scholarly journals High Stakes

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benedicte Carlsen ◽  
Hanne Riese

Abstract Researchers are key sources of an increasing amount of research news in the media. Hitherto, the meagre empirical literature on researchers’ media performances has been divided in two strands: one indicating that researchers are generally motivated to report their research in the media, and the other paradoxically reporting negative experiences of and conflict with journalists. The aim of the present study was to explore Norwegian researchers’ motivations for participating in and experiences of journalistic interviews. We find that researchers’ main reason for seeking media coverage is that they want their findings to be of use to society. This makes it essential to avoid errors or misleading framing of the news report. Despite strong motivations to do so, the researchers experience that communicating through the media is stressful and that their motivations for seeking media attention are in conflict with the motives of some research journalists. The study reveals a link between researchers´ motivation for seeking media coverage and their experiences of conflict with journalists.

2021 ◽  

Pretrial publicity (PTP) refers to media coverage of criminal and civil cases prior to trial. Every era has its high-profile cases involving individuals and businesses—e.g., Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Boston Bomber), Enron, Timothy McVeigh, O. J. Simpson, John Hinckley, Patty Hearst, John Mitchell, Sam Shepperd, Bruno Richard Hauptmann (Lindbergh baby kidnapping), Sacco and Vanzetti. Serious and notorious crimes and cases involving celebrities tend to receive the most media attention. Much media attention will operate to the detriment of criminal and civil defendants—reporting may emphasize the dastardliness of the defendant’s actions, the effects of those acts on victims, the evidence against the defendant, opinions about the defendant’s guilt expressed by law enforcement personnel, and the like. Whenever a case receives substantial PTP—and especially when the PTP is negative—questions arise about the likelihood that a defendant can receive a fair trial. The concern is that the substantial PTP will bias prospective jurors against the defendant and result in a verdict driven by PTP rather than trial evidence. Concerns about the media potentially biasing trials pit First Amendment guarantees of a free press against Sixth Amendment rights of defendants to “a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.” Of course, if media coverage has been substantial and negative, a number of questions arise: has the deck been stacked against a defendant? To what extent? How can this be proven? If there is improper bias, what are the solutions—delay the trial? Give the defendant expanded opportunities to find unbiased jurors? Rely on judges to instruct jurors to put aside their biases (and rely on jurors to do so)? Change the trial to another venue—if there is one where the PTP has not been so voluminous or negative? A substantial body of empirical research has developed over the past fifty years that seeks to answer such questions and do so using reliable research methods.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-171
Author(s):  
Thaddeus Müller

On May 26, 2016, the police raided 43 cannabis dispensaries in Toronto, Canada, making 90 arrests. This article aims to describe the narrative of the responsible state agencies concerning the police raid and compare it to the narrative of those who opposed it, such as activists, as well as consumers and sellers of cannabis. While such concepts as moral entrepreneur, moral panic, and moral crusade have traditionally been used to study those in power, I will employ them to explore both the state narrative and ways in which counterclaims-makers resisted it. In order to do so, I will further develop the concept of moral entrepreneurship and its characteristics by relating it to studies of moral panics and social problems. This article will be guided by the following question: How did each party socially construct its cannabis narrative, and in what way can we use the concept of moral entrepreneurship to describe and analyze these narratives as social constructions? I have investigated the media coverage of the raid and ethnographically studied shops in Toronto in order to study the narratives. My findings show that both parties used a factual neutral style, as well as a dramatizing style. The later includes such typical crusading strategies as constructing victims and villains and presenting the image of a dystopian social world. In order to explain the use of these strategies, we will relate them to the shifting wider social and historical context and to the symbolic connotation of cannabis shops in Toronto in particular and in Canada as a whole.


Author(s):  
Yangkun Huang ◽  
Xiaoping Xu ◽  
Sini Su

Over the past decade, China has witnessed fast-paced technological advancements in the media industry, as well as major shifts in the health agenda portrayed in the media. Therefore, a key starting point when discussing health communication lies in whether media attention and public attention towards health issues are structurally aligned, and to what extent the news media guide public attention. Based on data mined from 73,060 sets of the Baidu Search Index and Media Index on 20 terms covering different types of cancer from 2011 to 2020, the Granger test demonstrates that, in the last decade, public attention and media attention towards cancer in China has gone through two distinct phases. During the first phase, 2011-2015, Chinese news media still held the key in transferring the salience of issues on most cancer types to the public. In the second phase, from 2016-2020, public attention towards cancer has gradually diverged from media coverage, mirroring the imbalance and mismatch between the demand of active public and the supply of cancer information from news media. This study provides an overview of the dynamic transition on cancer issues in China over a ten-year span, along with descriptive results on public and media attention towards specific cancer types.


Author(s):  
Matt Wade

By any measure, 2009 was a big year for news in India. And yet the safety of Indian students in Australia ranked among the major news events in India that year. The India-Australia Poll 2013 found 65 per cent of respondents believed the Indian media had accurately reported the problems faced by Indian students in Australia in 2009-10. That implies two-thirds of Indians accepted the Indian media’s mostly negative depictions of Australia. Those who believed the media reporting about Australia had been accurate were more likely to be from large cities, be tertiary educated and have relatively high-incomes. The poll found 62 per cent of respondents thought Australia was a dangerous place for Indian students and that 61 per cent believed attacks on Indian students were motivated by racism. The results suggest negative perceptions about Australia created by the media’s portrayal of the student attacks linger in the Indian community. The timing of the initial attacks, and the imagery associated with them, helped attract and sustain media attention on the issue. The diplomatic tensions created by the crisis highlighted the growing influence of the broadcast media on India’s foreign relations. But the episode also exposed a deep lack of understanding about India in Australia. Governments were slow to comprehend how much damage media coverage of student attacks could do to Australia’s reputation in India. 


2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 171-187
Author(s):  
Taha Siddiqui

Valentine’s Day celebration in India has been much debated and covered by the media in the last couple of years. In the year 2009, far right Hindu activist from Sri Ram Sena to Bajrang Dal were involved in beating up unmarried couples and blackening their faces, as mark of shame for celebrating Valentine’s Day. They claimed that the festival was a “western practice” and promotes “lust not love”. Following this other Anti- Valentine’s Day groups also expressed their views and this led to public debate about moral policing and Indian culture. However what is interesting to note is the fact how media covered. At one side media has played a big role in promoting it (for many reasons) and on the other hand it has also criticized it for cultural and religious concerns.This research tries to explore in depth how media covers the festival with commercialization, culture, religion and politics in the backdrop. The research studies 9 newspapers of in 3 different languages, namely English, Hindi and Urdu.  The study tries to find out whether media is biased in covering the festival or is it propagating an idea to its readers. The idea of taking 3 different languages is to draw a sharp comparison and contrast among the national and vernacular newspapers.In order to find it, both quantitative and qualitative methods have been applied to the articles. Content analysis and Textual analysis are the important methods used to find out the statistics and underlying meanings behind these articles.Int. J. Soc. Sc. Manage. Vol. 3, Issue-3: 171-187


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Van Aelst ◽  
Rosa van Santen ◽  
Lotte Melenhorst ◽  
Luzia Helfer

AbstractThis study on the role of media attention for the Dutch question hour answers three questions: to what extent is media attention a source of inspiration for oral parliamentary questions? What explains the newsworthiness of these questions? And what explains the extent of media coverage for the questions posed during the question hour? To address this, we present a content analysis of oral parliamentary questions and related press coverage in five recent years. The results show first that oral questions are usually based on media attention for a topic. Concerns about media influence should however be nuanced: it is not necessarily the coverage itself, but also regularly a political statement that is the actual source of a parliamentary question. The media are thus an important “channel” for the interaction between politicians. Second, our analysis shows that oral questions do not receive media attention naturally. Several news values help to explain the amount of news coverage that questions receive. “Surfing the wave” of news attention for a topic in the days previous to the question hour seems to be the best way to generate media attention.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 367-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Birkner ◽  
Daniel Nölleke

Using the concept of mediatization, in this article, we analyze the relationship between sport and media from a sport-centered perspective. Examining the autobiographies of 14 German and English soccer players, we investigate how athletes use media outlets, what they perceive as the media’s influence and its logic, and—crucially—how this usage and these perceptions affect their own media-related behavior. Our findings demonstrate the important role of the media for the sports systems from the athlete’s point of view and demonstrate the research potential of mediatization as a fruitful concept in studies on sport communication. On the one hand, the sport stars reflect in their autobiographies that their status and income depend on media coverage; and on the other hand, they complain about the omnipresence of the media, especially offside the pitch and feel unfairly treated by the tabloid press, both in England and in Germany.


Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Stjernborg ◽  
Mekonnen Tesfahuney ◽  
Anders Wretstrand

This study focuses on Seved, a segregated and socioeconomically “poor” neighborhood in the city of Malmö in Sweden. It has attracted wide media coverage, a possible consequence of which is its increased stigmatization. The wide disparity between perceived or imagined fear and the actual incidence of, or exposure to, violence attests to the important role of the media in shaping mental maps and place images. Critical discourse analysis of daily newspaper articles shows that Seved is predominantly construed as unruly and a place of lawlessness. Mobility comprises an important aspect of the stigmatization of places, the politics of fear, and discourses of the “other.” In turn, place stigmatization, discourses of the other, and the politics of fear directly and indirectly affect mobility strategies of individuals and groups.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoine Bridier-Nahmias ◽  
Estera Badau ◽  
Pi Nyvall-collen ◽  
Antoine Andremont ◽  
Jocelyne Arquembourg

AbstractThe emergence of antimicrobial resistant infections from food is well documented in the scientific literature but, in this kind of matter, the public opinion is an important policy driver and is vastly forged by traditional media. Here, we propose a text mining study through about 500 articles from two reference daily U.S. newspapers to assess the media coverage of this issue. Our results indicate that, since the middle of the 80s, the two journals considered here adopted a very different narrative around the issue, echoing civil society concerns in one case and the official discourse in the other.


Author(s):  
DIYAH INDIYATI ◽  
Hartin Nur Khusnia ◽  
Dian Lestari Miharja

The mass media fact report within social reality comes with a complexities of interest. As an institution which has the power to shape public opinion, the press also able to give  influence both positive and negative, depend on the interests represented. Including while  representing the image of women in politics through its news report. Through the news report, text media construct a reality of a women in politics image. In which this reality constructed by the media is not a value-free.This study analyses the media discourse of a woman politician recently elected as a Bupati (which has the same rank as a Mayor) of Bima District Indah Dhamayanti Putri in the local news media coverage Lombok Post and Suara NTB from the February to May 2016. Both newspaper are daily newspaper which contribute the largest circulation in the province of West Nusa Tenggara. Hence, the two media are the most accessed printed media in the province. How the reality of woman leadership in local scale constructed by this two dailies will certainly influence the view of the people , and the way people behave towards this leadersship. Moreover Indah Dhamayanti Putri is the first female leader in the province of West Nusa Tenggara.The news about Indah Dhamayanti Putri leadership analyzed in this study consist of her profile as the Bupati, her political activities, polocies and programs. The news analyzed using critical discourse analysis method from Norman Fairclough model, by analyzing the text in the macro-micro societal context. FOcus of the analysis are more on how language is formed and shaped from social relationships and a certain social context.  Fairclough divide discourse analysis in three dimensions, textual analysis, discourse practice and socio-cultural practices . From the research conducted, it appears that women politicians Indah Dhamayanti Putri are perceived in terms of stereotypes both in terms of physical appearance, figure or her role as wife and mother are still inherent in the discourse of textual reports of two mass media. Keywords: Representation women politician, image, discourse analysis


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