Competitive pressure and arousing television news : a cross-cultural study

In many scholarly writings about journalism, the idea can be found that competitive pressure urges journalists to make news more arousing. This hypothesis was tested in two cultural settings: the Western European culture and the Chinese-dominated culture. A total of 3028 TV news stories from seven d...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lin, Trisha T. C., Vettehen, Paul Hendriks, Zhou, Shuhua, Kleemans, Mariska, D'Haenens, Leen
Other Authors: Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: 2013
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/96000
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/10766
Description
Summary:In many scholarly writings about journalism, the idea can be found that competitive pressure urges journalists to make news more arousing. This hypothesis was tested in two cultural settings: the Western European culture and the Chinese-dominated culture. A total of 3028 TV news stories from seven different markets, or 12 different news programs, were analyzed on the presence of arousing news characteristics. High competitive pressure at the market level appeared to contribute to the prevalence of arousing news, but this effect was more pronounced in the Chinese-dominated culture than in the Western European culture. Effects of high competitive pressure at the station level were only observed in the Western European culture.