“…Television news is therefore a highly probable and relevant public space for the production of public justifications, which play a normatively and empirically important role for democratic discourse. This idea has appeared in several studies of justification in the news (e.g., Ferree, Gamson, Gerhards, & Rucht, 2002;Gerhards, Neidhardt, & Rucht, 1998;Maia, 2009;Renwick & Lamb, 2013;Rudd & Fish, 1989). However, this study is the first major undertaking to link political justification in the news to sound-bite journalism.…”