No abstract

Fo r m o r e info r m a tio n, in cl u di n g o u r p olicy a n d s u b mi s sio n p r o c e d u r e , pl e a s e c o n t a c t t h e R e p o si to ry Te a m a t: u si r@ s alfo r d. a c. u k. Measuring and explaining the diversity of voices and viewpoints in the news. A comparative study on the determinants of content diversity of immigration news.

As part of a larger European Union (EU)-funded project, this paper investigates the coverage of corruption and related topics in three European democracies: France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Based on Freedom House data, these countries are characterized by different levels of press freedom. A large corpus of newspaper articles (107,248 articles) from the period 2004 to 2013 were analyzed using dedicated software. We demonstrate that freedom of press is not the only dimension that affects the ability to and the way in which news media report on corruption. Because of its political partisanship, the Italian press tends to emphasize and dramatize corruption cases involving domestic public administrators and, in particular, politicians. The British coverage is affected mainly by market factors, and the press pays more attention to cases occurring abroad and in sport. The French coverage shares specific features with both the British and the Italian coverage: Newspapers mainly focus on corruption involving business companies and foreign actors, but they also cover cases involving domestic politicians. Media market segmentation, political parallelism, and media instrumentalization determine different representations preventing the establishment of unanimously shared indignation.

Immigration is a dramatic challenge for Europe: the press has a large influence in determining the opinion climate at this regard. This article investigates how a selection of newspapers in Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy covers the immigration issue from 1 January 2013 to 30 April 2014, before and after the Lampedusa shipwreck on 3 October 2013. Departing from the hypothesis that the media ownership may have a large influence on the content of the news, we investigate 12 different media companies in conjunction with other variables that may affect the coverage of the topic as well. A quantitative content analysis has been first used to derive information from a collection of 2602 articles retrieved through a set of specific keywords from different online database. Afterward, a Multiple Correspondence Analysis has been performed to explore and synthetize the collected information into a small number of ‘factors’.

The article provides evidences about mechanisms and practices that undermine the effectiveness of investigative journalism through the analysis of selected case studies of corruptive phenomena in Italy, Hungary, Romania and Latvia. In particular, the article shows that the idea of watchdog journalism does not work actually in the observed countries. Indeed, investigative journalism requires certain socioeconomic conditions, such as a low degree of influence of the political and economic spheres and a high level of journalistic professionalism, which are not (always) present in the aforementioned countries. More specifically, the article focuses on three aspects that may distort investigative journalists' work: a certain proximity (sometimes overlapping) of publishers (often rich oligarchs or prominent businessmen) and politicians, the 'blackmail' exercised through advertising investments and the interferences of secret services, which may dissuade newsrooms from performing their role as the watchdog.