Money Matters – a Cross-National Study of Economic Influences on TV News
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Zurich Open Repository and Archive University of Zurich Main Library Strickhofstrasse 39 CH-8057 Zurich www.zora.uzh.ch Year: 2010 Money Matters – A Cross-National Study of Economic Influences on TV News Nguyen Vu, Hong Nga Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-77675 Dissertation Published Version Originally published at: Nguyen Vu, Hong Nga. Money Matters – A Cross-National Study of Economic Influences on TV News. 2010, University of Zurich, Faculty of Arts. Money Matters – A Cross-‐National Study of Economic Influences on TV News Thesis presented to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Zurich for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Hong Nga Nguyen Vu from Germany Accepted in the spring semester 2010 on the recommendation of Prof. Dr. Frank Esser and Prof. Dr. Heinz Bonfadelli Zurich, October 2010 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my advisor Frank Esser for his trust, encouragement and advice throughout the years of my Ph.D. He is the most supportive advisor one could ever imagine and a great researcher from whom I have gladly learned to “go comparative.” Further, I would like to thank Thomas Hanitzsch, Michael Bauer and Heinz Bonfadelli for the excellent collaboration in the Foreign News on TV project. I am also grateful to Heinz Bonfadelli for agreeing to co‐examine my thesis. I am greatly indebted to all members of the Foreign News on TV project who have kindly given me permission to use their TV news content data for this thesis and who also helped me gather data on the TV system and TV channels in their countries. It was a pleasure working with them during the last two years and I would like to thank Abby Goodrum, Agnieszka Stepinska, Akiba Cohen, Alon Kraitzman, António Bélo, Constanza Mujica, Christine Heimprecht, David Weaver, Elizabeth Godó, Joel Silveira, Jürgen Wilke, Knut De Swert, Lars Willnat, Marco Mazzoni, Paolo Mancini, Thilo von Pape, Thorsten Quandt, Ruud Wouters, Tai‐Li Wang, Ven‐hwei Lo, and William Porath. The Swiss part of this international project was funded by the National Science Foundation that also funded my travels to various conferences. The Mentoring programme at the University of Zurich granted me a research stay at Fordham University, New York. I also wish to thank all past and present colleagues at the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich for their support and feedback, particularly my colleagues at the Division of International and Comparative Media Research. A thousand thanks go to my friend Kathi Sommer not only for proofreading my thesis and bravely struggling through my QCAs without a word of complaint but also for her incredible moral support throughout the last years. My Ph.D. years in Zurich would have been so much less fun without her. Words are not enough to express my deepest gratitude toward my boyfriend Jan Engelstädter. He was always there for me when I needed encouragement, intellectual input, or simply a break. I would not have got very far in my dissertation without his love and unconditional support. Abstract This dissertation examines how economic factors on the level of media organisations and on the level of media systems and media markets influence news content on TV channels. Using content analysis data from 22 TV channels in eleven countries, the study investigates whether TV channels subjected to high economic pressures display a lower news performance with regard to news topics, news diversity and sensationalist reporting. Results are obtained by fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, a method which provides a middle path between case‐oriented qualitative research and variable‐oriented quantitative approaches and is thus highly appropriate for the research goal and data base of this study. The main results show that economic pressure indeed exerts a negative influence on news performance. News performance of public service channels depends on the market environment that the channels operate in and on the extent of their dependency on advertising revenues: public service channels with comparatively high ratings (and thus high popularity among the audience) also display a higher news performance than public service channels in countries with a weak PSB presence. Compared with public service channels with a high advertising dependency, public service channels which derive their revenues mostly from license fees or state subsidies offer news that is characterized by topics with high social relevance and a low degree of sensationalism. In addition, the results suggest that a commercialized market environment has a negative influence on quantity of and diversity in foreign news coverage. Commercial ownership also has a negative influence on news performance; commercial TV channels tend to neglect topics of socially high relevance and to display a highly sensationalist style of reporting. Table of contents 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 7 2 Theoretical background ................................................................................................... 12 2.1 Commercialization of media ...................................................................................... 12 2.1.1 Communication research ................................................................................... 14 2.1.2 Media economics ............................................................................................... 18 2.1.3 Political economy ............................................................................................... 23 2.2 Consequences of commercialization ......................................................................... 27 2.2.1 Effects of media ownership ................................................................................ 28 2.2.2 Effects of market conditions .............................................................................. 37 2.2.3 Effects of cost minimization ............................................................................... 41 2.2.4 Effects of market orientation ............................................................................. 44 2.3 Summary of the literature review ............................................................................. 49 2.4 Multi‐level models of influences on media content ................................................. 50 3 Research design ................................................................................................................ 55 3.1 Economic influences .................................................................................................. 57 3.2 News performance .................................................................................................... 60 3.3 Country sample .......................................................................................................... 64 3.4 Research questions .................................................................................................... 67 4 Methodology .................................................................................................................... 71 4.1 Content analysis of TV news ...................................................................................... 71 4.2 Operationalization of news performance ................................................................. 74 4.2.1 Topic coverage ................................................................................................... 74 4.2.2 News diversity .................................................................................................... 76 1 4.2.3 Sensationalist reporting ..................................................................................... 80 4.3 Operationalization of economic influences ............................................................... 82 4.4 Functional equivalence in comparative research ...................................................... 86 4.5 Qualitative comparative analysis .............................................................................. 88 4.5.1 How does QCA work? ......................................................................................... 92 4.5.2 Assessment of sufficient causes ......................................................................... 93 4.5.3 Truth table in crisp set QCA................................................................................ 94 4.5.4 Consistency and coverage in crisp sets .............................................................. 97 4.5.5 Fuzzy sets .......................................................................................................... 100 4.5.6 Truth table in fuzzy set QCA ............................................................................. 102 4.5.7 Consistency and coverage in fuzzy sets ........................................................... 103 4.5.8 Limited diversity and counterfactual analysis .................................................. 105 4.5.9 Fuzzy set membership of economic influences as causal conditions .............. 107 5 Results ............................................................................................................................ 112 5.1 Economic influences on topic coverage in TV news ................................................ 112 5.1.1 Coverage of politics and economy ..................................................................