This international edited collection brings together the latest research in political journalism, examining the ideological, commercial and technological forces that are transforming the field and its evolving relationship with news audiences. Comprising 40 original chapters written by scholars from around the world, The Routledge Companion to Political Journalism offers fundamental insights from the disciplines of political science, media, communications and journalism. Drawing on interviews, discourse analysis and quantitative statistical methods, the volume is divided into six parts, each focusing on a major theme in the contemporary study of political journalism. Topics covered include far-right media, populism movements and the media, local political journalism practices, public engagement and audience participation in political journalism, agenda setting, and advocacy and activism in journalism. Chapters draw on case studies from the United Kingdom, Hungary, Russia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Italy, Brazil, the United States, Greece and Spain. The Routledge Companion to Political Journalism is a valuable resource for students and scholars of media studies, journalism studies, political communication and political science.

Comparing Political Journalism is a systematic, in-depth study of the factors that shape and influence political news coverage today. Using techniques drawn from the growing field of comparative political communication, an international group of contributors analyse political news content drawn from newspapers, television news, and news websites from 16 countries, to assess what kinds of media systems are most conducive to producing quality journalism. Underpinned by key conceptual themes, such as the role that the media are expected to play in democracies and quality of coverage, this analysis highlights the fragile balance of news performance in relation to economic forces. A multitude of causal factors are explored to explain key features of contemporary political news coverage, such as Strategy and Game Framing, Negativity, Political Balance, Personalization, Hard and Soft News Comparing Political Journalism offers an unparalleled scope in assessing the implications for the ongoing transformation of Western media systems, and addresses core concepts of central importance to students and scholars of political communication world-wide.

Political journalism is often under fire. Conventional wisdom and much scholarly research suggest that journalists are cynics and political pundits. Political news is void of substance and overly focused on strategy and persons. Citizens do not learn from the news, are politically cynical, and are dissatisfied with the media. This book challenges these assumptions, which are often based on single-country studies with limited empirical observations about the relation between news production, content, and journalism's effects. Based on interviews with journalists, a systematic content analysis of political news, and panel survey data in different countries, this book tests how different systems and media-politics relations condition the contents of political news. It shows how different content creates different effects, and demonstrates that under the right circumstances citizens learn from political news, do not become cynical, and are satisfied with political journalism.

Political Journalism explores practices of political journalism, ranging from American 'civic journalism' to the press corps covering the European Union in Brussels, from Bangkok newsrooms to French and Italian scandal hunters. Challenging both the 'mediamalaise' thesis and the notion of the journalist as the faithful servant of democracy, it explores political journalism in the making and maps the opportunities and threats encountered by political journalism in the contemporary sphere.

Philippe M. F. Peycam completes the first ever English-language study of Vietnam's emerging political press and its resistance to colonialism. Published in the decade that preceded the Communist Party's founding, this journalistic phenomenon established a space for public, political contestation that fundamentally changed Vietnamese attitudes and the outlook of Southeast Asia. Peycam directly links Saigon's colonial urbanization to the creation of new modes of individual and collective political agency. To better justify their presence, French colonialists implemented a peculiar brand of republican imperialism to encourage the development of a highly controlled print capitalism. Yet the Vietnamese made clever use of this new form of political expression, subverting colonial discourse and putting French rulers on the defensive, while simultaneously stoking Vietnamese aspirations for autonomy. Peycam specifically considers the work of Western-educated Vietnamese journalists who, in their legal writings, called attention to the politics of French rule. Peycam rejects the notion that Communist and nationalist ideologies changed the minds of "alienated" Vietnamese during this period. Rather, he credits colonial urban modernity with shaping the Vietnamese activist-journalist and the role of the French, even at their most coercive, along with the modern public Vietnamese intellectual and his responsibility toward the group. Countering common research on anticolonial nationalism and its assumptions of ethno-cultural homogeneity, Peycam follows the merging of French republican and anarchist traditions with neo-Confucian Vietnamese behavior, giving rise to modern Vietnamese public activism, its autonomy, and its contradictory aspirations. Interweaving biography with archival newspaper and French police sources, he writes from within these journalists' changing political consciousness and their shifting perception of social roles.

Over the past decade, American outlets such as PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and the Washington Post's Fact Checker have shaken up the political world by holding public figures accountable for what they say. Cited across social and national news media, these verdicts can rattle a political campaign and send the White House press corps scrambling. Yet fact-checking is a fraught kind of journalism, one that challenges reporters' traditional roles as objective observers and places them at the center of white-hot, real-time debates. As these journalists are the first to admit, in a hyperpartisan world, facts can easily slip into fiction, and decisions about which claims to investigate and how to judge them are frequently denounced as unfair play. Deciding What's True draws on Lucas Graves's unique access to the members of the newsrooms leading this movement. Graves vividly recounts the routines of journalists at three of these hyperconnected, technologically innovative organizations and what informs their approach to a story. Graves also plots a compelling, personality-driven history of the fact-checking movement and its recent evolution from the blogosphere, reflecting on its revolutionary remaking of journalistic ethics and practice. His book demonstrates the ways these rising organizations depend on professional networks and media partnerships yet have also made inroads with the academic and philanthropic worlds. These networks have become a vital source of influence as fact-checking spreads around the world.

This timely book examines the role of fact-checking journalism within political policy debates, and its potential contribution to public engagement. Understanding facts not to operate in a political vacuum, the book argues for a wide remit for fact-checking journalism beyond empirically-checkable facts, to include the causal relationships and predictions that form part of wider political arguments and are central to electoral pledges. Whilst these statements cannot be proven or disproven, fact-checking can, and sometimes does, ask pertinent critical questions about the premises of those claims and arguments. The analysis centres on the three dedicated national British fact-checkers during the UK’s 2017 snap general election, including their activity and engagement on Twitter. The book also makes a close political discourse and argumentation analysis of three key issue debates in flagship reporting from Channel 4 News and the BBC.