Measuring and explaining the diversity of voices and viewpoints in the news

News media can be considered to fulfil their democratic role as a “marketplace ofideas” only if they present a diverse content that gives space to a wider range of ideasand viewpoints. But how can content diversity be assessed? And what determinesactor and viewpoint diversity in the first place? By employing measurements of actorand viewpoint diversity at the article and newspaper level, this study provides acomplete overview on the content diversity of immigration news, and it investigatesfactors that have an impact on content diversity of immigration newspaper articles inBelgium, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom (2013-2014). The results of amultilevel analysis indicate that both the articles’ size and the elite character of anewspaper play a key role in enhancing news’ multiperspectivalness. Also, thefindings show that these two measurements of content diversity are different yetrelated to each other