scholarly journals Digital Media Framing of the Egyptian Arab Spring: Comparing Al Jazeera, BBC and China Daily

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 66
Author(s):  
Minos-Athanasios Karyotakis ◽  
Nikos Panagiotou ◽  
Nikos Antonopoulos ◽  
Matina Kiourexidou

Digital Media organizations had a crucial role on the coverage of the Egyptian ‘Arab Spring’, but until today the outcomes of the news gathering are debatable in the academic society. This study examines the frames of the English-language websites of Al Jazeera, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and China Daily from 9 to 13 February 2011 because of the termination of Hosni Mubarak’s presidency. The sample consists of 92 website articles, which report the Egyptian ‘Arab Spring’ without considering any video footage in the examined news stories. The particular article examines the frames of each article and categorizes them according to a Knowledge Extraction (KE) tool named ‘Open Calais’, which is owned by another media organization, Reuters. In this study, China Daily’s coverage differs from the former researchers’ results regarding the ‘Arab Spring’ covering. According to the findings, there was a merited coverage on the case of the Egyptian ‘Arab Spring’ without relying exclusively on the content of the official press agency of the People's Republic of China, Xinhua News Agency, and acted like a western-type news media.

2021 ◽  
pp. 095792652110232
Author(s):  
Helton Levy ◽  
Dan Mercea

This article explores the use of narrative theory as an analytical framework to investigate the extent to which popular hashtags and the news can develop into intersecting stories. It juxtaposes the case of hashtag-based reports seen during the Arab Spring to understand the coverage of notorious political episodes in Brazil. Namely, the 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro. Here, narrative linearity emerges as a tool to observe the borrowing of Twitter hashtags in several journalistic pieces. It is contended that the linearity of authorship, narration and representation of time appears as a satisfactory pathway to trace the development of hashtags into popular news stories. Results suggested that hashtags can significantly follow narratives and agendas in journalism but differing from their original social media context.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 515-538 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zahra Mustafa-Awad ◽  
Monika Kirner-Ludwig

This article reports on the first stage of a research project on German university students’ conceptualization of Arab women and to what extent it is affected by the latters’ representation in the Western press during the Arab Spring. We combined discourse analysis and corpus-linguistic approaches to investigate the relationship between lexical items used by the students to express their attitudes toward Arab women and those featuring in news headlines about them published in British, American, and German news media. Results show that the portrayal of Arab women in Western news headlines has a clear impact on German students’ opinions of them. The findings also show that our participants tend to be aware of this effect, which could be partly due to their familiarity with discourse analysis as students of linguistics. These results have implications for incorporating media education systematically in general university courses.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-25
Author(s):  
Selena Irene Neumark

How are women utilizing the capabilities of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the service of social and political transformation in the wake of the Arab Spring Uprisings? The structure of information flows on new media platforms have enabled activist groups to gain leverage in political systems and social contexts that otherwise marginalized them and this was never more apparent in the use of ICTs during the Arab Spring. However, Morocco continues to be a largely forgotten hub of revolution as researchers grapple with the systemic shifts observed in countries like Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. Women’s rights movements in Morocco exploded in increased action, engagement and influence during the same period, largely by virtue of increased accessibility to and innovative capabilities of ICTs. Morocco’s movement for women’s rights and democratisation (gradualist movement) is a lesser-explored context of women’s heightened engagement since the Arab Spring and hence, the focus of this research. Women’s use of alternative civic spaces to organize and enact social and political change has resulted in global networks of activism that are changing the climate of the MENA as well as perceptions of it from elsewhere. The region, while often politically turbulent, is also characterized according to a single narrative in the West. The “resistance against communal norms” and broadening use of digital media as an extension to existing women’s voices (Robinson, 2014, p. ii) has helped disseminate critical knowledge on the importance of gender equity to democratic ideals. It has also put an emphasis on women’s public praxis in Morocco over their religious affiliations or domestic labour. Keywords: new media, Morocco, activism, communication, technology, social justice


Author(s):  
Ian Hargreaves

It was in the ‘Balkan wars’ of the 1990s that the news media and the military started to understand the extent to which digital media were reshaping the craft of war reporting. Journalists were now able to report from behind enemy lines. War has always delivered the most severe test to journalistic independence. What are the challenges to journalists reporting news in a war situation? How objective can they be? ‘The first casualty: journalists at war’ charts the impact of the digital era on war reporting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rise of the Arabic television channel Al Jazeera.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herman Wasserman ◽  
Wallace Chuma ◽  
Tanja Bosch ◽  
Chikezie E. Uzuegbunam ◽  
Rachel Flynn

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has led to unprecedented media coverage globally and in South Africa where, at the time of writing, over 20,000 people had died from the virus. This article explores how mainstream print media covered the COVID-19 pandemic during this time of crisis. The news media play a key role in keeping the public informed during such health crises and potentially shape citizens’ perceptions of the pandemic. Drawing on a content analysis of 681 front-page news stories across eleven English-language publications, we found that nearly half of the stories used an alarmist narrative, more than half of the stories had a negative tone, and most publications reported in an episodic rather than thematic manner. Most of the stories focused on impacts of the pandemic and included high levels of sensationalism. In addition, despite the alarmist and negative nature of the reporting, most of the front-page reports did not provide information about ways to limit the spread of the virus or attempt to counter misinformation about the pandemic, raising key issues about the roles and responsibilities of the South African media during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study shows that South African newspaper coverage of COVID-19 was largely negative, possibly to attract audience attention and increase market share, but that this alarmist coverage left little possibility for citizens’ individual agency and self-efficacy in navigating the pandemic.


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