AR; A new(s) sort of democracy?

I started to read Ewan Crawford’s article on the opinion pages in the Scottish quailty dailies in the hope that it would supply some more tips on how to understand, conceptualize and operationalize deliberation – but in this regard I wasn’t really satisfied.

The paper recounts results of a content analysis of two Scottish “broadsheet” daily newspapers, trying to answer the question – to what extent do these contribute deliberative democracy.

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Sources of the Daily Kos

One of the issues I’ve been writing about in my papers is the role of non-professional media contributors to, well, the media system – hence the focus on the analysis of sources to social news sites as well (about which you can read in my papers).

I have argued that non-professional journalists – independent bloggers, political activists etc. – might play an important role in the secondary dissemination and treatment of news, but they will always rely on professional media organs as the producers of news items, simply because professional – and for-profit – media organizations have at their disposal those human, financial and other resources that are needed for the continuous, high quality and up-to-date reporting about events.

Sound bites in news shrink, role of journalists on the increase

Here is a recently published article – by Michael Schudson and Danielle Haas, taken from the Columbia Journalism Review. It describes the findings of a report by Indiana University professors Erik Bucy and Maria Grabe; most importantly (for me anyway) that:

[w]hat seems to matter more is not what candidates say about themselves, or what they are seen doing, but the depth of reporting and commentary that journalists add to those sound and image bites. Bucy and Grabe find that journalists are increasingly brokers of meaning in political coverage—appearing twice as much as candidates, filling more than half of each news segment with context and commentary. And their interpretations, or lack of them, matter.

It would be a huge and unwarranted jump to take this argument as confirming my view that commenting on social news sites promises to be meaningful and important – but I guess we can say it certainly points to this direction.