The International Journal of Press/Politics

Despite signs of declining press trust in many western countries, we know little about trends in press trust across the world. Based on comparative survey data from the World Values Survey (WVS) and European Values Study (EVS), this study looks into national levels of trust in the press and identifies factors that drive differences across societies and individuals as well as over time. Findings indicate that the widely noted decline in media trust is not a universal trend; it is true for only about half of the studied countries, with the United States experiencing the largest and most dramatic drop in trust in the press. Political trust has emerged as key factor for our understanding of trust in the press. We found robust evidence for what we called the trust nexus—the idea that trust in the news media is strongly linked to the way publics look at political institutions. The link between press trust and political trust was considerably stronger in politically polarized societies. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that the relation between press trust and political trust is becoming stronger over time. We reason that the strong connection between media and political trust may be driven by a growing public sentiment against elite groups.

Print journalism has long been seen as a key institution of democratic politics, serving to enhance transparency, provide a forum for debate, and facilitate public participation. Instead, television journalism, particularly in its commercial form, has often been seen more negatively, as a form of infotainment that contributes little to the functions of journalism as an institution of democratic citizenship. Some scholars have questioned the dichotomy between infotainment and democratic roles, however, and the existing research comparing journalistic roles in print and television has produced mixed results. Focusing on the case of Chile and making use of a standardized news content-based index of journalistic roles, this study compares the prevalence of three professional roles by medium—newspapers and television—and also by audience orientation—popular and elite media across both print and television news. Our results show that commercial television in Chile is higher than print media in the performance of the watchdog and civic roles, and the infotainment role is positively, not negatively, correlated with these. We discuss the implication of these findings in light of the literature on infotainment and citizenship, as well as the emerging body of research on journalistic role performance.

The Social Justice Protest movement in 2011 was the largest social movement in Israel’s history. The movement received media coverage for almost two months and in all news outlets, despite the protest’s broad demands and its overall radical indictment against the economic system and the status quo. This study explores the causes for this extraordinary media coverage. We find that movement characteristics of the leadership’s professional background, the media strategies they employed, and the effects of mainstream channels on media tactics were important. We also find that journalists’ personal identification with the movement is a key factor leading to the wide and favorable media coverage. Personal identification led many journalists to report favorably on the movement and write supportive opinion columns, to ignore stories that could damage it, to participate and volunteer in movement activities, and to offer their professional skills to help the movement leadership. We propose a tentative model consisting of factors and mechanisms that may explain when personal identification and journalistic activism are more likely to occur.

Conventional wisdom holds that party leaders matter in democratic elections. As very few voters have direct contact with party leaders, media are voters’ primary source of information about these leaders and, thus, the likely origin of leader effects on party support. Our study focuses on these supposed electoral effects of the media coverage of party leaders. We examine the positive and negative effects of specific leadership images in Dutch newspapers on vote intentions. To this end, we combine an extensive automated content analysis of leadership images in the media with a panel data set, the Dutch 1Vandaag Opinion Panel (1VOP), consisting of more than fifty thousand unique respondents and 110 waves of interviews conducted between September 2006 and September 2012. The results confirm that media coverage of party leaders’ character traits affects voters: Positive mediated leadership images increase support for the leader’s party, while negative images decrease this support. However, this influence is not unconditional: During campaign periods, positive leadership images have a stronger effect, while negative images no longer have an impact on subsequent vote intentions.

Affective and social political polarization—a dislike of political opponents and a desire to avoid their company—are increasingly salient and pervasive features of politics in many Western democracies, particularly the United States. One contributor to these related phenomena may be increasing exposure to online political disagreements in which ordinary citizens criticize, and sometimes explicitly demean, opponents. This article presents two experimental studies that assessed whether U.S. partisans’ attitudes became more prejudiced in favor of the in-party after exposure to online partisan criticism. In the first study, we draw on an online convenience sample to establish that partisan criticism that derogates political opponents increases affective polarization. In the second, we replicate these findings with a quasi-representative sample and extend the pattern of findings to social polarization. We conclude that online partisan criticism likely has contributed to rising affective and social polarization in recent years between Democrats and Republicans in the United States, and perhaps between partisan and ideological group members in other developed democracies as well. We close by discussing the troubling implications of these findings in light of continuing attempts by autocratic regimes and other actors to influence democratic elections via false identities on social media.

In international politics, the strategic narratives of different governments compete for public attention and support. The Russian government’s narrative has prompted western concern due to fears that it exerts a destabilizing effect on societies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. However, the behavior and thought processes of news consumers targeted by contradictory strategic narratives are rarely subjected to analysis. This paper examines how Ukrainian news consumers decide where to get their news and what to believe in a media environment where “propaganda” and “disinformation” are regarded as major threats to national security. Evidence comes from thirty audio-diaries and in-depth interviews conducted in 2016 among adult residents of Odesa Region. Through qualitative analysis of the diary and interview transcripts, the paper reveals how participants judged the credibility of news and narratives based on their priorities (what they considered important), not just “facts” (what they believed had happened). The attribution of importance to different foreign policy issues was associated, in turn, with varying personal experiences, memories, and individual cross-border relationships.