Appraisal as co-selection and media performativity: 5G technology imaged in German news discourse

Author(s):  
Min Dong ◽  
Mengfei Gao

Abstract This article views appraisal as co-selection patterns of target, source and evaluative parameters and investigates the ways in which news discourse retells news stories and reproduces truthful reality. We combined the corpus-assisted method and quantitative/qualitative analysis of the data, i.e., 904 sentences which were extracted from the corpus of German 5G news reports by selecting the top 5 items from each of the noun keywords lists of the three subcorpora of economics, politics and technology news reports. It was found that the German media restage the necessity and desirability to promote the development of German communication facilities/technology through international cooperation, particularly Germany-Sino cooperation. In addition, a hesitant image was evoked as to the high-profile 5G development in Germany with an awareness of the potential security risks and economic losses. On the intersubjective dimension, our findings suggest that journalists make full exploitation of different dialogistic positioning strategies for closing down or opening up the dialogic space to a greater or lesser degree. More specifically, they tend to acknowledge and endorse the positive/negative attitudes attributed to the non-authorial voices towards particular targets in the fields of economics, politics or technology. A future comparison with the genre of news comments or editorials would deepen our understanding of the performativity of media.

Author(s):  
Nicolá Goc

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.


Author(s):  
Eleni Schirmer ◽  
Michael W. Apple

Corporate-backed philanthropic groups have become increasingly involved in political processes in the past ten years. The Koch Brothers’ and their political advocacy groups, have become particularly prominent players. Their influence extends beyond high-profile state-level elections and increasingly have begun investing in municipal affairs of small cities and towns, such as school board elections like Kenosha, Wisconsin and Jefferson County, Colorado in the US. This chapter asks, why do groups like Americans for Prosperity care about small-town school board elections? This chapter highlights two particularly significant local examples in the United States: school board elections in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2014 and Jefferson County, Colorado in 2015. Through documentary analysis of school board records, news reports, and district evaluations, in both Wisconsin and Colorado, we chronicle the political contest for control of each school board. Our findings illustrate the ideological and political project of corporate, conservative influence in public education in the United States.


2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gopal V. Krishnan

The accounting profession is facing a credibility crisis precipitated by the failure of several high-profile companies and the alleged failure of their auditors to detect and persuade their clients to recognize economic losses in earnings in a timely fashion. Investors, regulators, analysts, and the public are interested in identifying factors that enhance the timeliness of earnings, particularly about bad news. This study provides empirical evidence on one such factor—auditors' industry expertise. Using a large sample of clients of Big 6 auditors, this research examines the association between auditor industry expertise, measured in terms of an industry's share in the auditor's portfolio of client industries, and the speed with which publicly available bad news about future cash flows is recognized in earnings. The findings indicate that the earnings of clients of specialist auditors are more timely in reflecting bad news than earnings of clients of nonspecialist auditors. This finding is consistent with the notion that auditors' industry expertise moderates the tendency of auditees to delay the recognition of economic losses in earnings.


Journalism ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146488492110459
Author(s):  
Lillian Boxman-Shabtai

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.


Author(s):  
Kristy A. Hesketh

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.


2020 ◽  
pp. 183-210
Author(s):  
Donald C. Behringer ◽  
Chelsea L. Wood ◽  
Martin Krkošek ◽  
David Bushek

Infectious marine diseases have profound impacts on fisheries and aquaculture through their effects on growth, fecundity, mortality, and marketability. Economic losses have motivated research to minimize the negative impacts of disease on these industries. However, this relationship is reciprocal, as fishing and aquaculture can shape disease transmission. The effects of fisheries and aquaculture on disease are scale dependent, with different outcomes at the population, metapopulation, community, and ecosystem levels. Management approaches are limited in fisheries, and intense in aquaculture, sometimes with undesirable impacts on wild species. Management needs can be particularly intense in hatcheries, where stocks are sensitive and kept at high densities. Increased interest in microbiome–disease interactions are opening up new opportunities to manage marine diseases in aquaculture. Solutions for marine diseases in fisheries and aquaculture may ultimately improve human health by reducing exposure to pathogens and increasing nutrient quality, but could negatively impact human health through exposure to antibiotics and other chemicals used to treat parasites.


1999 ◽  
Vol 123-124 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Sur Jung Min

Abstract This study examines the linguistic structures and processes through which news reports about a political issue in South Korea serve to propagate specific ideologies. Critical linguistic analysis is used as the theoretical and analytical framework to examine news reports about the North Korean nuclear threat to South Korea in the New York Times and the Korea Herald. Through a comparative analysis of two newspapers, it illustrates how the linguistic structures and processes in news discourse combine to produce particular meanings which construct ideological representations of social reality by establishing an 'us vs. them' dichotomy from their own particular ideological position. This study makes two contributions. First, it contributes to the development of a theoretical and methodological framework which is capable of revealing the ideological underpinning of news texts. Second, this study demonstrates the ideological role of language within news discourse as an apparatus for molding attitudes and value-systems in readers. This study has an implication for teaching language awareness of the constructive and functional nature of language in general and news discourse in particular in and out of a school setting, (key words : critical linguistic analysis, language awareness, language and ideology, naturalization, propagation)


Author(s):  
Chris Paterson

The role of foreign correspondent has long been prominent in journalism but is undergoing considerable change. While many in this role are considered elite, and have a very high profile, others practice their reporting in anonymous and sometimes precarious conditions. Prominent types of foreign correspondent are the capital correspondent, bureau chief, and conflict correspondent. Conflict correspondents can, in turn, be categorized into three main types depending on how they perceive their role: the propagandist; the recorder of history; and the moralist. The role of foreign correspondent has been the subject of a great deal of research, including analyses of news content focused on the nature of bias and story selection and framing in international reporting, and observational and interview-based studies of practitioners of the role. Research has sought to shift the focus from elite correspondents for international media organizations to the myriad local media professionals who play an increasing role in shaping international news stories; to the move toward social media as a newsgathering and news-dissemination tool; to the safety of journalists—as their work becomes increasingly imperiled around the world; and to the vital but largely hidden role of news agencies in shaping international news.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoqi Yang ◽  
Kai Huo ◽  
Xinyu Zhang ◽  
Weidong Jiang ◽  
Yong Chen

Security risks and economic losses of civil aviation caused by Foreign Object Debris (FOD) have increased rapidly. Synthetic Aperture Radars (SARs) with high resolutions potentially have the capability to detect FODs on the runways, but the target echo is hard to be distinguished from strong clutter. This paper proposes a clutter-analysis-based Space-time Adaptive Processing (STAP) method in order to obtain effective clutter suppression and moving FOD indication, under inhomogeneous clutter background. Specifically, we first divide the radar coverage into equal scattering cells in the rectangular coordinates system rather than the polar ones. We then measure normalized RCSs within the X-band and employ the acquired results to modify the parameters of traditional models. Finally, we describe the clutter expressions as responses of the scattering cells in space and time domain to obtain the theoretical clutter covariance. Experimental results at 10 GHz show that FODs with a reflection higher than −30 dBsm can be effectively detected by a Linear Constraint Minimum Variance (LCMV) filter in azimuth when the noise is −60 dBm. It is also validated to indicate a −40 dBsm target in Doppler. Our approach can obtain effective clutter suppression 60dB deeper than the training-sample-coupled STAP under the same conditions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jayne Osgood ◽  
Camilla Eline Andersen

In this paper we grapple with the ways in which real-world issues directly impact children’s lives and ask what else gets produced through encounters with children’s global news media, specifically within the contexts of the United Kingdom and Norway. Our aim is to experiment with storytelling and worldling practices as a means to open up generative possibilities to encounter and reconfigure difficult knowledges. We take two contemporary events, the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire tragedy in London and the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting massacre in Florida, as a means to attend to ways in which affects are materialised across multiple times and spaces. News reports of these harrowing events, alongside what they produced in terms of child activism, racism and toxic masculinity, provided a catalyst for a feminist new materialist experiment in generating other knowledges through material-affective-embodied encounters. Newspapers, glue, sticky tape, string, torches, bags and a cartridge for a firearm were used in important work within a speculative workshop, where a small number of early childhood researchers came together to be open to multiple and experimental ways of (k)not-knowing to formulate collectively shared problems. Following Manning (2016), we recognise that to avoid getting stuck in familiar ways of thinking and doing we need to undertake research differently. We wondered how the re-materialisation of these events (through objects, artefacts, sounds and images) might shift our thinking about childhood in other directions. We dwell upon the affective work that these high-profile news events perform and how they might become rearticulated through affective encounters with materiality. Attending to how these events worked on us involves staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) as it becomes reignited, mutated and amplified across time and in different contexts. Our goal is to generate other possibilities that seek to reconfigure the ‘image of the child’. By resisting comforts of recognition, reflection and identification, we reach beyond what we think we know about how children are in the world and instead argue for their entanglement with difficult knowledges through our and their world-making practices.


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