Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly

Populism, especially that of the far right, has a major impact on journalism. Journalists have to respond to an increasingly hostile environment with dwindling resources and often precarious conditions. By using semistructured interviews with journalists who cover the populist far right in Italy and Spain, we investigate how they understand populism and its impact on their profession. Interviewees have a clear idea of what populism is, but feel that this concept is often used in a vague and politicized manner. Far-right populism’s hostility toward journalism has also generated professional problems such as difficult access to politicians, safety concerns, and violence.

We examine what types of news media trust can be identified among adolescents based on their trust levels and the degree of elaboration about media. Moreover, we investigate the role of socialization contexts (family, peers, and schools) in the development of adolescents’ media trust and ability to elaborate. Through qualitative interviews with 50 German adolescents aged 14 to 19, we find 5 types, with only a minority of adolescents showing highly elaborated media trust. With minor differences between the types, parents appear to be the most influential socialization agents in shaping how young people use, perceive, and trust news media.

This study challenges the view of professional identity in journalism as role-based, arguing that journalists are more than their roles. Drawing from management and organization studies, we explore how the processes of identity work and meaningfulness negotiation coevolve over the course of journalists’ careers. Through analysis of 30 Finnish journalists’ interviews, we identify three narrative identities—artisans, advocates, and stewards—and explore the coevolution patterns of identity work and negotiation of work meaningfulness associated with them. Our findings refine the distinction between roles and identities in journalism and offer practical insights for individual well-being and management issues in media organizations.

This study explores strategies geo-ethnic journalists use to build trust within ethnic minority communities, addressing two gaps in existing literature. First, while much research discusses ethnic media functions, it often remains separate from journalism scholarship on local news and trust. Second, previous research on media trust has largely focused on audience perspective, leaving journalists’ perspectives underexplored. By bridging these areas, this study situates geo-ethnic journalism as an essential yet understudied part of the American media landscape. Through interviews with 38 journalists, we identify three principles: reporting from within, narrative stewardship, and reporting with cultural consciousness. These principles foster reporting practices that reinforce geo-ethnic media’s role in local communities and offer a new model for nurturing media trust among underrepresented U.S. audiences. Based on these principles, this study proposes the concept of relatable journalism where mutual recognition of belonging between journalists and audiences serves as a central element of trust-building.

How sincere is Russian war journalism? This study investigates whether reporters support Moscow’s Ukraine narrative because they believe it, fear dissent, or already share nationalist convictions. Integrating cultivation theory and spiral of silence logic with a third, ideological pathway, we fielded an encrypted survey of journalists and collected self-submitted articles for frame analysis. Latent class modelling revealed three clusters: internalizers, strategic compliers, and ideological supporters, with texts linked to each class displaying distinctive linguistic signatures that matched survey profiles. By tying motive to discourse, the study offers a transferable template for diagnosing information control and tailoring support for journalists under authoritarian pressure.

News visibility is central to political success, shaping how citizens evaluate political actors. While previous research emphasizes institutional power as the main driver of media coverage, less is known about how elite personalities influence visibility across countries. This study combines personality profiles (Big Five and Dark Core) and media appearances of 159 candidates in 85 national elections across 52 countries (2016–2022). Stable politicians receive greater visibility overall, whereas dark traits—particularly narcissism and Machiavellianism—increase coverage in media systems emphasizing personalization and negativity. These findings reveal how media logic amplifies manipulative and antagonistic leaders, often linked to democratic backsliding.

After 70 years, little scholarship has systematically examined the spectrum of researcher conceptualizations and enactments of “participation” newsroom ethnographies. While the fields of Anthropology and Sociology have spent the last several decades grappling with researcher–subject relationships, our analysis shows that journalism scholars have yet to embrace their own participatory turn. Through an ethnographic content analysis of participant–observer newsroom research, the present study builds a narrative about the concept of participation and its change over time. We then propose a uniquely journalistic “turn” inspired by the shifting realities of contemporary newmaking and the need to bridge the “research—practice gap.”

With the proliferation of (deep)fake news, individuals will increasingly find it difficult to discern whether content is created by human journalists or artificial intelligence. A two-wave online experiment investigated the carryover effects of news authentication during the initial (deep)fake news exposure on responses to subsequent (deep)fake news. Participants encountered celebrity (deep)fake news in text and video formats on social media. The results showed that the difficulty induced by news authentication lowered self-confidence in truth discernment, which, in turn, decreased the perceived credibility and engagement intentions toward subsequent unrelated fake news of the same modality.

This article examined how elite news media frame the impact of generative AI on the cultural, social, economic, and political domains of life. We also analyzed the different types of ethical concerns surrounding generative AI and to whom the media attribute responsibility for creating and solving these ethical concerns. A content analysis of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal show that societal and economic impacts were the most frequently discussed when reporting about generative AI, while societal-level attributions were mentioned more often than individual-level attributions for responsibilities. We discuss theoretical implications and future research directions.

This study aims to better understand public policy communication in the context of public relations research. Semi-structured online interviews were conducted with 15 public policy communicators who work directly with policymakers. In defining public policy communication in the context of public relations, this study proposes a strategic model that provides a comprehensive view of public policy communication. This study contributes to the public relations literature by extending the understanding of the dynamics of strategic public policy communication practices and bridging the gap between practice and public relations theories.

This study examines how patterns of media consumption and demographic composition shape public perceptions of the pro-Palestine campus encampments that emerged across the United States in late 2023. Drawing on social identity theory and media framing theory, the research explores whether public support for protest goals and tactics, as well as perceptions of the protests’ effectiveness in generating awareness and political change, are better predicted by news source preference or by identity-based demographic characteristics such as age, education level, and political affiliation. Using survey data from 968 U.S. adults recruited via Prolific, the study finds that while social media and student-run news sources are associated with higher support for the encampments, traditional outlets like cable and network news are linked to lower support. Political identity consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of both support and perceived effectiveness. Overall, the findings suggest that while media environments shape the narratives audiences encounter, identity-based interpretation plays a dominant role in shaping evaluations of protest movements. These findings highlight the interplay between identity-driven interpretation and media framing, providing a clearer understanding of the challenges protest movements face when attempting to shape public opinion in fragmented media environments.

This study explores the dynamics of agenda-setting among policy institutions, news media, and the public within a hyperconnected media environment. We analyzed government briefings and news content from 2023, alongside survey data on public agendas in South Korea. Our network-based modeling revealed positive correlations among the three agendas. Significantly, news media emerged as a crucial factor in issue ownership, with the public displaying a greater reliance on liberal outlets. These findings underscore the media’s mediating role between policymakers and the public, providing empirical support for a tripartite model of agenda-setting in contemporary political communication.

Previous studies on news avoidance have theorized about the interconnected effects of age, changes in the media environment, and generations to explain the phenomenon. However, no current studies simultaneously assess these effects. Using nearly 40 years of Swedish data, I find that as people age, they increase their news media consumption while both cohort and period effects show opposite trends. I also find substantial educational gaps. Over the life course, educational gaps are formed early. Period effects show growing educational gaps. Cohort effects vary, with those born in the 70s showing the largest educational gaps.

Data, numeric or visual, can contain misinformation and contribute to the spread of false information. Yet the role of data has received little attention in misinformation research. This scoping review analyzes 41 studies across various disciplines and synthesizes how data are processed within a dual-process framework to map research on data and misinformation. The review identifies an overall lack of research in this area and highlights the need to consider multimodal data formats, as numerical and visual misinformation have largely been addressed separately. The study identifies research gaps and opportunities for future research, as well as implications for data communication praxis.