Hartmut Weßler an die International University Bremen berufen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Susanne Fengler,Universität Dortmund

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Klaus Beck,Freie Universität Berlin

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Legitimität in der Medienpolitik

This study develops a theoretical perspective on legitimacy in media policy that can be used to study debates taking place in the media. This perspective assumes that contentions about legitimacy are inscribed in media policy debates; in debates about which media content, business models and forms of media usage are legitimate. The aim of this perspective is to stimulate research questions and guide research. It contributes to understand why some regulation is successful and another is not. This article first discusses the state of research in communication studies. According to it, legitimacy can influence decisions in media policy. Legitimacy is a precondition for the effectiveness of regulation and regulatory procedures and for the stability of the media order. The media may operate as self-interested actors and deprive regulatory attempts of legitimacy. Most studies use a normative concept of legitimacy.Based on new institutionalism and the theory of structuration by Anthony Giddens, in the first step, an analytical (not normatively determined) and dynamic concept of legitimacy is developed. Legitimacy is with Suchman understood as a “generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions”. Drawing on both strategic and institutional approaches, legitimacy is conceptualized both as strategic reference to and as effect of normative structures. Media policy actors try to strategically employ legitimacy in order to assert or defy collectively binding rules. They cannot do this, however, without referring to expectation structures (normative structures) that at the same time constrain and enable them. Because legitimacy has these two sides, is part of action and structures, it can be defined as institution.New institutionalism differentiates between attributing, depriving of, repairing and maintaining legitimacy. The structuration theory is used to define these processes as a recursive interaction of actors and structures that takes place in public debates (structuration of legitimacy). The structuration theory provides a framework that integrates the strategic aspect of legitimacy related action and the institutional aspect of legitimacy. Furthermore, it includes the distribution of resources, political capabilities and authority in media policy and allows studying the influence of these factors on gaining, depriving of and repairing legitimacy. The following sections elaborate this framework and for this purpose, use the terms legitimacy episodes, structuration of legitimacy, grammar of legitimation, media communication.Due to legitimacy episodes, legitimacy becomes an issue in media policy. Arguing with Giddens, episodes are processes of social change that reorganize institutions. They occur with transgressions. Transgressions related to the media system can be expected when new media proliferate because new forms of media production, distribution and media usage develop, new actors enter media markets and public communication changes. Old issues of media regulations are raised from new perspectives, new regulatory problems emerge. Emerging debates and conflicts also concern legitimacy: the threats of certain new services, the acceptability of new business practices or the lawfulness of certain user behaviour.The structuration of legitimacy encompasses attributing, depriving of, repairing of and maintaining legitimacy and can be studied through the “grammar of legitimation”, resource distribution and the rules of the media. The abovementioned processes related to legitimacy take place in recursive interactions of actors and structures: within communication, sanction and power. These forms of interaction are closely related to each other. Language is a regulative force and reflects structures of domination. Three propositions can be derived from Giddens regarding the structuration of legitimacy: First, media policy conflicts can be understood through debates. Second, these debates are not only about exchanging arguments but about validity and influence. Third, public debates influence collectively binding decision-making processes because they construct legitimate definitions of an actor, a procedure, of existing rules or of other problems and discursively restrict available options. The structuration of legitimacy can be analysed by studying the grammar of legitimation, the resource distribution among actors and media related rules. The grammar of legitimation, resource distribution and media related rules are both enabling and constraining actors. The grammar of legitimation demands actors to include an interpretation of the legitimation object, a norm, an evaluation and arguments in their statements. It furthermore, demands actors to consider the structure of expectation and signification: prevailing norms, values, and patterns of interpretation. Resource distribution, more specifically the extent to which actors can invest allocative and authoritative resources structures debates about legitimacy. Legitimacy claims can be raised most effectively via mass media. The mass media are self-interested actors in media policy debates. They provide therefore not only a forum for but are actors in legitimacy debates. The rules of the media that affect legitimacy debates and their outcome are threefold: selection, interpretation and depiction of a media policy debate, the media’s own interests, and to what extent leading media cover a media policy issue. The present perspective allows identifying episodes of legitimacy, studying the structure of legitimacy statements, investigating the reasons of successful legitimacy strategies and media organizations’ self-interests.     

Liegt die Zukunft der Kommunikationswissenschaft in der Vergangenheit? Ein Plädoyer für Kontinuität statt Veränderung bei der Analyse von Digitalisierung

At present, social changes are summarized under the term digitalization. At first glance, this requires the development of new concepts, theories, and methods. This article takes a critical look at this assumption. Perceived changes can be understood as an opportunity to work out the constants of human communication. To clarify this argument, in the first part of the article we compare two perspectives: digitalization as changes in reality versus digitalization as a changed view of reality.Digitization is the conversion of continuous signals into discrete signals. While this technical process is more or less irrelevant for communication science, the related social process is of particular concern. However, to a large extent, what constitutes the social side of digitization is unclear. So far, digitalization can probably best be understood as a form of mediatization. Since mediatization is regarded as a social metaprocess, the concept of digitalization lacks empirical substance and the definition of the term remains vague.Due to the lack of meaning, we view digitalization as a change in the way we observe things. From this perspective, we explain the popularity of the concept of digitalization with the help of organizational theories. Following neo-institutionalist arguments, the digitalization discourse can be understood as an identity-forming communication flow. This is reflected in the positioning of the players in the texts that preceded this article. Representatives of standardized social research and interpretative social research present their conceptions of the discipline. Moreover, digitalization can be seen as a rationalized myth. Such myths reflect the expectations of the environment; they are adopted without considering their efficiency. The discipline adopts the attribute, digital, because it has a high positive connotation in the environment of communication science. Ultimately, digitalization appears to be a kind of heuristic for structuring the field with political implications, but not as a theoretically valid research category.Assuming that digitalization is a rationalized myth, consequences can be drawn for the development of theory and methods. We prove the benefit of this changed perspective by discussing the constitutive concepts of communication science. On the theoretical side, many studies have investigated on the topic of public communication. One topos of this research is the blurring of boundaries, e.?g. between public and private or public and interpersonal communication. Instead of highlighting the changes, we seek to determine what remains constant. Traditionally, the public has been associated with mass media and social outcomes. Upon closer inspection and when considering basic communication models, this connection has always been problematic. The blur is caused by definitions of the term and not by changes in the social world. To solve this problem, we propose a redefinition of publicness at the level of interpersonal communication.Methodologically, many approaches have been developed over the past years. For example, webometrics, digital methods and computational methods are promising fields of innovation. However, it is completely unclear how these methods relate to classical methods, such as surveys, content analyses, or observations. If web mining is about tracking user behaviors (digital traces) that were not created for scientific research (process-generated data), it can be seen as a kind of observation. For example, log file analysis is characterized as an observation method in classical methodological textbooks. But the same criterion also applies to websites. Websites are artifacts of human behavior that, for the most part, are not produced for scientific purposes. However, their analysis is usually seen as content analysis, not as observation.This comparison of methods demonstrates that even the distinction between classical methods is unclear. To solve this problem, we propose to better differentiate the different levels involved in the research process. Data collection can be understood as the transfer of empirical facts into data by observation. Data preparation would then be the transformation of data into datasets. Content analysis is a type of data preparation technique. Data analysis transforms data sets into substantial statements about the world. For example, statistics are used for this purpose. New methods can be better located in these known categories. Webometrics, digital methods and computational methods are examples of the automation of the research pipeline components, e.?g. as automated data collection or automated data preparation.We conclude that focusing on continuity offers an opportunity to improve proven concepts and methods instead of replacing them with vague terms. Therefore, we plead for observing continuity in the context of change and not using digitalization and its inherent metaphor of transformation as a lens for analyzing social change.     

Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft als Hauptfach: Die Göttinger Universität stärkt mit dem neu gegründeten Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Medienwissenschaft (ZIM) ihre Medienkompetenz

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Qualitätserwartungen,Qualitätswahrnehmungen und die Nutzung von Fernsehserien

Ziel des Beitrags ist die Beantwortung der Frage, welche Faktoren die Nutzung von Fernsehserien erkl?ren k?nnen. Kann sie im Wesentlichen auf Habitualisierung und strukturelle Rahmenbedingungen zurückgeführt werden, oder l?sst sie sich dadurch erkl?ren, dass die Erwartungen an die Qualit?t von Fernsehserien und die Wahrnehmung von Qualit?tseigenschaften der verschiedenen Serien zwischen den Rezipienten variieren? Zun?chst werden die theoretisch relevanten Faktoren für ein Modell der subjektiven Qualit?tsauswahl identifiziert und operationalisiert. Anschlie?end wird in einer empirischen Studie geprüft, ob diese Faktoren einen Einfluss auf die Nutzung der Fernsehserien haben. Die Untersuchungsergebnisse zeigen, dass die drei Elemente des theoretischen Ansatzes — Qualit?tserwartungen, Qualit?tswahrnehmungen und Qualit?tsurteile — die Seriennutzung zu einem betr?chtlichen Teil erkl?ren k?nnen. Der Vorteil dieses Ansatzes gegenüber dem Uses and Gratifications Approach besteht darin, dass die Eigenschaften des Angebots im Mittelpunkt stehen. Damit wird es m?glich, Aussagen darüber zu machen, welche wahrgenommenen Merkmale des Angebots für die Nutzungsentscheidungen der Rezipienten relevant sind.     

Mediennutzungsmotive türkeistämmiger Migranten in Deutschland

Media use of migrants is a widely discussed issue in the German debate on the integration of foreigners. Research so far shows that the correlation between the language of the media used and social integration is only indirect and to some extent unclear. In general, a complementary use of country-of-origin and country-of-residence media by migrants can be observed, which tends to persist independent of the process of social integration. The present text examines the motives that constitute this complementary media use by Turkish migrants (the largest national foreign group) in Germany by referring to a representative telephone survey (CATI) undertaken among the Turkish adult population in 2008. As a result, it shows that the way media serve the informational needs of their clientele to a large extent explains the media use of the group observed.     

Qualität im Journalismus – ein integratives Konzept

To determine the various performance criteria concerning journalism it is reasonable to develop a broad concept, which integrates the different theoretical approaches. In a functional and system-oriented perspective, fundamental performance criteria can be based on the social function and the specific code of journalism, which emerged in an historical process of mutual observation of journalists and audiences. In a normative-democratic perspective, performance criteria can be derived from societal and human values codified in diverse regulations. However, in this regard it has to be taken into account that specific claims of the political subsystem also play an important role. Finally from an audience and action oriented viewpoint, it is important to keep in mind that journalistic communication must be useful and applicable in the world the audience lives in.     

Zur Qualität der Medienkontrolle: Ergebnisse einer Befragung deutscher Rundfunk- und Medienräte

This article presents the results of a survey among German media supervisors (members of supervising boards in public broadcasting stations and state media institutions). Given the increasing commercialization and internationalization of television, the supervising boards play a crucial part in assessing the quality of programs. From among 940 German supervisors, 364 took part in the survey, which covered the individual role conceptions of respondents as well as their attitudes towards quality criteria for television. Results suggest that both the supervisors’ amount of television use and the types of programs they prefer is clearly different from patterns in the population. This, along with the observation that supervisors often criticize what they saw privately, suggests (given the diversity of programs) that too much might be expected of them. Media supervisors do heed quality criteria in their work, but these probably do not correspond to other groups’ criteria, and especially not to the general population’s. To conclude, suggestions are discussed to improve the system of supervising programs by important social groups.     

Journalistische Qualität – eine empirische Untersuchung des Konstrukts mithilfe der Concept Map Methode

Journalistic quality is one of the most important and at the same time most complex constructs in communication science. In particular, the dependencies between the diverse number of quality criteria has barely been investigated empirically. Based on the normative definition of journalistic quality according to democracy theory and employing the concept map method, this article attempts to determine the composition of the journalistic quality construct and contribute to a clearer understanding and a more reliable operationalization of the construct. The empirical data was collected from leading editors and journalistic quality scholars who displayed their understanding of the construct in the form of concept maps. Following the procedure suggested by Roedder John et al. (2006), the individual concept maps were then converted into one consensus map—a single map that represents all concept maps. The results show high levels of reliability and face validity. Central quality criteria are found to be credibility, relevancy, and professionalism. Further criteria that significantly determine the main criteria are impartiality, correctness/accuracy, objectivity, neutrality, and immediacy.