Perceived News Media Importance: Developing and Validating a Measure for Personal Valuations of Normative Journalistic Functions

Abstract

This study features the development and validation of a multidimensional scale for Perceived News Media Importance (PNMI), a concept pertaining to how much individuals personally value normative functions of political/public affairs journalism. Comprised of six different dimensions that represent the weight of what citizens deem to be desirable about news work, the PNMI concept exhibits the capacity to strengthen scholarly explanations about the public’s perceptions of the news media and related democratic outcomes. More specifically this research, which employs three data sets, is designed to (1) explicate the PNMI concept, (2) develop and validate a PNMI scale, (3) and explore PNMI’s predictive value relative to news media use and support for freedom of the press. Evidence of validity is confirmed with media trust, political media use, political interest, and ideology. Furthermore, PNMI is shown to be predictive of (a) mainstream and social media-based news use, as conditioned by perceptions of the press satisfactory performing normative functions, and (b) support for press freedoms. While the hypothesized PNMI model (as a higher order latent construct with six lower order dimensions) exhibits a sound model fit, a combined data set (total N=912) reveals that PNMI could also be treated as a multi-factor, lower-order latent construct.

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