Mass Communication and Policy Gatekeeping

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard T. Craig
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Mass Communication ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Media Audiences ◽  
The Public ◽  
Content Selection ◽  
Private Citizens ◽  
The Media ◽  
The One ◽  
Flow Of Information

Who filters through information and determines what information is shared with media audiences? Who filters through information and determines what information will not be shared with media audiences? Ultimately, who controls the flow of information in the media? At times commentary pertaining to media content references media as an omnipotent individual entity selecting the content transmitted to the public, reminiscent of a Wizard of Oz manner of the all-powerful being behind the curtain. Overlooked in this perception is the reality that in mass media, there are various individuals in positions of power making decisions about the information accessed by audiences of various forms of media. These individuals are considered gatekeepers: wherein the media functions as a gate permitting some matters to be publicized and included into the public discourse while restricting other matters from making it to the public conscience. Media gatekeepers (i.e., journalists, editors) possess the power to control the gate by determining the content delivered to audiences, opening and closing the gate of information. Gatekeepers wield power over those on the other side of the gate, those seeking to be informed (audiences), as well as those seeking to inform (politics, activists, academics, etc.). The earliest intellectual explanation of gatekeeping is traced to Kurt Lewin, describing gatekeeping as a means to analyze real-world problems and observing the effects of cultural values and subjective attitudes on those problems like the distribution of food in Lewins’s seminal study, and later modified by David Manning White to examine the dissemination of information via media. In an ideal situation, the gatekeepers would be taking on the challenge of weighing the evidence of importance in social problems when selecting among the options of content and information to exhibit. Yet, decisions concerning content selection are not void of subjective viewpoints and encompass values, beliefs, and ideals of gatekeepers. The subjective attitudes of gatekeepers influence their perspective of what qualifies as newsworthy information. Hence, those in the position to determine the content transmitted through media exercise the power to shape social reality for media audiences. In the evolution of media gatekeeping theory three models have resulted from the scholarship: (1) examination of the one-way flow of information passing through a series of gates before reaching audiences, (2) the process of newsroom personnel interacting with people outside of the newsroom, and (3) the direct communication of private citizens and public officials. In traditional media and newer forms of social media, gatekeeping examination revolves around analysis of these media organizations’ news routines and narratives. Gatekeeping analysis observes human behavior and motives in order to make conceptualizations about the social world.

Austerity against the Homo Sovieticus

Focaal ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (59) ◽  
pp. 51-65
Author(s):  
Daiva Repečkait
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Shock Therapy ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Class Background ◽  
The Media ◽  
Economic Shock ◽  
Homo Sovieticus

This article analyzes the public discourse on the riots of 16 January 2009, in Vilnius, when protest against economic shock therapy ended in violent clashes with the police. Politicians and the media were quick to ethnicize the riots, claiming an “involvement of foreign influences” and noting that the rioters had been predominantly “Russian-speaking.” Analyzing electronic and print media, the article identifies a wider tendency, particularly among middle-class Lithuanian youth, of portraying the social class consisting of “losers of the post-soviet transition” as aggressive and primitive Others. A pseudo-ethnicity that combines Rus sian language and culture with lower-class background into a notion of homo sovieticus comes to stand for what is hindering the “clean up” of Lithuania and middleclass aspirations to form a new European identity. As such, the riots serve as a lens that illuminates the way ethnicity is flexibly utilized to shift political loyalties.

Mental Health Ontologies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janna Hastings
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
The Public ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
Public Health Challenges ◽  
Health Related ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Way

Mental health presents one of the defining public health challenges of our time. Proponents of different conceptions of what mental illness is wage war for the hearts and minds of patients, practitioners, policy-makers, and the public. Debate and fragmentation around the nature of the entities that feature in the mental health domain divide resources and reduce progress. The way mental health is publicly discussed in the media has tangible effects, in terms of stigma, access to healthcare and resources, and private expectations of recovery. This book explores in detail the sorts of statements that are made about mental health in the media and public reporting of scientific research, grounding them in the wider context of the theoretical frameworks, assumptions and metaphors that they draw from. The author shows how a holistic understanding of the way that different aspects of mental illness are interrelated can be developed from evidence-based interpretation of the latest research findings. She offers some ideas about corrective, integrative approaches to discussing mental health-related matters publicly that may reduce the opposition between conceptualisations while still aiming to reduce stigma, shame and blame. In particular, she emphasises that discourse in the media needs to be anchored to an overview of all the research results across the field and argues that this could be achieved using new technological infrastructures. The author provides an integrative account of what mental health is, together with an improved understanding of the factors driving the persistence of oppositional accounts in the public discourse. The book will be of benefit to researchers, practitioners and students in the domain of mental health.

Nutzen von Erfahrungswissen in Krisen.

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-139
Author(s):  
Janina Barth ◽  
Andrea H. Schneider-Braunberger
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
Business Reporting ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
The Media ◽  
German Newspaper ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
Historical References

Abstract It appears to be almost self-evident that most people look towards past experiences for guidance during times of crisis. We would like to consider the empirical evidence for this assumption by analysing the public discourse regarding the reactions to crises, which includes general reporting, statements from politicians or discussions in the media. The outbreak of the Corona pandemic in Germany, starting in March 2020, opens the possibility to collect several preliminary findings by analysing relevant press coverage in the newspapers. Articles from different sections of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z.) and from the Handelsblatt were evaluated. As our main interest focuses on economic historical (not e. g. medical historical) research questions, we chose the F.A.Z. First, because its business reporting is important within the German newspaper environment in general. Second, because its reporting on the Corona pandemic was award-winning. Additionally, we focused on the Handelsblatt because the newspaper provides press coverage explicitly on financial, business, and political issues – all subjects directly affected by the Corona crisis. The analysis concluded that there was a rise in articles with historical references in general while the number of articles linked to businesses did not increase at the same time which can be linked to the absence of expert business history opinions on offer.

The Romanian orthodox church after 1989: social identity, national memory, and the theory of secularization

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-71
Author(s):  
Iuliana Conovici
Keyword(s):  
Mass Communication ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
The Public ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Romanian Orthodox Church ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Romanian Orthodox ◽  
The Church

The Romanian Orthodox Church engaged, after the fall of communism, in the reconstruction of its public identity and its position in society. The public discourse of its official representatives – the Holy Synod and individual hierarchs, especially the Patriarch Teoctist – expresses and „translates” this process to the faithful and the general public. Its perception by this public, particularly when mediated by means of mass communication, is usually partial and frequently altered.</p> <p>By focusing on the official discourse of the Romanian Orthodox Church representatives, as expressed in the ecclesiastical press and (re)transmitted in the common mass media, this paper will explore the justification/explanation by ecclesiastical officials of this process, following the lines of two main - intertwined - lines: the legitimization of the resurgence in the public sphere of the Church as an institution of spiritual and social assistance and its presence as the privileged keeper and guardian of national values.</p> <p>It will be further argued that, while explicitly refuting and condemning any signs of secularization in the Romanian society, the Romanian Orthodox Church, through its official discourse, is actually contributing to the deepening of this very process within both society and the Church itself.</p> <p>Our main sources for the public discourse of the Romanian Orthodox Church will be the ecclesiastical press and collections of speeches, sermons, articles of Orthodox hierarchs and documents of the Holy Synod. For the theoretical framing of the paper, the main references will be works of Thomas Luckmann, Danièle Hérvieu-Léger, Grace Davie, René Rémond, etc.

From asymmetric dependency to discursive disengagement: How social movements and the media/public talked past each other

2020 ◽  
pp. 016344372097231
Author(s):  
Hao Cao
Keyword(s):  
Chinese American ◽  
Research Focus ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Media ◽  
Filter Bubble ◽  
Dependency Model ◽  
American Police ◽  
The One ◽  
Chinese American Immigrants

Social movement-media/public interaction has been largely examined from the lens of “asymmetric dependency” in which both movements’ representation and self-understanding are mainly shaped by their media and public opinion environment. The introduction of digital technologies, however, has diversified this discursive environment and seemed to reverse the uneven dynamics. Using a case study of a protest campaign organized by Chinese American immigrants, this study demonstrates a new pattern of movement-media/public dynamics that goes beyond the “asymmetric dependency” model or its obverse. In the aftermath of a Chinese American police officer who shot a black man to death, Chinese immigrants stood with him and deliberated on WeChat, a China-based digital platform engineered like a “walled garden.” The technolinguistic enclosure of the platform facilitated the development of a separate interpretative universe in the WeChatsphere vis-à-vis the one in the mediasphere. Later, even when immigrant protesters confronted the public in the Twittersphere, they continued talking past each other. By unpacking the decoupling processes between movements and the media/public, this study shifts the research focus from understanding their interaction to examining their disengagement, as well as the “filter bubble” effects that contribute to contemporary fragmentation and polarization in political and civic engagements.

Psychopathy and the Media

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Personality Disorder ◽  
Antisocial Personality Disorder ◽  
Antisocial Personality ◽  
The Public ◽  
Moral Insanity ◽  
The Media ◽  
Rational Understanding ◽  
The One ◽  
Medical Treatises ◽  
The 19Th Century

The term “psychopath” has come in popular use to be understood as a description of an individual who seems to have a clear and rational understanding of the world around them; they are not deluded or suffering from hallucinations and yet they seem to be able to act with great cruelty or with recklessness towards the safety of others and themselves. The medical and legal professions have been struggling for over 200 hundred years to reach agreement on whether there might be appropriate psychiatric diagnoses that might helpfully describe such individuals. Various terms such as moral insanity, monomania, psychopathy, and antisocial personality disorder have been used. The term “psychopath” is the one that has become most firmly fixed in the public imagination. The violence and harm that people with these kinds of problems might do can raise a great deal of public anxiety. This anxiety has often played out and been amplified in various forms of the media. This article traces some of the ways that various forms of popular media have been of crucial importance to shaping our understanding of “psychopathy” and the related diagnoses of moral insanity, monomania, and antisocial personality disorder. From the medical treatises and press reporting of notorious trails, and the explorations of dangerous forms of consciousness in the 19th century, to the way that the mass media, including films, have presented such problems, they have often had a key influence on the legal and medical formulations.

The Role of Twitter in Opening New Domains of Discourse in the Public Sphere

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Badreya Nasser Al-Jenaibi
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Arabian Gulf ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
Flow Of Information

The use of Twitter to coordinate political dialogue and crisis communication has been a vital key to its legitimization. In the past few years, the users of Twitter were increased in the GCC. Also, the use of social media has received a lot of ‘buzz' due to the events that unfurled in the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt during the Arab Spring. Although not as dramatic as overthrowing a regime, the use of social media has been revolutionary in most areas of the Middle East, especially in the most conservative societies that have been relatively closed to the flow of information. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, for example, now have the largest-growing Twitter community of all the nations in the Arabian Gulf. Known for its tight rein on public discourse and the flow of information, even elements of the current regime are opening doors to a new public discourse, due in large part to the influence of social media. This paper explores the social media phenomenon that has had such an impact on the relatively closed societies of the Arab world, examining how it has changed the nature of the public sphere. The researcher used content analysis of four GCC journalists' accounts for four months. The paper concludes that the use of Twitter is shifting the Arab public's discourse and opinions in the region because those opinions are being heard instead of censored. Social media is having a major impact on the conservative Saudi, Qatar, and UAE societies.

Look Who's Talking! Islamic Discourse in the Chechen Wars

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Radnitz
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Television News ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Print Journalism ◽  
The Public ◽  
News Broadcasts ◽  
Psychological Warfare ◽  
The Media ◽  
Radio Free Europe ◽  
Chechen Wars

In any contemporary conflict, the war of ideas may be just as important as the war on the battlefield. Throughout history, propaganda has been used as a tool of psychological warfare. The prevalence of technology makes the mass media an ever more vital tool in spreading one's message, both to combatants and throughout the world. The case of the Chechen wars demonstrates the importance both sides placed on publicity in the course of fighting. In addition to the use of print journalism, the Chechen wars witnessed the employment of television news broadcasts, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Internet as a means to spread messages. Given the importance of the media, the public and private discourse by the combatants has been seen as crucial to their cause. The language of Islam carries a set of widely shared symbols, many related to war, that can be used to manipulate public opinion. This article will analyze how Islamic language was used in the two Russian invasions of Chechnya in the 1990s (1994–1996, 1999–2002). It analyzes three pairs of variables: Russian and Chechen public discourse, especially regarding the language of Islam; Chechen public and Chechen private discourse; and the discourse of both sides in the first war compared to the second war.

“Tanked up Yobs” and “Self-Pity City”. Deconstructing the Myths of the Hillsborough Disaster

STADION ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-75
Author(s):  
Alan McDougall
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
British History ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Grassroots Activism ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Overwhelming Evidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Government Legislation

On 15 April 1989, Liverpool FC played Nottingham Forest in an FA Cup semi-final at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield in northern England. Catastrophic errors by the police and other organisations led to the deaths of 96 Liverpool supporters, crushed against the perimeter fences on the Leppings Lane terrace. Though the horrific facts of the disaster were quickly and widely known, they were lost beneath another narrative, promoted by the police, numerous politicians, and large sections of the media. This narrative blamed the disaster on “tanked up yobs”: drunk and aggressive Liverpool supporters, who turned up late and forced their way into the ground. Over the subsequent years and decades, as Hillsborough campaigners vainly sought justice for the disaster’s victims in a series of trials and inquests, the destructive allegation remained in the public realm. It was reinforced by establishment dismissal of Liverpool as a “self-pity city”, home to a community incapable of accepting official verdicts or of leaving the past in the past. This essay uncovers the history of the myths of the Hillsborough disaster. It first shows how these myths were established - how false narratives, with powerful backers, shifted responsibility for the disaster from the police to supporters, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It then examines how these myths were embedded in public discourse - how Liverpool was demonised as an aggressively sentimental city where people refused to admit to “killing their own”. It finally analyses how these myths were overturned through research, media mobilisation, and grassroots activism, a process that culminated in the 2016 inquest verdict, which ruled that the 96 Hillsborough victims were unlawfully killed. In doing so, the essay shows how Hillsborough became a key event in modern British history, influencing everything from stadium design to government legislation.

Neue Gemeinwohlherausforderungen - Konsequenzen für Wettbewerbsrecht und Regulierung

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
The Public ◽  
Internet Age ◽  
Fourth Symposium ◽  
Regulatory Law ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
The Media ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
The One ◽  
The University

On 11 and 12 September 2018, the fourth symposium of the “Wissenschaftliche Vereinigung für das gesamte Regulierungsrecht” [“Scientific Association for the Entirety of Regulatory Law”] took place at the University of Regensburg. The topic was: “New challenges for the public good – consequences for competition law and regulation”. The basic idea of the conference concept was, on the one hand, to consider which new challenges for the public good exist in the classical network economies of the telecommunications, energy and railway regulations, and on the other hand, to focus on adjacent sectors – such as the media and communications industries – and finally go beyond the sectors considered so far. The conference was divided into the following thematic blocks: “basic papers”, “classic sectors in transition”, “new sectors in the internet age” and “new challenges beyond the sectors”. The fourth volume of the series contains the lectures given at the symposium. With contributions by Markus Ludwigs, Heike Schweitzer, Thomas Fetzer, Charlotte Kreuter-Kirchhof, Karten Otte, Karl-Eberhard Hain, Ralf Müller-Terpitz, Rupprecht Podszun, Thosten Kingreen, Julia Barth, Anna Kellner, Fabian Toros and Florian Sackmann

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