Does the National Context Matter? Towards a Framework for Analyzing International Differences in Content Diversity

• In Event: Still the Marketplace of Ideas? Studying Diversity of News Content in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Respecting societal diversity is one of the core values of democracy and the attempt to sustain and promote it also guides the evaluation and regulation of modern democratic media systems. Especially deliberative and participatory theories of democracy argue that in order to strengthen public discourse, a broad variety of voices and opinions should be given the chance to get heard in the mediated public debate.

But although media content diversity is regarded a universal value in all democracies, the investigation and explanation of media content diversity has so far mostly been restricted to a single-country perspective. Internationally comparative studies are rather scarce. Hence, little is known about potential international differences in content diversity and whether contextual, national-level factors can help to explain them. And, more importantly, theoretical frameworks that relate national macro-level factors to (a) media content diversity in a given country and (b) to other influential factors at the meso- and micro-level and that might guide comparative research into this issue are still lacking.

Therefore, this paper first discusses the potential direct and indirect effects of several macro-level factors on media diversity theoretically (e.g., regulation of media markets; market form; degree of media competition; commercialization of media markets; party system) on actor diversity as a central prerequisite of content diversity (e.g., issue and opinion diversity). Secondly, it relates those macro-level factors to the organizational and individual-level factors that have mostly been investigated and shown to impact content diversity (e.g., editorial lines). Thirdly, the paper tests some of these expected effects on a dataset of political news of 16 western democracies (AU, BEL, CH, DK, E, F, GER, GR, I, IL, N, NL, P, S, UK, USA). In order to investigate the factors driving actor diversity in outlets and countries we combine content analysis data with external data characterizing the media and political system environment of the respective outlets and countries.

Authors

• Carsten E. Reinemann, U of Munich

• Thomas Zerback, LMU Munich

• Peter Van Aelst, U of Antwerp