TY - JOUR
T1 - What makes news more multiperspectival? A field analysis
AU - Benson, Rodney
N1 - Funding Information:
I wish to thank the following persons for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article: Michael Schudson, Timothy Dowd, Marc Verboord, Abigail Saguy, Barbie Zelizer, Robert Entman, W. Lance Bennett, Julien Duval, Dominique Marchetti, Deana Rohlinger, Dalton Conley, Sandrine Boudana, Andreas Koller, Eric Darras, David Folsom, M.D., and the editors of Poetics and its anonymous reviewers. Frank Lopresti of the NYU Social Science Statistics Lab provided expert statistical advice. Audiences for earlier versions of this paper at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Toulouse, the Sociology departments at NYU and the University of Virginia, the 2008 International Communication Association conference, and the 2008 Erasmus University Rotterdam conference on Classification in the Arts and Media also offered helpful comments and critiques. Sarah Stonbely, Kathryn Kleppinger, Jane Mabe, and Nathalie Le Dinh Bao provided careful research assistance for this article, and research-related funding was provided by an NYU Humanities Council Grant and the NYU Steinhardt Dean’s Award.
PY - 2009/10
Y1 - 2009/10
N2 - Democratic normative theory suggests that the news media should promote a broad range of viewpoints, yet little research has attempted to identify and explain variations in press multiperspectivalness. This article introduces new generalizable measures of ideological and institutional pluralism, and applies them to a case study of immigration news coverage by a cross-section of the U.S. and French national newspaper fields. The most multiperspectival newspapers tend to receive less of their funding from advertising and have audiences with higher cultural capital. Consistent cross-national differences may be partially attributed to political field influence and news formats. In contrast to more atomized U.S. narrative-driven news stories, the French "debate ensemble" format (grouping together breaking news, editorials, interview transcripts, and background context articles) serves as the opening to a wide-ranging public debate. When U.S. newspapers offered "multi-genre" news coverage, their degree of multiperspectivalness also increased.
AB - Democratic normative theory suggests that the news media should promote a broad range of viewpoints, yet little research has attempted to identify and explain variations in press multiperspectivalness. This article introduces new generalizable measures of ideological and institutional pluralism, and applies them to a case study of immigration news coverage by a cross-section of the U.S. and French national newspaper fields. The most multiperspectival newspapers tend to receive less of their funding from advertising and have audiences with higher cultural capital. Consistent cross-national differences may be partially attributed to political field influence and news formats. In contrast to more atomized U.S. narrative-driven news stories, the French "debate ensemble" format (grouping together breaking news, editorials, interview transcripts, and background context articles) serves as the opening to a wide-ranging public debate. When U.S. newspapers offered "multi-genre" news coverage, their degree of multiperspectivalness also increased.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.poetic.2009.09.002
DO - 10.1016/j.poetic.2009.09.002
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:70449630981
SN - 0304-422X
VL - 37
SP - 402
EP - 418
JO - Poetics
JF - Poetics
IS - 5-6
ER -