scholarly journals ICYMI: RT and Youth-Oriented International Broadcasting as (Geo)Political Culture Jamming

2022 ◽  
pp. 194016122110727
Author(s):  
Robert A Saunders ◽  
Rhys Crilley ◽  
Precious N Chatterje-Doody

Research in political communication has recently begun to explore the role of non-Western English-language state-funded international broadcasters (NEIBs) in influencing international audiences. Despite this, there has been little attention given to understanding how NEIBs engage and influence young people in ‘Western’ democracies. Our article addresses this gap by providing a detailed analysis of RT's English-language, youth-orientated news product ICYMI. Launched in 2018, ICYMI is a social media-based news brand that consists of a series of 2–3-min videos that deliver satirical takes on recent global events including military conflict, financial scandals, and culture clashes. Our findings, which examine the first year of the platform's activity, show that ICYMI is a novel form of engagement, one that is not easily categorised as either public diplomacy or propaganda, nor can it be described as traditional journalism. Instead, we label this approach as geopolitical culture jamming. In this article, we conduct a discourse analysis of 45 videos published on YouTube by ICYMI over its first year to examine how the platform attempts to influence how young people relate to traditional foreign policy discourses. Our empirical analysis centres on how viewers engage with and interpret ICYMI's videos with the aim of addressing how RT may be influencing younger audiences, particularly its core demographic of Anglophone white males whose comments reflect an attachment to ICYMI's populist, anti-elite worldview.

Author(s):  
Yochai Benkler ◽  
Robert Faris ◽  
Hal Roberts

This chapter presents the book’s macrolevel findings about the architecture of political communication and the news media ecosystem in the United States from 2015 to 2018. Two million stories published during the 2016 presidential election campaign are analyzed, along with another 1.9 million stories about Donald Trump’s presidency during his first year. The chapter examines patterns of interlinking between online media sources to understand the relations of authority and credibility among publishers, as well as the media sharing practices of Twitter and Facebook users to elucidate social media attention patterns. The data and mapping reveal not only a profoundly polarized media landscape but stark asymmetry: the right is more insular, skewed towards the extreme, and set apart from the more integrated media ecosystem of the center, center-left, and left.


Journalism ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146488492110334
Author(s):  
Mona Elswah ◽  
Philip N. Howard

Turkey has vastly increased the scale of its investment in public diplomacy tools. Although Turkey is considered one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists, its media market is one of the fastest-growing in the world. In 2015, the Istanbul-based English-language TRT World was launched with the slogan ‘where news inspires change’, The channel promised to provide impartial coverage of global news, with its experienced journalists addressing global audiences. In this study, we investigate the interplay between public diplomacy and editorial policies at TRT World. After conducting in-depth interviews with TRT World journalists, we argue that the channel has shifted its style from being Turkey’s public diplomacy tool into becoming the AKP’s voice to the world. By examining TRT World, this study provides a framework to understand how international broadcasters operate in countries where media freedom is restricted.


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zachary W. Taylor

This study examines first-year undergraduate admissions materials from 325 bachelor-degree granting U.S. institutions, closely analyzing the English-language readability and Spanish-language readability and translation of these materials. Via Yosso’s linguistic capital, the results reveal 4.9% of first-year undergraduate admissions materials had been translated into Spanish, 4% of institutional admissions websites embed translation widgets, and the average readability of English-language content is above the 13th-grade reading level. Implications for research and practice are discussed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 182-198
Author(s):  
Julie E. Learned ◽  
Mary Jo Morgan

Purpose This paper aims to report on a study investigating how young people and teachers interpreted reading proficiency and difficulty across different tracks of English language arts in the sole high school serving a culturally diverse city. Design/methodology/approach For six months, the researchers observed in three hierarchically tracked English classes. Participants were three teachers and 15 focal youths. The researchers also conducted semi-structured and open-ended interviews and collected classroom artifacts and students’ records. Findings Despite adoption of the Common Core State Standards and a school-designed common English curriculum, both of which were to contribute to shared literacy objectives, students and teachers built highly contextualized understandings of reading proficiency, which diverged across tracks and mediated instruction. Across tracks, however, deficit discourses about reading struggle persisted, and students and teachers attributed difficulty to students’ attitudes and behaviors. Young people never described themselves in negative terms, which suggests they resisted the deficit labels tracking systems can generate. Originality/value Findings extend research by showing how literacy-related tracking contributed to exclusionary contexts through which students were unproductively positioned at odds. Findings suggest a need for renewed rigor in the examination of tracking practices, particularly how notions of reading difficulty/proficiency position youths and mediate literacy instruction. Despite deficit conceptions of “struggling readers” across the school, youths never described themselves negatively and accepted reading difficulty as normal; how youths achieved such resourceful stances can be further investigated. These research directions will support the creation of English contexts that invite all youths into inquisitive, critical and agentive interactions with texts and each other.


2006 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 234-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mick Short

This article reports on research conducted in the department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University from 2002 to 2005 on first-year undergraduate student performance in, and reaction to, a web-based introductory course in stylistic analysis. The main focus of this report is a comparison of student responses to the varying ways in which the web-based course was used from year to year. The description of student responses is based on an analysis of end-of-course questionnaires and a comparison of exit grades. In 2002–3, students accessed the first two-thirds of the course in web-based form and the last third through more traditional teaching. In 2003–4 the entire course was accessed in web-based form, and in 2004–5 web-based course workshops were used as part of a combined package which also involved weekly lectures and seminars. Some comparison is also made with student performance in, and responses to, the traditional lecture + seminar form of the course, as typified in the 2001–2 version of the course.


Author(s):  
Yustinus Calvin Gai Mali

This qualitative study explores motivational teaching strategies employed in English as a foreign language (EFL) writing classrooms and designs a sample of lesson plans elaborating the strategies that were reflected from open-ended questionnaires of sixty-five first-year students at English Language Education Program in a private university in Indonesia. The data analysis reveals possible motivational strategies that are classified into Dornyei’s (2001) framework of motivational teaching practice. Based on the analysis, the study reinforces a view that teachers can motivate their students to learn and they use particular teaching strategies to motivate their students. Eventually, this study hopes to provide insights for EFL teachers espousing similar teaching practices, so they can enhance their students’ motivation, particularly in their EFL writing classrooms.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 409-446
Author(s):  
Bushra Saadoon Al - Noori

Baghdad University is located in Baghdad; the Capital of Iraq, consists of many colleges via Sciences and Humanities , for example: College of languages, College of Arts, College of Education for Women and College of Education /Ibn Rushd and others. Each one of these Colleges consists of various departments. Our department is the English Department for four academic years. In the First year, we have four sections of more than fifty students each. Our students are boys and girls and all of them are going to be English Language Teachers because all these four academic years will make them qualified to be so. The government helps them to find jobs immediately after graduation. In these four years, our students spend 45 days in schools as a student - teacher and the staff members are visiting those two or three times to evaluate them in relation to the method of teaching and daily plan. Staff members will evaluate the way of treating the pupils in the secondary school, their way of teaching, their confidence inside the classrooms and many other points.


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