Perils of Politics-Driven Regulation

Author(s):  
Tijana Milosevic

This chapter provides an analysis of five digital bullying cases that resulted in suicides (the so-called “high profile cases”). The chapter documents the pressures that companies face when such circumstances arise; the nature of the public discussion and media coverage, reactions from relevant stakeholders and how such circumstances may result in government regulation that does not necessarily address the problem in a manner that benefits children. The consequences of similar legislation that developed in the aftermath of tragic incidents in other parts of the world are also examined, ushering the discussion on liability protections for intermediaries and self-regulatory systems that are taken up in the next chapter.

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans C. Schmidt

While there is a longstanding connection between sports and politics, this past year has seen a surge of social activism in the world of sport, and numerous high-profile athletes have used their positions of prominence to raise awareness of social or political issues. Sport media, in turn, have faced questions regarding how best to cover such activism. Given the popularity of sport media, such decisions can have real implications on the views held by the public. This scholarly commentary discusses how sport media cover the social activism of athletes and presents the results of a content analysis of popular news and sports television programs, newspapers, and magazines. Overall, results indicate that sport media are giving significant and respectful coverage to athletes who advocate for social or political issues.


2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Beyeler ◽  
Hanspeter Kriesi

This article explores the impact of protests against economic globalization in the public sphere. The focus is on two periodical events targeted by transnational protests: the ministerial conferences of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Based on a selection of seven quality newspapers published in different parts of the world, we trace media attention, support of the activists, as well as the broader public debate on economic globalization. We find that starting with Seattle, protest events received extensive media coverage. Media support of the street activists, especially in the case of the anti-WEF protests, is however rather low. Nevertheless, despite the low levels of support that street protesters received, many of their issues obtain wide public support.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 12-34
Author(s):  
Nestor A. Manichkin ◽  

The article dwells upon connection between the two most important Kyrgyz traditions: shamanism ( bakshylyk ) and storytelling ( zhomokchuluk ). It considers the general cultural and social field that forms some features that are characteristic of both shamans and storytellers, as well as the traces of pre-Islamic culture that can be found in the world of the Kyrgyz epic. Special attention is paid to the post-folklor version of the epic “Manas” – the dastan “Aykol Manas” and the public discussion around that literary work. The discussion reflects, on the one hand, specific aspects of the understanding of the Kyrgyz epic tradition, and on the other hand, a number of characteristic features that accompany modern transformations of Kyrgyz shamanism.


2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
James P. Todhunter

Abstract The notion that national leaders use foreign policy actions for domestic political benefit is widely accepted in the foreign policy literature, but has only been studied with regard to foreign policy involving the use of force. Literature on third-party mediation has emerged separately and has not taken mediators’ domestic political motivations and constraints into account when explaining mediation occurrence and outcomes. Diplomatic efforts such as mediation should be appealing to leaders seeking to impress their domestic audience because it provides them with a low risk opportunity to appear competent to their domestic audience. While mediation is a regular occurrence in US foreign policy, its public visibility varies greatly. However, models of presidential media coverage suggest that media outlets are likely to pay a disproportionate amount of attention to presidents and their high level surrogates while engaging in diplomacy overseas. The article proposes that the higher the profile of the official an administration sends to mediate a crisis overseas, the greater the increase in the president’s approval rating. Additionally, the public’s attentiveness to foreign policy should condition the effect of a high profile mediator on presidential approval. As foreign policy becomes more salient to the public, the effect of a higher profile mediator on presidential approval should be greater. Empirical results support the argument.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (16) ◽  
pp. 10-30
Author(s):  
Hannah Andrews

Personas are the public expressions of a private identity, the performance of personality in the social world. They are particularly visible and familiar in the world of celebrity, where entertainers regularly adopt an alter-ego for performance. This has intriguing consequences for biographical representations of performers. Biopic actors are obliged to duplicate the public-facing persona, which is an already-known, semi-fictional construction, and the private individual beneath. The narrative of the biopic must account for this relationship between the persona and the person who authors it. This article explores this process in two high-profile rock biopics, Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Rocketman (2019), comparing their different approaches to reproducing and exploring the persona of their subjects in performance, style and mise en scène.


10.2196/25108 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. e25108
Author(s):  
Joanne Chen Lyu ◽  
Garving K Luli

Background The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is a national public health protection agency in the United States. With the escalating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on society in the United States and around the world, the CDC has become one of the focal points of public discussion. Objective This study aims to identify the topics and their overarching themes emerging from the public COVID-19-related discussion about the CDC on Twitter and to further provide insight into public's concerns, focus of attention, perception of the CDC's current performance, and expectations from the CDC. Methods Tweets were downloaded from a large-scale COVID-19 Twitter chatter data set from March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, to August 14, 2020. We used R (The R Foundation) to clean the tweets and retain tweets that contained any of five specific keywords—cdc, CDC, centers for disease control and prevention, CDCgov, and cdcgov—while eliminating all 91 tweets posted by the CDC itself. The final data set included in the analysis consisted of 290,764 unique tweets from 152,314 different users. We used R to perform the latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm for topic modeling. Results The Twitter data generated 16 topics that the public linked to the CDC when they talked about COVID-19. Among the topics, the most discussed was COVID-19 death counts, accounting for 12.16% (n=35,347) of the total 290,764 tweets in the analysis, followed by general opinions about the credibility of the CDC and other authorities and the CDC's COVID-19 guidelines, with over 20,000 tweets for each. The 16 topics fell into four overarching themes: knowing the virus and the situation, policy and government actions, response guidelines, and general opinion about credibility. Conclusions Social media platforms, such as Twitter, provide valuable databases for public opinion. In a protracted pandemic, such as COVID-19, quickly and efficiently identifying the topics within the public discussion on Twitter would help public health agencies improve the next-round communication with the public.


BMJ Open ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. e038087
Author(s):  
Brooke Nickel ◽  
Ray Moynihan ◽  
Alexandra Barratt ◽  
Juan P Brito ◽  
Kirsten McCaffery

ObjectivesThe use of more medicalised labels can increase both concern about illness and the desire for more invasive treatment. This study analyses the media’s coverage of an Analysis article in The BMJ which generated a large amount of high-profile international media coverage. It aims to understand how to better communicate messages about low-risk cancers and overdiagnosis to the public.DesignContent analysis of media coverage.SettingMedia was identified by Isentia Media Portal, searched in Google News and cross-checked in Factiva and Proquest databases from August 2018.MethodsMedia headlines, full text and open access public comments responding to the coverage on the article proposing to ‘rename low-risk conditions currently labelled as cancer’ were analysed to determine the main themes.Results45 original media articles and their associated public comments (n=167) were identified and included in the analysis. Overall, headlines focused on cancer generally and there was little mention of ‘low-risk’, ‘overdiagnosis’ or ‘overtreatment’. The full text generally presented a more balanced view of the evidence and were supportive of the proposal, however, public responses tended to be more negative towards the idea of renaming low-risk cancers and indicated confusion. Comments seemed to focus on the headlines rather than the full article.ConclusionsThis study offers a novel insight into media coverage of the complex and counterintuitive problem of overdiagnosis. Continued deliberation on how to communicate similar topics to the public through the mainstream media is needed. Future work in the area of low-risk cancer communication should consider the powerful impact of people’s previous experience with a cancer diagnosis and the criticism about being paternalistic and concealing the truth from patients.


2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 105-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Walter

The article analyses the scale of, and reactions to, print media coverage of the dying from cancer in 2009 of young British media celebrity Jade Goody. Some sociologists have argued that death is sequestrated, with the dying body particularly hidden and problematic; hence the sociological significance of the intense and high profile coverage of Jade's final weeks. In particular, the baroque emotionality of press photos, especially those which glamorised her baldness (the result of failed chemotherapy), challenges the sequestration thesis. Reactions were complex, with criticism of her public dying mixed with criticism of reality television in general, together with class prejudice. New media's blurring of public and private creates new arenas for publicising the bodily, personal and emotional experience of dying, while at the same time affirming the public/private boundary so that the ordinary dying of ordinary people remains substantially hidden.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Hizra Marisa ◽  
Ade Pornauli ◽  
Achmad Indra ◽  
Alya Aurora

This study aims to find out a projection and how the development of elections during COVID-19 pandemic. The regional heads elections is one manifestation of the reform movement in 1998 which wants a change in state administration after being dominated by authoritarianism to become democratic. This election is known to the public as a venue for the election of regional heads who will serve or lead. Covid-19 pandemic is a virus transmission and causes an outbreak ove the world including Indonesia. A number of regions contributed to the 2020 elections. The regional head election system in 2020 is the third time held in Indonesia. The ballot is planned to be held simultaneously on September 2020. The total area that will carry out simultaneous regional head elections in 2020 is 270 regions with 9 provinces, 224 districts and 37 cities. The government regulation in lieu of law number 2/2020 on the local election was finally set by President Joko Widodopada on May 4th, 2020. The election which originally took place on September 23rd was finally postponed for 3 months, which became on December 2020. This step was criticized because it was considered ignoring COVID-19 pandemic.


Author(s):  
Hanne Thorsen

Denmark has the most developed public day care service in the world. The day care system is the daily condition of 281.076 children in the age group 0-5. The Nurshing of children is a timeressource that women purchase from the Welfare State institutions, and at the same time an instrument of the labour-marked which create the basis for the high workforce participation of Danish women. The ongoing subject for public discussion has been the waiting list problem. How does local councils provide room enough for the children without raising the public spendings. Surprisingly the discussion of the pedagogical contents has played a secondary role. The article ends up by recommending a serious discussion of the pedagogical aims and contents, in order to qualify the children to cope with a changing society.


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