Authority signaling: How relational interactions between journalists and politicians create primary definers in UK broadcast news

Abstract

How journalists construct the authority of their sources is an essential part of how news comes to have power in politics and how political actors legitimize their roles to publics. Focusing on economic policy reporting and a dataset of 133 hours of mainstream broadcast news from the 5-week 2015 UK general election campaign, we theorize and empirically illustrate how the construction of expert source authority works. To build our theory, we integrate four strands of thought: an important, though in recent years neglected, tradition in the sociology of news concerned with ‘primary definers’; the underdeveloped literature on expert think tanks and media; recent work in journalism studies advocating a relational approach to authority; and elements from the discursive psychology approach to the construction of facticity in interactive settings. Our central contribution is a new perspective on source authority: the identification of behaviors that are key to how the interactions between journalists and elite political actors actively construct the elevated authoritative status of expert sources. We call these behaviors authority signaling. We show how authority signaling works to legitimize the power of the United Kingdom’s most important policy think tank and discuss the implications of this process.

Using public opinion to serve journalistic narratives: Rethinking vox pops and live two-way reporting in five UK election campaigns (2009–2017)

“…The power dynamics involved in sourcing citizens are important to theorise in this context. Unlike expert sources, journalists are not ‘signalling authority’ (Chadwick et al, 2018) when invoking the public. Citizens may be used to display a range of opinions that are not necessarily representative but conducive to the narrative of a journalist’s story.…”

“…They not only help in constructing the narrative of news they also help legitimatise certain viewpoints, privileging some perspectives while marginalising or silencing many others. Examining television news coverage of the 2015 UK general election campaign, for example, Chadwick et al (2018) have theorised the source interaction between journalists and elites as representing ‘authority signalling’, elevating experts above other types of ‘ordinary’ sources.…”

Network Intellectuals and Networked Intellectuals: relational approaches to the study of British think tanks

“…First, think tanks can act as a mouthpiece or spokesperson for a coalition. Think tanks do this by contributing data, research, rhetoric and recommendations to those outside the core policy network -especially the media (Arnoldi, 2007;Chadwick et al, 2018;Lewis & Cushion, 2019). Think tanks use diverse methods of engaging with the network, including blogs, academic papers, policy proposals, evaluation studies and events.…”

The “Hierarchy of Credibility” among Economic Experts: Journalists’ Perceptions of Experts with Varying Institutional Affiliations

“…When reporting on and analysing economic policy, journalists routinely turn to economic experts representing such institutions as banks, research institutes, government agencies, think tanks and labour market organisations (Harjuniemi and Ampuja 2019;Basu 2018;Chadwick et al 2020;Walsh 2020). The scholarship on journalistic representations of the financial crisis and the ensuing euro crisis has concluded that experts played a pivotal role in providing the public with justifications regarding such economic policy ideas as austerity (Berry 2019;Cawley 2016;Vaara 2014).…”

“…Given the ability of experts to disseminate economic ideas and influence policy-making (Helgadóttir 2016), as well as shape public discourse on economics, it is hardly surprising that journalism scholarship has started to pay attention to how journalists construct the authority and credibility of economic policy experts (Chadwick et al 2020;Walsh 2020). However, given the variety of economic expert groups that provide journalists with information and insights (for instance, banks, government authorities, research institutes), the scholarship lacks analyses of how journalists assess the credibility of different types of expert groups.…”