IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cposxx/v43y2022i4p838-859.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The real fourth estate? Portrayals of Trump’s rise in the foreign media of friendly countries

Author

Listed:
  • Zim Nwokora
  • Benjamin Isakhan
  • Chengxin Pan

Abstract

That the news media should operate as an impartial and responsible “fourth estate” in a democracy is a pervasive ideal, but there are serious obstacles – economic, organizational and political – to its achievement in practice. These obstacles, we argue, may be lower when an outlet reports on politics in another country, which is strategically allied to its own. And, for this reason, the quality of news coverage of that country’s politics may be higher in the reporting by foreign media outlets than in the reporting by domestic outlets. This article outlines the theory behind this conjecture and then examines it empirically through a content analysis of media representations of Donald Trump’s rise in two non-American outlets, The Australian and The Guardian. Their coverage, our analysis suggests, approximated fourth-estate ideals more closely than did the domestic coverage of Trump’s rise.

Suggested Citation

  • Zim Nwokora & Benjamin Isakhan & Chengxin Pan, 2022. "The real fourth estate? Portrayals of Trump’s rise in the foreign media of friendly countries," Policy Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 43(4), pages 838-859, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:cposxx:v:43:y:2022:i:4:p:838-859
    DOI: 10.1080/01442872.2020.1771297
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01442872.2020.1771297
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/01442872.2020.1771297?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cposxx:v:43:y:2022:i:4:p:838-859. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/cpos .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.