Abstract
Although journalism and media coverage are known to induce, inform, and affect public accountability processes, little is known about media-covered accountability. This study therefore explores accountability processes of Danish and Flemish agencies as subjects of the news. Drawing on news construction literature, our quantitative content analysis of newspaper coverage ( N = 13,540) focuses on the presence of accountability processes in media coverage and the extent to which organizational characteristics (task, political salience, and size) are related to this phenomenon. Horizontal accountability forums have the highest media presence. Opinions from horizontal forums, vertical forums, and citizens appear less frequently for service-providing organizations.
Highlights
Public accountability is at the heart of the public sector: Government organizations are embedded in a range of formal and informal accountability relations (Busuioc & Lodge, 2017; Overman et al, 2020)
In only 8.0% of the analyzed articles about public agencies opinions voiced by accountability forums were present and these were mainly negative
Our findings imply that the negativity found in organizational news only to a small extent represents voices of criticasters but rather seems inherent to the media operating as accountability forum or fulfilling their democratic watchdog role (Eriksson & Östman, 2013; Jacobs & Schillemans, 2019)
Summary
Public accountability is at the heart of the public sector: Government organizations are embedded in a range of formal and informal accountability relations (Busuioc & Lodge, 2017; Overman et al, 2020). We focus on the latter: accountability as a subject of the news, called media-covered accountability. This concept refers to a specific subject of media coverage: organizations that are held to account (being criticized or praised) by “forums”: for instance, interest groups, citizens, or ministers. Accountability processes are interesting for journalists as they inherently focus on the evaluation and judgment of public organizations, which can exert powers over citizens and institutions in society (Harcup & O’Neill, 2017)
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