Fragmented Media Research Articles

Digital Media Audiences and Generations – Theories, Trends and Challenges

The digital age has brought several changes in the understanding of the former mass media and the way of distributing different media contents, but also in the ways of media audience involvement in mass communication processes. Due to the large amount of information and the channels through which it is disseminated and the increasingly fragmented media audiences, the influence of the media on contemporary democratic societies has changed significantly compared to the influence of the mass media in the 20th century. Differences in media representations of social reality, the dispersion of their authors, the number of publications and their reach, as well as the conditioned interpretations of media audiences, have led to the so-called post-truth media constructions of reality, also one of the key features of the 21st century. In this paper, the authors provide an overview of theories about media audiences and generations that have been developed within the communication sciences. They specifically focus on the contemporary trends that have affected the disappearance of the mass audience due to its intense fragmentation as a result of the technology change, and at the end of the paper, they highlight the social changes that arise as a result of the aforementioned processes.

Curating Emergent Publics Through Domain Crossing

Audiences for messages divide attention among a variety of media outlets, sources, and venues. Such segmentation creates a challenge for message creators to (re)engage audiences’ attentional capacities. This research investigates how domain elites may curate emergent attentive publics for public affairs content by engaging in processes of domain crossing to potentially redirect audience attention. Conceptually, we contribute to historic and contemporary understandings of how societal leaders attempt to build engaged and attentive publics for their messages. Methodologically, we employ large data and network analytic methods to study the creation of emergent publics online around a pseudo-event. We illustrate how leader-directed domain crossing could overcome audience challenges in a fragmented media ecology.

Day of Rage: Forensic journalism and the US Capitol riot

This article examines how video journalism produced by the elite press is using forensic techniques and aesthetics as part of the effort to reinvent journalistic authority in a fragmented media and political sphere. I first discuss some earlier moments in which news coverage of events adopted a media-forensic epistemology and style, and then turn to the formation of the New York Times Visual Investigations team, a group at the leading-edge of this type of journalism today. I provide an analysis of one of the team’s investigative reports, a 40-minute account of the January 6 Capitol riot assembled from vernacular video, surveillance footage, police bodycam video, and other non-news source materials. In both its formal aspects and its subject matter, the piece represents an important example for understanding an emerging form of forensic journalism. While the January 6 Capitol riot was not the first time news coverage of a violent event adopted a forensic style and epistemology, the forensic-media coverage of the riot represents a unique conjuncture. A new convergence of media-technological developments and journalist practices shaped how the storming of the Capitol was experienced, investigated, and covered as a media event.

The Stability of Cable and Broadcast News Intermedia Agenda Setting Across the COVID-19 Issue Attention Cycle

ABSTRACT In today’s fragmented media environment, it is unclear whether the correspondence between media agendas that characterizes intermedia agenda setting persists. Through a combination of manual and computerized content analysis of 486,068 paragraphs of COVID−19 coverage across 4,589 cable and broadcast news transcripts, we analyze second and third-level attribute agenda setting, both in terms of central themes and aspects. Through the lens of the issue attention cycle, we assess whether relationships among media agendas change over time. The results show that even in a fragmented media environment, there is considerable evidence of intermedia agenda setting. The attribute agendas were largely similar across outlets despite the similarity slightly decreasing over time. The findings suggest that there was only modest evidence for the prominent perception of fragmented coverage for cable and broadcast news networks’ attribute agendas concerning the COVID−19 pandemic.

Cable news media’s influence on climate change beliefs: A partisan comparison

The current, fragmented media landscape coupled with partisan views toward scientific issues has made it difficult for members of the public to achieve mutual understanding toward critical issues like climate change. Selective media exposure, media’s credibility in reporting science and reporting climate change, trust in science, along with demographic characteristics of consumers are all expected to influence the public’s belief in climate change. However, effects may differ across partisan lines. The purpose of this study was to understand how cable news media influences Illinois residents’ beliefs in climate change across political ideological groups. An online survey was completed by 506 respondents, and respondents were categorized as conservative, moderate, or liberal based on a political ideology question. Differences were noted between political groups for variables of interest. Most notably, liberals believed more in climate change compared to conservatives or moderates. Cable news use also followed party lines, and regression analyses found the media influenced climate change beliefs disproportionately across the political groups; conservatives were influenced the most. Trust in science was a positive predictor for all three groups; however, only conservatives and moderates were directly influenced by cable news media use.

Exploring Managers’ Perceptions on Sponsorship Relations and Decision Making in the Malaysian B2B Context

In a post-pandemic environment, businesses face new challenges in sustaining stakeholder interest due to the ever-changing consumer behaviour trends and a more fragmented media landscape. Achieving sponsorship contracts within this tumultuous financial period due to limited sponsor budget raises uncertainty in a potential or existing sponsorship relations due to competition with other organisations for the support of targeted sponsors. The objective of this study is to understand sponsorship relations and decision making from sponsors’ point of view and to explore approaches deployed by sponsored properties in drafting their proposals. In doing so, the study implemented semi-structured interviews with thirteen (13) corporate communication and marketing managers in Malaysia who were directly associated with sponsorship or sponsorship-seeking exercises through the marketing and branding programmes of their organisations. Through a thematic analysis, our study discovered three main findings on establishing sponsorship relations which included prioritising stakeholders, upholding current policies and developing value-added collaborations for growth. The need for accountability, compliance with organisation standards and linkages to government initiatives provided sponsored properties with the awareness of the evolving B2B sponsorship and media environment. The study emphasised the significance of ethical business practices when making strategic decisions on sponsorship. Further to this, the study outlined implications from the selection of sponsored properties in the business-to-business (B2B) community to continue fostering trust and inspire confidence from the public through strategic media and enduring partnerships. Keywords: Sponsorship, sponsorship relations, business-to-business, media, marketing mix.

Probe: The Message(s) are now the Media: A 2030 Outlook on McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan’s seminal “the medium is the message” one-liner, title to Chapter 1 of his 1964 book Understanding Media is a formidable sum up of mid 20th Century media analysis. With a remarkable economy of semantics, McLuhan posited that the powers inherent to radio and television were so immense that the technology itself needed to be the focus. McLuhan’s insight is worth revisiting with an updated frame of reference towards 2030, given our current fragmented media landscape. Finite analog broadcast networks who wielded immense powers have now been replaced by an abundant digital emporium, itself ruled by oligopolistic technology platforms.

The emerging fault line of alternative news: Intra-party division in Republican representatives’ media engagement

Intra-party factionalism and media fragmentation have emerged as two major trends in U.S. politics, especially on the right. We explore potential connections between these developments by analyzing the engagement of Republican members of the US House of Representatives with far-right alternative news media during the 116th Congress. We develop three discrete measures to scale representatives’ engagement using hyperlinks to news media on Twitter, demonstrating their validity against existing positional data: roll-call voting, ideological caucus membership, and political rhetoric. We then apply our scales empirically, showing that representatives with further-right media engagement became increasingly radical in their online communication during the Trump presidency. Representatives with more moderate media engagement did not radicalize in this way. These results suggest a dynamic relationship that reflects the ‘dual function’ of elite-media relations, where partisan elites serve as receivers of information and transmitters of intra-party signals in a fragmented media environment.

Media Use and Societal Perceptions: The Dual Role of Media Trust

How citizens’ perceptions of societal problems are shaped by media use has been a critical question in media effects research for decades. This study addresses a specific puzzle concerning media effects in contemporary fragmented media environments: the dual role of media trust as both (a) an antecedent variable guiding news selection and (b) a moderator variable conditioning the effects of news use on perceptions of societal problems. Building upon the differential susceptibility to media effects model, we analyze the role of media trust for citizens’ orientation towards mainstream and alternative news media—and how such usage influences perceptions of two major societal issues: health care and school. Findings from a four-wave panel survey conducted in Sweden suggest that public service and alternative news use matter for citizens’ perceptions of societal problems and that media trust influences news choices and may, partly, condition media effects.

Transparency in Portuguese media: from the buzzword to the unsolved regulatory challenge

Transparency is a long-discussed term in journalism. It has been conceptualized as an evolving professional value, a political issue, and a regulatory challenge. In the disinformed digital age, became a rescue criterion to rebuild a credible relationship with the public based on trustworthiness. Transparency urges for holistic approaches, due to its inherent instability and variability across media systems; political, economic, and regulatory frameworks; and editorial cultures. This article analyses media transparency from a local perspective, departing from the launching of the Platform of Transparency by the Portuguese Media Authority (ERC). The Portuguese case stands in a European space deprived of international standards to assess media transparency, even if the concept is broadly discursively constructed as a key element of media pluralism. An increasingly fragmented media landscape degrades ethical standards based on shared values and favors the des activation of transparency as a disruptive transforming professional practice. The benevolent Portuguese initiative may provide political legitimacy to a narrowed version of media transparency, confined to issues of accountability and assumptions of political independence. Will the prevailing “fortress newsroom” (Smith, 2005; Meier 2009) survive to a transparent account department?

Mass Media Influence on the Rapid Rise of Climate Change

Abstract When a political issue rises to the top of the public agenda, it puts pressure on decision-makers, shifts power to actors engaging with the issue, and opens a window of opportunity. This article shows that online mass media contributed to the rapid rise of climate change on European public agendas in and around 2019. It also suggests that climate issue publics, that is particularly concerned and interested citizens, were influenced most. Conversely, citizens without strong climate opinions are not subject to influence from intensive media coverage. The results come from vector autoregression (VAR) models that take advantage of unique daily salience time series. The time series are constructed from weekly repeated nationally representative surveys of the public (N = 25,445) and online news articles (N = 6,905) by a dominant mass media news outlet that boasts a particularly large, trustful, and diverse audience. Traditional mass media can retain a powerful agenda-setting role even in increasingly fragmented media environments. But the target of their influence depends on the issue and the composition of corresponding issue publics, plausibly due in part to individual differences in use and processing of information about the issue.

An Intersectional Approach to Exploring Audience Expectations of Journalism

Audience expectations of journalism reveal how well journalism is performing its role in society in the minds of its consumers. In an increasingly fragmented media and audience landscape, it has become more important to consider how social identity shapes audience expectations. However, scholarship has tended to examine expectations based on single identity categories (e.g., class or gender), revealing a crucial but disassembled understanding of how audiences perceive the journalism they consume. This study relies on an intersectional framework and eight focus groups to examine how class, race, and gender, as intersecting and mutually constitutive modes of power/oppression, shape audiences’ expectations of journalism in South Africa. It identifies intersectional differences in audiences’ expectations of solutions journalism, perceptions of journalism’s unaffordability and inaccessibility, and normative evaluations of quality and popular journalism that reveal classist and racist discourses of distinction and stereotyping. The study demonstrates the importance of intersectionality as a critical framework for studying audience expectations and the extent to which they are in/excluded and rendered (in)visible to journalism’s dominant ideology.

Television vs Social Media: Examining the Effects of Media Platforms on Audience’s Emotion and Sense of Social Solidarity during a Media Event

This study examines audience’s emotional and social experiences when consuming Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration through television and/or social media. A national survey (N = 420) was conducted immediately after the inauguration ceremony. Drawing on the theories of media events, emotional appraisal, and identity self-categorization, the study found that television was socially integrative while social media was socially disruptive. The media event’s relationship with the audience’s social and emotional experiences depended on both the audience’s identities and media affordances. The findings paint a nuanced picture of media events as a ritualistic genre in the fragmented media and social environment.

Rethinking the Public Sphere in an Age of Radical-Right Populism: A Case for Building an Empathetic Public Sphere

AbstractWith right-wing populist movements gaining ever more traction worldwide, great attention is paid to addressing their exclusionary rhetoric. In this article, I focus on the question how to deal with these radical-right sentiments in our public debates. Believing that both exclusion and inclusion of right-wing populist voices wield counter-productive effects, I juxtapose Habermas’s public sphere theory to Mouffe’s model of agonistic pluralism and posit that both are ultimately insufficient to tackle the populist danger, albeit for different reasons. However, by synthesizing Mouffe’s model with the ideas of Zygmunt Bauman and Iris Marion Young, I introduce the concept of an empathetic public sphere as a model for creating minimal common grounds between right-wing populist “selves” and the “others” they oppose. Finally, I then move this normative model into the realm of media and communication studies and assess how empathetic storytelling might be given shape in today’s fragmented media ecology.

Online Incidental Exposure to News Can Minimize Interest-Based Political Knowledge Gaps: Evidence from Two U.S. Elections

Concerns persist over the potential for the fragmented media environment to promote motivation-based political knowledge gaps between those who are interested in politics and those who are not. Yet, there is also evidence that the Internet can provide opportunities for individuals to incidentally encounter and learn from news, which may decrease these knowledge gaps. The current study tests this possibility using two, two-wave panel surveys of adults in the United States conducted during the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections. Across two distinct electoral contexts, we find evidence that incidental exposure to online news and political information promotes learning about presidential candidates’ policy positions over the course of the campaign. In addition, the data suggest the least politically interested benefit the most from this incidental exposure, as they see the largest gains in political knowledge. These findings indicate that opportunities to learn via incidental exposure have the potential to reduce motivation-based knowledge gaps.

Misinformation During the COVID-19 Outbreak in China: Cultural, Social and Political Entanglements.

Not only did COVID-19 give rise to a global pandemic, but also it resulted in an infodemic comprising misinformation, rumor, and propaganda. The consequences of this infodemic can erode public trust, impede the containment of the virus, and outlive the pandemic itself. The evolving and fragmented media landscape, particularly the extensive use of social media, is a crucial driver of the spread of misinformation. Focusing on the Chinese social media Weibo, we collected four million tweets, from December 9, 2019, to April 4, 2020, examining misinformation identified by the fact-checking platform Tencent-a leading Chinese tech giant. Our results show that the evolution of misinformation follows an issue-attention cycle pertaining to topics such as city lockdown, cures and preventive measures, school reopening, and foreign countries. Sensational and emotionally reassuring misinformation characterizes the whole issue-attention cycle, with misinformation on cures and prevention flooding social media. We also study the evolution of sentiment and observe that positive sentiment dominated over the course of Covid, which may be due to the unique characteristic of "positive energy" on Chinese social media. Lastly, we study the media landscape during Covid via a case study on a controversial unproven cure known as Shuanghuanglian, which testifies to the importance of scientific communication in a plague. Our findings shed light on the distinct characteristics of misinformation and its cultural, social, and political implications, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also offers insights into combating misinformation in China and across the world at large.

Overcoming Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: The United States Faces a Steeper Uphill Struggle than the United Kingdom

This policy brief reports findings from two nationally representative online surveys that were conducted in the United States (N=2,280) and in the United Kingdom (N=2,000) in October and November 2020 to explore the factors that influence the willingness to be vaccinated against Covid-19. The study was conducted before vaccines were officially approved and on the market. However, it very closely tracks the actual developments in both countries through the summer of 2021. Findings suggest that socioeconomic factors, some very difficult to influence by policy in the short term, strongly shape the willingness to be vaccinated. In addition, the contested and divided political landscape and the highly competitive and fragmented media system in the United States help explain the findings.The surveys identify similarities but also major differences between the two countries. In the United States, 51% of the adult population said they were willing to be vaccinated against COVID-19, 28% were not, and 21% were undecided. In the United Kingdom, 71% of the adult population said they were willing to be vaccinated, 14% were not, and 15% were undecided. Race may be a major barrier to achieving high COVID-19 vaccination rates in the United States. Black respondents were 46% less willing to be vaccinated than White respondents. Gender may be a barrier to achieving high vaccination rates in the United States and United Kingdom. Women were 43% less willing to be vaccinated than men in the United States. They were 41% less willing than men to be vaccinated in the United Kingdom.Older individuals and those with higher income indicated a higher willingness to be vaccinated in both countries. Trust appears key to vaccination acceptance. Individuals with higher levels of trust in mass media were more willing to be vaccinated in both countries. Individuals with a higher general level of trust in others were more willing to be vaccinated in the United States. Medical information. Individuals who consulted medical sources were more willing to be vaccinated. Media sources. Reliance on conservative outlets, mainstream outlets, and television was not associated in a statistically significant way with the willingness to be vaccinated. Concern about getting COVID-19 is strongly associated with willingness to get vaccinated. Individuals who were more concerned about the pandemic indicated they were more willing to be vaccinated, but this effect was much stronger in the United Kingdom than in the United States.Overall, in the United States, the factors most strongly associated with willingness to be vaccinated are race (White), gender (male), age (older), income (higher), trust in mass media, and concern about getting coronavirus. In the United Kingdom, the factors most strongly associated with willingness to be vaccinated are gender (male), age (older), income (higher), trust in mass media, and concern about getting coronavirus. Race is not associated with the willingness to be vaccinated, unlike in the United States.

Mediatisation and Rallies during the 2019 Valencian Regional Election: Between ‘media logic’ and ‘political logic’

This paper analyses how political rallies develop in an age of intense mediatisation in which politicians and media influence one another. In this connection, we look at the Regional Elections held in the Valencian Autonomous Community in April 2019. For the first time, these coincided with a General Election, so that even more was at stake than usual. We wanted to know how political rallies were designed and what impact they had on both social networks and on television. The data were obtained through a qualitative observational analysis of the key rallies of the main parties taking part in the elections (PP, PSOE, Compromís, Ciudadanos, Unidas Podemos, and Vox). We combined that approach with a quantitative methodology for content analysis of the various rally postings made by parties and their leaders on their official Facebook and Twitter accounts. We also studied À Punt’s TV coverage of the same rallies in its news. On the one hand, the results indicate that election rallies continue to be highly ritualised events. Political parties carefully plan their rallies, always mindful of how these will be reported in today’s highly fragmented media systems — especially in social networks. On the other hand, our study suggests that information on rallies is still tightly controlled by the parties — something that is commonplace in Spanish election campaigns.

Perfil sociodemográfico y actitudes políticas de los grupos a favor y en contra de limitar la libre circulación de información durante la pandemia

The Covid-19 pandemic has produced not only a terrible sanitary crisis but also several problems related to the circulation of disinformation in the context of hybrid and increasingly fragmented media systems. In this work, we analyze a polemical question included in the Center for Sociological Research (CIS) survey conducted in April about the appropriateness of limiting free circulation of information to avoid diffusion of fake news and disinformation. The goals are to (1) analyze the sociodemographic traits of those in favor of limiting the free circulation of information, and (2) explore their general political preferences and affiliations, and the association with attitudes regarding freedom of information. The results obtained through a quantitative methodological approach based on contingency tables and standardized residuals indicate that the most common sociodemographic profile of those in favor of limiting the flow of information is the following: young women (between 18 and 25 years) with secondary education who live in small municipalities and belong to the lower social class. Moreover, the findings illustrate that there is a significant statistical association between supporting the limitation of information and different indicators of supporting the Socialist government: voting and sympathizing with the Socialist Party, self-location in the extreme left, and trusting both the central government management of the crisis and the leadership of Pedro Sánchez. Resumen La pandemia ocasionada por la crisis de la Covid-19 ha supuesto no sólo una terrible crisis sanitaria, sino importantes problemas relacionados con la difusión de desinformación en el contexto de sistemas mediáticos híbridos y crecientemente fragmentados. Analizamos la polémica pregunta del CIS (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas) sobre la pertinencia de limitar la libre circulación de información para restringir la difusión de bulos y noticias falsas. El objetivo es: 1) analizar las características sociodemográficas básicas de quienes se declararon partidarios de restringir la libre circulación informativa, y 2) explorar sus inclinaciones políticas e ideológicas, y su asociación con las actitudes en torno a la libertad informativa. Así, mediante una metodología cuantitativa basada en tablas de contingencia y residuos tipificados corregidos, los resultados reflejan que el perfil sociodemográfico más frecuente entre los partidarios de limitar la libertad informativa es el de una mujer joven (entre 18 y 25 años), con estudios secundarios, que vive en municipios pequeños y declara pertenecer a la clase social baja. Además, los resultados ilustran que existe una asociación estadística significativa entre apoyar la restricción informativa y diversos indicadores de apoyo al Gobierno central: votar y simpatizar con el PSOE, situarse en la extrema izquierda, confiar en la gestión de la pandemia del Gobierno central y confiar en su presidente.

Online video channel management: An integrative decision support system framework

In the current fragmented media landscape, online video is becoming an important outlet for content dissemination. Online video channels provide content creators a way of organizing content and building an online following through subscriptions and social sharing. This paper describes a decision support systems (DSS) based framework for online video channel management and content creation. The relevant DSS literature was reviewed along with both modeling and behavioral aspects of online videos and video channels. An empirical case study was run on a dataset consisting of views, shares, and subscriptions from over 1000 videos from nine YouTube channels. This paper contributes to DSS theory by proposing a flexible framework for incorporating both behavioral and empirical work into an integrative process for online video content creation. This framework builds on existing data-driven DSS theory, but includes specific entities and processes for online content creation.