Religious motifs within reporting of the 7/7 London bombings in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Poland: A transnational agenda-setting network study

Existing studies have examined the significance of UK media coverage of the 7/7 London bombings. This article seeks to widen this analysis by exploring the coverage of 7/7 in the leading newspapers of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Poland comparatively using a new agenda-setting perspective that is grounded within network analysis. The study is devised to respond specifically to the contrasting arguments about the influence of media globalization versus religion and ethnicity on this reporting. It finds that the diverse approaches to religion within the countries of the analyzed newspapers appear to mitigate the reproduction of shared religious narratives in this reporting. Nevertheless, the analyzed coverage does carry common attributes and these, it argues, can be explained broadly by the influence of a US-dominated ‘lens on terror’.

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Communicating the “Race” for the COVID-19 Vaccine: An Exploratory Study in Newspapers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil

Frontiers in Communication ◽

10.3389/fcomm.2021.643895 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 6 ◽

Author(s):

Luisa Massarani ◽

Luiz Felipe Fernandes Neves

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

New York ◽

United Kingdom ◽

Media Coverage ◽

Exploratory Study ◽

New York Times ◽

The United States ◽

Computer Assisted ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Understanding Of Science

The search for an effective solution to control the COVID-19 pandemic has mobilized an unprecedented effort by science to develop a vaccine against the disease, in which pharmaceutical companies and scientific institutions from several countries participate. The world closely monitors research in this area, especially through media coverage, which plays a key role in the dissemination of trustful information and in the public’s understanding of science and health. On the other hand, anti-vaccine movements dispute space in this communication environment, which raises concerns of the authorities regarding the willingness of the population to get vaccinated. In this exploratory study, we used computer-assisted content analysis techniques, with WordStat software, to identify the most addressed terms, semantic clusters, actors, institutions, and countries in the texts and titles of 716 articles on the COVID-19 vaccine, published by The New York Times (US), The Guardian (United Kingdom), and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil), from January to October 2020. We sought to analyze similarities and differences of countries that stood out by the science denialism stance of their government leaders, reflecting on the severity of the pandemic in these places. Our results indicate that each newspaper emphasized the potential vaccines developed by laboratories in their countries or that have established partnerships with national institutions, but with a more politicized approach in Brazil and a little more technical-scientific approach in the United States and the United Kingdom. In external issues, the newspapers characterized the search for the discovery of a vaccine as a race in which nations and blocs historically marked by economic, political, and ideological disputes are competing, such as the United States, Europe, China, and Russia. The results lead us to reflect on the responsibility of the media to not only inform correctly but also not to create stigmas related to the origin of the vaccine and combat misinformation.

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Trajectories and Burials

Burying Jihadis ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190889128.003.0010 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 155-176

Author(s):

Riva Kastoryano

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Saudi Arabia ◽

United Kingdom ◽

Complex Networks ◽

The United States ◽

September 11 ◽

Body Parts ◽

Home Office ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

London Bombings

The four human bombs that perpetrated the 7/7 attacks were all British nationals. Three of them were born in the United Kingdom to Pakistani parents. The fourth was born in Jamaica and arrived in the U.K. at a very early age. Examination of the trajectory of these four jihadis highlights the importance of the “gang” or “clique” phenomenon analyzed by Marc Sageman.5 Unlike the September 11, 2001 hijackers, who had traveled from Asia to Europe and from Saudi Arabia to the United States through complex networks to prepare the most spectacular attacks so far this century, the young men who perpetrated the London bombings had organized locally. The British authorities immediately labeled them “homegrown terrorists.” “the Home Office returned the bodies and body parts to the families with dignity so that they could organize "normal" funeral services in keeping with the Muslim religion”.

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The Influence of Media Coverage and Governmental Policies on Google Queries Related to COVID-19 Cutaneous Symptoms: Infodemiology Study

JMIR Public Health and Surveillance ◽

10.2196/25651 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. e25651

Author(s):

Solene Huynh Dagher ◽

Guillaume Lamé ◽

Thomas Hubiche ◽

Khaled Ezzedine ◽

Tu Anh Duong

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

United Kingdom ◽

Media Coverage ◽

The United States ◽

Google Trends ◽

World Health ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Internet Searches ◽

The Impact ◽

Over Time

Background During COVID-19, studies have reported the appearance of internet searches for disease symptoms before their validation by the World Health Organization. This suggested that monitoring of these searches with tools including Google Trends may help monitor the pandemic itself. In Europe and North America, dermatologists reported an unexpected outbreak of cutaneous acral lesions (eg, chilblain-like lesions) in April 2020. However, external factors such as public communications may also hinder the use of Google Trends as an infodemiology tool. Objective The study aimed to assess the impact of media announcements and lockdown enforcement on internet searches related to cutaneous acral lesions during the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. Methods Two searches on Google Trends, including daily relative search volumes for (1) “toe” or “chilblains” and (2) “coronavirus,” were performed from January 1 to May 16, 2020, with the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany as the countries of choice. The ratio of interest over time in “chilblains” and “coronavirus” was plotted. To assess the impact of lockdown enforcement and media coverage on these internet searches, we performed an interrupted time-series analysis for each country. Results The ratio of interest over time in “chilblains” to “coronavirus” showed a constant upward trend. In France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, lockdown enforcement was associated with a significant slope change for “chilblain” searches with a variation coefficient of 1.06 (SE 0.42) (P=0.01), 1.04 (SE 0.28) (P<.01), and 1.21 (SE 0.44) (P=0.01), respectively. After media announcements, these ratios significantly increased in France, Spain, Italy, and the United States with variation coefficients of 18.95 (SE 5.77) (P=.001), 31.31 (SE 6.31) (P<.001), 14.57 (SE 6.33) (P=.02), and 11.24 (SE 4.93) (P=.02), respectively, followed by a significant downward trend in France (–1.82 [SE 0.45]), Spain (–1.10 [SE 0.38]), and Italy (–0.93 [SE 0.33]) (P<.001, P=0.004, and P<.001, respectively). The adjusted R2 values were 0.311, 0.351, 0.325, and 0.305 for France, Spain, Italy, and the United States, respectively, suggesting an average correlation between time and the search volume; however, this correlation was weak for Germany and the United Kingdom. Conclusions To date, the association between chilblain-like lesions and COVID-19 remains controversial; however, our results indicate that Google queries of “chilblain” were highly influenced by media coverage and government policies, indicating that caution should be exercised when using Google Trends as a monitoring tool for emerging diseases.

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