scholarly journals Betrayal and Fear: Press Coverage of Canadian Skinheads

1992 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Murray Forman

Abstract: This paper examines the ways in which skinheads and the press in Canada mutually engage in public strategies to subvert each other's significatory powers. Arguably, skinheads present a limited challenge to the social mainstream which, like their style, exists primarily on the surface. In analyzing the media response, the discursive containment of subcultural resistance is revealed as news reports retain the social order of the existing institutional structure. As skinheads attempt to draw attention to themselves and to society's hidden contradictions, the media exploit their spectacularity, transforming it into a saleable news commodity. Résumé: Cet article propose une étude des façons dont les "skinheads" et la presse au Canada se livrent un duel sur la place publique dans le but de subvertir leurs significations et leurs pouvoirs respectifs. On reconnaît qu'à première vue les "skinheads" posent un défi à la majorité de la société. L'analyse de la réponse des médias révèle que le discours de la presse atténue la dimension rebelle de cette sous-culture et tend à renforcer l'ordre social et la structure institutionnelle établis. Les "skinheads" veulent attirer l'attention sur eux-mêmes et sur les contradictions de la société; les médias exploitent leurs côtés spectaculaires à des fins commerciales.

2020 ◽  
pp. 175048132098209
Author(s):  
Quan Zheng ◽  
Zengyi Zhang

Current problems and controversies involving GM issues are not limited to scientific fields but spill over into the social context. When disagreements enter society via media outlets, social factors such as interests, resources, and values can contribute to complicating discourse about a controversial subject. Using the framework for the analysis of media discourse proposed by Carvalho, this paper examines news reports on Chinese GM rice from the dimensions of both text and context, covering the period of 2001–2015. This study shows that media may not only construct basic concepts, theme, and discursive strategies but also generate an ideological stance. This ideology constituted an influential dimension of the GM rice controversy. By following ideology consistent with the dominant position of the Chinese government, the media selectively constructed and endowed GM rice with a specific meaning in the Chinese social context, making possible the reproduction and communication of GM rice knowledge and risks to the public.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
pp. 597-612
Author(s):  
Daniel Trottier

This article offers an exploratory account of press coverage of digitally mediated vigilantism. It considers how the UK press renders these events visible in a sustained and meaningful way. News reports and editorials add visibility to these events, and also make them more tangible when integrating content from social media platforms. In doing so, this coverage directs attention to a range of social actors, who may be perceived as responsible for these kinds of developments. In considering how other social actors are presented in relation to digital vigilantism, this study focusses on press accounts of those either initiating or being targeted by online denunciations, and also on a broader and often amorphous range of spectators to such events, often referred to as ‘internet mobs’. Relatedly, this article explores how specific practices related to digital vigilantism such as denunciation are expressed in press coverage, as well as coverage of motivations by the public to either participate or facilitate such practices. Reflecting on how the press represent mediated denunciation will illustrate not only how tabloids and broadsheets frame such practices, but also how they take advantage of connective and data-generating affordances associated with social platforms.


2019 ◽  
pp. 107-122
Author(s):  
Ana Sentov

This paper will examine how Grace Marks, the female protagonist/narrator of Alias Grace (1996), reclaims her history, which is comprised of many different, often contradictory stories of her life and the crime for which she is imprisoned. These stories reflect the dominant discourse of a conservative male-dominated society, in which Grace is an outsider, due to her gender, class, age, and immigrant status. The law, the medical profession, the church, and the media all see Grace as a disruptive element: a woman who committed or assisted in a murder, a lunatic and/or a member of the working class who dared disturb the social order. Grace is revealed not as a passive victim, an object to be acted upon, but as an agent capable of reclaiming history and constructing herstory, challenging and defying the expectations of dominant social structures. The paper will show that Alias Grace, as a novel giving voice to the marginalized and the silenced, stands as a compelling work that examines and provides insights into the position of women and its changes over the course of history, provoking a discourse that remains relevant today


2019 ◽  
pp. 130-156
Author(s):  
Katherine Isobel Baxter

Chapter Six provides an extended examination of the newspaper reporting of the treason trial of Obafemi Awolowo, the second major treason trial after independence. How the Nigerian press covered the trial illuminates the ways in which legal process as a mode of nation formation was woven into the daily lives of newspaper readers. Moreover, attending to that press coverage illustrates the importance of narrative and literary form in the process of national self-construction. The chapter begins by outlining the relationship of politics and the press in Nigeria before looking at the defining features of the trial itself. The chapter examines how the trial was presented in the press and the readerly engagement that the press sought to foster. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the larger significance of the trial and its coverage in the media at the dawn of Nigeria’s first Republic.


Author(s):  
Russell Lidman

This paper considers how to reduce corruption and improve governance, with particular attention to the impacts of information and communication technology. The media and the press in particular have played an important role in opposing corruption. The Internet and related tools are both supplementing and supplanting the traditional roles of the press in opposing corruption. A regression model with a sample of 164 countries demonstrates that, controlling for the independent variables commonly employed in empirical work on corruption, greater access to the Internet explains reduced corruption. The effect is statistically significant albeit modest. It is possible that the social media will have a growing impact on reducing corruption and improving governance. A number of examples of current uses of these media are provided. Recent insight and experience suggest how the newer information and communication technologies are somewhat tipping the balance toward those opposing corruption.


2005 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Dorman

Since the Aum Shinrikyôô affair of 1995, the Japanese authorities have been quick to demonstrate that they are firmly in control in situations involving religious groups that espouse millennial ideas, or other groups rumored to be acting against social norms. In April 2003 the Japanese mass media began reporting intensely on a virtually unknown new religious movement named Pana Wave. A massive police investigation was launched immediately on the premise that the group appeared to resemble Aum Shinrikyôô in its early days. Although the press coverage and police involvement again raised the public's fears over dangerous religious groups, the media dropped the story quickly after the investigation yielded little more than vehicle violations. The Pana Wave affair represents a post-Aum Shinrikyôô moral panic in which the reaction to the perceived threat far outweighed the reality of the situation.


Journalism ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Cammaerts ◽  
Brooks DeCillia ◽  
João Carlos Magalhães

This research critically assesses the press coverage of Jeremy Corbyn during his leadership bid and subsequent first months as the leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party. A content analysis ( n = 812) found that the British press offered a distorted and overly antagonistic view of the long-serving MP. Corbyn is often denied a voice and news organisations tended to prize anti-Corbyn sources over favourable ones. Much of the coverage is decidedly scornful and ridicules the leader of the opposition. This analysis also tests a set of normative conceptions of the media in a democracy. In view of this, our research contends that the British press acted more as an attackdog than a watchdog when it comes to the reporting of Corbyn. We conclude that the transgression from traditional monitorial practices to snarling attacks is unhealthy for democracy, and it furthermore raises serious ethical questions for UK journalism and its role in society.


Author(s):  
Rashid Muhaev ◽  
Yuliya Laamarti

The information and communication revolution of the late XX — early XXI century not only radically changed the modern world, but also formed a new social reality — a post-industrial society. The current stage of post-industrial development is associated with the formation of the information society, a distinctive feature of which is that in it information, the process of its production and methods of transmission, becomes more important than the thing itself. Information is a decisive factor in the social order, which has changed the ways and technologies of organizing social space and the nature of everyday practices, the life worlds of ordinary people, and the media become the main tool for the production of semantic systems.


Adrian Desmond & James Moore, Darwin . London: Michael Joseph, 1991. Pp. 808, £20.00. ISBN 0-3403-3 In Britain, as in much of Europe, the early and mid-19th century was a period of great social, political and intellectual turbulence. The industrial revolution was transforming the countryside, crowding the cities and disrupting the social order at all levels. The right to govern, long assumed by the duo of church and aristocracy, was being challenged. In 1848 Europe erupted in a cluster of radicalist revolutions and, though in Britain the threat of Chartism came to nothing, radical political thinking was taking root and would culminate, as the century progressed, in the ascendancy of Liberalism and the birth of the labour movement. In philosophy and religion, freedom of thought and discussion was rampant: questions once taboo as heresy were openly discussed (in 1880 Northampton was to elect an avowed atheist as its M.P.); utopian, evangelist and spiritualist groups abounded; developments in Natural Philosophy (which we now call science) were followed with enthusiasm, not only by naturalists, but by non-scientific intellectuals and (more surprising to us today) by the press and its now widely based readership.


2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thierry Giasson ◽  
Colette Brin ◽  
Marie-Michele Sauvageau

Résumé.De mars 2006 à décembre 2007, le Québec a été secoué par un débat sociétal sur la question de la gestion de la diversité culturelle. Cette «crise» aurait été alimentée par untsunami médiatiquetraitant de divers cas d'accommodements juridiques ou d'ajustements administratifs accordés dans les services publics à des citoyens québécois issus de l'immigration dans la grande région de Montréal (Giasson et coll., 2008). Par le biais d'une couverture étendue, les médias ont attiré l'attention de la population sur ces pratiques d'accommodement. L'article présente les données exploratoires d'une analyse de contenu de la couverture faite par onze journaux québécois du climat de l'opinion des Québécois en matière de diversité et d'immigration pendant la phase intensive de développement du débat. L'étude montre que dans leur analyse des sondages d'opinion et dans la présentation générale des tendances de l'opinion publique sur les accommodements raisonnables, les journaux ont mis l'accent sur l'évaluation du malaise des répondants envers l'immigration et la diversité religieuse plutôt que sur l'ouverture de la population québécoise envers la diversité et sur l'apport social de l'immigration, renforçant ainsi davantage l'impression populaire qu'une crise sociale majeure se déroulait et qu'il existait un fossé entre les Québécois «de souche», les Québécois issus de l'immigration et les autres Canadiens.Abstract.From March 2006 to December 2007, the province of Quebec experienced a contentious public debate on diversity. The “crisis” was fueled by a “media tsunami” during which news outlets actively reported on numerous cases of reasonable accommodation practices or administrative agreements in public services granted in the Greater Montreal region to citizens of immigrant background (Giasson et al., 2008). Through this extensive coverage, the media brought these instances of accommodation to the public's attention. The research studies the press coverage that 11 daily newspapers dedicated to the state of public opinion in Quebec during the active and intense development phase of the “crisis”. The study shows that in their analysis of polls and their general framing of the mood of public opinion towards reasonable accommodation, newspapers focused mostly on the malaise in the population toward immigration and religious diversity rather than on its openness to diversity and to the positive social outcomes of immigration. In doing so, the media further anchored the popular impression that a serious social crisis was ongoing and that a wide gap in tolerance existed between Francophone Quebeckers, Quebeckers of recent immigrant background and other Canadians.


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