SOURCE CREDIBILITY AND JOURNALISM

The extent to which information sources, that stand behind virtually all the news, are perceived by journalists as credible is a key determinant of the likelihood of their obtaining news access and public voice. The nature of source credibility judgment in journalism, however, is disputed between two major schools: while the “visceral” camp contends that it is highly subjective, intuitive and biased, the “discretional” camp perceives it as a far more reasonable and legitimate journalistic tool. The present study attempts to uncover evidence of both “visceral” and “discretional” judgment by studying the conceptual credibility (trustworthiness ratings) and practical credibility (practices indicating trust or skepticism, such as cross-checking and attribution) and the congruence between the two in a sample of 840 news items based on 1870 news sources. Findings were gleaned in face-to-face reconstruction interviews with reporters from nine leading Israeli news organizations, who reconstructed, source by source, the processes behind their items, shortly after their publication. Pro-discretional evidence shows that while journalists perceive their own experience as more credible than that of any other human agent, they do tend to stick with sources they perceive as more credible, the majority of which were relied on in the past, granting them more ready acceptance. Pro-visceral evidence, in turn, demonstrates that even the least credible sources receive substantial news space, some without any cross-checking. Furthermore, reporters ranked their sources' credibility even when they had no former record of trustworthiness. The paper suggests interpreting the composite of these findings as discretional logic with islands of visceral judgment.     

MIGRANTS AND MEDIA NEWSMAKING PRACTICES

European societies are becoming increasingly multicultural and ethnically diverse as a result of immigration. This change, however, is not properly reflected in the European mass media, neither in the portrayal nor in the representation of immigrants in the mainstream media. The aim of this paper is to analyse the newsmaking routines of mainstream newspapers and TV channels in six European countries (Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland amd the United Kingdom) with a view to showing which factors mostly influence these routines. We analyse the impact of three factors on the making of migration-related news: (1) the news value of such news; (2) the role of newsmaking routines and in particular who selects what is published and why; and (3) the availability of alternative sources and the journalists' trust of different types of news sources. Our study shows that while migrant media follow the general rule that something negative has a higher news value, they are also bound up with additional challenges—notably that media do not cover migration as a topic regularly, that media outlets have a given “line” of coverage concerning migration and this contributes to shaping what kind of news are reported. Third, journalists are not always well networked with migrant sources to have access to them. While the rule of thumb “you have to talk to people who are directly involved” holds, not all journalists devote the necessary energy and time to present a balanced coverage of migration-related issues.

For a full explanation of the methodology of the research project, please see the introduction in this themed section: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2012.740213.     

A Mirage of Change: Visibility of Politicians on TVE during the 2015 and 2016 General Elections

ABSTRACT

The use of strategies to enhance the media visibility of politicians intensifies above all at election time and their focus is chiefly television due to the fact that it still has the greatest power to sway voters. Thus, based on a content analysis of the evening news on Televisión Española (TVE) and 18 semi-structured in-depth interviews with professionals working at the Spanish public broadcaster, the airtime that politicians were given was established to assess whether it had fulfilled its obligation as regards independence and pluralism at two crucial moments for Spanish politics: the period prior to the election calls, the pre-campaign periods and the official campaigns before the general elections held on 20 December 2015 and 26 June 2016. Both were unique in their own way: on the one hand, the debut of new political parties with the potential to win a large number of seats in Parliament; and, on the other, despite the fact that in just six months the party in power had lost its absolute majority and there were still no visible signs of change at TVE, it is still worth examining the variations in news treatment prior to both elections.