数字新闻生态与极化：赋能、固化与调和失效

近年来,极化现象成为了国内外社会科学研究的热点问题。现有的媒介环境,特别是处于转型期的新闻媒体,在诱发和加剧极化现象的过程中发挥了重要作用。本研究遵循新兴的数字新闻学范式,从数字新闻的技术生态入手,在对既有研究的梳理和归纳基础上,总结了数字新闻通过赋能、固化与调和失效的路径为诱发极化提供土壤。研究从技术视角为理解极化及其动力机制进行理论补充,同时实践了一条建立在数字技术本体论和认识论基础上的数字新闻学的新路径。     

Effectiveness of a News Media Literacy Advertisement in Partisan Versus Nonpartisan Online Media Contexts

Moving media literacy messages out of the classroom and onto the Internet, where much news consumption happens, offers an opportunity to extend media literacy education to a wider public. However, in doing so it becomes important to consider how the context in which such messages are seen conditions their impact on media literacy attitudes and knowledge. The results of an experimental test suggest that a media literacy public service announcement was more effective in reinforcing media literacy beliefs when paired with a partisan, rather than a neutral, political program. The effects of presenting media literacy messages outside of the classroom are discussed.     

The Partisan Affect of News Seekers vs. Gatekeepers: Linguistic Differences in Online vs. Front-Page News in Campaign 2012

This article examines if patterns in online news seeking privilege stories featuring more linguistic markers of partisan affect than those positioned by traditional gatekeepers on the print front page. Online “most-read” and print front-page stories covering 8 weeks of the 2012 presidential campaign were submitted to computer-assisted text analysis (n = 302). Guided by research on online and partisan affect, this study hypothesizes that (a) “most-read” stories will feature more supportive language than stories placed on the front page by traditional gatekeepers when the news outlet has a reputation for supporting the incumbent party; and (b) “most-read” stories will feature more antagonistic language than those placed on the front page by traditional gatekeepers when the news outlet has a reputation for supporting the challenger party. The findings show how online audiences opted for stories that featured more linguistic markers of preferred partisan affect than journalists and editors placed on Page One.     

Partisan Media Selectivity and Partisan Identity Threat: The Role of Social and Geographic Context

There is growing concern about the polarizing impact of citizens primarily choosing sources of political information consistent with their existing partisan perspective. Although research has begun providing answers about the consequences, questions remain about what factors drive such selective use of political media. This study conceptualizes partisanship as a social identity and the decision to selectively use like-minded political media as a method for maintenance of that identity. Using the logic of the reinforcing spirals model (Slater, 2007, 2015), we investigated partisan media selectivity as a response to identity threat. We argue the partisan composition of one’s geographic locale and the presence of partisan difference in one’s interpersonal network are common causes of identity threat, which we predict will be associated with compensatory use of partisan media. Results from national survey data generally provide support for the assertion that greater partisan media selectivity is associated with the presence of various forms of identity threat, especially for strong partisans.     

Polarization as a Function of Citizen Predispositions and Exposure to News on the Internet

Observers of democratic polities decry a seeming increase in social and political polarization. This article outlines the conditions under which Internet-based news exposure can facilitate polarization. Analyses of data from a nationally representative United States panel study reveal that frequency of news consumption over the Internet can widen disagreements between Democrats and Republicans over a wide range of social and political issues. The results reveal few signs of a similar Internet news exposure effect for disagreement linked to race and income. These findings point to some possible mechanisms of, and limitations to, processes driving social and political polarization.     

Rush,Rachel, and Rx: Modeling Partisan Media's Influence on Structural Knowledge of Healthcare Policy

Examining the impact of various media sources on knowledge has a long tradition in political communication. Although much of the extant research focuses on the impact of traditional media on factual knowledge, research is expanding to include a variety of media sources and multiple dimensions of knowledge, in addition to understanding processes that better explain these relationships. Using a nationwide, opt-in online survey (n = 993), we examine the relationship between partisan media and structural knowledge, which assess how interconnected people see political concepts. Utilizing understanding of the Affordable Care Act as the content area of interest, we examine whether exposure to partisan media has differential effects on attitudinal ambivalence—holding both positive and negative attitudes toward an object—based on the political ideology of the respondent, and whether this impact of ambivalence influenced structural knowledge. Our results show that exposure to attitude-consistent media decreased attitudinal ambivalence. This exposure to attitude-consistent media results in a positive indirect effect on structural knowledge through this decrease in ambivalence. We find the reverse effect for use of attitude-inconsistent media.     

Partisan Patriotism in the American Presidency: American Exceptionalism,Issue Ownership,and the Age of Trump

This study employs issue ownership theory to examine the partisan dynamics surrounding the idea of American exceptionalism in presidential discourse. We conducted a content analysis of invocations of American exceptionalism in all major U.S. presidential addresses—domestic and foreign—from the end of World War II through Trump’s 1st year in office. We find that even though Republicans have traditionally claimed ownership of American exceptionalism, patterns in presidential discourse tell a very different story. Specifically, our results show (a) in domestic contexts, Republican and Democratic presidents were very similar in their invocations of American exceptionalism during the Cold War but that Democrats have held a substantial advantage over Republicans throughout the post–Cold War era, including on issue areas that Republicans are perceived to “own” (e.g. national security); (b) in foreign contexts, Democrats have been much more outspoken in their embrace of American exceptionalism throughout both the Cold War and post–Cold War; and (c) President Trump has diverged significantly, both in substance and frequency, from his Democratic and Republican predecessors in his invocation of American exceptionalism. We reflect on the implications of these findings on our broader understanding of issue—and trait—ownership, presidential discourse, and American exceptionalism in American politics.     

Partisan Media and Discussion as Enhancers of the Belief Gap

This study examines the roles of partisanship, partisan media use, and political discussion in the development of belief gaps. Using national survey data, we construct models of political identity, media use, and discussion factors predicting beliefs on five contested political issues and find that ideology and partisanship are generally stronger predictors of beliefs than is education. Notably, each has independent effects on belief outcomes. Contrary to some concerns that the Internet especially promotes partisan clustering, use of partisan traditional media—television and radio—is by far the strongest information-related predictor of belief outcomes, whereas partisan social media use and partisan discussion are relatively weak and inconsistent. These findings suggest that political elites continue to exert significant influence over the perceptions of rank and file partisans.     

Historical Dramas,Current Political Choices: Analyzing Partisan Selective Exposure With a Docudrama

This study investigates the docudrama hypothesis—the idea that fiction based on real stories can influence audience members’ perception of political reality—in the context of current debates on partisan selective exposure and reinforcement effects. It does so by analyzing the influence of an Oscar-nominated docudrama on viewers’ attitudes and behavioral intention using propensity score matching. By means of a representative survey, we find strong evidence of partisan selective exposure and avoidance. Furthermore, among respondents with a similar likelihood of film attendance, actual attendance has a strong association with positive retrospective evaluations of the political coalition glorified in the movie, and an indirect relationship—via retrospective evaluations—with voting intentions. Discussion of the findings shed light into potential real-world political effects of partisan selective exposure using content other than news.     

Mobile Devices Offer Little In-depth News: Sensational,Breaking and Entertainment News Dominate Mobile News Sites

ABSTRACT

The smartphone is now an indispensable part of everyday life. Such mobile devices are increasingly used to consume news. Newspapers have embraced the mobile devices to augment their print and online versions. Newspapers, however, appear to offer different news content to mobile newsreaders when compared to their own print and online content. Mobile newsreaders are provided significantly more sensational, breaking, and entertainment-oriented news. Mobile devices on the mobile web also provide significantly less public affairs content as top stories. Analyzing a sample of 50 U.S. newspapers over a six-month period, this content analysis quantifies the heterogeneity of news content in print, online, and mobile platforms.     

新闻博客与博客新闻

新闻博客与博客新闻都有自己的传播特性,发挥着特有的新闻传播功能,它们与传统媒体共生互惠,给新闻事业注入生机与活力.     

客观性与压力型新闻报道——以“武大解聘病榻前教授”事件为例

基于用户生成内容的压力型新闻报道是对客观性的新冲击。在互联网技术的推动下,受眼球经济的刺激,由于对自身相对优势的认识不足,传统媒体与用户自由生成内容的关系越来越紧密。网络媒体的传播逻辑不断挟持、绑架着传统媒体的传播逻辑,损害了新闻客观性原则,最终影响到受众发现真相的行为。本文认为,基于用户生成内容压力下形成的新闻报道之所以偏离了客观性,并非网络技术的问题,而在于传统媒体在新闻采写过程中的执行力问题,因此,加强高质量的新闻采编队伍、增加基于自身媒介可能性前提下的‘新尺度’是重塑客观性的核心。     

Partisan Balance and Bias in Network Coverage of the 2000 and 2004 Presidential Elections

This study conceptualizes news bias as a causal factor producing systematic imbalance in the coverage of conflicting sides. Partisan bias is distinguished from structural bias by coverage that systematically favors one side with more prominence and attention. Content analysis was used to compare the television networks' balance in their treatment of Republican and Democratic candidates in stories and segments covering the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Presidential candidates received balanced aggregate treatment in both elections. But individual networks differed in their partisan balance. CBS News consistently favored the Democratic candidate in both elections, unlike the mixed results for ABC and NBC. CBS's pattern of imbalance, especially in the 2004 election, suggests a possible political bias in its coverage.     

Storying the News through Category,Action, and Reason

From a sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic perspective, news stories have often been considered as operating within a similar structural framework to oral narratives (Labov, 1972 Labov, W. 1972. Language in the inner city, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.  [Google Scholar]), sharing formal elements with narratives produced in other contexts (although as Bell (1991) Bell, A. 1991. The language of news media, Oxford: Blackwell.  [Google Scholar] has demonstrated in relation to print news, these elements occur in temporal disorganization). In this paper, in line with other recent treatments of news stories, we suggest that news does not conform to this kind of “narrative” structure as such. Examining data taken from print and live-broadcast TV news through a Sacksian (1995) lens, we argue that it is possible to simplify the analysis of news structure by approaching the news as “stories,” where the story elements are organized around the notions of category, action, and reason rather than as a series of narrative clauses involving orientation, complicating actions, evaluation, and resolution (Bell, 1991 Bell, A. 1991. The language of news media, Oxford: Blackwell.  [Google Scholar]; van Dijk, 1988 Van Dijk, T. A. 1988. News as discourse, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.  [Google Scholar]).     

Complexity,Uncertainty and Change in News Organizations

ABSTRACT

Media managers and journalists have responded to digitalization over time by implementing online journalism and by converging and de-converging print and online newsrooms. Drawing on complexity and uncertainty theories, this article develops a cycle model, which furthers the understanding of why and how news organizations change. Qualitative and quantitative findings in two European legacy media companies indicate that managers are constantly striving to minimize their own complexity and uncertainty, which, in turn, drives change in news organizations through different stages that are characterized by economization and integration or investment and specialization. More specifically, under lower external and internal complexity and uncertainty, managers are pushing news organizations toward more economization and integration. However, they invest and specialize if either their external or their internal complexity and uncertainty increase. Moreover, the findings reveal the mechanism through which the internal complexity and uncertainty arise, and they show differences depending on the ownership structure of a news organization.     

Urban crisis: Polarization and communication

This essay is a speculative attempt to explain the operation of four interaction elements that exist in an urban crisis situation. The relations of “polarization”; “communication,”; “isolation”; and “confrontation”; are viewed structurally as constituent elements in the creation or alleviation of crisis tensions. Communication is suggested as an alter‐native technique of confrontation in tension modification.     

Producers,Directors, and Horizontal Communication in Television News Production

This study examines the horizontal communication between producers and directors as they put together a television newscast. Results of the Internet survey show that producers tend to be younger and less experienced than the directors they work with, that producers and directors don't communicate often or effectively in the process of putting together a daily newscast, and that they don't believe their counterpart contributes the information they need in order to best perform their jobs. Correlations between the amount of information relayed between producers and directors and ratings performance indicate a link between internal communication and market profitability.     

聚合新闻:新闻聚合服务对新闻编辑行业的影响

新闻聚合服务的崛起和主流化对传统及数字新闻编辑行业产生了显著的影响,这种影响体现在新闻编辑日常实践、新闻编辑角色定位,以及新闻编辑与新闻行业的关系三个维度上.文章基于在瑞士一家本地新闻网站展开的田野调查,结合通过互联网检索获得的相关行业自述文本,尝试对上述影响做出清晰而准确的剖析.在“联接为王”及其他与之类似的话语的支配下,数字新闻行业开始全面重视编辑业务在聚合时代扮演的重要角色;一种新的、基于数字化平台和聚合逻辑的专业主义新闻编辑理念和新闻编辑身份认同也在逐渐形成;而编辑群体是否能够顺利完成从“内容生产者”到“内容策略设计者”的角色转型,将是决定整个行业生态的一个至关重要的因素.     

Explaining Media Choice: The Role of Issue-Specific Engagement in Predicting Interest-Based and Partisan Selectivity

This study analyzes the predictors of 2 types of media selectivity: interest-based (i.e., choice of entertainment over politics) and partisan (i.e., choice of pro-attitudinal over counter-attitudinal or balanced news). Relying on a large survey-based experiment, we find that issue-specific engagement variables, including perceived issue understanding, issue importance, and issue attitude strength, predict interest-based and partisan selectivity above and beyond the influence of general political knowledge, news interest, and strength of political leanings. These results show that the drivers of selectivity are more complex than general political attributes; rather, they are contextual and reflect people’s engagement with particular issues.