Political Communication Online: Structures, Functions, and Challenges by Ognyan Seizov

Author:Ognyan Seizov [Seizov, Ognyan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Political Science, Media Studies, General
ISBN: 9781317815570
Google: 18NwAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-04-24T12:15:24+00:00

News Websites

When it comes down to studying political communication, there is a long research tradition dedicated to political news, which also figures prominently in the preceding literature reviews. This thesis makes no exception and acknowledges the primary importance of news media in the political communication process, namely the relay of political information from political actors to citizens and, more recently due to the relevant developments in the World Wide Web, vice versa. The choice of media aims at an international sample of prominent news sources. From the US, the websites of CNN and MSNBC are covered. Both media figure prominently in numerous studies of news, whether they were chosen for semantic analysis (e.g. Aday, 2010; Tian & Stewart, 2005) or for automatic content-analytical software testing (e.g. Nakamura & Kenada, 1997; Qi, Gu, Jiang, Chen, & Zhang, 2000). On both websites, the “Politics” sections are taken into account so as to keep the semantic focus on US domestic political matters. The US webpages’ layouts and multimodal structures are compared with BBC News, which is another common comparative choice, and with Al Jazeera International. To ensure the topical comparability, the “Americas” sections of both extra-US news outlets are considered, and only stories pertaining to US politics appear in the final sample.

The political news websites are the largest subsample in this empirical study. They also represent the most widespread genre of political communication: offering 24/7 updates and staffed by a host of professional reporters and technical personnel, modern news websites have the highest incentive to be at the helm of all information flows and design innovations. This has implications for the expectations and the actual findings of the ICON analyses conducted here. On the one hand, in terms of design and technical know-how, all websites under scrutiny are likely to display considerable similarities since they all strive towards the same standard of effective and up-to-date online communication. This trend will likely be reinforced by the similarity of content as well, since the new sample focuses on US news or news about that region in the case of BBC and Al Jazeera. This gives good grounds for speculations about the influence of content over communication structures and designs: Will the reporting on similar events overlap multi-modally across the different websites? If yes, what implications does this have for the field of multimodal political communication research?

On the other hand, mass media serve the interests of their stakeholders, in practice and most often also by design. Semblances of objectivity and visions of purely factual reporting are part of almost every mass medium’s public image, but any mass communication system is fraught with political and economic interdependencies (e.g. Hallin & Mancini, 2004) which exert influences on news content selection and presentation. Keeping this in mind enriches the above multimodal analysis and helps explain the similarities and differences that occur in reporting similar or identical events across different news media. This view also helps imbue the overall structures with additional meaning and enhances the interpretive powers of ICON beyond describing structures and functions.

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