Abstract
Abstract Historical classifications of journalistic traditions are the backbone of comparative explanations for political news coverage. This study assesses the validity of the dominant media systems framework and proposes and tests a novel framework, which states that a history of authoritarianism affects today’s coverage. To facilitate a clean cross-national comparison, we focus on the same person and measurement in 12 Western democracies, that is, the use of the pejorative terms “sexist,” “racist,” “dictator,” and equivalents to describe Donald Trump. Our manually validated automated content analysis (2016–2018; N = 27,830) shows that content varies along with countries’ media and authoritarian history: pejoration is more common in countries with a polarized pluralist media system and former authoritarian countries than elsewhere. Newspapers’ ideology does not matter, irrespective of countries’ level of political parallelism or experiences with authoritarianism. Combined, we provide new methodological and theoretical handles to further comparative communication research in Western democracies.
Highlights
IntroductionPlease Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Why does news appear in different forms in different countries? In Four Theories of the Press (1956), Fred Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm proposed that what we read in the paper today is the product of a historical interplay between press, government, and society
We develop a novel theory, which is based on insights from political science literature on authoritarian legacies (e.g., Art, 2005; Costa Pinto, 2010; Dinas & Northmore-Ball, 2019)
Summary
Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. The Impact of Media and Authoritarian History on Political News Coverage in Twelve Western Countries. Historical classifications of journalistic traditions are the backbone of comparative explanations for political news coverage. This study assesses the validity of the dominant media systems framework and proposes and tests a novel framework, which states that a history of authoritarianism affects today’s coverage. We provide new methodological and theoretical handles to further comparative communication research in Western democracies. This work would later inspire Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini’s (2004) seminal study Comparing Media Systems, which argued that the historical development of media systems shapes content features of coverage. Hallin and Mancini’s classification has been the most
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