Although Switzerland is the hub of the global raw materials market, commodity trading companies went unnoticed by the Swiss public for a long time. Glencore Xstrata, which is now the third biggest company in Switzerland, had neither a PR division nor a spokesperson until 2011. It was thus the human resources manager who took delivery of the "Public-Eye-Award" in 2008, a "prize" for unethical business practices. Since then, the days of calm are over for these companies, with social movements and political initiatives striving for tighter regulation of the commodities sector. In particular, a campaign of the "Berne Declaration", a non-profit organization, has triggered more than 30 parliamentary initiatives (Sprecher, 2014; pp. 21-22). In 2013, three Swiss government departments jointly stated in the "Background Report: Commodities" that Switzerland expects CSR that goes beyond profitability and statutory requirements, for instance by participating in the "UN Global Compact" (FDFA, FDF, & EAER, 2013, p. 37). Alarmed by these recent developments, leading commodity trading companies like Glencore Xstrata have begun to communicate about CSR engagements-apparently in order to (re)gain legitimacy (Du & Vieira, 2012). This raises the question: Can commodity trading companies enhance legitimacy through CSR disclosures? PR and CSR research provide two contrasting answers to this question. On the one hand, CSR is regarded as a means for companies to gain legitimacy (Chen, Patten, & Roberts, 2008; Deegan, 2002; Dowling & Pfeffer, 1975). Podnar and Golob (2007) found empirical evidence that CSR is "a way for a company to gain the license to operate and goodwill in the public eye" (p. 336). For commodity trading companies this would mean that CSR disclosures are worth doing in order to enhance legitimacy. On the other hand, Morsing, Schultz, and Nielsen (2008) caution companies about the "'Catch 22 of communicating CSR": Although publics would expect companies to engage in CSR they nevertheless do "not appreciate" corporate communication about it (p. 108). Moreover, Ashforth and Gibbs (1990) warn companies with tarnished legitimacy about the "self-promoter's paradox": the lower the perceived legitimacy of a company, the more skeptical will publics be of legit-* Corresponding author.

High-quality news is important, not only for its own sake but also for its political implications. However, defining, operationalizing, and measuring news media quality is difficult, because evaluative criteria depend upon beliefs about the ideal society, which are inherently contested. This conceptual and methodological paper outlines important considerations for defining news media quality before developing and applying a multimethod approach to measure it. We refer to Giddens' notion of double hermeneutics, which reveals that the ways social scientists understand constructs inevitably interact with the meanings of these constructs shared by people in society. Reflecting the two-way relationship between society and social sciences enables us to recognize news media quality as a dynamic, contingent, and contested construct and, at the same time, to reason our understanding of news media quality, which we derive from Habermas' ideal of deliberative democracy. Moreover, we investigate the Swiss media system to showcase our measurement approach in a repeated data collection from 2017 to 2020. We assess the content quality of fifty news media outlets using four criteria derived from the deliberative ideal ( N = 20,931 and 18,559 news articles and broadcasting items, respectively) and compare the results with those from two representative online surveys ( N = 2,169 and 2,159 respondents). The high correlations between both methods show that a deliberative understanding of news media quality is anchored in Swiss society and shared by audiences. This paper shall serve as a showcase to reflect and measure news media quality across other countries and media systems.

Despite coming from a world-famous, widely published sociologist and ethicist, Zygmunt Bauman’s thought has not significantly influenced scholarship on public relations. Although Bauman’s works indeed challenge classical theories of public relations, they also offer concepts that can reshape current understandings of how organisations interact with publics. Referring to Bauman’s social and ethical theory, in this article, I argue that amid the transition from solid to liquid modernity, the boundaries between public relations and other communications disciplines also become liquid and ultimately dissolve. As a consequence, experts from traditional disciplines within communications (e.g. public relations, marketing and corporate communications) increasingly compete with data engineers to influence publics, and in the process, their attempts at persuasive communication neglect moral considerations. In light of that dynamic, I contend that the recent data scandal involving Cambridge Analytica does not represent a false start but the dark future of digital communications management.

Due to structural changes in the media industry, the topic of CSR has gained more and more attention among media companies. Our research question was whether media companies can gain legitimacy through CSR disclosures. There is reason to assume that CSR disclosures both directly increase and indirectly decrease a media company's legitimacy. On one hand, CSR is regarded as a means of strengthening legitimacy; on the other hand, stakeholders might become skeptical and distrust disclosures about generous deeds. The experimental study detailed here considers both possibilities by using five CSR disclosures of a fictional media company as the stimuli, ranging from low-to high-communicated CSR engagement (single-factor between-groups design, 274 participants). According to the results of the Structural Equation Model (SEM), both assumptions are incorrect: CSR is not the crucial factor in determining whether or not stakeholders perceive a media company as legitimate, but rather its corporate credibility. Many media companies struggle for economic survival, leading to cost-cutting programs and market concentration. Although media companies strive to adapt new business models, they are accused by critics of increasingly neglecting their unique obligation to strengthen democratic processes through quality journalism (e.g., Kaye & Quinn, 2010; Levy & Nielson, 2010; Russ-Mohl, 2011). Hence, news media companies are in danger of losing legitimacy (Tolvanen, Olkkonen, & Luoma-aho, 2013). Strategic communication might prove useful as an antidote to this. In general, as Falkheimer (2014, p. 124) states, "the main driving force behind the increased interest in strategic communication is the organizational need of legitimacy to operate in the late modern society." The body of strategic communications knowledge includes how organizations can present themselves "in society as a social actor" (Hallahan, Holtzhausen, van Ruler, Verčič, & Sriramesh, 2007, p. 27). It is striking that the topic of "corporate social responsibility" (CSR) has gained more and more attention among media companies (Altmeppen, 2011; Bardoel & d'Haenens, 2004; Trommershausen, 2011). Many media companies have adopted the practices of CSR communication (Hou & Reber, 2011; Ingenhoff & Koelling, 2012). For example, although The Economist is notorious in campaigning against CSR, with the magazine publishing many critical articles about this issue (Guthey, Langer, & Morsing, 2006, pp. 42-45), The Economist Group makes extensive CSR claims on their corporate webpage: "As an international company, we conduct business in many different markets around the world. In the countries in which we operate, we abide by local laws and regulations. We make an active contribution to local charities by charitable giving" (The Economist Group, 2015). This raises the research question: Can media companies gain legitimacy through CSR disclosures?

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