Are News Media Biting Hard Enough? Public Watchdog Role Expectations and Performance Evaluations in the Era of Big Tech

In the digital age, concerns have been raised about journalism’s watchdog role over Big Tech corporations in particular. Exploring the evolving watchdog role of journalism from an audience perspective, we examine audience expectations and performance evaluations towards news media’s role in Big Tech accountability. Drawing upon a cross-national online survey (n = 2737) conducted in the Netherlands, Germany, France, United Kingdom, United States, Poland, and India, we demonstrate how journalism’s monitorial role towards Big Tech differs from its traditional watchdog role. Compared to the media’s traditional watchdog role, audiences’ higher expectations towards the media’s critical scrutiny of Big Tech go more persistently unfulfilled, highlighting the particularly complex challenge in holding these powerful digital players accountable. These expectation-performance evaluation discrepancies positively correlate with perceptions of the media’s relative role in Big Tech accountability and general media trust. Additionally, we show how discrepancies are associated with traditional news consumption, while social media news consumers’ expectations are more frequently met by their performance evaluations. Overall, our study rehearses the importance scholars, and not least publics, place on the role of news media for Big Tech accountability, and the need to further adapt specialized digital accountability reporting.