Inflated 3D ConvNet context analysis for violence detection

According to the Wall Street Journal, one billion surveillance cameras will be deployed around the world by 2021. This amount of information can be hardly managed by humans. Using a Inflated 3D ConvNet as backbone, this paper introduces a novel automatic violence detection approach that outperforms state-of-the-art existing proposals. Most of those proposals consider a pre-processing step to only focus on some regions of interest in the scene, i.e., those actually containing a human subject. In this regard, this paper also reports the results of an extensive analysis on whether and how the context can affect or not the adopted classifier performance. The experiments show that context-free footage yields substantial deterioration of the classifier performance (2% to 5%) on publicly available datasets. However, they also demonstrate that performance stabilizes in context-free settings, no matter the level of context restriction applied. Finally, a cross-dataset experiment investigates the generalizability of results obtained in a single-collection experiment (same dataset used for training and testing) to cross-collection settings (different datasets used for training and testing).

Media Broadcast of the Image of Russia in the Dichotomy of “Authorities – Opposition” in American, British and Spanish Media

This article is devoted to the study of the media broadcast of the image of Russia in the dichotomy “authorities – opposition” in the American, British and Spanish media. The work identifies the most frequent thematic dominants in the creation of the image of Russia in the dichotomy “authorities – opposition” in American, British, and Spanish articles. The research is carried out on the material of articles taken from modern American (“The New York Times”, “The Wall Street Journal”, “The Washington Post”), British (“The Guardian”, “The Independent”, “The Times” Financial Times) and Spanish media (El País, La Vanguardia, El Mundo, ABC). The purpose of the work is achieved by applying a comparative method and a complex method of lexical-semantic and stylistic analysis. The relevance of the research under study is determined not only by the huge influence of the American, British, and Spanish media on the mass consciousness, not only by the interest of Western media in positioning Russia in the modern world in political communication, but also by the lack of study of the problem of broadcasting the image of Russia created by journalists in the dichotomy “power – opposition” in modern American, British and Spanish media. We identified the main thematic dominants from 07.2020 to 09.2021: 1) the image of the leader of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) Alexei Navalny; 2) the image of political prisoners; 3) unauthorized rallies. An analysis of the selected 75 articles from the American, British and Spanish media confirmed the hypothesis that since August 2020, since the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, there have been more cases of mentioning the media event aspect of “power and opposition in Russia. Evaluative and emotional connotations prevail, which create an image of authorities and opposition.

When Algorithms Recommend What’s New(s): New Dynamics of Decision-Making and Autonomy in Newsgathering

Newsroom innovation labs have been created over the last ten years to develop algorithmic news recommenders (ANR) that suggest and summarise what news is. Although these ANRs are still in an early stage and have not yet been implemented in the entire newsroom, they have the potential to change how newsworkers fulfil their daily decisions (gatekeeping) and autonomy in setting the agenda (agenda-setting). First, this study focuses on the new dynamics of the ANR and how it potentially influences the newsworkers’ role of gatekeeping within the newsgathering process. Second, this study investigates how the dynamics of an ANR could influence the autonomy of the newsworkers’ role as media agenda setters. In order to advance our understanding of the changing dynamics of gatekeeping and agenda-setting in the newsroom, this study conducts expert interviews with 16 members of newsroom innovation labs of<em> The Washington Post</em>,<em> The Wall Street Journal</em>, <em>Der Spiegel</em>, the BBC, and the Bayerische Rundfunk (BR) radio station. The results show that when newsworkers interact with ANRs, they rely on suggestions and summaries to evaluate what is newsworthy, especially when there is a “news peak” (elections, a worldwide pandemic, etc.). With regard to the agenda-setting role, the newsworker still has full autonomy, but the ANR creates a “positive acceleration effect” on how certain topics are put on the agenda.

The USSR and Cold War Legacy: Implications for the Current International Agenda

Interview with Michael A. Reynolds, Director of the Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies of Princeton University, USAMichael A. Reynolds is an American historian and political analyst. His teaching and research range over the geography of the Middle East and Eurasia and covers the themes of empire, international relations, nationalism, geopolitics, ethnic confl ict, and religion and culture. He is the author of Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), co-winner of the 2011 American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize, a Financial Times book of the summer, and a Choice outstanding academic title. He is the editor of Constellations of the Caucasus: Empires, Peoples, and Faiths (Markus Weiner, 2016). Reynolds also writes on contemporary issues related to Turkey, Russia, the Caucasus region and U.S. foreign policy. His writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The National Interest, and War on the Rocks, among other venues. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton and an MA in Political Science from Columbia.

Fighting Deepfakes: Media and Internet Giants’ Converging and Diverging Strategies Against Hi-Tech Misinformation

Deepfakes, one of the most novel forms of misinformation, have become a real challenge in the communicative environment due to their spread through online news and social media spaces. Although fake news have existed for centuries, its circulation is now more harmful than ever before, thanks to the ease of its production and dissemination. At this juncture, technological development has led to the emergence of deepfakes, doctored videos, audios or photos that use artificial intelligence. Since its inception in 2017, the tools and algorithms that enable the modification of faces and sounds in audiovisual content have evolved to the point where there are mobile apps and web services that allow average users its manipulation. This research tries to show how three renowned media outlets—<em>The Wall Street Journal</em>,<em> The Washington Post</em>,<em> </em>and<em> Reuters</em>—and three of the biggest Internet-based companies—Google, Facebook, and Twitter—are dealing with the spread of this new form of fake news. Results show that identification of deepfakes is a common practice for both types of organizations. However, while the media is focused on training journalists for its detection, online platforms tended to fund research projects whose objective is to develop or improve media forensics tools.

US media’s coverage of China’s handling of COVID-19: Playing the role of the fourth branch of government or the fourth estate?

The present study is an analysis of a sample of reports on China’s handling of COVID-19 by several major US media with a focus on a controversial op-ed by the Wall Street Journal. It is found that instead of covering it objectively as a public health crisis, these media reports tend to adopt the strategy of naming, shaming, blaming, and taming against China. In other words, they seize the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan as an opportunity to serve Trump’s “America First” doctrine by a coordinated attempt to destroy the Chinese dream and arresting China’s ascendency. First, the naming/shaming technique is used to tarnish China’s image as a virus. The op-ed on the Wall Street Journal describes China as “the real sick man of Asia.” In addition, a cluster of ferociously negative names are slung onto China to describe the coronavirus as “the Wuhan virus,” “the Belt & Road Initiative pandemic,” “the China virus,” and so on. Second, the blaming technique is applied. On top of such negative name-calling, these media tend to blame the Chinese leadership, the political system, and finally Chinese food culture for eating pangolins. Finally, the taming technique is used to constrain, isolate, or quarantine China. One goal behind such a China threat strategy is to fan American or foreign businesses to move (back) to the United States out of China. Another goal is to create the public opinion environment that would be conducive to some American groups’ litigations against China. It is concluded that American mainstream media while quarreling with the Trump administration for domestic affairs seem to be colluding with the conservative intellectual base in the United States in supporting Trump’s strategy to knock down and divide China.

BALANCE OF OPINION IN NEWSPAPERS THROUGH EDITORIAL AND OP-ED GENRES

The article deals with the analysis of the balance of opinion in the newspaper, which is originally realized through editorial and op-ed genres. We analyzed 20 articles from “The Wall Street Journal” and “The New York Times” in the genres of editorial and op-ed about events in Afghanistan in August 2021, which were interpreted differently in mass media due to the role of the White House. The findings prove that in the context of new digital reality the op-ed has lost its original function of conveying alternative positions to the ones stated in the editorial; at the same time newspapers tend to advocate the positions shared by the political parties they have historically developed close relations with: “The Wall Street Journal” - with the Republican Party, “The New York Times” - the Democratic Party.