scholarly journals Migrants are not welcome

Author(s):  
Réka Benczes ◽  
Bence Ságvári

Abstract Figurative framing, in the form of metaphorical expressions, is especially effective in carrying conceptual content on an issue and affecting public opinion. One topic that has been heavily debated in contemporary Hungarian media is migration. Framing starts with the label that journalists select to refer to fled people: bevándorló (“immigrant”), migráns (“migrant”) or menekült (“refugee”). Depending on the label, different associations emerge, resting upon differing (metaphorical) conceptualizations evoked by the labels. We analysed metaphorical compounds based on the keywords in a media corpus of approx. 15 million words. Our results indicate that while all three keywords evoke predominantly negative frames and evaluations that build on stock metaphorical conceptualizations of fled people as also identified in the international literature – such as flood, object, business, war and crime –, the distribution of these metaphors does vary, depending on a) the selected keyword; and b) the political agenda of the media source.

Res Publica ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-425
Author(s):  
Luc Huyse

From September 1944 on the military courts that handled matters of wartime collaboration had to scrutinize 350. 000 charges and prosecute 57. 000 suspects white political authorities, parties, the media and public opinion kept a close watch. The aim of this article is to study the place the issue of the purge of the Belgian collaborators took on the political agenda of that time. It was found that the topic in question seldom received a top priority position and that when it attracted major attention interests outside the issue of the purge itself (such as the reconstruction of the economy or the reshuffling of a government) were at stake.


Author(s):  
Stefaan Walgrave ◽  
Peter Van Aelst

Recently, the number of studies examining whether media coverage has an effect on the political agenda has been growing strongly. Most studies found that preceding media coverage does exert an effect on the subsequent attention for issues by political actors. These effects are contingent, though, they depend on the type of issue and the type of political actor one is dealing with. Most extant work has drawn on aggregate time-series designs, and the field is as good as fully non-comparative. To further develop our knowledge about how and why the mass media exert influence on the political agenda, three ways forward are suggested. First, we need better theory about why political actors would adopt media issues and start devoting attention to them. The core of such a theory should be the notion of the applicability of information encapsulated in the media coverage to the goals and the task at hand of the political actors. Media information has a number of features that make it very attractive for political actors to use—it is often negative, for instance. Second, we plead for a disaggregation of the level of analysis from the institutional level (e.g., parliament) or the collective actor level (e.g., party) to the individual level (e.g., members of parliament). Since individuals process media information, and since the goals and tasks of individuals that trigger the applicability mechanism are diverse, the best way to move forward is to tackle the agenda setting puzzle at the individual level. This implies surveying individual elites or, even better, implementing experimental designs to individual elite actors. Third, the field is in dire need of comparative work comparing how political actors respond to media coverage across countries or political systems.


1999 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 285-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Harlow

Freedom of information is an idea which has been high on the political agenda of western democratic societies for many years. It has been cultivated, propagated and sometimes misused in self-interested fashion by the media. Its meaning, always imprecise, has fluctuated. It has been recycled under the American terms of “openness” and “Government in the Sunshine”. Recently it has been once more recycled under the fashionable term “transparency”. In the European context, this imprecision has been detrimental to the development of logical and sturdy principles concerning transparency and access to information. What has emerged from the conceptual confusion has been a reliance on the more restricted administrative law rights of access to information in contexts where a constitutional right to transparency would have been more appropriate, with a consequential impoverishment of the transparency concept in EC law.


Author(s):  
Greg Simons ◽  
◽  
Andrey Manoilo ◽  

This article examines the nature of the origin, definitions and functional principles of so-called fake news – reports that are deliberately false in nature which can create a stir in society around a non-existent informational case born ofthesamenews source.Incombinationwithviraltechnologiesandmechanisms of distribution in the media and social networks, fake news in modern political campaigns is becoming a dangerous tool for influencing mass consciousness of societies. The main task of fake news in modern political campaigns and processes is interception of the political agenda, with its subsequent closure to the news feed generated by the fake news itself, as well as creation of general excitement around the given news story. This present article seeks to review and analyse the academic debates on the what (definition), how (operationalization) and why (motivation) questions pertaining to the fake news phenomena. These aspects are then combined to generate the beginnings of creating a conceptual taxonomy to understand this highly topical and emotive concept.


Author(s):  
Jens Wolling ◽  
Dorothee Arlt

The annual climate summits (Conferences of the Parties, or COPs) are major political events that receive considerable media attention. In this way, the topic of climate change returns regularly to both the media and the political agenda. It makes sense, therefore, that communication research regards COPs as occasion to investigating how the media cover climate change. Nevertheless, this strategy has two shortcomings: On the one hand the focus on the conferences might provide a distorted picture—because of the political character of the conferences, the role of political actors and policy-related frames might be overestimated. On the other hand, the political character of the conferences is not always considered appropriately. Most research is mainly interested in the coverage on climate change in the context of the conferences and not in the political discussions taking place at the summits. Future research should address these discussions more intensively, giving more attention especially to the debates in the various online media.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-181
Author(s):  
Nandita Haksar

This article argues that although Irom Sharmila’s 16-year-old fast from November 2000 to August 2016 has earned her the status of an icon of non-violent protest, yet she did not seek these appellations; her only aim was to put moral pressure on the government to repeal the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958. The article seeks to assess the efficacy of Irom Sharmila’s protest and how far it has helped or hindered in mobilizing public opinion against the Act. It propounds that the publicity around Irom Sharmila put her on a pedestal and trapped her in her own image, made invisible entire histories of sufferings of people in the northeast, including Manipur, and their struggles against the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. The gains of many struggles and efforts were wiped out of the collective memory of the nation and the only image of Manipur was this frail woman with a tube hanging from her nose. The article also argues that there is a kind of fetish in the way the media celebrates non-violence without reference to the political context.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Ruth Malau

<p><em>Countries that embrace the ideology of freedom of the press, the court is of opinion that is commonly encountered in public spaces. Media, in this case could be interpreted as a medium in favor of the public interest which requires the presence of a new color in Libyan politics for 42 years filled with pressure and persecution.</em></p><p><em>Revolutionary period which lasted for most of the year 2011, which then shows how the media have spread the legality of its influence over public opinion. The mass media in Indonesia does have the power to set the political agenda, because democracy gives him legal to do so.</em></p><p><em>However, court opinions that appeared in the Libyan revolution is not because the country embraced the ideology of freedom of the press, but because of the pull-menaraik between freedom of the press with dimensions embedded control during the reign of Gaddafi.</em></p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-361
Author(s):  
Greg Marquis

Since the 1960s, celebrity drug trials have usually involved actors or musicians. The first drug prosecution of a Canadian “celebrity” took place in 1985 after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) found a small amount of marijuana in the luggage of New Brunswick Premier Richard Hatfield at the airport in Fredericton. He was charged with simple possession and, aided by a team of lawyers, pleaded not guilty. Although Hatfield was the most successful premier in the province’s history, he was facing challenges over the economy and language policy, and a finding of guilt would have devastated both his political career and the fortunes of his party. This article examines the Hatfield drug prosecution, which was followed by revelations of drug use with university students in 1981, as a chapter in Canadian legal and political history. It involved not only a privileged defendant, but also the independence of judges, the role of the RCMP, the relationship between the courts and the media, federal-provincial relations and an internal RCMP probe. Hatfield, the political celebrity, won his 1985 court battle but, with his lifestyle impugned, lost in the court of public opinion. In 1987, his party was crushed by the landslide victory of Frank McKenna’s Liberals.


2016 ◽  
Vol 0 (26) ◽  
pp. 171-199
Author(s):  
Viviana Muñiz Zúñiga ◽  
◽  
Rafael Fonseca Valido ◽  
Ruslán Guerra Marzo ◽  
◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Dmitry Voitenko ◽  

Public opinion formed in the conditions of the political regime and determined by political and legal processes, the activity of their subjects, the media, the impact of globalization on the information openness of the state, legal unification, and legal and cultural dynamics. Opinion manifests and forms consciousness and acts as an element of the institutions of society. Its mechanism manifested in the behavior of subjects, motivated by changes in the content of their judgments. Public opinion contains emotional and mental judgments and carry out evaluative, analytical, regulatory functions. Political and legal judgments formed in the channels of communication between the public and the authorities, objectified in the form of analytical comments by experts and the media. Public opinion is a collective value judgment, has a communicative nature, is formed in the context of changes in the technologies of social dialogue, and opinion becomes a factor of public administration. The peculiarity of interaction between public opinion and government reflects the relationship between the state, law and society and gives rise to political and legal regimes of interaction between government and public opinion. Their originality depends on the type of attitude of the state power towards it. Especially in the context of a democratic transition for societies with an unstable hybrid form of political regime, which are delimited depending on the democracy of electoral laws, consideration of opinions in laws, forms of discussions with the authorities and forms of expression of opinions. In the methodology of public opinion research, factor analysis is advisable since it significantly directed by laws and is a significant factor in influencing the dynamics of legislation - the legal basis of government institutions and the private sphere of society. Information technologies are a resource of power and turn public opinion into an object of influence. It reveals the risks of the impact of hidden, latent public opinion and the purposeful formation of artificial, pseudo-public opinion by the authorities as result of the use of methods of manipulating power resources in the legal sphere. This preserves the ability for the authorities to change the markers of public opinion and artificially create the appearance of legitimate grounds to lobby for the content of legal policy, the drafting of laws, and law enforcement decisions, which is desirable for public authorities.


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