Casting Roles to Stakeholders – A Narrative Analysis of Reputational Storytelling in the Digital Public Sphere

This article presents a narrative study of stakeholder positions, storytelling agency, and power in the digital public sphere as seen by organizational actors. According to the institutional approach, corporations and their reputations are enacted, sustained, and altered by their external stakeholders. This article posits that, in the online public sphere, corporate reputations are formed by narratives, in which stakeholders take different positions on intended actions. Using a qualitative data set derived from seventeen interviews with communication and risk management professionals, these positions were analyzed using a Burkean pentadic analysis combined with the Stakeholder Saliency Model. Using pentadic ratios, seven different narrative stakeholder positions were identified: Information seeker, Influencer, Pressurer, Communicator, Mender, Monitor, and Intermediator. These positions were taken by different actors, such as individual users, communities, online media and the organization itself. Analyzing the attributes of power, legitimacy and urgency related to these positions three transformations were identified: mobilizing crowds, issue recognition, and scene transformation. The proposed model helps to identify the different stakeholders in the digital communication sphere and to understand their agency through their narrative positions.     

Strategic Ambiguity and Crisis Apologia: The Impact of Audiences' Interpretations of Mixed Messages

Based on the perspectives of strategic ambiguity and organizational reputation, the current study examines the effects of mixed crisis response strategies, which adopt seemingly contradictory messages (i.e., apology and denial), through experiments. Consistent with the scope of strategic communication research, this study incorporates theoretical aspects of distinct areas of organizational communication to examine audience response to strategic messages, and makes recommendations for organizational communication strategies during crisis situations. The findings demonstrate that, instead of taking messages straightforwardly, people interpret the same messages divergently in their own ways, and these interpretations accordingly affect their attitudes and behavioral intentions. Findings indicate participants choose a dominant interpretation when given mixed messages, and subsequent responses are based on the initial interpretation, such that evaluating a mixed message as an apology yielded more positive outcomes than those who interpreted the message in other ways. In addition to people’s diverse interpretations, organizations’ crisis communication strategies and the business type also significantly influenced the outcomes. The apology-interpreters showed more positive outcomes than those who were exposed only to apology for an automaker’s crisis. On the other hand, for a nonprofit organization’s crisis, those who were exposed to a simple denial message showed more positive outcomes than those who perceived the mixed message as a denial. Based on these findings, this study offers practical recommendations on when to use single messages versus mixed messages, along with the explanation of how these divergent strategies work.     

The Impact of Corporate Communication on Company Evaluation: Examining the Message Effects of CSR,Corporate Ability,and Hybrid Strategies

This experiment examines how three corporate communication strategies (i.e., corporate ability (CA) strategy, corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy, and hybrid strategy) positively affect consumers’ evaluation of a company. It also tests whether consumers’ involvement with the company’s products moderates these effects. Additionally, in the context of hybrid strategy, the order effect of receiving CA and CSR messages is discussed. Results of the experiment support the value of all three strategies in cultivating positive company evaluation. Findings pertaining to hybrid strategy scenarios generally show that a single CSR message performs as well as hybrid strategies because of the transferring effect of CSR. In addition, CSR was found to have an additive effect on CA when CA is the first message. However, the positive effect of CSR is discounted when CSR is the first message. Meanwhile, the moderating effect of product involvement is not supported. This study contributes to current strategic communication scholarship on corporate communication through proposing and empirically testing an interdisciplinary model that articulates the contingent relationship of corporate messages to consumer reactions. Its findings can aid in future theory building efforts and assist strategic communication professionals in determining the types of corporate communication messages, as well as the order in which they are presented, that will have an impact on consumers’ perceptions.     

Die Print-Reportage: Genrekonventionen aus Reportersicht

There are lots of textbooks on writing reportages in the so-called practitioners’ literature. Whether and how the classifications and instructions are in line with professional practice is rarely explored. In order to compare the recommendations of reportage textbooks with the views of reporters, we conducted a survey and used a multistep methods design: The first step was to identify the complete German-language reportage instructions literature. In the second step, the key statements about fundamental questions of narrative reportage were extracted from selected titles. Finally, these key statements were presented to reporters in a survey. The study focused in particular on the question of the professional relevance of formal and functional report definitions and on the question of standard dramaturgical patterns in reportage narratives. In summary, there’s a broad consensus in the profession with regard to the form and the standards of reportage narratives.     

Struggling with New Media and Old Expertise: Reconstructing the Professional Role of Communication Consultancy

This study investigates how communication consultants struggle to reconstruct their professional role in the digital media landscape. The extant literature on professional roles in public relations has a tendency to render roles as static pregivens. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to contribute conceptually and empirically to role research by focusing on the process of “role-making” and how role actors purposefully engage in role construction in order to maintain legitimacy. The qualitative study of Scandinavian communication consultants reveals how these actors effectively refashion their role as expert advisors by describing the client and her problems, the competitors, their own knowledge and values. The role construct is supported by a narrative strategy and an epic storyline, where social media serves as a vehicle for self-definition and the consultancy role is framed and reinforced by social media. However, the jurisdictional claims of professional expertise and values that constitute the core of a consultant’s role construct are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain in a digital society. A critical reading of the consultants’ narrative thus implies that social media may in fact constitute a professional identity crisis rather than a consolidation of the expert role.     

Championing Women’s Empowerment as a Catalyst for Purchase Intentions: Testing the Mediating Roles of OPRs and Brand Loyalty in the Context of Femvertising

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) research indicates that consumers are skeptical of a company’s support of social causes unless they can determine that the efforts are legitimate and authentic. One way companies can demonstrate legitimacy in their CSR efforts is by supporting causes that are perceived to “fit.” The goal of this study is to explore the effects of company–cause fit within the context of the CSR strategy of femvertising. Femvertising is defined as “advertising that employs pro-female talent, messages, and imagery to empower women and girls.” A survey of U.S. adults (n = 419) was employed to investigate consumer attitude toward femvertising as well as four specific femvertising messages as they related to respondents’ perceptions of company–cause fit, CSR associations, and purchase intentions. This study also examined the mediating roles of two related mechanisms – perceived organization-public relationship quality and company loyalty – in connecting CSR associations and purchase intention. The findings suggest that within a femvertising context, purchase intention is impacted by CSR associations and company–cause fit both directly and through loyalty. The findings clarify how company support of women-empowering causes can be an effective CSR strategy and how it fits with the current strategic communication literature.     

Der Wert der Worte – Wie digitale Methoden helfen,Kommunikations- und Wirtschaftswissenschaft zu verknüpfen

The use of digital methods offers a chance to connect communication science with economics. In recent years, a growing body of research in economics has turned its attention to media content, assuming that journalistic coverage contains hitherto neglected information relevant for business cycles or financial market movements. Interestingly, these approaches largely ignore communication science’s established theories and empirical findings. This paper aims at building a bridge between the two disciplines. Its contribution is threefold: a) it provides an overview of the most important approaches in economics that incorporate media content; b) it operationalizes the concept of the “narrative”, as it is used in economics, and distinguishes it from the concept of the “frame”, essential in communication science; c) exemplifying our approach, we present a new Uncertainty Perception Indicator (UPI) based on the topic modeling method Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), that enables us to isolate different factors of economic policy uncertainty contained in media coverage.Economic studies treat journalistic media content as a proxy for sentiment prevalent in society. Typically, they rely on frequency analyses of certain keywords, like “recession” or “inflation”. Even more sophisticated approaches, such as Shiller (2017), who calls for establishing a new branch of “narrative economics”, or Baker et al. (2016), who construct a comprehensive set of media-based indicators, make no or little reference to communication science. This neglect could be discounted as pure ignorance, but this misses the point. Being a predominantly empirical discipline today, economics relies on long time-series of data, that have not been available for media content, a gap rendering the two disciplines largely incompatible.The gap is also reflected in terminology. “Frame” is a major analytical concept in communication science, while the term “narrative” has become in vogue in economics. Although both concepts are closely connected, they are rarely properly distinguished from each other. “Frame” can be considered as a rather static concept that applies during a limited period of time. “Narrative”, in contrast, implies dynamic properties, i.?e., the sorting of events, causes and effects over time, that explain how the current state of the world has come about, as stressed by Tenenboim-Weinblatt et al. (2016).In this paper, we propose a synergetic concept. Following Entman (1993), a media frame contains four elements: a) a problem definition, b) a problem diagnosis, c) a moral judgement, and d) possible remedies. We augment this approach by adding two more elements. According to our definition, a media narrative comprises a frame, or several ones, plus e) one or several protagonists—persons, institutions, or social groupings (nations, classes, etc.)—, whose relationships are (often) antagonistic and may change over time; and f) events, that are chronologically integrated and that are (often) assumed to constitute causal relationships. To put it metaphorically: a frame is to a narrative what a still photo is to a movie. Both are valuable concepts; the still photo shows more details, while the movie provides a contextualization over time.Topic models like LDA are valuable tools for the measurement of media narratives. The probabilistic approach enables researchers to conduct what may be called “macro-content analyses”, an exercise that focuses on average reporting patterns in large text corpora and can be translated into numerical time-series, thereby facilitating compatibility with empirical economics. Based on a topic’s frequency analysis, its top words and top articles, “mean media narratives” can be formulated, that integrate certain events, protagonists and frames.In our case study, we exemplify this concept by applying it to an indicator that is currently popular in economics, the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index (Baker et al. 2016). The EPU aims at capturing political developments that are exogenous to economic models and therefore unpredictable. Essentially, the indicator is based on the counts of articles containing a set of search words, such as “uncertain”, “economic” as well as institutions like the European Central Bank. Using identical search words as the EPU for Germany, we construct a similar corpus for the years 1994 to 2017. By conducting an LDA-based analysis, we are able to extract additional relevant information from the data. In particular, the evolution of different uncertainty factors and their development over time can be detected.Our Uncertainty Perception Indicator (UPI) contains six relevant news topics that are highly relevant for market developments: central banks, the national government, international politics, the business cycle, companies, and society. While the EPU merely shows how often uncertainty concerning economic policy is mentioned in the media, the UPI also indicates the origins of uncertainty. By grouping the six topics into three analytical categories—governments, markets, and society—we find a distinct break in the time-series. Before the financial crisis of 2008, the perception of uncertainty was rather balanced between the three factors. Since then, however, economic uncertainty has mainly been driven by political actors, most prominently by central banks. The corresponding narratives are a two-chapter story: in the first part, up to 2008, stable financial markets and smoothed business cycles prevailed, making central banking a rather straight-forward task. The second part is characterized by multiple crises, leaving central banks as dominant actors, that intervened with unconventional measures. Thereby, they became stabilizing forces, but at the same time sources of uncertainty with respect to the timing and the impact of these measures.     

Techniques of Strategic Political Communication: The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Persuasive Devices

This research analyzes the entire range of Arabic language communiqués issued by the Muslim Brotherhood from July 2013–July 2017 in order to show how political Islamist movements utilize persuasive techniques to advance their strategic communication campaigns and achieve their political goals. Using agenda-setting as a theoretical framework and the seven devices developed by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) in the late 1930s as a deductive tool, this article demonstrates that the Brotherhood’s communication strategy strongly aligned with the seven devices developed by the IPA: more than one technique was identified in 97% of the movement’s communiqués analyzed. These findings indicate that persuasive techniques are being used by the Brotherhood as strategic communication devices to serve the goals of 1) discrediting the current military regime; 2) winning the hearts and minds of Egyptians; and, 3) establishing themselves as a legitimate political actor. This case study advances second-level agenda setting theory by suggesting that the IPA’s persuasive techniques reveal the specific mechanisms through which the Brotherhood seek to achieve their communication goals. By raising awareness of these techniques as a critical means of setting the Brotherhood’s agenda, this article also seeks to empower domestic and regional audiences consuming these messages.     

Strategic Communication Campaigns at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office: Managing Mediatization During the Papal Visit,the Royal Wedding,and the Queen’s Visit to Ireland

This article investigates strategic communication in the context of the wider adoption of “campaign” approaches to public diplomacy at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. The three case studies are the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the United Kingdom, the marriage of HRH Prince William to Kate Middleton, and Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Ireland. The analytical framework seeks to situate strategic communication theory within a political–economic environment pervaded by a dependence on the media and its institutions for sociopolitical knowledge. Therefore, while affirming the growth and influence of strategic communication as a social phenomenon, this article questions how processes of mediatization impact strategic communication, its organization and practices. The case studies reveal characteristic techniques such as managing mediated spaces for meetings and discussion; shaping the salience of target groups, stakeholders, and participants; an emphasis on values and norms that may be tailored efficiently to different circumstances; and, a strong focus on achieving strategic consistency across diverse messages and messengers. The results will be of interest to researchers and students interested in better understanding how organizations utilize complementary communicative techniques to shape knowledge and steer experiences of political events in ways supportive of their overarching goals.     

„Politische Kommunikation“: Kern und Rand des Begriffsverständnisses in der Fachgemeinschaft

Terms and concepts are both premises and results of research. Controversies about the basic concepts of a discipline prompt scientific advancement. The aim of this paper is not to put forward an authoritative definition of “political communication,” but—based on prototype semantics—rather to work out what the core of the understanding of this concept is within the scientific community, and what the margin. This is also a test for a method of analyzing the understanding of concepts in general. The basis is a dimensional analysis of the concept of “political communication,” in which a four-dimensional basic structure established by deduction was tested by means of a content analysis of textbook definitions. This leads to a tool for a factorial survey to empirically analyze students’ and lecturers’ understanding of this concept (n = 161). The findings were: At the heart of the understanding of the concept are communication participants deeply involved in the political system in a context of mass media communication. Differences in content and consequences of communication have no influence on the understanding of the concept, and the differences between students and lecturers are small. Comparisons between countries and longitudinal studies are possible on this basis.     

Self-censorship on Internal Social Media: A Case Study of Coworker Communication Behavior in a Danish Bank

Internal social media (ISM) or social intranets provide organizations with a communication arena in which coworkers can actively contribute to organizational communication. Coworkers are, however, far from impulsive and spontaneous when they communicate on ISM. A case study in a Danish bank found that coworkers considered carefully the consequences of their posts or comments before publishing them. These coworkers perceived four different risks associated with ISM communication, and they used seven self-censorship strategies to ensure that both the content and the formulation of their communication were relevant and appropriate. Coworkers not only censor themselves by withdrawing, as previous studies have suggested, but they also postpone publishing content, phrase or frame content differently, imagine responses from organizational members, ask others for a second opinion, choose another channel, or write only positive comments. Through these seven self-censorship strategies, coworkers retain the quality of communication on ISM and prevent conflict or relational damage. Future research should explore the self-regulation strategies underlying self-censorship in order to improve understanding of the circumstances that increase the likelihood of responsible use of ISM. The potential dark side of self-censorship also requires exploration: when can self-censorship threaten coworkers’ freedom of expression, and develop into organizational silence?     

The Co-Presence of Clarity and Ambiguity in Strategic Corporate Communication – An Exploratory Study

The purpose of this article is to examine the co-presence of clarity and ambiguity in the formulation, interpretation and implementation of corporate communication strategies. Following a growing scholarly interest in how ambiguity can be seen as a productive strategic resource in strategy work, this article focuses on the interdependency of clarity and ambiguity in corporate communication strategies. Through an exploratory study, using interpretive discourse analysis of interviews with employees at a corporate communication department, the present article analyses how the employees perceived the writing, reading, and enactment of their organisation’s new corporate communication strategy. The analysis reveals that the employees sometimes use shared understandings to produce ambiguity in relation to engagement and responsibility, and how they use ambiguity to create a shared understanding of objectives and practices. Though this co-presence might cause the members to feel a lack of ownership, it does not impede the department’s ability to execute strategy-work.     

Die »Jungtürken« der Kommunikationswissenschaft

This article presumes that the identity of an academic discipline is defined by the people pursuing it, and thus at least indirectly by the societal and individual experiences these people were shaped by. Biographical interviews present a portrait of a generation of professors who greatly influenced the field of communication science in the German-speaking countries during the last four decades. This generation of the so-called »Young Turks« was born between 1929 and 1940, experienced the chaos of the 2^nd World War as children or adolescents and studied German Publizistik-or Zeitungswissenschaft in the 1950s or 60s to become professional journalists. These professors experienced the low reputation of their field both in the media world and in the university. This explains the importance of this generation’s wish for legitimacy of their field, and is a key to understanding the opening of the discipline to media practice (key-word: journalism programs) and its turn into an empirical social science discipline. It was predominantly the empirical (communication) research that promised a gain in reputation. The »Young Turks« found the appropriate empirical research in the field’s literature published in the United States, as well as in neighbouring social science disciplines, in economics and partly in the new founders of the discipline.     

Qualität auf dem Anzeigenmarkt und ihre publizistischen Implikationen

In the field of communication and journalism, an old subject is revived: the criticism of advertisers’ influence on the content of print media. The assumption of such an influence — first claimed in articles by Karl Bücher from the twenties — is supported by hinting at the sources for publishers’ revenue, i.e. the dominance of revenue from advertising over that from paper or magazine sales, and also by the tougher competition. A susceptibility of publishing houses to yield to advertisers’ demands also when they concern news or editorial content is deduced from this. As a consequence, the product as traded among a market of readers is formed by the demands on a market of advertisers. This suggests negative consequences for the quality of a paper. At first, this article investigates quality criteria on the advertisers’ market and its interdependence with the readers’ market. Then it evaluates the (potential) consequences of advertisers’ influence on the media product. Finally, it presents an explicatory model of relevant mechanisms.     

Segmenting and Understanding Publics in a Social Media Information Sharing Network: An Interactional and Dynamic Approach

This study segments social media publics and analyzes their informational behaviors during organizational crises. With a public-centric perspective, our study highlights how social media publics interact with each other (i.e., interdependence) and share different information through crisis stages (i.e., dynamics). Following the situational approach to segmentation, we identify different types of social media publics (i.e., influentials, broadcasters, and followers) based on their informational behaviors and their positions in an information sharing network. Crisis managers are recommended to pay more attention to publics with higher influence, namely key influentials and broadcasters. In addition, we try to understand social media publics’ changing concerns by analyzing whether and how publics share messages of different themes and forms in different stages of a crisis. Crisis managers are recommended to customize crisis communication content to fit publics’ needs, prioritize organizational resources, and maximize positive communication effect. With big data from Chipotle’s E. coli crisis, we analyzed the Twitter activities surrounding this crisis over a 6-month period. Our segmentation receives initial support from the network analysis and content analysis on the Twitter data, which lays the foundation for effective social media crisis management.     

Strategic Communication through Social Media Influencers: Current State of Research and Desiderata

ABSTRACT

This article provides an overview of the current state of research in strategic influencer communication and highlights research desiderata. We conducted a systematic literature review of 39 peer-reviewed articles published between 2011 and 2018. Using Lasswell’s transmission model of communication as an approach to systemize communication acts, we identified, systematized, and synthesized main findings from existing literature. The review reveals a rag rug of fragmented research questions, combined with a lack of theoretical integration and a widespread methodological monism. Moreover, questions related to the implications of influencer communication for strategic planning are understudied. Hence, more research is required to understand underlying cause-and-effect relations and managerial implementation of strategic influencer communication. In conclusion, we encourage researchers to investigate the concept of social media influencer communication from a strategic communication perspective, including applying multidisciplinary approaches and a broader range of empirical methods, which would foster a deeper understanding of strategic influencer communication.     

Employee Communication Responsibility: Its Antecedents and Implications for Strategic Communication Management

Although organizations increasingly acknowledge the communicative importance of employees, and increasingly frame communication as an employee responsibility, communication responsibility remains an unexplored topic in strategic communication research. To address this gap, this study introduces the concept employee communication responsibility and offers insight into factors influencing employees’ predisposition towards taking communication responsibility. Data were obtained from 4,726 employees working in ten Swedish organizations. Half the sample (2,244) was used for exploratory factor analysis that enabled the identification of a smaller number of factors to construct a model with four hypotheses, and half the sample (2,482) was used to test the proposed model through structural equation modeling (SEM). Hypotheses formulation was informed by previous research examining factors influencing employees’ communication. The study shows that all tested factors, internal communication climate openness, immediate supervisor communication, top management–employee communication, and perceived importance of communication significantly contribute to employees’ predisposition towards taking communication responsibility. Thus, the study provide knowledge useful to researchers interested in employees’ communication, and to strategic communication practitioners responsible for internal communication and employees’ communication.     

Interaktivität, Interaktion, Internet

In recent years, numerous suggestions have been made to clarify the concept of interactivity in communication science. Most often, an inclusion strategy is used, in which diverse definitions are summarized into a multi-dimensional notion of interactivity. Aside from this, there is also an exclusion strategy: On the one hand, certain technical media (computer-mediated communication, »interactive television«) or communicative situations (face-to-face communication) are marked as »interactive«. In doing this, no differentiation is made between potential and process, and betwen »interactivity« and »interaction«. On the other hand, the notion of interaction as it is rooted in sociology offers itself for a theoretically grounded definition. Seven ways of using the term in relationsship to the notion of communication can be found. It is suggested to conceptualize interaction as a type of communication in the sense of Rafaeli: Interactive communication is reciprocal and relates to earlier messages. The concept of interactive communication chosen here can be linked with systems theory and the deliberative theory of the public sphere.     

TTIP in den Medien

The global trade of goods and services is characterised by several disputes on policy, economic, and social issues. Especially the negotiations about the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the US were highly discussed. In such controversies mass media plays a crucial role by shaping public discourses and democratic processes of opinion building. This study focuses on the deliberative media function and analyses the performance of German newspapers in the TTIP debate. Influenced by Habermas’ concept of deliberation, the public sphere is seen as an arena for rational debates and discursive interactions. According to this normative concept mass media should create a generally accessible, inclusive communication space where a diversity of political positions is argued and validated (input dimension of deliberation). Furthermore, public discourse should be based on a rational, responsive, and respectful way of communication (throughput dimension of deliberation). This leads to the empirical questions on how news reporting fulfills these normative demands of the deliberative theory.Although the concept of a deliberative public has been intensively discussed since the beginning of the 1990s, empirical studies on deliberative performance of mass media are relatively rare. Especially the conditions of a viable public deliberation need more investigation. To contribute to a deeper understanding of mediated deliberation, the present study examines different context factors which can be related to different degrees of deliberative media quality: (1) journalism type (quality vs. tabloid journalism), (2) partisan line (conservative vs. left-liberal papers), and (3) scandalisation, personalisation and emotionalisation as special characteristics of news construction. Particularly, the role played by these three patterns of journalistic news construction is unclear. On the one hand, it could be argued that substantial criticism and scandalisation of grievances is a fundamental element of public deliberation. On the other hand, scandalisation may reduce rational and respectful argumentation and create a hysterical public climate. In the same way it seems reasonable to assume that a strong emphasis on persons and their attributes rather than on issues and policy positions restricts the deliberative exchange of ideas. Otherwise, the focus on politicians and their positions could reduce the complexity of the discourse and report political concepts and abstract ideas within a personal story. Finally, emotions are ingredients of an empathic, responsive communication but also may harm the rationality of discourse at the same time. Considering these patterns of news construction, prospects for deliberative exchange are mixed and call for more empirical investigation.To investigate these contexts for a deliberative media performance, a quantitative content analysis of the debate on TTIP in German newspapers was conducted. The media sample included four quality newspapers (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, tageszeitung, Welt) and three tabloid newspapers (Bild, Hamburger Morgenpost, Abendzeitung München) which represent the left-right-wing spectrum of German print media. We analysed 531 articles about TTIP from June 2013 until January 2016. The coding scheme involved the deliberative criteria and the three discussed patterns of news construction. To measure deliberative media performance, two normative demands of the input dimension of public deliberation (inclusiveness of speakers and inclusiveness of opinions) and four demands of the throughput dimension were coded (justification, verifiable justification, responsiveness, and civility).Considering the input dimension of deliberation, it turns out that the discourse across all newspapers can be seen as inclusive. Speakers and opinions from different parts of the political system as well as actors from civil society and economic stakeholders are included in the news reporting on TTIP. However, for individual newspapers it can be shown that apart from this general conclusion partisan lines limit the diversity of the debate. Especially the left-wing newspaper tageszeitung rarely quotes and discusses positions pro TTIP while the most conservative paper of the sample Welt focuses more on pro opinions from industry actors. The moderate papers SZ and FAZ draw a balanced, inclusive portrait of the trade agreement. In sum, although the whole debate on TTIP is largely diverse, single papers give a biased picture of the conflict which limits the deliberative performance of these media outlets. On the throughput dimension of mediated deliberation, the study shows substantial differences between quality and tabloid journalism. The three tabloid newspapers of this sample show significantly lower performance. In particular, a comprehensive rational justification and responsive comparison of different opinions is mostly missing in this journalism type. For the three analysed patterns of news construction we find that personalisation, emotionalisation and scandalisation relate to low deliberative performance. In particular, the civility of communication is missing when media content reports on TTIP in a scandalised and emotionalised way. But also the rational and responsive exchange of ideas is limited in articles which show these characteristics. In sum, the study shows that the concept of public deliberation offers a fruitful benchmark to examine the performance of news coverage and evaluate different contexts of media content.