J. Kleinnijenhuis

Loss of Parliamentary Control Due to Mediatization and Europeanization: A Longitudinal and Cross-Sectional Analysis of Agenda Building in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands

The central question in this study is whether the power of the media agenda over the political agenda has recently increased. The agenda-building dynamics are established using cross-country time-series data on four issues, covering fifteen and eight years respectively of British and Dutch parliamentary debates and newspaper articles. Structural equation models show that the parliamentary agenda is more influenced by the media agenda than the other way around, and that the power balance has shifted even more in favour of the media. It is additionally found that media power is especially associated with issues within the European domain. This study contributes empirically to the ‘mediatization’ debate in a EU context, which is largely limited to the realm of theoretical speculation. The reciprocity between the agenda of politicians and public opinion is a major theme in political science. Research results indicate that political parties often adjust their policies to public opinion. 1 Conversely, public opinion is sensitive to political events and popular leaders, 2 at least when the issue at hand is considered to be sufficiently important. 3 It has long been recognized that mass media play a vital role in forging the links between politicians and citizens in modern democracies. 4 Politicians, often ignorant of public preferences, monitor the media for a proxy measure of the public mood. 5 Citizens would hardly be aware of political policies and performance, were it not for the media. 6 The media offer a forum for political profiling on behalf of politics, as well as for the exchange of * Department of Communication Science, Free University Amsterdam. This article is part of the doctoral dissertation of Lonneke van Noije (expected in 2007) under the supervision of Jan Kleinnijenhuis and Dirk Oegema. Lonneke van Noije is currently engaged as a researcher at The Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP). Earlier versions were presented at the International Communication Association, New York, 2005, and at Elections, Public Opinion and Parties at the School of Politics and International Relations, Nottingham, 2006. The authors are indebted to Wouter van Atteveldt and Ivar Vermeulen for their help with data retrieval and processing. They also thank the Journal’s reviewers for refining the argument throughout the article. 1

Negative News and the Sleeper Effect of Distrust

The role of the media in the creation of distrust is much debated in political communication. Will negative news, for example, relentless attacks on political authorities, result in political cynicism or in a stimulation effect? By and large the media may stimulate political participation,but it is less clear when negative news will nullify this effect. Negative news may not only have short-term behavioral effects but also effects on underlying attitudes such as trust in politicians, which may produce their “sleeper effect” on political behavior only in the long run. This article addresses two related research questions.Will negative news discourage trust in political leaders? Will trust have a sleeper effect for future party choice and future turnout within the months to come? The 2002 Dutch election campaign,being an unprecedented negative campaign as compared to other Dutch campaigns, provides a good case to investigate these questions. On the basis of a biweekly seven-wave panel survey study and a daily content analysis of television news and newspapers,negative news was found to have a significant effect on trust in party leaders in addition to prior vote preference and education.The distrust in party leaders also had a significant sleeper effect in the long run on turnout and on the actual vote in addition to previous intentions.In general,these findings support the malaise theory. They are helpful to explain why the Christian Democrats could win the elections in defiance of the polls.

Newspaper Complexity and the Knowledge Gap

The knowledge gap hypothesis states that segments of the population with higher education acquire knowledge from the mass media at a faster rate than the lower educated segments. This article states that the faster learning rate of highly educated persons, which is claimed by knowledge gap theory, rests upon their greater capacity to process complex, compactly written newspapers. Content analysis data from The Netherlands in combination with data from national election studies in The Netherlands support this hypothesis. For the less educated, watching political news on television proves to be more efficient for acquiring political knowledge than reading political news in a newspaper. Conversely, for higher educated persons reading political news is more efficient, provided they opt for a compactly written newspaper with complex news.

Good news or bad news: Conducting sentiment analysis on Dutch texts to distinguish between positive and negative relations

ABSTRACT Many research questions in political communication can be answered by representing text as a network of positive or negative relations between actors and issues such as conducted by semantic network analysis. This article presents a system for automatically determining the polarity (positivity/negativity) of these relations by using techniques from sentiment analysis. We used a machine learning model trained on the manually annotated news coverage of the Dutch 2006 elections, collecting lexical, syntactic, and word-similarity based features, and using the syntactic analysis to focus on the relevant part of the sentence. The performance of the full system is significantly better than the baseline with an F1 score of .63. Additionally, we replicate four studies from an earlier analysis of these elections, attaining correlations of greater than .8 in three out of four cases. This shows that the presented system can be immediately used for a number of analyses.

Financial news and market panics in the age of high-frequency sentiment trading algorithms

Whether financial news may contribute to market panics is not an innocent question. A positive answer is easily used as a legitimation to limit the freedom of financial journalists. Long-term effects of news are moreover inconsistent with the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), which maintains that new information gives immediately rise to a new equilibrium. The EMH is under discussion, however, as a result of the transformation of financial markets and of financial journalism due to new economic thoughts, new communication theories, high-frequency trading and high-frequency sentiment analysis. As a case study of a market panic we show the impact of US news, UK news and Dutch news on three Dutch banks during the financial crisis of 2007–9. To avoid market panics, financial journalists may strive for greater transparency, not only on asset prices and corporate philosophies, but also on network dependencies in the worldwide financial markets.

Media logic in election campaign coverage

The media logic thesis holds that the content of political news is the product of news values and format requirements that media make use of to attract news consumers. This study tests whether three content characteristics – personalized, contest and negative coverage – manifest a single media logic by analysing whether they co-vary over time. It also tests the implicit assumption underlying the media logic thesis that media adhere to a single media logic as one institution. A semantic network analysis measured the degree to which television and newspaper coverage of five Dutch national election campaigns (1998–2010) contained the three content characteristics. The study shows that personalized, contest and negative coverage form three indicators of a single logic that is shared by different media. Since the turn of the century, Dutch political news has simultaneously become decreasingly personalized, less focused on the contest and less negative.

News selection criteria in the digital age: Professional norms versus online audience metrics

On newspaper websites, journalists can observe the preferences of the audience in unprecedented detail and for low costs, based on the audience clicks (i.e. page views) for specific news articles. This article addresses whether journalists use this information to cater to audience preferences in their news selection choices. We analyzed the print and online editions of five national newspapers from the Netherlands with a mixed-method approach. Using a cross-lagged analysis covering 6 months, we found that storylines of the most-viewed articles were more likely to receive attention in subsequent reporting, which indicates that audience clicks affect news selection. However, based on interviews with editors we found that they consider the use of this information for news selection to conflict with professional norms. We elaborate on the implications of this discrepancy in the norms and behaviors of journalists, and project directions for future studies.

Personalization in political television news; A 13-wave survey study to assess effects of text and footage

Television news is the main battlefield of democratic politics. How are politicians presented in this news and how do voters react to this presentation? Theory about the effects of attention for a politician in texts, sound bites or voice-overs on party preference is discussed in this article. The content of 457 news items from a public and commercial broadcaster is analyzed using the NET method (Network analysis of Evaluative Texts, Van Cuilenberg et al., 1986). The items were broadcast during the 15 weeks preceding the 1989 elections in the Netherlands. Pooled time series analysis is used to predict party preference of an individual (assessed in a 13-wave panel survey study, N=575) on the basis of his or her news consumption as assessed by the content analysis. This analysis makes clear, that, although party leaders are important, parties are still dominant in the texts of the news items. Politicians, especially party leaders, are the foremost important messengers of stands on issues of a party. The results affirm Hallins suggestion (1992) that politicians need sound bites to convince voters. Voice-overs do not have a discernible effect. The effect of texts of political news is strongly related to the effect of the footage. These communication effects result from a combination of characteristics of the politician and his party, features of media coverage and characteristics of the voter

Polarization in the media during an election campaign: a dynamic network model predicting support and attack among political actors

In multiparty election campaigns, many political parties and candidates compete for media attention, voters, and a government majority. Negative campaigning, which is often newsworthy, is an attractive strategy in the competition for media attention. However, political support for another party offers an alternative strategy because it signals preferred government coalitions. The research question to be addressed here is: What is prompting a political party to either support or attack another party in a news medium on a specific day in an election campaign? We analyze statements of support and attack among politicians and political parties reported in the news media during the 2006 Dutch national election campaign. Combining hypotheses from research in negative campaigning and the mediatization of politics with concepts from social network analysis, we predict whether a reported statement expresses support or an attack among political actors. Party size, party ideology, and incumbency of the political actors are important static predictors. Dynamic predictors, which indicate how the campaign has evolved thus far, include agreement or disagreement on issues recently raised in the media as well as recent attacks and support statements. The dynamic predictors are needed to explain polarization among political actors in the media during the campaign. The results show that reported statements affect the course of the election campaign.

The Mediating Role of the News in the BP Oil Spill Crisis 2010 How U.S. News Is Influenced by Public Relations and in Turn Influences Public Awareness, Foreign News, and the Share Price

The paper explains antecedents and consequences of news during the BP oil spill crisis by analyzing newspaper and internet coverage as well as financial indicators. The study establishes the roles of routines in financial journalism and of BP’s public relations efforts in building the U.S. media agenda. The U.S. media agenda in turn bears a classic agenda-setting effect on public awareness, an intermedia agenda-setting effect on foreign media, and a stakeholder agenda-setting effect on financial markets. A second-level attribute agenda-setting post-hoc study reveals that these first-order agenda setting effects depend on the resonance of specific problems and solutions with specific interests and a specific frame of mind. Financial stakeholders, for example, reacted negatively to news about judicial accountability, but positively to press releases about BP’s skills in implementing solutions. The findings contradict research which states that the news in classic media merely mirrors share prices.