Mediated Deliberation in Deep Conflicts: How Might Deliberative Media Content Contribute to Social Integration Across Deep Divides?

Conflicts perceived by the media, either within or across national borders, are a staple of modern societies. These conflicts become especially challenging for societies that are divided along religious, ethnic, cultural or political lines. In the light of such deep conflicts, the contribution of mediated deliberation to social integration moves center stage. In this paper we discuss normative standards for mediated public communication deemed conducive to social integration in divided societies by deliberative theorists. We identify inclusiveness, responsiveness, mutual respect, and the display of group-bridging identities as the essential criteria. These criteria can be applied as yardsticks to assess the production, the content as well as the reception of media material in both mass media and social media. They therefore serve as an ideal point of departure for empirical work on the media’s role in social integration

Deliberative qualities of generic news frames: Assessing the democratic value of strategic game and contestation framing in election campaign coverage

News frames are patterns of news construction journalists rely on to present information to their audiences. While much of the research on news frames has focused on their identification and effects, less work has investigated the specific contributions these different frames make to democratic life. Value judgments about distinct news frames are often not generated in a systematic fashion, not grounded in democratic theory, and/or not supported by empirical evidence. In this article, we address these problems by arguing for and extending normative assessment as a standard operating procedure to determine the democratic value of political communication phenomena. We demonstrate the usefulness of normative assessment by showing how two important generic news frames (politics as a strategic game and as a substantive contestation) contribute to a deliberative public discourse prior to a general election. Using data on television news coverage of the German federal election campaign in 2009, we investigate how these frames are related to the inclusiveness and civility of public discourse and the extent to which it features exchanges of substantive reasons for political positions. Results show that mediated democratic deliberation suffers consistently from strategic game framing, while contestation frames make ambivalent contributions. Implications for political communication scholarship as well as journalistic practice are discussed

Mannheim International News Discourse Data Set (MIND)

The MIND data set is a collection of news items spanning one year beginning 1st of August 2015 until the 31st of July 2016. It contains news items of over 110 sources from six countries on four continents. Selected were the most relevant political information sources in each country, for the research question "Religion and Secularism in the Society" in the categories News Website, Printed Newspaper and Blog. Collected was the complete output of each source (e.g. with the topics politics, society, economy, culture, while excluding the topics sport, lifestyle and weather)

Political learning through entertainment - only an illusion? How motivations for watching TV political talk shows influence viewers’ experiences

The purpose of this study is to explain viewers’ entertainment and feelings of being informed when watching political talk shows on German TV, depending on their viewing motivations. First, an exploratory survey (N = 189) aims to identify the motivation. Results show that some participants had a strong interest in gaining political information by following such shows, while others simply watch them for entertainment purposes. Drawing on the concept of infotainment as well as on the elaboration likelihood model as a basis for entertainment and the feeling of being informed, four hypotheses are then tested in a 2 × 2 (focus on entertaining features versus focus on information × talk show containing a video clip versus talk show containing no video clip) experiment with 63 subjects. The results suggest that people felt better informed and were more entertained through political talk shows when watching them with a focus on entertaining features rather than with a focus on information. However, whether a talk show contained a video clip or not did not make any difference. The fact that a focus on entertaining features can induce a feeling of being informed reveals an interesting phenomenon, which is consistent with current developments in entertainment theory. </jats:p