Masculinities, Media and the Rugby Mind: An Analysis of Stakeholder Views on the Relationship Between Rugby Union, the Media, Masculine-Influenced Views on Injury, and Concussion

Rugby union, alongside other collision and contact sports, faces ever mounting pressure from increased recognition of concussive injuries and the risks they present to athletes, both in the short-term and long-term. Here, the media is a central component of increasing pressure for cultural change. This research analysed data from 524 self-selected survey respondents to examine rugby union fans’ and stakeholders’ perceptions of media portrayal of concussion and how it might influence their own perceptions. We found evidence of a complex and heterogenous relationship between perceptions of masculinity, views and attitudes toward mass media, and degree of involvement in rugby union. Specifically, partisans of the sport generally saw mass media as hostile, with coverage biased against rugby, allowing them to manufacture doubt regarding risk information, as well as maintaining involvement in the sport. We conclude that critical commentaries from the media have the ability to challenge masculinities around concussion.

Media Portrayal of Older Adults Across Five Canadian Disasters

We conducted a constructivist grounded theory approach in which discourse analysis was used to explore how Canadian news media portrays older adults and aging in a disaster context. We analyzed 119 articles covering five Canadian disasters and identified four themes: (a) stereotypes of older adults are presented on a positive–negative continuum in journalistic coverage of disasters, (b) journalistic coverage tends to exclude perspectives of older adults from relevant discourse, (c) journalists assess the value of losses for older adults—“home” as a central concept, and (d) disasters are framed as disrupting retirement ideals. A model was created to provide an overview of the journalistic coverage of older adults in disaster contexts. Understanding how old age and aging are presented by the media in a disaster context is important because it has further implications for informing and structuring disaster risk reduction policies.

Study of Detecting the Political Bias in News Articles

Nowadays news audiences are experiencing an "echo chamber" due to news biased coverage, which causes individuals to shape views with only one side of the story in mind. Media is considered the strongest source of insight and viewpoint for readers about current events. Therefore, the inequality and misrepresentation of media portrayal of topics is necessary to scrutinise. So, by computing a bias score for the news articles, the reader is able to make an informed decision related to particular events. In this paper, an attempt is made to prepare a survey report detailing some of the literature work done for figuring out the systems which detect the political bias for the news articles.