Encoding polysemy in the news

Journalism ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146488492110459
Author(s):  
Lillian Boxman-Shabtai
Keyword(s):  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
News Stories ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Media Audience

Although media-audience encounters are always potentially open to different interpretations, little is known about the textual mechanisms that encourage polysemy. Focusing on a story about a CEO who pledged to drastically cut his pay to increase his employees’ salaries, this study compared news reports that covered the same event but were met by different levels of polysemy in their reception. Through a combination of frame and semiotic analysis, the study pinpoints differences in content and style between news stories that were met by interpretive convergence from audiences (low polysemy) and those that were met by interpretive divergence (high polysemy). Based on these differences, a typology of three textual mechanisms is offered to explain the range of polysemy in the news: the attributes and representation of characters, the use of empiricism versus mythology in structuring conflict, and the level of closure versus uncertainty in the story’s conclusion.

Spiritualism and the Resurgence of Fake News

2020 ◽  
pp. 222-237
Author(s):  
Kristy A. Hesketh
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Fake News ◽  
News Stories ◽  
News Reports ◽  
The World ◽  
Spirit World ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
False News

This chapter explores the Spiritualist movement and its rapid growth due to the formation of mass media and compares these events with the current rise of fake news in the mass media. The technology of cheaper publications created a media platform that featured stories about Spiritualist mediums and communications with the spirit world. These articles were published in newspapers next to regular news creating a blurred line between real and hoax news stories. Laws were later created to address instances of fraud that occurred in the medium industry. Today, social media platforms provide a similar vessel for the spread of fake news. Online fake news is published alongside legitimate news reports leaving readers unable to differentiate between real and fake articles. Around the world countries are actioning initiatives to address the proliferation of false news to prevent the spread of misinformation. This chapter compares the parallels between these events, how hoaxes and fake news begin and spread, and examines the measures governments are taking to curb the growth of misinformation.

Infanticide in 19th-Century England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolá Goc
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
News Stories ◽  
News Reports ◽  
News Discourse ◽  
The Times ◽  
History Of Journalism ◽  
Insight Into

Throughout the history of journalism the notion of a mother killing her infant child—committing an act of infanticide—has always been high on the news values scale. In the 19th century, sensational news reports of illicit sexual liaisons, of childbirth and grisly murder, appeared regularly in the press, naming and shaming transgressive unmarried women and framing them as a danger to society. These lurid stories were published in broadsheets and the popular press as well as in respectable newspapers, including the most influential English newspaper of the century, The Times of London. In 19th-century England, The Times played a powerful role in influencing public opinion on the issue of infanticide using lurid reports of infanticide trials and coronial inquests as evidence in stirring editorials as part of their political campaign to reform the 1834 New Poor Law and repeal its pernicious Bastardy Clause, which had led to a large increase in rates of infanticide. News texts, because of their ability to capture one view of a society at a given moment in time, are a valuable historical resource and can also provide insight into journalism practices and the creation of public opinion. Infanticide court and coronial news reports provided details of the desperate murderous actions of young women and also furnished potent evidence of legal and government policy failures. The use of critical discourse analysis (CDA) in studying infanticide reports in The Times provides insight into the ways in which infanticide news stories worked as ideological texts and how journalists created understandings about illegitimacy, the “fallen woman,” infanticide, social injustice, and discriminatory gendered laws through news discourse.

scholarly journals A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis of Pre-2019 General Elections Reports in Selected Nigerian Newspapers

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
pp. 142-147
Author(s):  
Samuel Oyeyemi Agbeleoba ◽  
Edward Owusu ◽  
Asuamah Adade-Yeboah
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
News Reports ◽  
General Elections ◽  
Negative Perceptions ◽  
Language Corpus ◽  
Different Levels

Generally, language experts believe that there are inherent ideologies in language use. The aspect of discourse study that discloses such ideologies is known as Critical Discourse Study (CDA). This paper seeks to exhume the various inherent ideologies that presuppose selected news reports on the Nigeria’s 2019 General Elections in Nigerian newspapers. This study is, however, corpus-based. Scholars have established that discourse is a kind of constructively conditioned public exercise. They believe that power relations exist at different levels of daily social interaction; revealing superiority or inferiority of interlocutors involved. News reports relating to the General Elections were electronically collated from the various newspaper platforms for a sizable language corpus. The name Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was selected and analysed purposively with the aid of Digital Humanities (DH) tool to observe the frequency of the acronym INEC and the textual context in which it occurs in five newspapers’ reports about the electoral body via the authority it gives; the warning it issues, and the appeal it makes to the stakeholders. The paper finds out that the negative perceptions of many observers about the elections have actually been predicted by the various reports in the newspapers, prior to the elections. The paper concludes that reporters of news items do not account for issues concerning electoral body with the same constructive and destructive dispositions; and this gives room for subjectivity and prejudice.

The Press Grew More Interpretive

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin G. Barnhurst
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Public Radio ◽  
Network Television ◽  
News Content ◽  
News Stories ◽  
News Reports ◽  
The Press ◽  
Science News ◽  
The Right ◽  
Interpretive Turn

This chapter discusses the growing pressure for news to become more interpretive. The Left worries about commercial and public relations influences, and the Right about reporters' biases, but both sides call for news that gives more context. They say the press should also do a better job of explaining where information comes from. News content producers want to supply more and better interpretations and have called for more context that “makes the complex coherent and meaningful,” decried a growing tendency of science news reports to manipulate facts, and warned against surrendering “their functions of analysis and explanation”. A closer look at news stories shows a broad interpretive turn toward modern news, with explanations along with judgments and opinions increasing in the news content of daily papers, network television, public radio, and mainstream sites online.

Degrees of Anthropocentrism in Accounts of Wildlife-Vehicle Collisions

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mai Kuha
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Vehicle Collisions ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Land Vehicles ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
English Speaking

AbstractAn investigation of language use in news stories about collisions involving vehicles and nonhuman animals in the wild reveals that reports of bird-airplane collisions tend to focus on the safety of the humans involved, even to the point of constructing the bird as a projectile, rather than a victim. Reports of land vehicles and boats colliding with larger nonhuman animals tend to demonstrate a greater concern for nonhuman participants, attributing greater responsibility to humans for the collisions, although they are more dangerous to humans. Although similar patterns are found in news reports in several languages and in several English-speaking countries, anthropocentrism alone does not fully explain the patterns in journalists’ choice of expressions and structures in these news stories.

Competing constructions of bath salts use and risk of harm in two mediated contexts

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip R Kavanaugh ◽  
Zachariah Biggers
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
Drug Effects ◽  
Presentation Of Self ◽  
Local News ◽  
Bath Salts ◽  
News Stories ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Drug Policies ◽  
Medical Health

Drawing on depictions of bath salts use in two different mediated contexts (110 local news reports, 109 individual user reports), in this study we highlight the incongruence between accounts of use and harm in news media versus drug users’ own narratives. Findings reveal that depictions of bath salts use in local news stories drew on three overlapping frames of risk and harm: a medical/health frame, a typifying example/atrocity story frame, and a legal/regulatory frame. User narratives were comparably neutral and richly descriptive, with tempered accounts of drug effects, psychopharmacological and other experiences while using, as well as tactics used to counter unpleasant effects. We find that both media forms limit discussions of drug use and risks of harm and are similarly dependent on a medical/health frame to legitimate them. The problem with news accounts is the denial of complex social and cultural contexts and possibilities regarding alternative drug policies. The problem with user narratives is the extent to which their accounts are moderated or excluded in order to manufacture a coherent public presentation of self, serving alternate ideological aims.

scholarly journals Journalistic representation of women in the reportage of military operations against Boko Haram in Northeast Nigeriao Haram in Northeast Nigeria

Contratexto ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 155-179
Author(s):  
Ben-Collins E. Ndinojuo ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Group Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Boko Haram ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
News Stories ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
Northeast Nigeria

The role of women in the reportage of military operations against the Boko Haram insurgents and their portrayal in news reports were investigated in this study. Radical Feminist Theory and Feminist Muted Group Theory were used to elucidate the research. Using content analysis, online editions of four Nigerian newspapers―Daily Trust, Premium Times, The Nation, and Vanguard―from January 2014 to December 2016 were investigated to reveal how women were presented in news reports. Findings produced 185 news stories; women were included in 10 % of the total pictures used. Women made up 8 % of the bylines and 4% of the sources, with 59 % of the women mentioned in the news presented as kidnap and rescued victims. The study found an underrepresentation and misrepresentation of women in news reports, which were attributed to the male-dominated journalism field that preferred using their male sources to the detriment of issues affecting women.

scholarly journals Cancer In The News: Bias And Quality In Media Reporting Of Cancer Research

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Amberg ◽  
Darren N. Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Cancer Research ◽  
Reporting Quality ◽  
Online News ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Research Reporting ◽  
News Reports ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Study Selection ◽  
Meta Analyses

AbstractCancer research in the news is often associated with sensationalising and inaccurate reporting, giving rise to false hopes and expectations. The role of study selection for cancer-related news stories is an important but less commonly acknowledged issue, as the outcomes of primary research are generally less reliable than those of meta-analyses and systematic reviews. Few studies have investigated the quality of research that makes the news and no previous analyses of the proportions of primary and secondary research in the news have been found in the literature. The main aim of this study was to investigate the nature and quality of cancer research covered in online news reports by four major news sources from USA, UK and Australia. We measured significant variation in reporting quality, and observed biases in many aspects of cancer research reporting, including the types of study selected for coverage, and in the spectrum of cancer types, gender of scientists, and geographical source of research represented. We discuss the implications of these finding for guiding accurate, contextual reporting of cancer research, which is critical in helping the public understand complex science and appreciate the outcomes of publicly funded research, avoid undermining trust in science, and assist informed decision-making.

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