Bund katholischer Ärzte: Homeopathic Conversion Therapists in 21st Century Germany

Even in modern Germany of the 21st century there is still homophobia and other intolerances towards different sexualities and genders. These are also evident in the presence of so-called conversion therapies, which are still offered although there are already legal efforts. Among those groups, the Bund katholischer Ärzte (Association of Catholic Doctors) is a unique curiosity. Although this group is no longer really active, it is currently moving into the German focus again due to criminal charges and reporting in the tabloid press. The aim of this publication is to bring the Bund katholischer Ärzte not only into a more scientific but also into a more international focus. Furthermore, it is an ideal example to show what strange effects homophobia can produce.

Post-Sensationalism: Catastrophism and Fight Paradigm in Romanian On-Line Media

In traditional journalism, sensationalism was a characteristic of tabloid press. The main instruments used in sensationalistic headlines were bombastic epithets (awesome, amazing, greatest etc), and exaggerations used to increase the impact by curiosity. In the last decade, transformation with society and online media consumption behaviour have triggered a change of paradigm: we believe that we are facing a post-sensationalism media narrative, defined by catastrophism and the fight paradigm. In the context of a huge news feed overloaded with information, in the purpose of increasing the number of views of online media, the journalistic discourse has transformed radically and switched from informative to a more aggressive approach. The study shows that in Romania, the pursuit for clicks has generated a new discursive paradigm, a sort of post-sensationalism era, which we referred to as catastrophism and fight paradigm. This conclusion is based on quantitative and qualitative research that analysed Romanian online press headlines and content in approximately the same period of time both in 2018 and 2019. The research followed the frequency and context of usage of a few hashtags and keywords connected with our main concepts of concern: sensationalism, catastrophism, fight paradigm. In other words, we selected a few words that are, in our opinion, the most representative for the aforementioned concepts, and, with the use of professional instruments of press monitoring, we analysed their frequency and dynamics.

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

Francis Bacon painted pictures based mostly on photographs published in encyclopaedias, popular magazines, the tabloid press, posters and packaging. He was interested in reproductions of paintings by great masters. He used photographs by Muybridge. Photographs, treated by Bacon as tools, were later “worked on” by the artist, becoming the canvas for his paintings. The scenes he chose – often drastic, depicting rape and violence – were painted into his canvases, creating a deformed image of the world that “emerged” from the horrors of both world wars. He painted portraits based on his photographs of friends. These were usually people with whom the artist was emotionally connected. He painted self-portraits base on a series of photographs taken in automatic photography, from which he selected several to form the basis of his paintings. Real things and persons should exist in the fictional space assigned to them. By destroying literalism in painting, Bacon wanted to find the similarity desired in painting as its principal, so to rediscover realism. When painting a portrait, he tried to capture the appearance of the figure. After Francis Bacon’s death, his London studio (7, Reece Mews), restored by conservators, was “repeated” in the space of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. It contains about 7,500 objects, among them numerous photographs which had been torn up by the artist, photographs of his lovers and friends, black and white reproductions. The Bacon ‘archive’ collected in Dublin is now a silent hint of the creative process of the artist, who despite numerous studies devoted to him and recorded conversations, still remains one of the most inscrutable artists of the 20th century.

The UK as victim and hero in the Sun’s coverage of the Brexit ‘humiliation’

This paper discusses how emotions were mobilised by the British tabloid press as discursive strategies of persuasion during the public debate on the implementation of Brexit. Using the case study of the Suns coverage of the alleged UKs humiliation at the Salzburg meeting (2018) during the Brexit negotiations, the analysis addresses the questions of how and through which linguistic means actors and events were framed discursively in such an article. The findings suggest that The Sun elicited emotions of fear, frustration, pride, and freedom to frame Brexit along a long-established narrative of domination and national heroism. The discourse was also sustained by a discursive prosody in keeping with a satirical genre and a populist register that have often characterised the British tabloid press. In particular the linguistic analysis has shown how antagonistic representations of the UK and the EU were driven by an allegory of incompetent gangsterism and morally justified resistance. Emotionalisation in the article was thus aimed both at ridiculing the EU and at representing it as a criminal organisation. Such framing was instrumental in pushing the newspaper agenda as much as in legitimising and institutionalising harder forms of Brexit with the tabloids readership. Approaching journalist discourse at the intersection of affective, stylistic, and political dimensions of communication, this paper extends the body of literature on the instrumental use of emotive arguments and populist narratives and on the wider historical role of tabloid journalism in representing political relations. between the UK and the EU.

Analysis of Genres of the BBC One TV Programs

The relevance of the study is based on the fact that the BBC One channel is interesting as an example of a public service broadcaster which retains its image and competitiveness on the global media market. The goal of the research is to analyze the BBC One programming with regard to its forms of journalists and cameramens work. The semiotic methodology is chosen for interpreting sign systems, i. e. journalists texts or TV frames, as interconnected phenomena of culture. As a result, important sociocultural and philosophical elements integrated into the BBC One programming and determining its genre profile have been revealed. The social mission of the public broadcasting, combination of regional and metropolitan grounds, the prevalence of serious news genres are among them. Moreover, the programs are open for entertaining content including a foreign-made one. There is also a visual and aesthetic adaptation of pre-TV cultural forms of theater and the tabloid press, etc. Therefore, we can speak of a rather flexible programming policy of the BBC One, which can be a good model to develop strategies for public service broadcasters in other countries.

FEUILLETON IN SERBIAN PRESS

The feuilleton is one of the most specific and oldest genres in journalism, but also one of the least analyzed and defined. Often appropriated as a literary genre in journalism, it has changed its form, style and content throughout history in order to adapt to the current circumstances in the media world. In keeping with the contemporary development of digital platforms, online journalism and sensational, fast-paced reporting, its specifics and peculiarities bring new challenges. The aim of the paper is to note the use, specifics, topics and the position of this genre through the analysis of feuilletons in the serious, semitabloid and tabloid daily press in Serbia. Additionally, the goal is to observe potential differences in relation to the type of press, but also the ways in which this newspaper genre is implemented in online newspaper portals. In accordance with these goals, the method of descriptive and comparative content analysis as well as the statistical method were used in the paper. The research was conducted on four daily newspapers, Danas, Politika, Večernje novosti and Blic, in the period from January 24, 2020 to January 30,2020. Twenty seven issues of these newspapers were analyzed, including 2,230 media texts, 30 of which were feuilletons. Research has shown that this genre is more common in serious than in semi-tabloid and tabloid press, that the most common topic covered through this genre is politics and that there are significant differences between the same feuilletons in printed newspapers in comparison to online editions.

After the madhouses: the emotional politics of psychiatry and community care in the UK tabloid press 1980–1995

The deinstitutionalisation of mental hospital patients made its way into UK statutory law in 1990 in the form of the NHS and the Community Care Act. The Act ushered in the final stage of asylum closures moving the responsibility for the long-term care of mentally ill individuals out of the NHS and into the hands of local authorities. This article examines the reaction to the passing of the Act in two major tabloid presses, The Sun and The Daily Mirror, in order to reveal how community care changed the emotional terrain of tabloid storytelling on mental health. Reviewing an archive of 15 years of tabloid reporting on mental illness, I argue that the generation of ‘objects of feeling’ in the tabloid media is dependent on the availability of recognisable and stable symbols. Tabloid reporting of mental illness before 1990 reveals the dominance of the image of the asylum in popular understandings of mental illness. Here the asylum is used to generate objects of hatred and disgust for the reader, even as it performs a straightforward othering and distancing function. In these articles, the image of the asylum and its implicit separation of different types of madness into categories also do normative gender work as mental illness is represented along predictable gendered stereotypes. By performing the abolition of asylums, the 1990 Act appears to have triggered a dislodging of these narrative norms in the tabloid press. After 1990, ‘asylum stories’ are replaced with ‘community care stories’ which contain more contradictory and confusing clusters of feeling. These stories rest less heavily on gendered binaries while also demonstrating a near-frantic desire on the part of the mass media for a return of institutional containment. Here, clusters of feeling becoming briefly ‘unstuck’ from their previous organisations, creating a moment of affective flux.

Categorized and Mapping the Lexical Meaning that Describing Sexual Harassment (Obscenity/Lewd) Crimes in Malay Tabloid Press

The categorization of meanings against lexical items that have multiple meanings or that undergo an expansion of meaning often poses problems to language users. This is because language users are often confused and unsure of the true meaning of a lexical item based on the context of its use. Studies on lexical semantics have been extensively conducted but most of the studies conducted focus on the meaning of adjectives, idioms and verbs only. Studies linking word meaning to sexual crime using newspaper data are still considered new and still lacking in number. This study, which uses Prototype Theory, will utilize digital newspaper data, namely Harian Metro, which is expected to fill the existing gaps. This prototype theory is proven to help unravel the cognitive processes involved as the reader tries to understand the true meaning of the word meaning that describes this obscene sexual crime. This study also proves that the use of cognitive semantics by utilizing prototype theory as well as the concept of lexical mapping has helped the process of utterance comprehension take place. All these cognitive processes are used in helping the reader understand the true meaning of a word. This study proves that the lexical used to describe the obscene crime is easily understood by the reader but there are other features that can be used by the author to describe the obscene sexual crime. This aims to further facilitate the reader's understanding of obscene sexual crimes. Overall, the results of this study found that the lexical used is appropriate to the concept of the crime of obscenity.

Remembering hope: mediated queer futurity and counterpublics in Turkey’s authoritarian times

This article explores how hope and visions of the future have left their mark on media discourse in Turkey. Looking back at some of the events that took place in the 1980s, a decade that was shaped by the aftermath of the 1980 coup d’état, and considering them alongside what has happened since the ban of Istanbul’s Pride march in 2015, it examines traces of hope in two periods of recent Turkish history characterized by authoritarianism. Drawing on an array of visual and textual material drawn from the tabloid press, magazines, newspapers, and digital platforms, it inquires into how queer hope manages to infiltrate mediated publics even in times of pessimism and hopelessness. Based upon analysis of an archive of discourses on resistance, solidarity, and future, it argues that queer hope not only helps to map out possible future routes for queer lives in (and beyond) Turkey, but also operates as a driving political force that sustains queers’ determination to maintain their presence in the public sphere despite repressive nationalist, militarist, Islamist, and authoritarian regimes.

Interviewing a right-wing populist leader during the 2019 EU elections: Conflictual situations and equivocation beyond borders

Populist leaders and their radical policies attract the interest of the media across borders. The aim of the current article is to uncover whether interviews centered on one populist leader, but involving interviewers located in different European countries, lead to the same production of populist equivocation across the EU. In addition, two types of journalistic elements that can explain potential differences are investigated: the broad interactions between the media and politicians in a given country, or the reporters belonging to a specific media segment such as the tabloid press or public broadcasters. The research is based on interviews given by Viktor Orbán during the 2019 EU election campaign. Critical discourse analysis is carried out to investigate the equivocal populist narratives produced.