Abstract
Ideally, democratic citizens enjoy equal opportunity to deliberate, vote, and express feedback, as well as equal voice enabling them to civically participate in order to further their interests and concerns. To take full advantage of these equalities, journalism must serve as an effective mechanism to ensure that citizens are able to participate. Many news stories feature personal and dramatic elements of events exclusively (narrow-context information), but those hoping to become informed and motivated require socially contextualized (broad-context) information as well. In this chapter, I argue that the journalistic presentation of hybrid accounts consisting of narrow- and broad-context information best enables citizens to become informed about, and motivated to resolve, societal problems.
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Notes
- 1.
Voting “correctly” means that citizens would select “the choice which would have been made under conditions of full information” (Lau and Redlawsk 1997, 586).
- 2.
The segments cut from this story were additional eyewitness accounts that offered no broad-context information and their omission was intended to save space.
- 3.
Selective attention concerns internally situated processing that is automatic and unconscious. Framing concerns externally situated processing that involves the conscious choosing of information and emphasis performed by journalists. Due to this difference, selective attention and framing are not identical.
- 4.
The segments cut from this story were mere filler and their omission was intended to save space.
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Waltz, R.W. (2014). Journalists as Purveyors of Partial Truths. In: Cudd, A., Scholz, S. (eds) Philosophical Perspectives on Democracy in the 21st Century. AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02312-0_15
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