How Media Coverage Might Drive Polarisation (and Depolarisation)

The final speaker in this I-POLHYS 2024 session is Sergio Martini, whose interest is in the role of media in perceived polarisation. This might be driven by the conflict focus in media coverage, and its attention especially to extreme positions – but are there ways to counteract this and contribute to depolarisation instead?

The concept of issue framing is key here: how issues are interpreted in media coverage can affect citizens’ perception of these issues. This might include thematic framing (of the facts relating to a story), which might drive issue polarisation, or episodic and exemplary framing (the selection of specific individuals as representative of an issue), which might drive affective polarisation; both might also occur in combination, of course.

News focussing on issue disagreements or uncivil exchanges between partisan groups might increase news audiences perceived polarisation, and media narratives on polarisation may drive the development of stereotypical perspectives on out-group actors. Such negative stereotypes may be revised based on positive encounters with out-group members at the collective or individual level.

The study first explored this through survey experiments, confronting participants with news articles containing thematic and/or episodic frames of distances between the left and right of Italian politics. Findings show that it is thematic framing that increases partisan value polarisation, and the effect of issue disagreement is larger for both value and issue polarisation. Additionally, it tested whether news coverage of issue similarities or cross-group solidarity might help to reduce perceived polarisation – and yes, both result in some level of affective depolarisation.

There is thus potentially a space for depolarisation here, though this needs to be tested outside the experimental setting. Media frames clearly matter for perceptions of polarisation, and issue-related information seems to matter more here than personal stories. Further analysis of real-life news coverage of polarisation would help validate these results and provide deeper context on media framing.