Abstract

Alternative outlets can differ in their degree of partisanship, activism, and their opposition to a perceived news “mainstream.” We expect this could lead to diverging contributions to overall news diversity. We assess how mainstream-like, partisan and activist media differ from mainstream reporting concerning migration and refugee policy in Germany. We combine a manual analysis of speaker diversity in 12 mainstream and alternative outlets (N = 1,172 articles) with a computational topic model (N = 34,819 articles) covering 30 outlets to assess topic diversity. Interestingly, we find no significant differences between mainstream and alternative outlets regarding overall speaker diversity. But our data show differences in which parties get cited, and whether outlets focus on experts, civil society speakers, or migrants themselves. While mainstream media offer higher overall topic diversity, alternative media split along the lines of agenda accommodation and more independent agendas of partisan and activist media.

摘要

另类媒体的党派偏见、激进主义程度以及对被认为是新闻“主流”的反对程度可能有所不同。我们预计这可能会导致对整体新闻多样性的不同贡献。我们评估了主流媒体、党派媒体和激进媒体与关于德国移民和难民政策的主流报道有何不同。我们将 12 个主流和替代渠道（ N = 1,172 篇文章）中说话人多样性的手动分析 与计算主题模型（N = 34,819 篇文章），涵盖 30 个渠道以评估主题多样性。有趣的是，我们发现主流媒体和替代媒体在整体演讲者多样性方面没有显着差异。但我们的数据显示了哪些政党被引用的差异，以及媒体关注的是专家、民间社会发言人还是移民本身。虽然主流媒体提供了更高的整体主题多样性，但另类媒体沿着议程适应的路线以及党派和激进媒体更独立的议程分裂。