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More and more scholarly attention is paid to dissecting discipline of communication research under the microscope thereby aiming at revealing foci of scientific interest. The lion's share of research has hereby focused either on the supply side of research examining what topics scholars write about or at the popularity side of research shedding light on what scientific publications receive the most citations. Building up on this, we argue that these research strands are inadequate to the task of exhaustively identifying foci of scientific interest. Tailoring for the fragmented topical landscape of communication research, we propose an integrative combination of three metrics: supply, popularity, and prestige of research topics. By means of topic modeling, citation counts and citation networks, our study showcases how our approach is able to reveal the intellectual architecture of our discipline in order to identify relevant paths for further scientific inquiry.

China's control of information online is often imposed by social media platforms in the name of "rumor management." This article examines the content moderation strategies of Sina Weibo, China's largest microblogging platform, in regulating discussion of rumors following the 2015 Tianjin blasts. More than 100,000 Weibo posts were collected and categorized into three data sets: rumor discussion posts from the public, rumor‐debunking posts from Weibo's official rumor rebuttal accounts, and posts removed from the system. Two content‐moderation rumor strategies, namely rumor rebuttal and content removal, were identified. Clustering analysis and time series analysis was applied to test how these two strategies were used to filter posts of different topics and how they were associated with public discussion of rumor‐related topics. Our findings suggest that the platform's response to rumor varied depending on the political sensitivity of the topic. Time‐series analysis indicated that the implementation of both strategies was usually associated with a subsequent increase in general discussion about the rumor, suggesting that these strategies do not create a consistent chilling effect on public speech.

Online discourse integration, or the degree to which online user comments are responsive, that is, address or refer to other debate participants, is a normatively valued yet neglected quality dimension of online discussions. This preregistered study features the first cross-country/cross-platform investigation of online discourse integration, using manual and computational content analysis ( N = 9835 and N = 30,753 positional news reader comments). Unexpectedly, about one quarter of the comments was responsive in both majoritarian and consensus-oriented democracies (Australia/United States vs Germany/Switzerland) and on platforms that separate or mix public and private contexts (websites vs Facebook pages of mainstream media), even though other deliberative quality criteria were previously shown to vary by country and platform. Comments that are responsive to fellow commenters in the opposing perspective camp were more likely to contain negative evaluations of those addressed, whereas comments responsive within the same perspective camp were more likely to contain positive evaluations.

Research has shown how unpremeditated events can influence media attention and media framing. But how do staged political events influence patterns of news coverage across countries, and are such changes sustainable beyond the immediate event context? We examined whether the UN climate change conferences are conducive to an emergence of a transnational public sphere by triggering issue convergence and increased transnational interconnectedness across national media debates. An automated content analysis of climate change coverage in newspapers from Germany, India, South Africa, and the United States between 2012 and 2019 revealed largely event-focused reporting. Media coverage quickly returned to preconference patterns after each conference. References to foreign countries showed almost no relationship to the climate change conferences' coverage. We found similar results for the effects of the Fridays for Future movement. The significance of these events lies less in long-term changes in media reporting but more in short-term attention generation and coordinated message production.

This study looks into how the combination of Islam, refugees, and terrorism topics leads to text-internal changes in the emotional tone of news articles and how these vary across countries and media outlets. Using a multilingual human-validated sentiment analysis, we compare fear and pity in more than 560,000 articles from the most important online news sources in six countries (U.S., Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, and Lebanon). We observe that fear and pity work antagonistically—that is, the more articles in a particular topical category contain fear, the less pity they will feature. The coverage of refugees without mentioning terrorists and Muslims/Islam featured the lowest fear and highest pity levels of all topical categories studied here. However, when refugees were covered in combination with terrorism and/or Islam, fear increased and pity decreased in Christian-majority countries, whereas no such pattern appeared in Muslim-majority countries (Lebanon, Turkey). Variations in emotions are generally driven more by country-level differences than by the political alignment of individual outlets.

Abstract
In recent decades, disruptive media events, such as major terrorist attacks, have gained increasing relevance in news coverage around the world. Despite the growing importance of such globally broadcast media events, little research to date has examined cross-national variation in event coverage or the predictors of this variation. This study examines news coverage about the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States across 51 countries to analyze whether the topical focus and emotional tone of news coverage about the attacks varied according to a country's proximity to the United States and the dominant role perceptions of its journalistic culture. We show that these macro-level predictors are associated in varying degrees with the country-level topical focus and emotional tone of reporting over the 30 days following this salient event. Moreover, our analysis also suggests that temporal developments may have uniformly structured much of this worldwide coverage.

Recent terrorist attacks such as the Christchurch mosque attacks in 2019 renew the discussion of whether right-wing attacks are reported less negatively than Islamist attacks. To clarify this point, our study is the first to combine the selection of media inside and outside the West with a distinction between Islamist and right-wing attacks. We compare coverage given to thirty-two right-wing and forty Islamist attacks from 2015 to 2019 in nine Western and eight non-Western English-language media outlets, tapping the differential use of the "terrorist/terrorism" label and textual sentiment. Both (many) Western and (some) non-Western media use this label more frequently in the coverage of Islamist attacks. Importantly, public diplomacy channels from non-Western countries such as China Daily and Sputnik also demonstrate this pattern. Delegitimizing Islamist attacks more than right-wing attacks thus cannot be explained as merely a Western phenomenon alone. We point to alternative explanations and call for greater standardization of coverage across Islamist and right-wing attacks.

This study looks into how the combination of Islam, refugees, and terrorism topics leads to text-internal changes in the emotional tone of news articles and how these vary across countries and media outlets. Using a multilingual human-validated sentiment analysis, we compare fear and pity in more than 560,000 articles from the most important online news sources in six countries (U.S., Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, and Lebanon). We observe that fear and pity work antagonistically—that is, the more articles in a particular topical category contain fear, the less pity they will feature. The coverage of refugees without mentioning terrorists and Muslims/Islam featured the lowest fear and highest pity levels of all topical categories studied here. However, when refugees were covered in combination with terrorism and/or Islam, fear increased and pity decreased in Christian-majority countries, whereas no such pattern appeared in Muslim-majority countries (Lebanon, Turkey). Variations in emotions are generally driven more by country-level differences than by the political alignment of individual outlets.

The study, funded by the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg, is carried out jointly by GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, and the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) as part of the digilog@bw project. Digilog investigates the effects of digitalization on individuals and the society from an interdisciplinary point of view. The study collected data on the use of digital media, misinformation, political trust and political behaviour in Germany in May/June 2022. The focus is on misinformation, perceptions of democracy, different political behaviours, political attitudes and digital media use.

English:

The study, funded by the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg, is carried out jointly by GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, and the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) as part of the digilog@bw project. Digilog investigates the effects of digitalization on individuals and the society from an interdisciplinary point of view. The three-wave online panel study collected data on the use of digital media, misinformation, political trust and political behaviour in Germany in late 2020 to late 2021. The focus is on perceptions of democracy, different political behaviours, political attitudes and digital media use.





Deutsch:

Die vom Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg geförderte Studie wird gemeinsam von GESIS - Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften und dem Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung im Rahmen des Projekts digilog@bw durchgeführt. Digilog untersucht den Einfluss der Digitalisierung auf einzelne Individuen und die Gesellschaft. Mittels eines drei-welligen Online-Panels wurden zu diesem Zweck Daten zur Nutzung digitaler Medien, Misinformation, zu politischem Vertrauen und politischem Verhalten in Deutschland in 2020 und 2021 erhoben. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf Einstellungen zur Demokratie, verschiedenen Formen politischer Beteiligung, politischen Einstellungen und digitalen Medien.