Heroes or criminals? The legitimacy of humanitarian organizations rescuing lives in the Central Mediterranean Sea after 2017

Since late 2016, NGOs operating in the Mediterranean have been at the centre of a campaign of delegitimization and criminalization culminating with former Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini’s 2018 NGO ban, which de facto erased the presence of humanitarian search and rescue operations and left the national coastguards to deal with an unprecedented migration crisis. Drawing upon discourse analysis of Italian and international news media articles and informed by semi-structured interviews with NGO representatives, this study investigates the implications of such media-driven public hostility. The results are threefold: first, the climate of suspicion surrounding NGOs has damaged them profoundly and led to a dramatic increase in deaths. Consequently, second, NGO’s ability to present themselves publicly as legitimate has been heavily limited. Last, it is fundamental to investigate the range of legitimation strategies all organizations can use when victims of a media-led scandal or a smear campaign are legitimized by political institutions.

Cities and News

This Element examines urban imaginaries during the expansion of international news between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, when everyday information about faraway places found its way into newspapers all over the world. Building on the premise that news carried an unprecedented power to shape representations of the world, it follows this development as it made its way to regular readers beyond the dominant information poles, in the great port-cities of the South American Atlantic. Based on five case studies of typical turn-of-the-century foreign news, Lila Caimari shows how current events opened windows onto distant cities, feeding a new world horizon that was at once wider and eminently urban.

Registering the Impact of Words in Spoken Political and Journalistic Texts

Words in spoken political and journalistic texts may inspire, infuriate or even become mottos. Often, the entire spoken interaction may be forgotten, yet individual words may remain associated with the Speaker and/or the group represented by the Speaker or even the individual word or words themselves obtain a dynamic of their own, outshining the original Speaker. In the current-state-of affairs, connected with the impact of international news networks and social media, the impact of words in spoken political and journalistic texts is directly linked to its impact to a diverse international audience. The impact or controversy of a word and related topic may be registered by the reaction it generates. Special focus is placed in the registration and evaluation of words and their related topics in spoken political and journalistic discussions and interviews. Although as text types, spoken political and journalistic texts pose challenges for their evaluation, processing and translation, the presented approaches allow the registration of complex and implied information, indications of Speakers attitude and intentions and can contribute to evaluating the behaviour of Speakers-Participants. This registration also allows the identification of words generating positive, negative or diverse reactions, their relation to Cognitive Bias and their impact to a national and international audience within a context of international news networks and social media.

The Confines of News Universalism

News outlets remain predominantly segmented by national boundaries, despite the spectacular development of a range of technologies offering the potential to overcome many of the barriers to transnational news circulation. Likewise, national and local outlooks on the news are persistent even for matters of worldwide magnitude and interest. This article argues that the facts related to newsworthy events should be more systematically paired with the scientific knowledge that is required to describe them accurately. Because facts and scientific knowledge should transcend cultural, social and political differences, they could constitute the basis for a limited but fundamental core of news universalism supported by global news agencies and other international news sources.

Rethinking International News Translations: Toward a Foreignizing Approach to News Events Translations

The present paper investigates the ideological manipulation that creeps in translated news headlines and falsifies the produced translated version since such process involves both the imposition of dominant ideologies and the negative portrayals of the other in mediated news. Thus, international news translation basically exploits and manipulates the original news events in such a way that misrepresents the image of otherness and creates a positive representation of patrons. In this vein, this paper brings to the fore the influence of extra-textual factors on the translation of headlines. Many strategies and translation techniques are utilized and translators do intervene to align produced headlines with the two networks’ ideological affiliations and editorial policies. The present paper adopts descriptive approach where I attempted to compare translated news headlines and pinpoint the alterations and transformations undertaken over them, also it aims to call for rethinking strategies undertaken while translating global news in a cosmopolitan context where openness to the other and appreciation of difference are conducive to an effective cross cultural and linguistic interactions. Accordingly, it proposes foreignizing approach to global news translation because it retains the image of otherness which is essential in the original event.