Public Debates about the Social Responsibility of Media Companies: A Longitudinal Analysis of Swiss Media Companies from 2010 to 2019

Abstract

With increasing competition among media organizations and growing moral expectations toward companies, the pressure on media organizations to assume social responsibility has significantly grown in recent years. This chapter adopts a media studies perspective, considering media social responsibility (MSR) in the public sphere as displayed by mass media. Media portrayals of responsible behavior in terms of MSR can positively influence the media organization’s social reputation, that is, its adherence to norms and values. The public negotiation of a company’s social responsibility in the media provides a distinctive feature in the case of media organizations because they are both reporters and subjects. The purpose of this chapter is to determine whether and if so, how news coverage about MSR has changed over time, how news coverage about MSR contributes to the media reputation of media organizations, and how these aspects differ between public and private media organizations and owned and non-owned media outlets. Therefore, we conducted a quantitative content analysis of news articles (n = 4556) in 10 Swiss media outlets covering the social aspects of Swiss media organizations from 2010 to 2019. Overall, our results show that MSR coverage has increased over the period, primarily driven by coverage of public media organizations’ MSR. However, the tone of the articles was mainly negative, implying that MSR may pose a risk to the social reputation of media organizations. By providing valuable and comprehensive insights into the role of the media in negotiating MSR, our study significantly contributes to the emerging field of MSR research.