Perceived News Media Importance: Developing and Validating a Measure for Personal Valuations of Normative Journalistic Functions

Perceptions of Media Performance: Expectation-Evaluation Discrepancies and Their Relationship with Media-related and Populist Attitudes

“…Expectations of media performance: Based on normative media functions and existing research on media perfor-mance (Peifer, 2018), journalistic role ideals (Hanitzsch, 2011), and journalistic role performance (e.g., Mellado et al, 2020), we asked respondents what they demand of the media concerning six functions based on 16 items (for more details, see Figure 1): information (1 item), public forum (4 items; Cronbach's = .81), watchdog (2 items, = .78), analysis (3 items, = .78), social empathy (2 items, = .74), and mobilization (4 items, = .88; 5-point scales from 1 = does not apply at all to 5 = fully applies). A principal component analysis revealed a onefactor solution (M = 3.94, SD = .81, Cronbach's = .95).…”

“…These normative functions of the press are not fixed and the capacity of the media to fulfill them has often been doubted (e.g., Chomsky, 2002;Graber, 2003). The question remains, however, whether citizens as the main addressee of journalistic content, and thus normative ideals related to journalistic media, share these expectations, and how well they see them fulfilled (Peifer, 2018).…”

“…Research examining citizens' expectations and evaluations of media performance is usually based on journalistic role conceptions or quality criteria which again are usually derived from normative media functions. A recent study by Peifer (2018), for instance, developed a 15-item scale of perceived news media importance, which includes both the individual as well as the overall social importance of six media functions, such as information, watchdog, and mobilization (e.g., "provide me with a daily account of what is happening in the world" or "provide analysis and interpretation of the complex problems around me"; p. 23). In the Netherlands, van der Wurff and Schönbach (2014) showed that the various journalistic role expectations and ideals, such as the information and watchdog roles, are consistently expected by citizens (but see for Asian media systems Guo & Li, 2011;Tandoc & Duffy, 2016).…”

“…Communication research has only recently started to deal more intensively with the audience perspective on these normative media functions and to investigate, for instance, the extent to which citizens' values are congruent with key normative roles in journalism (e.g., Gil de Zúñiga & Hinsley, 2013;Peifer, 2018). This research usually examines what users demand from the media (expectations) or how they evaluate the media's actual performance (evaluations) but has rarely analyzed both in a comparative way.…”

The Value of Explaining the Process: How Journalistic Transparency and Perceptions of News Media Importance Can (Sometimes) Foster Message Credibility and Engagement Intentions

“…It seems the more one is, essentially, "uncertain" about the fundamental value of journalism, the less effective transparency efforts can be in reducing uncertainty about journalistic content/actors. In light of extant evidence that PNMI is strongly associated with news media credibility (Peifer, 2018b), it suggests that transparency may not be too successful among those most inclined to have little faith in the news media and generally skeptical of journalism's value. This echoes the findings of Karlsson (2020), who demonstrated a positive correlation between media trust and valuing disclosure transparency.…”