Examining the framing patterns of environmental issues: Episodic and thematic analysis of Pakistani and British news stories

Practice and applicability of environmental journalism accelerate changes in environmental policy, foster environmental awareness amongst the public and encourage environmentalism in the society. Reporting news in episodic instead of thematic manner is imperative in altering the public narrative regarding environment as well as providing assistance for significant decision making, to concerned stakeholders for better policy formation. The comparative design of this study utilized quantitative content analysis to examines framing approach of Pakistani and British environmental news stories. Using simple random sampling technique total (n=1139) environmental news stories analysed from all four newspapers since 2007 to 2016-time period. The findings indicate the contrast among four newspapers of two countries (Dawn & Nation) from Pakistani print media however (Guardian & Telegraph) from Great Britain identify the divergent framing characteristics of Pakistani and British environmental news stories with thematic and episodic preferences. Guardian and Telegraph framed thematic news stories focusing on structural attributions while Dawn and Nation news stories evoke individualistic attributions with episodic frames. In spite of media’s regular journalistic practice of featuring episodic news stories still communicators can shift their professional approach by learning the construction of persuasive thematic environmental news stories for bigger social change.

Shaping the ‘inexplicable’: A social constructionist analysis of news reporting of familicide-suicide

Media framing helps to shape our understanding of the meaning of news events, often problematically. This study examines how this process interacts with the phenomenon of familicide-suicide, where a person kills one or more family members before taking their own life. A social constructionist analysis of the print media coverage of three high-profile cases in Ireland highlights framing and discursive patterns, contributing to an explanatory framework that is misleading and lacking in an evidence base. As well as a tendency towards broad and poorly supported claims-making, several primary causal frames are prevalent: mental health; financial debt; fall from grace; and ‘out of the blue’, whilst a domestic violence frame is notable in its absence. Coverage is found to be episodic in character, linked to dramatisation and more simplistic explanatory frames, rather than evidence-based analysis of potential causal factors for these incidents. Findings raise important questions for journalistic practice, regarding processes of selection and salience of sources contributing to overall coverage that is partial and biased, rather than an ‘objective’ representation of the social world.

Mass Media and Conflicts: Media-Geographical Studies

This article presents the results of media geographical studies of publications of American and European mass media covering conflicts and crises of different levels and scales (global, international, regional, and local). Through the prism of media-geographical views on the processes of media reality formation, the author examined mass media approaches of different countries on the topic of coverage. The research methodology included media metric analysis, rank analysis (rank distributions of the popularity of semantic categories for Internet audiences around the world), quantitative and qualitative content analysis of media texts and analysis of publications according to the criteria of the theory of peaceful journalism. The results of the rank analysis illustrated the possibilities of using this method to study the mental landscapes of different countries and regions. Special attention was paid to the interpretation of meanings and their transformation in space and time, as well as to the spatial analysis of big data (based on Google Trends statistics) with an emphasis on the dynamics of changes in media behavior and media consumption of Internet audiences in different time periods. The empirical basis for content analysis was made up of publications of online versions of 10 American and European mass media in English, German and French of 2020. The main result of the study: the majority of media texts — about 80 % — do not contribute to the search for ways of peaceful settlement of conflicts (they abound in emotionally colored vocabulary, negative markers, categorical assessments, journalists do not make attempts to deeply analyze the situation, synthesize different positions and search for creative non-violent ways to resolve contradictions). Mass media publications often become a source of increasing tension in society, the parties of conflicts are represented as antagonists in media texts, journalists fail to establish a connection between them and bridge the gap between their interests. The results of a comparative analysis of media texts according to the criteria of the theory of peaceful journalism allowed us to classify the main approaches for the mass media conflicts covering and develop a number of proposals and recommendations to use in journalistic practice.

Question design and the construction of populist stances in political news interviews

This paper focuses on the relationship between journalism and right wing populist discourses in the context of broadcast news interviews. We analyse a specific feature of question design in which the public is invoked as a source of opinionated positions in adversarial interviewing. Analysing data from a range of socio-political contexts, we identify a shift in adversarial questioning along a scale of ‘soft’ populism, that is the attribution of views and concerns to a generic public ‘in crisis’, to ‘hard’ populism, where interviewers construct hypothetical scenarios in which populist positions are attributed to ‘some people’. We argue that the democratic role of journalists as public watchdogs, holding politicians and public figures accountable on behalf of the public, is challenged by this normalisation of populist moral order discourses in a routine journalistic practice, both drawing on and contributing to the propagation of populist agendas and anti-democratic populist rhetoric.

The Image of Syrian Refugees in the Lebanese Press: Case of Al-Akhbar Newspaper

This paper investigates how Syrian refugees are portrayed in the Lebanese press, namely in Al-Akhbar Newspaper. Although there are existing studies that focus on the media representation of Syrian refugees, they allot significant attention to negative images of Syrian refugees presented by a number of Lebanese media outlets. In addition, there is a dearth of studies that scrutinise positive representation of Syrian refugees in the Lebanese press. Owing to these problems, this paper bridges the gap in the current literature through paying further attention to the positive media representation of Syrian refugees in the Lebanese press taking the case of Al-Akhbar Newspaper. In answering the question: how Al-Akhbar depicts Syrian refugees who fled to Lebanon, this paper analyses samples of articles published in Al-Akhbar to highlight the discourse of this Newspaper relating to Syrian refugees. The paper draws on qualitative analysis to arrive at its conclusion. The findings of the paper are significant because they reveal journalistic practices and agenda towards one of the serious issues in Lebanon which suffers from political turmoil and severe economic crisis. As this paper distinguishes between what it calls antagonist and protagonist discourses in reporting Syrian refugees in the Lebanese press, it recommends paying further attention to the protagonist discourse because it reflects good journalistic practice.

REVIEW: Noted: Destructive pandemic impact on Global South media

The Impact of COVID-19 on Journalism in Emerging Economies and the Global South, by Damian Radcliffe. London: Thomson Reuters Foundation. 2021. 142 pages. A NEW publication from the Thomson Reuters Foundation reviews the impacts of COVID-19 on journalism in Emerging Economies and the ‘Global South’. Working on the premise that media and journalism in these regions already face even greater challenges than in the ‘West’, this report describes a worsening of the situation through effects of the pandemic. It shows that factors external to media practice and media organisations are having destructive impacts, but proposes remedies which draw on internal strengths and professionalism in journalistic practice. The work is a qualitative research project obtaining analysis from 56 journalists from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, out of 15,000 journalists who have done courses offered by the foundation, as a backer of innovation and media freedom.

Britain as a protector, a mediator or an onlooker?

Since Hong Kong’s handover to China, British newspapers still play an active role in constructing Britain’s connections with its former colony. This study elaborates a schema for protests to help better understand protests in general. Based on this schema, the study examined representations of the 2019–20 protests in British newspapers using the approach of corpus-assisted critical discourse studies. The analysis shows that they mainly used the predicational strategy, and emphasized the Chinese government’s control of Hong Kong – including the inabilities of the Hong Kong government and police violence – in contrast with the protestors’ demands for universal suffrage. They suggested that Britain act as a mediator to shoulder a moral responsibility over Hong Kong. Their attitudes are interpreted with regard to Britain’s foreign policies and the dominant ideology cultivated in its historical, socio-political contexts and suggest that the UK journalistic practice regarding Hong Kong issues is political-driven to a great extent.