Faces of an Invisible Population

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (7) ◽  
pp. 783-801 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tine Ustad Figenschou ◽  
Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud

Based on a quantitative, comparative analysis of U.S., French, and Norwegian news media, this article examines the use of human interest stories in the coverage of irregular immigration. In an innovative design, it systematically analyzes how human interest framing is related to the frequency and complexity of dominant arguments and perspectives (issue-specific frames). In contrast to the extant literature, arguing that news on immigration reduces immigrants to dangerous and anonymous threats, the article finds that about half the news stories studied have a human face or example. Moreover, these human interest articles tend to frame the issue from the immigrants’ perspective, describing their personal stories and struggle. This result nuances the commonly held assumption that human interest frames signal declining news quality, as the number and range of arguments presented are not significantly reduced when human narratives are employed. The prevalence of human interest frames is highest in Norway, where we also identify a reduction in frame complexity in human interest stories, indicating the need to rethink the democratic corporatist model in media system theory.

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (10) ◽  
pp. 1741-1762 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shiau Ching Wong ◽  
Scott Wright

This article assesses how social movements make use of media, and how their media practices influence movement outcomes using a case study of the Anti-National Education Movement in Hong Kong. It contributes to the literature on this important protest event and to ongoing debates about changes in the relationship between media and protesters. It is argued that activists adapted to what we call a “hybrid mediation opportunity structure.” The concept of a hybrid mediation opportunity structure is built on a critical engagement with Cammaerts’ mediation opportunity structure and is informed by Chadwick’s hybrid media system theory. We find that old (mainstream) and new (social) media tactics were deployed interdependently in a hybrid, symbiotic process. Old and new media logics fed off each other, in turn producing new logics: hybrid mediation opportunities which enabled activists to simultaneously broaden their connective networks and capture the attention of news media to publicize and legitimize their collective protests.


Author(s):  
Victor Pickard

Chapter 5 makes the case that a publicly subsidized news media system is journalism’s last best hope. It shows that when compared with that of other countries, US media is exceptional in being dominated by a handful of corporations, only lightly regulated, and primarily commercial. As well as tracing the historical roots of this “US media exceptionalism,” the chapter provides a historical analysis of US public media. It then gives a comparative analysis showing how little money Americans devote toward their public media system and a general survey of press subsidies around the world. The chapter concludes with some suggestions on how to construct a viable US public media system.


Author(s):  
Leigh Moscowitz

This chapter examines the extent of gay rights activists' success in framing the gay marriage debate and in producing their preferred images for the news media. It first describes the linguistic and visual devices that news entities relied upon to represent gay and lesbian couples as “deserving” of marriage. It then explores how markers of gender, class, race, lifestyle, and sexuality were deployed to construct the human face of gay marriage and goes on to discuss the ways in which gay marriage ceremonies were ritualized and symbolized in news narratives. It also shows how “poster couples” selected by news producers and gay rights activists were legitimated in news narratives, but were also cast as “different” from the more “radical” community of non-married gays, relegating particular LGBT and queer identities to the margins. The chapter concludes by considering how news stories and images work together to produce new forms of gay desire.


MedienJournal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Li Xiguang

The commercialization of meclia in China has cultivated a new journalism business model characterized with scandalization, sensationalization, exaggeration, oversimplification, highly opinionated news stories, one-sidedly reporting, fabrication and hate reporting, which have clone more harm than good to the public affairs. Today the Chinese journalists are more prey to the manipu/ation of the emotions of the audiences than being a faithful messenger for the public. Une/er such a media environment, in case of news events, particularly, during crisis, it is not the media being scared by the government. but the media itself is scaring the government into silence. The Chinese news media have grown so negative and so cynica/ that it has produced growing popular clistrust of the government and the government officials. Entering a freer but fearful commercially mediated society, the Chinese government is totally tmprepared in engaging the Chinese press effectively and has lost its ability for setting public agenda and shaping public opinions. 


2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Todd DeZoort ◽  
Travis P. Holt ◽  
Jonathan D. Stanley

SUMMARY Materiality remains a challenging concept for auditors to implement in practice. The challenges underlying auditor materiality assessments are compounded by the fact that courts, regulation, and professional standards emphasize that materiality should be based on a “reasonable investor” perspective. Despite the investor orientation and ambiguous nature of the “reasonable investor” criterion, the extant literature lacks empirical evidence about investor materiality judgments and decision-making. To address this problem, we model sophisticated and unsophisticated investors' materiality judgments in a policy-capturing study and compare them to experienced auditors charged with assessing materiality from an investor perspective. The results indicate significant differences in materiality judgments, judgment consensus, and cue utilization among the three participant groups. We conclude the paper with discussion of the study's implications, highlighting that the overall results suggest the need for further consideration of ways to help auditors meet standards and expectations in this critical domain.


2021 ◽  
pp. 175048132098209
Author(s):  
Mark Nartey ◽  
Hans J Ladegaard

The activities of Fulani nomads in Ghana have gained considerable media attention and engendered continuing public debate. In this paper, we analyze the prejudiced portrayals of the nomads in the Ghanaian news media, and how these contribute to an exclusionist and a discriminatory discourse that puts the nomads at the margins of Ghanaian society. The study employs a critical discourse analysis framework and draws on a dataset of 160 articles, including news stories, editorials and op-ed pieces. The analysis reveals that the nomads are discursively constructed as undesirables through an othering process that centers on three discourses: a discourse of dangerousness/criminalization, a discourse of alienization, and a discourse of stigmatization. This anti-nomad/Fulani rhetoric is evident in the choice of sensational headlines, alarmist news content, organization of arguments, and use of quotations. The paper concludes with a call for more balanced and critical news reporting on the nomads, especially since issues surrounding them border on national cohesion and security.


2021 ◽  
pp. 107769902199864
Author(s):  
Iskander De Bruycker ◽  
Matthijs Rooduijn

This article conceives of populist communication as a contextually dependent political strategy. We bridge actor- and communication-centered approaches by arguing that the context of issues conditions the extent to which parties employ populist communication. We draw from a content analysis of 2,085 news stories in eight news media outlets and Eurobarometer data connected to 41 EU policy issues and analyze statements from 85 political parties. Our findings show that populist parties are more prone to express populism on salient and polarized issues. Issues important to civil society groups, in contrast, make non-populist parties more inclined to express such communication.


2021 ◽  
pp. 194016122199966
Author(s):  
Philipp Bachmann ◽  
Mark Eisenegger ◽  
Diana Ingenhoff

High-quality news is important, not only for its own sake but also for its political implications. However, defining, operationalizing, and measuring news media quality is difficult, because evaluative criteria depend upon beliefs about the ideal society, which are inherently contested. This conceptual and methodological paper outlines important considerations for defining news media quality before developing and applying a multimethod approach to measure it. We refer to Giddens' notion of double hermeneutics, which reveals that the ways social scientists understand constructs inevitably interact with the meanings of these constructs shared by people in society. Reflecting the two-way relationship between society and social sciences enables us to recognize news media quality as a dynamic, contingent, and contested construct and, at the same time, to reason our understanding of news media quality, which we derive from Habermas' ideal of deliberative democracy. Moreover, we investigate the Swiss media system to showcase our measurement approach in a repeated data collection from 2017 to 2020. We assess the content quality of fifty news media outlets using four criteria derived from the deliberative ideal ( N = 20,931 and 18,559 news articles and broadcasting items, respectively) and compare the results with those from two representative online surveys ( N = 2,169 and 2,159 respondents). The high correlations between both methods show that a deliberative understanding of news media quality is anchored in Swiss society and shared by audiences. This paper shall serve as a showcase to reflect and measure news media quality across other countries and media systems.


1995 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 666-681 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert H. Wicks

This article suggests a theoretical explanation of the processes related to recall and learning of media news information. It does so by linking the concepts of schematic thinking and the Search of Associative Memory (SAM) to the variable of time. It argues that learning from the news may be better than many recent studies suggest. Although humans may have trouble recalling discrete news stories in recall examinations, it seems likely that they acquire “common knowledge” from the news media. Time is an important variable in helping people to remember news if they use it to think about new information in the context of previously stored knowledge.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document