Open AccessAfter All This Time? The Impact of Media and Authoritarian History on Political News Coverage in Twelve Western Countries
Author(s) -
Sjifra de Leeuw,
Rachid Azrout,
Roderik Rekker,
J.H.P. van Spanje
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of communication
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.752
H-Index - 131
eISSN - 1460-2466
pISSN - 0021-9916
DOI - 10.1093/joc/jqaa029
Subject(s) - authoritarianism , dictator , pejorative , politics , ideology , newspaper , autocracy , news media , content analysis , political science , sociology , political economy , media studies , democracy , social science , law
Historical classifications of journalistic traditions are the backbone of comparative explanations for political news coverage. This study assesses the validity of the dominant media systems framework and proposes and tests a novel framework, which states that a history of authoritarianism affects today’s coverage. To facilitate a clean cross-national comparison, we focus on the same person and measurement in 12 Western democracies, that is, the use of the pejorative terms “sexist,” “racist,” “dictator,” and equivalents to describe Donald Trump. Our manually validated automated content analysis (2016–2018; N = 27,830) shows that content varies along with countries’ media and authoritarian history: pejoration is more common in countries with a polarized pluralist media system and former authoritarian countries than elsewhere. Newspapers’ ideology does not matter, irrespective of countries’ level of political parallelism or experiences with authoritarianism. Combined, we provide new methodological and theoretical handles to further comparative communication research in Western democracies.