scholarly journals The victims, villains and heroes of ‘panic buying’: News media attribution of responsibility for COVID-19 stockpiling

2021 ◽  
pp. 144078332110573
Author(s):  
Tarryn Phillips ◽  
Carmen Vargas ◽  
Melissa Graham ◽  
Danielle Couch ◽  
Deborah Gleeson
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
News Media ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Moral Leadership ◽  
Attribution Of Responsibility ◽  
Disadvantaged Groups ◽  
Public Sentiment ◽  
Online Shoppers

Societies often respond to a crisis by attributing blame to some groups while constructing others as victims and heroes. While it has received scant sociological attention, ‘panic buying’ is a critical indicator of such public sentiment at the onset of a crisis, and thus a crucial site for analysis. This article traces dynamics of blame in news media representations of an extreme period of panic buying during COVID-19 in Australia. Analysis reveals that lower socio-economic and ethnically diverse consumers were blamed disproportionately. Unlike wealthier consumers who bulk-bought online, shoppers filling trollies in-store were depicted as selfish and shameful, described using dehumanising language, and portrayed as ‘villains’ who threatened social order. Supermarkets were cast simultaneously as ‘victims’ of consumer aggression and ‘heroes’ for their moral leadership, trustworthiness and problem-solving. This portrayal misunderstands the socio-emotional drivers of panic buying, exacerbates stigma towards already disadvantaged groups, and veils the corporate profiteering that encourages stockpiling.

News Sources and Framing of Responsibility on Devolution in Kenya, 2013–2017

2022 ◽  
pp. 107769902110665
Author(s):  
Jimmy Ochieng
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Newspaper Coverage ◽  
Attribution Of Responsibility ◽  
News Sources ◽  
News Source ◽  
Official Sources

The present research examines two aspects of newspaper coverage of devolution during a 4-year period between March 27, 2013, and May 28, 2017: first, through the lens of attribution of responsibility, who the news media most blamed for problems facing devolution; second, whether reliance on official sources in reporting of devolution mirrors the indexing hypothesis. Findings show that the most-blamed actor and dominant news source on devolution is the county executive. Journalists continue to rely on the elite as their main news source and as a result they shape the discourse on devolution.

scholarly journals A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Jost ◽  
Mahzarin R. Banaji ◽  
Brian A. Nosek
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
System Justification ◽  
Ingroup Bias ◽  
System Justification Theory ◽  
Disadvantaged Groups ◽  
The Status ◽  
Outgroup Favoritism

Most theories in social and political psychology stress self-interest, intergroup conflict, ethnocentrism, homophily, ingroup bias, outgroup antipathy, dominance, and resistance. System justification theory is influenced by these perspectives—including social identity and social dominance theories—but it departs from them in several respects. Specifically, we argue that (a) there is a general ideological motive to justify the existing social order, (b) this motive is at least partially responsible for the internalization of inferiority among members of disadvantaged groups, and (c) paradoxically, it is sometimes strongest among those who are most harmed by the status quo. In this article, we review and integrate 10 years of research on 20 hypotheses derived from a system justification perspective, focusing especially on the phenomenon of implicit outgroup favoritism among members of disadvantaged groups (including African Americans, the elderly, and gays/lesbians) and its relation to political ideology (especially liberalism-conservatism).

scholarly journals Women in the Margins: Media Representations of Women's Labour in the Canadian Press, 1935-1945

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy Moniz
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Labour Force Participation ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
War Effort

During the Second World War, women’s participation in Canada’s ‘total war’ effort meant increased domestic responsibilities, volunteering, enlisting in the armed forces, and joining the civilian workforce. Women’s labour force participation more than doubled throughout the war, with more women working alongside and in place of men than ever before. This created a situation that could challenge the traditional sexual division of labour, and so women’s labour became a subject for discussion in the public sphere. Through a comparative content analysis of the commercial and alternative (labour) press, this study examines representations of women’s labour in wartime in the context of women’s mobilization into the war effort through to subsequent demobilization near war’s end. It first considers the theoretical and methodological issues involved in the historical study of news media and women and then offers original empirical research to demonstrate that when women’s labour did emerge as a subject in the Canadian press, gender, not labour, was prioritized in the news. This was symbolically and systematically leveraged both within and across the commercial and alternative press, which reinforces stereotypical values about women and their labour and upheld the patriarchal status quo. In the end, while there were surface-level changes to the nature of women’s paid labour during the war, the structures of female subordination and exploitation remained unchallenged despite women’s massive mobilization into the workforce. By setting media representations against the wartime realities of women’s labour told through archival records and secondary literature, this dissertation argues that news media generally presented a ‘history’ of women’s labour that did not reflect the lived reality or the political economic and social significance of women’s labouring lives. This not only coloured how women’s labour was represented in the news, but it can also shape the history that scholars construct from the newspaper. In contributing to feminist media and media history scholarship, this dissertation offers empirical evidence that challenges dominant ways of thinking about women’s history in terms of the domestic sphere and furthers an understanding of women’s wage labour as a provocation to such historical public-private divisions. This may, in turn, inspire histories that more fully and equitably capture women’s experiences.

A Critical Examination of Online News Media Representations of Bisexual Women Who Use Cannabis

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-229
Author(s):  
Melissa Marie Legge ◽  
Lesley Tarasoff ◽  
Corey Flanders ◽  
Rasha Taha ◽  
Margaret Robinson
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Online News ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Bisexual Women

Medical Tourism Patient Mortality

2022 ◽  
pp. 143-162
Author(s):  
Alicia Mason ◽  
Sakshi Bhati ◽  
Ran Jiang ◽  
Elizabeth A. Spencer
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Cosmetic Surgery ◽  
Medical Tourism ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Patient Death ◽  
Bereavement Counseling ◽  
Media Reports ◽  
Social Support Systems

Medical tourism is a process in which a consumer travels from one's place of residence and receives medical treatment, thus becoming a patient. Patients Beyond Borders (PBB) forecasts some 1.9 million Americans will travel outside the United States for medical care in 2019. This chapter explores media representations of patient mortality associated with medical tourism within the global news media occurring between 2009-2019. A qualitative content analysis of 50 patient mortality cases found that (1) a majority of media representations of medical tourism patient death are of middle-class, minority females between 25-55 years of age who seek cosmetic surgery internationally; (2) sudden death, grief, and bereavement counseling is noticeably absent from medical tourism providers (MTPs); and (3) risk information from authority figures within the media reports is often vague and abstract. A detailed list of health communication recommendations and considerations for future medical tourists and their social support systems are provided.

‘An Image of Hope in a Week of Despair’: Representations of Sam the Koala in the Australian Mainstream News Media

2014 ◽  
Vol 151 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clemence Due ◽  
Kirrilly Thompson ◽  
Danielle Every
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
Disaster Relief ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Single Animal ◽  
International Attention ◽  
The Media ◽  
Animal Image

Natural disasters are events with far-reaching humanitarian implications that frequently receive international attention through the use of an image that comes to represent the disaster in question. The most successful images often comprise ‘identifiable’ and therefore human victims. What is more unusual is for a single animal image to become representative of an entire disaster. This was the case with the 2009 Victorian bushfires in Australia, when the image of a firefighter offering a koala a drink gained international fame. Given that this image of ‘Sam’ the koala does not conform to traditional disaster imagery, we undertook a thematic analysis of mainstream news media representations of Sam in order to identify how she was represented by the media. In this article, we discuss these themes in relation to the ‘identifiable victim’, together with the implications of Sam's success in terms of disaster-relief campaigns.

scholarly journals What’s the deal with ‘websleuthing’? News media representations of amateur detectives in networked spaces

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Yardley ◽  
Adam George Thomas Lynes ◽  
David Wilson ◽  
Emma Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Wound Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
True Crime

This article explores websleuthing, a phenomenon widely discussed and debated in popular culture but little-researched by criminologists. Drawing upon a review of existing literature and analysis of news media representations, we argue that websleuthing is much more diverse than previously thought. Encompassing a wide range of motives, manifestations, activities, networked spaces and cases, websleuthing has a variety of impacts upon victims, secondary victims, suspects, criminal justice organisations and websleuths themselves. We conclude that websleuthing is the embodiment of true crime infotainment in a ‘wound culture’ (Seltzer, 2007, 2008) and as such, is deserving of more criminological scrutiny than has been the case to date.

scholarly journals “Superbugs” in the Risk Society: Assessing the Reflexive Function of North American Newspaper Coverage of Antimicrobial Resistance

SAGE Open ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824402090180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela Capurro
Keyword(s):  
Antimicrobial Resistance ◽  
News Media ◽  
North American ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Risk Society ◽  
Reflexive Modernization ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Populations At Risk ◽  
Reflexive Function

This article examines how antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is covered in four elite North American newspapers and whether the dailies act as sites of reflexive modernization. I draw on risk society theory to situate AMR as a modern risk and news media as key spaces for reflexivity. Through a qualitative content analysis of 89 news stories on AMR, this study shows that this risk is communicated through inaccurate definitions and oversimplified accounts of the causes, populations at risk, and preventive measures. Media representations of health risks affect public perceptions of risk and risk prevention. The dailies, however, seldom expressed reflexive modernization, a key function of “mass media” in the Risk Society, which I argue could be due to the very complexity of “modern risks.” Lack of reflexivity in the media regarding AMR could delay crucial policy and institutional changes necessary to tackle this risk.

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