The White Racial Frame in Sport Media: Framing of Donald Trump and LaVar Ball’s Public Feud Following the UCLA Basketball Player Arrests in China

2020 ◽  
pp. 019372352096295
Author(s):  
Ryan Turcott ◽  
Jules Boykoff

This article utilizes the “white racial frame” to analyze the sport media coverage of the public feud between U.S. President Donald Trump and basketball celebrity entrepreneur, LaVar Ball. The feud originated in November 2017, when LaVar’s son—University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) player LiAngelo Ball—was detained in Hangzhou, China, for shoplifting along with two of his UCLA teammates. After some tense moments, the three players were released and flown back to the United States. The U.S. President Donald Trump took credit, leading to a prolonged, prickly exchange with LaVar Ball. This article analyzes six major U.S. newspapers and six sports-specific outlets that covered the Trump–Ball feud. First, we identify the predominant frames that appeared in coverage. Second, we track whose views were included in the news and how sourcing inflected the appearance of particular frames. The incident highlights how racialized language—if coded and dog whistled—enters public discussion through the lens of sport. It also highlights the role of social media, especially Twitter, in influencing news production.

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  

Bertijn van der Steenhoven The media coverage of fake news, a hype? This article provides insight into the intensified media attention for fake news in Dutch newspaper articles between May 2016 and April 2017 from the perspective of Vasterman’s (2005) theory of media hypes. It was found that speculations about the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States as a result of the spread of fake news caused a news wave. This news wave consists mainly of meta news and contains few news articles about the disclosure of fake news. The news production is mainly driven by meta news and by news about qualifications of the media as ‘fake news’. This article calls for further research into the media attention for fake news in other media than newspapers in the Netherlands as well as in other countries. Keywords: fake news, media hype, news wave, key event, hoax


Author(s):  
Loren Collingwood ◽  
Benjamin Gonzalez O'Brien

On January 25, 2017, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13768, which marked the first federal action targeting American sanctuary cities and fulfilled one of Trump’s key campaign promises. Sanctuary cities, which do not permit local officials to inquire into immigration status and may decline ICE detainer requests, have been in existence since the early 1980s, but the shooting of Kathryn Steinle in 2015 brought them renewed attention. Ms. Steinle’s accidental shooting by an undocumented immigrant, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, ignited a firestorm of controversy over these policies. Garcia Zarate had been released by the SFPD based on San Francisco’s sanctuary policy, leading then-candidate Donald Trump to make a promise to “end” sanctuary cities a key part of his campaign for president. Yet many Americans know very little about sanctuary policies despite their growing importance in the debate over undocumented immigration and the incorporation of immigrant communities. In this work, Drs. Collingwood and Gonzalez O’Brien provide the first comprehensive examination of sanctuary cities in the United States. Analyzing the historical evolution of these policies, the tone and tenor of media coverage, public opinion, state-level sanctuary legislation, and the effect these policies have on crime rates and Latino political incorporation, the authors hope to provide researchers, members of the public, and lawmakers with the tools to objectively assess the value of sanctuary legislation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (7) ◽  
pp. 797-811 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brianne Suldovsky ◽  
Asheley Landrum ◽  
Natalie Jomini Stroud

In an era where expertise is increasingly critiqued, this study draws from the research on expertise and scientist stereotyping to explore who the public considers to be a scientist in the context of media coverage about climate change and genetically modified organisms. Using survey data from the United States, we find that political ideology and science knowledge affect who the US public believes is a scientist in these domains. Our results suggest important differences in the role of science media attention and science media selection in the publics “scientist” labeling. In addition, we replicate previous work and find that compared to other people who work in science, those with PhDs in Biology and Chemistry are most commonly seen as scientists.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (03) ◽  
pp. A02 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Giordano ◽  
Yi-Lin Chung

Despite low public knowledge of synthetic biology, it is the focus of prominent government and academic ethics debates. We examine the “NY Times” media coverage of synthetic biology. Our results suggest that the story about synthetic biology remains ambiguous. We found this in four areas — 1) on the question of whether the field raises ethical concerns, 2) on its relationship to genetic engineering, 3) on whether or not it threatens ‘nature’, and 4) on the temporality of these concerns. We suggest that this ambiguity creates conditions in which there becomes no reason for the public at large to become involved.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewan McGaughey

Abstract What explains the election of the 45th President of the United States? Many commentators have said that Trump is a fascist. This builds on grave concerns, since Citizens United, that democracy is being corrupted. This article suggests the long term cause, and the shape of ideology is more complex. In 1971, an extraordinary memorandum of Lewis Powell for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce urged that ‘[b]usiness interests’ should ‘press vigorously in all political arenas for support’. Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court, and a few years later, despite powerful dissent, a majority in Buckley v. Valeo held that candidates may spend unlimited funds on their own political campaigns, a decision of which Donald Trump, and others, have taken full advantage. Citizens United compounded the problems, but Buckley v. Valeo was the ‘Trump for President’ case. This provided a platform from which Trump could propel himself into extensive media coverage. The 2016 election was inseparable from the social ideal pursued by a majority of the Supreme Court since 1976. No modern judiciary had engaged in a more sustained assault on democracy and human rights. Properly understood, ‘fascism’ is a contrasting, hybrid political ideology. It mixes liberalism’s dislike of state intervention, social conservatism’s embrace of welfare provision for insiders (not ‘outsiders’), and collectivism’s view that associations are key actors in a class conflict. Although out of control, Trump is closely linked to neo-conservative politics. It is too hostile to insider welfare to be called ‘fascist’. Its political ideology is weaker. If we had to give it a name, the social ideal of Donald Trump is ‘fascism-lite’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 123 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Jeanne M. Powers ◽  
Kathryn P. Chapman

Background In the past decade, the laws governing teachers’ employment have been at the center of legal and political conflicts across the United States. Vergara v. California challenged five California state statutes that provide employment protections for teachers. In June 2014, a California lower court declared the statutes unconstitutional because they exposed students to “grossly ineffective teachers.” Purpose The purpose of the article is to document and analyze how Vergara was presented in the print news media. It is important to understand how the print news media presents education policy debates to the public, because the print news media shapes the general public's understanding of education and other public policy debates by providing frames and themes for interpreting the issues in question and people associated with them. Research Design Using the social construction of target populations and political spectacle as conceptual lenses, we conducted a content analysis of print news media articles on the Vergara case published between June 2012 and November 2014. We provide a descriptive overview of the full corpus of articles published during this period and a thematic analysis of the 65 unique news articles published in the aftermath of the decision. The latter focuses on news articles because they are intended to provide more objective coverage of the case than opinions or editorials. Findings In the print news media coverage, the word “teacher” was often paired with a negative qualifier, which suggests that Vergara was an effort to change the relatively advantaged social construction of teachers. Similarly, metaphors and the illusion of rationality associated with political spectacle were used in ways that bolstered the plaintiffs’ claims. While Vergara consumed a substantial amount of philanthropic and public dollars, ultimately it did not change the policies that govern teachers’ employment in California. Vergara may have been more successful in shaping the general public's perceptions of teachers and the conditions of teachers’ employment in the period following the trial.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 205032451987228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob S Aday ◽  
Christopher C Davoli ◽  
Emily K Bloesch

While interest in the study of psychedelic drugs has increased over much of the last decade, in this article, we argue that 2018 marked the true turning point for the field. Substantive advances in the scientific, public, and regulatory communities in 2018 significantly elevated the status and long-term outlook of psychedelic science, particularly in the United States. Advances in the scientific community can be attributed to impactful research applications of psychedelics as well as acknowledgement in preeminent journals. In the public sphere, Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind was a commercial hit and spurred thought-provoking, positive media coverage on psychedelics. Unprecedented psychedelic ballot initiatives in the United States were representative of changes in public interest. Finally, regulatory bodies began to acknowledge psychedelic science in earnest in 2018, as evidenced by the designation of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy to “breakthrough therapy” status for treatment-resistant depression by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In short, 2018 was a seminal year for psychedelic science.


2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
David B. Grusky ◽  
Emily Ryo

We test the popular claim that poverty and inequality were “dirty little secrets” until the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina exposed them to a wider public. If this account were on the mark, it would suggest that the absence of major antipoverty initiatives in the United States is partly attributable to public ignorance and apathy coupled with the narrowly rational decision on the part of policymakers to attend to other issues about which the public evidently cares more. Using the 2004 Maxwell Poll, we find strikingly high levels of awareness and activism on poverty and inequality issues even prior to Katrina, clearly belying the “dirty little secret” account. The follow-up Maxwell Poll, which was administered in 2005 immediately after Katrina, revealed only a slight increase in public awareness of poverty and inequality. The Katrina effect was evidently dampened because (1) the large number of preexisting poverty activists reduced the size of the residual population “at risk” for conversion to antipoverty activism, and (2) the remaining non-activists were ardently opposed to poverty activism and hence unlikely to be receptive to the liberal message coming out of Katrina.


Author(s):  
Toby Bolsen ◽  
Matthew A. Shapiro

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Please check back later for the full article. Most of what people think about politics comes from information acquired via exposure to mass media. Media thus serve a vital role in democracy as a fundamental conduit of political information. Scholars study the factors that drive news coverage about political issues, including the rise of discourse on climate change and shifts in media coverage over time. Climate change first received sustained attention in the U.S. press in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As scientific consensus emerged on the issue, interest groups and other actors emerged who accentuated the inherent uncertainty of climate science as a way to cast doubt on the existence of scientific consensus. The politicization of climate science has resulted in uncertainty among the public about its existence, anxiety about the effects of a fundamental transformation of U.S. energy systems, and support for the status quo in terms of the use of traditional energy sources. Media coverage often magnified the voices of contrarian scientists and skeptics because journalistic norms provided equal space to all sides, a semblance of false balance in news coverage that has persisted through the mid 2000s. By this time, the U.S. public had fractured along partisan lines due to rhetoric employed to generate support by elites. Media fragmentation and the rise of partisan news outlets further contributed to polarization, especially given the tendency of individuals to seek political information about climate change from trusted and credible sources. More recently, new media has come to play an increasingly significant role in communicating information on climate change to the public. Ultimately, there is a need for knowledge-based journalism in communicating climate change and energy alternatives to all segments of the U.S. public, but doing this effectively requires engagement with a broader audience in the debate over how best to address climate change. “Honest brokers” must be referenced in the media as they are best equipped to discuss the issue with citizens of different political identities and cultural worldviews. The success of collective efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change requires not only scientific consensus but the ability to communicate the science in a way that generates greater consensus among the public.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikki Usher

The U.S. journalism industry is facing unprecedented challenges from questions of economic stability, rising antimedia sentiment among the government and the public, new technologies that have democratizing effects on news production, and the lowest levels of trust in journalism in decades. At the same time, the United States is facing structural inequality and political polarization that has taken on a distinctly place-based dimension. Taken together, the places of news have changed, both because of forces inside and outside journalism: The places where journalists do their work have changed, not only in an immediate sense of their own work routines but also because of the larger place-based realignment in the United States. This monograph argues that place must be at the center of scholarly and industry analysis to better understand the challenges to professional journalism today.


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