The issue of institutional dominance and how statements in German and Middle-Eastern and North African (Egyptian), or MENA, newspapers evaluated actors in the coverage of hydrogen was studied by Majid Ali and Lutz M. Hagen from Boysen-TU Dresden-Research Training Group.
Questions of sourcing endure in the process of information collection – who is granted an authoritative voice in news? Who gets to define a complex issue? Classical news gathering favors organizational, institutional sources – they are granted an authoritative voice in the stories.
However, the source categories may still vary even with elite, institutional sources: as actors draw authority from sources based on their type: political actors from formal decision-making, economic actors from production, investment, and market capacity (Harjuniemi 2022). Epistemic actors from specialized knowledge and justification of knowledge claims (Ekström 2002).
This study used newspaper coverage of hydrogen in Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt, to examine how source hierarchies are organized internally. Hydrogen was chosen because it combines political strategy, economic implementation, technical uncertainty, climate policy, and international coordination.
For the first hypothesis, the authors suspected that “In hydrogen coverage, political, economic, epistemic, and international elites will dominate attributed visibility, while civil society and lay-public actors will remain marginal”. To clarify the hypothesis, the authors examined the context.
In Germany, structural press pluralism was combined with differentiated editorial positions, while in Saudi Arabia and UAE attention to state-media relations was necessary. In Egypt organizational diversity was combined with political concentration.
The 1b hypothesis, suspected that “Compared with Germany, the distribution of attributed authority in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt will be more concentrated on political elites than on civil society and lay-public”. The first RQ, on the other hand, was about differences in Germany – “How does the composition of attributed authority differ among German newspapers?”.
The second RQ was “How does statement-level evaluative stance toward hydrogen vary across authority categories?”. Then, the second hypothesis was “Actor-category differences in evaluative stance will be greater in German coverage than in the Saudi Arabian, Emirati, and Egyptian newspapers.”
Materials comprised Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Die Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), and die tageszeitung (TAZ) from Germany, and Arab News and Saudi Gazette, Khaleej Times and Gulf Today, and Daily News Egypt and Egyptian Gazette as the MENA sample. The articles were from July 2018 to September 2023.
The authority categories were journalists, political elites, economic elites, epistemic elites, international elites, civil society, and lay public. H1b was broadly supported, despite the pattern across MENA countries not being uniform. The authors saw these patterns as being indicative of social-system influences, rather than a direct media-system effect. There was a relatively high prevalence of international elites in MENA sources, reflecting hydrogen governance surrounding COP27 in Egypt.
Germany reflected a more internally differentiated institutional source field, but it did not count as an alternative to elite sourcing. Political and economic actors still remained central, and lay-people perspectives and civic sources remained marginal.
Editorial orientation in Germany did not directly predict source selection. Rather, the organizational differentiation operated through issue-specific definitions relevance, section placement, beat specialization, audience positioning, and journalist–source relationships. There was no democratization of source selection by organizational differences, instead it affected the elite sources chosen.
As for evaluative stances by source, international and political elites were the most positive, economic actors remaining supportive but conditional, while epistemic and journalists expressed greater qualification. Civil-society and lay-public were the least positive, but the authors cautioned that the sample for them was small.
H2 received qualified support, but it should be interpreted as contextual variation rather than newspaper polarization. Indeed, in Germany, there was differentiated legitimation, whereas the MENA sample demonstrated evaluative convergence.
In conclusion, the study offers three contributions to sourcing research. First, elite dominance is not a unitary condition. Second, the findings offer strong interpretations of indexing. Third, the findings contribute to frame-building research by locating journalistic agency as within source structures rather than outside.
The article “Differentiating authority in hydrogen news: Source hierarchies and evaluative positions across Germany and MENA newspapers” by Majid Ali and Lutz M. Hagen is in Journalism. (Open access).
Picture: the Toyota FCV Plus Hydrogen Concept car, shown at the 2020 Megaweb Toyota City Showcase in Odaiba, Tokyo by Maximalfocus.
License Unsplash.
