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Field of application/theoretical foundation: Analyses of change of perspectives are theoretically linked to the news performance and democratic function of the media (McQuail, 1992). This construct is related to viewpoint diversity and the normative expectation that different views should be presented in news coverage (Napoli & Gillis, 2008). In addition, more recent analysis focus on different perspective articulated in user comments, often linked to theories of deliberation (Baden & Springer, 2015). References/combination with other methods of data collection: Perspective change in news coverage is measured i) directly (e.g., by asking whether change of perspective is presented in an article) or i) indirectly by coding different perspective (e.g. statements including different viewpoints). Indirect measures can also be used in automated approaches (Möller et al., 2018). Example studies: Baden & Springer (2014); Humprecht (2016) Table 1. Study summaries Author(s) Sample Unit of Analysis Values Reliability Baden & Springer (2014) Content type: Online news coverage on selected key events and user comments Outlet/country: 5 German newspapers (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt, TZ, Die Zeit, Spiegel) Sampling period: Feb– July 2012 Sample size: 42 news articles, 384 user comments News article: max. 2 main interpretative frames (the text's 'central organizing idea') User comments: main frame Object of problem definition Logic of evaluation: inspired (Good is what is true, divine & amazing) popular (Good is what the people want) moral (Good is what is social, fair, & moral) civic (Good is what is accepted & conventional) economic (Good is what is profitable & creates value) functional (good is what works) ecological (good is what is sustainable & natural) Logic of (inter)action: believing (interactions between the mind & the world) desire (interaction btw the mind & objects) ought (interaction btw the mind & people) negotiation (interaction btw people & the social ...

Field of application/theoretical foundation: Analyses using the constructs cause/antecedents/history in news content are theoretically related to news performance and the democratic function of the media (McQuail, 1992). This construct is linked to professional standards and the normative assumption that the media should provide the audience with background information on current events and issues (Westerstahl, 1983). For example, news can be used to explain how a particular problem occurred, what happened beforehand and what the concrete reasons are for the current situation. References/combination with other methods of data collection: The analysis of reporting on the causes, background and history of events is complex and requires an understanding of the context and the relationships established by the journalist. As a result of this complexity, no automated measurement procedures have yet been developed. Example study: Humprecht (2016) Table 1. Study summary Author(s) Sample Unit of Analysis Values Reliability Humprecht (2016) Content type: Political routine-period news Outlet/ country: 48 online news outlets from six countries (CH, DE, FR, IT, UK, US) Sampling period: June – July 2012 Sample size: N = 1660 Unit of analysis: Political news items (make reference to a political actor, e.g. politician, party, institution in headline, sub?headline, in first paragraph or in an accompanying visual) News items are all journalistic articles mentioned on the front page ('first layer' of the website) that are linked to the actual story (on second layer of website) Not mentioned Rudimental mention (e.g. reference to previous events without explanation) Mentioned in detail (e.g. explanation of historical events, causes, etc.) Cohen's kappa average ≥ 0.69 References Humprecht, E. (2016). Shaping Online News Performance. In Palgrave Macmillan. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-56668-3 McQuail, D. (1992). Media Performance: Mass Communication and the Public Interest. Sage Publications. Westerstahl, ...

Field of application/theoretical foundation: Studies of critical analysis and comment are theoretically linked to news performance and the watchdog function of the media (Donsbach, 1995; McQuail, 1992). This construct is related to the normative expectation that the news media should critically analyze and comment on cases of abuse of power, incompetence, failures and grievances in government institutions, non-profit organizations, or the private sector (Downie & Schudson, 2009). References/combination with other methods of data collection: The analysis of critical reporting and comment is complex and requires an understanding of the context and the references made by the journalist. Furthermore, it is empirically demanding to distinguish between critical reporting in the sense of the watchdog function and criticism in the sense of negativity or sensationalism (Humprecht, 2016). Due to this complexity, automated approaches have hardly been employed so far. Example studies: Benson (2010); Humprecht (2016) Table 1. Study summaries Author(s) Sample Unit of Analysis Values Reliability Benson (2010) Content type: immigration news coverage (all articles focused on broad immigration trends, policy making and politics, or individual immigrants) Outlet/ country: 14 newspapers from two countries (FR, US) Sampling period: 1991/1994; 2002/2004; 2006) Sample size: N= 1088 Unit of analysis: critical statements in news articles (from sources/ journalists) Critical statements are classified according to their target, substantive focus, and sources Target (government; dominant left parties; dominant right parties; minor political parties; civil society organizations; business; foreign or international organizations) Focus (administrative, character, truth, ideology, policy, and strategy) Administrative criticism (e.g., corruption, incompetence, mismanagement) Truth criticism (e.g., evidence to demonstrate the falsity of claims) Character criticisms (e.g., attacks on personal characteristics of powerful individuals in public ...

Field of application/theoretical foundation: Analyses of actor diversity are theoretically linked to news performance and the democratic media function of integration (Imhof, 2010). This construct is related to the normative assumption that news content should represent society as a whole and thus cover a large variety of societal groups (Boydstun et al., 2014). More recent studies also focus on the influence of algorithms on news diversity (Möller et al., 2018). Analyses are often carried out in three steps. First, all actors are (inductively or deductively) identified. Second, actors are coded according to predefined lists. Third, the level of diversity is determined using diversity indices (van Cuilenburg, 2007). Diversity indices are calculated at article level (internal diversity) or at the organizational level (external diversity) to compare diversity between news articles of a single outlet or between different news outlets. References/combination with other methods of data collection: Studies on actor diversity use both manual and automated content analysis to investigate the occurrence of actors and in texts. They use inductive or deductive approaches and/or a combination of both to identify actor categories and extend predefined lists of actors (van Hoof et al., 2014). Example studies: Masini et al. (2018); Humprecht & Esser (2018) Table 1. Summary of studies on actor diversity Author(s) Sample Unit of Analysis Values Reliability Masini et al. (2018) Content type: news about immigration Outlet/ country: 2 news outlets in four countries (BE, DE, IT, UK) Sampling period: January 2013 to April 2014 Sample size: N=2490) Unit of analysis: news article No. of actors coded: max. 10 quoted or paraphrased actors per article Level of analysis: article and news outlet level Diversity measure: Simpson's diversity index National politics, international politics, public opinion and ordinary people, immigrants, civil society, public agencies/ organizations, judiciary/police/military, religion, ...

Recent research has mainly used two approaches to identify publishers or sources of disinformation: First, alternative media are identified as potential publishers of disinformation. Second, potential publishers of disinformation are identified via fact-checking websites. Samples created using those approaches can partly overlap. However, the two approaches differ in terms of validity and comprehensiveness of the identified population. Sampling of alternative media outlets is theory-driven and allows for cross-national comparison. However, researchers face the challenge to identify misinforming content published by alternative media outlets. In contrast, fact-checked content facilitates the identification of a given disinformation population; however, fact-checker often have a publication bias focusing on a small range of (elite) actors or sources (e.g. individual blogs, hyper partisan news outlets, or politicians). In both approaches it is important to describe, compare and, if possible, assign the outlets to already existing categories in order to enable a temporal and spatial comparison. Approaches to identify sources/publishers: Besides the operationalization of specific variables analyzed in the field of disinformation, the sampling procedure presents a crucial element to operationalize disinformation itself. Following the approach of detecting disinformation through its potential sources or publishers (Li, 2020), research analyzes alternative media (Bachl, 2018; Boberg, Quandt, Schatto-Eckrodt, & Frischlich, 2020; Heft et al., 2020) or identifies a various range of actors or domains via fact-checking sites (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017; Grinberg et al., (2019); Guess, Nyhan & Reifler, 2018). Those two approaches are explained in the following. Alternative media as sources/publishers The following procedure summarizes the approaches used in current research for the identification of relevant alternative media outlets (following Bachl, 2018; Boberg et al., 2020; Heft et al., 2020). Snowball sampling ...

Disinformation can appear in various forms. Firstly, different formats can be manipulated, such as texts, images, and videos. Secondly, the amount and degree of falseness can vary, from completely fabricated content to decontextualized information to satire that intentionally misleads recipients. Therefore, the forms and format of disinformation might vary and differ not only between the supposedly clear categories of "true" and "false". Field of application/theoretical foundation: Studies on types of disinformation are conducted in various fields, e.g. political communication, journalism studies, and media effects studies. Among other things, the studies identify the most common types of mis- or disinformation during certain events (Brennen, Simon, Howard, & Nielsen, 2020), analyze and categorize the behavior of different types of Twitter accounts (Linvill & Warren, 2020), and investigate the existence of serveral types of "junk news" in different national media landscapes (Bradshaw, Howard, Kollanyi, & Neudert, 2020; Neudert, Howard, & Kollanyi, 2019). References/combination with other methods of data collection: Only relatively few studies use combinations of methods. Some studies identify different types of disinformation via qualitative and quantitative content analyses (Bradshaw et al., 2020; Brennen et al., 2020; Linvill & Warren, 2020; Neudert et al., 2019). Others use surveys to analyze respondents' concerns as well as exposure towards different types of mis- and disinformation (Fletcher, 2018). Example studies: Brennen et al. (2020); Bradshaw et al. (2020); Linvill and Warren (2020) Information on example studies: Types of disinformation are defined by the presentation and contextualization of content and sometimes additionally by details (e.g. professionalism) about the communicator. Studies either deductively identify different types of disinformation (Brennen et al., 2020) by applying the theoretical framework by Wardle (2019), or additionally inductively identify and build ...

In previous decades, women in Western countries have gained more influence in various social realms. The percentage of females in higher education, the workforce, boards at publicly traded companies and national parliaments has increased. However, substantial underrepresentation of women in political news has remained. To explain the reasons behind this gender imbalance in news content, we conducted a content analysis of different types of online news in six Western countries. In our study, we distinguish among three levels of analysis: (1) the story level (frequency and format), (2) the media organization level (popular vs mass and upmarket outlets) and (3) the societal level. The results indicate that female actors are most frequently covered by popular news outlets and are more likely to be depicted in a photograph. Furthermore, strong determinants of continued gender differences in political news were found at the country level. Specifically, coverage increases in countries where gender equality is progressing in major parts of society.

This paper examines diversity in online news reporting and explanatory factors that shape news production. The analysis is based on online news from six countries (the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France, and Italy), comparing online-only news sites and legacy media. The analysis shows that most online media reported in a diverse way, comprising multiple topics and actors. Furthermore, event-driven news journalism explains the occurrence of high diversity in news reporting. Available resources and the intensiveness of online reporting (the extent as well as the editing style) also account for diversity. We draw from these findings to make a contribution to research on diversity in online news and to comparative communication studies. Qualitative comparative analysis is used to reflect on the direction and meaning of changes in journalistic practices in the current media environment.

This study examines the role of heavy commenters on social media. We propose typologies of heavy commenters on Facebook pages of six news organizations in two systems that historically embraced different discourse cultures—the United States and Germany. We find that discourse cultures are impacted by news outlet and country: the US discourse is more participatory in terms of comment frequency, but further characterized by a strong non-discursive culture compared to a participatory liberal discourse culture in Germany. Frequency of commenting as normative ideal of social media sites (e.g. web traffic) does not lead to higher amounts of deliberation. On the contrary, it may contribute to what we conceptualize as the non-discursive model. As an expression of this, heavy commenters in the United States more often perform hate watching that manifests in hostile commenting on stories that are incongruent with their political ideologies. Implications for the democratic function of media organizations on social media are discussed.

Online disinformation is considered a major challenge for modern democracies. It is widely understood as misleading content produced to generate profits, pursue political goals, or maliciously deceive. Our starting point is the assumption that some countries are more resilient to online disinformation than others. To understand what conditions influence this resilience, we choose a comparative cross-national approach. In the first step, we develop a theoretical framework that presents these country conditions as theoretical dimensions. In the second step, we translate the dimensions into quantifiable indicators that allow us to measure their significance on a comparative cross-country basis. In the third part of the study, we empirically examine eighteen Western democracies. A cluster analysis yields three country groups: one group with high resilience to online disinformation (including the Northern European systems, for instance) and two country groups with low resilience (including the polarized Southern European countries and the United States). In the final part, we discuss the heuristic value of the framework for comparative political communication research in the age of information pollution.

The increasing dissemination of online misinformation in recent years has raised the question which individuals interact with this kind of information and what role attitudinal congruence plays in this context. To answer these questions, we conduct surveys in six countries (BE, CH, DE, FR, UK, and US) and investigate the drivers of the dissemination of misinformation on three noncountry specific topics (immigration, climate change, and COVID-19). Our results show that besides issue attitudes and issue salience, political orientation, personality traits, and heavy social media use increase the willingness to disseminate misinformation online. We conclude that future research should not only consider individual's beliefs but also focus on specific user groups that are particularly susceptible to misinformation and possibly caught in social media "fringe bubbles."

Typologies are omnipresent both in everyday life as well as in the sciences. Epistemologically, there are several systematic ways to build typologies, such as qualitative, theory-based descriptions on one end and quantitative, exploratory statistical means on the other end of the spectrum. Both have their specific advantages and disadvantages, which can be bridged by applying set-theoretic methods, such as Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). The contribution of this paper is substantial and methodological: First, we show how QCA can enhance our understanding of media systems by building a typology that draws on Hallin and Mancini's framework. The main improvement of QCA is the ability to identify ideal types as well as border cases. In our analysis, we move beyond the widely discussed case of Great Britain and take a closer look at further border cases such as Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal. Second, QCA has been scarcely applied to build typologies and if so, only in neighboring disciplines. Thus, we aim at familiarizing comparative political communication scholars with this method.

Im vorliegenden Open-Access Handbuch wird der Status Quo standardisierter, inhaltsanalytischer Forschung in der Kommunikationswissenschaft identifiziert, systematisiert und für Forschende und Studierende zugänglich gemacht. Es behandelt Themen- und Forschungsbereiche des Nachrichtenjournalismus, der fiktionalen Inhalte sowie der Kommunikation von professionellen und LaienkommunikatorInnen. Der Fokus liegt auf den zentralen Fragestellungen und Forschungsdesigns unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der verwendeten Konstrukte/Variablen. In der dazugehörigen Datenbank "Database of Variables for Content Analysis – DOCA" werden Variablenbeschreibungen zusammengetragen und recherchierbar gemacht. Das Handbuch bietet hierfür den kontextuellen Rahmen. Zusammen bilden sie die Grundlage zur Vereinheitlichung und damit Vergleichbarkeit inhaltsanalytischer Studien.

This study aimed to validate and extend Hallin and Mancini's framework of comparison to discriminate empirical types of media systems in Central and Eastern Europe. We tested and complemented their original dimensions by using aggregated data from 11 countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia). Our study shows the strength of political parallelism and public service broadcasting as variables for comparison. It also found that press freedom and foreign ownership point to significant differences between media systems in the region. Finally, a cluster analysis revealed the existence of three groups of media systems and provides empirical support for the assertion that there is no unique type of East-Central European media system.