Increasing journalistic quality?
Assessing the citizenship news voucher model for the Swiss media landscape27th June 2014
Philippe Bernard Stalder (10583416)
This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfilment of the Erasmus Mundus MA in Journalism, Media and Globalisation
Media and Politics
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) Supervisor: dhr. dr. A.R.T. Andreas Schuck
Abstract
Scholars from the political economy of communication described the ongoing commercialisation of the media as one of the main causes for the decrease of journalistic quality. They depict the incentives, which the commercial business model sets to journalism, as a serious threat to the democratic functions of the media - and thereby to democracy itself.
It was against this backdrop that Nichols and Mc Chesney formulated a radically alternative business model for private media, which they call the citizenship news voucher model. This model implies a demand-based distribution of media subsidies that, according to the authors, would ultimately should foster the journalistic quality. This thesis examines that model for the Swiss media landscape by analysing three focus groups (N=18), each representing a different media stakeholder cleavage. The main question that this study answers is how do Swiss media consumers evaluate the opportunities and challenges of the citizenship news voucher model with regard to an improvement of the democratic functions of the media. Although most of the participants agreed that the decreasing journalistic quality in Switzerland is problematic, they could not entirely be convinced by the model since some of its implications are still obscure.
Key words: journalistic quality, citizenship news voucher model, focus groups, inductive coding, Swiss media landscape.
Introduction
Like most European media systems, the Swiss public sphere has undergone a considerable structural change since the 60s. While 50 years ago, decisions in news rooms were still based upon a political-idealistic paradigm, they now mostly orient themselves on an economic paradigm (Meier and Jarren, 2001, p. 146; Picard, 2004, p. 54; Imhof, 2006, p. 15). This economic primacy changed the incentive structures within the private media sector and is challenging the democratic functions of the media (Stepp, 2000, p. 39). The economic logic introduced new commercial news values such as sensationalism, infotainment and emotionalism (Allern, 2002, p. 145). While changing news values are only the visible negative effect of the economic primacy in Switzerland, there are also less visible negative effects, such as the ongoing concentration in media ownership, the severe reduction of the number of media titles as well as a drastic shortage of journalistic staff (University of Zurich, 2013, p. 3).
Since these trends are not only apparent in Switzerland, several international scholars from the field of the political economy of communication (PEC) described the implications of the current commercial business model as a serious threat to the quality of the democratic functions of the media and thereby as a threat to democracy itself (Herman and Chomsky, 1990; Allern, 2002; Rolland, 2007; Rysman, 2009). Since these scholars see the dysfunctions of the media as inherent to the commercial business model, they advocate to change the free market policy within the media system as a whole. Mc Chesney (2013) argued that:
“Policies are crucial to establishing media systems, and governments have the capacity to change policies and media systems, but they do so only on rare historical occasions. Indeed, it is so rare that most people understandably do not realize that the right to change these policies and systems even exists. (Mc Chesney, 2013, p. 66).
Mc Chesney (2013) stresses the point that the current free market policies are not God-given and thereby should be subject to change, once they appear to be dysfunctional. McChesney (2013) himself then also provides an alternative business model for the private media with a demand-based distribution of government media subsidies at its core. He calls it the citizenship news voucher model.
The model was designed for the American context. This thesis, however, aims at examining the hypothetical chances and challenges of Mc Chesney’s model for the Swiss media landscape by conducting focus groups, consisting of different groups of Swiss media consumers. The main research question guiding this study is how Swiss media consumers evaluate the opportunities and challenges of the citizenship news voucher model with regard to a potential improvement of the democratic functions of the media. In a first step the model will be laid out and critically examined. The methodology of focus groups and its implications on the findings as well as the analytical approach that was used to code the focus group transcriptions will be discussed in a second step. Afterwards the findings will be presented and discussed. A general conclusion then will be drawn in a last step.
Before taking a closer look at the model itself, it is important to recapitulate the structural change that the Swiss media system has been going through and the contradictory interests that commercial media have to meet.
From political to commercial
In the old days, Swiss newspapers were owned and funded by political parties, certain churches or worker unions. The purpose was to explain the world through the respective ideological perspective. With the advent of general newspapers, which presented a wide array of different political or religious interpretations of reality, newspapers needed to be commercialised in order to survive (Meier and Jarren, 2001, p. 148). There are several
definitions of commercialisation of the media, however, this thesis draws upon Kiefer’s (2001) definition that she gave for the German-speaking world: “Commercialisation can be understood as a de-meritisation [from merit good] of media services. This means that merit media offers that serve the public interest are being pushed back to the benefit of marketable and micro-economically profitable media offers.” (Kiefer, 2001, p. 22). Also in Switzerland, commercialisation of the media was ‘‘a move away from reliance on craft norms defining what is newsworthy and how to report, toward a journalism based on serving the marketplace.’’ (McManus, 1995, p. 301). Media commercialisation replaced the citizen by the consumer and while the shareholder value became the ultimate driver for journalistic performance, those new commercial news values became the ultimate driver of story-telling (Heinrich, 2001, p. 160).
Proof for this argumentation as well as for the ongoing media commercialisation in Switzerland can be found in the study ‘The Quality of the Media 2013’ by the University of Zurich (2013). This study reports an over-time media content analysis of Swiss media, revealing that between 2001 and 2012 the amount of high-quality media dropped from 36% to 27% while the amount of low-quality media grew from 24% to 38%1
. In this content analysis, high-quality media were related to information-based journalism while low-quality media was related to market-based journalism. These findings are clearly inconsistent with the democratic requirements of the media which demand for high-quality journalism in order to accurately inform the citizenship.
Public service broadcast media
In order to compensate for this deficit in democratic functions by the commercial !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
media, most Western countries established public service media (PSM) that receive public funding. Because PSM are not solely dependent on advertisement money, they can afford producing content that from an economical perspective is not profitable, but important from a normative-democratic perspective. The PSM policy is consistent with the democratic perspective that journalism is not a commercial but a merit good (Meier and Jarren, 2001, p. 242). However, Nissen (2013) criticised the PSM model for cementing a monopoly position for the PSM:
“The stable budgets and the absence of external competition from other broadcasters laid
the foundation for the same kind of stability in the departments’ programme portfolio. […]
Programme departments therefore often acted as if they were autonomous principalities in a
loosely knit kingdom.” (Nissen, 2013, p. 90).
Nissen (2013) criticises the PSM for not being innovative enough, since the subsidies cuts them off from any kind of competition. However, although the PSM model hinders a healthy competition amongst broadcast channels, it at least allows media consumers to receive un-commercialised content (Cuilenburg and McQuail, 2003).
Commercial media
Commercial media on the other hand, serve a two-sided market (Rysman, 2009, p. 129). That means that they serve two fundamentally different groups of clients. They need to a) publish content for a specific audience and b) sell the attention by this specific audience to advertisers. They can charge more money from the audience the better the content, and they can charge more money from the advertisers the bigger - or the more specific - the target group (von Ehrlich and Greiner, 2013, p. 724).
media companies face a problem: They need to meet the – often contradictory - interests from these two different groups; The advertisers do not primarily care about the content, they only want the attention from their target group and the readers do not primarily buy a magazine for the advertisement that is in it but rather for the content (Kepplinger, 1996, p. 52).
Helland (1999) described the situation of media entities functioning between the poles of the two client groups as follows: “It is in the tension between performing idealized societal functions and serving up attractive products on the market that news reporting evolves […] .“ (Helland, 1999, p. 189). While Helland depicts both client groups to be equally strong, McChesney (2004) argues thatadvertisers and not consumers are the media’s most important customers: “This changes the logic of media markets radically, since the interests of consumers must be filtered through the demands of advertisers.” (McChesney, 2004, p. 189). So in order to attract advertisers and remain successful in a competitive environment, media companies face strong economic incentives to use news values that may attract many readers, but are not necessarily related with high-quality journalism.
However, high-quality journalism – as a crucial part of the public sphere – is essential for democracy. It is therefore crucial for any democratic society that media houses have incentives to publish relevant stories rather than merely spectacular ones. This is why the consideration of alternative business models is not only relevant for media economics but for the society as a whole. Next, the citizenship news voucher model by Mc Chesney (2013) will be introduced, which represents one potential alternative business model.
The citizenship news voucher model
According to Nichols and Mc Chesney (2010) the primacy of economic incentives is supposed to be one of the key roots of the recent decline of journalistic quality: “The market
has voted journalism off the island. This necessary nutrient of democracy will be washed away unless we recognize that commercial values are no longer going to provide us with sufficient quality journalism.” (Nichols and Mc Chesney, 2010, p. 6).
Raymond suggested already in 1974 that journalistic content should be produced within non-commercial media structures (Raymond, 1974). As national PSM subsidies usually benefit only a few or even only one media company (Nissen, 2013), McChesney (2013) built upon Raymond’s idea and formulated an alternative subsidy-model that would benefit all media companies that fulfil democratic functions. The model was formulated for the American context and comprises of the following main components (McChesney, 2013, p. 212):
• Every citizen gets a $200 voucher s/he can use to donate money to any non-profit news medium of her choice.
• S/he can split her $200 among several different qualifying non-profit media.
• A government agency can be set up to allocate the funds and to determine eligibility according to universal standards
• Everything the medium produces would have to be made available immediately by publication on the Internet, free to all.
• Qualifying media ought not be permitted to accept advertising.
What this model would imply is a demand-based budgeting of all newspapers that fulfil certain criteria for journalistic quality. This rather radical idea has not been left without criticism by several academic and professional exponents. Nichols and McChesney (2009) also detected relevant points of concern themselves:
“First, people will have to accept that some of the vouchers are going to go to media that they detest. […] Second, the program may not develop exactly the type of journalism our
greatest thinkers believe is necessary. The plan requires that there be faith in the judgment of the American people.” (Nichols and McChesney, 2009, p. 253).
On the one hand this plan indeed contains the potential for further support for partisan press. On the other hand, however, the notion that the judgement of the citizens should be inferior to the judgement of the elite is contradicting the basic idea of democracy. Nevertheless, Thierer and Szoka (2010) took his criticism even one step further:
“[…] the private provision of media services has worked quite well for some time […]. They [Nichols and McChesney] claim that era is over but, […], it is their policies that would end private media by taxing and regulating it to death. […] Second, what exactly counts as a ‘qualifying media entity’, and who makes that call?” (Thierer and Szoka, 2010, p. 5).
Thierer and Szoka (2010) first argue that the current model works just fine and that the suggested model’s regulation would end the ‘successful’ era of private media. This neoliberal point of view, however, seems to ignore the negative effects of the structural change in the media landscape which were discussed previously. His second argument though is much more valid. Who has the legitimacy to decide what counts as a qualifying media entity and even more importantly, what does not? The chances for this model to be implemented in anti-statism America thus are quiet low. However, chances are that in more subsidy-friendly countries like Switzerland such a demand-based subsidy model could be regarded as an alternative to the current PSM model in the near future.
In order to find out what Swiss media consumers make of this model, this study uses focus groups to assess the opportunities and challenges for the Swiss media landscape. Thus, the overall research question of the present study is as follows:
RQ: How do Swiss media consumers evaluate the opportunities and challenges of the citizenship news voucher model with regard to an improvement of the democratic functions of the media?
Method Focus groups
Since the assessment of the citizenship news voucher model for the Swiss media landscape is a new and untested undertaking, one has to acknowledge the explorative character of this research. Therefore this study uses focus groups in order to facilitate an assessment of what media consumers make of the citizenship news voucher model. Kitzinger (1999) noted about the function and possible contribution of focus groups as a research method that:
“Focus groups are ideal for exploring people’s experiences, opinions, wishes and
concerns. The method is particularly useful for allowing participants to generate their own
questions, frames and concepts and to pursue their own priorities on their own terms, in their
own vocabulary.” (Kitzinger, 1999, p. 5).
The aim of this study is not to make an ultimate judgement about the model but rather to lay out all the pro and contra arguments that can be made about the model in the first place and in a given context. The central increment value of this study thus is to provide a basic argumentarium for the question whether this model could – at all – be applicable to the Swiss media landscape and how it is judged by different groups of media consumers. In order to assess the main challenges and opportunities of the citizenship news voucher model, one has to think of a structured way to do so.
Constellation of the focus groups
The constellation of the focus groups was based upon the three main cleavages that appear amongst opposing stakeholders when the model is being adapted to the Swiss media landscape: First, there is the general cleavage that appears every time when the state interferes into a free market such as the private media sector in Switzerland. I call this the liberalist-interventionist cleavage since it is about the basic question whether state intervention leads to unintended side effects or if it actually helps the situation and thus can be regarded as serving the public interest. A good example that illustrates this cleavage is the treaty of Amsterdam from 1997, where the European Commission reacted to market distortion complaints against public service media (PSM) by private media that accumulated throughout the 90s. Donders and Pauwels (2008, p. 296) wondered in this context “whether the case for public service broadcasting and its traditional remit remains valid.” It is conceivable that private media that are unauthorized to receive citizenship news vouchers would raise market distortion criticism towards qualified media.
Second, there is the typically Swiss centre-periphery cleavage that corresponds to the highly federalist structure of the Swiss state. Schwander (2005) described that cleavage as follows:
“As the borders and the political authority of modern states were being created, a contention emerged between the centralist and the peripheral forces of the state. The centralists demanded for a standardisation of law, markets and culture while the peripheries feared a loss of autonomy and independence.” (Schwander, 2005, p. 4).
Arising from the foundational years, this cleavage is still apparent today when there is a debate about how resources or subsidies should be distributed over the different cantons.
The third cleavage corresponds to the image of humanity about the citizenship’s power of judgement. Since the model advocates for a demand based distribution of media
subsidies, there is a cleavage between the ones who think that ‘the people’ know what is good for themselves (cultural optimists) and the ones who think that people do not know and therefore need to be protected from themselves (cultural pessimists). An example of cultural pessimism in this regard is the following quote from Gorman (2010), an opponent of the citizenship news voucher model who fears that media consumers would direct the subsidies to irresponsible media entities:
„One can easily imagine the campaigning that would go on for the citizenship news
vouchers, and it seems fairly obvious that one way to attract those vouchers would be to
tell citizens what they wanted to hear. (Gorman 2010, p. 2).
Gorman (2010) fears that the model would implicate unintended and contra productive side effects, due to his notion that the citizenship does not know what is good for itself. An example of cultural optimists on the other hand are Nichols and McChesney (2009), the authors of the model, who argue that the people very well know what is good for themselves or that extreme positions at least balance each other out on a national scale. Although Swiss direct democracy principally attests a strong power of judgement to its citizens, Gorman’s (2010) critique recently gained relevance since the successful direct democratic referenda by the right populist party SVP on minarets (2009) and on mass immigration (2014) strongly has been criticized by more moderate parts of the Swiss civil society.
Based upon those three cleavages three focus groups were designed for the purpose of the current study, each consisting of six participants, three representing each side of the respective cleavage:
• Focus group 1: The liberalist-interventionist cleavage • Focus group 2: The centre-periphery cleavage
Sample
It is trivial to understand that three focus groups alone is not a big enough sample to represent the wide spectrum of Swiss media consumers. However, three focus groups can be enough to reach a sufficient saturation of the research question at stake. Kitzinger (1999) stated that:
“Statistical ‘representativeness’ is not the aim of most focus group research. Usually focus
group researchers employ ‘qualitative sampling’ (Kuzel, 1992) in order to encompass
diversity and compose a structured rather than random sample.” (Kitzinger 1999, p. 7).
The qualitative sample was structured through the three cleavages. In the initial contact form the participants received six statements each of them representing one sub-group. They than had to chose which statement best fits their own attitude in order to be assigned in one of the sub-groups. This constellation provides a textured approach to answer the research question from a Swiss perspective. Kitzinger furthermore noted that: “Focus group studies range from just three or four groups, to over fifty. […] The appropriate number of focus groups will depend on the research question, the range of people you wish to include and, of course, time and resource limitations.” (Kitzinger, 1999, p. 7).
Admittedly, in order to reach sufficient saturation three focus groups seem to be at the lower limit, however, since each focus group consists of two subgroups one could also envision six focus groups combined in three synoptic groups. Furthermore, a thematic cross-over interview guideline was used during the focus group sessions. That means that focus group 1 was mainly talking about the pros and cons of intervention, but not only. They were also consulted for their opinion on the other two cleavages. The same goes for the other two focus groups. This cross-over approach in the interview guideline made sure, that saturation was further fostered.
Group size
Since this model has not been discussed in the Swiss public yet, one could assume that the research participants had little to none prior knowledge about the model. Although Morgan (1998) recommends larger groups for topics where participant involvement is likely to be low (Morgan, 1998, p. 75), I decided to form small groups of six participants since Bryman (2012, p. 507) argued that smaller groups are better for topics in which participants have little involvement. Peek and Fothergill (2009) furthermore stated that the management of larger groups can be expected to be more challenging (Peek and Fothergill, 2009, p. 37). Small groups furthermore increase the reliability of the focus groups sessions, since the cacophonic potential for coding errors, due to multiple people speaking at the same time, is smaller.
Focus groups usually comprise of a homogeneous set of participants. The idea is that individuals behave more openly and feel more comfortable speaking amongst their own peers. However, Bryman (2012) noted that:
“[…] the focus group approach offers the opportunity of allowing people to probe each
other’s reasons for holding a certain view. […] For one thing, an individual may answer in
a certain way during a focus group, but, as he or she listens to others’ answers, he or she may
want to qualify or modify a view.” (Bryman, 2012, p. 503).
Following this approach, the focus groups were set up in this study to stipulate a vivid discussion within the opponent groups of the respective sub issue, providing arguments for questions that homogeneous groups might not raise in the first place.
Ethics
When the participants were contacted via the e-mail distribution list of the University of Zurich, they received a fact sheet about the research as well as an informed consent for
participation form that conformed with the ‘Ethical Review Procedure for Research at the Department of Communication Science, University of Amsterdam’. Participants were contacted through an e-mail list in order to prevent a personal network effect.
Location
The focus group sessions took place in a private apartment in Zurich. The room where the session was held was not furnished so there were no flashy objects that could have distracted the participant’s attention. This setting conformed with the ideal focus group location described by Kitzinger (1999): “Ideally, the room needs to be quiet and comfortable, free from interruptions and protected from observation by those not participating in the research.” (Kitzinger, 1999, p. 11).
The only objects that were placed inside the room were a beamer for the introductory PowerPoint presentation (see section below), a dictaphone to record the session and 7 chairs that were arranged in a circle. Using chairs from the same model and arranging them in a circle, made sure that there was no power structure resulting from the seating arrangement, which increased reliability.
Procedure
In the beginning of the focus group session, each participant was asked to assess the current quality of the Swiss journalistic performance in a pre-questionnaire and on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 standing for very bad and ten standing for very good. This question measured the participant’s perceived journalistic quality of the Swiss media system. In a second open question the participants were asked to write down the reasons they considered to be responsible for the current level of journalistic quality.
After all the participants handed in their questionnaires, a short but concise PowerPoint presentation was shown about the citizenship news voucher model (see appendix 4). It entailed the basic premise of the model, evidence of the current status and over-time development of journalistic quality, a detailed summary of the main points of the model as well as some expected positive and negative effects that were collected through the literature review, all of this from a neutral and balanced standpoint and without personal commentary or own evaluation by the moderator. In order to increase reliability all the three focus groups received the exact same information. Then each focus group had 10 minutes time to ask comprehension questions in case that someone did not understand what the presentation was all about.
When the actual focus group sessions started, a cross-over and semi-structured format was utilised. That means that the session followed a basic interview guideline (see appendix 2) but with the possibility for the moderator to broach certain subjects again when answers were unclear or the participant was expected to have more to tell.
This structure was furthermore used in order to capitalize on the explorative character of the research. As we will see later on in the discussions part, some of the most interesting arguments were articulated by participants from another thematic sub-group, pointing to one of the advantages of the focus group method with its open and flexible character.
In the end of the focus group sessions each participant had to fill out a post questionnaire, where s/he had to state whether s/he would approve the model or not. They furthermore had to sum up the main concerns and hopes towards the model. This question assessed whether the participants after the discussion in their group were convinced by the citizenship news voucher model and based on which considerations.
Each focus group session lasted for about one hour. They were all transcribed in the week after the sessions were held (see appendix 3). In order to increase the reliability of this
research to a maximum, each of the three focus group sessions has been convened on one single occasion. Therefore it was not possible that one member was present at the first session but then missed out the second, what would have biased his participation and ultimately the results of the study. In order to guarantee equivalence throughout the sessions as well as throughout the coding process, only one and the same moderator and coder was used to lead the sessions and to go through the material.
Analysis
Before the actual results of the focus group sessions can be presented, we need to take a look at the approach that was used to conduct the focus group analysis.
Due to the fact that the participants were expected to have no prior knowledge about the citizenship news voucher model, an inductive approach was used to code the focus group transcripts. Since Elo and Kyngäs (2008) noted that: “If there is not enough former knowledge about the phenomenon or if this knowledge is fragmented, the inductive approach is recommended.” (Elo and Kyngäs, 2008, p. 109).
This means that through open coding, categories were derived from the data in an emerging coding approach and not the other way around. Moving from the specific to the general, the inductive approach first observes instances and then combines them into general statements. While reading the transcripts, the coder wrote down notes and headings into the text. The headings were then transferred onto the coding sheet were they were grouped under higher order headings in order to abstract from the specific to the general. This procedure also conforms with Burnard’s (1991) suggestion for grouping data: “The aim of grouping data was to reduce the number of categories by collapsing those that are similar or dissimilar into broader higher order categories.” (as cited in Elo and Kyngäs, 2008, p. 111).
Here is an exemplary illustration of how the abstraction process looks like with regard to the several categories. The illustration is supposed to be read from right to left, meaning from sub-category to the main category:
Figure 1: Categorization of focus group analysis
⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐⇐ source: own display
The different argument categories then were ready to be compared amongst the three focus groups. Discussing the purpose of focus group analysis, Kidd and Parshall (2000) noted that: “A major aim of analysis with focus group data is to identify areas of agreement and controversy to better understand how perspectives arise and are modified in a group.” (Kidd and Parshall, 2000, p. 300). The patterns of how the arguments were being raised in the different focus groups was furthermore analysed, in order to identify their relevance for the respective sub-groups. This analysis was based on Kidd and Parshall’s (2000, p. 301) suggestions for ways to conduct a structured focus group analysis:
• Gauging whether an issue constitutes a theme for the group or merely a strongly held viewpoint of one or a few members.
sub<
category!
generic!
category!
main!
category!
call!for!action?! yes! "ongoing!media! concentration!is! alarming."! "market!incapable! of!generating! sufSicient!quality."!• Assessing whether an issue only comes up in one or a few groups.
• Examining whether issues are raised, or returned to, in spontaneous discussion by group members or only come up in response to questions posed by the moderator
Results
After the focus group sessions have been coded and the different categories have been abstracted, an extensive argumentarium unfolded which can be found in appendix 1. In the following, each segment of the argumentarium will be commented so readers are encouraged to read this chapter with the appendix beside. The number which is attached to each argument in the appendix is the statement code that can be traced in the transcription of the focus group sessions in order to find the respective comments. In the tables that follow after each segment of the argumentarium, the amount of statements that correspond with the subcategories have been counted and ascribed to the respective focus subgroup.
The tables are supposed to be read like this: The first statement pattern in the first cell of Table 1 is 1/4 (row fg1: lib./int. x column 2). This means that the liberal subgroup made one statement that corresponds to the subcategory 2 (need for action, since decreasing journalistic quality) while the interventionist subgroup made 4 comments that correspond to subcategory 2. The next statement pattern is 3/2 which means that the centralistic subgroup made three statements that correspond with subcategory 2 while the periphery subgroup made two comments and so forth. In the end of the row there is the total statement pattern corresponding to the generic category 1.1 (yes, call for action needed).
This quantitative tabular presentation of statement patterns allows for analysing which arguments were raised how many times and by which sub-groups. Thereby we can analyse how the stakeholder cleavages help to explain disagreement amongst the sub-groups. The qualitative analysis suggested by Kidd and Parshall (2000) furthermore help to analyse
whether an issue is only important for a member, a subgroup, a focus group or even for several or all focus groups. In the following, the results for each argument paragraph as well as the pre and post questionnaire are briefly presented.
Pre questionnaire
The results of the pre questionnaire show that there was no strong difference in quality perception among the different sub-groups and that the perceived journalistic quality overall is good. On a scale from 1 to 10 the different sub-group averages ranged from 6.6 to 8.0, resulting in a overall average score of 7.3 with the interventionists giving the lowest score and the centralists the highest. The mentioned reasons for a positive quality perception were variety in the media offer, media accountability through ombudsman, constitutional press freedom as well as openness of the profession. The mentioned reasons for a negative quality perception were high media concentration, party affiliation of certain media, and a general decrease of quality with the rise of free newspapers.
Figure 2: Average quality perception per subgroup and overall
liberals interventionists centralists peripheries pessimists optimists overall average
7.3 6.6 8.0 7.6 7 7.3 7.3
source: own display
1. call for action?
The very first question that was posed to each focus group was whether they think there is a need for an interventionist action (as the citizenship news voucher model would imply) in order to improve journalistic quality in Switzerland or not.
There were 98 statements in total throughout all of the three focus groups that corresponded to this question. The most comments in favour of an action (Yes) came from the pessimistic subgroup with 20 comments, while the liberal subgroup were the least action-supportive subgroup with only three comments.
The major aim of the analysis was to detect areas of agreement and controversy. While the opinions amongst the subgroups in focus group 2 (centre-periphery) and focus group 3 (pessimist-optimist) were quite balanced, there was a lot of disagreement between the sub-groups in focus group 1 (liberalist-interventionist). The liberals were opposing any intervention by arguing that the market only provides what the readers demand while the interventionists mainly argued that the market could not generate sufficient content that meets the democratic requirements of the media. Although there was a lot of interaction, the sub-groups could not agree upon this issue. This question triggered participation amongst all the participants, so there was not one overly active participant in one of the groups.
2. procedural arguments
Table 2 shows the distribution of all the procedural arguments that were raised throughout the focus group sessions, meaning all the arguments that refer to the procedure of the model implementation.
There were 15 statements in total. In contrast to the last segment (see point 1 above), these arguments were being raised spontaneously by the participants and not as a reaction to an explicit question by the moderator. Some of them were rather imaginative and reflect the fact that the participants were actively engaged. One pessimist suggested to make a media subsidy constitution in order to prevent governments from changing the authorizing criteria for their own means. One member of the optimists suggested to divide the list of authorized media in thematic branches in order to make it more user friendly. And one member from the
liberals argued that ‘media title’ is an unclear definition and thus should further be specified in the model.
Those points however represent the ideas of single persons who could not convince their subgroups as a whole, which is why the focus group cleavages are not helpful in explaining the statement patterns of this segment. However, the pessimistic subgroup was the most vocal one, while the interventionist subgroup did not come up with any arguments on their own. Not everyone contributed to this segment on the same level. Only the more extroverted participants came up with arguments in this segment.
3. format specific regulation
This segment was about the question whether different media formats should be regulated separately and about the challenges that would come along with it. So that through quotas, TV would be allowed to receive more subsidies than online, since its production is more cost-intensive.
There were 18 statements in total. While the opinions in focus group 2 were balanced and focus group 3 was not even going into this question, the subgroups of focus group 1 held a strong disagreement about the issue. The interventionists argued in favour of a format-specific regulation in order to compensate for the different cost structures of the respective formats. The liberals, however, argued that the more complicated and regulated the subsidy distribution would be, the less people would support the model. The liberals furthermore argued that the citizenship is able to anticipate the different cost structures without being patronized by quotas. The participation level in this segment was only high in focus group 1. In focus group 2 there were only individual comments that contributed to this issue.
4.1 root cause
The segment ‘root cause’ was about the question what the reasons for the decreasing journalistic quality might be. The participant’s faculty of imagination ranged from individual causes such as lacking self-responsibility to societal causes such as the changing technology.
There was a total of 42 comments on the issue. The most vocal subgroup were the pessimists with 17 comments. The most often mentioned reasons for the decreasing quality was a lack of media socialisation, followed by time pressure, the demand for pornographic content as well as the changing zeitgeist. A participant from the liberal subgroup stated that entertainment is not always bad, because it can also attract readers for topics they would not be interested in otherwise. The only cleavage that helped explaining some of the disagreement was the one from focus group 3, since the attribution of potential causes did not follow the cleavages of the other two focus groups. While the pessimists basically argued that everything was better in the old days, the optimists countered that changing news values, presentation forms and ownership structures are just a reflection of the changing zeitgeist and that this reflects a progression rather than a regression. The participation level for this question was more or less balanced, almost all of the participants contributed at least one comment to the issue.
4.2 do people know what is good for them?
This segment corresponds with Gorman’s (2010) critique that media companies can easily trick the readers by telling them what they want to hear, rather than what they should be hearing, since the citizenship would not know what is good for itself.
There was a total of 23 statements, ten of them were raised by focus group 3. While the opinions in focus group 1 and focus group 2 were more or less balanced on the issue, focus group 3 was strongly disagreeing. The pessimists used right and left populist
referenda that were successful as examples of how the citizenship not always knew what is best for itself while the optimists argued that the consequences of donating vouchers to a right populist magazine and the consequences of voting for its proposals can not be compared. They furthermore argued that extreme positions would balance each other out on a national scale. The participation level here was overall rather high, given the limited perimeter of the question.
5. institutional arguments
This segment was about the setup of the committee that is supposed to implement the model and to define the criteria that media have to fulfil in order to be authorized to receive subsidies. There were 77 statements in total.
The general argument that was raised the most by all focus groups was the one about definatory power. This concern refers to Thierer and Szoka’s (2010) argument: “What exactly counts as a ‘qualifying media entity’, and who makes that call?” (Thierer and Szoka, 2010p. 5). It was clear to all sub-groups that the power of the committee to set the criteria in order to define who is allowed and who is not allowed to receive vouchers could be abused for political means if not checked properly. All sub-groups therefore shared the concern about the definatory power of such a committee, although the interventionists restrained to only one comment. The first basic question here was whether the committee should comprise of politicians, of professionals, of scholars or of a mix of all these three. The second basic question was whether the committee should be appointed or voted on. Although there was no disagreement on the issue of definatory power, all of the three cleavages at least helped explaining the disagreement on the legitimacy of the committee. While the liberals, the peripheries and the pessimists argued that it is not possible to install such a committee with sufficient legitimacy (often due to the notion that quality is subjective), the
interventionists, the centralists and the optimists argued that such a committee could be legitimised either through a mixed composition of the committee or through a vote (often due to the notion that quality can be defined universally). Except of the pessimistic sub-group where especially one participant took the lead, the participation level has been balanced in the other sub-groups.
One single participant from the pessimists suggested that the university best fits to implement the model which lead to a new and balanced discussion within focus group 3. The overall participation level for the whole segment was moderate.
6. professional arguments
This segment was about the journalistic profession and the standards it should operate on. Like the procedural arguments also the professional arguments were raised by the participants themselves and were not part of the interview guideline.
With a total of eleven comments, participants were mainly discussing the importance of professional standards and whether the form of infotainment is problematic or not. While the liberals argued that infotainment is not problematic since it attracts recipients that otherwise would not be interested in the topic, the pessimists argued that infotainment creates political cynics. They furthermore criticised the mass media for selective reporting. Focus group 3 was the most vocal one with nine comments, while focus group 2 did not raise any professional arguments at all. The discussion was mainly held by individual participants and not by the group as a whole. The cleavages thereby did not help to explain disagreement.
7. criteria
In the criteria segment the participants were asked about which criteria a medium should fulfil in order to be allowed to receive the vouchers.
A total of 19 statements were given. Next to some rather obvious criteria raised by the centralists like diversity and expertise there were also some special criteria raised by the liberals and pessimists like subjectivity and labour conditions of the media company. The liberal argued that there is no such thing as objectivity and therefore he prefers subjective news pieces over pieces that follow a false objectivity. The pessimist argued that only media that provide good labour conditions (insurance, fair wages and technical support) should be allowed to receive the vouchers. The sub-groups of focus group 1 agreed on adopting to the criteria formulated by the Swiss press council2
. Almost all participants contributed to this question although the overall participation level was very low, especially in the interventionist and periphery sub-groups. Preference for certain criteria therefore could not be linked to subgroup affiliation.
8. PEC arguments
This segment is a collective category subsuming all the arguments that could be linked to the field of political economy of communication. It entails the subcategories PSM model, cross funding, voucher campaigning, remit, voucher amount and subject to distribute.
A total of 69 statements were given in the Political Economy of Communication (PEC) segment. The cleavage of focus group 2 helped to explain the disagreement whether the current PSM model should be exchanged. While the peripheries feared that they would loose the periphery-friendly programmes created by the current PSM, the centralists argued against the periphery focus of the current PSM and stated that a demand based distribution of the subsidies would better meet the democratic criteria of the media.
All of the sub-groups except the optimists anticipated the problem discussed in argument 8.2 that a corporation could end up using the subsidies for another media title than !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
originally intended by the citizens. The cleavage of focus group 3 therefore helped explaining disagreement on cross funding. While the pessimists raised the argument 8.3 that media entities could start campaigning for the vouchers by telling the citizens what they wanted to hear the optimists argued that the citizens can suss the voucher campaigning. The cleavage of focus group 3 therefore helped explaining disagreement on voucher campaigning. While the question 8.4 whether the allowed advertisement revenues should be caped proportionally to the subsidies did not trigger a strong participation, argument 8.5 about the subsidy remit was an area with major disagreement for focus group 1. While the liberal subgroup made the point that sports magazines if excluded, would be disadvantaged, the interventionist group argued, that sports does not contribute to an informed citizenship. The discussion about argument 8.6 revealed that the participants were not capable of gauging whether the amount of 200 CHF is adequate, since they had no benchmark available. The question whether citizens or tax payers should receive the vouchers was an area of complete agreement. In contrast to the original model, focus groups 1 and 2 unanimously decided that tax payers rather than Swiss citizens should be allowed to distribute the vouchers. Otherwise foreigners that work and pay taxes in Switzerland would be excluded and Swiss expats who pay their taxes in other countries would be included which was regarded as unfair. The overall participation level in this segment was moderate, with a mix of group and individual opinions.
9. federalist arguments
This segment was about the issue of adapting the centralist voucher model to the federalist media landscape of Switzerland. Since the model is based upon a centralistic per capita distribution of the vouchers, chances were that federalists could have demanded for a federalist per canton distribution.
17 comments were made in total whereby focus group 2 expectedly was the most vocal one. The biggest disagreement then was also amongst focus group 2 in which the centralists argued that the model (with further regulation) easily can be adapted while the periphery subgroup argued that it can not be adapted to Swiss federalism, since unknown local newspapers would only get funded by the few local people that already know the newspaper. The cleavage of focus group 2 helped explaining disagreement on this argument while the other two focus groups did not disagree on the issue. The participation level was moderate.
10. alternative arguments
This last segment of arguments contains a total of eight statements that could not be assigned to any of the categories above.
Like the procedural and the professional arguments they were raised spontaneously and were not a part of the interview guideline. One participant from the liberal subgroup suggested that people should get a free subscription for their favourite media title rather than a voucher. Three participants from focus group 1 and focus group 3 argued that the model does not tackle the root cause and that the state rather should invest in journalistic education. Two participants from the pessimistic subgroup argued that the content should be free to everyone after a medium got subsidised. However, those were individual opinions which could not be linked to sub-group affiliation.
Post questionnaire
In the end of the focus group sessions participants were asked whether they would support the model if there was a vote about its implementation today. Although most
participants answered yes, no majority for the model could be found, since five participants abstained from voting:
Figure 3: Assessment of the model by focus groups
fg / validation? yes no abstention
fg 1: lib./int. 0/2 2/0 1/1
fg 2: cen./per. 1/1 1/1 1/1
fg 3: pes./opt. 1/2 2/0 0/1
total 7 6 5
source: own display
Justifying their decisions many participants from the yes camp mentioned that the current system is dysfunctional since it does not allocate the subsidies based on the consumer’s demand. Therefore they advocate for an alternative model, even if some implications are still unclear. Most participants from the no camp argued that it is by no means sure that the alternative model would improve the situation and that journalistic quality also exists under the current model and / or is subjective and should not be defined by a state committee. The participants from the abstention camp argued that although they think that the current model needs to be changed, they could not be convinced by the alternative model to actually improve the situation, since too many implications are still unclear.
From all the three cleavages the liberal-interventionist cleavage helps explaining the most disagreement on this vote, followed by the pessimistic-optimistic cleavage while the centralistic-periphery cleavage does not help explain any agreement at all.
Discussion
Answering the research question of this study, the post questionnaire revealed that the citizenship news voucher model could not be validated by a majority of the participants. For most of the participants, the challenges prevailed the chances of the model. While the interventionists and the optimists by tendency supported the model, the liberalists and pessimists by tendency opposed the model and the centralists and peripheries felt ambivalent about it. What does this tell us about the potential chances of implementing the model in Switzerland and abroad?
First of all, as the pre questionnaire disclosed, the journalistic quality in Switzerland is perceived as not extraordinarily high, but it is on an acceptable level. This finding is in line with the annual freedom of the press index by reporters without borders where Switzerland ranked 15th
out of 180 countries in 20143
. This puts the discussion about the model in a situation where the conservative concern ‘is there really a need for action?’ easily can be raised. Taking action for progressive alternatives is always easier when the current situation is strongly dissatisfying rather than just acceptable. The model therefore should have better chances – at least in the point of departure – in media systems whose perceived quality is lower than in Switzerland.
Secondly, the post questionnaire revealed that the model would have been approved by a majority, if the abstaining participants - who generally were dissatisfied by the current model - could have been entirely convinced by the new model. However, there were several obscurities about the new model that caused reluctance among the participants. If a social or political initiative one day intends to promote the model (in Switzerland or elsewhere) they should find clear and convincing answers to the following six questions which were inspired !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
by the focus group analysis:
• What are the criteria media have to fulfill in order to be qualified to receive the vouchers and how can these criteria be justified from a social, political, economic as well as journalistic perspective?
• Of which representatives does the committee that scrutinizes media for qualification comprise of and which institution (state, academic or civic) is the committee embedded in?
• How can the media-scrutinizing committee be democratically legitimized?
• Should there be a format or content-specific contingent? (for example: maximum a third of the voucher can be distributed to TV titles, or maximum half of the voucher can be distributed to infotainment media titles)
• Should the model function as a supplement of the PSM or should it substitute the PSM model? • Should the amount of the voucher be an absolute amount or should it be proportional to the
media system’s yearly turnover?
Without providing clear and satisfying answers to those questions, any movement is going to have a hard time successfully promoting this model, regardless of which country it is addressing. Since these questions derive from model-specific obscurities they can be generalised to any media system. Should a potential movement address a federalist country, it additionally should also think of the following question, since it derives from a federalist country-specific obscurity:
• Should the vouchers be distributed per capita or per state?
All these questions were either raised by individuals or entire sub-groups during the course of the focus group sessions. They were selected based upon their impact on prompting participants not to support the model in the post questionnaire.
Thirdly, during the focus group sessions participants made suggestions for how to improve the original model formulated by McChesney (2013):
• Tax payers rather than citizens should be able to receive the vouchers, since 23% of Switzerland’s population are foreigners and 10% of the Swiss citizenship lives abroad. The government will have to provide the subsidies through fiscal revenues and it would discriminate foreigners who pay taxes in Switzerland and it would privilege Swiss expats who pay their taxes abroad.
• The whole implementation of the model by the committee would have to be made absolutely transparent to the public in order to increase legitimacy.
• Corporations receiving the vouchers would have to substantiate that the subsidies end up at the intended title and that they do not cross fund the subsidies to other titles in order to boost their performance.
The suggestions constitute of elements that the author of the original model did not anticipate. They therefore made some of the model’s implications unclear for the participants.
Fourthly, based upon the patterns of disagreement presented in the results section a potential model-promoting movement can anticipate which stakeholders will offer opposition on which arguments. Let us now have a look at the different cleavages and the arguments they help to explain:
The liberal-interventionist cleavage from focus group 1 helped to explain the disagreement on whether there is a need for an interventionist action, whether the distribution process should be regulated format-specifically and whether sports should be included in the remit of authorized media. Liberal forces of any colour can be expected to oppose the very basic question whether there is a need for an interventionist action. This expectation was partially validated by the results of the post questionnaire where two out of three liberals opposed the model while the third one abstained. This fundamental liberal attitude is based on the argument “that the shortcomings of the media can be blamed on the public because the market gives people what they want.” (McManus, 1995, p. 224). While liberal exponents
depict dysfunctional implications of ‘the market’ as almost God-given necessities, interventionist exponents depict them rather as results of human decisions that also can be altered. But really, it is a classic ‘chicken and the egg’ question; Do media provide what consumers demand or do consumers demand what the media provides.
While liberals argue for the former, Bogart (2000) argues for the latter: “Tastes are neither spontaneous nor immutable; they are provided to the public ready-made. Media’s content reflects what their managements choose to offer rather than instinctive public preferences.” (Bogart, 2000, p. 221). Although the truth may lie in a mutual interdependence between the consumer’s demand and the media’s offer, Bogart (2000) concludes: “The first step […] is to recognize that a problem exists, and that market forces cannot solve it.” (Bogart, 2000, p.324). In contrast to the political economist Bogart, Thierer (2010) argues that the actual problem lies within Nichols and McChesney’s model, due to its alleged contra productive consequences of “regulating private media to death” (Thierer, 2010, p. 5).
For the same reason,liberal forces furthermore can be expected to oppose any further regulation that limits the freedom of citizenship. Whether they will advocate for sports to be included into the remit of qualifying media, however, remains doubtful. Admittedly, the liberal participants argued in favour of sports, but that could merely correspond to their personal preferences too. Since this general disagreement is based upon market belief, these findings can be generalized to any country where resistance against free market policies is politically organized.
The centre-periphery cleavage from focus group 2 helped to explain the disagreement on whether the model can be adapted to the federalist structure of the Swiss state and whether the current PSM model should be dismissed. Federalist forces can be expected to advocate for a voucher distribution by state and not by capita in order to leverage their influence on the national media system. Centralist forces on the other hand can be expected to aim at
centralising the implementation process of the model, for the same reason. (However, those theoretical expectations could not be validated by the results of the post questionnaire.) Since the population of the different Swiss cantons differ up to a factor 204
, local media from small cantons fear to receive hardly any vouchers if they would be distributed per capita, while local media from big cantons dislike the federalist idea that media from small cantons should receive overproportionally more vouchers if distributed by canton. After all they serve a way bigger audience.
For the same reason, the centralists dismissed the current PSM model while the peripheries support it, since the current PSM model is strongly federalist. Although only 0.6% of the Swiss population talk Romansh, an entire production desk at the Swiss public broadcast station generates content for this lingual minority. The overproportional use of production resources has been justified with the integration function of the PSM; Without a strong belief in commonality, citizens would not have loyalty dispositions for each other. It is therefore crucial that a public sphere integrates the different subgroups in a population into the mediated discourse by publishing in minority languages or reporting on minority topics (Imhof 2006, p. 10). However, this federalist PSM model recently has been questioned by the initiative byebyebillag.ch that started to advocate an abolition of the mandatory PSM fees and expressed Nissen’s (2006) critique that: “one has to take into account the risk that entrusting PSM to a monolithic, publicly owned media corporation can lead to too much uniformity and a lack of healthy divergence.” (Nissen, 2006, p. 34). While the citizen’s interests are globalizing, the PSM’s offer remains national. Public discussions about the use of national PSM media are therefore likely to emerge more often in Europe during the next decade.
The culturally optimist-pessimist cleavage from focus group 3 helped to explain the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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disagreement on whether the citizenship knows what is good for itself, what the root causes of the decreasing journalistic quality might be, and whether the fear of cross funding and voucher campaigning is legitimate.
Generally one can expect culturally optimistic forces to support the model while culturally pessimistic forces are likely to oppose the model, since “The plan requires that there be faith in the judgment of the American people.” (Nichols and McChesney, 2009, p. 253). This expectation was partially validated by the results of the post questionnaire where two out of three optimists supported the model and two out of three pessimists opposed the model because they did not believe in the citizenship’s power of judgement. The pessimists furthermore feared that the media would use the subsidies for cross funding and shared Gorman’s (2013) critique that the media would start campaigning for the vouchers while the optimists argued that this could be prevented with sufficient regulation and control. Although the cleavage of this focus group helps to explain a lot of disagreement, it is hard to derive practical implementations from those findings, since it is almost impossible to detect or even locate civic organizations, political parties or socio-economic think tanks that are either culturally optimistic or pessimistic. However, a way of estimating a countries belief in its people’s power of judgment is looking at the scope of direct-democratic rights a nation grants to its citizens. Therefore a potential model-promoting movement should have the best chances in a country with strong direct-democratic rights such as Switzerland and the least chances in strictly authoritarian regimes like Angola, Saudi Arabia or Cuba5
. However, the extent to which a government can include its citizens into decision making processes also depends on its size, so this operationalisation has its limits. Further limitations to this study will be presented in the next chapter.
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Limitations
Although the last chapter suggested that the findings of this study to a certain degree can be generalised to other countries there are certain limitations to this study one should have in mind when drawing conclusions.
First of all, as already mentioned in the methods part, the sample of this study is by no means statistically representative. However, the aim was not to reach sufficient representativeness but sufficient saturation, that’s why a thematic cross-over interview guideline was used during the focus group sessions. Secondly, the cleavages on which the constellation of the focus groups was based upon were not exhaustive. This stresses the need for replicating the study in different settings where further cleavages such as technological-savvy or political engagement additionally are taken into account. Thirdly, did the internal composition of the respective sub-groups differ on more dimensions (such as age and sex) than just the ones which constituted the different focus groups. Admittedly, this differentiation could not be totally controlled, but it was kept to a minimum in order to prevent an omitted variable effect. In the case of the peripheries it was on the other hand made sure that representatives of different peripheral regions comprised the sub-group.
Fourthly, the focus group sessions were being moderated and different emphasis was put on different parts of the interview guideline depending on the respective focus group. Therefore a certain bias is apparent in the statement patterns. This is why one has to be careful in comparing the different amounts of comments on one argument by the different focus groups.
Fifthly, since the original model does not consider whether the citizenship news voucher model constitutes an additional or a substitute arrangement to the current PSM model, the citizenship news voucher model was discussed independently and not in direct comparison to
the current PSM model. This might have caused some confusion amongst the participants which could have been prevented if more weight would have been put on this issue in the introductory presentation.
Further research therefore could either envision a comparative analysis of the two models or incorporate the subgroups PSM supporters vs. PSM opponents as a further cleavage or consider other country-specific cleavages. It would also be enlightening to compare how focus groups from more liberal vs. more interventionist countries, from more centralistic vs. more federalist countries and from countries with strong democratic vs. less direct-democratic participation rights assess the opportunities and challenges of the citizenship news voucher model.
Generally, the model makes perfect sense in theory. However, in practice, there is a big difference between theory and practice. This is why supporters of the model should work on the practical implementations of the model, before they aim at implementing the model in Switzerland or elsewhere.
Conclusion
Despite these limitations, this study concludes that the citizenship news voucher model could provide an alternative path to the current PSM model as well as to the advertisement-oriented business model of private media. Before a movement could start promoting the model, however, they would have to overcome certain challenges; The biggest model-specific challenge is how to legitimately define journalistic quality. Recent technological progress has unsettled the field of journalism, by changing established ways of media consumption, story telling, professional standards and news values. Journalism entered the new millennium with the big task of re-inventing itself. It is clear that a model-promoting
movement will only be sustainably successful if they acknowledge those changes within their criteria catalogue. Second, they will have to find a way of gaining democratic legitimacy for the members of such a committee. Thirdly, there are country-specific challenges that depend on the country such a movement is addressing. If the respective country entails many tax-paying immigrants, they should be incorporated in the voucher distribution too. If the respective country in addition is federalist, the model should somehow find a way to balance the centre-focused per capita distribution.
Since these challenges were not yet addressed by the original model by McChesney (2013), a majority of the participants in this study did not support it. However, the field of journalism is changing at such a fast pace that it is conceivable that this model could find support in the near future – given the appropriate adjustments that this study suggests.
References
Allern, S. (2002). Journalistic and commercial news values. Nordicom Review, 23(1-2), 137-152.
Bogart, L. (2000). Commercial culture: The media system and the public interest. Transaction Publishers. (Original work published 1995).
Broad, G. M. (2013). Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. International Journal of Communication, 7(4).
