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Democratic theory and the potential of value frames in assessing media performance
[journal article]
Abstract Media users need information and knowledge to act as free citizens. From this basic democratic assumption, news standards for media performance can be derived. Porto’s (2007) model of the ‘interpreting citizen’ assigns a central role to the diversity of interpretive frames. These frames enable citiz... view more
Media users need information and knowledge to act as free citizens. From this basic democratic assumption, news standards for media performance can be derived. Porto’s (2007) model of the ‘interpreting citizen’ assigns a central role to the diversity of interpretive frames. These frames enable citizens to make judgments about societal issues and related political positions. However, a theoretical foundation for classifying these frames in terms of their content is missing. We propose to derive such a basis from democratic theories of citizenship, which assume that values define a citizen’s position vis-à-vis the political sphere. Building on the cleavage approach from political science, we characterize which values organize political debates. The results of a large-scale content analysis of German news media demonstrate which empirical insights into media performance can be gained with a theoretically derived classification of value frames (most notably, measuring the substantive content of plurality). Based on this, we discuss additional avenues for future research.... view less
Keywords
citizenship; democracy; journalistic diversity; news; pluralism; value; politics; media; content
Classification
Media Contents, Content Analysis
Political Process, Elections, Political Sociology, Political Culture
Free Keywords
cleavages; framing; media performance; news standards
Document language
English
Publication Year
2020
Page/Pages
p. 281-292
Journal
Media and Communication, 8 (2020) 3
Issue topic
Media performance in times of media change
ISSN
2183-2439
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed