Abstracts 2/2009

Thomas Hanitzsch: On the Perception of Influences in Journalism: Comparative Results from 17 Countries

Drawing on interviews with 1,700 journalists from 17 countries, this study explores journalists’ perceptions of influences on news-making. The findings suggest a dimensional structure which underlies the various sources of influence; thus supporting a common argument in journalism studies. A Principal Component Analysis revealed that six distinct dimensions play a role in journalists’ perceptions of influences, namely the political, the economic, the organisational, the professional and the procedural dimension, as well as reference groups. However, journalists perceived organisational, professional and procedural influences as more important than political and economic factors. These six dimensions of influences run across the organisational boundaries of news organisations and the limits of journalism as a social system. Moreover, the cross-national comparison showed that the relative importance of the various sources of influence depends on specific national characteristics of the media systems.

Keywords: journalism, influences, factor analysis, comparative research

Andreas Hepp/Hartmut Wessler: Political Discourse Cultures: Explaining the Segmented Europeanisation of Public Spheres

The article addresses the question of how to conceptualise the ‘socio-cultural foundations’ of political public spheres, in order to allow for empirical research of the transnationalisation of public spheres in Europe. The concept of political discourse cultures is developed by drawing on research on political cultures as well as cross-cultural and trans-cultural comparative media and communication research. We understand political discourse culture to be the specific totality of cultural patterns of production, representation and appropriation of political communication, as well as related cultural patterns concerning regulation and identification. We argue that this concept can help explaining one of the main research results regarding political public spheres in Europe: on the one hand, we can detect a process of transnationalisation; on the other hand, national public spheres persist and nations partly retain influence on the emergent European public sphere.

Keywords: European public sphere, discourse, media culture, political communication, empirical media and communication research

Marcus Maurer: Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? The Relevance of Verbal and Visual Information to Impression Formation

Political consultants and journalists alike often believe that impression formation is mainly based on visual information. So far, however, empirical research fails to confirm this assumption entirely. This article provides an overview of the research on the relevance of verbal and visual information in impression formation, and reports on the results of an empirical study. Using a new experimental research design, part of a televised debate in a 2006 local election campaign was presented to voters in three different versions: a television version (audio & video), a radio version (audio only), and a version including only visuals (video only). During the reception, impression formation was measured using the method of real-time-reponse measurement. After the reception, respondents filled in a short questionnaire. The analysis showed that only during the first 30 seconds of the debate, recipients’ impressions were based on visual information. Thereafter, verbal information made a much stronger impact than visual information. The long-term opinion formation was also clearly based on verbal information. The article discusses causes and consequences of these findings.

Keywords: visual communication, impression formation, televised debates, RTR-measurement

Florian Arendt: The Newspaper Kronen Zeitung’s Long-Term Cultivation Effects on Explicit and Implicit Attitudes (of its Readers?)

The article explores long-term media effects of the Austrian tabloid Kronen Zeitung on its readers’ attitudes, assuming that regular readers’ attitudes correspond to a larger degree to the newspaper’s recurring and consistent value judgements (cultivation hypothesis). In a first study, I correlate existing data from quantitative content analyses as well as representative (explicit) attitudes surveys with three socially relevant subject matters (Austria joining the EU; the construction of the power plant Hainburg, and genetic engineering). The results show a hypothesis-confirming coherence between the coverage’s bias and the participants’ attitudes. In the second study, implicit attitudes concerning the European Union were measured using an ‘implicit association test’, and correlated with the reading frequency. Still, the results significantly confirm the cultivation hypothesis, even after controlling for third variables.

Keywords: Kronen Zeitung, Austria, media effects, cultivation effects, attitudes, implicit association test

Michael Dellwing: Television Studies Without Television Theory: The Pragmatism of Nonchalantly Redescribing Television in "Reading Contemporary Television"

Scholarly considerations of television have significantly increased over the past fifteen years. Some of the most prominent contributors have published in Reading Contemporaray Television, a ‘series’ of television books on popular television shows in particular. The series serves to exemplify an important trend: many contributors have ceased attempts to ground their arguments in theoretical or methodological models. The present article analyses three randomly selected books from that series in order to show that the majority of contributions do not discuss theory at all, while a minority of authors uses theoretical quotations eclectically to support their theses. Theory as such only appears when it is deemed useful for practical analytical goals. While avoiding method may be a consequence of having to analyse a huge amount of material, avoiding theory cannot be explained in this way. It may, however, be explained as an example of the renaissance of pragmatism: contributions take the position that grounding is a wheel which plays no part in the mechanism, and collaborating the dualism between material and theory in order to produce contingent re-descriptions of scripted television shows.

Keywords: television shows, media research, USA, Reading Contemporary Television