In Search of the Holy Grail of Journalism:
Tracking Journalistic Role Performance in Presidential News
Coverage
Cady Annette Rasmussen
Student ID number: 12846813
Master’s Thesis
Graduate School of Communication
Master’s programme Communication Science
Supervisor: Penny Sheets Thibaut
Date of completion: 29.05.2020
Word count: 7,475
Abstract
Scholars and journalists alike tend to refer to journalism’s important role in society. For many, the watch-dog role or fourth estate come to mind, although a number of roles have been conceptualized. This study explores the extent to which journalistic role performance, as conceptualized in literature, is measurable in U.S. presidential news content. Furthermore, the relationship between role performance factors such as time and public opinion toward the president are explored. Based on a longitudinal, quantitative content analysis of articles from the New York Times, this study finds that extant conceptual journalistic roles are not only difficult to measure in practice but also may not be fully functional as an explanatory tool. To open up the discussion about future research paths, new roles are proposed, which suggest additional nuance to the literature. Finally, the study also demonstrates that presidential reporting styles have changed signifi-cantly since the inauguration of Donald Trump.
Introduction
In journalism, two words have proven especially characteristic of the Trump presidency: “fake news”. Now, “fake news” is an accusation not just directed at troll factories, but also at mainstream leg-acy media such as New York Times or Washington Post. What has by now become quite a buzzword does more than simply highlight the President’s dissatisfaction with how the media portrays him. It has contributed to the questioning of the truthfulness of news outlets that have traditionally been considered trustworthy sources – even among the audience. In 2016, Gallup measured an all-time low in Ameri-cans’ trust in mass media, with only 32% declaring “a great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media (Swift, 2016). Although mostly fueled by Republican voters, this trend indicates that the term “fake news” has begun to affect general opinion. According to Lischka (2019), President Trump’s attacks
have now led one of the legacy news outlets, the New York Times, to use delegitimization methods to push back against “fake news” claims. What Lischka (2019) suggests, in other words, is that the outlet is changing its tone and voice to legitimize their role as the fourth estate.
It could also be argued that journalists are taking on an entirely different role for the sake of saving another. However, despite the concept’s long history, conclusive evidence of the existence of journalistic roles in news content is still lacking. Some scholars have attempted to define journalists’ roles in society (Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017; Hanitzsch & Vos, 2018; Mellado, 2015) and have further claimed that roles are dynamic and subject to change over time (Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017). But when it comes to measuring these roles in journalistic content, some have tried with varying levels of success. While some manage to find evidence of journalistic roles existing in reporting (Carpenter, Boehmer, & Fico, 2016; Eriksson & Östman, 2013; Mellado, Humanes, & Márquez-Ramírez, 2018; Scherr, Bachl, & de Vreese, 2019; Tandoc, Hellmueller, & Vos, 2013), others find little or inconclusive evidence of the roles journalists claim to fulfill in the content they produce (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014; van Da-len, de Vreese, & Albæk, 2012). The inconclusiveness of findings not only stems from differences in focus but also from differences in theoretical understanding. Some scholars believe that roles ought to be measured as a product of journalistic beliefs (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014; Scherr et al., 2019; Tan-doc, et al., 2013; van Dalen et al., 2012), while others believe that roles are a byproduct of other factors (e.g. Carpenter et al., 2016; Eriksson & Östman, 2013; Mellado et al., 2018).
Furthermore, some academic research has focused on only a couple or a handful of roles (e.g. Carpenter et al., 2016; Eriksson & Östman, 2013; Mellado & Van Dalen, 2017; Scherr et al., 2019) cre-ating further variations in approach. As a result, in the quest to find and further understand these roles as they appear in content, it is often taken for granted that these roles do in fact exist in reporting and that they are significantly distinct to measure and discuss as separate phenomena. A vital step seems to
be missing in our search for roles: determining whether we can or even should be measuring them at all. Thus, to determine whether journalistic roles truly are affected by outer factors such as presidential behavior, this paper takes a necessary step back and first seeks to answer the following research ques-tion:
RQ: To what extent are journalistic roles observable in journalistic news content?
Journalistic Roles in Theory
Journalistic roles are rather elusive phenomena in communications research. While journalists may like to boast about their important role as the fourth estate, scholars may prefer to add more roles to better represent the plethora of media systems in existence. However, when it comes to measuring the roles in news content, many are left scratching their heads. Scholars tend to agree, in theory, on how these roles are created and how they should appear. It is, for example, argued that journalistic roles are “…discursive constructions of journalism’s institutional identity…” and “…a struggle over discur-sive authority in conversations about the locus of journalism in society” (Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017, p. 116). Furthermore, they “…set the parameters of what is “appropriate” or “acceptable” action in a given context” (Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017, p. 120). Therefore, roles are more than labels for journalists and their work. They shape how we think about journalism and act as a bargaining tool for journalists who seek to legitimize their work, as also suggested by Lischka (2019) who found that when New York Times journalists were challenged on the legitimacy of their work, one of the argumentation techniques included an emphasis on the importance of their role in society.
Within the world of academia, it is common to place these roles along three dimensions (van Dalen et al., 2012; Mellado, 2015). Although they may differ in name, the three dimensions tend to concern the journalist’s attitude toward those in power, the journalist’s approach to its audience, and how the journalist approaches his/her own place in reporting. The deferential-critical dimension con-cerns how much or how little critique of those in power is offered by the news. While the more defer-ential roles tend to be more supportive of power holders, the critical roles tend to lean in the opposite direction (Mellado, 2015). In terms of the journalist’s approach to its audience, roles range from con-sidering their audience a consumer (in need of entertaining) to concon-sidering them a citizen (in need of knowledge) (Mellado, 2015). Finally, how a journalist considers their own place in reporting will deter-mine whether they are more likely to simply “pass on” information or provide their own knowledge and/or opinions to accompany it (Mellado, 2015). These dimensions, however, mainly exist in theory and conceptualizations of journalistic roles. Measuring this empirically is another challenge entirely.
Despite a large body of research and handful of attempts to properly conceptualize journalistic roles, a universal set of clearly defined roles is still sought after (Mellado, 2015; Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017; Hanitzsch & Vos, 2018). The challenge consists not only in a disagreement about how to define the different roles, but also the simple fact that scholars disagree on just how many there are. Mellado (2015), for example, offers a set of six roles, while Hanitzsch and Vos (2018) offer no fewer than 18. Although these all represent steps in the right direction, explicating journalistic roles often remains at the conceptual level, thus leaving future researchers with very little guidance as to what is specifically to be expected in news content as a result of these roles, let alone measured. Another source of disa-greement is exactly how to measure roles. It has been argued that roles can appear both as conceptions and performances (Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017; Hellmueller & Mellado, 2015). Although these two levels
are interrelated, it is also argued that they should be considered vastly different (Hellmueller & Mel-lado, 2015).
Journalistic Roles in Practice
Despite the lack of a universal method to measure the existence of roles in content, attempts to do just that have still been made. These attempts have thus far been scattered in approach and focus and have yielded varying results. A popular area of research has sought to explore the relationship between role conception and role performance (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014; Scherr et al., 2019; Tandoc et al., 2013; van Dalen et al., 2012). Tandoc et al. (2013) found some evidence of a relationship in their mixed-methods study, by combining a web-based survey and a content analysis of the survey respond-ents’ work. The authors found that, while not a strong predictor, a mobilizer role conception, which in-cludes concern about affecting the reader’s political attitudes and attempting to motivate the audience to participate in society, predicted a mobilizer role enactment as well as an adversarial role enactment, which mostly includes critique and skepticism (Tandoc et al., 2013).
A similar study conducted by van Dalen et al. (2012) yielded similar results. In this four-coun-try European mixed-methods study, a survey was conducted among political journalists followed by a content analysis of political news coverage. While results were mixed, some evidence was found in certain countries for links between role perception and enactment. Likewise, Scherr et al. (2019), using latent class analysis, found that journalists will “…combine different news elements that reflect their professional roles” (p. 1647). Furthermore, although not specifically focused on role enactment, Patter-son and Donsbach (1996) also found links between perPatter-sonal beliefs of journalists – in this case partisan
orientations – and the content they create, thus indicating that individual-level factors – such as concep-tions and beliefs – (Reese & Shoemaker, 2016) can have an influence on news content.
On the other hand, other scholars have found little evidence of the individual level, including role conceptions, having an impact. Mellado and Van Dalen (2014), for example, also conducting a mixed-methods study, found that significant gaps exist between journalistic conceptions and reporting practice in Chilean news. It has similarly been argued from a conceptual standpoint by Hellmueller and Mellado (2015) that journalistic role performance is not exclusively linked to the individual level but is also influenced by higher levels in the hierarchy of influences (Reese & Shoemaker, 2016). Part of the differences in findings can be explained by varying methods. Scherr et al. (2019), for example, use la-tent class analysis and, thus, do not compare conceptions and performance directly. However, more in-teresting is the fact that studies using the same methodological combination of survey and content anal-ysis (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2014; Tandoc et al., 2013; van Dalen et al., 2012) still end up with vastly different findings. However, the problem may not be the method itself, but rather that we are assuming too much if we expect to find a relationship between two concepts before we have accurately deter-mined how to measure them individually.
A Universal Solution
As argued above, although scholars agree that the field lacks consensus, consensus has still not been reached. Therefore, a new and more concise definition of each journalistic role is suggested in Ta-ble 1.1 to not only answer the research question above but also, in the future, guarantee a more stream-lined method for research. These role definitions are not entirely new, but ought to be considered a syn-thesis of especially Hanitzsch and Vos’ (2018) and Mellado’s (2015) works.
Table 1.1
Conceptualization of Journalistic Roles Governmen-tal mouthpiece Audience advocate Watchdog Dissemina-tor Context provider Concerned citizen Infotainer Self- legitimizer Displays support for powerhold-ers and po-litical deci-sions made by the gov-ernment. Speaks for the people and is con-cerned with giving voice to those who otherwise would not have one as well as help-ing the pub-lic get in-volved in societal matters. Actively searches for political wrongdoings and misuse of power and seeks to hold the powerful accountable. Sees it as his/her duty to report news with as little per-sonal opin-ion as possi-ble and as quickly as possible. Considers it their duty to give the reader a broader and more in-depth under-standing of the individ-ual news items. Plays an ac-tive role in the public sphere by delivering news rele-vant to the individual and by voic-ing journal-istic opin-ion. Is focused on deliver-ing news that enter-tains the au-dience by mainly re-porting on the personal lives of the powerful as well as making use of emotions. Out of con-cern for the survival of the practice, attempts to explain to audiences the im-portant role journalism plays in so-ciety.
The detailed operationalization and coding of each role will be further discussed in the methods section and in the codebook (Appendix A). Furthermore, based on the changing political rhetoric in the U.S., as described by Lischka (2019), a new self-legitimizer role has been developed. Thus, starting from the bottom, the current research seeks to explore whether journalistic roles really are as distinct as we would conceptually expect in news content.
RQ1: To what extent are the performances of different journalistic roles in news content
dis-tinct?
Outer Influences on Role Performance
Another popular, albeit more scattered, area of research is examining the relationship between journalistic role performance and factors at higher levels of influence (Reese & Shoemaker, 2016).
Much like research focused on the conception-performance relationship, this area of research tends to yield varying results. Carpenter et al. (2016) found that, in the U.S., organizational factors such as em-ployees’ workloads as well as the organization’s economic model significantly affect the role perfor-mance of journalists. Another factor that has received some attention is time. Eriksson and Östman (2013), for example, found that journalistic role performance (in the form of aggressiveness) is likely to change between the time of interviewing sources and writing the final news piece. Observing role per-formance over a slightly longer timespan, Clayman, Heritage, Elliott and McDonald (2007) discovered that short-term differences can even be observed between presidential terms, as journalists attending presidential news conferences in the U.S. were more aggressive in their questioning during a presi-dent’s second term compared to their first. However, role performance does not necessarily change consistently or continuously over time, but rather tends to fluctuate in intensity or salience (Mellado & Van Dalen, 2017). Comparing journalistic role performance now (during the Trump presidency) to role performance in the past will thus require more conclusive research tracking changes over several dec-ades.
RQ2: To what extent does the performance of different journalistic roles in news content
change over time?
Interestingly, while many scholars have been occupied with determining the possible factors influencing journalistic roles, few have investigated the influence of the topic itself on coverage. Look-ing specifically at U.S. presidential news conferences, Clayman et al. (2007), found that presidential popularity had no significant effect on aggressiveness of questioning. However, as demonstrated by Eriksson and Östman (2013), how journalists question sources seems to be a poor indicator of journal-istic role performance in news content. And although they argue that presidential characterjournal-istics do not affect questioning of sources, Clayman et al. (2007) did find evidence that the internal state of the
country can. In other words, a negative economic situation is related to more aggressive questioning by journalists, thus suggesting some links between politics and political news content. Unfortunately, the field still lacks studies directly exploring how the main subject of reporting (e.g., the president) specifi-cally affects news content written about it.
RQ3: To what extent do the trustworthiness and approval ratings of U.S. presidents explain the
salience of different journalistic role performances in American presidential news coverage over the past five decades?
Finally, it would seem, as suggested by Lischka (2019), that the behavior and characteristics of the current U.S. president have resulted in a shift in the style of presidential reporting. More concretely, what could be considered a new self-legitimizer role has appeared because of the new president. It is, therefore, expected that:
H1: The role of self-legitimizer is more salient during the presidency of Donald Trump than
dur-ing previous presidencies.
Methodology
As suggested by Hanitzsch and Vos (2017), academic research on journalistic roles has, thus far, mostly been of an inductive or descriptive nature and has lacked a streamlined approach. Therefore, a quantitative content analysiswas chosen, due to its ability to ensure higher levels of replicability and quantification (Riffe, Lacy, Watson, & Fico, 2019).More specifically, the research question was inves-tigated through the quantitative content analysis of presidential coverage by the New York Times over the past 50 years, since the beginning of Richard Nixon’s first presidential term. Given the study’s
exploratory nature, the goal was to balance this longitudinal focus with a manageable and comparable sample across presidential terms, resulting in a sample of N = 450 articles, or 50 per presidential first term.
Sampling
Due to different coverage among historical databases, half of the sample was collected from the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database and the other half through NexisUni. Articles were collected via stratified random sampling. In the ProQuest database, articles for years 1969-1992 were retrieved using the search term “President [last name]” within the timeframe from the date of the given presi-dent’s inauguration up to and including the day before the inauguration for the next presidential term. Only articles where the president was mentioned in either the headline, subheadline and/or first three lines of the body were included in the sample. NexisUni allowed for a more specified search term in years 1993-2020, allowing the researcher to automatically eliminate articles where the president is not mentioned in the headline or lead. This was done by using the search term “President [last name]” AND HLEAD(“President” OR “[last name]”). The altered search term allowed for elimination of irrel-evant articles while still accounting for the many forms in which the president could appear in the cle (i.e., “Reagan-administration”, “Mr. Clinton”, etc.). Within each set of results per first term, 50 arti-cles were randomly selected by collecting every nth article. The stratified sample was chosen to enable more valid comparisons between presidents. Only news articles, editorials and op-ed articles (that were (co-)written by a New York Times writer) were chosen, thus excluding letters to the editor, book re-views, news bulletins, etc., to ensure that the voices and choices of the journalists themselves would be the focus of the research.
Coding
As previously mentioned, due to the descriptive nature of prior research, scholarship still lacks a definitive roadmap for deductively measuring journalistic role performance. For the sake of the current and future research, a deductive codebook was developed that operationalizes each of the eight journal-istic role performances mentioned previously using two to four indicators per role. The operationaliza-tion can be seen in Table 2.1. The unit of data collecoperationaliza-tion was the entire article, excluding images and their corresponding descriptions.
Table 2.1
Operationalization of Journalistic Roles Governmen-tal mouth-piece Audience advocate Watchdog Dissemina-tor Context pro-vider Concerned citizen Infotainer Self-legiti-mizer 1. Defense of the presi- dent/admin-istration 2. Reliance on official White House infor-mation 3. Strict ad-herence to official statements 4. Creating a positive im-age of the president/ad-ministration 1. Support-ing civilian groups 2. Sparking audience discussion 3. Getting the audi-ence in-volved 1. Independ-ent investi-gation 2. Fact-checking 3. Scrutiniz-ing presi-dential mis-conduct 4. Question-ing the pres-ident 1. Adher-ence to press mate-rial 2. Recy-cling con-tent 1. Providing larger per-spective 2. Explaining causes/out-comes 3. Providing background knowledge 1. Change advocate 2. Informing about policy impact and placing blame 3. Suggest-ing solutions to con- flict/disa-greements 1. Personal-ization 2. Focus on private life 3. Sensa-tionalism 4. Emo-tions 1. Anger or displeasure 2. Humor 3. Highlight-ing im-portance of journalism
Each indicator was measured on a 0-3 scale where 0 is “not present at all” in the article, 1 is “briefly present”, 2 is “moderately present”, and 3 is “heavily present” throughout the article. For more details on the codebook, see Appendix A.
Two indicators were dropped from analysis due to a lack of observations in the dataset: 1) Highlighting importance of journalism, and 2) Strict adherence to press material. Furthermore, three more indicators were dropped after conducting the intercoder reliability test with a second coder, who coded a randomly selected 10% of the sample (N = 45 articles). Using Krippendorff’s Alpha, 1) Ques-tioning the president (α = .564), 2) Providing larger perspective (α = .491), and 3) Emotions (α = .544) all failed to achieve sufficient reliability and were dropped from analysis. Two variables were still in-cluded despite an α < .700 but are to be interpreted with caution moving forward. These are Creating a positive image of the president (α = .659) and Recycling content (α = .632). For all remaining 19 varia-bles, intercoder reliability was between α = .775 and α = 1.
Finally, presidential trustworthiness and approval ratings were operationalized using Gallup opinion poll results, as reported on the firm’s website (see Appendix B for an overview of scores for each president). The approval ratings for President Donald Trump are, according to Gallup, “…based on Gallup Daily tracking averages for President Donald trump in 2017 and 2018, and periodic multiday polls for Trump starting in 2019” (“Presidential approval ratings -- Donald Trump”, n.d.). The term av-erages1 for each president dating back to Harry Truman are likewise listed (“Presidential approval rat-ings – Gallup historical statistics and trends”, n.d.). Presidential trustworthiness has been measured by Gallup since 19952 by asking the question “Thinking about the following characteristics and qualities,
1 Term averages were chosen due to the small N of 50 articles for each president.
please say whether you think each applies or doesn’t apply to [president’s name]. How about…” and then listing characteristics in random order (“Presidential ratings”, n.d.). Specifically, presidential trust-worthiness was operationalized by calculating the average of the results listed for each presidential term for “honest and trustworthy” 3.
Results
RQ1 asked: To what extent are the performances of different journalistic roles in news content distinct? To answer this question, the overall occurrences of each role were first analyzed, followed by a Pearson correlation analysis to determine whether the roles really are as distinct as we would expect. Recall that a total of N = 450 articles was coded for each role conception on a 0-3 scale. Due to a very small presence of each journalistic role, however, the values 1-3 were collapsed to 1 (i.e. “Present”), while 0 still translates to “Not present”. All following analyses were thus conducted using the recom-puted versions of the journalistic roles4. Chart 3.1 shows the frequency of each role in presidential re-porting and reveals that all roles are largely absent in the sample apart from the governmental mouth-piece role which appears in just over a third (n = 167) of the articles. This suggests that the roles con-ceptualized in literature are, generally, rather difficult to identify in presidential news coverage.
3 Averages calculated based on information available in March 2020.
4 An exception was made for a factor analysis presented later, which was conducted using the original 0-3 scale. Factor
analyses were conducted using both scales; however, the factors produced by the analysis using the 0-3 scale accounted for a larger percent of variance. Furthermore, a large number of factors remained almost or entirely the same regardless of scale. However, future research should further investigate possible differences.
Chart 3.1
Presence of Journalistic Roles in Presidential News Coverage (%)
Note: N = 450.
To determine the extent to which the roles are distinct, a Pearson correlation analysis was per-formed with all eight roles. (See Appendix C for a full correlation matrix). Rather surprisingly, signifi-cant positive correlations were found between the infotainer role and two others: the governmental mouthpiece, r(448) = .15, p = .002, and the disseminator, r(448) = .13, p = .008. Furthermore, a signifi-cant negative correlation was found between the infotainer and the context provider role, r(448) = -.12, p = .013. While this may be an indication that the roles are somewhat distinct, the overall small number of observations for each role suggests that they may be harder to measure than we might theoretically assume. N = 167 N = 80 N = 71 N = 69 N = 52 N = 52 N = 22 N = 5 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Per ce n t Roles
RQ2 asked: To what extent does the performance of different journalistic roles in news content change over time? To answer this question, it is first worth looking at each role’s mean score across the different presidents. Table 3.1 shows some interesting differences in mean scores for especially five roles.
Table 3.1
Descriptives: Mean Scores Across Presidencies & Results of One-Way ANOVA
President GM AA D W CP CC I SL ANOVA-results Nixon .3000 .0200 .0400 .0600 .0800 .1800 .0600 .0200 GM * President df = 8, 441 F = .383 p = .930 Ford .4200 .0600 .1200 .0400 .0600 .1600 .2600 .0200 AA * President df = 8, 441 F = 2.495 p = .012 Carter .3400 .0600 .1800 .0600 .1800 .1800 .1400 .0000 D * President df = 8, 441 F = 3.434 p = .001 Reagan .4000 .0600 .0800 .0200 .1800 .1200 .1600 .0000 W * President df = 8, 441 F = 6.756 p = .000 Bush Sr. .4000 .1400 .2200 .0000 .1000 .1000 .2200 .0000 CP * President df = 8, 441 F = 1.728 p = .090 Clinton .4000 .1400 .1000 .0000 .2200 .0800 .1800 .0200 CC * President df = 8, 441 F = 1.164 p = .319 Bush Jr. .3600 .1400 .2600 .0200 .2600 .0400 .1600 .0000 I * President df = 8, 441 F = 1.512 p = .150 Obama .3200 .2400 .3200 .0000 .1400 .1000 .1000 .0000 SL * President df = 8, 441 F = .958 p = .469 Trump .4000 .1800 .2800 .2400 .2000 .0800 .1000 .0400 Total .3711 .1156 .1778 .0489 .1578 .1156 .1533 .0111
Note: GM: Governmental mouthpiece. AA: Audience advocate. D: Disseminator. W: Watchdog. CP: Context provider. CC: Concerned citizen. I: Infotainer. SL: Self-legitimizer.
For the audience advocate and disseminator roles, large differences appear between Nixon and Obama, with both roles showing much lower mean scores during the Nixon presidency compared to the Obama presidency. Interestingly, the watchdog role scores similar means during all presidencies except for during Trump’s incumbency where the role comparatively scored much higher. The context pro-vider role showed slightly more differences across presidencies, where it scored low during Nixon and Ford and comparatively much higher during Bush Jr. Finally, the concerned citizen role seemed to have experienced a low during Bush Jr. compared to during other presidencies.
A one-way ANOVA5 and Tukey HSD post-hoc test revealed similar trends. Results of the ANOVA can also be found in Table 3.1. The analysis revealed that there is a significant difference be-tween presidencies for the presence of the audience advocate role, F(8,441) = 2.50, p = .012, the dis-seminator role, F(8,441) = 3.43, p = .001, and the watchdog role, F(8,441) = 6.76, p < .001. Further-more, results of a Tukey HSD post-hoc test revealed significant mean differences corresponding with most of the above-mentioned trends. For the audience advocate role, a significant difference was found between Nixon and Obama (p = .016), while significant differences for the disseminator role were found between Nixon and Obama (p = .007), Nixon and Trump (p = .039), and Reagan and Obama (p = .039). Finally, significant differences were found between Trump and all of his predecessors for the watchdog role: Trump and Nixon (p = .001), Trump and Ford (p < .001), Trump and Carter (p = .001), Trump and Reagan (p < .001), Trump and Bush Sr. (p < .001), Trump and Clinton (p < .001), Trump
5 A Levene’s test revealed that all but one role (the governmental mouthpiece) did not meet the assumption of equal
and Bush Jr. (p < .001), and Trump and Obama (p < .001). However, only the watchdog role showed an effect size above .06 (η2 = .11), thus indicating a medium effect size (van den Berg, 2018a).
Furthermore, another Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to determine whether any roles show a significant relationship with year of publication. Five roles showed significant correlations with year – though relatively small, that these are significant is remarkable, considering the very small N for each year. Significant positive correlations were found between year and the audience advocate role, r(448) = .19, p < .001, the disseminator role, r(448) = .21, p < .001, the watchdog role, r(448) = .13, p = .006, and the context provider role, r(448) = .09, p = .048. Furthermore, a significant negative relationship was found between year and the concerned citizen role, r(448) = -.11, p = .024. In other words, over time, the concerned citizen role has become less present, while the audience advocate, dis-seminator, watchdog, and context provider roles have all become increasingly present in presidential news content. Worth noting is that these trends appear to be driven by the outliers described in the sec-tion above – so this is perhaps more about particular presidents than global over time trends. More at-tention to this will be paid in the discussion section. Full correlations can be found in Appendix D.
Presidency and Role Performance
RQ3 asked: To what extent do the trustworthiness and approval ratings of U.S. presidents ex-plain the salience of different journalistic role performances in American presidential news coverage over the past five decades?To answer this question, another Pearson correlation analysis was con-ducted to test the relationship between approval rating and trustworthiness on the one hand and the presence of the eight journalistic roles on the other. A full correlation matrix can be found in Appendix E. The analysis revealed that only the watchdog role showed a significant correlation with either
approval rating, r(448) = -.20, p < .001, or trustworthiness, r(448) = -.30, p < .001, interestingly indi-cating that the watchdog role’s presence decreases when approval rating and/or trustworthiness in-crease.
As mentioned earlier, literature suggests that there could be a shift in how journalists report on presidential affairs after the inauguration of Donald Trump (Lischka, 2019). It was, therefore, hypothe-sized that (H1): The role of self-legitimizer is more salient during the presidency of Donald Trump than during previous presidencies. However, as discussed above, larger differences seem to appear for the watchdog role when comparing presence across presidencies. As a result, an independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare the watchdog and the self-legitimizer roles between Trump and all other presidencies, to identify any significant differences in role presence. Unsurprisingly, a significant dif-ference in the presence of the watchdog role was found between non-Trump presidencies (M = [0.03], SD = [0.16]) and the Trump presidency (M = [0.24], SD = [0.43]), t(449) = -3.50, p = .001. However, no significant difference was found between Trump (M = [0.04], SD = [0.20]) and non-Trump presi-dencies (M = [0.01], SD = [0.09]) for the self-legitimizer role, t(449) = -1.15, p = .257. Hypothesis H1 is, therefore, rejected.
Possible Changes to Future Conceptualization
As mentioned above, although largely distinct, the journalistic roles that we would conceptually expect to see in journalistic content were difficult to detect. To further explore how reality matches (or does not match) theory, a factor analysis was conducted, using Varimax rotation. This type of factor analysis was chosen because it provides an orthogonal rotation which “…produces factors that are un-related to or independent of one another…” (Bryman & Cramer, 2012, p. 327). As we expect,
conceptually, that these roles are distinct, the Varimax rotation was considered the most fitting. In con-trast to the above analyses, the factor analysis was performed using the 0-3 scale for each indicator for the sake of exploration. The analysis produced 11 factors (as opposed to the conceptually defined eight roles) with Eigenvalues above 1, which collectively account for 62.87% of variance. Any variables with factor loadings below 0.4 were excluded (van den Berg, 2018b). As presented in Table 3.2, the roles we might expect to see, do not appear conclusively clear-cut.
Some indicators load together, as expected in theory: this is the case for scrutinizing presiden-tial misconduct and independent investigation from the watchdog role. Anger or displeasure and humor from the self-legitimizer role, likewise, load together. Finally, the context provider role is partly repre-sented by providing background knowledge and explains causes/outcomes loading together, while reli-ance on WH-information and strict adherence to official statements load together, partly forming the governmental mouthpiece role. However, some rather surprising combinations appear that would sug-gest that these roles are not entirely set in stone – at least not in the longitudinal sample of coverage coded here. For example, the fact-checking variable now appears as a factor on its own despite expecta-tions of it loading with the remaining indicators in the watchdog role. This is surprising considering that the watchdog role is one that holds the powerful accountable. Traditionally this would include holding them accountable for their actions as well as their words. Furthermore, focus on private life and personalization, which both belong in the infotainer role, now also load with the recycling content indi-cator, while sensationalism is loading on a factor (mostly) on its own with a weaker secondary factor loading of recycling content. Finally, defense of the president similarly loads on its own factor rather than loading with other indicators from the governmental mouthpiece role.
Table 3.2
Factor Analysis: Journalistic Roles
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Focus on private life7 .720
Recycling content4 .599 .427
Personalization7 .531
Scrutinizing presidential miscon-duct3 .797 Independent investigation3 .605 Anger or displeasure8 .764 Humor8 .723 Change advocate6 .786
Supports civilian groups2 .628
Providing background knowledge5 .743
Explains causes/outcomes5 .726
Defense of the president1 .791
Getting the audience involved2 .746
Suggests solutions to conflict/disa-greements6
.609
Strict adherence to official state-ments1
.709
Reliance on WH-information1 .676
Informs about policy impact and places blame6
.855
Sparking audience discussion2 .442
Fact-checking3 .867
Creating a positive image of the president1
Sensationalism7 .787
Notes: The raised numbers by the name of each variable represents how they were conceptually expected to load on factors, based on literature.
1: Governmental mouthpiece. 2: Audience advocate. 3: Watchdog. 4: Disseminator. 5: Context provider. 6: Concerned citizen. 7: Infotainer. 8: Self-legitimizer.
This analysis, combined with the relatively mixed findings earlier, suggests that it may be nec-essary to rethink our conceptualization of journalistic roles. It is arguably necnec-essary to include entirely new subdimensions to these new roles, but for the sake of exploration, the new roles manufactured in the factor analysis above were named and run through similar tests to the ones conducted above (again collapsed to the 0-1 scale, due to limited presence in the dataset). The roles were named and computed as followed:
➢ The Entertainer (consisting of focus on private life, recycling content, and personalization) ➢ The Watchdog II (consisting of scrutinizing presidential misconduct and independent
investiga-tion)
➢ The Profession Protector (consisting of anger or displeasure and humor)
➢ The Bleeding Heart (consisting of change advocate and supports civilian groups)
➢ The Elaborator (consisting of provides background knowledge and explains causes/outcomes) ➢ The Defender (consisting of defense of the president)
➢ The Problem-solver (consisting of getting the audience involved and suggesting solutions to conflict/disagreement)
➢ The Mouthpiece (consisting of strict adherence to official statements and reliance on WH-info) ➢ The Mediator (consisting of informing about policy impact/placing blame and sparking
audi-ence discussion)
➢ The Fact-checker (consisting of fact-checking) ➢ The Sensationalist (consisting of sensationalism)
Testing New Roles
First, a Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to test the relationship between year and presence of the new roles – the results of which can be found in detail in Appendix F. Four roles show significant, positive correlations with year: the entertainer role, r(448) = .12, p = .012, the bleeding heart role, r(448) = .10, p = .028, the elaborator role, r(448) = .09, p = .048, and the fact-checker role, r(448) = .25, p < .001. Especially the fact-checker role has become more present over time. Furthermore, a significant negative correlation was found between year and the problemsolver role, r(448) = -.14, p = .003. Interestingly, all roles showing significant correlations contain elements of the conceptual roles that showed significant correlations in the analysis conducted earlier. As a reminder, the concep-tual roles that showed significant correlations with year were audience advocate, disseminator, watch-dog, context provider, and concerned citizen. Furthermore, the fact-checker role showed stronger corre-lations with time compared to the conceptual watchdog role. This suggests that while the roles may measure some form of reality, they may require more nuancing.
A Pearson correlation analysis was also conducted to determine the relationship between ap-proval rating and trustworthiness on the one hand and the presence of the empirical roles on the other; the results of which can be found in Appendix G. A significant negative correlation was found between the factchecker role and approval rating, r(448) = .20, p < .001, as well as trustworthiness, r(448) = -.25, p < .001. Furthermore, a slightly weaker negative correlation was found between the watchdog II role and trustworthiness, r(448) = -.16, p = .021. Again, the result of this analysis showed a similarity between the results of the conceptual role correlation and the empirical role correlation. To be sure, in the correlation analysis between conceptual role presence and approval rating and trustworthiness, the watchdog role was the only one with a significant correlation. Now, the fact-checker, which consists of
a sub-element of the old watchdog role, shows up as the strongest correlation. This further supports the idea that the conceptual roles may require updating to reflect (at least) how presidential news coverage plays out.
The new roles were also tested for differences between presidencies. After a Levene’s test, only the defender role proved to live up to the assumption of homogeneity of variance. Thus, results of a one-way ANOVA are to be interpreted with caution. Significant differences in role presence between presidencies appear for the fact-checker role, F(8,441) = 9.35, p < .001, and the sensationalist role, F(8,441) = 2.08, p = .037. When testing for η2, effect size proved large (van den Berg, 2018a) for one of the empirical roles. The fact-checker role showed an η2 = .145. A Tukey HSD post-hoc test revealed that significant differences in role presence only existed for one role – the fact-checker. Significant dif-ferences were found between Trump and all eight of his predecessors (p < .001).
To account for the violation of the assumption of homogeneity of variance (and cautious ANOVA-results), and in order to compare Trump to all other presidents, an independent-samples t-test was also conducted with all 11 roles. Interestingly, three roles showed signs of their presence being sig-nificantly different during the Trump presidency compared to non-Trump presidencies. Unsurprising is the significant difference in the presence of the fact-checker role between the Trump presidency (M = [0.18], SD = [0.39]) and non-Trump presidencies (M = [0.00], SD = [0.05]), t(449) = -3.23, p = .002. More surprising, however, is the significant difference in the presence of the sensationalist role be-tween the Trump presidency (M = [0.00], SD = [0.00]) and non-Trump presidencies (M = [0.02], SD = [0.15]), t(449) = 3.03, p = .003. The same goes for the significant difference in the presence of the problem-solver role between the Trump presidency (M = [0.00], SD = [0.00]) and non-Trump presiden-cies (M = [0.05], SD = [0.22]), t(449) = 4.70, p < .001. This indicates that, although there may not be
many significant differences in role presence from one presidency to the next, there certainly are differ-ences in how journalists report about Donald Trump and any other president from the past 50 years. Furthermore, these findings show that the empirical roles could offer some nuance to analysis. How-ever, more research is required to properly determine how we, in the future, ought to consider updating the conceptual roles.
Discussion
This paper sought to answer the research question: To what extent are journalistic roles observ-able in journalistic news content? Furthermore, it also aimed to explore possible factors influencing role performance, including time and presidential characteristics. Overall, the results were mixed. While the conceptual roles, indeed, were observable, they were largely absent in the longitudinal sam-ple. They were, however, mostly distinct with only the infotainer role overlapping with other roles. This lends some support to the original conceptualizations of journalistic roles – especially those pro-duced by Hanitzsch and Vos (2018) and Mellado (2015).Furthermore, all outer factors did correlate with at least one journalistic role; however, the correlations were more likely a result of the particular president rather than other factors. This was further supported by the significant difference in reporting style between the Trump presidency and all other presidents. However, these differences did not appear as expected based on findings by Lischka (2019). Finally, findings from a comparison of the concep-tual roles and roles derived from a factor analysis suggested that an update of the concepconcep-tual roles may be needed in the future.
Some findings were particularly unexpected and deserve further investigation. Firstly, it is inter-esting that the conceptual infotainer role is the only one to overlap with other roles. And even more in-teresting is the fact that it overlaps specifically with the governmental mouthpiece and disseminator roles. These findings could be explained by the nature of politics as well as the mediatization of it. Serazio (2018) argues that politicians and their communications teams, in order to compete with televi-sion entertainment and pop culture in general, have made it their goal to make politics entertaining for the average voter by, for example, making appearances on late-night talk shows and doing magazine interviews. If official political messages are served in easy-to-digest bites, it is unsurprising that the in-fotainer would overlap with especially the governmental mouthpiece, which relies heavily on official messages in unfiltered form. Furthermore, it is unsurprising that the infotainer and disseminator roles overlap since the disseminator relies not only on quotes from other news media but also on recycled material from late night interviews and other entertainment media.
Also interesting is the relationship between the conceptual roles and time. The increasing dis-seminator role is perhaps unsurprising. As reporters are expected to produce more content in less time due to shrinking funds for newsrooms (Lewis, Williams, & Franklin, 2008), it is expected that increas-ing amounts of content are recycled from other sources. However, contrary to this trend, an increase in the context provider role over time was also found. This could arguably be a result of the time saved on recycling some content, thus allowing journalists to devote more time to providing context in other arti-cles, although research including interviews with journalists would have to verify this theory. Interest-ingly, and contrary to findings by Mellado and Van Dalen (2017), the audience advocate has become more present over time. At the same time, the concerned citizen has become less so. One explanation for these contradicting trends could be that the audience advocate, which has increased, is mostly con-cerned with giving voice to citizens, while the concon-cerned citizen speaks on behalf of citizens. For
journalists, whose profession rests on an assumption of neutrality (Lichtenberg, 1990), it is conceivable that the audience advocate is the more popular role as it better allows journalists to remain more neutral while letting citizens speak for themselves.
Another role worth more attention is the conceptual watchdog role and empirical fact-checker role, which correlated both with time, approval rating, and trustworthiness. As argued above, this seems to stem from a significant difference between reporting during the Trump presidency and report-ing durreport-ing his predecessors. This shift in reportreport-ing style could be a result of Trump havreport-ing the lowest average approval rating and trustworthiness score during his first term compared to his predecessors (see Appendix B), as indicated by the correlation analyses above. However, other factors could be driv-ing this as well, such as the prestige assumed to stem from fact-checkdriv-ing. Accorddriv-ing to Graves, Nyhan, and Reifler (2016), journalists are more likely to produce fact-checking coverage if they also believe that producing such coverage leads to journalistic status. For an outlet such as the New York Times, which has long considered itself the “newspaper of record” (Barkin & Levy, 1983, p. 220), and still to this day considers independence, integrity and excellence cornerstones of the organizational spirit (“Mission and values”, n.d.), it is unsurprising that fact-checking would naturally be considered an in-creasingly important duty.
Finally, worth mentioning is the differences found between the conceptual roles and empirically derived roles. For example, the fact that recycling content were to load with focus on private life and personalization while sensationalism loads on its own factor is rather surprising and suggests that the conceptual roles are not as accurate as we might have hoped. These findings could partly be explained by the fact that the New York Times holds itself at such high esteem (Barkin & Levy, 1983, p. 220), thus suggesting that the infotainment style of reporting may not be of greatest priority. However,
recycling from other outlets might just explain the use of entertaining content, as New York Times re-porters themselves are not directly connecting their bylines to such content. However, this does not ex-plain why the sensationalism indicator appeared as a factor of its own. An explanation may be that sen-sationalism (as operationalized in this research) is reliant on the occurrence of very specific events, such as sexual misconduct, thus possibly resulting in it loading independently from the other indicators.
This study is limited not only by the choice of only one news outlet but also the relatively small N for each presidency. A larger sample size as well as the inclusion of a larger number of more diverse media outlets would be necessary to strengthen the findings made here. Furthermore, future studies ought to conduct similar research on non-political news coverage to determine whether similar trends appear across journalistic beats. Finally, more inductive research could aid future work in updating the current conceptual roles. This study has, however, demonstrated that, for the measurement of role per-formance in presidential news coverage, the conceptual roles could be in need of an update as well as offered the first tentative suggestions to how such an update could be conceived.
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Appendix A: Codebook
PART I – INTRODUCTION
This study seeks to explore to what extent journalistic roles are observable in presidential news content, as well as how role performance is affected by other factors such as time and presidential characteris-tics. Below, you will be asked to code different articles from the New York Times for the presence of different journalistic roles.
PART II – BASIC INFORMATION
You have been provided with a coding sheet where you are asked to put in the following information: Coder ID, article number, and publication date of the article. The coder ID for the secondary coder is 2. The article number is found in the name of the pdf. The publication date can also be found in the pdf-documents. For the first, approximately, half of the sample (collected from ProQuest – with the layout of a proper newspaper article), you will be asked to collect the date listed at the very top of the pdf (not the one listed at the beginning of the article itself). For the second half of the articles (collected from NexisUni – not in proper newspaper layout), you will be asked to collect the first date listed on page 2 of the pdf. You are asked to please code the publication date as follows: DD.MM.YYYY.
PART III – PRESENCE OF JOURNALISTIC ROLES
Below, eight different journalistic roles are listed including their respective indicators. These roles are measured at the article-level. For your given article, you are asked to please indicate how present each
individual indicator is in the article (not including pictures and their corresponding texts), using a 0-3 scale where 0 is “not present at all”, 1 is “briefly present”, 2 is “moderately present”, and 3 is “heavily present”. Although it is up to the individual coder to determine where each measure is to be placed on the scale, the following can be used as a rule of thumb: 0 = not present at all, 1 = present in less than half of the article, 2 = present in about half of the article, and 3 = present throughout the entire article. It is important to note that several indicators can be present in the same article. Likewise, the journal-istic roles are not mutually exclusive – in other words, indicators for both the watchdog role and the audience advocate role, for example, can be present in the same journalistic piece. Furthermore, these indicators can be present at any time in the article. This includes plain text, quotes from other sources, etc.
Journalistic Roles Governmental mouthpiece
Defense of the president
The article immediately follows critique of the president/administration/WH and/or their decisions with arguments, state-ments or facts that counteract the aforementioned critique.
Examples can include:
• A presidential decision (presented as being controversial or questioned) being backed up by use of the law • The president defending policy (presented as opposed by others) in a speech or statement
• After being critiqued for using WH funds to move official china from city to city for official dinners, WH
offi-cials defend the president calling the action “perfectly proper”
Reliance on WH-information
The article makes use of information or sources/quotes directly provided by the WH that is not verified by the original source. This, for example, includes data or spokespeople provided by government officials or second-hand information.
This, however, does not include regular interview setups with WH-officials or the use of unnamed/anonymous WH sources.
Examples of this can include:
• A White House official/the president quoting someone else or using data provided by someone else (such as the
CIA, and the newspaper/journalist not verifying this quote/data with the original source
• White House officials claiming that another country’s officials had expressed doubts/concerns/excitement, etc.
Strict adherence to official statements
The article does not interview/check any other sources (also other state/administration officials) or offer facts or infor-mation to supplement claims made by the president, the administration or other official government sources (whether named or not). An example of what is not considered strict adherence: The president calling for a change in the electoral system followed by information about whether this is supported by the public.
Examples can include:
• The president claiming that a given policy is necessary in order to avoid “national catastrophe” and the article,
for example, not following up with other administration officials or studies to question why this might be the case
• The president claiming that a policy has lowered energy prices and the article not conferring with the
Depart-ment of Energy or statistics to back up the claim
Creating a positive image of the president
The article uses information or quotes that create a positive image of the president, i.e. make him/her appear as a good human being or strong and/or capable political leader. Examples of this include:
• Highlighting successes by the president/administration such as a strong economy, growing employment rates, a shrinking deficit
• Mentioning political “wins” such as passing proposed/supported policies
• Direct praise of the president, whether by the journalist/newspaper or other sources (praise can, for example, include congratulatory statements on passing policy)
• Descriptions of the president as being kind, humble, decent, forgiving, understanding, etc. or in other ways em-pathetic toward the American people (or certain subgroups of it), or, for example, a strong leader/strong political contender, or someone looking out for American interests, as well as being liked by Americans
o For example: “Mr. Ford said…that only by providing more military aid could Congress assure that the Americans killed in the war did not die in vain.”
Note: Elements that create a positive image of the president are coded as present regardless of whether they are later rejected or contested.
Audience advocate
Supports civilian groups
The article supports U.S. civilian groups or causes (organized by non-governmental civilians or professionals) by high-lighting their political goals or demands and/or puts them in a positive light by, for example:
• Highlighting how the group or cause is helping their community and other people • Praising their work
• Describing members and representatives as good, decent and/or helpful.
This does not include unions or programs/groups/organizations that are federally funded.
Sparking audience discussion
The article sparks political discussion among the audience by:
• Informing people about different debate forums such as debate groups or other physical debates held on differ-ent topics
• Encouraging the audience to contribute to the media by contributing their own opinions and/or sending in their own opinion pieces
• Encouraging the audience to send in questions that the news outlet ought to answer or that the audience finds otherwise important
Getting the audience involved
The article informs the audience about how to get involved in matters concerning the presidency by:
• Informing the audience about different advocacy/civilian groups or NGOs that are looking for more members to help achieve political goals
• Informing the audience about protests they can join or petitions they can sign
• Informing the audience about how to get in touch with representatives from advocacy/civilian groups or NGOs
Watchdog
Independent investigation
The article mentions that the journalist or news outlet in some way has conducted their own investigation into the given topic. This does not include mentioning other news outlets’ independent investigations. Independent investigation in-cludes:
• Undercover work
• The use of anonymous sources that reveal misconduct by the president/administration • Searching documents (both classified and non-classified) that reveal misconduct • Conducting independent analyses
Misconduct includes (but is not exclusive to): • Discrimination
• Hate speech/hate crime • Financial wrongdoings • Abuse of power • Obstruction of justice
• Does not include sexual misconduct
Fact-checking
The article attempts to fact-check (or verify) a presidential/administrative statement of any kind (including social media post, interview quotes, speeches or any other type of communication). It does not matter whether the statement is proven correct or incorrect.
Scrutinizing presidential misconduct
The article (either the journalists themselves or other sources) openly critiques presidential misconduct (of the current president only) by offering moral judgments (by using terms such as “disgraceful”, “bad”, “horrible”, etc.), or legal judg-ments (i.e. by stating by law what constitutes the misconduct). Misconduct includes (but is not exclusive to):
• Discrimination
• Hate speech/hate crimes • Financial wrongdoings • Abuse of power • Obstruction of justice
• This does not include sexual scandals
Questioning the president
The article (either the journalists themselves or other sources) questions the credibility/feasibility of the president or a presidential decision/proposal by:
• Expressing doubts, insecurities or negative opinions about policies or nominations to different positions • Highlighting political flip-flopping by the president/administration (including not following through on
prom-ises/statements).
• Critiquing the president/administration for being out of reach or unavailable to whomever may need them, as well as being inactive on policy and/or societal issues
• Explaining any moral ambiguities or legal uncertainties/restrictions concerning policies or nominations to differ-ent positions
Examples include:
• Congress/Senate critiquing a deal made between the Ford administration and President Nixon allowing for the transfer of files concerning Watergate from the White House to Mr. Nixon’s estate.
• Calling a policy proposal/decision “controversial”.
Disseminator
Adherence to press material
The article adheres to press materials (such as press releases or statements) either by directly quoting from it or by mak-ing the press material the story itself (i.e. the headline and/or first three sentences are about the press material). An article can be coded as such if it is explicitly mentioned that a press release (or other, similar press materials) have been
used/quoted. This does not include press material from the White House/president.
The measure is coded as present regardless of how this material is used.
Recycling content
The article reuses or repeats content, facts or quotes from other media outlets and/or news agencies.
Context provider
Providing larger perspective
The article explicitly connects the current news event to events in the past or to current events in other countries.
For example, an article about a presidential speech about trade could either connect the current speech to past speeches by previous presidents or to economic growth in China. Another example includes mentioning under which circum-stances or during which presidency a policy currently in question was enacted.
Explains causes/outcomes
The article explicitly mentions events leading up to/causing the covered event and/or possible outcomes of the given event.
For example, an article about a presidential decision on trade could cover how this decision might affect future relation-ships with other countries. Another example is an article explaining how a presidential policy on economy might boost big business. Note: This only includes articles predicting potential outcomes. Therefore, articles retroactively blaming the president for certain policy outcomes after the policy has been put into effect are not included. It also does not in-clude outcomes at the local (i.e. not national) or personal level.
