Volume 41, Issue 4

While the role of the media in the identity work of children, adolescents, migrants or fans of particular genres and formats has seen much research, little attention has been paid to the impact of everyday media practices on the general identity work of young adults. To address this gap, we conducted an explorative study based on four-week media diaries of 59 students. These were used to identify four different types of multi-media theme repertoires and the ways in which they are employed for different identity practices. While drama-lovers and sports-fans differ strongly in their thematic interests, they share a similar identity style, relying mostly on practices of identification and of expressing their affiliation to certain in-groups via media content. In contrast, the identity style of news-aficionados and intense-media-users is mainly based on practices of distinction.

News factors can be conceptualized as general relevance indicators guiding the attention of all humans. However, that doesn’t mean that they are the only factors influencing selection processes or that all news factors have the same importance across different actor types. Within the concept of news factors it is still unclear to what degree those news factors also apply to the communication outside of traditional mass media. We therefore ask whether and how actors with varying degrees of professionalization employ news factors in their communication differently. To answer our research question, we conducted a quantitative content analysis and compared the coverage in traditional newspapers with the communication of civil society actors with varying degrees of professionalization. We analyzed the relevance of news factors within the presentation of a specific issue, namely climate change in Germany. Our results show that news factors are – at least partly – also applied by non-journalist actors. The mass media and the more professionalized civil society actors do not apply news factors more strongly to their communication than do non-professionalized civil society actors. Instead, we find that different actors focus on different news factors.

We investigated the attribute agenda-setting (AAS) effect of political advertising. Individuals ( N  = 209) participated in an experiment and were exposed to six political print advertisements, which were manipulated to represent either a text-only, visual-only, or visual-plus-text version. As expected, we found that AAS led to association effects in which advertising content strengthened mental links between the party and advertised issues. However, we also present evidence for disassociation effects in which non-advertised issues were mentally delinked from the party. Importantly, AAS was dependent on the modality of presentation with information presented verbally plus visually (dual-modal presentation) eliciting the strongest effects. Furthermore, the strength of the AAS effect predicted voting intentions for that party, but only in those who rated the advertisements favorably. We discuss the present study’s contribution to the AAS literature with regard to association and disassociation effects, modality of presentation, and AAS’s consequences on voting.

A large proportion of television consumption takes place in groups, usually in households shared by partners or families. However, theories of media use tend to neglect this: Although they explain how individual orders of preference come about, they hardly address the fact that different orders of preference within a small group may conflict with one another. We propose using game theory to illustrate how to find a solution when conflicts in orders of preference arise. Game theory is suited to explaining decisions in social conflict situations in which those involved have an influence over one another. We use different (fictional) examples to demonstrate the potential of game theory here and provide a theoretical framework for future empirical studies.

This article presents a methodological tool, Justifications Analysis, and uses it to analyze the debate on globalization in Finnish mass media between 1995 and 2014. Justifications Analysis focuses on the moral principles evoked to justify arguments, something that tends to be overlooked by most established approaches to media content analysis. Regarding the frequency of coverage, it is found that the debate in Finland deviates from the global issue attention cycle and lasts longer, driven by national key events. Concerning the groups of speakers, the Global Justice Movement is found to have initiated the debate; the elites are divided into two groups, one defending and the other opposing the movement. Moral justifications are used extensively. All parties to the debate justify their arguments by referring to the common good, but disagree over whether it should be defined in terms of market worth, equality and democracy, national values, or some combination of these.