Mobilizing Youth in the 21st Century: How Digital Media Use Fosters Civic Duty,Information Efficacy,and Political Participation

Youth turnout at European Parliamentary elections has been dwindling. This study investigates the impact of news media exposure on electoral participation of first time voters. Relying on a data set that combines content analysis of news stories about the EU (N = 769) and a multiple wave panel survey (N = 994), we analyze the impact of exposure to online and offline coverage of relevant topics on turn out across a period of 6 months. We find that exposure to news in offline media had no significant effect on participation, whereas exposure to relevant news in online media positively affected turnout.     

Assessing the Role of Information-Processing Strategies in Learning From Local News Media About Sources of Social Capital

This study examines the mediating effects of information-processing strategies on the relationship between use of local news media, informational use of the Internet, and sources of social capital: interpersonal trust, reciprocity, and associational membership. Analyses of a telephone survey data (n = 546) of American adults show that even though local news media were influential, information-processing strategies were more powerful than attention in explaining learning from local news media about social norms at the individual level. These findings support the usefulness of the cognitive mediation model of information-processing behaviors in examining learning from local news media about social norms. Of the two strategies, elaborative processing played a more important role than active reflection in the mediating process. Informational use of the Internet had a significant and independent effect on associational membership, after demographic, structural anchoring, local media use, and information-processing measures were statistically controlled.     

The Role of Engagement in Learning From Active and Incidental News Exposure on Social Media

The growing reliance on social media as news platforms may lead to more passive news consumption but also offers greater potential for engaging in news. This study investigates the role of engagement with news content on Facebook and Twitter between news exposure and current events knowledge. An online survey (N = 400) tests the relationships between social media news seeking, incidental exposure to news on social media, engagement in shared news content, cognitive elaboration, and current events knowledge. The results show that both active seeking of and incidental exposure to news on both sites are linked to engagement, which is linked to greater cognitive elaboration about the content. Furthermore, engagement mediates the relationship between both types of news exposure and cognitive elaboration. However, engagement and elaboration are not related to knowledge. These results indicate that the key role of social media in news content is not knowledge gain but the ability to engage users who may be passively receiving news on these sites. This study extends the cognitive mediation model of learning from the news in the context of current social media, with updated news consumption norms such as engagement with news on these sites, and incidental news exposure.     

Silent Majority: Childhood Vaccinations and Antecedents to Communicative Action

The topic of childhood vaccinations has received much news media attention recently, prompting scholars to examine how the public has responded. In light of this news, and the deep divide that seems to exist between parents who support childhood vaccinations and those who do not, this study examines how and why individuals may involve themselves in communication about vaccinations, particularly on social media or in other online environments. Focusing on the concept of communicative action and drawing from spiral of silence and other research, a survey of mothers (N = 455) found that those who do not support childhood vaccinations are more likely to engage in communication about the issue, including information seeking, attending, forefending, permitting, forwarding, and sharing. In addition, issue importance and affective and cognitive involvement help drive communicative action regarding childhood vaccinations, which could affect public opinion or public perceptions of the issue. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

The European Union,China, and the United States in the top-1% and top-10% layers of most-frequently cited publications: Competition and collaborations

The percentages of shares of world publications of the European Union and its member states, China, and the United States have been represented differently as a result of using different databases. An analytical variant of the Web-of-Science (of Thomson Reuters) enables us to study the dynamics in the world publication system in terms of the field-normalized top-1% and top-10% most-frequently cited publications. Comparing the EU28, USA, and China at the global level shows a top-level dynamic that is different from the analysis in terms of shares of publications: the United States remains far more productive in the top-1% of all papers; China drops out of the competition for elite status; and the EU28 increased its share among the top-cited papers from 2000 to 2010. Some of the EU28 member states overtook the United States during this decade; but a clear divide remains between EU15 (Western Europe) and the Accession Countries. Network analysis shows that China was embedded in this top-layer of internationally co-authored publications. These publications often involve more than a single European nation.     

Media discourse and perception of game regulatory issues

This study examines how the issue of game regulation has been discussed and influenced public perception by exploring ideologically differing media outlets’ distinct uses of frames by analyzing news contents (N = 1,217) and public opinion survey of the national sample of Korean gamers (N = 1,362), who play games currently. The analyses include the influence of media on attitudes toward game regulation, perception of games, and frame adoption, based on the results of news content analysis. The study found that (a) mainstream media was ambivalent about game issues and tended to define gaming and gamers in sensationalistic ways; (b) while the dynamics of media effects on public attitudes toward game regulation are complex, exposure to game-related news content significantly impacted public attitudes; mass media that highlight the negative aspects of games have strong impacts on public perception toward games, which may ultimately affect attitudes toward game regulation.     

Modeling the Effects of Political Information Source Use and Online Expression on Young Adults’ Political Efficacy

This online survey conducted at a public university in the Northwest (N = 434) examines the influence of political involvement, information source attention, and online political discussion on young adults’ political efficacy. A factor analysis indicated that political information sources loaded into three factors including conventional and online hard news media such as newspapers, opinion and social media such as blogs or social networking websites, and public affairs websites including government and candidate websites. A path analysis revealed significant differences in their association with online political expression and external efficacy. As an entry point in the theoretical model, involvement in public affairs positively associated with attention to political information sources, online political expression, and external political efficacy. Attention to hard news and to public affairs websites positively predicted political efficacy. Attention to online opinion and social media and to public affairs websites positively predicted online political expression.     

Online Media Relations as an Information Subsidy: Quality of Fortune 500 Companies' Websites and Relationships to Media Salience

This study probes relationships among corporate financial resources, web-based corporate media relations, and media attention to corporations to determine whether online media relations functions as an effective information subsidy in the agenda-building process. It compares the quality of online press rooms of Fortune 500 companies with the number of news articles about those same companies published by five major news outlets in the United States. A causal model was supported predicting that resource-rich companies have better-operating online newsrooms with more diverse informational and interactive components, which in turn generate more news stories about the companies. This result suggests that the effectiveness of corporate Web activities depends on financial and professional resources and contradicts earlier expectations that the dominance of resource-rich organizations in communication would be undermined by the Internet.     

Comparing Theories of Media Learning: Cognitive Mediation,Information Utility,and Knowledge Acquisition from Cancer News

Determining what factors predict media learning is an important avenue of research for the field of mass communication. The present study provides a comparative investigation of two models of media learning: the cognitive mediation model and the information utility model. Participants (N = 1,076) read a news article related to scientific discoveries relevant to cancer prevention and responded to all constructs of the two models. Recognition and comprehension were used to measure knowledge acquisition. Results generally support previous predictions of each model, though predicted variance remains small. In addition to testing the existing models, a modified cognitive mediation model using a key construct related to information utility—perceived relevance—was tested. The refined cognitive mediation model offered a more nuanced understanding of certain causal mechanisms but did not result in a meaningful change in predictive power of the model. Implications of the theoretical comparison and integration are discussed.     

Self-efficacy,information-processing strategies,and acquisition of health knowledge

Informed by the Cognitive Mediation Model of media learning, this study explores how self-efficacy and information-processing strategies jointly impact the learning of health knowledge. Using survey data (N=1409), the study examines the roles that self-efficacy, motivation of media use, news attention, and elaboration play in acquiring knowledge about swine flu during the 2009 global pandemic crisis. Results support the hypothesized relationships among self-efficacy, motivation, attention to and elaboration of swine flu news, and knowledge about the flu. Implications of the findings to advance the research in mediated cognitive learning are discussed.     

Putting Our Own People First: The Content and Effects of Online Right-wing Populist Discourse Surrounding the European Refugee Crisis

The 2015 refugee crisis has sparked heated polarized debates throughout the globe. Yet, to date, we know too little about the discursive framing of the refugee crisis by various actors on online media, and the effect of right-wing populist messages on stereotypical images of refugees. The extensive qualitative content analysis reported in this paper (Study 1, N = 1,784) shows that the framing of populist politicians and citizens overlap in the problem definitions. However, citizens attribute more responsibility to refugees themselves and perceive that the native people are relatively deprived. Traditional news media are more divided. Overall, tabloid media define refugees as a problem, and broadsheet media frame them as victim. The second experimental study (N = 277) demonstrates that messages that blame immigrants for increasing crime rates activate negative stereotypical images of migrants among people with stronger perceptions of relative deprivation. These messages have the opposite effect among citizens with weaker perceptions of relative deprivation. These findings provide important insights into the political consequences of anti-immigration framing. Online media discourse is generally one-sided, and exposure to anti-immigration messages may polarize the electorate in opposing camps.     

Back to Reality: The Complex Relationship Between Patterns in Immigration News Coverage and Real-World Developments in Dutch and Flemish Newspapers (1999–2015)

Although prior studies investigating immigration news typically documented a dominant focus on negativity and threats, only limited empirical research is available, which scrutinizes the way real-world developments affect these patterns in immigration news. This study aims to fill this void. First, we report results of a large-scale and longitudinal content analysis (N = 4,340,757) of trends in immigration news coverage in two Western European cases, Flanders (the northern, Dutch-speaking, largest region of Belgium) and the Netherlands, from 1999 to 2015. Both the salience of immigration as a news topic on itself and its linkages with three prominent issues (i.e., crime, terrorism, and socioeconomic issues) are explored. Second, this study builds on previous insights by comparing dynamics in immigration news to real-world events and developments. Overall, the results show that the linkage of immigration to issues of crime, terrorism, and the economy in Flemish and Dutch newspapers was considerable throughout the 17-year period under study. Yet there is limited evidence for a close relationship between news and real-life developments; hence, trends in immigration news seem largely unaffected by trends in society.     

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.     

Spreading the word? European Union agencies and social media attention

Public agencies need to distribute information to their manifold audience quickly and directly. The emergence of social media platforms has sparked positive projections about future government-public interactions via the internet and almost every EU agency has created social media presences on the leading social media platforms. However, social media accounts of agencies receive strongly varying amounts of public attention and therefore display varying degrees of usefulness to connect with the public. This research examines which factors influence how much long-standing and temporal attention social media accounts of EU agencies receive. Using an extensive Twitter dataset of EU agencies and a new methodology that employs supervised text classification through the novel BERT language model to classify agency tweets, possible explanations of social media attention are tested. Results show that long-standing social media attention (i.e., size of the followership) is mostly explained by salience in traditional news, account age, and tweeting frequency, whilst a more interactive communication style tends to yield more temporal attention (i.e., number of retweets). The findings underline previous assumptions that employing a more interactive communication style maximizes public organizations' potential to connect with their audiences on social media.     

Closing Gaps in International Knowledge and Participation: News Attention,Online Expression,and the 2010 Haiti Earthquake

The effects of international news have been relatively underexamined despite evidence that socioeconomic-based gaps in knowledge and participation tend to be the widest for foreign news. This study investigated international news use, online expression, foreign affairs knowledge, and monetary donations in the context of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Regression analysis of national survey data found that high levels of attention to news about the disaster narrowed the knowledge gap for foreign news questions. Also, attention to news about the earthquake was the strongest predictor of monetary donation to the relief effort after controls and was more than twice as likely as income to predict donation. Three measures of online expression (exchanging information about the Haiti earthquake via social media website, e-mail, and text message) also produced positive independent associations with donation, and produced a complementary effect with news attention when interaction terms were considered.     

Culture and comparative media research: Narratives about Internet privacy policy in Chinese,U.S., and UK newspapers

This article compares American, British, and Chinese news coverage of Internet privacy policies. Specifically, we examine media discourse about the “real-name” policies established by Facebook and Weibo. We find that U.S. and UK news coverage of Internet privacy policy is broadly similar, when compared with the more authoritarian–corporatist media system in China. British and U.S. newspapers were much more independent from state control, and were able to maintain a more critical stance than the Chinese newspapers. But there were additional factors that shaped the patterns in news discourse in complicated ways, which are related to (a) the difference between domestic and international news genres, (b) specific narratives about national identity, and (c) more general discourses about civil society, democracy, and the public good. We suggest that the range of comparative media research can be extended by paying attention to how these cultural factors interact with media system dynamics.     

Social Media References in Newspapers

Social media are increasingly being used as sources in mainstream news coverage. Yet, while the research so far has focused mainly on the use of social media in particular situations, such as breaking news coverage, during crisis news events or in times of elections, little attention is paid to journalists' routine, day-to-day monitoring of social media platforms. The aim of this study is to examine the use and selection of social media as sources in routine newspaper coverage. First, it presents a quantitative overview of all the articles published between January 2006 and December 2013 in the print editions of two Flemish (north Belgian) quality newspapers, De Standaard and De Morgen, that explicitly refer to Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. Next, a content analysis is conducted of a sample of newspaper articles published in 2013 that explicitly mention Facebook, Twitter or YouTube as sources of information. The goal of this content analysis is to examine the different appearances and functions of social media references in the news. The study thus provides a first insight into Belgian newspaper journalists' regular sourcing routines in relation to social media.     

Global Mistrust in News: The Impact of Social Media on Trust

ABSTRACT

Digital platforms such as search engines and social media have become major gateways to news. Algorithms are used to deliver news that is consistent with consumers’ preferences and individuals share news through their online social networks. This networked environment has resulted in growing uncertainty about online information which has had an impact on news industries globally. While it is well established that perceptions of trust in news found on social media or via search engines are lower than traditional news media, there has been less discussion about the impact of social media use on perceptions of trust in the news media more broadly. This study fills that gap by examining the influence of social media as news sources and pathways to news on perceptions of the level of news trust at a country level. A secondary data analysis of a 26-country survey in 2016 and 2019 was conducted. The analysis revealed an increase in social media use for accessing news resulted in a decline in trust in news media generally across the globe. Higher levels of general mistrust in news were related to an increased use of sharing of news. This paper argues the use of social media for news is closely linked to the increase in news mistrust, which is likely to continue to rise as the number of people using social media to access news continues to grow.     

Reducing Native Advertising Deception: Revisiting the Antecedents and Consequences of Persuasion Knowledge in Digital News Contexts

Building on the persuasion knowledge model, this study examines how audience characteristics and native advertising recognition influence the covert persuasion process. Among a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults (N = 738), we examined digital news readers’ recognition of a sponsored news article as advertising. Although fewer than 1 in 10 readers recognized the article as advertising, recognition was most likely among younger, more educated consumers who engaged with news media for informational purposes. Recognition led to greater counterarguing, and higher levels of informational motivation also led to less favorable evaluations of the content among recognizers. News consumers were most receptive to native advertising in a digital news context when publishers were more transparent about its commercial nature. Beyond theoretical insights into the covert persuasion process, this study offers practical utility to the advertisers, publishers, and policymakers who wish to better understand who is more likely to be confused by this type of advertising so that they can take steps to minimize deception.