To any fellow scholar that helps me,
I am a year-1 PhD student in media and communication. I proposed a comparative study between the UK and India that aims to (1) systematicly record the news coverage of the ongoing war, (2) figure out how the news coverage interplay with the foreign policy of the two countries, and (3) if possible, examine to what extent the features of state-media interplay supports or refutes the characteristics of media system/political economy of media argued by existing literature. I would like you to give some comments to my plan for theoretical framework and my questions.
When I was looking for suitable theories to build up a theoretical framework, I found a "long gap" between the concepts in the system-level theories and those in content-level theories. To put it another way, I found it hard to operationalize system-level concepts into variables that can be empirically examined and thus to explain findings from media content and have a dialogue with the academic community. Nontheless, I began with media content level and found that agenda-setting theory might be useful as it is quite well-developed and inclusive, such as inclusing framing theory to some extent, and could possibly reflect variable with a higher level.
Despite the fruitfulness of theoretical as well as empirical developments, to make my questions simple, I summarize the key argument of agenda-setting as: Media organizations are able to influence the public and policy makers and the influence is reciprocal sometimes. In this way, there is an interaction between media agenda, policy agenda and public agenda.
The reason why I think agenda-setting theory might help is that the term "agenda" suggest it is not in the microscopic level, namely media content produced by journalists, but rather a mesoscopic one since the actor--group-- is between system and content, namely the public, policy makers/government and media stuff/media organizations. As such, there possibly comes a level between the system and the content. Or put in a way from internatonal relations, this project aims to examine the interplay between the performance of actors of three levels (system, government/the public/media organization and journalists)---features of media system, foreign policy decisions (and public opinion) and news coverage (product of journalists and thus can be regarded as the peformance of individuals to some extent), respectively. As to public opinion, I am still hesitating as it is not easy to do a poll.
Having identified actors and performances of three levels, a potential conceptualization and hypothesized correlations/causalites can be proposed are posed: Dimensions of media system (and addition of political system when necessary, concept 1) are correlated with, if not determine, stances or decisions of foreign policy (policy agenda, concept 2) and characteristics of media content including but not limit to media agenda (media agenda, concept 3).
The paragraphs above introduces my project, difficulty and current ideas and possible solution. Finally, I request any of your comments on my current plan and conceptualization and I would appreciate if you could answer any of my questions as follows:
1. To what extent is Hallin and Mancini's comparing media system model applicable to the explanation of the findings from another two levels, namely the interplay between policy agenda and media agenda and the characteristics of news coverage itself ?
I found that it is difficult to make all of dimensions of media system correspond to policy agent-media agent interplay and characteristics of news coverage, except state intervention, which could possibly operationalized as the measurement of causality between foreign policy agenda and media agenda, and journalistic professionism, which can be measured or analyzed through some formal (e.g. balance of source) and substantial features of news coverage (e.g. providing context and balance of opinions).
2. Is there any possibility to abandon media system theories and adopt an IR theory and method to explain the interplay between media and government in terms of foreign policy and news coverage ?
3. Could you give some comments on the difficulty in combining analysis with macroscopic theories and analysis through empirical data, e.g. from content analysis ? such as the difficulty in setting questions for empirical examination from such grand theories as critical economy? And how can the findings of the analyses of two levels mutually confirm ?
4. How do you think about the work load of my project? If you think it is too much, from your perspective, what revision can be made?
Best regards,
Yifang
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Psychology