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

Zim Nwokora, Benjamin Isakhan and Chengxin Pan

Policy Studies, 2022, vol. 43, issue 4, 838-859

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.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1080/01442872.2020.1771297

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