Detecting Tabloidization of Online Media in Latvia

Abstract

The turmoil of presidential election campaign of 2016 echoed around
the world. The coverage of it spread far and wide. Even local and
regional media started to follow the campaign that Americans
themselves describe as divisive and unprecedented. Most likely it
happened thanks to the personality of Republican Party candidate
Donald J. Trump, a businessman and a television star. His personality,
populist campaign and many scandals that followed him caught
the attention of the world media. The scandalous news that came
out of the campaign in the last few months became an interesting
media tabloidization study ground. This paper talks about detecting
and describing the key elements of tabloidization. Although Latvian
online news sites have been running for almost two decades, there
has not been an in-depth research on tabloidization of online media.
Therefore, methods which could be used to identify the tabloidization
of media content have not been developed yet. By using content
analysis this study tries to set a base for further research on online
media tabloidization and draws the attention to Latvian commercial
news portals ñ TVNET, Delfi, Apollo and public media website Lsm.lv
and the news they produced and republished concerning US presi-
dential campaign in 2016. Findings show two major aspects ñ firstly,
even though there is quite a lot of information about the campaign
published on those media sites, this information is mostly republished
from news agencies, secondly, the study has revealed that there are
some indicators of tabloidization to be found in the Latvian news
websites.