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2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

9. Social TV and Political Talk Shows: Empowering the Audience?

Author : Andrea Ceron

Published in: Social Media and Political Accountability

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Chapter 9 highlights how the practice of ‘social TV’ and the analysis of the SNS audience can represent an innovative source of information on the degree of media pluralism. In fact, by analyzing the SNS audience’s reaction to media content, we can shed light on how media content is perceived and digested by the audience. This can allow the building of a synthetic and multi-dimensional indicator of media pluralism, which can potentially empower the audience and the general public, provided that the opinions expressed online are taken into account by media and political institutions.

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previous chapter Restoring Online Political Trust

next chapter Conclusion: A Sentiment Democracy?

See: http://www.lastampa.it/2015/08/05/italia/politica/manca-laccordo-sul-nome-del-presidente-slitta-lassemblea-degli-azionisti-rai-IQiOujW7APkMZmzBdk4v7H/pagina.html

See: http://www.repubblica.it/politica/2016/08/04/news/rai-145341376/

See: http://www.repubblica.it/politica/2015/12/22/news/rai_la_riforma_e_legge_cosa_cambia_e_come-130002293/

Overall, almost 20,000 tweets were manually tagged. The supervised analysis allowed us to get rid of the noise produced by the politicians’ staff and by the official accounts of the shows. These tweets, which were generally just a propagation of the exact statements pronounced by the guests without any additional original content, have been classified in an ad hoc Off-topic category (i.e., tweets not relevant with respect to the analysis). The same applies to noise due to retrieval of hashtags and keywords that are also common words (e.g., Matrix). The Off-topic category represents approximately 50% of the training set in 2014 and 30% in 2016. Accuracy has been assessed on a subsample of 8,000 tweets related to seven guests. Compared to hand-coded documents, the root mean square error of the estimates is on average 2.8%.

Notice that in 2014 only politicians belonging to the main left-leaning (e.g., PD) or right-leaning (e.g., FI) parties were invited, and little or no room was available for third parties, including representatives of the M5S, whose participation in TV shows was forbidden by the M5S leader, Grillo. In 2016 some M5S politicians were periodically invited and allowed to participate in talk shows. However, to perform a more consistent comparison with 2014 data I excluded them from the analysis.

Considering the unstandardized positions of the TV networks produces the same results: RAI’s and Mediaset’s talk shows are addressed to generalist and centrist audiences (though RAI also attracs the left-wing audience and Mediaset the right-wing one), while La7 deviates from the center of the space to cater to an anti-political audience.

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Title: Social TV and Political Talk Shows: Empowering the Audience?
Author: Andrea Ceron
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Social Media and Political Accountability
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-52626-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-52627-0

Copyright Year: 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52627-0_9