Reputation and Public Accountability in the Media: The Role of News Values

This article contributes to our understanding of the audiences that hold public organizations to account in the news media. As an audience-based approach, a reputational perspective highlights how different audiences respond to demands for holding to, or giving, account (Busuioc & Lodge, 2017). Studies have mostly taken a relational perspective (Busuioc & Lodge, 2017) or an agency-centered perspective (Boon et al., 2019) to understand the nexus between reputation and accountability. This study will take an audience-centered approach, and integrate insights from the literatures on public accountability, news values and reputation to understand which audiences are more likely to bring positive or negative attention to public organizations in the news media. Public accountability has received considerable academic attention in the past years, with a specific strand focusing on the role of the news media in accountability processes (Djerf-Pierre, Ekström & Johansson, 2013; Jacobs & Schillemans, 2019). Several studies examined the classical role of the media as a requester of accountability from public organizations (Norris, 2014). Furthermore, media coverage has been studied in the context of triggering accountability processes, e.g. inducing organizational self-reflection or parliamentary questions (Jacobs & Schillemans, 2019). In contrast, accountability processes of public sector organizations as a topic of media content have received less empirical attention. News content results from selection and interpretation processes in which news values play a key role (Harcup & O’Neill, 2017). We analyze to what extent news factors, specified to public accountability, can explain coverage of accountability processes. Empirically, we build on a large longitudinal dataset (over 10.000 articles) on the frequency and valence of media attention for Belgian and Danish public agencies.