Journalism

I got to the next session at the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference a little late, so I missed Christina Monzer’s presentation – I’ll start instead with Willem Buyens. His interest is in news on social media: social media remain a critical space of news consumption and engagement, and the dissemination of news here is also governed by the social media logics that affect news curation here.

Political actors also act as news curators on social media, and in doing so make specific news selection decisions; how audiences engage with the news shared by political actors then also depends on their …

The final speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Jihye Park, whose interest is in the role of media trust in reducing affective polarisation. Exposure to cross-cutting media has been recognised in the research as reducing polarisation, but what leads users to expose themselves to such cross-cutting media? Jihye suggests that media trust is critical to such media selection choices.

Her focus here is on affective polarisation – the emotional gap between in- and out-groups. This gap has been shown to grow in countries like the US and South Korea, for partisans of the dominant left and right …

The next speakers in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel are Christiane Eilders and Henri Mütscheler, who note that positional polarisation (on distinct issues) also needs to be distinguished by level: micro-level polarisation between individuals; meso-level polarisation within groups or organisations; or macro-level polarisation between groups or organisations. Such polarisation is thus always relational (between two or more entities), as well as dynamic.

Most of the research to date has focussed on the micro- and macro-levels, especially focussing on political parties. There is also substantial focus on the affective dimension of polarisation, and on the movement of single entities towards …

I am presenting the next paper in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference, providing a brief overview of our Laureate Fellowship project on the drivers and dynamics of polarisation and partisanship. Here are the slides:

It’s the second and last day of the ECREA PolCom 2023 conference in Berlin, and it starts with a panel on polarisation that I’ve had a hand in organising. We begin with Michael Brüggemann, whose focus is on discursive polarisation. He begins by pointing out that polarisation is often ill-defined, and the communicative dimension in particular is often under-conceptualised and under-researched.

Discursive polarisation is when debates break apart: a multi-dimensional divergence emerging in and through communication. There is also a more intuitive aspect to polarisation, as is demonstrated for instance with the German debate around the Letzte Generation climate activists …

The next session at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference starts with a paper by Pablo Jost, whose interest is in protest events. Protests often aim to generate media attention, yet such media attention is often not supportive of protests, especially when they are disruptive (or can be portrayed as such) – and this produces more critical perception and less identification with protests.

To explore this further, this project therefore studied the Website of the Last Generation climate protest movement in Germany to identify their protest events, and coded their 108 protests between November 2021 and December 2022 by type; it also …

The final speaker in this THREATPIE panel at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is Patrick van Erkel, who explores the role of media literacy in addressing misinformation. Media or news literacy has been promoted substantially in response to the infodemic of mis- and disinformation in recent years, and some such approaches can be affective. But what are the mechanisms for such effects: do they genuinely increase news literacy, or simply create more general distrust in the media? Does the framing of news literacy messages play a role here?

The present study thus begins by assuming that news literacy messages will generally …

The fourth speaker in this session at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is Ana Cardenal, who moves beyond reported to observed behaviour, with a particular focus on selective exposure practices. This combines survey data with Web tracking data across Spain, France, Germany, the US, and the UK.

For the Web tracking data, this focusses on visits to any on a list of news outlets, and from this determined how selective participants media diets were (in terms of time spent with left- or right-wing media. This also depends on a coding of the partisan slant of news media, of course, which was …

The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel is Nicoleta Corbu, who explores the same dataset as the previous two speakers by examining third-person perceptions about misinformation detection. People generally tend to perceive greater media effects on third persons than on themselves; this might also have consequences for their own behaviours, such as less active fact-checking practices – but to date, there is no empirical data to prove this assumption.

The present study used the survey data also used by the past two speakers to establish participants’ third-person perceptions and explore their own engagement in active or passive …

The second speaker in this panel at ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is Christine Meltzer, whose focus is on the perception of social cohesion in society, and its relationship with media use. Such cohesion is critical as it plays a crucial role in societies’ responses to crises.

Media use can contribute to perceived social cohesion in society if people consume the same media, if such media content supports some level of social cohesion and shared experience, and supports trust and tolerance. Such media often tend to be high-quality rather than alternative and hyperpartisan media.

How is media use associated with social …