scholarly journals Dominant Christian narratives of solidarity during the COVID pandemic in Hungary

Intersections ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 101-119
Author(s):  
Anna Vancsó ◽  
Zoltán Kmetty

In crises, the importance of solidarity becomes crucial. Religious organizations, as members of civil society, have an essential role in promoting and participating in solidarity action. Dominant religious organizations thus can have the power to shape the image of solidarity in a crisis and, by creating a dominant narrative, to strengthen their social position. In times of crisis, hidden religious narratives could gain visibility, and religious authority could also gain more power. But in the previous migration crisis, religious actors failed to fulfill their solidarity role actively, and were unable to strengthen their public position in Hungary. We used both quantitative and qualitative text analysis methods to understand the role of religious actors in solidarity action during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have blended these methods with network analysis techniques to present the role of different actors in this communication process. Our results show that the appearance of religious or church-related actors does not infer a religious interpretation, per se. Many articles mentioned church-related organizations as good examples of solidarity, but this was not embedded into the religious narrative. Religious actors mentioned together with political actors were more visible in online media, but the lack of the former’s own voice also shows the decreasing power of religious authority. However, we found religious narratives that called for new understanding and interpretations of the pandemic and its effect on society and the future, but those interpretations were represented mainly by Pope Francis, and echoed by only a few Hungarian actors, showing the lack of dominant and politically independent religious narratives about social issues in the media or the public sphere.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-85
Author(s):  
Suada A. Dzogovic ◽  
◽  
Vehbi Miftari ◽  

The topic of this article presents communication challenges and the role of the media in constructing an image of migrants and refugees as “the others” in our societies today. The article analyses the migrant situation in South-Eastern Europe, specifically in migration crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina that has been going on since 2018. The aim is to present the basic aspects of this issue and offer answers to key questions - who are migrants and refugees, what’s their own identity, from which countries do they come, how do they cross the border, where do they go, what is the state’s attitude towards them, what forms and channels of communication the state and other stakeholders use toward them, who cares for them, what do they preserve from their national, cultural and/or language identities and how do they construct self-identity and confront with the “hosting identities”, who donates funds for migration management and how they are managed? Also, a special focus of the research will be on the human rights of migrants and refugees in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is the subject of various discussions - both within the country itself and among various humanitarian, governmental and non-governmental international organizations in the EU and beyond.


Res Publica ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-270
Author(s):  
Spyros A. Walgrave

Although the quasi-confederal character of Yugoslavia, especially after the introduction of its 1974 constitution did not encourage the development of a genuine Yugoslavian public sphere wherepublic debate could transcend ethnic and republic divisions, it nevertheless allowed the formation of what could be called Yugoslav cultural space, a space within which social and political actors (feminist, peace movements) forged their identities regardless of the ethnic or national diversity that characterised their membership. However, the existence of this 'space' had a limited impact in Yugoslav politics partly due to the breakdown of inter-republic communication and the fragmentation of the Yugoslavian mass media. This paper traces the process of disintegration of the Yugoslav cultural space and the emergence of national 'public spheres' in the republics and provinces of former Yugoslavia and attempts to assess the role of the mass media and cultural institutions in these developments by identifying the key strategies of representation employed in the process of the fragmentation and 'nationalisation' of the public sphere of former Yugoslavia.


Journalism ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146488492095950
Author(s):  
Jefferson Lyndon D Ragragio

Editorials are a political force used by news media to fulfil its watchdog function in fragile democracies like the Philippines. However, they also serve as a platform to invite a more positive reading of strongman administration. Against the backdrop of media populism, the article will problematize how the Fourth Estate articulates its political stance by examining the tensions and complexities in editorials. It will highlight the ways the media deals with subjects and stories surrounding Rodrigo Duterte. Through an analysis of editorials of four leading dominant news outlets (Bulletin, Inquirer, Rappler, and Star), three meta-thematic categories of media frames are uncovered. First, character degradation frames delineate how the media denounces the ties of Duterte with other political actors, particularly the Marcoses and China’s Xi. Second, pro-establishment frames echo the optimistic mantra of the government amid crisis. And third, non-editorial frames exhibit the failure of media to publish watchdog-inspired editorials. Each of these categories has underlying frames that are indicative of the democratic potential, or lack thereof, of news media.


2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 590-612
Author(s):  
Luca Ozzano

AbstractThis article is part of a special issue on the five Muslim democracies. It aims at understanding the role played by religion, and particularly by religiously oriented actors, in Turkey's democratization processes. The first section analyzes the different theoretical approaches to the role of religion in democratization. The second section analyzes the different phases of Turkey's political history since the 1980 coup, taking into account both democratization processes and the role played by religious actors in the political system, and trying to understand the possible relations between the two phenomena.


2011 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 166-188
Author(s):  
Aistė Valiauskaitė

The article analyses the information that spreads in the media during the election campaign. It looks at the aspect of promises made by politicians through an academic lens. The definition of a political promise is explained; some insights are devoted to an analysis of the reasons why some promises are more commonly fulfilled. The paper mostly concentrates on the role of the media, combining ideas of media theorists with the investigation of pre-election TV debates “Lyderių forumas”.Keywords: campaign, objectivity, parliamentary elections, political communication, professionalism, promise, tv debates.


2020 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 01004
Author(s):  
Elena Terentyeva ◽  
Marina Milovanova ◽  
Elena Pavlova ◽  
Nina Wendt ◽  
Rumiya Kaderova

The study reveals the multifunctionality which is typical of German and Russian political blogs. Regardless of the language of the blogs, information and evaluation, political and convening, consolidating, agitation and propaganda, presentation and propaganda, and directive functions are among the dominant functions. The paper briefly describes the linguistic means which represent these functions. It shows the discursive hybridity of political blogs which is manifested in combining the features of Internet discourse with elements of political, news, journalistic, and social values discourses (in German political blogs) and political, business, legal, conversational, and artistic discourses (in Russian political blogs). The authors establish the relevant communicative strategies of the addresser (the strategy to justify a “problem”, the strategy to support / not support demonstrated evaluation) and the tactics that implement them. The authors also define the topics for discussion which initiate the addressee’s protest reaction – these are social issues, international and regional developments, environment and migration crisis in German political blogs and finance and taxes, constitution and government, elections, corruption and officials in Russian political blogs. The paper describes the ways of forming and maintaining convening technologies in the protest practice considered. It considers the features of mediatization of politics and personality in the content analyzed, which are manifested in guiding the political agenda to the needs of the addressee. It also establishes that German and Russian political blogs as a protest practice are characterized by a set of common system and communicative characteristics, a similar strategy and tactic organization, and a different set of problem areas marked with the “threat” index. The results obtained contribute to further development of the provisions of the communicative theory of protest, facilitate the understanding of modern protest forms and attempt to explain how technology, politics and the media sphere are interlinked.


Author(s):  
María Velasco González ◽  
Ernesto Carrillo Barroso

This article forms part of a classic social science debate on the role of the media in the construction of social and political narratives. The object of the paper is to study the rise and fall of the concept of tourismphobia in the Spanish media. The case is analyzed in the light of public policies studies, especially those analyzing agenda-setting, the social construction of the definition of public problems and the struggles of coalitions seeking to impose their public policy narratives in the policy-making process. With this purpose, a database was used that collected more than 11,000 news items over a substantial period of time. Its analysis reveals that media attention rises sharply after active protest actions against tourist saturation and that the term is mostly linked to specific territories and cities and to certain political figures. It also allows us to observe how some political responses to the problem appear more in the media, while others are minimized. The conclusions indicate that the “tourismphobia” neologism was capitalized on – which is often the case with terms that circulate in the public sphere – by various groups attempting to highlight some of its semantic dimensions over others. The study also reveals that the media assume an active position in the construction of discourses in relation to tourism also as a political and not just an economic issue. Furthermore, it shows that the use of the term has greatly declined, either because the problem has become dormant or because it has been reformulated into other terms that are more in line with dominant narratives.


2022 ◽  
pp. 026732312110726
Author(s):  
Anu Koivunen ◽  
Johanna Vuorelma

This article examines the role of trust in the age of mediatised politics. Authority, we suggest, can be successfully enacted despite the disrupted nature of the public sphere if both rational and moral trust are utilised to formulate validity claims. Drawing from Maarten A. Hajer's theorisation of authority in contemporary politics, we develop a model of how political actors and institutions as well as the media employ both rational and moral trust performances to generate authority. Analysing a Finnish case of controversial investigative journalism on defence intelligence, we show how the media in network governance need to critically evaluate the authority performances of political actors while at the same time enacting their own authority performances to retain their position within the governing network and to manufacture trust among networked publics. This volatile position can lead to situations where the media compete for authority with traditional political institutions.


The Handbook of Migration Crises runs the gamut of situations that are constructed as crises in migration contexts around the globe, historically and contemporaneously. The volume deconstructs and questions representations of migrations as crises, examining how crises arise, what is a crisis, and how this concept is used in the media and politics in transit and receiving countries. As a whole, the volume unveils the structural forces and actors that contribute to the construction of migration crises. It highlights the role of the media and public officials in framing migratory flows as crises, revisits and redefines, through a critical lens, what is commonly understood as a “migration crisis.” The volume brings together an exceptional group of scholars from around the world to critically examine migration crises and to revisit the notion of crisis through the prism of the context in which permanent and non-permanent migration flows occur.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolina Borčić ◽  
Sara Glavač

This article analyses links between the archetypal myths in Croatian news stories and images of woman politicians transferring through the media to the public. A total of 73 articles have been empirically analysed using content analysis to identify master myths according to Jack Lule’s classification in Croatian news articles about the migration crisis 2015. The analysis covers the period from 31 July 2015 to 8 November 2015. The articles have been selected by searching web extension of the newspapers Jutarnji list, Večernji list and 24sata from 31 July 2015 to 8 November 2015. The data has been selected, coded and analysed per chosen woman politicians, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, Vesna Pusić, Mirela Holy, Ruža Tomašić and Milanka Opačić. The results show that the dominant myth in all analysed statements is the myth of a good mother. In doing so, the use of lexemes indicates a stereotyped and idealized social role of a woman who cares for and protects ‘her family’. Two framing perspectives are evident: one is a patriarchal, protective and defensive attitude towards migrants, while the other is humanitarian, based on a positive attitude towards migrants. The article’s value is that it provides a perspective on mythological narration within media texts, whereby the mythological narration could be used as a tool for stereotypical and ideological construction on politician’s images in the media.


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