic debate. The debate is partly related to the perceived failure of financial journalists to warn the public about the early signs of the global financial crisis of 2007/2008. Given the documented effects of economic news exposure on consumer and political behavior, this entry examines research findings on the content and the production challenges related to financial, business, and economic journalism.
Nach der Finanzkrise 2008 wurde Wirtschafts- und Finanzjournalisten vorgehalten, nicht rechtzeitig und ausreichend vor Fehlentwicklungen auf den Märkten gewarnt zu haben. Studien führen verschiedene Gründe für das vermeitliche Versagen an – unter anderem die Komplexität des Themas. Wie gehen Journalisten heute mit komplexen Finanzthemen um? In Leitfadeninterviews konstatieren die Befragten, dass sie seit 2008 insbesondere Informationen von Unternehmen und Kreditinstituten kritischer betrachten. Eine Reflexion auf organisatorischer Ebene fand allerdings nicht statt.
Changes in journalism spurred by technological shifts and industry restructuring have left observers questioning both the nature of the profession and what educators ought to do in order to prepare aspiring journalists. Despite attempts to rethink what it means to be a journalist and the educational experience needed to prepare students, few qualitative studies have emerged that track how learners are negotiating professional values. This article does precisely that by providing a case study of how students in an undergraduate Canadian university’s journalism program are conceptualizing the profession against the backdrop of changing practices and principles. Based on the data generated from 96 open-ended reflections, this investigation offers some important findings about the student professional identity experience within a 4-year program. More precisely, the results indicate that the ideals of ‘high modernism’ (especially those surrounding objectivity, the role of the public watchdog, and ethical practice) are being negotiated by journalists in training in important and meaningful ways.
Objective: Work on economic news argues that US coverage focuses primarily on changes rather than levels of future economic conditions; it also both affects and reflects public economic sentiment. Given that economic perceptions are related to policy preferences and government support, this is of consequence for politics. This paper explores the generalizability of these findings.
Methods: Using nearly 100,000 stories over 30 years in the US, UK, and Canada, we compare media tone, public opinion and economic conditions.
Result: Results demonstrate that media tone and public opinion follow future economic change in all three countries. Media and opinion are also related, but the effect mostly runs from the public to the media, not the other way around.
Conclusion: These results confirm the generalizability of prior findings, and the importance of considering more than a simple uni-directional link between media coverage and public economic sentiment.
This article explores the relationship between political clientelism and the development of media systems in southern Europe and Latin America, considering the cases of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. Common characteristics of the media systems in these countries include low newspaper circulation, a tendency towards political instrumentalization of the media, limited development of journalism as a differentiated and autonomous profession, and regulatory agencies that are at the same time party-politicized and relatively weak. We argue that these media-system characteristics must be understood in relation to a broader history of political clientelism - though a number of forces, including commercialization of media industries and globalization, have tended in recent years to undermine clientelistic relationships.
Objectivity is a cornerstone in the journalistic profession. There is a widespread acknowledgement that a one-to-one representation of reality is not possible, and thus the norm must be interpreted by journalists in their daily work. Based on a journalist survey among Danish journalists (N = 2008) we find that journalists’ role perceptions have substantial explanatory power in regard to how journalists implement the objectivity norm. The objectivity norm pervades the news production process by guiding journalists when they select, gather, and present the news, and the results give a hint about how journalistic role perceptions might affect the production process through the objectivity norm and subsequently also the news content.
This article seeks to explore whether political reporters present more meticulous, complex, and active standards of news reporting—justifying their special role as enablers of informed citizenry—and to help resolve the theoretical ambiguity regarding news beats as distinct domains of practice. The sample comprised reporters from three beat clusters—political, financial, and territorial—in nine national Israeli news organizations, who were asked to describe, source by source, how they obtained a sample of their recently published items (N = 840), addressing sourcing patterns, news practices, and communication technologies used. As expected, reporting was found to be distinctive across beat clusters, with political reporters employing significantly and consistently higher standards although financial reporters, in contrast to expectations, were not found to be the weakest link in the reporting chain. Despite the substantial differences, the studied beats embody a united community of practice following a similar media logic.
The increasing popularity of the framing concept in media analysis goes hand in hand with significant inconsistency in its application. This paper outlines an integrated process model of framing that includes production, content, and media use perspectives. A typology of generic and issue-specific frames is proposed based on previous studies of media frames. An example is given of how generic news frames may be identified and used to understand cross-national differences in news coverage. The paper concludes with an identification of contentious issues in current framing research.
Election campaigns in advanced democracies are highly mediated events. Thus, the electorate has come to depend upon the media for information regarding the election, the parties and their policies. At the same time, research indicates that the news coverage of elections tends to be structurally biased, in the sense that the media coverage is episodic rather than thematic and that it is focused on the horse race and the political strategies of the competing parties rather than on the issues at stake. However, comparative studies of election news coverage in different countries are still somewhat lacking. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to compare the election news coverage in Britain and Sweden, two countries that are part of different models of media and political systems. The study investigates the election news coverage in two major broadsheets and one major tabloid in each country, during the last three weeks before the Swedish Election in 2002 and the British Election in 2005. The results show several significant differences between the Swedish and the British election news coverage.
This study of the main evening television news programs in four European countries focuses on the framing of news surrounding a major European event, the January 1, 1999, introduction of the common European currency, the euro. We investigated the visibility of political and economic news in general and of the launch of the euro in particular. We found variations across countries in the emphasis on political and economic news, with the proportion of the newscast normally devoted to these sub- jects ranging from 45% to 60%. Journalists in all countries were more likely to emphasize conflict (rather than economic consequences) in framing general political and economic news. In the coverage of the launch of the euro, there was a greater emphasis on framing the news in terms of economic consequences. The findings are discussed in terms of influences on framing practices internal and external to jour- nalism and the value of the cross-national comparative approach.
Using a simplified psychology of perception and some additional assumptions, a system of twelve factors describing events is presented that together are used as a definition of 'newsworthiness'. Three basic hypotheses are presented: the additivity hypothesis that the more factors an event satisfies, the higher the probability that it becomes news; the complementarity hypothesis that the factors will tend to exclude each other since if one factor is present it is less necessary for the other factors to be present for the event to become news; and the exclusion hypothesis that events that satisfy none or very few factors will not become news. This theory is then tested on the news presented in four different Norwegian newspapers from the Congo and Cuba crises of July 1960 and the Cyprus crisis of March-April 1964, and the data are in the majority of cases found to be consistent with the theory. A dozen additional hypotheses are then deduced from the theory and their social implications are discussed. Finally, some tentative policy impli cations are formulated.
This article analyses the news coverage of the 2004 European parliamentary elections in all 25 member states of the European Union (EU). It provides a unique pan-European overview of the campaign coverage based on an analysis of three national newspapers and two television newscasts in the two weeks leading up to the elections. On average, the elections were more visible in the 10 new member states than in the 15 old EU member states. The political personalities and institutional actors featured in news stories about the elections were generally national political actors and not EU actors. When evaluative, the news in the old EU-15 was generally negative towards the EU, whereas in the new countries a mixed pattern was found. The findings of the study are discussed in the light of the literature on the EU’s legitimacy and communication deficit.
List of tables List of figures Preface Part I. The News Media and Civic Malaise: 1. The news media and democracy 2. Evaluating media performance 3. Understanding political communications Part II. Trends in Political Communication: 4. The decline of newspapers? 5. The rise (and fall?) of the television age 6. The emerging internet era 7. The evolution of campaign communications 8. The rise of the post-modern campaign? Part III. The Impact on Democracy: 9. Negative news, negative public? 10. Knows little? Information and choice 11. Cares less? Cynical media, cynical public? 12. Stays home? Political mobilization 13. American exceptionalism? 14. A virtuous circle? Technical appendix Notes Select bibliography Author index Subject index.
We investigated the prevalence of 5 news frames identified in earlier studies on framing and framing effects: attribution of responsibility, conflict, human interest, economic consequences, and morality. We content analyzed 2,601 newspaper stories and 1,522 television news stories in the period surrounding the Amsterdam meetings of European heads of state in 1997. Our results showed that, overall, the attribution of responsibility frame was most commonly used in the news, followed by the conflict, economic consequences, human interest, and morality frames, respectively. The use of news frames depended on both the type of outlet and the type of topic. Most significant differences were not between media (television vs. the press) but between sensationalist vs. serious types of news outlets. Sober and serious newspapers and television news programs more often used the responsibility and conflict frames in the presentation of news, whereas sensationalist outlets more often used the human interest frame.
Damian Tambini suggests that journalistic privileges should be given to bloggers and citizen reporters who fulfil a public interest role. But he questions whether ‘journalists’ who seek merely to serve investors – rather than the wider public interest – should not be deserving of such privileges
In order to understand why so little media attention was paid to risks in the banking sector in the run up to the financial crisis, we need to understand the framework of law, regulation, self-regulation and professional incentives that structure the practice of financial and business journalism. This paper focuses in particular on what role financial journalists play in the system of corporate governance, the ways in which law and regulation recognize that role, and the extent to which this role is accepted and understood by financial journalists themselves. The first part of the essay reviews recent debate on financial journalism and investigates the role of financial journalism from a systemic perspective: looking at its role in corporate governance, and its impact on market behaviour. I develop the notion that financial and business journalists operate within a framework of rights and duties which institutionalize a particular ethical approach to their role. The second half of the article, which draws more extensively on interviews conducted with journalists and editors, asks how journalists themselves understand and describe their role and what they see as the key challenges they face as they attempt to perform it. It emerges that there is no consensus among financial and business journalists about their “watchdog” role in relation to markets and corporate behaviour, and whilst the financial journalists interviewed tended to agree on the key challenges they face, they are uncertain how to respond to them.
This paper sets out an improved framework for examining critical junctures. This framework, while rigorous and broadly applicable and an advance on the frameworks currently employed, primarily seeks to incorporate an a priori element. Until now the frameworks utilized in examining critical junctures were entirely postdictive. Adding a predictive element to the concept will constitute a significant advance. The new framework, and its predictive element, termed the “differentiating factor,” is tested here in examining macro-economic crises and subsequent changes in macro-economic policy, in America and Sweden.
Building on a survey of media institutions in eighteen West European and North American democracies, Hallin and Mancini identify the principal dimensions of variation in media systems and the political variables which have shaped their evolution. They go on to identify three major models of media system development (the Polarized Pluralist, Democratic Corporatist and Liberal models) to explain why the media have played a different role in politics in each of these systems, and to explore the forces of change that are currently transforming them. It provides a key theoretical statement about the relation between media and political systems, a key statement about the methodology of comparative analysis in political communication and a clear overview of the variety of media institutions that have developed in the West, understood within their political and historical context.
The SAGE Key Concepts series provide students with accessible and authoritative knowledge of the essential topics in a variety of disciplines. Cross-referenced throughout, the format encourages critical evaluation through understanding. Written by experienced and respected academics, the books are indispensable study aids and guides to comprehension. Key Concepts in Journalism offers a systematic and accessible introduction to the terms, processes, and effects of journalism;a combination of practical considerations with theoretical issues; and further reading suggestions. The authors bring an enormous range of experience in newspaper and broadcast journalism, at national and regional level, as well as their teaching expertise. This book will be essential reading for students in journalism, and an invaluable reference tool for their professional careers. © Bob Franklin, Martin Hamer, Mark Hanna, Marie Kinsey and John E. Richardson 2005.
This paper investigates the press's role as a monitor or "watchdog" for accounting fraud. I find that the press fulfills this role by rebroadcasting information from other information intermediaries (analysts, auditors, and lawsuits) and by undertaking original investigation and analysis. Articles based on original analysis provide new information to the markets while those that rebroadcast allegations from other intermediaries do not. Consistent with a dual role for the press, I find that business-oriented press is more likely to undertake original analysis while nonbusiness periodicals focus primarily on rebroadcasting. I also investigate the determinates of press coverage, finding systematic biases in the types of firms and frauds for which articles are published. In general, the press covers firms and frauds that will be of interest to a broad set of readers and situations that are lower cost to identify and investigate.
We investigated the prevalence of 5 news frames identified in earlier studies on framing and framing effects: attribution of responsibility conflict, human interest, economic consequences, and morality. We content analyzed 2,601 newspaper stories and 1,522 television news stories in the period surrounding the Amsterdam meetings of European heads of state in 1997. Our results showed that, overall, the attribution of responsibility frame was most commonly used in the news, followed by the conflict, economic consequences, human interest, and morality frames, respectively. The use of news frames depended on both the type of outlet and the type of topic. Most significant differences were not between media (television vs. the press) but between sensationalist vs. serious types of news outlets. Sober and serious newspapers and television news programs more often used the responsibility and conflict frames in the presentation of news, whereas sensationalist outlets more often used the human interest frame.
There is a considerable amount of evidence to suggest that the political preferences of voters are influenced by the condition of the domestic economy. This article examines the proposition that, in Britain at least, the connections between macro-economic change and public perceptions of the government are mediated by the way in which the major national daily newspapers cover economic news. Using an aggregate data-analytic approach, it is shown that there is a moderate correlation between the economic coverage of most national dailies and the condition of the ‘real economy’ – though, unsurprisingly, some newspapers tend to be more accurate in their coverage than others. It is also shown that although press coverage of the economy fails to exert a direct effect on government popularity, it does exert an indirect effect through its impact on the overall level of personal financial optimism/pessimism.
One of the most notable features of the recent and continuing global banking crisis has been the failure of financial journalism, together with the global news agencies, to alert us to the signs of imminent catastrophe, thus confounding over-simplistic models of journalism as an efficient system of antennae monitoring the external environment. With a handful of honourable exceptions, most financial journalists and most international news agencies simply failed to report much of the emerging evidence of the growing possibility of collapse. Various explanations have been proposed for this failure including the complexities of the evidence, the manipulative power of financial public relations, and the difficulties of undertaking investigative journalism when newsrooms cut staff. This article, drawing on a theoretical framework for analysing exchange relationships between journalists and their sources first developed in Manning (2001), argues that a more fully developed explanation needs to explore the ways in which a distribution of political and symbolic power shaped relationships between financial correspondents, news agencies and the key information flows operating within global financial systems.
It is widely believed that the media has an important role to play in promoting development and in shaping economic policy. This is done partly by the media’s framing of the issues for public debate and by educating consumers of news. Increasingly, economists have shown that the media has played a constructive role in promoting informed civil engagement on economic policy and even in promoting corporate governance. At the same time, the business press has been referred to as the weak link or ‘step child’ in an increasingly professional and knowledgeable news room. Among other critiques, business journalists are faulted for being ideologically captured, and so generally presenting a pro-business/market point of view. They are often accused of being not only biased, but too ill-informed to write in an analytical or critical way about economics. This article examines the US press coverage of the stimulus package over several months in 2009 to ascertain the validity of these hypotheses. We found that although there was robust discussion of the stimulus, it was mostly focused on the political process rather than the economic issues, there was little agenda setting and government and business sources – including many with a ‘vested interest’ – were overwhelmingly cited the most.
The relation between journalistic role conceptions and news content is central for the understanding of differences in journalistic cultures. Previous research has shown that the professional roles of individual journalists can influence their behaviour and that occupational socialization leads to similar role conceptions within countries. This article therefore studies the relation between cross-national differences in role conceptions and news content. A survey among political journalists in Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Spain (N = 425), combined with a content analysis of political coverage in these countries (N = 1,035 newspaper articles) shows that role conceptions vary more across countries than within countries. Spanish political journalists see their role as more sacerdotal and partisan than their colleagues in northern Europe, while British journalists are most entertainment oriented. These differences in role conceptions are reflected in the reporting style of political news.
Financial scandals and controversies have recently attracted much attention in the British press. The excesses of the bankers’ bonuses, MPs’ expenses scandals and those deemed ‘benefit cheats’ and welfare scroungers have been given prominence by the print news media, and the present Coalition government. The politicization of the current financial crisis has resulted in ‘the privatization of loss and the socialization of costs’. Yet how do we make sense of this? Or how are those responsible for financial wrongdoings able to ‘get away with it’? This article suggests that the interests of business as a class remain largely uncontested in contemporary political discourse. Just one way in which this is evident is through the coverage of financial crime, and this article offers as illustration a case study of the political construction of business crime (price fixing) in the pages of the British press. It is suggested that the way in which this crime is framed is reflective of a broader ideological discursive commitment which privileges business interests over the public interest.
This article returns to the long-running public service versus free market debate in media and communications but from a rather unconventional perspective. Critics of the steady, globally driven marketization of national public media and information services tend to object on social and political grounds. Market advocates, in contrast, make their case on economic grounds. Greater competition in markets, including media markets, brings economic efficiencies which, in turn, are a `public good'. This economic assertion is rarely scrutinized within media studies. The study presented here, which looks at financial media and communications in the London Stock Exchange (LSE), does just this. In recent decades the LSE has been opened up to accommodate the needs of international financial institutions and international capital flows. This has had a detrimental impact on its media and information systems. Such liberalization, it is argued, has made the LSE less economically efficient, not more, and with quite negative economic (as well as social) consequences.
The collapse of Enron and other corporate scandals have raised concerns about the efficacy of financial journalism. Based on research on where reporters get their ideas for stories and how they approach their work, this article explores the particular circumstances in which production of financial and economic news takes place. The author argues that, while reporters are generally highly sceptical about ‘spin’ and strongly inclined towards highlighting instances of corporate underperformance and mismanagement, the circumstances and constraints they work within nonetheless make it unlikely that financial irregularities obscured within company accounts will be detected on a routine or consistent basis. Moreover, the way in which the commercial sector is organized (with in-depth analysis generally confined to specialist media whose audiences are already financially literate) means that the task of facilitating a sound public grasp over the significance of financial and economic news developments is largely being neglected.
This paper examines how journalists have used three narrative strategies— synecdoche, omission, and personalization—to assert their authority in their retellings of the Kennedy assassination. By giving themselves a central position within the story, journalists have helped make the assassination story a tale as much about American journalists as about Kennedy's death.
This chapter analyses the recovery of the Danish economy from the crisis of the 1980s, its elevation to a bit of an ‘economic miracle’ or at least an ‘employment miracle’ from 1995 to 2005 and its subsequent decline during the financial crisis, which revealed more long-standing problems that precluded a quick recovery. The solution of Denmark's structural balance of payment problems in the early 1990s paved the way for long-term prosperity, and Denmark managed the challenges of globalisation and deindustrialisation almost without social costs. However, an accumulation of short-term policy failures and credit liberalisation facilitated a credit and housing bubble, a consumption-driven boom and declining competitiveness. In broad terms, the explanation is political; this includes not only vote- and office-seeking strategies of the incumbent government but also ideational factors such as agenda setting of economic policy. Somewhat unnoticed – partly because of preoccupation with long-term challenges of ageing and shortage of labour – productivity and economic growth rates had slowed down over several years. The Danish decline in GDP 2008–2009 was larger than in the 1930s, and after the bubble burst, there were few drivers of economic growth. Households consolidated and were reluctant to consume; public consumption had to be cut as well; exports increased rather slowly; and in this climate, there was little room for private investments. Financially, the Danish economy remained healthy, though. Current accounts revealed record-high surpluses after the financial crisis; state debt remained moderate, and if one were to include the enormous retained taxes in private pension funds, net state debt would de facto be positive. Still, around 2010–2011 there were few short-term drivers of economic growth, and rather unexpectedly, it turned out that unemployment problems were likely to prevail for several years.
▪ Abstract This article provides an overview of recent developments in historical institutionalism. First, it reviews some distinctions that are commonly drawn between the “historical” and the “rational choice” variants of institutionalism and shows that there are more points of tangency than typically assumed. However, differences remain in how scholars in the two traditions approach empirical problems. The contrast of rational choice's emphasis on institutions as coordination mechanisms that generate or sustain equilibria versus historical institutionalism's emphasis on how institutions emerge from and are embedded in concrete temporal processes serves as the foundation for the second half of the essay, which assesses our progress in understanding institutional formation and change. Drawing on insights from recent historical institutional work on “critical junctures” and on “policy feedbacks,” the article proposes a way of thinking about institutional evolution and path dependency that provides an alter...
At the 2009 AEJMC conference, journalism and mass communication panelists debated the challenges, criticisms, and responsibilities of financial reporting in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Maria B. Marron evaluated British and Irish media coverage and concludes that they failed to exercise scepticism about what was done by those in political and financial power. Zeny Sarabia-Panol and Marianne D. Sison look at the extra-media influences on reporting of the crisis in Malaysia and the Philippines. Sandhya Rao turned to the blog discussions to find a credible forum for gaining sought-after information from the financial experts. Here, she teams up with Ray Niekamp to write about blogs in the United States and China.
A guard dog perspective is offered as a way to better understand the functioning of the mass media as an important set of communication agencies in the social system. This perspective takes into account the varying role performances by mass media in reporting on major public issues. The guard dog metaphor suggests that media perform as a sentry not for the community as a whole, but for groups having sufficient power and influence to create and control their own security systems. This conception is delineated from other perspectives, which include (a) the traditional fourth estate role of watchdog media, (b) the lapdog view of submissive media, and (c) the view of media as part of a power oligarchy. Several hypotheses that may be derived for testing the utility of the guard dog perspective are suggested and discussed in light of various bodies of evidence available.
This article considers how journalists have turned stories about the Gulf War into a forum for discussing satellite-fed technology, real-time reportage, and other issues of concern to the professional community. In focusing on the Cable News Network (CNN) and Peter Arnett, reporters have turned the Gulf War into a critical incident that helps them consider consensual notions of professional practice.
This paper investigates the press's role as a monitor or "watchdog" for accounting fraud. I find that the press fulfills this role by rebroadcasting information from other information intermediaries (analysts, auditors, and lawsuits) and by undertaking original investigation and analysis. Articles based on original analysis provide new information to the markets while those that rebroadcast allegations from other intermediaries do not. Consistent with a dual role for the press, I find that business-oriented press is more likely to undertake original analysis while nonbusiness periodicals focus primarily on rebroadcasting. I also investigate the determinates of press coverage, finding systematic biases in the types of firms and frauds for which articles are published. In general, the press covers firms and frauds that will be of interest to a broad set of readers and situations that are lower cost to identify and investigate. Copyright University of Chicago on behalf of the Institute of Professional Accounting, 2006.
Har finanskrisen sparket liv i kritisk erhvervsjournalistik
- C Kier
Kier C (2012) Har finanskrisen sparket liv i kritisk erhvervsjournalistik. Master's Thesis,
University of Southern Denmark, Denmark.
Where were the media in the financial crisis of 2008, and have we seen this trend before? Honors Projects in Communication 7
- M Dickinson
Dickinson M (2010) Where were the media in the financial crisis of 2008, and have we seen this
trend before? Honors Projects in Communication 7. Available at: http://digitalcommons.bryant.edu/honors_communication/7
The media and markets in the United States
- E Herman
Herman E (2002) The media and markets in the United States. In: Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, Roumeen
Islam and Caralee McLiesh (eds) The Right to Tell: The Role of Mass Media in Economic
Development. Washington, DC: The World Bank, pp. 61-82.
Political roles of the journalist
- T E Patterson
Patterson TE (1998) Political roles of the journalist. In: Graber D, McQuail D and Norris P (eds)
The Politics of News: The News of Politics. Washington, DC: CQ Press, pp. 17-32.
Profits and Losses: Business Journalism and Its Role in Society
- C Roush
Roush C (2006) Profits and Losses: Business Journalism and Its Role in Society. Oak Park, IL:
Marion Street Press.
Power problem: The business press did everything but take on the institutions that brought down the financial system
- D Starkman
Starkman D (2009) Power problem: The business press did everything but take on the institutions
that brought down the financial system. Columbia Journalism Review 48(1): 24-30.
Myth making on the business-pages: Local press and global crisis
- J Stein
- D Baines
Stein J and Baines D (2012) Myth making on the business-pages: Local press and global crisis.
Ethical Space: The international Journal of Communication Ethics 9(1): 52-59.
2012) and journals such as the
- Arjen Van Dalen
Arjen van Dalen (PhD) is Associate Professor at the Centre for Journalism at the University of
Southern Denmark. He wrote his PhD dissertation on Political Journalism in Comparative
Perspective. His research interests are in comparative communication research, particularly journalistic cultures and the relations between journalists and politicians. He has published about these
topics in The Global Journalists in the 21st Century (edited by David Weaver and Lars Willnat,
2012) and journals such as the European Journal of Communication, Political Communication,
The International Journal of Press/politics, and Journalism Studies.