Soft Presentation of Hard News? A Content Analysis of Political Facebook Posts

Abstract

The current media environment is primarily characterised by a large amount of information and, in contrast, rather fragmented audience attention. This is especially true for social media, particularly Facebook, which have become important news sources for many people. Journalists cannot help but publish content on Facebook if they want to reach the part of their audience that mainly—or even only—consumes news there. On Facebook, journalists are at the mercy of the algorithm that determines the visibility of their content. Because user engagement is a crucial factor in the algorithm, concerns have been raised that journalists are abandoning their normative quality standards to make the news as attractive as possible to the audience—at the expense of media performance. A softened presentation of the news, particularly in Facebook posts, may help achieve this aim, but research on this subject is lacking. The present study analyses this practice of softening the news in four German media outlets’ (<em>BILD</em>,<em> FAZ</em>,<em> Der Spiegel</em>,<em> Tagesschau</em>) political Facebook posts. The results show that the overall level of news softening is low to medium. Furthermore, comparing them to website teasers reveals that news softening is only slightly higher on Facebook (mainly <em>BILD</em> and <em>Der Spiegel</em>), and that there are no converging trends between quality or public service media and tabloid media. Exaggerated fears about news softening are therefore unnecessary. Continued analysis of news softening, as well as ongoing adaption of the concept according to dynamic developments, is nevertheless important.

Adapting to Affordances and Audiences? A Cross-Platform, Multi-Modal Analysis of the Platformization of News on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter

“…Evidence suggests similar conclusions for adaptation processes: If anything, outlets followed platform logics by including or excluding links to their websites in social media posts (RQ3). In contrast, they did not systematically change the use of interactive features (RQ4), engaging language (RQ5), or personalization (RQ6) in contrast to what prior research partly indicated (e.g., Hågvar 2019;Haim et al 2021 but see Lamot, Kreutz, and Opgenhaffen 2022;Steiner 2020). A noteworthy exception is Twitter where, at least compared to other platforms, news was for instance more often adapted by decreasing engaging language or textual personalization.…”

“…Personalization (Text) describes the relative share of words in articles' titles/teasers or social media posts describing persons, with higher values indicating stronger personalization. Like previous studies (Haim et al 2021;Steiner 2020;Welbers and Opgenhaffen 2019), we focused on articles' titles and teasers since these are often simply adapted to create social media posts (Hågvar 2019). This allows us to directly compare changes from news outlets' own platforms for external platforms.…”

The News Sharing Gap

“…Exploring the overall results, and taking previous studies into account, we found the H1 results suggest that hard news might be more stable and regular than expected. This could be the case, especially for legacy news media, as Steiner (2020) showed in her study of different types of news media in Germany.…”

“…The evidence offered by these studies suggests a general trend of news editors being pushed to offer a more softened supply of their news production to Facebook audiences. However, Steiner's (2020) study of four German news media outlets challenges this by showing that there is no unified trend when one compares legacy with tabloid media. This is because the former is proving to be more reluctant to pursue news softening than the latter.…”

Political Knowledge to Go: An Analysis of Selected Political Influencers and Their Formats in the Context of the 2021 German Federal Election

“…In this respect, PSMI and their content can, more broadly, be viewed and analyzed through the lenses of quality research in news media (e.g., Bachmann et al, 2022) and political media coverage in particular (e.g., Jandura & Friedrich, 2014), for social media posts explicitly (e.g., Steiner, 2020), or for participatory content (e.g., Borger et al, 2019). Many of the studies on quality in journalism deduce quality criteria from the normative ideal of a deliberative democracy, for example, relevance, contextualization, professionalism, or diversity (Bachmann et al, 2022).…”