scholarly journals Journalism and the political structure

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-89
Author(s):  
Helle Sjøvaag ◽  
Truls André Pedersen ◽  
Ole Martin Lægreid
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Information Needs ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
The Political ◽  
System Perspective ◽  
Media System ◽  
Community Information ◽  
Local Journalism ◽  
And Performance

Abstract This article assumes a media system perspective on the local news media structure in Norway, using a dataset of 847,487 news articles collected from 156 Norwegian news outlets in 2015–2017. Using a series of hypotheses, the analysis uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling to ascertain to what extent local journalism meets community information needs through infrastructure, output and performance. The analysis finds that the size of the publisher and the size of the community covered matter more for hard news coverage than regulatory factors. To that end, the results indicate that the Norwegian local media system is somehow shaped by the geography of the political landscape. The results and their contributions are discussed in light of media systems theory and local journalism structures.

scholarly journals A topic analysis of traditional and social media news coverage of the early COVID-19 pandemic and implications for public health communication

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wallace Chipidza ◽  
Elmira Akbaripourdibazar ◽  
Tendai Gwanzura ◽  
Nicole M. Gatto
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Health Communication ◽  
News Media ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Cable News ◽  
Public Health Communication ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Public Health Officials

AbstractKnowledge gaps may initially exist among scientists, medical and public health professionals during pandemics, which are fertile grounds for misinformation in news media. We characterized and compared COVID-19 coverage in newspapers, television, and social media, and discussed implications for public health communication strategies that are relevant to an initial pandemic response. We conducted a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), an unsupervised topic modelling technique, analysis of 3,271 newspaper articles, 40 cable news shows transcripts, 96,000 Twitter posts, and 1,000 Reddit posts during March 4 - 12, 2020, a period chronologically early in the timeframe of the COVID-19 pandemic. Coverage of COVID-19 clustered on topics such as epidemic, politics, and the economy, and these varied across media sources. Topics dominating news were not predominantly health-related, suggesting a limited presence of public health in news coverage in traditional and social media. Examples of misinformation were identified particularly in social media. Public health entities should utilize communication specialists to create engaging informational content to be shared on social media sites. Public health officials should be attuned to their target audience to anticipate and prevent spread of common myths likely to exist within a population. This will help control misinformation in early stages of pandemics.

Polarization and partisanship: Key drivers of distrust in media old and new?

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (5) ◽  
pp. 484-501
Author(s):  
Jane Suiter ◽  
Richard Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Multilevel Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media System ◽  
Political Environments ◽  
Key Drivers ◽  
The Relationship

Some worry that increased partisanship is lowering trust in the news media, as people increasingly come into contact with cross-cutting news coverage. We use multilevel analysis of online survey data from 35 countries and find that left-right partisans (1) have slightly less trust in the news media in general, (2) slightly higher levels of trust in the news they consume and (3) perceive a larger ‘trust gap’ between the news they use and the rest of the news available within their country. However, we do not find evidence to support the idea that people in more politically polarized countries have less trust in the news, or that the association between partisanship and trust is strengthened in polarized political environments. Although in most cases the relationship between partisanship and trust is weak, it is noticeably stronger in the United States. However, the United States is home to a unique media system, and our analysis highlights the problems of assuming that the processes at work in one relatively well-understood country are playing out in the same way globally.

Covering #MeToo across the News Spectrum: Political Accusation and Public Events as Drivers of Press Attention

2020 ◽  
pp. 194016122096808
Author(s):  
Shreenita Ghosh ◽  
Min-Hsin Su ◽  
Aman Abhishek ◽  
Jiyoun Suk ◽  
Chau Tong ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
News Media ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Sexual Misconduct ◽  
The Political ◽  
Language Usage ◽  
Media Attention ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
The Right

Garnering coverage across the political spectrum is a major challenge for burgeoning social movements. The #MeToo movement stands out due to the volume of attention it generated. Yet, it is unclear how news media across the partisan spectrum covered the movement using different sexual violence language markers, latent topic, and word choices and which accusations and events drove media attention. To examine this, we used Media Cloud to extract 17,877 news articles from nine media outlets across the political spectrum, containing specific n-grams or co-occurrences of (1) “metoo,” (2) “sexual misconduct,” (3) “sexual harassment,” and (4) “sexual assault” from October 2017 through February 2018. The analyses first examined whether language and attention differed across the ideological news ecology and then turned to time-series modeling of these discourses to examine what drove press coverage and structural topic modeling (STM) and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) analysis to understand latent topics and language usage. Findings reveal that (1) left-leaning media dedicated more relative attention across all topics—#MeToo, sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, and sexual assault—relative to centrist and right-leaning media. Moreover, across the right, left, and centrist media, the language markers “misconduct,” “harassment,” and “assault” decreased over the study period, while the mentions of #MeToo movement increased during the same period; (2) stories relating to entertainment and those accusing politicians, especially those belonging to the party in power at the Federal level, seemed to be by far the strongest driver of news media attention; and (3) we further observed partisan differences in topics of news coverage and language usage.

Democracy without Journalism?

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Pickard
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Systems ◽  
News Media ◽  
Market Failures ◽  
Media System ◽  
New Models ◽  
Publicly Owned ◽  
Local Journalism ◽  
Systemic Problems

Democracy without Journalism? is about the ongoing journalism crisis and the policies we need to confront it. It exposes the historical roots, market failures, and policy inaction that led to the loss of local journalism and the proliferation of misinformation through both social media and mainstream news. In underscoring these threats to democracy, the book also draws attention to the growing problem of monopoly control over digital infrastructures in general and the rise of platform monopolies in particular, especially the “Facebook problem.” The book proposes that now is an opportune moment to address core weaknesses in US news and information systems and push for alternatives. Above all, the book argues that to understand the underlying pathologies in our news media and the reforms that are needed, we must penetrate to the roots of systemic problems. Toward this aim, Democracy without Journalism? emphasizes the structural nature of journalism’s collapse. The book concludes with an in-depth discussion of new models for journalism, emphasizing the need for a publicly owned and democratically governed media system. Ultimately, the goal is to reinvent journalism.

scholarly journals API AND BEYOND: DETECTING COORDINATED BEHAVIOURS IN FACEBOOK INTERACTIONS AROUND POLITICAL NEWS STORIES

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giglietto Fabio ◽  
Nicola Righetti ◽  
Giada Marino
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Online News ◽  
General Election ◽  
The Political ◽  
Final Report ◽  
Political News ◽  
News Stories ◽  
The Social

This proposal is a follow-up of the project “Mapping Italian News Media Political Coverage in the Lead-up to 2018 General Election” (MINE). MINE aimed at creating a comprehensive map of the political news coverage created by the Italian online news media in the lead-up to 2018 general election. The final report of the project highlighted how the populist narrative dominated the news (both in terms of volume of coverage and Facebook engagement), and pinpointed the diverging patterns of Facebook interactions employed by different partisan communities to amplify the reach of the contents aligned with their worldview by sharing the news stories on social media, while trying to reframe, through comments, the negative coverage of the party they support. These insights led to further questions concerning the nature of the observed diverging patterns of Facebook interactions around political news. In particular, we wondered if the observed patterns were the result of a spontaneous grassroots effort or instead of a strategically organised attempt to manipulate the online news media landscape in order to game platforms algorithms in support of specific viewpoints, candidates and parties. Data originally collected for MINE during 2018 via publically available Facebook API proved useful to identify the patterns, but fall short of providing compelling evidence on the nature of these behaviours. In order to shed some light on this question, we thus requested and obtained access to two additional datasets directly provided by Facebook and made available through the Social Science One (SSO) initiative.

Approaches to Dance (2): Influences

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Kant
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Comic Opera ◽  
Artistic Activity ◽  
Humboldt University ◽  
East German ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Weimar Culture ◽  
Intellectual Formation

This statement is an attempt to reflect on my intellectual formation and how certain influences, both from home (a place suspended between Germany with the remnants of its Weimar culture and Britain as the place of exile) and from subsequent experiences, led me to adopt an historical approach to dance studies and to emphasise the context in which artistic activity unfolds. My education at Berlin's Humboldt University and the Comic Opera shaped my perspectives on theatre and performance. The East German milieu in general forced me to confront the immediate past and think about the political and ideological legacies of the cultures in which I grew up.

Welcome to the Party

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khadijah Costley White
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Tea Party ◽  
Audience Appeal

This chapter lays out the Tea Party’s history as a mass-mediated construction in the context of journalism, political communication, and social movement studies. It argues that the news coverage of the Tea Party primarily chronicled its meaning, appeal, motivations, influence, and circulation—an emphasis on its persona more than its policies. In particular, the news media tracked the Tea Party as a brand, highlighting its profits, marketability, brand leaders, and audience appeal. The Tea Party became a brand through news media coverage; in defining it as a brand, the Tea Party was a story, message, and cognitive shortcut that built a lasting relationship with citizen-consumers through strong emotional connections, self-expression, consumption, and differentiation.

Political Knowledge and Misinformation in the Era of Social Media: Evidence From the 2015 UK Election

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Kevin Munger ◽  
Patrick J. Egan ◽  
Jonathan Nagler ◽  
Jonathan Ronen ◽  
Joshua Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
News Media ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Political Information ◽  
The Political ◽  
Election Campaign ◽  
Social Media Platform ◽  
Media Platform

Abstract Does social media educate voters, or mislead them? This study measures changes in political knowledge among a panel of voters surveyed during the 2015 UK general election campaign while monitoring the political information to which they were exposed on the Twitter social media platform. The study's panel design permits identification of the effect of information exposure on changes in political knowledge. Twitter use led to higher levels of knowledge about politics and public affairs, as information from news media improved knowledge of politically relevant facts, and messages sent by political parties increased knowledge of party platforms. But in a troubling demonstration of campaigns' ability to manipulate knowledge, messages from the parties also shifted voters' assessments of the economy and immigration in directions favorable to the parties' platforms, leaving some voters with beliefs further from the truth at the end of the campaign than they were at its beginning.

Political corruption in Zimbabwe: News media, audiences and deliberative democracy

2021 ◽  
pp. 174165902110224
Author(s):  
Mthokozisi Phathisani Ndhlovu ◽  
Phillip Santos
Keyword(s):  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
News Media ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Political Corruption ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
The Political ◽  
Media Audiences ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Ruling Party

Even though corruption by politicians and in politics is widespread worldwide, it is more pronounced in developing countries, such as Zimbabwe, where members of the political elite overtly abuse power for personal accumulation of wealth. Ideally, the news media, as watchdogs, are expected to investigate and report such abuses of power. However, previous studies in Zimbabwe highlight the news media’s polarised and normative inefficacies. Informed by the theoretical notion of deliberative democracy developed via Habermas and Dahlgren’s work and Hall’s Encoding, Decoding Model, this article uses qualitative content analysis to examine how online readers of Zimbabwe’s two leading daily publications, The Herald and NewsDay, interpreted and evaluated allegations of corruption leveled against ministers and deputy ministers during the height of factionalism in the ruling party (ZANU PF). The article argues that interaction between mainstream media and their audiences online shows the latter’s resourcefulness and, at least, discursive agency in their engagement with narratives about political corruption, itself an imperative premise for future political action.

scholarly journals News media attention in Climate Action: latent topics and open access

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tahereh Dehdarirad ◽  
Kalle Karlsson
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Regression Analysis ◽  
Open Access ◽  
News Media ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Topic Modelling ◽  
Sustainable Development Goal ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Development Goal ◽  
Climate Action

AbstractIn this study we investigated whether open access could assist the broader dissemination of scientific research in Climate Action (Sustainable Development Goal 13) via news outlets. We did this by comparing (i) the share of open and non-open access documents in different Climate Action topics, and their news counts, and (ii) the mean of news counts for open access and non-open access documents. The data set of this study comprised 70,206 articles and reviews in Sustainable Development Goal 13, published during 2014–2018, retrieved from SciVal. The number of news mentions for each document was obtained from Altmetrics Details Page API using their DOIs, whereas the open access statuses were obtained using Unpaywall.org. The analysis in this paper was done using a combination of (Latent Dirichlet allocation) topic modelling, descriptive statistics, and regression analysis. The covariates included in the regression analysis were features related to authors, country, journal, institution, funding, readability, news source category and topic. Using topic modelling, we identified 10 topics, with topics 4 (meteorology) [21%], 5 (adaption, mitigation, and legislation) [18%] and 8 (ecosystems and biodiversity) [14%] accounting for 53% of the research in Sustainable Development Goal 13. Additionally, the results of regression analysis showed that while keeping all the variables constant in the model, open access papers in Climate Action had a news count advantage (8.8%) in comparison to non-open access papers. Our findings also showed that while a higher share of open access documents in topics such as topic 9 (Human vulnerability to risks) might not assist with its broader dissemination, in some others such as topic 5 (adaption, mitigation, and legislation), even a lower share of open access documents might accelerate its broad communication via news outlets.

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