Long-Term Trends in News Content

Abstract

The way news is produced and consumed has changed dramatically during the first two decades of the 21st century due to digitalization and economic pressures. In a globalized world, current events are reported in almost real time in various countries and are diffused rapidly via social media. Thus much scholarly attention is devoted to determining whether these developments have changed news content. Comparative research in the area of journalism focuses on whether news content across countries converges over time and to what degree national differences persist across countries. When studying the research on long-term trends in news content, three main observations can be made. First, theoretical assumptions are often rooted in different models of democracies, but they are rarely explicitly discussed. Second, many studies focus on the organizational level using theoretical concepts related to increased market orientation of news outlets, such as personalization, emotionalization, or scandalization. Furthermore, commercialization is associated with the effects of digitalization and globalization, namely, decreased advertising revenues and increased competition. A commonly expressed fear is that these changes have consequences for democracy and informed citizenship. Third, in recent years, there has been a steady increase of studies employing international comparisons as well as a growing standardization for measurements. These developments lead to more multicountry studies based on large samples but come at the expense of more fine-grained analysis of the way news content changes over time. Finally, the vast majority of cross-national and single-country studies focus on Western democracies. Thus our knowledge about recent changes in news content is limited to a small set of countries. Overall, many studies provide evidence for constant changes of news content driven by social, political, and economic developments. However, different media systems exhibit a sustained resilience toward transnational pressures reflected in a persistence of national differences in news content over time.

Political communication in and about crises. Potentials of a fragmented field

“…Esser, 2016) but empirically, this research applies mainly to routine periods or elections, probably because these periods can be more easily controlled by researchers (cf. Humprecht & Udris, 2019). "Crisis events" such as referenda with far-reaching impact (e. g. the Brexit referendum in Great Britain in 2016), wars, catastrophes (e. g. nuclear disasters), "moral panics", big political scandals (e. g. revelation of corruption) or events with massive protest upheavals are studied much less in a comparative perspective.…”

News coverage of social protests in global society

“…Another important factor that shapes news content is a news outlet’s market competition (McManus, 1995) and its audience’s demographic characteristics (Hamilton, 2004). Since the mid-1980s, journalism has shifted to a market-based commercial news production (Hamilton, 2004; Humprecht and Udris, 2019; McManus, 1995; Napoli, 1997). Today, it is almost common knowledge that media size, ownership, and profit orientation are considered the first of many filters that determine what will get news coverage (Herman and Chomsky, 2002).…”

“…However, prior empirical work testing these different theoretical perspectives often focuses on a limited number of news outlets in a single country, a comparative study of major news outlets in a few countries, or a single type of social movement across different countries (Amenta et al, 2009; Evans et al, 2020; Humprecht and Udris, 2019). First, due to data constraints, existing studies tend to focus on limited media sources (e.g.…”

“…Even though comparative media studies show some evidence of media convergence (e.g. commercialization and Americanization) in global society, cross-national differences still persist, especially between democratic and authoritarian countries (Humprecht and Udris, 2019). The most common research design in prior studies is to assess a dichotomous or continuous measure of media coverage in the United States across different periods (Rafail et al, 2019).…”

“…Third, much of sociological work focusing on the longitudinal analysis of protest coverage typically uses protest data in 1960–1995 from the Dynamics of Collective Action (DoCA) project (Earl et al, 2004; Rafail et al, 2019). Even though the DoCA project presents an opportunity for scholars to better understand the historical evolution of news coverage of social movements, these findings might not be extended to the current era, as rapid development and adoption of information and communication technologies in our societies have transformed media and social movements (Humprecht and Esser, 2018; Humprecht and Udris, 2019; Rafail et al, 2019). One big shortcoming of current scholarship is that we lack critical studies examining the dynamics of media attention to social movements, especially about digital media during the contemporary period.…”