Rosa Berganza

MAPPING JOURNALISM CULTURES ACROSS NATIONS: A comparative study of 18 countries

This article reports key findings from a comparative survey of the role perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views of 1800 journalists from 18 countries. The results show that detachment, non-involvement, providing political information and monitoring the government are considered essential journalistic functions around the globe. Impartiality, the reliability and factualness of information, as well as adherence to universal ethical principles are also valued worldwide, though their perceived importance varies across countries. Various aspects of interventionism, objectivism and the importance of separating facts from opinion, on the other hand, seem to play out differently around the globe. Western journalists are generally less supportive of any active promotion of particular values, ideas and social change, and they adhere more to universal principles in their ethical decisions. Journalists from non-western contexts, on the other hand, tend to be more interventionist in their role perceptions and more flexible in their ethical views.

Mapping journalism cultures across nations. A comparative study of 18 countries

This article reports key findings from a comparative survey of the role perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views of 1800 journalists from 18 countries. The results show that detachment, non-involvement, providing political information and monitoring the government are considered essential journalistic functions around the globe. Impartiality, the reliability and factualness of information, as well as adherence to universal ethical principles are also valued worldwide, though their perceived importance varies across countries. Various aspects of interventionism, objectivism and the importance of separating facts from opinion, on the other hand, seem to play out differently around the globe. Western journalists are generally less supportive of any active promotion of particular values, ideas and social change, and they adhere more to universal principles in their ethical decisions. Journalists from non-western contexts, on the other hand, tend to be more interventionist in their role perceptions and more flexible in their ethical views.

Negativity in political news: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings

The concept of negativity in political news has not reached the status of a homogenous, overarching theoretical concept. This article proposes conceptual understandings, categorizations and practical operationalizations of negativity in the news that reflect the consensus of existing work paying special attention to recent European research. This work aims to systematize existing concepts and categories in order to increase comparability and cumulativity of empirical evidence. To structure and standardize dimensions of negativity in the news we differentiate firstly between negativity and confrontation, secondly between frame-related negativity and individual actor-related negativity, and thirdly between non-directional and directional dimensions of negativity. This article provides a common set of indicators and matrice-based classifications of negativity (and its antithesis) in the news to measure and categorize its intensity and multi-dimensionality.

Political Information Opportunities in Europe: A Longitudinal and Comparative Study of Thirteen Television Systems

This study examines the supply of political information programming across thirteen European broadcast systems over three decades. The cross-national and cross-temporal design traces the composition and development of political information environments with regard to the amount and placement of news and current affairs programs on the largest public and private television channels. It finds that the televisual information environments of Israel and Norway offer the most advantageous opportunity structure for informed citizenship because of their high levels of airtime and a diverse scheduling strategy. The study contributes to political communication research by establishing “political information environments” as a theoretically and empirically grounded concept that informs and supplements the comparison of “media systems.” If developed further, it could provide an information-rich, easy-to-measure macro-unit for future comparative research.

Political communication in a high-choice media environment: a challenge for democracy?

ABSTRACT During the last decennia media environments and political communication systems have changed fundamentally. These changes have major ramifications for the political information environments and the extent to which they aid people in becoming informed citizens. Against this background, the purpose of this article is to review research on key changes and trends in political information environments and assess their democratic implications. We will focus on advanced postindustrial democracies and six concerns that are all closely linked to the dissemination and acquisition of political knowledge: (1) declining supply of political information, (2) declining quality of news, (3) increasing media concentration and declining diversity of news, (4) increasing fragmentation and polarization, (5) increasing relativism and (6) increasing inequality in political knowledge.

Sourcing the News: Comparing Source Use and Media Framing of the 2009 European Parliamentary Elections

The relationship between journalists and their sources has been described as an interdependent relationship where each part needs the other. For political actors, this relationship is particularly important during election campaigns, when their need to reach voters through the media is even more urgent than usual. This is particularly true with respect to European Parliamentary election campaigns, as these are often less salient and as peoples need for orientation is greater than in national elections. However, there is only limited cross-national research on the medias use of news sources and whether there are associations between the use of news sources and media framing. This holds true for research on election campaigns in general and on European Parliamentary election campaigns in particular. Against this background, this study investigates cross-national differences and similarities in the medias use of news sources in their coverage of the 2009 European Parliamentary election campaigns and the extent to which the use of news sources is associated with the medias framing of politics and the EU. The study draws upon a quantitative content analysis of the media coverage in twelve countries. Findings suggest that there are both important similarities and differences across countries with respect to the use of news sources and that there are cases when the use of news sources is related to the framing of politics and the EU.

Political Trust among Journalists: Comparative Evidence from 21 Countries

Political scientists often argue that political trust is critical to democracy. Mishler and Rose (2001: 30), for instance, maintain that trust links ordinary citizens to the institutions that are supposed to represent them, ‘thereby enhancing both the legitimacy and the effectiveness of democratic govern- ment’. It comes as no surprise that this proposition has sparked a large array of research on political trust, from David Easton’s (1965) early study of polit- ical support to more recent endeavors to trace trust across various nations (e.g. the World Values Survey), and to attempts to identify the sources of trust (Campbell, 2004; Luhiste, 2006; Mishler and Rose, 2001). Empirical evidence suggests a rather pessimistic outlook for many of the established democracies, which show alarming signs of widespread public discontent with politics and cynicism about government (Norris, 1999a). Mair (2006: 6) notes that ‘[n]ever before in the history of postwar Europe have govern- ments and their political leaders...been held in such low regard.’

Framing the European Union and Building the Media Agenda: The 2004 European Parliamentary Elections in the Spanish Daily Press

This article uses the analysis of the 2004 European elections in the Spanish press as a case study that can be broached from the agenda building and framing theoretical frameworks. We seek to compare the media agenda in the 2004 and 1999 European elections by use of a content analysis in order to evaluate the impact of new real-world conditions (the March 11 Madrid bombings) and new strategies of political actors after the March 14 general elections concerning foreign affairs on the news coverage. The research also aims to advance framing research by identifying news frames (as the “conflict frame” and the “political game frame”) that can link this study with prior ones.

In Media We Trust: Journalists and institutional trust perceptions in post-authoritarian and post-totalitarian countries

Trust is a societal value that is difficult to gain and easy to lose. This article deals with the levels of trust that journalists working in eight post-authoritarian and post-totalitarian countries (Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Czech Republic, Indonesia, Latvia, South Africa and Tanzania) have in various social institutions using data from the present Worlds of Journalism Study. In each country, results showed the level of trust in journalists’ own institution—the media—is higher than the level of trust in both political and regulative institutions. The expression of low trust, particularly in regulative institutions, in the sampled countries represents significantly different results from previous studies about journalists’ trust in countries with longer democratic traditions.

The impact of media and NGOs on four European Parliament discourses about conflicts in the Middle East

There is empirical evidence of media influence on parliamentary agenda, especially when media coverage privileges conflict framing of reality and negativity. This article addresses the impact of media presence (traditional and social media) and NGOs on European parliamentary discussions about violent conflicts in the Middle East and their role during phases of escalation and pacification. The authors content analysed 7,633 minutes from debates involving the Syrian (from January 2011 to June 2015) and Israeli–Palestinian (from March 2006 to June 2015) conflicts, from the European Parliament (N = 2,541), the German Bundestag (N = 2,138), the UK House of Commons (N = 2,514) and the French Assemblée Nationale (N = 440). Conflict-related paragraphs were filtered and analysed. Using the multilingual and cross-validated dictionary adapted to conflict and media analysis created by INFOCORE, they measured the presence of media and actors as well as the inclusion of conflict-key concepts within parliamentary discussions. Findings revealed that social media (when compared to traditional media and NGOs) are the main actors quoted in parliamentary minutes when they refer to violent conflicts and that this attention varies over time and is driven by focusing events. The presence of traditional and social media as well as NGOs in the debates was significantly different depending on the parliament studied and the conflict under consideration. The authors found empirical evidence supporting the claim that such concepts as limited violence, crisis, assistance and pacification are correlated with the presence of media and NGOs.