Journal Description
The International Journal of Press/Politics (IJPP) is an interdisciplinary journal for the analysis and discussion of the role of the press and politics in a globalized world. The Journal publishes theoretical and empirical research which analyzes the linkages between the news media and political processes and actors.
IJPP’s articles cover a wide range of topics, including the following:
- Press and political institutions (e.g. the state, government, political parties, social movements, unions, interest groups, business)
- Politics of media coverage of social and cultural issues (e.g. race, language, health, environment, gender, nationhood, migration, labor)
- Dynamics and effects of political communication (e.g. election campaigning, advocacy, grassroots mobilization, political advertising, lobbying)
- Politics and media systems
- Relation between politics and journalistic practice
The Journal also publishes comparative, cross-national research from various theoretical and methodological approaches across the social sciences. It features long and short research articles, commentary on pedagogy and current news headlines from around the world, and a book review section.
Journal Feed
- by Camila Mont’AlverneThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. Studies have found limited evidence consistent with the theory that partisan and like-minded online news exposure have demonstrable effects on political outcomes. Most of this prior research, however, has focused on the particular case of the United States even as concern elsewhere in the world has grown about political parallelism in media content online, which has sometimes been blamed for heightened social divisiveness. This article investigates the impact of online partisan news consumption on voting behavior and social polarization during the 2022 elections in Brazil, a country where the public’s ties to […]
- by Meagan E. DollThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. Changes in global journalism are reflected in myriad cross-national professionalization efforts, including the development and exportation of models for journalism practice. Literature on peace journalism, for instance, suggests that its adaptation across contexts is shaped by forces on several levels, including the influence of individual media practitioners. However, little research examines those likely to practice peace journalism nor the implications of these social profiles on the diffusion of the model more broadly. Drawing on field theory and 20 in-depth interviews with East African journalists conducted between 2020 and 2021, this study explores […]
- by WijayantoThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. Coordinated influence campaigns on social media have become an increasingly important tool for political and economic elites to sway public opinion in their favor. As the study of this phenomenon has so far largely focused on traces of such campaigns on social media itself, we know relatively little about the people and networks implementing them. Furthermore, existing literature offers limited analytical handles to delineate and analyze different forms of influence operations. To address these challenges, we employ interviews with fifty-two members of the “cyber troops” implementing such operations in Indonesia. On the […]
- by Sara ShabanThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. Following the death of twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini, tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets in Iran—and the whole world watched through their screens. Several Iranian diaspora journalists stepped up to cover the events in Iran for western news outlets. In this study, we interviewed fourteen Iranian diaspora journalists on how they define their role when reporting on Iran and how they navigate the balance between their personal experience and their reporting. Implications for this study include journalistic expectations for international news coverage and the role of the diaspora journalist […]
- by Heinz BrandenburgThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. Public broadcasters are bound by strict guidelines to ensure balance in representing different demographic and political groups, and to better reflect the distribution of these characteristics within the public and political elites. How are these decisions affected when the biggest political issues of the day create further cleavages that not only cross-cut existing divides but also deserve representation in political discourse? In this article, we examine how panel selection on BBC Question Time dealt with this in relation to two prominent issues in twenty-first century UK politics: Brexit and the UK invasion […]
- by Lina ButtgereitThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. Media criticism is a crucial part of meta-journalistic discourse, ensuring that journalists adhere to their democratic functions, such as informing citizens in an honest and complete manner. However, the profession increasingly faces hostile, nonevidence-based attacks from politicians that attempt to strategically fuel distrust among citizens and delegitimize opposed viewpoints. Despite this reality, we lack a systematic overview of the boundaries between constructive feedback and weaponized attacks in media criticism. To address this gap, we inductively analyzed how media criticism is represented within the social media discourse of ten German politicians from all […]
- by Yin LuoThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. This study focuses on a new trend in journalism, which we conceptualize as transnational citizen journalism. We argue that the diasporic and transnational production and consumption of alternative and counter-hegemonic information by nonprofessional individuals have sparked fresh imaginations and opened up new spaces for journalism, particularly in authoritarian contexts. We specifically examine several prominent transnational citizen journalism projects that played a significant role in the large-scale protests against China’s stringent Covid-zero policy in late 2022. Through a content analysis of the multimodal content posted on these projects’ Instagram accounts, and semistructured interviews […]
- by Bin ChenThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. Research on fact-checking journalism has predominantly centered on Western countries, often overlooking how distinct political media systems in non-Western countries might influence its practices and effectiveness. This article addresses this gap by focusing on government-led fact-checking in China, referred to as “rumor-debunking,” and we argue that compared to the Western mode of fact-checking, rumor debunking differs significantly with its unique motives, targets, and outcomes within the context of an authoritarian regime. Employing content analysis (Study 1) and a conjoint experiment (Study 2), we empirically examined the characteristics and credibility perceptions of rumor-debunking […]
- by Paul BalluffThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. Mounting concern surrounds the influence of political actors on journalism, especially as media outlets face increasing financial pressures. These circumstances can give rise to instances of media capture, a mutually corrupting relationship between political actors and media organizations. However, empirical evidence substantiating such mechanisms and their consequences remains limited, particularly in the context of Western democracies. This chapter investigates a recent case in which a former Austrian chancellor allegedly colluded with a tabloid newspaper to receive better news coverage in exchange for increased ad placements by government institutions. We employ automated content […]
- by Frankie Ho Chun WongThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. This study investigates how digital connectivity may influence news coverage of protests globally. Scholars argue that the arrival of the digital age did not overthrow legacy media but built a hybrid media system where old and new media logics work together. Although some recent studies highlighted that mobile internet access enabled protestors to gain media attention internationally, evidence also suggests that regimes were increasingly capable of controlling media environments to shape news coverage of conflicts. It remains unclear if connectivity allows citizens to bypass limitations in free speech to increase protest visibility […]
- by James FitzgeraldThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. This comparative study examines the interplay of religious messaging and disinformation in the election campaign material of Jair Bolsonaro and Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the 2022 Brazilian and 2023 Turkish presidential elections. We employ a mixed-methods approach, combining computational keyword filtering and content analysis with qualitative discourse analysis and applied to a corpus of 10,519 posts across seven social media platforms. The analysis informs two key findings. First, in both Bolsonaro and Erdogan’s presidential campaigns, religious rhetoric and symbolism is used to bolster personal authority and in-group support to consolidate the idea […]
- by Dennis SteffanThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. An evolving body of research generally referred to as visual politics has brought the heavy research focus on linguistic modalities of political communication closer to parity with visual emphasis. The study reported here transcends this schism by joining momentum toward multimodality as an ontological departure point for research. We expanded an existing visual instrument into a multimodal one and provided evidence that it reliably captures character framing of political candidates (stateliness, compassion, mass appeal, ordinariness, and sure loser) in German, Polish, and United States commercial online news. We focused on election coverage […]
- by Hwayong ShinThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. News sources that correct misinformation seek to foster an informed citizenry and promote democratic accountability. One such effort is being made by fact-checking sites across the globe. However, public trust in these outlets remains limited. Is their politics-focused coverage one factor behind the limited trust? Politics-focused coverage highlights partisan competition, which can harm credibility by activating identity-protective biases or resistance to persuasive intent. Prior research suggests depoliticized contexts can help mitigate defensive psychological tendencies in news source assessments. Thus, a potential approach to build broad-based trust could be to broaden the scope […]
- by Patrick F. A. van ErkelThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. Despite increasing academic attention, several questions about news literacy messages (NLM) remain unanswered. First, it remains unclear how differences in the framing of the NLMs may influence their effectiveness. Second, we still know little about how NLMs work and, in particular, whether people also adopt the recommendations they are given. To answer these questions, this study conducts an experiment in the Netherlands and Belgium, where we manipulate the frames of the NLM, comparing interventions using a “fake news” frame with those using a “reliable news” frame or a mix of the two. […]
- by Saumava MitraThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. In journalism research conducted in the Global South, power relationships between the researcher and the researched mirror the uneven power structures between the Western journalists and their news subjects or their non-Western colleagues working alongside them. But so far, the figure of the journalism researcher in such contexts has not been problematized to any great extent in journalism scholarship. Moreover, the journalism researcher working in such contexts borrows heavily from the methodological toolkit of ethnography. But while the cultural anthropologists who created and refined ethnographic methodology have long been interrogating the colonial […]
- by Chonlawit SirikuptThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. Why and how do autocracies discursively conduct digital astroturfing against their populations? As these regimes increasingly co-opt social media to manipulate online political discourse, the current political disinformation literature continues to privilege a Cold War paradigm, focusing on countries that dominate Western foreign policy priorities and concerns. Its normative underpinnings overshadow other understudied cases that have also been weaponizing social media to manipulate domestic online discourses. Concurrently, findings from ethnographic interviews and big data approaches remain theoretically disconnected from the long-held logics of regime stabilization. I argue that regime digital astroturfing follows […]
- by Timothy CharltonThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. This article explores the interactions between journalistic actors and emerging open-source intelligence and investigation (OSINT) communities. It employs qualitative content analysis of discourse from two OSINT communities surrounding three events following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which received substantial coverage in news media. OSINT practices are rapidly becoming a mainstay of the contemporary political process by allowing ordinary citizens to verify information shared through digital platforms, which is traditionally the societal task assigned to journalism. In doing so, they provide a timely factual baseline for opinion formation and political decision-making. […]
- by Yunkang YangThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. Russian state propaganda outlets Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik are an important part of Russian foreign policy and key global sources of disinformation. Previous work has argued that they focus on exploiting social divisions among foreign audiences and worried that Russian propaganda may influence the broader media agenda. To date, though, there has been no comprehensive study of what RT and Sputnik actually cover, or any quantitative analysis of their influence on other coverage. We analyze 4.7 million English-language news articles from RT, Sputnik, and sixty-seven other news outlets linked to on […]
- by Daniela MahlThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. Democratic societies inherently depend on an informed citizenry. By shaping citizens’ voting behavior, fostering political cynicism, and reducing trust in institutions, misinformation can pose significant challenges to individuals and societies. Against this backdrop, fact-checking initiatives aimed at verifying the accuracy of publicly disseminated (mis)information have flourished worldwide. However, existing research is disproportionately oriented toward the Global North, with a focus on the United States and the most influential organizations. Equally scarce are comparative studies. To address these shortcomings, this study introduces a context-sensitive framework for analyzing fact-checking cultures and illustrates its application […]
- by Cédric TantThe International Journal of Press/Politics, Ahead of Print. This theoretical article takes a fresh look at the relationship between journalists and politicians, based on the public critique they level at each other. It proposes that this critique should be seen not simply as the expression of reproaches between rival actors, but as a meaningful metadiscursive articulation. Public critique means, for example, defining journalism, politics, democracy, or a particular context in which the relationship between journalists and politicians takes place. Above all, public critique is part of a process of legitimization that involves journalists and politicians, who are increasingly mistrustful of […]