Misunderstanding News Audiences

Seven Myths of the Social Media Era

Eiri Elvestad, Angela Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315444345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

Misunderstanding News Audiences interrogates the prevailing myths around the impact of the Internet and social media on news consumption and democracy. The book draws on a broad range of comparative research into audience engagement with news, across different geographic regions, to provide insight into the experience of news audiences in the twenty-first century.

From its inception, it was imagined that the Internet would benignly transform the nature of news media and its consumers. There were predictions that it would, for example, break up news oligarchies, improve plurality and diversity through news personalisation, create genuine social solidarity online, and increase political awareness and participation among citizens. However, this book finds that, while mainstream news media is still the major source of news, the new media environment appears to lead to greater polarisation between news junkies and news avoiders, and to greater political polarisation. The authors also argue that the dominant role of the USA in the field of news audience research has created myths about a global news audience, which obscures the importance of national context as a major explanation for news exposure differences.

Misunderstanding News Audiences presents an important analysis of findings from recent audience studies and, in doing so, encourages readers to re-evaluate popular beliefs about the influence of the Internet on news consumption and democracy in the West.

1

Introduction

News audiences, and the myths of the social media era

We started out to produce a book that would de-bunk some of the prevailing myths about the Internet and its impact on news audiences. By the time we finished, we found ourselves engaged in drawing together the empirical and intellectual underpinning of one of the most important debates of our time, as concerns that had been circulating in the academic community, about the impact of personalised information systems on democracy, were catapulted into the mainstream by a series of elections across Europe and the USA.

Our initial concern had been to explore a gap in the literature. While there was a great deal of research on the use of different platforms to find news, there seemed to be little information about what news was being found there, where it came from and who was producing it. We started our own research (with Mira Feuerstein) into students’ use of news in three national contexts (Elvestad, Phillips, & Feuerstein, 2017). This was a small study, using mixed methods, carried out in 2014.¹ Our intention was to examine the ways in which students access news, what news sources they trusted, what sources they tended to use, and whether and under what circumstances they interacted with news. Alongside surveys we carried out in-depth interviews with students who were selected to produce a varied sample in terms of study programme, gender, age, and ethnicity. We refer to the in-depth interviews with the 12 Norwegian and 12 UK students in the study in this book as “our interviews”. We are of course aware that this is a small sample but where we find these interviews help to provide insight into news audiences and democracy in the social media era, we have included them.

Our study raised many questions, which we went on to address through a far-reaching review of secondary literature (articles, books, reports etc.) and data from the increasing range of research in the field of news audiences. While we were working, it became clear that our research was just a small stitch in an ever-growing tapestry of work following changes in the way in which people were accessing, circulating and using news. This new research, adding to some older work that foreshadowed the changes, was clearly overturning many of the utopian assumptions that had been made about the impact of the Internet on news and democracy.

From its inception, a mythical assumption of the benignly transformative and democratic nature of the Internet, drawn from its origins as a collaborative tool, had permeated discussion of its possible impact on news audiences and democracy. From that foundational misconception, many other myths had developed about the collapse of trust in “mainstream” news; the development of new forms of news information un-corrupted by power; and the emergence of a more collaborative form of journalism, powered by a democratically engaged, globally aware audience. In practice, as we can now see, the Internet has been shaped by globalisation and the power of free market economics into a means by which a handful of companies have achieved world dominance, autocratic governments have increased their powers of surveillance, and communication options for anti-democratic organisations have been enabled outside the normative structures of the mainstream.

This is not to suggest that the Internet as a technology does not have democratic potential. At the heart of every myth there lies a kernel of truth, but that kernel has been layered beneath distortions and misunderstandings which have had far-reaching and often totally unexpected consequences. This book will use the evidence provided by audience studies to reflect on these misunderstandings and to demonstrate how the impact of untrammelled market pressures, allied to technical change, has affected the way in which people find out about information that is important to them, and what that means for the way in which they understand themselves, the society in which they live, their place in the global order and how they then engage as deliberative citizens.

The advent of new systems for circulating news and information via the Internet and on social media inevitably changed old habits of news engagement and, as a result, it has been accompanied by a wealth of speculation and a growing research literature. However, the speculation has too often been entirely disconnected from the research, allowing for the development of narratives that assumed a new world in which old media hierarchies are disappearing and audiences have become “prosumers” (Tapscott, 1998; Toffler, 1970) actively involved in the production, distribution and consumption of news.

Many of these assumptions pre-dated or ignored research findings that might have thrown light on developments. Where research has been used, it is often US research, much of it produced by media companies, which maps uneasily onto different media and political systems. Yet too often lessons learned are assumed to be directly transferable. While US research has much to tell the rest of the world about what might happen elsewhere, it needs to be interrogated carefully, not taken as a blueprint. Comparative research, which takes national differences into account, often tells a different story about the interaction between policy, democracy and the media.

Models of democracy

In this book we look carefully at the research on news audiences. We focus mainly on democracies but we recognise that they are not all the same. Different normative models of democracy have different expectations of citizen engagement (e.g. Ferree, Gamson, Gerhards & Rucht, 2002) as well as different media systems (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). If we are to truly understand the impact of new media forms on citizen involvement and deliberation, then we need to look at them as media ecologies in which technology plays one part alongside public policy and legal frameworks.

We divide models of democracy very broadly into liberal (competitive or rational choice) like that in the USA, and participatory and deliberative, such as that in Northern European countries.² These normative models of democracy expect participation from citizens on different levels, require different models of media and therefore have different approaches to the role of law making and regulation. In the US competitive model of democracy, the central mechanism for securing the primacy of common good is through competitive elections, while for countries with a participatory model of democracy, citizens’ participation in public life, both outside and within political parties, is also important (Strömbäck, 2005).

These two models of democracy also have different normative expectations of citizens’ political knowledge and engagement. The competitive model expects citizens to have “clear opinions of societal problems; knowledge of who has had power; knowledge about the record of the office holders; knowledge about party platforms and promises” (Strömbäck, 2005, p. 337). On the other hand, the participatory model has normative expectations of citizens who are more trustful and cooperative, are more interested in politics, have a high degree of knowledge about how to influence public life, clear opinions of societal problems and the relevant factual information to form opinions about them (Strömbäck, 2005, p. 337).

In most of Europe, proportional, multi-party systems of representation allow voters to choose the candidate that most closely represents their views. Coalition government is the norm and debate and compromise is built into systems that require constant negotiation with partners. In the Nordic countries, for example, there is an expectation that the media will contribute to citizen participation in political processes in between elections. In these countries there is more media regulation aimed at encouraging citizens to participate in the political process. In the US model of democracy, critical decisions about the choice of candidates take place within the two major parties and it is through the system of party primaries that presidential candidates emerge, offering a winner-takes-all choice to the electorate and little opportunity for impact on political decisions between elections. Here, media regulation for citizen involvement is largely absent, the information needs of citizens are left to the market, and citizen participation tends to be seen as a choice rather than an obligation or duty.

Media systems also differ. As Hallin and Mancini (2004) observed, Southern European media organisation is quite unlike that of Nordic countries even though they mostly have systems of proportional representation. In Southern Europe, the “polarised pluralist” system is based on political parallelism and media represent differing political positions from which they argue a case rather than report it. In the Nordic countries, a “democratic corporatist” media system (Hallin & Mancini, 2004) combines a degree of political parallelism with professionalisation reminiscent of US print media, alongside public service broadcasting. The UK has a competitive model of democracy, in common with the USA, but a hybrid media system in which the press is openly partisan and unregulated whereas broadcasting (both public and private) is bound by rules of impartiality.

In spite of these differences, all of these democratic systems rely on the idea of an informed citizen. The competitive, or rational choice, democracy model implies that citizens need to have enough information to be able to decide between competing elites in elections, but they do not necessarily have to follow the political processes closely in between elections. The “burglar alarm” (Zaller, 2003) function will be enough to keep them informed about emergency matters. This model presupposes an electorate that is happy to leave governing to political parties and sees little role for citizens in shaping public policy.

In participative or deliberative models, the role of media in spreading information assumes that citizens need to be alert to the actions of government; that public pressure from citizens has a meaningful role to play in shaping policy; and that there needs to be systems both for circulating information and for public deliberation in order to facilitate this process. Habermas (1989) describes such a system as a “public sphere” in which citizens can come together to deliberate without coercion, and the news media provide the means by which information can be spread, so that such deliberation can take place. In this model:

Democratic public discourse does not depend on pre-existing harmony or similarity among citizens but rather on the ability to create meaningful discourses across lines of difference.

(Calhoun, 1988, p. 220)

Habermas noted that a true public sphere could only come into being if the full range of differing views are actually accessible to all, a state of grace that he found unlikely in a capitalist economy, in which news media are dominated by sectional interests and elites are intertwined with media interests. His original paper has been criticised from a number of positions for its failure to recognise the complexity of media systems and the dynamic between the centre and periphery (Peters, 1993); for being too pessimistic about the possibilities of regulation (Benson, 2009); and for conceptualising such a sphere in too rigid a fashion so that it ignores the potential impact of radical campaigning and social movements on the structures he describes (Fraser, 1990). Nevertheless, in spite of these critiques and of his reformulation of this model, the idea of a plural and diverse system of news provision, free from government interference, provides a benchmark for the empirical investigation of news media within a democracy (Benson, 2004).

Plurality and diversity

In order to critique any system using these measures it is necessary to define what is meant by plurality and diversity, terms that are generally used rather loosely with little attention to the conditions in which either can actually emerge. Des Freedman (2008) describes “plurality” as relating to media structures that enable a variety of views whereas “diversity”, he suggests, relates to the content of the media and refers to the variety of people who speak and the expression of a variety of opinions (p. 72). The liberal assumption has been that, provided there is plurality in the media market, diversity should follow. Generally speaking, liberal scholars and policy makers have used this conception of plurality as a benchmark against which to measure the democratic health of media systems.

However, market forces have historically tended to operate against plurality. After the introduction of new media technologies there is often a brief flowering of pluralism (Phillips, 2018), but market leaders have tended to become monopoly or near-monopoly providers and to dominate the market (Bourdieu, 1998; Bourdieu, 2005; McChesney & Nichols, 2011). The move towards consolidation and market dominance happened slowly in the print media so the use of market regulation has been less interventionist, particularly in the UK and the USA. It happened very quickly in the case of the telegraph, radio and television (Carey, 1983; Flichy, 1999; McChesney & Nichols, 2011; Wu, 2010), and the differing examples of state action taken to address monopoly formation informs the kinds of action which could be considered today when contemplating the speedy adoption of the Internet as a news channel.

In Europe, the response to the growth of a telegraph monopoly was to nationalise. In the USA, a self-regulating monopoly was formed. Similarly, with the advent of broadcasting, nationalisation and then regulatory intervention to enforce “fairness” became the norm across European democracies. Whether in public or private hands, broadcasters were either enjoined to be neutral or “balanced” in the expression of political views, or broadcasting licences were used to ensure a balance of viewpoints. These values are enshrined in article 11 of the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights that guarantees: “the freedom and pluralism of the media”.

Typically, the establishment of plurality involved legislation against monopoly formation and, in broadcasting, regulation for fairness in representation and impartiality in delivery. In some cases it also involves subsidies to encourage alternative providers. In Belgium, legislation ensures that different language communities are represented. In Holland, different religious and social groups are guaranteed representation on broadcast media. In France, subsidy ensures that marginal political voices are heard; and in Italy, public broadcasting channels are divided among the dominant political parties (Hallin & Mancini, 2004).

The American Constitution is silent on the question of plurality; it merely prohibits: “infringing on the freedom of the press”. Nevertheless, in 1949, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Federal Communications Commission of the United States introduced a Fairness Doctrine to ensure that broadcast licensees covered political issues even-handedly; but this came under fire from conservatives as an attack on press freedom and was finally revoked in 1987 at the advent of cable television. The argument was that cable removed the problem of scarcity (Patterson, 2000). If there were now hundreds of channels to choose from, market forces should be able to ensure that viewers could select the programmes that they wanted from a wide variety of providers. This change to the system meant that the USA moved decisively away from any attempt to manage plurality and as such, it provides a media model that is quite distinct from those in most other democracies and a means of comparing change between more managed systems and free market systems. This difference is critical for understanding news consumption as it now is but also for imagining a different future, if, for example, Europe chooses to impose regulation on new media systems as it has done in the past.

For liberal media theorists, who see choice-making as inherently empowering and audienc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: News audiences, and the myths of the social media era
• 2. Personalisation is democratisation: Myth: news personalisation will improve plurality, diversity and ultimately democracy
• 3. We are all journalists now: Myth: the role of the journalist is merging with the role of the audience
• 4. The wisdom of crowds? How algorithms rule online: Myth: the many are smarter than the few
• 5. Globalisation: Myth: the Internet has produced the “global village” envisioned by McLuhan
• 6. Communities online are replacing communities offline: Myth: real social solidarity online has displaced the imagined solidarity of the mass news media
• 7. The end of trust in mainstream media: Myth: the Internet and social media have replaced edited news
• 8. The net generation will revolutionise the way we relate to news: Myth: there is a digital generation with an innate understanding of digital communication
• 9. Conclusion
• Index