Reader Comments on News Articles: Critical or Complementary

Sammanfattning: Guardian and Zeit online articles attract a large number of reader comments in generaland those that include links specifically. Using both quantitative and qualitative contentanalysis, the reader comments that include links in 80 articles on four topics – TheRefugee Crisis, the Syrian Conflict, Elections and Artificial Intelligence – from bothnewspapers were classified according to type and pro or contra stance to the article theywere posted in response to.The aim was to discover whether a majority of these comments agreed with or opposedthe main premises of the articles they were responding to and to determine whetherdifferent topics results in different reactions. In addition to that the goal was to try andascertain whether these findings indicated falling trust in journalists or not, and whatreaders sought to achieve by commenting and posting links, if in fact they had a concretemotivation.Findings demonstrated that 61.1% of reader comments with links disagreed with thearticles they were posted to, and controversial topics were more likely to attract links byreaders and greater disagreement. Previous research and this study could not clearlyconclude whether audience trust in journalists is falling or whether that was a mereextension of falling trust in authorities and organizations for example. It could also notdetermine whether audiences comment and share links to effect some form of change orwhether they simply seek a platform to express their opinion without any conscious goalin mind.