Measuring and explaining the diversity of voices and viewpoints in the news

News media can be considered to fulfil their democratic role as a “marketplace of ideas” only if they present a diverse content that gives space to a wider range of ideas and viewpoints. But how can content diversity be assessed? And what determines actor and viewpoint diversity in the first place? By employing measurements of actor and viewpoint diversity at the article and newspaper level, this study provides a complete overview on the content diversity of immigration news, and it investigates factors that have an impact on content diversity of immigration newspaper articles in Belgium, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom (2013-2014). The results of a multilevel analysis indicate that both the articles’ size and the elite character of a newspaper play a key role in enhancing news’ multiperspectivalness. Also, the findings show that these two measurements of content diversity are different yet related to each other