Media coverage of political actors and debates is a crucial avenue for voters to learn about political parties and their policies. However, nowadays party-media agenda-setting is increasingly shaped by large-scale transformations and the fragmentation of political communication across various party channels (e.g., press releases, social media, speeches) and media types (e.g., newspapers, television

The knowledge gap hypothesis—the assumption that an increasing flow of news on a topic fosters a gap in knowledge between the more and the less educated—has been demonstrated in numerous studies throughout the past 60 years. Knowledge gaps are attributed to individual differences in media selection and information processing capacities. However, it has been difficult to investigate the relative influence

According to selective exposure theory, people tend to select news media that are perceived to provide attitude-consonant information and avoid those that are perceived to provide dissonant information. Despite this, research on selective exposure seldom takes people’s perceptions of media bias into account, while research on perceptions of media bias seldom links such perceptions to subsequent media

This study explores the interplay of imagery and text in online political communication by European party leaders. We examine how visual and textual components combine to convey emotions in Instagram posts published by one hundred twenty-four mainstream and populist leaders of one hundred fourteen parties in twenty-four EU countries, covering 3 months before and after the 2019 European elections. Images

Politicians on social media curate the flow of information their followers are exposed to, and they share news as a way to do so. Previous research has shown that they are strategic in their selection of news stories—they select specific news items and outlets to appeal to their online audiences. The reach of politicians’ news-sharing posts and their possible effects, are, however, influenced by the

Mindful of the spread of negative sentiments toward journalism, scholars have been paying increased attention to audience perceptions of the news media and expectations from journalists (driving an “audience turn” in journalism studies). Adding to this body of knowledge, this study examines audience beliefs on journalistic autonomy, exploring which factors are perceived as influencing journalists.

The global spread of political misinformation poses serious challenges to democracies, eroding trust and distorting public discourse. However, research has largely focused on WEIRD countries—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic—limiting our understanding of how misinformation operates across diverse political, cultural, and technological contexts. This special issue addresses these

Newspapers in most West European countries have historically had strong ties to specific political parties. While formal bonds have vanished, parallelism in news content might still remain; for instance, in a tendency to report more often and more favorably on parties that align with the political leaning of a newspaper. In this article, we ask whether political parallelism exists in newspapers today

During the 2023 Nigerian presidential campaign, a variety of political, ethnic, and religious tensions contributed to a significant spike in false and misleading information. To navigate this complex information ecosystem, campaigns set up media units to, in varying degrees, produce disinformation about other candidates, reinforce disinformation being spread on social media, and respond to disinformation

This study integrates the perspectives of issue niche theory and issue ownership theory to examine how variations in issue salience affect the resources available to political organizations affiliated with different parties. Analyzing a database with millions of donors’ political donation records, our time series analysis reveals a nuanced interplay: When some issues associated with Democrats assume

Democratic backsliding has been on the rise globally, including in the established and transitional democracies of the Global North, with populist leaders adopting similar practices of undermining the epistemology of journalism or attempting to capture news media outright. A representative survey with 391 Bulgarian journalists conducted as part of the Worlds of Journalism Study in 2021–2024 shows that

Trust in public authorities can be crucial for a country to navigate through times of crisis. Such crises put news media into the spotlight as crucial information brokers between authorities and the public. It is argued that media coverage should affect trust in public institutions and that such effects are likely to be conditioned by individuals’ crisis risk perceptions. This article investigates

Research shows that female politicians often receive more negative news coverage than their male counterparts, which can undermine voter support and contribute to their underrepresentation in politics. Despite the increase in politically active women and heightened attention to gender issues in political discourse in the United States, the past decade has also witnessed a rise in divisive rhetoric

Campaign promises are a central mechanism for voters to hold politicians accountable, and information about their breakage or fulfillment features prominently in the media during election campaigns. Despite the importance of campaign promises, previous research yields conflicting expectations regarding their influence on citizens. Some theories suggest citizens vote based on policy performance and

Concerns have been raised over AI-generated deepfakes and their impact on democracy. Unlike earlier forms of disinformation relying on text or traditional video-editing techniques (cheapfakes), deepfakes employ artificial intelligence, provoking speculations that they may be even more persuasive and harder to debunk. Using an experiment with a multiple-message design ( N = 2,085), we found that fake

Despite the increasing reliance on online media for news consumption, people generally exhibit lower levels of trust in online news relative to traditional media. To explain the preference disparities in media trust and their potential cross-national variations, this article examines individuals’ trust gap between newspapers and Internet news across 14 countries and regions in East, South, and Southeast

While there is a strong scholarly interest surrounding the content of political misinformation online, much of this research concerns misinformation in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) countries. Although such research has investigated the topical and stylistic characteristics of misinformation, its findings are frequently not interpreted systematically in relation to

Scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the ways in which the public trusts an array of media content, outlets, and platforms. However, the bulk of this work has focused on audience research in Western democracies. This study uses surveys of journalists in Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya in 2019 to examine the metajournalistic discourse surrounding how press freedom levels, technological advancements

The spread of misinformation has emerged as a global concern. Academic attention has recently shifted to emphasize the role of political elites as drivers of misinformation. Yet, little is known of the relationship between party politics and the spread of misinformation—in part due to a dearth of cross-national empirical data needed for comparative study. This article examines which parties are more

Misinformation poses a significant threat to the integrity of political systems, particularly in competitive authoritarian regimes (CARs), where it can distort public perception and undermine democratic processes. This study focuses on the 2023 Turkish general elections—a context characterized by widespread misinformation. While extensive research has been conducted on misinformation in democratic

While Africans are committed to democracy, governments across the continent have failed to deliver on the democratic aspirations of the populace, with declinatory outcomes for satisfaction with democracy (SWD) over the past decade. A number of reliable variables (e.g., economics, political participation, democratic performance) have been used over the past 50 years to study trends in SWD worldwide

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the production and distribution of news has generated theoretical, normative, and practical concerns around the erosion of journalistic authority and autonomy and the spread of misinformation. With trust in news already low in many places worldwide, both scholars and practitioners are wary of how the public will respond to news generated

The global reach of misinformation has exacerbated harms in low- and middle-income countries faced with deficiencies in funding, platform engagement, and media literacy. These challenges have reiterated the need for the development of strategies capable of addressing misinformation that cannot be countered using popular fact-checking methods. Focusing on Kenya’s contentious 2022 election, we evaluate

This paper analyses the extent to which African journalism fields have outsourced the labor of knowledge construction to non-African actors. Focusing on the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi and the atrocities in Darfur between 2003 and 2008, it captures the extent to which both news organizations and journalists privileged narratives from Minority World Countries as they constructed knowledge about

Mis- and disinformation have been associated with detrimental political consequences, such as increasing ideological and epistemic polarization. Yet, we know little about how people perceive the risks of misinformation across countries and domains of information. As holding high-risk perceptions of encountering misinformation across domains may result in high levels of media cynicism and uncertainty

News consumption and voting behavior are interlinked and particularly important in elections where traditional political cleavages are not easily applicable. This relationship becomes more complex and uncertain in contexts of low trust in the news media and high levels of misinformation circulating in different news ecosystems. In this study, we test an indirect path between differentiated news media

Many western democracies have witnessed an upsurge of partisan alternative media that explicitly challenge the legitimacy of mainstream media and politics alike and promote populist discourses. Accordingly, alternative media are often discussed in relation to lower levels of political trust and support for populist parties. Yet, only a limited number of studies have investigated these relationships

The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by an unprecedented influx of misinformation often with adverse impact on the effectiveness of institutional responses to the health crisis. However, relatively little is still known about the factors that may have facilitated the proliferation and public acceptance of misinformation related to the virus or to the government’s anti-pandemic measures, particularly

Studies have found limited evidence consistent with the theory that partisan and like-minded online news exposure have demonstrable effects on political outcomes. Most of this prior research, however, has focused on the particular case of the United States even as concern elsewhere in the world has grown about political parallelism in media content online, which has sometimes been blamed for heightened

Changes in global journalism are reflected in myriad cross-national professionalization efforts, including the development and exportation of models for journalism practice. Literature on peace journalism, for instance, suggests that its adaptation across contexts is shaped by forces on several levels, including the influence of individual media practitioners. However, little research examines those

Following the death of twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini, tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets in Iran—and the whole world watched through their screens. Several Iranian diaspora journalists stepped up to cover the events in Iran for western news outlets. In this study, we interviewed fourteen Iranian diaspora journalists on how they define their role when reporting on Iran and how

Public broadcasters are bound by strict guidelines to ensure balance in representing different demographic and political groups, and to better reflect the distribution of these characteristics within the public and political elites. How are these decisions affected when the biggest political issues of the day create further cleavages that not only cross-cut existing divides but also deserve representation

Media criticism is a crucial part of meta-journalistic discourse, ensuring that journalists adhere to their democratic functions, such as informing citizens in an honest and complete manner. However, the profession increasingly faces hostile, nonevidence-based attacks from politicians that attempt to strategically fuel distrust among citizens and delegitimize opposed viewpoints. Despite this reality

Mounting concern surrounds the influence of political actors on journalism, especially as media outlets face increasing financial pressures. These circumstances can give rise to instances of media capture, a mutually corrupting relationship between political actors and media organizations. However, empirical evidence substantiating such mechanisms and their consequences remains limited, particularly

This study investigates how digital connectivity may influence news coverage of protests globally. Scholars argue that the arrival of the digital age did not overthrow legacy media but built a hybrid media system where old and new media logics work together. Although some recent studies highlighted that mobile internet access enabled protestors to gain media attention internationally, evidence also

An evolving body of research generally referred to as visual politics has brought the heavy research focus on linguistic modalities of political communication closer to parity with visual emphasis. The study reported here transcends this schism by joining momentum toward multimodality as an ontological departure point for research. We expanded an existing visual instrument into a multimodal one and

This comparative study examines the interplay of religious messaging and disinformation in the election campaign material of Jair Bolsonaro and Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the 2022 Brazilian and 2023 Turkish presidential elections. We employ a mixed-methods approach, combining computational keyword filtering and content analysis with qualitative discourse analysis and applied to a corpus of 10,519 posts

News sources that correct misinformation seek to foster an informed citizenry and promote democratic accountability. One such effort is being made by fact-checking sites across the globe. However, public trust in these outlets remains limited. Is their politics-focused coverage one factor behind the limited trust? Politics-focused coverage highlights partisan competition, which can harm credibility

Despite increasing academic attention, several questions about news literacy messages (NLM) remain unanswered. First, it remains unclear how differences in the framing of the NLMs may influence their effectiveness. Second, we still know little about how NLMs work and, in particular, whether people also adopt the recommendations they are given. To answer these questions, this study conducts an experiment

In journalism research conducted in the Global South, power relationships between the researcher and the researched mirror the uneven power structures between the Western journalists and their news subjects or their non-Western colleagues working alongside them. But so far, the figure of the journalism researcher in such contexts has not been problematized to any great extent in journalism scholarship

Why and how do autocracies discursively conduct digital astroturfing against their populations? As these regimes increasingly co-opt social media to manipulate online political discourse, the current political disinformation literature continues to privilege a Cold War paradigm, focusing on countries that dominate Western foreign policy priorities and concerns. Its normative underpinnings overshadow

This article explores the interactions between journalistic actors and emerging open-source intelligence and investigation (OSINT) communities. It employs qualitative content analysis of discourse from two OSINT communities surrounding three events following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which received substantial coverage in news media. OSINT practices are rapidly becoming a mainstay of

Russian state propaganda outlets Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik are an important part of Russian foreign policy and key global sources of disinformation. Previous work has argued that they focus on exploiting social divisions among foreign audiences and worried that Russian propaganda may influence the broader media agenda. To date, though, there has been no comprehensive study of what RT and Sputnik

This theoretical article takes a fresh look at the relationship between journalists and politicians, based on the public critique they level at each other. It proposes that this critique should be seen not simply as the expression of reproaches between rival actors, but as a meaningful metadiscursive articulation. Public critique means, for example, defining journalism, politics, democracy, or a particular

Democratic societies inherently depend on an informed citizenry. By shaping citizens’ voting behavior, fostering political cynicism, and reducing trust in institutions, misinformation can pose significant challenges to individuals and societies. Against this backdrop, fact-checking initiatives aimed at verifying the accuracy of publicly disseminated (mis)information have flourished worldwide. However

Findings on whether voters like or dislike targeted campaign messages have been contradictory. I argue that voters react differently depending on how precisely the targeted messages are tailored to them, and tailoring can potentially become “too much.” I corroborate this claim with the results of a factorial survey experiment among a representative sample of the German voting population ( N = 3,217)

Several studies argue that journalism can facilitate and shape democratic backsliding when news organizations are captured by business and political elites. Under these conditions, journalists will likely fail to hold political actors to account and provide information essential for public deliberation. Gradually, news outlets devolve to provide unfair representations based on private interests instead

In this article, we suggest that the ideological cultural forces explain the differences in journalism practices in Western and Muslim majority countries (MMC). It is argued that the norms, values, and the deep political culture of the West and MMC have been materialized leading to different types of journalism practices. The statistical analysis of 11,246 interviews from twenty four Western and MMC

This conceptual article argues that the strategic use of personal storytelling to attract public attention and gain political impact is insufficiently theorized in political communication, journalism studies, and lobbying research. Claiming the need to study backstage relations among interest groups, professional communication workers, journalists, and decision-makers, it conceptualizes how lay personal

Misinformation has become increasingly prevalent in online media. Transnational misinformation, in particular, poses an increasing threat to the security and stability of modern nation-states. To this end, at least some anecdotal evidence suggests a direct relationship between misinformation and domestic acts of politically motivated violence. Yet, such claims lack systematic empirical evidence, especially

We take two approaches to understanding democratically corrosive sentiment (DCS) in the US, which we operationalize in terms of populist attitudes, conspiracy beliefs, and expectation of fraud in the next election. Our first approach is media use, which is not well understood as a correlate of DCS beyond generalities about the harms of social media and partisan news. We distinguish between mainstream