Anne C. Kroon

Victims or perpetrators? Explaining media framing of Roma across Europe

Discrimination against Roma is a reality across Europe. The extent to which stereotyped, discriminatory beliefs of this minority group are reflected or reinforced by news media has received only limited attention. This study investigates media framing of Roma and explains variation in how European news media frame Roma in diagnostic and prognostic terms. We content analysed 825 news articles from newspapers in the Netherlands, Germany, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom for the period 2010–2012. Results show that attention for Roma is clustered around key-events and differs considerably between countries. Our analyses of frame variation, based on multilevel modelling, indicate a duality in the use of frames, with Roma being both portrayed as victims and perpetrators. Variation in these portrayals could be ascribed mainly to sources and newspaper types. This study contributes to our understanding of the factors that account for problem-emphasizing portrayals of Roma in European countries.

Reliable and unproductive? Stereotypes of older employees in corporate and news media

ABSTRACT Older employees face a severe employability problem, partly because of dominant stereotypes about them. This study investigates stereotypes of older employees in corporate and news media. Drawing on the Stereotype Content Model, we content analysed newspaper coverage and corporate media of 50 large-scale Dutch organisations, published between 2006 and 2013. The data revealed that stereotypical portrayals of older employees are more common in news media than in corporate media and mixed in terms of valence. Specifically, older employees were positively portrayed with regard to warmth stereotypes, such as trustworthiness, but negatively with regard to competence stereotypes, such as technological competence and adaptability. Additionally, stereotypical portrayals that do not clearly belong to warmth or competence dimensions are found, such as the mentoring role stereotype and the costly stereotype. Because competence stereotypes weigh more heavily in employers’ productivity perceptions, these media portrayals might contribute to the employability problem of older employees. We suggest that older employees could benefit from a more realistic media debate about their skills and capacities.

Between Accommodating and Activating: Framing Policy Reforms in Response to Workforce Aging across Europe:

In the past decade, European governments have implemented activating policy reforms to maximize older workers’ employment and employability, representing a paradigmatic change in approaches to work and retirement. This study isolates the factors that explain the relative success and failure of competitive frames that are either in favor of or against activating policies in European news coverage, by applying time-series analysis (ordinary least squares with panel-corrected standard errors) to monthly aggregated news coverage in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Spain over the timespan 2006–2013. The results show that pro-activating and counteractivating frames generally coincide in competitive framing environments. The pro-activating frame proliferated in times of high employment protection, whereas the counteractivating frame prevailed stronger in conservative compared with progressive newspapers, and gained momentum during the aftermath of the financial crisis and in times governments on the economic left were in power. The study advances knowledge of competitive issue framing by demonstrating how the economic, policy, and political context matters for the emergence and evolvement of competing frames. In addition, the findings contribute to the understanding of the factors that contribute to news representations that promote active aging in European news, which may foster support for policy reforms that sustain older workers’ employability.

Age at work : Explaining variation in frames of older employees in corporate and news media

Despite the fact that workforce aging is recognized as a key social and economic concern of developed countries, previous research has largely neglected the role of corporate and news media in the debate about this topic. Relying on a content analysis of five Dutch newspapers and the corporate media of 50 Dutch organizations (N = 1328), this study traces variation in frames of older workers’ employability. Results reveal that organizations in their corporate media attempt to avoid associations with problems related to older employees and highlight the solutions they offer, while news media are more inclined to problematize the issue and victimize older employees. This study elucidates our understanding of how corporate and news media communicatively deal with older workers’ employability, and how key actors drive frame-formation processes in both domains.

Dealing with an aging workforce: Locating threats and opportunities in corporate media

ABSTRACT Although workforce aging is among the major challenges facing developed countries, organizational communication about this issue has received little scholarly attention. Drawing on a content analysis of corporate media, we reconstruct how Dutch organizations (N = 50) framed older workers’ employability during the period 2006–2013 in diagnostic (problem-definitions) and prognostic (solution-definitions) terms, and we trace the influence of corporate media types and organizational characteristics on these frames. Results reveal that organizations frequently highlight problems on the macrolevel (societal) and the mesolevel (organizational), while most solutions are located on the microlevel (individual). Using multilevel modelling, we found support for the expectation that the issue is more strongly problematized in internal compared to external corporate media, and that problems related to individual older employees are most pronounced in public sector organizations’ communication. Our findings highlight diverse ways in which organizations can communicatively address factors that hamper older workers’ employability.

Mediatization and the Disproportionate Attention to Negative News

Do news media increasingly portray a distorted world image when reporting menace? The purpose of this study is to investigate how media attention for negative incidents evolves over time and how this relates to real-world trends and public responses. A longitudinal content analysis (1991–2015) of media coverage of aviation incidents is used to provide a systematic investigation into the trends of media attention related to real-world data. Results show that while the total number of aviation incidents declined across time, relative media attention increased. Time series analysis revealed that media attention for these negative incidents was negatively associated with shifts in public responses—i.e. air travel behavior—whereas real-world statistics on aviation incidents did not seem to explain variation in public behavior. Moreover, when exploring the variation in the coverage of media attention, increasing presence of mediatization facets was observed as a potential explanation for the over-time rise in disproportional attention to negative news. In conclusion, news media may have a blind spot for progression and a distorted media reality can be a predictor of public responses instead of reality itself.

Biased media? How news content influences age discrimination claims

Information distributed via the news media is acknowledged as a potential source of negative beliefs about, and biased behaviors toward, older workers. Focusing on the Netherlands, the current study explains age discrimination claims filed by older workers by investigating the impact of visibility and media stereotypes of older workers in the news media, while controlling for real-world events and older workers’ expectations of unemployment (2004–2014). The results, based on time-series analysis, reveal that the visibility of older workers in the news media is associated with higher levels of age discrimination claims. This effect can be partly explained with the visibility of the negative media stereotype that older workers experience health problems in the content of news coverage. Furthermore, unemployment expectations decreased the number of age discrimination claims. These results offer support for the notion that the news environment is a source of variation in the experience of age discrimination at the workplace.

Who Takes the Lead? Investigating the Reciprocal Relationship Between Organizational and News Agendas:

This study introduces the element of time to investigate the causal relation between organizational and news media agendas. Reciprocal time-series analyses were applied to daily-level aggregated press releases (n = 17,221) and news articles (n = 74,067). Results indicate that on the first level of agenda building, organizational and news agendas are intertwined in an intimate relation of reciprocal influence, in which organizations more often take the lead. Conversely, results suggest that on the second level of agenda building, organizational and news agendas influence each other less often. Organizational and newspaper characteristics proved useful to map the contingency of agenda-building effects. The findings suggest that organizational sources are more influential in the news discovery phase compared with the news-gathering phase, and imply that the unidirectional conceptualization of news media as a channel to vent organizational messages is too narrow.