Abstract
Political Journalism in Comparative Perspective assesses familiar journalism-related topics of production, content, and effects of political news by employing comparative cross-national approach. Albæk, van Dalen, Jebril, and de Vreese systematically use multiple methods, including surveys among political journalists, content analysis, and panel studies in order to determine the right mix of conditions for political journalism in four European countries, Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Spain. This book explores who political journalists are, what kind of relationship they develop with politics and politicians, the ways journalists perceive their roles, and the effects of different political reporting on the public’s perception and cognition. Those questions are critically examined and evaluated in the light of three main concepts: a sacerdotal versus pragmatic journalistic approach to politics, the impartial versus partisan relationship between politics and journalism, and informative versus entertaining features of journalists’ roles. The authors also examined those questions in different media and political systems by applying Hallin and Mancini’s media system framework of the democratic corporatists model, the polarized pluralist model, and the liberal model.
By applying a cross-national approach, the authors conclude that journalists perceive their roles in different ways and that levels of journalistic autonomy vary across countries. The results of the study revealed that journalists believe that outside actors who affect their autonomy are politicians, media owners, and spin-doctors. Furthermore, the authors of the book find that their data do not support Hallin and Mancini’s media system model and conclude that specific features of the model should be explored in more detail.
The book acknowledges the importance of historical contexts for understanding the relationship between journalists and politicians. If the relationship between journalists and politicians is affected by political pressure, journalists will move from critical professionalism toward cynicism. The authors go a step further in examining the relationship between role conceptions and news content and find that those two elements are related on the national (macro) level when journalists report about national institutions such as government and parliament.
The second part of the book analyzes the effects of different types of political reporting and evidence on perception and cognition. In order to examine political knowledge formation, the authors study the combination of news exposure and news content characteristics by using the news frames of human interest and conflict. The study suggests that the usage of those frames positively affects learning from the news and is especially beneficial to politically less-interested segments of the public. Further examination on whether political news presented from the entertaining aspect generates public political cynicism reveals that people with low interest in politics develop cynical attitudes when exposed to privatized news. At the same time, exposure to personalized news with human-interests stories decreases cynicism. Finally, the study shows that respondents highly value the watchdog-reporting perception of political coverage and that they show satisfaction with coverage if they perceive it as objective, informative, and critical of government.
After thorough analysis, the authors reach the conclusion that different conditions in different countries affect political journalism, which then furthers influence knowledge gained from the political coverage and satisfaction with the news. Even though the authors are not able to specify the combination of conditions that lead to these differences, they still believe that a generalizable combination of conditions for political journalism is reachable. The right mix of conditions contains ‘a high degree of professionalism, low degree of political parallelism, a strong broadcasting system, and moderate degrees of commercialization and competition’ (p. 170).
This research strives to reach generalizability, but the authors are aware that the national differences in professionalism, commercialization, mediatization, and individualization cannot be neglected. The authors do offer new insights and connections within the existing national contexts, but they are aware that this project lacks a qualitative perspective that could be used to explore what kind of meaning those differences produce. Additionally, the longitudinal research in larger number of countries and between countries with less similarity will provide more details about the ways journalism and the context around it are changing.
Political Journalism in Comparative Perspective contributes to the fields of media sociology, journalism studies, and media effects and the authors’ intention to provide the bridge between those fields. Moreover, the book represents the bridge between studying news production and studying news content and its effects. Furthermore, this book is beneficial to both newcomers to the field and more experienced scholars because it provides in-depth analysis of existing research on political journalism and contributes to the topic by presenting a cross-national perspective. The authors end with the hope that it is possible to meet the right conditions in democratic societies where political journalists will perceive their work as autonomous and free of political and commercial pressures and that they will continue to contribute to future development of journalism and democracy.