scholarly journals Comparing Platform “Ranking Cultures” Across Languages: The Case of Islam on YouTube in Scandinavia

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 205630511881703
Author(s):  
Hallvard Moe
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
English Language ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
Search Results ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
Language Areas ◽  
Qualitative Exploration

This article is concerned with how different agencies play out in shaping public debate online and, for this purpose, employs an approach that acknowledges the role not just of algorithms seen in isolation, but in context with users. The empirical case is YouTube video search results related to Islam in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. As such, the article makes a contribution by adding a comparative layer to the discussion of “ranking cultures,” which has so far focused on individual cases or English-language searches. The analysis is based on a mapping of the highest-ranking videos, as well as a qualitative exploration of these videos’ content and context. Findings illustrate how intricate practices of re-posting and re-framing of videos is key to understand the ways YouTube’s search function contributes to shape the public image of an issue differently in different language areas and social settings. Findings are related to previous studies of immigration coverage in mainstream news media in the case countries. The discussion highlights the merits of the approach, not only for bringing out nuances in how YouTube shape political issues in different contexts but also for pointing to questions of the broader public debate.

Issue Salience and Political Decisions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Moniz ◽  
Christopher Wlezien
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Issue Salience ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Political Decisions

Salience refers to the extent to which people cognitively and behaviorally engage with a political issue (or other object), although it has meant different things to different scholars studying different phenomena. The word originally was used in the social sciences to refer to the importance of political issues to individuals’ vote choice. It also has been used to designate attention being paid to issues by policy makers and the news media, yet it can pertain to voters as well. Thus, salience sometimes refers to importance and other times to attention—two related but distinct concepts—and is applied to different actors. The large and growing body of research on the subject has produced real knowledge about policies and policy, but the understanding is limited in several ways. First, the conceptualization of salience is not always clear, which is of obvious relevance to theorizing and limits assessment of how (even whether) research builds on and extends existing literature. Second, the match between conceptualization and measurement is not always clear, which is of consequence for analysis and impacts the contribution research makes. Third, partly by implication, but also because the connections between research in different areas—the public, the media, and policy—are not always clear, the consequences of salience for representative democracy remain unsettled.

What’s political Twitter talking about?

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-190
Author(s):  
Kylah J. Hedding ◽  
Kevin Ripka
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Presidential Debates ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Media ◽  
Twitter Users ◽  
Policy Agendas

Abstract This study explicates the concept of news media agendamelding. While only one-quarter of U.S. adults are on Twitter, it remains a popular platform among news media and political elites who often still set the public agenda for political discourse. Twitter provides insights into the issues that are at the top of the media and policy agendas, as well as how social media might influence the way journalists approach political issues. At the same time, there is concern about the influence of social media on political polarization. This study uses a specific set of influential Twitter users to examine one main question: Were there differences between right, left, and center political media reactions during the 2016 presidential debates? This study provides further evidence that there is, in fact, a conservative political Twitter media agenda that exists separately from liberal or nonpartisan media outlets.

Sex, Lies, and War: How Soft News Brings Foreign Policy to the Inattentive Public

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW A. BAUM
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Consumption ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Soft News ◽  
Foreign Policy Crises ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
News Programs

This study argues that, due to selective political coverage by the entertainment-oriented, soft news media, many otherwise politically inattentive individuals are exposed to information about high-profile political issues, most prominently foreign policy crises, as an incidental by-product of seeking entertainment. I conduct a series of statistical investigations examining the relationship between individual media consumption and attentiveness to several recent high-profile foreign policy crisis issues. For purposes of comparison, I also investigate several non-foreign crisis issues, some of which possess characteristics appealing to soft news programs and others of which lack such characteristics. I find that information about foreign crises, and other issues possessing similar characteristics, presented in a soft news context, has indeed attracted the attention of politically uninvolved Americans. The net effect is a reduced disparity in attentiveness to select high-profile political issues across different segments of the public.

scholarly journals Alternative news on social media in Norway

2022 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-150
Author(s):  
Thomas Wold
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
The Public ◽  
Small Organizations ◽  
Muslim Countries ◽  
Participatory Journalism ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
News Sharing

Alternative news media in Norway have become visible in public debates. Partly because of news sharing on social media. Social media has become an arena for news, information, and public debate, and has also become a place to fight for the news agenda. The present study examines news sharing in social media in Norway and how right-wing alternative news outlets use social media to impact the news agenda. These are small organizations with only a handful of employees, but they have very proactive readers and feature a considerable amount of user-generated content. They are critical of immigration, particularly from Muslim countries, and of the political elite. They mimic traditional media in the way they organize and label their content, but their reporting is more subjective. The present study uses quantitative content analysis to reveal which topics are the most shared on social media, and from which news type of news organizations they come. It also looks at how news sharing differed in the days following a series of terrorist attacks and how the pattern changed during the course of a normal day. This leads to a discussion on participatory journalism and how news sharing can be seen as a part of the public debate.

Rap Music in Turkey

2017 ◽  
pp. 204-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Didem Buhari-Gulmez
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Contributions ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
Shed Light

Benefiting from the theoretical debate between grobalization and glocalization, this chapter aims to shed light on the emerging role of rap music as an alternative venue for political communication in a polarized country, Turkey. The chapter will discuss the political contributions of the selected underground Turkish rappers – Norm Ender, Sagopa Kajmer and Rapzan Belagat – on the public debate in the country about identity, human rights, and other socio-political issues that go beyond the traditional “Kemalist versus Kurdish”, “Kemalist versus Islamist”, and “Islamist versus Kurdish” divide. This study suggests that the Turkish rap and its varieties reflect a complex set of interactions between the local and the global in line with the glocalization approach.

scholarly journals Metaphoric Conceptualization of Social Reality in the Language of News Media

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Indra Karapetjana ◽  
◽  
Gunta Roziņa ◽  
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
English Language ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Negative Evaluation ◽  
News Medium ◽  
Levels Of Abstraction ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Nuclear Disaster ◽  
The One

Today, social reality can hardly be viewed as the one-state-one-nationone language ideological framework (Bauman and Briggs, 2003). The modern multilingual and multicultural communities are inclined to examine social reality in a multiple variety of socio-economic and political manifestations and forms. To understand how social reality can be explored through examining certain socio-political processes in a country, the present paper aims at analysing the role of conceptual metaphor in cases when political scandals, involving corruption charges of high-ranking officials in Latvia are considered. For this purpose, the present study has focused on the analysis of selected commentaries that deal with corruption charges which were revealed in December 2019 issues of the magazine IR. The Latvian-origin weekly magazine IR was selected deliberately because; on the one hand, it has an enormous influence on how social reality is constructed and perceived by Latvian citizens. On the other hand, it was important to reveal that the evidence-based theoretical premises on the relationship between metaphor and society in the English language are applicable and work cross-linguistically in Latvian. The research presents a case study type. With the focus on the conceptualization of corruption-related social problems, selected discursive practices that dealt with the corruption cases being revealed by the news medium IR were considered. The results demonstrated that the journalists of the commentaries tend to take a critical discourse perspective on the representation of corruption-related issues and political events, which can be represented at the levels of abstraction. Conceptual metaphors contributed to mental representations of political issues and communication of social reality by conveying additional negative evaluation of such an inherently derogatory concept as corruption. The metaphors CORRUPTION IS DIRT, CORRUPTION IS GARBAGE, CORRUPTION IS NUCLEAR DISASTER, CORRUPTION IS A DISEASE also fulfil a cognitive function, helping to understand the concept of corruption in terms of another more concrete concept. The use of metaphors in the commentaries may have causal effects such as bringing about changes in the readers’ knowledge, beliefs and attitudes.

Eating words: a discourse historical analysis of the public debate over India’s 2013 National Food Security Act

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 174-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashok Kotwal ◽  
Kate Power
Keyword(s):  
Food Security ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
English Language ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
National Food Security

Purpose – This paper aims to provide a situated critical discourse analysis of the public debate around India’s 2013 National Food Security Act (NFSA), describing its rhetorical characteristics and the context within which it has taken place. Design/methodology/approach – Using Wodak’s (2001) Discourse Historical Approach (DHA), the authors examine media coverage of the NFSA, attending to perspectivization, intensification and mitigation and representational and argumentational strategies. The authors also consider this coverage in light of its intratextual, intertextual, situational and wider socio-political and economic contexts. The corpus consists of 29 English-language Indian newspaper and magazine articles, published in print and online between 2011 and 2014. Findings – This paper explains the rhetorical purchase of the term “food security” in contemporary Indian public policy debates by comparing the leftist, right wing and centrist arguments. Research limitations/implications – Owing to the detailed qualitative analysis presented here, the corpus is necessarily limited in size. Newspaper articles contributed by one of the authors were omitted from the study. Originality/value – The DHA claims to be an interdisciplinary framework, but relatively few studies involve true cross-disciplinary research. By contrast, this study relies on close collaboration by scholars active in economics and applied linguistics – thus, demonstrating both the potential for, and the value of, working coherently across academic disciplines. Also, unlike most DHA studies, which interrogate dominant discourses, this paper compares diverse discourses competing for influence.

scholarly journals Without SLO BECCS, fast net-zero looks unlikely

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caspar Donnison ◽  
Karolina Trdlicova ◽  
Alison Mohr ◽  
Gail Taylor
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Carbon Capture ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Carbon Capture And Storage ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Media Analysis ◽  
The Public ◽  
Net Zero ◽  
Social License ◽  
The Uk

Abstract Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) discussions have been dominated by global scale assessments with very limited exploration of how and where the technology could be deployed. A social license to operate (SLO) may not be achieved if key aspects of deployment and public concerns are not addressed, as has happened with onshore wind energy and fracking. There is a crucial role for the news media in this process because of its influence over the public debate and public attitudes. The fate of the public debate on BECCS has major implications for the delivery of net-zero emissions: time is very short for policymakers to find alternative strategies to meet carbon budgets if BECCS is rejected. Our news media analysis of the UK and California explores the ‘storylines’ which frame the public debate of BECCS. Results highlight: 1) an immature public debate, significantly lagging policy objectives; 2) a distinctive set of storylines specific to California and the UK; and 3) the absence of a location-specific discussion of BECCS, which we argue is critical to community-level support necessary for a SLO.

scholarly journals The uses of satire: Unorthodox news, cultural chaos and the interrogation of power

Journalism ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Harrington
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
The Political ◽  
Audience Research ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
Production Team ◽  
Significant Challenge ◽  
Political World ◽  
Political Agents ◽  
Significant Opportunity

This article focuses on the satirical Australian show The Chaser’s War on Everything, and uses it to critically assess the potential political and social ramifications of what McNair (2006) has called ‘cultural chaos’. Drawing upon and analysing several examples from this particular program, alongside interviews with its production team and qualitative audience research, this article argues that this TV show’s engagement with politicians and political issues, in a way that departs from the conventions of traditional journalism, offers a significant opportunity for the interrogation of power. The program’s use of often bizarre and unexpected comedic confrontation allows it to present a perhaps more authentic image of political agents than is often cultivated in mainstream journalism. This suggests therefore that the shift from homogeneity to heterogeneity in the news media – which McNair (2006) sees as a key feature of cultural chaos – presents a significant challenge to those who wish to retain control over what the public sees and understands about the political world, and is a development which should be viewed in positive terms.

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