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The Construction of News in a Polarised State
Maltese Advocacy Journalism
Adrian Hillman
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eBook - ePub
The Construction of News in a Polarised State
Maltese Advocacy Journalism
Adrian Hillman
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About This Book
Taking a qualitative approach based on original case studies, this book offers a detailed overview of the contemporary media system in Malta.
Three Maltese news organisations are examined to understand the editorial routines, ownership and management structures, and social and cultural factors that affect the day-to-day business of creating news. In-depth interviews with key stakeholders of each organisation are conducted alongside qualitative textual analysis of the content they publish. Contrary to previous research, the work finds that advocacy continues to dominate Maltese journalism, indicating that the country has retained similarities to other media systems within its geographic region. While recognising that the gold standard in journalism is judged to be objectivity and balance, a case is made for a responsible, measured form of advocacy journalism to extend media diversity and contribute to a high level of national political engagement.
Presenting an informed case for the need to pay closer attention to small states, especially at a time when many countries are seen to be becoming increasingly socially and politically divided, The Construction of News in a Polarised State is an insightful text for scholars and academics in the fields of media and communication studies, political science, and sociology.
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1 Introduction
DOI: 10.4324/9781003270829-1
1.1 Introduction
An inspection of the American liberal media system shows that there has been steady sociological analyses of structures and work routines from North American sociologists collectively explaining the nature of journalism (Tuchman, 1978; Epstein, 1974; Molotoch & Lester 1974; Schudson, 1981; Gans, 2004; Fishman, 1988; Gitlin, 1980). Their central argument is that the way news is gathered and presented determines that, in effect, journalists construct news. They conceptualised news construction and prompted the realisation that it is not useful to think of journalism as a means for the search for the truth. Their thesis is that news is the outcome of strategic work routines at news organisations which, ultimately, are production facilities, and it is difficult to comprehend the nature of news without getting to the heart of its manufacturing process.
However, their conclusions are anchored to the way news is constructed in the United States, creating a limited model by which other media systems are defined. Although this body of work presents a framework which aids our understanding of the news, it does not adequately explain the nuances of divergent media systems. Consequently, we turn to a highly polarised state, Malta, where Sammut (2007), in her ground-breaking work, indicated that the Maltese media system was in transition towards the American model, given that it is a negotiation between professional culture and market influence.
Within this context, a three-fold argument is presented for looking at the United States and Malta as news models to help elucidate an understanding of polarisation and its corollary, advocacy journalism. First, because the US looms large in the literature and is the prism through which many people view their media system; as a result, it is enormously influential. Second, the United States is experiencing a significant rise in polarisation (Benkler et al., 2018; Kelin, 2020), a state of being well understood by the Maltese media environment. These disparate models could offer an insight into the way polarised states construct the news. Third, Maltese exceptionalism is demonstrated through the extreme level of polarisation together with extraordinary democratic participation in general elections. At 93%, the country has the highest consistent voting turnout in the world (IDEA, 2018), a trend which is counter to prevailing knowledge (Davis, 2019), and an understanding of this media system could act as a guide to other countries as they drive headlong towards higher levels of polarisation: countries such as the US and the UK.
Further, this book makes a reasoned argument for the need to pay closer attention to small states. If small states have similar political and media system arrangements to large states, then we are wasting valuable data by not including them in our analysis. If they are different, then we are missing out on the insights that these diverse, extreme, deviant, or most different cases offer. When seeking generalisability, it will be argued that there are few, persuasive reasons that justify the omission of small states in the systematic way of research that has become accepted practice. Within this context, understanding the workings of polarisation and advocacy journalism becomes highly relevant. By ignoring how democracy works in small states, this book will argue we risk missing important lessons where the experience of smaller states is important to scholars of comparative media systems.
Finally, we note that the arena of news and how it is constructed has not been adequately addressed when it comes to Malta. As noted, to date, only one book empirically addresses the elements that mould the way news comes to be. While the work (Sammut, 2007) was a significant achievement and shed light onto the level of polarisation and the unique media system within the country, the work is now dated and needs to be revisited. The remaining work in the field, while being reflective, is not empirical in nature and is largely historical in its concern.
1.2 Structure and layout
Chapter 2 sets out to establish what is meant by the construction of news in the framework of an American liberal media system, and we outline the field in which this research will operate. We will visit the comparative literature to establish Maltaâs regional fit and question if the country aligns with what the literature states is expected from a Mediterranean polarised pluralist system.
The lack of research and understanding of the small state, and specifically of Malta, then moves us in Chapter 3 to outline the historical context in which Maltese news has emerged and what this media system looks like today. This helps identify the historical nuances which may be peculiar to the journalistic field in Malta. By incorporating history into the heart of this media analysis, we hope to provide further meaning to the construction of news on the premise that fields cannot be understood without considering their historical genesis.
Further, we recognise a growing body of work which attests to the level of polarisation which is presenting itself globally (Bennet, 2016; Benkler et al., 2018). Exploring polarisation in a state with a history of polarised news can shed light onto what to expect in a larger media system and how it will impact on the construction of news. This work could shed some light on coping mechanisms that may exist in a small state and could be relevant to other, much larger systems.
This is important because we know that in the polarised climate in the United States, partisanship, a bi-product of polarisation, is a âmega identityâ, one that is correlated with other identities, such as race or religion, and structures peoplesâ social connections or media use (Mason, 2018). People derive pride and self-esteem from the groups to which they belong, they aim to protect or enhance a positive view of their in-group (Wojcieszak, Sobkowicz, Yu & Bulat, 2021). Partisanship is driven not by support of positive feelings towards a party one supports but by negative feelings for the party one opposes (Klein, 2020).
In the polarised state, the unengaged citizen asks the question: what will this policy do for me? Among the engaged, however, reactions to issues are better understood as expressively motivated signals of identity. The question for the engaged citizen is: what does support for this policy position say about me? (Johnston, Lavine & Federico, 2017). This leads us to the point that if we care enough about politics that it becomes part of our self-expression then we participate in politics to express who we are; in effect politics becomes our identity. All this points towards an important principle: the most engaged experience politics differently than everyone else (Mason, 2018). Here lies one of the key elements of the Malta comparison. We will show that the Maltese are a politically highly engaged population. Consequently, it is vital to explore what coping mechanisms the news media adopt.
1.2.1 Case studies
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 move to take a case study approach, not so much as a methodological decision but as a selection of what is to be studied. Flyvbjerg (2011) advocates context-dependent education, but states that social science has not always succeeded in producing general, context-dependent theory and thus can only offer context-independent knowledge to its students. If people are restricted to context-independent knowledge and rules, they cannot progress beyond the beginnerâs level in the learning process. However, few educational institutions have taken this on board, Harvard university among them.
Case studies differ from other forms of research strategy, in that they focus on a bounded case. It is the natural approach to use in this research given our focus on news construction and deciphering why members of an organisation act in a certain way. Hallin and Mancini (2017) sustain that case studies and field-based methods are often necessary to access certain information or evidence, such as journalistic practices and routines which cannot easily be studied by quantitative methods, and that they provide a depth of knowledge that is essential to judge the validity of numerous quantitative measurements.
The three cases chosen are Malta Today, Television Malta (TVM) and Times of Malta. In terms of ownership, size, and output, each organisation brings a different dimension to the discussion. All are national news organisations with websites ranking in the top ten in Malta. This is significant, as the key area of focus and data capture will be on and from their online content. All three websites are published in English, with TVM also offering a Maltese version.
The research will develop an understanding of each organisation, study the individuals inside it, and establish the spheres of influence at work in each case. Being of a qualitative nature, this research does not strive to be representative but will focus on these three news organisations at both the corporate and editorial levels. Their different ownership structures create a spectrum that adds breadth to our findings, and we will focus primarily on the news-construction elements within these organisations.
1.2.2 Research design
This research possesses three different instruments in its design which are complementary and converge to create an in-depth understanding of each case. They are: in-depth interviews, the collection of primary data (from financial and credit authorities), and textual analysis. We will set forth the rationale behind the use of each instrument.
The first level and primary method of data capture is in-depth interviews, one of the most used methods of data collection in qualitative research. An informal questioning approach was adopted in this research precisely because of the need to acquire meaningful insights into what could be a complex understanding of news construction. The interviewees are executives and managers, editorial staff and (where possible) directors from each news organisation. As a form of pre-testing and pilot study, four in-depth interviews were completed with senior-level executives from American and British news organisations. Ten interviews were subsequently conducted for each case study, resulting in a total of 34 in-depth interviews, covering the executive and editorial arms of each organisation.
The second instrument in the research design enabled a fuller understanding of the media organisations and of the relationships between the individuals involved in them. Corporate background checks were conducted using the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) database and archive, as well as the Creditinfo database. The MFSA database provided the list of shareholders, memoranda, and articles of each company, as well as basic audited accounts. This information reveals the structure of each organisation and the reasons for their creation.
The third research instrument used follows news events as they are covered by the organisations online and examines the way in which stories are captured and narrated, paying particular attention to who the contributing journalist is and the diversity of sources reported and used. Textual analysis is employed to gather and analyse the data, the data being news content itself. Here, we follow Curran, Esser, Hallin, Hayashi, and Lee (2017), who report that their qualitative approach entailed reading, summarising, rereading, and analysing patterns of meaning. For the sake of clarity, the websites analysed were: maltatoday.com.mt, tvm.com.mt, and timesofmalta.com.
Using these three levels of research, a portrait of the organisationsâ structures is created that will also reveal where the influences and leadership roles within these organisations really exist. The aim is to understand th...