‘Discursive news values analysis’ of Iranian crime news reports: Perspectives from the culture

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 437-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Makki
Keyword(s):  
1996 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-80
Author(s):  
Per Ledin

This paper deals with anaphoric expressions in news reports. It is argued that many aspects of discourse anaphora cannot be accounted for within the dominant cognitive paradigm, where anaphoric NPs are conceived of as representations of invariant and universal psychological phenomena. As demonstrated in the paper, anaphoric NPs are intertwined with different social and ideological processes. Anaphoric NPs can for example be used to individuate the main character to a lesser or greater degree, a use that in turn can be seen as a manifestation of basic news values, such as personalization and objectivity.


Author(s):  
Jeroen Vaes ◽  
Marcella Latrofa ◽  
Caterina Suitner ◽  
Luciano Arcuri

Abstract. The present research aims to verify the presence of linguistic biases in crime news reports (Study 1) and their role (Study 2) in activating a crime stereotype toward racial/ethnic minorities. In a first content analysis study, the natural occurrence of a set of linguistic biases was analyzed in Italian news articles that described comparable crimes committed by an in- or an outgroup aggressor. Results indicated that when the crime was committed by an outgroup (vs. ingroup) member, more aggravating and less attenuating adjectives were used. Moreover, the nationality of the perpetrator was not only mentioned more frequently, it also appeared in most cases as a noun. In Study 2, participants read a fictitious news article that either described an in- or outgroup criminal act with neutral or biased language. Their implicit associations between in- and outgroup members and weapons (vs. tools) were measured immediately afterward in the weapon paradigm. Results confirmed that a biased (vs. neutral) language use increased participants’ crime-related associations with the outgroup in general only when an outgroup criminal was staged. The role of media portrayals in determining the cognitive representations of racial/ethnic minorities is discussed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thulani Tshabangu ◽  
Abiodun Salawu

The coverage of crises such as the global health pandemic, COVID-19, is to a large extent guided by national interest, journalistic culture and editorial policies of media outlets. This article argues that the state-controlled newspaper, The Herald, in Zimbabwe deployed constructive journalism as an approach to report COVID-19. Constructive journalism is about injecting positive angles into news reports while abiding by the core news values of accuracy, impartiality and balance. The findings reveal that constructive journalism elements of solutions orientation, future orientation, and explanation and contextualization were frequently deployed by The Herald to advance a safe nation narrative whose objective was to prevent public hysteria in the face of a deadly COVID-19 outbreak in the country. The paper concludes that the deployment of constructive journalism in less developed countries like Zimbabwe to inspire hope through positive psychology in the face of global crises does not always yield the intended outcomes.


Author(s):  
Chris Greer ◽  
Eugene McLaughlin

News corporations are reconstituting and dramatically extending their power to shape crime consciousness and influence criminal justice rhetoric and practice. At the same time, in depth crime news research has fallen off the criminological radar. In this chapter we argue that because criminologists have not kept pace with the transforming news environment, the relations between news power, crime, and criminal justice remain under-researched and under-conceptualized. We begin by revisiting two concepts that continue to dominate UK crime news research: news values and moral panic. Though these concepts are still important for understanding news power, crime, and criminal justice, there has been a qualitative shift in how increasingly adversarial corporations manufacture crime news in a 24/7 digital environment. We identify ‘trial by media’ and ‘scandal hunting’ as journalistic practices that news corporations are perfecting through the relentless exposure of institutional failure as the cause of a systemic crisis in public protection and criminal justice. It is in this intermediatized context that we situate the shift from criminal justice to media justice.


Author(s):  
Hussein Zedan ◽  
Meshrif Alruily

Digital forensics aims to examine a wide range of digital media in a “forensically” sound manner. This can be used either to uncover rationale for a committed crime and possible suspects, prevent a crime from taken place or to identify a threat so that it can be dealt with. The latter is firmly rooted within the domain of intelligence counter measures. The authors call the outcome of the analyses subject profiling where a subject can be a threat or a suspect. In this Chapter the authors outline a process for profiling based on Self-organizing Map (SOM) and evaluating our technique by profiling crimes using a multi-lingual corpus. The development and application of a Crime Profiling System (CPS) is also presented. The system is able to extract meaningful information (type of crime, location and nationality), from Arabic language crime news reports. The system has two unique attributes; firstly, information extraction depends on local grammar, and secondly, automatic generation of dictionaries. It is shown that the CPS improves the quality of the data through reduction where only meaningful information is retained. Moreover, when clustering, using Self Organizing Map (SOM), we gain efficiency as the data is cleansed by removing noise. The proposed system is validated through experiments using a corpus collated from different sources; Precision, Recall and F-measure are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed information extraction approach. Also, comparisons are conducted with other systems.


2021 ◽  
pp. 175048132110265
Author(s):  
Geqi Wu ◽  
Chunlei Pan

Delivering news on social media platforms is an increasingly important consideration in journalism practice. However, little attention has been paid to audience engagement with news on social media, especially the discursive presentation of news on the Chinese social media platform WeChat. Based on 36 news reports collected from the People’s Daily official account, this study analyses how news discourse is constructed and presented to engage audiences. The results suggest that highlighting proximity, personalisation, positivity and human interest in news values are the strategies adopted by journalists to engage audiences. The headline tends to use forward-referring terms and performs the speech acts of assertives and expressives to construct news values of proximity and positivity. The news story makes use of particular addressing terms, reported speeches and evaluative markers to construct news values of personalisation, positivity and human interest. The study enriches the analysis of journalistic practice of news on social media in the Chinese context.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 517-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Lindgren

The study of discursive understandings of cybervictimisation draws on a dataset of crime news reporting and asks the question of if and how cybervictimisation is construed in ways that differ from other types of (non-digital) victimisation. Building on a critical discourse perspective employing corpus-based text analysis methods, the composition of news discourses about cybervictimisation are analysed, alongside the relationship between such representations and news media discourse on crime victimisation generally. The aim is to see what effect the presence of a digital dimension has for how the notion of victimisation is socially and culturally understood. The study shows, first, that news reporting on cybervictimisation has a strong bias towards crimes that fit well with the notion of ‘the ideal victim’ (such as sexual victimisation and bullying) while excluding other types like hacking and identity theft. The question is raised whether ‘victim’ discourse is able to account for the latter types or if new understandings and concepts will emerge. Second, the study shows that discourses promoting understandings of technology as contributing to amplifying danger, and that represent technology as potentially undermining social order, are strong in cybervictimisation news reports. These discourses are consequential for who is seen as a legitimate victim and not. Just as it can be very difficult to identify and apprehend perpetrators of cybercrime, so is also the identification and definition of cybervictims ambiguous and demands to be further researched.


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