scholarly journals Constructing abortion as a social problem: “Sex selection” and the British abortion debate

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellie Lee
Keyword(s):  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Sex Selection ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Abortion Debate ◽  
Parliamentary Debate ◽  
The Media

Between February 2012 and March 2015, the claim that sex selection abortion was taking place in Britain and that action needed to be taken to stop it dominated debate in Britain about abortion. Situating an analysis in sociological and social psychological approaches to the construction of social problems, particularly those considering “feminised” re-framings of anti-abortion arguments, this paper presents an account of this debate. Based on analysis of media coverage, Parliamentary debate and official documents, we focus on claims about grounds (evidence) made to sustain the case that sex selection abortion is a British social problem and highlight how abortion was problematised in new ways. Perhaps most notable, we argue, was the level of largely unchallenged vilification of abortion doctors and providers, on the grounds that they are both law violators and participants in acts of discrimination and violence against women, especially those of Asian heritage. We draw attention to the role of claims made by feminists in the media and in Parliament about “gendercide” as part of this process and argue that those supportive of access to abortion need to critically assess both this aspect of the events and also consider arguments about the problems of “medical power” in the light of what took place.

scholarly journals Image, krop og maskulinitet. Mediediskurser om skihoppere

2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gertrud Pfister ◽  
Rikke Schou Jeppesen
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Teenage Girls ◽  
Ski Jumping ◽  
Fan Communities ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Discourses ◽  
The 19Th Century

Artiklen beskriver og forklarer de forandringer, som sporten har gennemgået, og den indflydelse, som disse forandringer har haft på udøvere og på deres kroppe og images. Der er særlig fokus på mediernes rolle i forhandlingen om konstruktion af ambivalente maskulinitetsformer. Gertrud Pfister & Rikke Schou Jeppesen: Images, Bodies and Masculinities. Media discourses about Ski JumpersToday ski jumping can be considered a typical media sport: it has very few participants and no basis to become a »sport for all« movement. Nevertheless, the few specialists and their main events attract masses of spectators and great media attention. The high demands of skill and strength as well as the danger involved have made ski jumping a typical male sport. Since its beginnings in the 19th century a ski jumper was looked upon as the epitome of »true manhood«. Today ski jumpers are celebrities with fragile egos, skinny bodies, boyish looks, ambivalent masculinities and fan communities of teenage girls. With a constructivist theoretical approach, we will describe and explain the changes that have taken place in ski jumping and the effects of these changes on the athletes, their bodies, their images and their masculinities. The focus will be on the media representation of two German ski jumpers, Martin Schmitt and Sven Hannawald who dominated this sport between 2000 and 2003. Sources are the articles about these athletes in 6 German print media. With a qualitative content analysis, we explore the media coverage of ski jumping and the way the athletes are presented. The correlations between the images and the »doing gender« of the athletes and their presentations in the media along with the role of the media in constructing new and ambivalent masculinities will be the key issues of this article.

The Role of Mass Media in Women's Participation in 2013 Kenya General Election

2016 ◽  
pp. 250-270
Author(s):  
Thomas Ibrahim Okinda
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
General Election ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Women Candidates ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
The Media ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Free Media

This chapter assesses the role and performance of the Kenyan media in women's participation in 2013 Kenya general election with particular emphasis on radio, television and newspapers. Kenya has a diverse, vibrant and largely free media whose coverage of the election was useful in informing, educating and mobilizing women to vote. However, limited and biased media coverage of women candidates, inadequate civic and voter education may have inhibited women's electoral participation as few women contested and won electoral seats in the 2013 Kenyan polls. Therefore, the media should enhance the visibility of women, political rights and issues of women as the country endeavours to enhance gender equality in political representation. To achieve this, the media should partner with women, the electoral body, government, political parties and other stakeholders in Kenya in order to improve women's media coverage and political participation.

scholarly journals The Mask of Aging: Doing Cultural Research for a ‘Social Problem’

1970 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kit-Ling Luk
Keyword(s):  
Social Problem ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Social Activists ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

Debates about ‘social problems’ routinely raise questions: is the problem widespread?; how many people, and which people, does it affect?; is it getting worse?; what does it cost society?; what will it cost to deal with it? Convincing answers to such questions demand evidence, and that usually means numbers, measurements, statistics.  However,  the same group of statistics can be ‘manipulated’ by different sectors, including activists as well as policy makers. In this article the author explores was the way in which the impact of statistical dominance in social research was relayed by media coverage and also by social activists and policy makers.

The Role of Mass Media in Women's Participation in 2013 Kenya General Election

2020 ◽  
pp. 528-548
Author(s):  
Thomas Ibrahim Okinda
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
General Election ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Women Candidates ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
The Media ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Free Media

This chapter assesses the role and performance of the Kenyan media in women's participation in 2013 Kenya general election with particular emphasis on radio, television and newspapers. Kenya has a diverse, vibrant and largely free media whose coverage of the election was useful in informing, educating and mobilizing women to vote. However, limited and biased media coverage of women candidates, inadequate civic and voter education may have inhibited women's electoral participation as few women contested and won electoral seats in the 2013 Kenyan polls. Therefore, the media should enhance the visibility of women, political rights and issues of women as the country endeavours to enhance gender equality in political representation. To achieve this, the media should partner with women, the electoral body, government, political parties and other stakeholders in Kenya in order to improve women's media coverage and political participation.

Leaders or “Guides” of Public Opinion? The Media Role of Chinese Foreign Policy Experts

Modern China ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 009770041988273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pascal Abb
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Chinese Foreign Policy ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Full Potential ◽  
Think Tank ◽  
Chinese Media ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
The Media ◽  
International Issues

This article explores the growing role of think tank experts in Chinese media coverage on international issues and determines the degree to which voices in this spectrum diverge from each other as well as the official line espoused by China’s central media organs. It combines a large-sample sentiment analysis of commentaries published by three major institutes that have developed significant public profiles with an in-depth discussion of selected pieces written by especially prolific experts. Based on the results, I argue that Chinese expert commenters sometimes enrich media coverage and show a substantial variety in opinions among them, but prevailing political constraints, skewed incentives, and a slanted media environment keep them from realizing their full potential as public intellectuals. This limits their usefulness both for improving policy outcomes and for managing public expectations about China’s rise.

scholarly journals Emergence of Lyme disease as a social problem: analysis of discourse using the media content

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-481
Author(s):  
Clélia Pascal ◽  
Jocelyne Arquembourg ◽  
Philippe Vorilhon ◽  
Olivier Lesens
Keyword(s):  
Lyme Disease ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Transformation Process ◽  
Media Content ◽  
Problem Analysis ◽  
Chi Square ◽  
Patient Organizations ◽  
The Media ◽  
Science Methodology

Abstract Background Chronic Lyme disease (LD) is a matter of debate worldwide and has emerged as a social problem. We aim to analyze the media content and describe the transformation process of a collective pain into a social problem in France. Methods Using social science methodology, a corpus of articles from 20 newspapers and videos from seven major TV stations from 1987 to 2017 were analyzed for discourse content. The speaking times and the frequency of interventions between doctors supporting the official guidelines and those against them were compared using the Mann–Whitney test and the Chi-square test, respectively. Results In France, the media discourse is carried through testimonials from patient organizations and a professor of infectiology who acted as a whistleblower (WB). We showed that the emergence of the LD alert in the media corresponds to the process described by social sciences as ‘naming, blaming, claiming’. Since his first article in 2014, the WB has featured in 24% (22/89) of newspaper articles compared with 20% (18/89) for doctors defending the official guidelines (P = 0.52). Since his first appearance on a TV newscast in 2014, the WB has appeared in 45% (22/49) of news reports on LD with 24% of the speaking time compared with 22% (11/49) for doctors defending the official guidelines (P = 0.018). Conclusions Media coverage of LD has been unbalanced since 2014 and promotes associations as well as the WB, who seems to be better identified than any of the different doctors defending the official guidelines.

Extreme violence against women in Peru: The role of the State and health professionals

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santiago Stucchi-Portocarrero 3 ◽  
Jessica Raquel PÉREZ-ANDRADE 1* ◽  
Humberto MALDONADO-RUIZ 2
Keyword(s):  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Public Health Problem ◽  
The State ◽  
Health Service Providers ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
The Media ◽  
Extreme Violence

Violence against women occurs in all latitudes, countries and cultures, and represents a public health problem. In Peru there is currently a wave of extreme violence against women, which must be understood as a very recurrent phenomenon, but not sufficiently reflected. Citizen movements from social networks and civil society have manifested the alarming number of occurrences of this problem and the media evidence more and more cases of women being violated and even killed with mechanisms as cruel as incineration. This article reflects on the role of the State and health institutions in the attention of violence against women and how through the discourse of hegemonic masculinity, as well as that of the pathologization of the victimizer, can even encourage its perpetuation. This analysis includes those components related to the professional training of health service providers and provides some ideas to improve the sociocultural understanding of the phenomenon of violence against women.

From Newspaper to Parliament and Back? A Study of Media Attention as Source for and Result of the Dutch Question Hour

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Van Aelst ◽  
Rosa van Santen ◽  
Lotte Melenhorst ◽  
Luzia Helfer
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Media Influence ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
News Values ◽  
Media Attention ◽  
Political Statement ◽  
The Media

AbstractThis study on the role of media attention for the Dutch question hour answers three questions: to what extent is media attention a source of inspiration for oral parliamentary questions? What explains the newsworthiness of these questions? And what explains the extent of media coverage for the questions posed during the question hour? To address this, we present a content analysis of oral parliamentary questions and related press coverage in five recent years. The results show first that oral questions are usually based on media attention for a topic. Concerns about media influence should however be nuanced: it is not necessarily the coverage itself, but also regularly a political statement that is the actual source of a parliamentary question. The media are thus an important “channel” for the interaction between politicians. Second, our analysis shows that oral questions do not receive media attention naturally. Several news values help to explain the amount of news coverage that questions receive. “Surfing the wave” of news attention for a topic in the days previous to the question hour seems to be the best way to generate media attention.

Soccer Players and Their Media-Related Behavior

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 367-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Birkner ◽  
Daniel Nölleke
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Soccer Players ◽  
Sport Communication ◽  
The Media ◽  
The One ◽  
Tabloid Press ◽  
The Relationship

Using the concept of mediatization, in this article, we analyze the relationship between sport and media from a sport-centered perspective. Examining the autobiographies of 14 German and English soccer players, we investigate how athletes use media outlets, what they perceive as the media’s influence and its logic, and—crucially—how this usage and these perceptions affect their own media-related behavior. Our findings demonstrate the important role of the media for the sports systems from the athlete’s point of view and demonstrate the research potential of mediatization as a fruitful concept in studies on sport communication. On the one hand, the sport stars reflect in their autobiographies that their status and income depend on media coverage; and on the other hand, they complain about the omnipresence of the media, especially offside the pitch and feel unfairly treated by the tabloid press, both in England and in Germany.

The Politics of Fear, Mobility, and Media Discourses

Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Stjernborg ◽  
Mekonnen Tesfahuney ◽  
Anders Wretstrand
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mental Maps ◽  
Daily Newspaper ◽  
The Media ◽  
Politics Of Fear ◽  
Media Discourses ◽  
The City

This study focuses on Seved, a segregated and socioeconomically “poor” neighborhood in the city of Malmö in Sweden. It has attracted wide media coverage, a possible consequence of which is its increased stigmatization. The wide disparity between perceived or imagined fear and the actual incidence of, or exposure to, violence attests to the important role of the media in shaping mental maps and place images. Critical discourse analysis of daily newspaper articles shows that Seved is predominantly construed as unruly and a place of lawlessness. Mobility comprises an important aspect of the stigmatization of places, the politics of fear, and discourses of the “other.” In turn, place stigmatization, discourses of the other, and the politics of fear directly and indirectly affect mobility strategies of individuals and groups.

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