The Impact of Sound-Bite Journalism on Public Argument

The rise of sound-bite news is one of the most widely bemoaned findings in political communication research. Yet, the detrimental effects of this trend have been more assumed than demonstrated. This study examines one consequence of sound-bite journalism: the creation of incomplete argument, in which speakers presenting their political position in the news do not also justify it. Drawing on data about television news in Germany, Russia, and the United States, it shows that shrinking sound bites consistently reduce the probability of opinion justification across widely differing national contexts. Sound-bite journalism emerges as harmful to television news' ability to produce public justification

Media Ecologies, Communication Culture,and Temporal-Spatial Unfolding: Three Components in a Communication Model of the Egyptian Regime Change

Discussion of the events of early 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt in Western publics has been largely unstructured and characterized by an undue preoccupation with new media. In light of this, the aim of this paper is twofold: to learn from these regime-changing processes in order to understand them, and to inform a nascent model of political communication in contemporary Arab societies more generally. We start by proposing some critical steps for giving structure to present and coming attempts at understanding the course of events, focusing on those in Egypt. They involve giving greater attention to three heretofore neglected components of a prospective communication model of the Egyptian regime change: the media ecologies, communication culture, and temporal-spatial unfolding of events. After a brief discussion of these, we offer several personal on-the-ground observations from the starting days of the revolutionary movement in Cairo to give flesh to the analytical structure we propose, and provide starting points for coming inquiries into the role of communication for anti-authoritarian movements in the Arab world

Journalismus und Politik

Die Interrelation von Journalismus und Politik ist, in einem anspruchsvollen Sinn, zentral für das Funktionieren von Demokratie. Das Kapitel gibt eine überschau der wichtigsten normativ-theoretischen Ansprüche an diese Interrelation sowie relevanter empirischer Befunde zu ihr. Es beschreibt zunächst drei zentrale normative Demokratiemodelle und präsentiert sodann Ergebnisse normativ angeleiteter und relevanter empirischer Forschung zu den Beziehungen von Journalismus und Politik. Wir betrachten dabei jeweils Deutschland im internationalen Vergleich und behandeln zunächst die Strukturen, dann die Inhalte und schließlich die Wirkungen des politischen Journalismus

Selbstbestimmung in der digitalen Welt. Über die Vorteile eines ebenenübergreifenden normativen Basiskonzepts für die empirische Erforschung der digitalen Kommunikation

Diese Einleitung zum Themenheft entwickelt ein normatives Konzept von Selbstbestimmung unter den Bedingungen digitaler Kommunikation, das die individuelle und die kollektive Ebene miteinander verbindet. Dazu greift die Einleitung die drei empirischen Dimensionen von individueller Selbstbestimmung auf, die Ryan und Deci in ihrer motivationspsychologischen Selbstbestimmungstheorie unterscheiden - Autonomie, Kompetenz und soziale Verbundenheit - und überträgt sie auf die kollektive Ebene. Kollektive Selbstbestimmung betrifft in der Autonomiedimension die Institutionen und Regeln einer demokratischen Kommunikationsordnung, in der Kompetenzdimension die politischen Kompetenz- und Einflussüberzeugungen der Bürger/innen („political efficacy“) und in der Dimension der sozialen Verbundenheit geteilte kommunikative Räume auch über Lagergrenzen hinweg. Mit dieser Bestimmung von Selbstbestimmung in der digitalen Welt können einerseits ebenenübergreifende Wirkprozesse identifiziert und andererseits gesellschaftliche Problemlösungsbedarfe und -potenziale besser fokussiert werden. Abschließend werden die Beiträge des Themenheftes den drei empirischen Dimensionen und zwei Ebenen von Selbstbestimmung zugeordnet und in ihrer jeweiligen normativen Relevanz charakterisiert. [As an introduction to this special issue of Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft, we present a conceptualisation of self-determination in a digital world which connects the individual with the collective realm. We draw on Ryan and Deci’s (2017) motivational theory of psychological self-determination, where the authors distinguished between three empirical dimensions of self-determination, and we apply these dimensions to the collective level. With regard to the issue of autonomy, collective self-determination refers to the institutions and the rules of a democratic communication system. The matter of competence refers to citizens’ beliefs in political efficacy, and with regard to the aspect of social connectedness, collective self-determination refers to the existence of shared communicative spaces, even across deep divides. Such a conception of self-determination allows us to identify causal influences between the individual and collective realms. It also helps singling out the challenges of self-determination in societal communication, as well as its potentials. In conclusion, we show how the individual papers within this special issue relate to these three empirical dimensions, and to the two levels of self-determination; highlighting their respective normative relevance.

The Obama Factor: Change and Stability in Cultural and Political Anti-Americanism

Global public opinion toward the United States is an important factor in international politics. But to what degree are distinct dimensions of attitudes toward the United States associated with the person of the president and the consumption of U.S.-produced media content? Two surveys of German college students before and after the 2008 U.S. presidential election revealed that attitudes toward U.S. foreign policies improved from 2008 to 2009, and views on U.S. culture remained stable. Perceptions of Obama depended less on attitudes toward U.S. culture than perceptions of ordinary U.S. Americans, indicating a potential for the president to influence foreign political support, even in the face of cultural reservations. Consumption of some types of U.S. media was also associated with lower levels of anti-Americanism

The POPC Citizen: Political Information in the Fourth Age of Political Communication

A woman checking messages on her phone while standing next to a newspaper rack. A girl waiting in line scrolling down the Facebook timeline, stumbling upon a video clip about the outcome of the recent US presidential elections. A young man playing a game on his tablet, with TV news running in another window. These are just three everyday scenarios that illustrate how today’s “permanently online, permanently connected” (POPC) communication environment has created new conditions for the access to and consumption of political information. A myriad of options to choose from regarding the form and content of communication make it easy to acquire political information continuously, but also to avoid political content given the many other interesting things to do online. At the same time, social networking sites (SNS) have made it more difficult to abstain completely from political information, as they often push news to unsuspecting users. With the permanent potential to activate social ties through SNS and instant messaging services, the political information of citizens has become embedded into their mediated social networks whose members like, share, and comment on it. The implications of widespread digitization and mediatization for the political domain are so profound and far-reaching that they have recently led Jay Blumler (2016) to announce a new “fourth age of political communication.” Political communication in the fourth age is characterized by “yet more communication abundance” (p. 24) compared to the preceding ages, particularly due to new, mobile-access devices that have led to an ever more intense competition for audience attention. The fact that the Internet has gone mobile reinforces developments it initiated much earlier: Mobility increases the frequency of communication and thus the frequency of situations in which more or less conscious choices regarding the modes and content of communication are necessary. Because people often initiate and process digital communication in parallel with an ongoing “offline life,” communication acts may also become more impulsive and automatic (van Koningsbruggen, Hartmann, & Du, this volume), and attention paid to content more superficial than in the past

How Combining Terrorism, Muslim, and Refugee Topics Drives Emotional Tone in Online News: A Six-Country Cross-Cultural Sentiment Analysis

This study looks into how the combination of Islam, refugees, and terrorism topics leads to text-internal changes in the emotional tone of news articles and how these vary across countries and media outlets. Using a multilingual human-validated sentiment analysis, we compare fear and pity in more than 560,000 articles from the most important online news sources in six countries (U.S., Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, and Lebanon). We observe that fear and pity work antagonistically—that is, the more articles in a particular topical category contain fear, the less pity they will feature. The coverage of refugees without mentioning terrorists and Muslims/Islam featured the lowest fear and highest pity levels of all topical categories studied here. However, when refugees were covered in combination with terrorism and/or Islam, fear increased and pity decreased in Christian-majority countries, whereas no such pattern appeared in Muslim-majority countries (Lebanon, Turkey). Variations in emotions are generally driven more by country-level differences than by the political alignment of individual outlets

Social media, protest cultures and political subjectivities of the Arab spring

This article draws on phenomenological perspectives to present a case against resisting the objectification of cultures of protest and dissent. The generative, self-organizing properties of protest cultures, especially as mobilized through social media, are frequently argued to elude both authoritarian political structures and academic discourse, leading to new political subjectivities or ‘imaginaries’. Stemming from a normative commitment not to over-determine such nascent subjectivities, this view has taken on a heightened resonance in relation to the recent popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. The article argues that this view is based on an invalid assumption that authentic political subjectivities and cultures naturally emerge from an absence of constraint, whether political, journalistic or academic. The valorisation of amorphousness in protest cultures and social media enables affective and political projection, but overlooks politics in its institutional, professional and procedural forms