Abstract
The chapter uses Twitter data to investigate the extent to which British, Italian, and Spanish journalists employ Twitter to comment on the news as well as reporting on national and European topics, and, conversely, the degree to which the audiences these journalists manage to attract on Twitter reflect the journalists’ or their media outlets’ political affiliations. Our findings suggest that national contexts matter, as journalists working in media environments characterised by lower degrees of parallelism are less likely to use Twitter to provide commentary on the news than those working in outlets or systems where parallelism is higher. We also show that both journalists and news outlets are less likely to editorialise when they tweet about the EU than when they focus on domestic politics.
In accordance with Italian academic conventions, we specify that Pablo Barberá conducted the data collection and analysis and wrote the sections titled ‘Data and methods’ and ‘Results’. Cristian Vaccari wrote the sections titled ‘Introduction’ and ‘Research Design’ and Augusto Valeriani wrote the section titled ‘Political Parallelism, Social Media, and Journalists’ Self-Branding’. The authors collaborated in the theorising behind this study and its research design, and in writing the section ‘Conclusions’.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/oct/18/twitter-reinvent-sale-jack-dorsey (accessed 1 July 2016).
- 2.
For a lengthier comparison of Twitter to other social media platforms, see e.g. Bossetta, Segesten and Trenz (2016) in this volume.
- 3.
We used the following rules to decide what journalists were covering ‘political news’ and thus were included in our sample: we decided to exclude (1) reporters covering weather, culture, sports, science, technology, etc., (2) cameramen and other technical jobs, (3) contributors and columnists, (4) ‘freelance’ journalists and journalists no longer working for the media outlet to which the list belongs, and (5) collective accounts and news desks; however, we decided to include (1) journalists covering economic news, except for those covering only business and companies, (2) correspondents, (3) broadcast producers, (4) everyone with missing information in their description. Personal accounts of journalists were also included in the sample if the journalists identified themselves as such. We only consider accounts with more than 1000 followers because we observe that below this threshold our estimates of political ideology suffer from high measurement error.
- 4.
According to We Are Social, a market research firm, 47 per cent of Spaniards and 46 per cent of Italians are on social media, as opposed to 59 per cent of British citizens. See http://wearesocial.net/blog/2015/01/digital-social-mobile-worldwide-2015/ (accessed 1 July 2016).
- 5.
All the codes required to estimate this model is available in the tweetscores package for R (www.tweetscores.com).
- 6.
The differences across outlet types are also generally consistent with those reported in previous studies. In Italy, parallelism is higher for TV and radio news accounts than for print. In the United Kingdom, we find the opposite pattern: parallelism in print media is greater than in TV and radio. In Spain, the levels of parallelism are similar across the two traditional types of media. With the exception of this last result, such general pattern is consistent with the findings in Van Kempen (2007). However, parallelism in TV media in Spain has increased over the past few years, due to the appearance of new TV channels clearly aligned with either the left (la Sexta) or the right (Intereconomia).
- 7.
The list of relevant keywords for each country are forza italia, PD, M5S, cinque stelle, NCD, centro destra, berlusconi, bersani, renzi, grillo, letta, alfano (Italy), PSOE, PP, podemos, ciudadanos, sánchez, rajoy, rivera, iglesias (Spain), labour, conservative, libdem, ukip, cameron, miliband, corbyn, clegg, farron, farage (UK)
- 8.
Some of these keywords can also be considered related to domestic issues, but they are still nonetheless considered here because they represent the most relevant issues about European politics being discussed during this period. Note that the * sign indicates multiple keywords were matched. For example, euro* would match euro, europe, europeans, etc.
- 9.
We are aware that this strategy over-simplifies the structure of party competition in all three countries, particularly in Italy where the Five Star Movement (M5S) has established itself as a stable third pole, with a substantial number of legislators elected in 2013. However, because the M5S does not operate on the same left-right ideological axis as the two other main parties, incorporating it would not substantially change the results of the analysis.
- 10.
We documented this result in Models 1 and 2, where we find negative and significant coefficients for the correlation between percentage of tweets about Europe and level of editorialisation.
References
Barberá, P. (2015). Birds of the same feather tweet together. Bayesian ideal point estimation using twitter data. Political Analysis, 23(1), pp. 76–91.
Barberá, P., Popa, S. and Schmitt, H. (2015). Prospects of ideological realignment(s) in the 2014 EP elections? Analyzing the common multidimensional political space for voters, parties, and legislators in Europe. Paper presented at the 2015 MPSA Conference, 12 April 2015. Available at: http://pablobarbera.com/static/eu-dimensionality.pdf [Accessed 1 July 2016].
Barisione, M. and Ceron, A. (2016). A digital movement of opinion? Contesting austerity through social media. In: M. Barisione and A. Michailidou, (eds.), Social Media and European Politics. Rethinking Power and Legitimacy in the Digital Era. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Bossetta, M., Segestean, A.D. and Trenz, H.-J. (2016). Transnational citizen engagement through social media: The factual, the ideological, and the moral style. In: M. Barisione and A. Michailidou, (eds.), Social Media and European Politics. Rethinking Power and Legitimacy in the Digital Era. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Bruno, N. (2011). Tweet first, verify later? How real-time information is changing the coverage of worldwide crisis events. Reuters Institute Fellowship Paper. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, Available at: http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/tweet-first-verify-later [Accessed 1 July 2016].
Bruns, A. (2012). Journalists and Twitter: How Australian news organisations adapt to a new medium. Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, (144), pp. 97–107.
Cobianchi, V., Del Sal, G. and Splendore, S. (2014). Nuove forme per le news e (vecchio) giornalismo. I direttori italiani e l’uso di Twitter. Problemi Dell’informazione, 39(2), pp. 199–218.
Cornia, A. (2010). The Europeanization of Mediterranean journalistic practices and the Italianization of Brussels: Dynamics of the interaction between EU institutions and national journalistic cultures. European Journal of Communication, 25(4), pp. 366–381.
Farhi, P. (2009). The Twitter Explosion. American Journalism Review, April/May. Available at: http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4756 [Accessed 1 July 2016].
Greenacre, M. (2007). Correspondence Analysis in Practice, 2nd ed. London: Chapman & Hall/CRC.
Gulyas, A. (2013). The influence of professional variables on journalists’ uses and views of social media: A comparative study of Finland, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Digital Journalism, 1(2), pp. 270–285.
Hallin, D.C. and Mancini, P. (2004). Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hoff, P.D., Raftery, A. and Handcock, M.S. (2002). Latent space approaches to social network analysis. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 97(460), pp. 1090–1098.
Koopmans, R. and Statham, P. (eds.) (2010). The Making of a European Public Sphere: Media Discourse and Political Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kriesi, H. (2012). Personalization of national election campaigns. Party Politics, 18, pp. 825–844.
Lasorsa, D.L., Lewis, S.C. and Holton, A.E. (2012). Normalizing Twitter: Journalism practice in an emerging communication space. Journalism Studies, 13(1), pp. 19–36.
Lawrence, R.G., Molyneux, L., Coddington, M. and Holton, A. (2014). Tweeting conventions: Political journalists’ use of Twitter to cover the 2012 presidential campaign. Journalism Studies, 15(6), pp. 789–806.
Machill, M., Beiler, M. and Fischer, C. (2006). Europe-topics in Europe’s media. The debate about the European public sphere: A meta-analysis of media content analyses. European Journal of Communication, 21(1), pp. 57–88.
Mancini, P. (2013). Media fragmentation, party system, and democracy. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 18(1), pp. 43–60.
Mancini, P. and Mazzoni, M. (2015). Countries still matter. In: R.G. Piccard, (ed.), The Euro Crisis in the Media. Journalistic Coverage of Economic Crisis and European Institutions. Oxford: I.B. Tauris.
Michailidou, A., Trenz, H.J. and De Wilde, P. (2014). The Internet and European Integration: Pro-and Anti-EU Debates in Online News Media. Berlin: Barbara Budrich.
Michailidou, A. (2016) Social media and crisis politics in the European Union: Reaffirming the communicative power status quo?. In: M. Barisione and A. Michailidou, (eds.), Social Media and European Politics. Rethinking Power and Legitimacy in the Digital Era. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Nielsen, R.K. and Schrøder, K.C. (2014). The relative importance of social media for accessing, finding, and engaging with news: An eight-country cross-media comparison. Digital Journalism, 2(4), pp. 472–489.
Picard, R.G. (2009). Blogs, tweets, social media, and the news business. Nieman Reports, 63(3), p. 10.
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2015). Reuters Digital News Report 2015. Available at: http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/ [Accessed 1 July 2016].
Schmid, H. (1994) Probabilistic part-of-speech tagging using decision trees. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Methods in Language Processing, Manchester, UK. Available at: http://www.cis.uni-muenchen.de/~schmid/tools/TreeTagger/data/tree-tagger2.pdf [Accessed 1 July 2016].
Schudson, M. and Anderson, C. (2009). Objectivity, professionalism, and truth seeking in journalism. In: K. Wahl-Jorgensen and T. Hanitzsch, (eds.), The Handbook of Journalism Studies. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 88–101.
Vaccari, C. (2011). The news media as networked political actors: How Italian media are reclaiming political ground by harnessing online participation. Information, Communication & Society, 14(7), pp. 981–997.
Vaccari, C. (2015). The features, impact and legacy of Berlusconi’s campaigning techniques, language and style. Modern Italy, 20(1), pp. 25–39.
Van Kempen, H. (2007). Media-party parallelism and its effects: A cross-national comparative study. Political Communication, 24(3), pp. 303–320.
Ward, S. (2008). Truth and objectivity. In: C. Christians and L. Wilkins, (eds.), The Handbook of Mass Media Ethics. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 71–83.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Barberá, P., Vaccari, C., Valeriani, A. (2017). Social Media, Personalisation of News Reporting, and Media Systems’ Polarisation in Europe. In: Barisione, M., Michailidou, A. (eds) Social Media and European Politics. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59890-5_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59890-5_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-59889-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-59890-5
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)