scholarly journals Tweets That Matter: Reconsidering Journalistic Sourcing and Framing Processes in the Context of the #Grexit Debate

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-144
Author(s):  
Andreas Kollias ◽  
Fani Kountouri

This study explores the news media Twitter messaging on the issue of Grexit, as an exemplary case of transmediatisation of problems in highly polarized contexts. Our analysis focuses on media tweets (in English, French, Italian, and Greek) using the Grexit hashtag between March and July 2015. There are three main questions on the potential reshaping of journalistic sourcing and framing on Twitter. The first focuses on the milieu of actors used by media outlets as sources in the #Grexit debate, the second on the types of news frames that dominated #Grexit media tweets, and the third on how sourcing and news frames interact to construct a space of power positions. The above processes took shape within a close information system, which included politicians, media elites, and economic experts that marginalized alternative voices and critical perspectives. These findings indicate that mainstream news media normalized Twitter to fit their traditional sourcing and framing norms and practices. More specifically, our findings indicate the following: first, traditional sources and powerful economic actors get easier access to online media reporting on Twitter; second, the negative and episodic media-driven frames take the lead in the frame-building process; and third, the non-elite political and socially-driven frames are marginalized in the framing building process. The Twitter affordances were essentially normalized by media to fit into their understandings of the negotiation process as a high-stakes international politics and economic game with predetermined winners and losers. It is also likely that this normalization reflects the normalization of Twitter by powerful political and economic elites aiming to offer journalists on Twitter easy and instant access to their narratives.

Author(s):  
Yochai Benkler ◽  
Robert Faris ◽  
Hal Roberts

This chapter presents the book’s macrolevel findings about the architecture of political communication and the news media ecosystem in the United States from 2015 to 2018. Two million stories published during the 2016 presidential election campaign are analyzed, along with another 1.9 million stories about Donald Trump’s presidency during his first year. The chapter examines patterns of interlinking between online media sources to understand the relations of authority and credibility among publishers, as well as the media sharing practices of Twitter and Facebook users to elucidate social media attention patterns. The data and mapping reveal not only a profoundly polarized media landscape but stark asymmetry: the right is more insular, skewed towards the extreme, and set apart from the more integrated media ecosystem of the center, center-left, and left.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian S. Czymara ◽  
Marijn van Klingeren

News media have shape-shifted over the last decades, with rising online news suppliers and an increase in online news consumption. We examine how reporting on immigration differs between popular German online and print media over three crucial years of the so-called immigration crisis, from 2015 to 2017. We extend knowledge on framing of the crisis by examining a period covering start, peak and the time after the intake of refugees. Moreover, we establish whether online and print reporting differs in terms of both frame occurrence and variability. Crises generally create an opening for the formation of new perspectives and frames. These conditions provide an ideal test to see whether the focus of media reporting differs between online and print sources. We extract the dominant frames in almost 18,500 articles using machine-learning methods. While results indicate that many frames are, on average, more visible in either online or print media, these differences do not appear to follow a systematic logic. Regarding diversity of frame usage, we find that online media are, on average, more dominated by particular frames compared to print and that frame diversity is largely independent of important key events happening during our period of investigation.


Author(s):  
Gorgi Krlev ◽  
Anker Brink Lund

Abstract News reporting typically has a dual function: it mirrors what is going on in real life, but it also shapes how actors behave. Previous studies suggest that media presence, by way of shaping public and policy perceptions, influence how well nonprofits are able to raise funds and mobilize human resources. Yet, we are lacking insights into how the third sector is actually framed in the media, in particular with regard to innovation, which increasingly complements the more traditional functions of advocacy and service provision. To find out, we performed a longitudinal content analysis and an in-depth framing analysis on national and regional newspapers from nine European countries. The analyses demonstrate that third sector activities, especially those related to social innovation, are largely ignored. We find no systematic evidence that crises increase news attention to nonprofit activities. The third sector is becoming more newsworthy when it co-engages with government and business actors, but can benefit only little from this “positive glow”. We suggest how research on these matters can be taken forward, with a specific focus on the agenda-setting theory of mass media, the strategic management of nonprofit organizations, and collaboration in the context of social innovation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 389-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirjana Pantic

This gatekeeping theory-based study investigates ongoing practices that most prominent news media organizations employ to enable user participation. A thorough analysis of 20 top news websites in the world suggests that reader participation in developing news content and reacting to it is limited. Specifically, major news websites allow participation in areas that increase website traffic, while enabling citizens to produce stories is not a widely adopted form of reader participation.


Info ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seong Eun Cho ◽  
Dong-Hee Shin

Purpose – This study aims to examine the impact of news frames associated with traditional media and with Twitter discourse on social issues. Design/methodology/approach – Using semantic network analysis, it identifies the role of new alternative channels as well as discussing ways of understanding and consuming news content in the changing media environment. Additionally, it focuses on the dominant Twitter communicators who rank high in betweenness centrality. Findings – The results confirmed that traditional news media tend to superficially describe main events and media strikes without comment. They tended to consciously or unconsciously favor media corporations by engendering anxiety and conflict or by restraining reports on the rationales of the strike. Twitter discourse, on the contrary, positively represents the striker's arguments and frequently reveals support of the strike. Research limitations/implications – The data set of this study was specialized, not generalized. However, the findings extend literature relating to the role of journalism and alternative channel. For example, this study indicated that the change of media environment has reinforced partiality of news, including both traditional and alternative channels. Practical implications – The findings imply that the advent of new media does not purely represent a laymen's voice and rather tends to strengthen the partiality of media, including both traditional and new media, beyond selective exposure on content of the receiver. Originality/value – By clarifying the influence of alternative channels, this study suggests the counterpart of traditional journalism in the near future.


Author(s):  
Marina Dekavalla

This book discusses the framing of referendum campaigns in the news media, focusing particularly on the case of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Using a comprehensive content analysis of print and broadcast coverage as well as in-depth interviews with broadcast journalists and their sources during this campaign, it provides an account of how journalists construct the frames that define their coverage of contested political campaigns. It views the mediation process from the perspective of those who participate directly in it, namely journalists and political communicators. It puts forward an original theoretical model to account more broadly for frame building in the context of referendums in Western media systems, using insights from this and from other cases. The book makes an original contribution to the study of media frames during referendums.


2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 2028-2049 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris J Vargo ◽  
Lei Guo ◽  
Michelle A Amazeen

This study examines the agenda-setting power of fake news and fact-checkers who fight them through a computational look at the online mediascape from 2014 to 2016. Although our study confirms that content from fake news websites is increasing, these sites do not exert excessive power. Instead, fake news has an intricately entwined relationship with online partisan media, both responding and setting its issue agenda. In 2016, partisan media appeared to be especially susceptible to the agendas of fake news, perhaps due to the election. Emerging news media are also responsive to the agendas of fake news, but to a lesser degree. Fake news coverage itself is diverging and becoming more autonomous topically. While fact-checkers are autonomous in their selection of issues to cover, they were not influential in determining the agenda of news media overall, and their influence appears to be declining, illustrating the difficulties fact-checkers face in disseminating their corrections.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 67-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chandra Lal Pandey ◽  
Priya A. Kurian

News media outlets are crucial for the dissemination of information on climate change issues, but the nature of the coverage varies across the world, depending on local geopolitical and economic contexts. Despite extensive scholarship on media and climate change, less attention has been paid to comparing how climate change is reported by news media in developed and developing countries. This article undertakes a cross-national study of how elite newspapers in four major greenhouse gas emitting countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, China and India—frame coverage of climate change negotiations. We show that framing is similar by these newspapers in developing countries, but there are clear differences in framing in the developed world, and between the developed and developing countries. While an overwhelming majority of these news stories and the frames they deploy are pegged to the stance of domestic institutions in the developing countries, news frames from developed countries are more varied.


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