Audience expectations of journalism: What’s politics got to do with it?

Abstract

Audience expectations of journalism are a crucial dimension not only to understand journalism’s public legitimacy and institutional character but also its economic foundations in terms of consumers’ prospects. Although we see a critically growing disconnect between the audience and journalism, we know little about what the audience actually expects from journalism and what explains audience expectations. Using data from an online survey among the audience (n = 2775) as well as professional journalists (n = 818), this study compares audience expectations of journalism with journalists’ role orientations in Austria. Furthermore, multivariate analyses particularly aim to explore the role of political parameters for the understanding of audience expectations of journalism. Results show both congruencies and discrepancies between citizens’ and journalists’ perception of specific functions of journalism and that – besides media use – political attitudes may very well play an important role.

Keywords

Audience expectations journalistic roles political attitudes political journalism

Introduction

Not only due to technological changes in the field, the audience receives growing attention both within journalism as a profession and within journalism as a field of research. Studies are busy “[m]aking sense of the audience in the newsroom” (Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc, 2018) or even “[p]utting the citizen back into journalism” (Meadows, 2013), to quote recent examples. This increasing attention to news consumers comes as no surprise given the disconnect between audiences and journalism (Karlsson and Clerwall, 2019): trust in news media is declining in several countries – including in Austria as the object of this study (Newman et al., 2020) – and audiences orient themselves toward alternative sources of news. Obviously, this changing relationship between recipients and the media is connected to a changing relationship between citizens and politics; for instance, political trust turned out to be a key factor in understanding media trust (Hanitzsch et al., 2018). In line with that, changing political attitudes and ideologies have been found to be connected with the perception of journalism (Eberl, 2019).

Despite these critical developments, we know surprisingly little about what the audience actually expects from journalism – “the opinions of citizens themselves have been remarkably absent” (Karlsson and Clerwall, 2019: 1184). Moreover, we hardly know what explains audience expectations of journalism. Particularly whether and how divergent perceptions of politics may also result in divergent expectations of journalism is still an open question. Third, although several case studies explore expectations of journalism in depth (e.g. Heise et al., 2014), there are few generalizable studies based on representative samples. Knowledge about different media systems is scarce, with findings of democratic corporatist countries like Austria (Hallin and Mancini, 2004) being particularly limited (with the exception of Loosen et al., 2020, for Germany and van der Wurff and Schoenbach, 2014, for the Netherlands).

Why is it important to know what the audience expects from journalism? Understanding audience expectations of journalism extends our understanding of journalism as an institution. While other conceptualizations of journalism place certain practices or outcomes into the center, a discursive-institutionalist view “looks at journalism and journalistic roles as ontological objects that are discursively constituted” (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017: 118). As a discursive institution, journalism has “no ‘true’ essence” but “exists because and as we talk about” it (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2017: 129). Thereby, it is not only the professional and scientific but also the public discourse among the audience which shapes how to understand journalism at all (see also Nielsen, 2016). Furthermore, audiences function as an “institutional force” (Craft et al., 2016: 680) in this process of negotiation and, thus, mold journalism’s very nature. Based on this assumption, audience expectations, particularly in comparison with professional journalists’ own roles, appear to be a crucial indicator for which journalistic norms, rules, and values are currently under public consideration – and, therefore, more likely to be discursively (re-)formed, (re-)interpreted, and/or (re-)considered (Hanitzsch et al., 2019a).

The approval by the audience is thereby not only a source for public legitimacy as a central form of journalistic capital, audiences as a source for revenue also represent a fundamental economic dimension of journalism’s functioning (Vos et al., 2019). Moreover, research indicates that journalists, as news producers, orient themselves toward their audience – or at least what they assume their audience to be – and reflect that in their news decisions (Coleman et al., 2012). To comprehend all these dimensions, a better understanding of what audiences expect from journalism is crucial.

From the perspective of news consumers as an “independent, active, and integral component of the communication process with opinions and expectations” (Heider et al., 2005: 955) themselves, considering concrete needs and hopes becomes a key component for understanding how they make sense of news coverage. Research indicates that public perceptions about the main features of “good journalism” are strongly associated with news media use (Gil de Zúñiga and Hinsley, 2013); meeting – and beforehand knowing – audience expectations might thus be a defining feature to understand media usage.

Against this background, the present study, first, explores which expectations the audience in Austria holds of journalism and, second, compares how they differ from professional journalists. It, third, aims to connect these expectations with respondents’ political attitudes and to explore the extent to which these are able to explain diverging expectations.

Journalistic roles in the political domain

Following the idea of journalism as a discursive institution, we start our exploration of audience expectations of journalism by referring to a concept that both expresses the scientific discourse about what journalism is or should be and reflects journalists’ own formulation of what journalism means to them (Standaert et al., 2019): journalistic roles as they have repeatedly been used to grasp audience expectations of journalism (e.g. Tsfati et al., 2006). Although such roles have been developed to explore professional journalistic cultures, the conceptual link to audiences lies in the very nature of their theoretical origins: role theory assumes that roles are executed and even perceived in relation to at least assumed expectations of possible spectators (Hanusch and Banjac, 2018). Holistically understanding journalistic roles, therefore, also requires understanding which views journalistic audiences – as a source of expectations – hold.

In the political domain, journalistic roles are closely tied to the idea of democracy. That is why journalism is considered to fulfill high normative expectations (Fawzi, 2020). Depending on the model of democracy, journalism is expected to contribute to a democratic public sphere in a wide variety of ways (Christians et al., 2009). However, there is broad consensus that one of journalism’s main functions is to act as an informer (terminology of this and following roles in italics: Standaert et al., 2019) and disseminate relevant information, which fulfills citizens’ informational needs both in case of specific incidents and to be able to make a choice in the polling booth (Zaller, 2003). This informational role is closely connected with the idea of impartiality: as observer, journalists do not necessarily follow a naïve understanding of objectivity but understand themselves as “witness” of events and report about them in a detached way, widely rejecting a subjective journalistic voice (Standaert et al., 2019).

Beyond these informational dimensions, analytical-deliberative roles incorporate a more active role of journalism (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2018) and equip citizens with arguments and perspectives that can serve as the basis for public deliberation (Ferree et al., 2002). As analysts, journalists provide an analysis of current affairs and place them in larger causal contexts. As a mobilizer, journalism tries to motivate its audience to actively engage in politics. Audiences’ political interest is conceptualized as to be raised and renewed by journalistic news coverage as it also touches a participatory notion of democracy (Riedl, 2019).

Another central role which highlights journalism’s responsibility in a democracy is the role of a watchdog, which is historically deeply enrooted in journalism culture (Weaver et al., 2019) and is one of the roles most strongly supported by journalists all around the globe (Standaert et al., 2019). It conceptualizes journalism as the “fourth estate,” which holds the government accountable and monitors its actions. While that does not necessarily mean an active political stance, journalistic culture in the political domain is also shaped by journalists’ position in relation to loci of power, their “power distance” (Hanitzsch, 2007). As one of such roles, the missionary promotes particular values and ideologies originating in journalists’ personal worldview. Discursive-democratic theorists highlight the necessity of shared values like tolerance and diversity (Ferree et al., 2002) as it adds a normative component to a missionary role.

More recent research stresses journalistic roles beyond a narrow political sense, which addresses citizens’ “everyday life” (Hanitzsch and Vos, 2018). The entertainer role is one of the most pronounced examples. On the one hand, entertainment is seen as a potential distractor for a substantial, fact-based discourse (Reinemann et al., 2012); on the other hand, research highlights its ability to express societal values and to arouse involvement (Baum and Jamison, 2006). In any case, a comparison with political roles in a narrow sense allows us to reflect the “boundaries” of what the public expects of journalism as an institution. In the specific Austrian context, where a tabloid is the daily newspaper with the highest reach, and the free tabloid press is growing (Lohmann and Riedl, 2019), entertainment has a particular relevance (Magin and Stark, 2015). A second role belonging to the domain of everyday life is that of the marketer. As marketers, journalists feel primarily responsible for the marketability and financial feasibility of their news company (Standaert et al., 2019). As such, they stick to the interest of advertisers but also try to reach a wide audience and meet its “taste” following “financial considerations” (Tsfati et al., 2006: 161; similarly: Vos et al., 2019).

Another journalistic role with a disputed normative value – at least in the context of established liberal democracies – is that of a collaborator, which is government-friendly and generally supports its policies. In Austria, a typical “Western” journalism culture (Hanitzsch et al., 2019a), it does traditionally play a minor role. However, recently government actors in Austria have shown to put an effort into both controlling media messages and pressuring news outlets into more benevolent reporting (Eberl et al., 2020). We, therefore, suggest exploring the extent to which audiences may identify with this role as well.

These nine roles – informer, observer, analyst, mobilizer, watchdog, missionary, collaborator, entertainer, and marketer – can, of course, never do justice to the broad palette of possible roles used in journalism research. However, they express the variety of journalism’s role in society, journalism’s democratic responsibility as well as specific boundaries which journalism is currently facing. We, therefore, assume them to be a suitable conceptual framework to explore which expectations audiences hold of journalism and how they differ from the profession’s own view.

Audience expectations of journalism

What is it that the audience concretely expects from journalism? Research indicates that media users, first of all, have distinct expectations of professional journalism and rate the importance of professional journalists adhering to certain roles higher than nonprofessional citizen journalists (Nah and Chung, 2011). It also shows that the audience has a clear and rather uniform understanding of defining features of “good” journalism (Gil de Zúñiga and Hinsley, 2013) as it underlines the distinctness of audience evaluations.

Research about concrete expectations is relatively limited and fragmented. However, we can identify some general trends from different studies: first, roles connected to the impartial and detached dissemination of relevant and accurate information – as they correspond with the informer and observer role in our conceptual framework – represent a cornerstone of expectations among many different audiences in both case studies (Heise et al., 2014; Nah and Chung, 2011; Schmidt and Loosen, 2015) and in representative studies (Heider et al., 2005; Loosen et al., 2020; Tsfati et al., 2006; Vos et al., 2019; Willnat et al., 2019). Second, in most of these cases, this dissemination of information is accompanied by roles corresponding with an analytical, explanatory impetus – mirrored by our analyst role – which repeatedly ranks among the most important expectations (e.g. Tandoc and Duffy, 2016; van der Wurff and Schoenbach, 2014) as it highlights the audience’s demand for contextualized information within a complex new ecology. Third, roles expressing journalism’s critical and monitorial watchdog function were, in several studies, also among the top three role expectations (e.g. Nah and Chung, 2011; Willnat et al., 2019). Beyond these commonalities, other roles showed a less clear pattern in different media and political systems, highlighting the importance of a deeper understanding of how role expectations are connected with audiences’ societal reality.

Pertinent studies compared audience expectations of journalism with orientations of professional journalists. That not only allows us to test the extent to which journalists act on behalf of citizens following the “public interest” (Tsfati et al., 2006), it also allows us to reflect on whether expectations are more or less supported by professionals who produce the news that audiences are confronted with. Most representative studies show that, in the vast majority of roles, audiences significantly differ in their expectations compared to professional journalists’ own role orientations. More concretely, however, these comparisons paint an unclear picture. An early study from Israel found that “while the public prefers neutrality to interpretation, the journalists believe that the opposite mix of neutrality and interpretation best serves the public” (Tsfati et al., 2006: 160), and a recent study from the US mirrors this finding (Willnat et al., 2019). At the same time, however, another US study found that it is journalists who “assign more importance than the public to all the neutral observer-type roles” (Vos et al., 2019: 1020). Loosen et al. (2020: 15) conclude for Germany that citizens generally “consider more role aspects as of higher importance than journalists do.”

Additionally, comparisons between audience expectations and journalists’ orientations also revealed inconsistencies that recent literature could not yet explain exhaustively. For example, findings show that the US public attributes more importance to a collaborator role than journalists but at the same time assigns more importance to journalism executing a watchdog role (Vos et al., 2019) as it calls for a deeper understanding of the audience’s political perceptions. Against the background of these little and not yet fully consistent findings and limited knowledge about democratic corporatist countries like Austria, we want to contribute to expanding this knowledge by asking:

RQ1: What does the audience expect from journalism in Austria, and how do audience expectations differ from role orientations of journalists?

Understanding audience expectations

As shown, audience expectations of journalism are not always free from inconsistencies. This might be the case partly due to different subgroups holding diverging expectations. Therefore, researchers aim to identify predictors that explain why recipients are more or less likely to hold specific expectations.

Among others, sociodemographics turned out to predict what people demand from journalism. Not only does age inform us about what the audience generally expect of journalism, in particular stressing that older generations more strongly demand a watchdog (Heider et al., 2005; Vos et al., 2019); gender also turned out to play a role (e.g. Willnat et al., 2019). In terms of education, research indicates that a more highly educated audience also holds higher expectations concerning most political roles of journalism (Loosen et al., 2020).

Based on the idea “that suggested audience expectations are shaped by what they see journalists actually doing” (Vos et al., 2019: 1023), audience expectations have also been analyzed from the perspective of media use. Broadly speaking, nearly all forms of (traditional) media use were found to be positively related to different role expectations (van der Wurff and Schoenbach, 2014; Willnat et al., 2019), indicating that the more people consume news, the higher their expectations generally are and/or vice versa. Audience expectations turned out to be connected not only with what kind of news people consume but also their attitudes toward the media – in particular, media trust. Citizens’ trust in media was found to be significantly negatively correlated with the discrepancy between media users’ own expectations and professional journalists’ attitudes, problematically indicating that “the more an audience member diverged from journalists’ perceptions of what constitutes worthy journalism, the lower his or her trust in the media was” (Tsfati et al., 2006: 168). More concretely, media credibility turned out to be one of the strongest predictors for “interpreter” role expectations as they incorporate analyst and watchdog dimensions (Nah and Chung, 2011), indicating that the extent to which citizens have confidence in the media to fulfill complex functions depends on their trust. Media trust might not only be the reason for diverging expectations of journalism; it might also be the result of neglected expectations. Coleman et al. (2012: 42) argue that when “distrust in the news was expressed [. . .] it was because people felt that their expectations of the news were not shared by news producers.” In line with that, a recent study by Fawzi and Mothes (2020) found that a higher discrepancy between audience expectation of journalism concerning several core functions and their evaluation of its actual performance was negatively correlated with media trust.

Despite the close connection between journalism and democracy, research on the relationship between audience expectations of journalism and their political attitudes is surprisingly scarce. In recent years, right-wing political elites and social movements, in particular, have been increasingly questioning the legitimacy of the democratic function of the media and also attacked individual journalists for their critical reporting (e.g. Egelhofer et al., 2020). In line with that, conservatism as a political ideology has been shown to negatively predict expectations of adversary roles (Nah and Chung, 2011), indicating that conservative citizens indeed prefer journalism to be the literal “paper tiger.” Conversely, liberal audience members (in terms of social issues) expect journalism to more strongly follow a watchdog, mobilizer, and missionary but also an informer role (Vos et al., 2019). Ideologically moderate audiences turned out to significantly more strongly support the apolitical marketer (Loosen et al., 2020). Beyond that, political interest was found to be positively correlated with a variety of expectations of journalism’s normative role among the audience (Fawzi and Mothes, 2020).

However, while these studies show some first connections, they are not yet able to weigh up the relative importance of political parameters to understand what the audience wants from journalism by including different media- and politics-related parameters at the same time. We, therefore, follow the plea of Willnat et al. (2019) that future studies should address the currently changing political environment by incorporating both to explore audience expectations. Thus, we ask:

RQ2: How do media use and media trust, as well as political parameters, relate to audience expectations of journalism?

Data and methods

Audience survey

We use data from the seventh wave of an opt-in online access panel survey (n = 2775) conducted between February 25 and March 12, 2019, in Austria. The profile of the panel was largely in line with the overall population, with minor discrepancies concerning age and region that reflect the usual patterns of online surveys (Aichholzer et al., 2020). While, of course, this is only a “potential audience” of journalism, 97.3 percent of respondents have indicated that they use print, television, online, radio, or social media news at least once a month to inform themselves about politics, which is why we will continue to refer to them as “audience” henceforth. Note that, during that time, Austria was ruled by a conservative and far-right government (Eberl et al., 2020).

Dependent variables

The questionnaire includes items used in the Worlds of Journalism Study (Hanitzsch et al., 2019b), representing core role orientations of journalists, as theoretically introduced (see Table 1). We used the wording as developed by Hanitzsch et al. (2019a). Respondents were thus concretely asked, “How important do you think it is that journalistic news media in Austria fulfill the following functions?” We used a scale from 1 (“unimportant”) to 5 (“extremely important”). For a more intuitive understanding, we recoded the scale to a range from 0 to 4.

Table 1.

Mean comparison between audience expectations and journalists’ roles.

Role	Audience		Journalists		Mean-Diff.	t (2181)	p
Role	Mean	SD	Mean	SD	Mean-Diff.	t (2181)	p
Observer: Be a detached observer	3.39	0.86	3.41	0.83	–0.02	–0.49	0.621
Analyst: Provide an analysis of current affairs	3.03	0.80	3.44	0.79	–0.41	–10.83	0.000
Informer: Provide information people need to make political decisions	2.82	0.98	2.81	1.16	0.01	0.16	0.871
Mobilizer: Motivate people to participate in political activity	2.80	0.88	2.43	1.18	0.37	7.02	0.000
Watchdog: Monitor and scrutinize political leaders	2.69	1.13	2.30	1.32	0.39	6.40	0.000
Missionary: Promote tolerance and cultural diversity	2.62	1.07	2.78	1.07	–0.16	–3.09	0.002
Entertainer: Provide entertainment and relaxation	2.28	1.01	2.26	1.11	0.02	0.29	0.769
Marketer: Provide the kind of news that attract the largest audience	2.23	1.01	2.65	1.05	–0.42	–8.38	0.000
Collaborator: Support government policy	1.52	1.13	0.34	0.65	1.18	28.82	0.000

Comparison between audience (n = 1555) and journalists (n = 628). Audience data has been weighted.

Independent variables

Moving to our independent variables, we first have a set of media parameters. We asked respondents how regularly they used newspapers, television, online news sites, or social media to inform themselves about politics (each coded 0–4). We then further specified the news consumption by asking how often they read or watched (“never” = 0 to “every day” = 7) either of a set of quality outlets, tabloid outlets, and television news shows from the public broadcaster or from private channels.¹ We also asked respondents about their trust in the media (0–10).

The second set of independent variables includes political parameters, such as a respondent’s ideology (“left” = 0 to “right” = 10) and the variables’ centered and squared transformation in order to measure ideological extremism (0–25). As some of the journalistic roles refer directly to political leaders and the government, we asked respondents about their satisfaction with the federal government as well as about their satisfaction with democracy in general (each 0–3). Similarly to trust in the media, we asked about respondents’ trust in six political institutions: (1) the national parliament, (2) the government, (3) the European Union, (4) the judiciary system, (5) the constitutional court, and (6) the police. We combined these items into one additive index of trust in political institutions (0–10). As a last political variable, we included respondents’ political interest (0–3). For the multivariate analyses below, we also consider sociodemographic controls for age (16–85), gender (0/1; 1 = “female”), and level of formal education (0–3). After dropping cases with missing values for the relevant variables, the remaining subsample contained 1,555 respondents.

Journalism survey

We used Austrian journalists’ data (n = 818) from the latest wave of the Worlds of Journalism Study, which is publicly available (WJS, 2019). It was collected in 2014/15 in a complex multistage sampling process (Hanitzsch et al., 2019a; Riedl, 2019). As respondents were confronted with highly political topics in the audience questionnaire, we compare their expectations only with journalists who may potentially work with political news and current affairs. We, therefore, excluded journalists working in explicitly nonpolitical beats in a narrow understanding² but included those working in beats that can have a political dimension (e.g. culture) as well as generalists (i.e. journalists not working for a specific beat). Additionally, we only used data from journalists, which answered all role items in which we are interested in this study. That reduced our final sample of journalists to n = 628.

Findings

Audience expectations versus journalists’ role orientations

In a first step, we looked at the average support for the respective expectation items among the audience (see Table 1) to answer RQ1. Overall, audience members most strongly expect the observer, analyst, and informer roles, which are closely connected to journalism’s mission to disseminate relevant information. Expectations that partly address journalists’ power distance and incorporate a more interventionist stance of journalism – mobilizer, watchdog, and missionary – receive a comparably moderate ranking. This ranking is followed by the expectation that journalism’s role is one of an entertainer and marketer as it leads away from a narrow understanding of journalism’s functions in the political sphere. Citizens’ support for a collaborator role is the lowest, indicating that, on average, the audience devalues an actively political involvement of journalists by supporting the governors. While the standard deviations within the group of professional journalists vary somewhat from item to item, the deviations within the audience are more stable and close to one unit of the five-point scale, indicating relatively higher consensus within audience expectations.

To systematically compare these expectations with the support for journalistic roles among journalists, we calculated t-tests for all single role items (see also Figure 1). In fact, there is a strong consensus about the observer, informer, and entertainer roles, where the means differ not even at the first decimal place. In particular, the agreement about the entertainer role is surprising as this is a role that gained more importance among journalists only during recent years (Kaltenbrunner et al., 2020). Roles more strongly supported by journalists than expected by the audience – and, therefore, a potential area for conflict when journalism offers efforts which do not meet audience expectations – are those of the analyst, missionary, and marketer. While it might be a simple professional perspective that journalists are more aware of reaching a wide audience because of economic reasons, both a stronger analytical impetus from the journalistic side and the promotion of certain values – although also supported above average by the audience – might potentially cause a conflictual relationship.

Figure 1.

Mean comparison between audience expectations and journalists’ roles.

Roles with significantly more support from the audience are the mobilizer, watchdog, and collaborator roles, with the latter being – while of lower importance overall – the role with the largest discrepancy to the professions’ self-perception as that also turned out to be the case in Germany (Loosen et al., 2020) as well as in the US (Vos et al., 2019), where comparable research designs were applied. That these very different roles are continuously more important to the audience than professional journalists hints at inconsistencies within the public perception of journalism: that the audience at the same time demands a watchdog who controls the elite and a collaborator who supports the elite might be due to different parts of the audience holding disparate expectations.

Remarkably, in six of the seven cases where we found a significant difference between audience and journalists, the “direction” of the differences, that is, whether the audience or journalists perceive it as more important, is the same in neighboring Germany – only the entertainer role is more important for journalists there (Loosen et al., 2020); in the US, however, the direction of significant differences is the other way around in three out of these six roles (Vos et al., 2019) as it underlines the importance of the media and/or political system to understand audience expectations of journalism. To answer RQ2, we, therefore, calculated separate OLS models for each role to find out how divergent expectations of journalism are connected with both media and political parameters.

Correlates of audience expectations

The analysis reveals that for the informer role, political interest and trust in media are the strongest correlates, indicating both media and political parameters relating to audiences’ expectation of receiving journalistic information as a basis for political decisions. Similarly, among the roles shared by both groups, the observer expectation is most strongly correlated with trust in political institutions (other than media) and political interest – whether the audience believes political institutions are trustworthy seems to be decisive for journalism’s detached and, therefore, rather passive role. Finally, the idea of journalism as an entertainer is significantly connected with high tabloid use and lower education but hardly related to political variables.

When it comes to correlates of roles that are significantly more strongly supported by journalists, the analyst can most strongly be connected to high political interest and – to a considerably lower extent – media trust; keeping in mind that this is one role where we diagnosed “overfulfillment” by journalists, the gap seems to be particularly wide for respondents who show little interest in politics. In the case of the missionary expectation, a right-wing ideology and satisfaction with the (conservative/right-wing) government are the strongest negative correlates. Put differently, being rather right-wing and satisfied with the current government coincides with audience expectations even farther away from where journalist see themselves and their work. Lastly, the expectation of journalism acting as a marketer is related to tabloid press use and lower education. This can be explained by the fact that a tabloid newspaper is the one with the highest share in Austria (Lohmann and Riedl, 2019).

Among the four roles more strongly expected by the audience than supported by journalists, the mobilizer expectation is predominantly positively related to political interest and trust in political institutions other than media, while it is not connected to news use at all. Citizens obviously delegate the mission to mobilize other people based on their political understanding but not because of their actual media diet. The watchdog expectation turned out to be the only role which is strongest associated with a sociodemographic dimension – the older the respondents, the more they expect journalism to act as a watchdog – and to be correlated with dissatisfaction with the government; the less people are convinced by the current elite, the more they want journalism to scrutinize and control them. Conversely, satisfaction with the government is the strongest factor relating to a collaborator expectation (next to private TV use) – if people support the current coalition government, they also expect journalism to do so.

Thinking back to the diagnosis that political parameters have hardly been applied to understand audience expectations of journalism, our analysis underlines their importance: in five out of nine cases, political parameters turned out to explain more variance (see incremental R2 change in Table 2) than media use and trust as media-related parameters. This is not only and not necessarily the case for expectations with a strong reference to the current political status quo, like, for example, the watchdog expectations, but also for those at the very core of traditional journalistic functions, like, for example, the informer. At the same time, both roles out of those that are more strongly supported by journalists than expected by the audience and the other way around are more strongly correlated with political parameters, while others are stronger correlated with media parameters; there is no clear pattern of either over- or underexpected roles being particularly connected to respondents’ political attitudes.

Table 2.

OLS for the relationship between sociodemographics, media, and political parameters in connection with audience expectations of journalism.

	Informer	Observer	Analyst	Mobilizer	Watchdog	Missionary	Collaborator	Entertainer	Marketer
Sociodemographics
Gender (female)	0.016	0.019	0.059*	0.072**	–0.039	0.079***	0.061*	0.075**	0.061*
Age	0.057*	0.098***	0.025	–0.022	0.193***	0.092***	–0.023	–0.005	0.029
Education	0.105***	0.064*	0.054*	0.018	0.031	0.009	–0.090***	–0.080**	–0.099***
Incremental R2 change	0.036***	0.029***	0.016***	0.009**	0.048***	0.031***	0.050***	0.029***	0.038***
Media parameters
News use social media	0.010	–0.072**	–0.009	0.022	0.024	0.029	0.088***	0.012	–0.001
News use quality (print/online) outlets	0.046	–0.018	0.037	–0.010	0.027	0.052*	–0.109***	–0.080**	–0.087***
News use tabloid (print/online) outlets	–0.042	–0.030	–0.023	–0.015	–0.025	–0.060*	0.100***	0.093***	0.105***
News use PSB TV	–0.012	–0.025	0.008	0.029	0.013	0.025	0.042	0.031	0.042
News use private TV	–0.031	–0.081**	–0.016	0.001	0.003	–0.004	0.136***	0.084**	0.069**
Trust in media	0.120***	–0.131***	0.094**	0.016	0.137***	0.061*	0.093***	0.030	0.078**
Incremental R2 change	0.045***	0.018***	0.034***	0.025***	0.036***	0.091***	0.089***	0.031***	0.041***
Political parameters
Ideology (right)	–0.066*	–0.037	–0.056	–0.079**	–0.084**	–0.238***	0.040	0.006	0.056
Extremism	–0.003	–0.032	0.038	–0.004	0.023	–0.001	0.035	0.011	–0.001
Satisfaction with Government	–0.060	0.048	–0.030	–0.075*	–0.183***	–0.248***	0.189***	0.079*	0.074*
Satisfaction with democracy	–0.066*	–0.089**	–0.021	–0.063*	–0.052	–0.032	0.075**	–0.042	0.008
Trust in political institutions	0.062	0.165***	0.057	0.114***	–0.070*	0.179***	–0.008	0.049	–0.006
Political interest	0.135***	0.139***	0.199***	0.220***	0.148***	–0.000	–0.025	0.003	0.026
Incremental R2 change	0.031***	0.035***	0.043***	0.063***	0.091***	0.159***	0.055***	0.007	0.012**
Total R2	0.111	0.082	0.093	0.096	0.174	0.281	0.194	0.067	0.091
N	1555	1555	1555	1555	1555	1555	1555	1555	1555

Mean variance inflation factor = 1.31. Standardized beta coefficients.

p < 0.05. **p < 0.01. ***p < 0.001.

Incremental R2 change values in italics.

Discussion and conclusion

Overall, the study shows that, in Austria, there is a particular agreement between audience expectations and journalists’ roles about journalism’s core function of information dissemination as well as, on a lower level, of entertainment. However, we could diagnose specific deviations for selected roles in terms of both an over- and underexpectation by the audience, which considerably vary in terms of the width of this gap. Furthermore, we see that there are roles more strongly expected by audiences that are conceptually almost antipodes, such as the watchdog and the collaborator. Such inconsistencies within audience expectations underline the importance of analyzing in more detail – and in particular more systematically – to which extent media and political realities are connected with expectations and of exploring to what extent we should rather think about a ‘multiple audience’ (Loosen et al., 2020) than of a homogenous one.

The identification of correlates of audience expectations reveals that, for several roles, it is, in fact, political parameters that better explain diverging wishes and demands addressed to journalism than media use and trust. Given the important role of the respective relation to the current government and state of democracy, we can assume that audience expectations might be situational and relational vis a vis the presently existing group of elites. However, other roles – also genuinely political ones – are more strongly dependent on the respondents’ media diet and trust. All in all, our analysis stresses that focusing on the public either as news consumers when exploring expectations of journalism – as research did predominantly – or as political beings falls short as both dimensions turned out to be crucial for our understanding of public demands on journalism.

Connecting these findings with our theoretical considerations, we could indeed confirm our expectations that media trust is connected to what the audience expects from journalism. Media trust is thereby related to both roles that turned out to be “common ground” between the audience and journalists and to those more strongly demanded by the audience as they underline the importance of media trust to understand (un-)fulfilled audience demands. While we can, based on our study, trace neither the mutual connection over time nor the actual degree of (dis-)satisfaction (for the latter, see Fawzi and Mothes, 2020), we advocate for incorporating audience expectations of journalism when studying such critical developments. When thinking about journalism as a discursive institution, our audience-centric approach reveals that there is a stable core of roles that both the audience and professionals associate with journalism. This allows us to conclude that journalism’s legitimacy is probably questioned fairly little concerning these roles. However, our “map” of expectations versus professional roles identifies specific roles – several of them related to journalism’s interventionism and power distance (Hanitzsch, 2007) – where we diagnosed significant differences between public and professional perception. In these cases, we can thus assume that a process of (re-)interpretation or (re-)negotiation is more likely than for roles that are “common ground” between audience and profession.

While there are, as argued, good reasons to draw on professional journalists’ roles to locate audience expectations, scholarly debate must face the question of the extent to which we can and (normatively) should expect a strict overlap. First, it is an open question of how far such a gap has to be until it appears to be a possible source of dissatisfaction or the extent to which inconsistencies are the result of expectably different but unproblematic perspectives. While we could identify areas of lacking congruence, that is not to say that these are necessarily always and for all parts of the audience problematic. When we, for instance, think about journalistic media as merit goods (Ali, 2016), where a lower public demand than societally desired is a constitutive characteristic, we could even raise the question of whether there is even a normatively desirable gap. Additionally, Loosen et al. (2020) stress an important aspect when arguing that mere expectations do not sufficiently cover the question of “how reachable an audience actually is” (p. 17); while expectations and professional roles might, therefore, overlap to a smaller or larger extent, that does not tell us how actively audiences actually consume and perceive news coverage. Thus, under what conditions, to what extent, and in which cases such gaps are problematic for the audience-journalism relationship is, therefore, up to future, maybe qualitative research.

This study has some limitations. First, our study has – as other comparable studies (e.g. Loosen et al., 2020; Vos et al., 2019) – a considerable time span between the survey among journalists and the public. Although we know from long time series that professional journalists’ roles are rather stable and do not change during the course of some years (Weaver et al., 2019), changes both in the profession and in politics might lead to slightly different observations. However, for the largest discrepancies, we have no reason to assume a problematic bias: while we, for example, asked journalists under a social democratic–conservative government about the importance of being a watchdog – the role with the largest gap – we did so concerning the importance among the audience under a conservative right-wing government; against the background of journalists in Austria placing themselves pretty exactly at the middle of a left–right continuum (Dietrich-Gsenger and Seethaler, 2019) and the fact that the conservative right-wing government openly attacked the public broadcasting system (Egelhofer et al., 2020), which employs a considerable share of Austrian journalists, we see no reason that journalists’ critical attitude toward the government would have decreased meaningfully.

Second, our audience data collection took place during a politically highly vigorous time of the return of a conservative right-wing government at the national level after more than a decade that eventually ended with the widely known “Ibizagate” scandal (Eberl et al., 2020). On the one hand, the level of political expectations toward journalism might be overestimated compared to more steady times; on the other hand, we can expect most of the respondents to have an explicit political opinion as it helps us to explore relations with political attitudes. However, we do not follow van der Wurff and Schoenbach’s (2014) explanation that “conflicting results may simply be caused by conflicting demands depending on what is happening in society at a given moment” (p. 438, italics added) but, quite contrary, opt for a theoretical discussion about what a context-sensitivity of audience expectations might mean for both scholarly debate and the actual journalistic news coverage.

This assumed context-sensitivity of audience expectations does, moreover, also imply a strong demand for comparative studies between different national contexts or at least comparable national studies, which allow us to reflect on the extent to which the explored relations are specific and situational or stable trends. For example, do right-wing audiences always reject the watchdog expectation (see also Nah and Chung, 2011), or will they, instead, welcome it when the political adversary is in power? As this study systematically incorporated political parameters when studying audience demand and weighed them against media parameters, it delivered a first systematic overview of a still underexplored research avenue. Future studies are invited to dig deeper into this promising field by focusing on the interactions between political and media parameters.

Lastly, scholars should critically reflect on the extent to which existing measures of audience expectations sufficiently and, in particular, exhaustively cover the complexity of audience demands. While journalistic roles, as used in this and a number of other studies, offer the auspicious advantage of a strong theoretical background and the possibility for insightful comparisons with the profession, they were naturally designed within a professional, not an audience-centric, context. As qualitative studies highlight the importance of a more active and participatory demand of the audience (Heise et al., 2014) but also – quite soberingly – simply “more emphasis on stylistic and linguistic qualities” (Karlsson and Clerwall, 2019: 1184), future research should incorporate both traditions to develop an even more comprehensive approach to studying what the audience expects of and demands from journalism – which, as this study has highlighted, should be strongly aware of recipients’ political reality.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank Christina Krakovsky, Phoebe Maares, Josef Seethaler, and as well as two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Authors’ Note

Andreas Riedl is also affiliated with University of Klagenfurt.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Andreas Riedl

Jakob-Moritz Eberl

Notes

Author biographies

Andreas Riedl is a Junior Scientist at the Institute for Comparative Media and Communication Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Klagenfurt in Vienna and PhD candidate at the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich.

Jakob-Moritz Eberl is a Post-Doc at the Department of Communication, University of Vienna. His work has been published in journals such as Communication Research, International Journal of Press/Politics, and Political Communication among others. He is currently a member of the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES, Media Side).

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