Search

Journalism is presented as fundamental to democratic accountability in that news media are both able and expected to hold power to account. Such normative expectations, which justify the protections given journalists and news media, are most frequently studied with regards to state power as the natural object of press scrutiny. This article reports on a successful effort to conduct a replicable analysis of a paradigmatic case of corporate power, the UK chicken meat production industry, that asked whether and how newspapers hold corporate power to account. The analytic framework that we developed to support our two-stage framing analysis decomposed accountability into problematization, causal interpretation and attributions of responsibility, thus allowing us to systematically describe how newspapers shape the public debates in a large heterogeneous dataset. We examined a census of relevant articles from seven UK outlets published between 1985 and 2016 (N = 766). While we were pleased to find that our method, if labor intensive, was fully workable, we were concerned to find that media practice was not compatible with holding corporate power to account. These findings raise serious concerns at the levels of this case, for media practice and for media scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, focusing on journalists working for Turkish-language newspapers in the United Kingdom, examines the way that journalists working in ethnic media perceive their professional roles and performance. Ethnic media have different forms and functions to mainstream media and present different challenges and pressures for journalists, reflecting their communities’ consumption habits and social, economic and political circumstances. This study, based on interviews conducted with journalists and editors working for Turkish-language newspapers, suggests three conceptual dimensions that can be operationalized as a model to help understand ethnic media journalists’ professional roles and performance: perception of audience, relation to power and professional ideals. These dimensions, which may overlap in practice, aim to provide the basis for studying ideas and attitudes towards journalism and the context of production within ethnic media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accepted narrative of British press conduct during the First World War is highly negative. Commentators overwhelmingly agree that newspapers downplayed the horror of life in the trenches and afterwards were found to have published fabricated atrocity stories to encourage hatred of “the Hun” on a grand scale. Scholarly assessment of news coverage of women's involvement in war work is also predominantly negative, highlighting patronising and unrealistic portrayals of munitions workers and others. These narratives, however compelling, ignore sections of newspapers and other current affairs journals devoted to helping readers trying to feed families on restricted budgets with scant food, who were grieving for or caring for sons and husbands, and who were adjusting to bewildering disruptions to family life. The dominant historical narratives ignore the development of a previously unexamined form of “lifestyle” journalism and a genre of vivid features journalism focusing on lives on the “Home Front” and which helped undermine traditional boundaries between the domestic and public realms. This article asks whether “soft” genres of journalism actually better reflected the realities of wartime readers' lives, and better satisfied their need for information than propaganda-driven news pages. Assessing readers' responses to these different genres of journalism helps explain why readers can simultaneously mistrust and also enjoy their news media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This research finds that the emergence of infographics as a regular phenomenon in UK news can be traced back toThe Daily Expressof the mid-1950s. These “Expressographs” were often used not as a means of conveying data accurately and objectively, but in order to propagate the paper's editorial line, and to further Lord Beaverbook's political interests. A series of editorial narratives are established via the literature onThe Daily Express, and its proprietor Lord Beaverbrook. These narratives are used as a framework to analyse statistical infographics published inThe Daily Expressbetween January 1956 and October 1959, by means of a combined content analysis and structural semiotic analysis. Best practice, as espoused in the information design literature, is used to identify misleading graphical methods in the sample, which were then analysed in the context of the editorial narratives identified. This study finds that infographics in UK news were the product of a lavishly financed organisation whose key decision-makers were deeply concerned with the impact of the visual in news. The purpose of these infographics was to perpetuate their employer's idiosyncratic view of how the world should be. Occupational norms and practices may account for some of the biases identified, but cannot account for the breadth, range and consistency of bias found across the sample, which constitutes an example of mid-twentieth-century propaganda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]