Suchergebnisse

Trotz seiner demokratietheoretischen Bedeutung ist der Begriff der »publizistischen Vielfalt« bis heute weitgehend unbestimmt geblieben. Auch wissen wir bisher wenig über Faktoren, die die inhaltliche Vielfalt der Berichterstattung beeinflussen.Thomas Zerback widmet sich, neben einer genauen Bestimmung des Begriffs und seinen demokratietheoretischen Wurzeln, vor allem journa-listischen und wirtschaftlichen Einflussfaktoren auf die inhaltliche Vielfalt.Eine vielfältige Medienlandschaft, die dem Bürger ein breites Spektrum an Themen und Meinungen zur Verfügung stellt, gilt in modernen Demokratien als erwünscht und schützenswert. Im Kern erhofft man sich davon gut informierte und rationale politische Urteile, Toleranz gegenüber Andersdenkenden sowie eine größere Legitimität politischer Entscheidungen. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit kommt dabei der Frage zu, inwiefern die Struktur von Medienmärkten die inhaltliche Vielfalt beeinflusst – ein Aspekt, der in Zeiten fortschreitender Medienkonzentration besondere Relevanz hat. Der Autor verbindet in seiner Analyse publizistikwissenschaftliche Ansätze mit der ökonomischen Wettbewerbstheorie und ist damit im besten Sinne des Wortes interdisziplinär.

The current study examines the role of affective and cognitive attitude extremity on perceived exposure to diverse political viewpoints and investigates the possibility of a "primacy of affect." Based on a multi-level analysis of panel survey data, we show that people with extreme attitudes toward immigrants experience less viewpoint diversity and that this tendency is especially pronounced for affective attitude extremity. However, even those holding extreme attitudes do not find themselves in issue-specific echo chambers, that is, they still encounter relatively diverse sets of viewpoints.

Online astroturfing is a novel form of disinformation that relies on the imitation of citizen voices to create the false impression that a particular view or idea has widespread support in society. In this study, we test if political online astroturfing messages (i.e., forged user comments beneath digital news items) can influence perceptions of public opinion on three issues: the poisoning of the former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, the use of toxic gas by Russia's close ally Syria, and the manipulation of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We further examine the immunizing effects of three inoculation strategies to prevent the distorting effects of online astroturfing comments. Our results indicate that only a few astroturfing comments can bias readers' perceptions of public opinion in the intended direction. Moreover, prior inoculation only provides limited protection against this effect. Only one inoculation strategy (refutational‐same) proved to be effective, but even this effect is only short‐term. Our findings indicate that recent fears about the potentially negative effects of this novel form of disinformation on political discourse are justified and underscore the difficulties of responding to this challenge.

In modern media environments, social media have fundamentally altered the way how individual opinions find their way into the public sphere. We link spiral of silence theory to exemplification research and investigate the effects of online opinions on peoples' perceptions of public opinion and willingness to speak out. In an experiment, we can show that a relatively low number of online exemplars considerably influence perceived public support for the eviction of violent immigrants. Moreover, supporters of eviction were less willing to speak out on the issue online and offline when confronted with exemplars contradicting their opinion.

"In order to investigate how five possible coalitions were evaluated by the mass media and how citizens formed their coalition expectations a content analysis and a telephone survey were conducted during the campaigning of the 2013 German national election. The media favored the coalition between CDU/CSU and SPD and also depicted it as the most likely election outcome. The same applied to the interviewees. Their coalition expectations were influenced by soft as well as hard indicators of public opinion: Perceived media slant, opinions in their social environment and within the broader population served as cues to the perceived likelihood of possible coalitions. Remembered poll results, however, as well as expectations regarding the likelihood of the smaller coalition partner to pass the election threshold were only relevant for particular scenarios, e.g. if the smaller party (i.e. the FDP) was close to the five-percent-threshold or if the summed poll share of the whole coalition was close to not being sufficient for forming a government." (author's abstract)

Emotions are considered important drivers of the diffusion of messages on social networking sites. Therefore, emotion-eliciting political communication yields the potential to reach broad audiences and to influence citizens' attitudes and behavior. In this study, we investigate message characteristics that potentially trigger emotional reactions on part of the users of political social networking pages and test if this fosters the diffusion of political content in the network. Based on appraisal theory, we employ a manual coding scheme to identify appraisal dimensions in political parties' Facebook posts that should trigger sadness or anger. We subsequently combine the manual codings with information of the users' reactions to the respective posts, which we gathered using an automated content analysis. More specifically, we determine (1) if posts that include sadness or anger appraisals are associated with the corresponding emotional reactions in the form of emojis and (2) if these posts are shared more often.

This study is the first to scrutinize the psychological effects of online astroturfing in the context of Russia's digitally enabled foreign propaganda. Online astroturfing is a communicative strategy that uses websites, "sock puppets," or social bots to create the false impression that a particular opinion has widespread public support. We exposed N = 2353 subjects to pro-Russian astroturfing comments and tested: (1) their effects on political opinions and opinion certainty and (2) the efficiency of three inoculation strategies to prevent these effects. All effects were investigated across three issues and from a short- and long-term perspective. Results show that astroturfing comments can indeed alter recipients' opinions, and increase uncertainty, even when subjects are inoculated before exposure. We found exclusively short-term effects of only one inoculation strategy (refutational-same). As these findings imply, preemptive media literacy campaigns should deploy (1) continuous rather than one-time efforts and (2) issue specific rather than abstract inoculation messages.

This study analyzes how perceptions of the popularity of political parties (i.e., the current opinion climate) and expectations about parties' future electoral performance (i.e., the future opinion climate) are formed. Theoretically, the paper integrates research on the sources of public opinion perception and empirically draws on a representative survey carried out before the 2013 German federal election. We show that the perceived media slant and opinions perceived in one's personal surroundings are closely related to perceptions of party popularity, whereas individual recall of poll results and personal opinions about the parties are not. However, poll results are shown to be the single most important predictor of expectations about the parties' future electoral success.

Media contain various cues to opinions of others and therefore serve as an important source of information about the climate of opinion. We distinguish explicit cues directly describing opinion distributions in society, from implicit cues lacking such a direct reference. In an experiment, we examined the relative impact of survey data (explicit cue) and arguments (implicit cue) on climate of opinion judgments. While survey results strongly affected assessments, argumentation had an effect only when no survey information was available. However, arguments produced an indirect effect, as they strongly affected personal opinions, which in turn influenced climate of opinion judgments (projection).