Manufacturing consent through integration: Social networks of German journalists in the elite milieu and their effects on coverage

Abstract

Most of the previous research concerning the interaction between journalists and their elite sources was done by questioning the players, the results being anonymized. This study has chosen a different methodological approach in order to pinpoint any possible influence by elite sources on journalistic content. First, a social network analysis focuses on the social environment of German journalists, in particular that of four senior foreign policy editors with the leading newspapers Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt and Die Zeit. These were involved in a number of associations, think tanks and policy-planning groups, which have ties with the German federal government, the United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization where they potentially had contact with national and international political and business elites. Following this, a frame analysis shows that the output of the four journalists on the controversial issues of the definition of security (‘extended security concept’) and of deployments of the German army abroad (especially in Afghanistan) follows the same line as that of the identified peer groups. Finally, the implications of this coincidence are discussed.

News Sources as a Propaganda Filter: The New York Times Coverage of Palestine and Kosovo Unilateral Approaches of Statehood Recognition

“…Several studies correspond with the current findings (Hallin, 1984;Brown et al, 1987;Zaller & Chiu, 1996;Herman and Peterson, 2000;Hertog, 2000;Dimitrova and Connolly-Ahern, 2007;Bennett et al, 2007;Bharthapudi, 2012;Schwalbe, 2013;Schwalbe & Dougherty, 2015;Kruger, 2015;Koehler, 2016;Zollmann, 2017). At large, the NYT discourse of statehood recognition of both Palestine and Kosovo have been constructed with an overbearing reliance on official news sources.…”

Towards a Real Comprehension of Social Networks Effects on Cybermedia Web Traffic: Quantitative Impact in the 27 European Union Countries Most Popular Online Journals

“…The area of research on the impact of social networks on the productive structure of the media is approached taking into account factors such as their contribution to the changes in the model itself that involves the promotion of practices like hyperlinking and cyber-banning (Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink, 2015), those referring to their effects on sponsored content (Serazio, 2020) or those that impact their role in prolonging the traditional news production cycle (Goode 2009;Anderson 2013). Also noteworthy are works that have to do with their effects on speci c media or media groups ( The third line of research focuses on the speci c impact that social networks have on information professionals working in the media, focusing on aspects such as their gradual use as sources of information even by the most prestigious journalists (Krüger, 2015), which contrasts with the distrust with which these same reporters view them (Varona and Sánchez, 2016), in areas such as the guidelines for maintaining a conversation with receivers that breaks with their work routines (Whibey, Joseph, and Lazer, 2019), in location-based monitoring or the detection of possible informatively relevant events that require extreme caution (Thurman, 2018) and even underlining the possibility of the journalist becoming a global celebrity through its use (Newman, 2009).…”

Sources that Trigger the News: Multiplexity of Social Ties in News Discovery

“…Because journalists find themselves caught between the meanings constructed by their organization and the meanings of their source networks (Berkowitz 2019), and since multiplex social ties mean more trust as well as more potential influence (Ho and Levesque 2005), journalists are able to not only access various types of information but also construct the frames for the news selection, such as relevant angles or subsequent sources in the story. One example of how exposure to a certain interpretative environment (even though not necessarily through the multiplex ties) is the network study of German journalists, who adopted the frames of the elite politicians (Krüger 2015).…”

“…Finally, interaction within certain networks can influence the news selection since the actors acquire similar states (in this case interpretational frames) as the other members of those networks (McClurg, Klofstad, and Sokhey 2017;Krüger 2015).…”