Vox pops as a tool for interventionist journalism? Explaining the presence of vox pops in political news on television in 12 countries.

Vox Pops (i.e. common, unaffiliated, at first sight randomly chosen people being interviewed by media about a news topic) are an intriguing phenomenon. For some, they represent the decline of television news quality, exemplifying the purely economic choice of media to ‘go popular’ and bring the news using people that have close proximity to the viewer as interviewees, rather than bringing the message with quotes of politicians and/or experts. For others, however, the use of vox pops is more than just an attribute of media commercialization. Since the journalist can select the vox pops that suit his/her story easily, they are also excellent instruments for journalists to (re)gain control over the news content, at the expense of politicians, who see their chances to communicate directly in the news diminished even further, after having to suffer already severely from recent trends of e.g. shrinking soundbites. As such, using vox pops could also been seen as a more subtle form of interventionist journalism. Vox pops are booming, and recent studies have shown that they are not just window-dressing: the impact of opinions expressed by vox pops is found to be more influential on television news viewers’ opinions than when politicians say the same thing in a soundbite. Some studies have been done on the prevalence of vox pops, as well as on the potential effects. What is lacking in political communication research, is information about the factors that lead to the use of these vox pops in the news. How do we explain the presence of vox pops in (political) news items? Several factors come to the fore as potential determinants, situated at different analytical levels. Is it the national political system or media system that matters? Is the level of competition between news broadcasters of influence? Or are organizational elements important (e.g. public versus private broadcasters)? Or could the use of vox pops be linked to specific topics, or most interestingly of all, to a certain kind of journalist? The main question is whether well-experienced and well-specialized journalists would be more inclined to use vox pops than unexperienced or generalist reporters? If the latter journalist level-effects are found, this could be linked to the earlier stated potential of vox pops to be instruments of subtle intervention of journalists. If the economic factors (competition, private/public) matter, this would support observers who see vox pops mainly as a sensational news element, used to attract attention. In this study, I will use an existing constructed sample of 28 non-election television news broadcasts, from 24 public as well as private news broadcasters in 12 countries (The Netherlands, Flanders, Wallonia, France, Italy, UK, Germany, Norway, Ireland, USA, Canada & Turkey) as a base for a multi-level regression analysis. The goal is to try to determine which factors lead to the use of vox pops in political news, and on which level these factors are mainly situated. Additionally, a large longitudinal dataset of Flemish news casts will be used to add the ‘election’ component to this study (which would also be a period in which this subtle intervention could be relevant/expected, because journalists are then confronted with high levels of controlled political information).