Defining and Measuring News Media Quality: Comparing the Content Perspective and the Audience Perspective

Abstract

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.

Believing Journalists, AI, or Fake News: The Role of Trust in Media

“…To avoid topic-specific difference [2], the topic of all texts was the same. The journalistic article was chosen according to scientific criteria [11] from the online portal of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a renowned news media company in Germany. This article dealt with the typical symptoms of an infection with the coronavirus [31].…”

“…Integrating fake news in our research, i.e. false or misleading news [10], allows us to place the credibility of AI-generated news on a spectrum ranging from objectively well-written journalistic content [11] to objectively false content [10] and to judge consumers' perception of texts written by an AI in relation to these two major categories of news content that are shaping or threatening societies worldwide [12].…”

Situational effects of journalistic resources on gender imbalances in the coverage of Swiss news media: A longitudinal analysis from 2011 to 2019

“…Subscription media, the Sunday press and tabloids also differ in terms of their editorial profiles. In Switzerland, subscription media and the Sunday press offer higher quality reporting than tabloids (Bachmann et al, 2021) and, thus, will most likely invest more journalistic resources to ensure this quality. With regard to media types, we created the following hypotheses: H5.1 The representation of women in subscription media will be higher when compared to tabloid media but lower when compared to Sunday papers.…”

Paying Attention to the Pandemic: Knowledge of COVID-19 Facts by News Source and Demographics

“…Local news is viewed as more trustworthy than national news, particularly among Democrats (Knight Foundation & Gallup, 2019;Newman et al, 2020). 4 Though generally, the lay public's trust in or assessment of quality of a news source is predictive of the factual quality of the source (Bachmann, Eisenegger, & Ingenhoff, 2021;Knudsen, Dahlberg, Iversen, Johannesson, & Nygaard, 2021), people often consume news they do not trust, depending on their motivations (Fisher, 2016). As a result, measures of trust have important limitations when it comes to understanding the public's knowledge.…”