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Amid increasing climate change and environmental degradation, illegal mining (galamsey) has received widespread public concern in Ghana, with greater attention in recent times due to increased medi...

By the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, populists have taken charge in Turkey, India and Israel, all previously heralded as exceptional democracies in difficult regions. This m...

That the news media should operate as an impartial and responsible “fourth estate” in a democracy is a pervasive ideal, but there are serious obstacles – economic, organizational and political – to...

Government perpetrated attacks against independent media, ranging from journalists’ imprisonment to verbal attacks against outlets, carry an adverse effect for freedoms in democracies. Verbal attac...

Over the last several years, numerous journalists and news organizations have reported incidents in which their communications have been hacked, intercepted, or retrieved. In 2014, Google security ...

As critical issues such as climate change, exploited fisheries, declining human rights, and reconfiguration of political systems inherited at independence increasingly challenge the microstates of ...

The reform of the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo in the 1980s has been often presented by scholars and the reformers themselves as an example of a process of journalism modernization inspire...

This article looks at how Kashmiri author Malik Sajad’s graphic novel Munnu: A Boy From Kashmir (Fourth Estate, 2015), employs the narrative form of the kuntslerroman, cartographic interventions, a...

With the advent of the internet it had appeared to many that the traditional, normative, pro-democratic functions of journalism as critical scrutineer, Fourth Estate and source of common knowledge for the public sphere would be strengthened. Today, however, digital platforms are being utilized with great effect by the opponents of liberal democracy, whether extreme factions within Islam, reactionaries and populists within the democratic countries, or in authoritarian polities such as Russia and China. This article considers if cultural chaos and the digital tools which fuel it have now emerged as drivers of ideological conflict in addition, or opposition, to cultural democratization.

News organizations in many Western democracies face decreasing trust amid fake news accusations. In this situation, news organizations risk losing their license to operate and need to defend their legitimacy. This study analyzes how The New York Times (NYT) discredits fake news accusations, which are prominently expressed by US President Trump. A critical discourse analysis of the NYT’s news articles about fake news accusations in the first 70 days following President Trump’s inauguration reveals four delegitimizing strategies. First, the accusations are taken as a “badge of honor” for professional journalism but are morally evaluated to damage journalism’s role as the fourth estate in democracy. Second, using sarcasm, the articles criticize President Trump’s capacity to govern and thus question his legitimacy. Third, reporting implies that fake news accusations aim at suppressing critical thinking as in authoritarian regimes. Fourth, accusations are described as irrational responses to professional repor...

This article addresses how D-Day and its aftermath were reported in the British press. It focusses on the logistical operation that shaped the news flow from the front line back to the Ministry of Information headquarters at Senate House, London, and out again to British newspaper readers, and explores the extent and range of news reporting that this made possible. It argues that the ways in which the news operation surrounding the D-Day invasion was organised and pursued can best be described as a mutually sustaining collaboration between the military on the one hand and the British media, including the press, on the other. Far from being an independent ‘Fourth Estate’, when it came to D-Day and the Normandy invasion the British newspaper press was—and absolutely considered itself to be —another weapon of war.

There has been a recent, rapid growth in the number of digital start-ups seeking sustainable models for doing journalism (Carvajal et al 2012). However, there is a relative lack of detailed, empirical research about such organisations (Wahl-Jorgensen et al 2016). This article addresses this by analysing The Ferret – a recently launched investigative journalism platform threatening to ‘nose up the trousers’ of power in Scotland. Based on in-depth interviews with members of The Ferret’s Board of Directors, the article explores the motivations behind the launch of the co-op, examines its growth to date, and critically assesses its prospects of achieving a sustainable future. It finds The Ferret was a response to three perceived crises: democratic, economic and ethical. Its founders call upon the traditions and mythology of journalism while seeking to offer a new version of what journalism might be. Funded mainly by subscriptions, The Ferret has achieved slow and steady growth, but only survives due to the subsidized labour of its core team. The organisation is now reaching a tipping point where, if it is to endure, it must expand beyond its journalistic base, while building a much fuller understanding of the nature and motivations of its paying audience.

On the night of June 25, 1975, news presses along Delhi's Fleet Street, home to several mainstream Englishlanguage newspapers of India, plunged into darkness at the start of a power cut that denied people print news for two days. Elsewhere in the country, presses faced a different problem: they were raided and stopped, and newspaper bundles were seized. By the early hours of June 26, hundreds of political leaders, activists, and trade unionists opposed to the ruling Congress party were imprisoned.1 But because of the absence of major newspapers, few among the public learned of the arrests, which were to become increasingly common in the next few months-a period called "the Emergency" in India.2The purported goal of the Emergency, which lasted from June 26, 1975, to March 21, 1977, was to control "internal disturbance" and thus enable smooth governance and usher in national development.3 To achieve this goal, the Emergency suspended the constitutional rights of Indian citizens and instituted strict controls on the freedom of speech and press. Censorship-and in some cases prior restraint-was employed on newspapers and magazines. The government, led by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, expelled several foreign correspondents, withdrew accreditation from reporters and arrested more than two hundred journalists.4 Most publications succumbed to the Emergency, choosing to abide by the laws of censorship, which prohibited publishing anything critical of the government.Even so, among the English-language press, two newspapers- Indian Express and The Statesman-tried to withstand the attack on free speech.3 As most newspapers were "filled with fawning accounts of national events, flattering pictures of Gandhi and her ambitious son, and not coincidentally, lucrative governmental advertising," The Statesman and the Indian Express helped produce counter-frames by using visual and verbal rhetoric and by reporting issues that were otherwise suppressed.1' Despite the efforts of these newspapers, Gandhi held a strong grip on the press, at least during the Emergency censorship.This article analyzes the Indian Express's framing of the Emergency to address larger questions about the functioning of journalism under censorship, namely, to what extent can a free press act as the Fourth Estate if freedom of expression is curtailed?7 And, more specifically, how did the Indian Express construct its role in the Emergency versus the Gandhi regime? The study begins with a brief review of the Emergency and Indian press. The next section delineates the theoretical framework of framing. It then explains and undertakes a qualitative content analysis of news text and cartoons that appeared on the front and editorial pages of the Indian Express during the Emergency.On June 26, 1975, Gandhi imposed the Emergency, legitimized under the Indian Constitution, to battle corruption, economic slowdown, growing population, and political dissent from the opposition parties. The proclamation declaring the Emergency was broadcast over All India Radio. It advanced that "a grave emergency exists whereby the security of India is threatened by internal disturbances."8 These "internal disturbances" mainly referred to the oppositions increased efforts in demanding Gandhi's resignation after she was accused of corruption. Two weeks before the Emergency, Allahabad High Court annulled Gandhis 1971 parliamentary election on the grounds of corrupt practices, in particular for spending more money than permitted and for using official machinery and government officials in her campaign.9 Although Gandhi went on to negate the corruption charges, eventually winning the case in the Supreme Court in November 1975, the High Court judgment served as a catalyst for reviving protests against her.10The protests were led by socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan (popularly known as JP), who opposed Gandhi even before the High Court judgment was delivered. In fact, starting in January 1974, JP had been organizing a series of agitations against the Gandhi-led Congress to eliminate corruption and usher in educational and electoral reforms. …

Journalism's relationship with the public has historically rested on an assumption of its Fourth Estate roles and as fulfilling democratic imperatives. The normative dimensions of these ideals have also long been taken as given in journalism studies, serving as a starting point for discussions of journalism's public service, interest, and role. As contradictions to these normative ideals expose flaws in such assumptions, a reassessment of this normative basis for journalism is needed. This paper looks to challenge normative legacies of journalism's societal role. Drawing on uses and gratification theoretical frameworks and engaging with communities of practice, it explores how communities understand journalism from both top-down (journalism) and bottom-up (citizen) perspectives. This research considers citizen expectations of journalism and journalists, and evaluates perceptions of journalistic values from the ground up. By employing a community facilitation model, it offers an opportunity for participants from across the community to reassess their own conceptions of the role of journalism. This establishes a better basis to approach the journalism-public relationship that does not advantage historic, normative, or traditional legacies.

This article explores the political economy of the media in the context of weak formal state institutions in Somalia. Drawing on literature examining the political economy of war, the authors argue that, rather than being either a system of anarchy or a system in which journalists strive to serve normative functions of a fourth estate, the media in Somalia have their own internal logic that operates according to local norms and rules. This accounts for the media's ability to continue to grow despite the serious security concerns and the absence of strong state institutions and regulations, as well as predictable and regular revenue.

This paper uses a new set of online research tools to develop a detailed study of the public debate over proposed legislation in the United States designed to give prosecutors and copyright holders new tools to pursue suspected online copyright violations. For this study, we compiled, mapped, and analyzed a set of 9,757 stories relevant to the COICA-SOPA-PIPA debate from September 2010 through the end of January 2012 using Media Cloud, an open source tool created at the Berkman Center to allow quantitative analysis of a large number of online media sources. This study applies a mixed-methods approach by combining text and link analysis with human coding and informal interviews to map the evolution of the controversy over time and to analyze the mobilization, roles, and interactions of various actors.This novel, data-driven perspective on the dynamics of the networked public sphere supports an optimistic view of the potential for networked democratic participation, and offers a view of a vibrant, diverse, and decentralized networked public sphere that exhibited broad participation, leveraged topical expertise, and focused public sentiment to shape national public policy. We find that the fourth estate function was fulfilled by a network of small-scale commercial tech media, standing non-media NGOs, and individuals, whose work was then amplified by traditional media. Mobilization was effective, and involved substantial experimentation and rapid development. We observe the rise to public awareness of an agenda originating in the networked public sphere and its framing in the teeth of substantial sums of money spent to shape the mass media narrative in favor of the legislation. Moreover, we witness what we call an attention backbone, in which more trafficked sites amplify less-visible individual voices on specific subjects. Some aspects of the events suggest that they may be particularly susceptible to these kinds of democratic features, and may not be generalizable. Nonetheless, the data suggest that, at least in this case, the networked public sphere enabled a dynamic public discourse that involved both individual and organizational participants and offered substantive discussion of complex issues contributing to affirmative political action.Find more information about the paper, including raw data available for download and an interactive visualization of the maps included in this paper, on the Berkman Center website.

A rumour dire doth hurtle thro' the Town-Whisper sinister that doth raise the hair!That when the vast "Titanic" did go downThe facts that there transpir'd were not laid bare.-John Armstrong Chaloner, "The Secret of the 'Titanic'"1Not long after the sinking of the Titanic on April 14, 1912, in which more than two-thirds of the 2,223 people aboard lost their lives, The New York Times described the disaster as "the most important 'news event,' probably in the history of modern journalism."2 Yes, agreed Editor and Publisher, the major trade journal for the newspaper industry. As the rescue ship Carpathia approached New York, "Probably never before have so many newspaper men been engaged in handling a news story." The newspapers combined to hire the Strand Hotel, just opposite the pier at the foot of West Fourteenth Street where the Carpathia was planning to dock. Each newspaper made offices out of separate rooms at the hotel with extra phones installed to quickly call in stories to the rewrite men in the newsroom. Editor & Publisher made special note of The New York Times's effort. "In the short time between the reception of the harrowing news of the Titanic's fate and the arrival of the rescue ship the Times conceived, perfected and set in motion a masterly organization for getting the first-hand news."3In fact, many papers responded with a fervor to match the magnitude of the story, but none more so than the Times, which- between April 15 and April 28, 1912-published one hundred pages of narratives, descriptions, commentary, photos, and schematics related to the wreck.4 Following much planning and logistical organization under the leadership of legendary managing editor Carr Van Anda, on the day the Carpathia arrived in New York with its survivors, the Times staff gathered, wrote, set in type, and printed thirteen pages of text and photos in less than four hours.5 That enterprise also included the purchase of two exclusive stories based on interviews with the surviving Titanic wireless operator, Harold Bride, and the operator aboard the Carpathia, Harold Cottam, that had been facilitated by both men's boss, Guglielmo Marconi.6According to the newspaper trade journal The Fourth Estate, those two stories among the many the Times published after the Carpathias arrival were ranked "as the two most thrilling reports published that day."7 Indeed, The Fourth Estate and other newspaper trade journals both in the U.S. and abroad praised the paper's coverage.8 And months later when Van Anda visited London and stopped by Lord Northcliffe's London Daily Mail, an editor opened a desk drawer and took out a copy of The New York Times of April 19, 1912, and said: "We keep these as an example to our staff as the last word in newspaper work."9 Still, despite the praise and admiration for a job well done, the Times became the target of charges it colluded in suppressing news for profit. Those accusations about what one writer called a "strange absence of news to the relatives and friends on both continents in spite of the perfection of wireless telegraphy"10 also targeted the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, the owners and operators of the Titanic, the Carpathia's wireless operator, and the Titanic's surviving operator.11But those critics had to have known _ that paying for news was not an uncommon practice of the time.12 Indeed, George Grantham Bain, a pioneering newspaper photographer, observed in 1895 that it was "hard to resist the temptation to purchase a good piece of news."13 One prominent example of just such a purchase occurred just three years before the Titanic disaster when Jack Binns, the Marconi wireless operator aboard the White Star liner Republic, sold his story to the press as - an exclusive upon his return after he wired for help and saved hundreds of lives following a collision with a cargo ship off the coast of Nantucket on January 23, 1909. Binns recalled that after he was rescued at sea and heading back to the United States, various newspapers sent him wireless messages seeking his story. …

What is the function of the media in post-2011 Tunisia? As the media provides knowledge, message, and reach across a nation, it is a critical tool within the political sphere. As Tunisia undergoes systemic socio-political change, what role is the media playing? How is ‘public’ now being defined? How is the sector changing its own professional practices in the face of a liberated public sphere, and how are media owners responding to market shifts and new faces in the government? These and other questions seeking to understand changes in Tunisia's Fourth Estate over the three years since President Ben Ali was ousted will be analysed through the lens of hybrid theory. As the process of adapting past practices and institutions to new ideological aspirations takes place in Tunisia, hybrid theory offers a means to observe the multiple elements contributing to that process – seeing them as non-linear, intersecting, at times harmonious, and at others, interrupting democratic processes as competing elites – includ...

The last few years have seen several attempts to strengthen press regulation in various parts of the world, while the difficulty of controlling online publication is arguably only increasing. In this article the focus is on recent suggestions for a new system of co-regulation of the press in South Africa, in order to see how online journalism is viewed and treated by regulators. In comparison, the article refers to suggestions in this regard by the Leveson Inquiry in Britain and two Australian press and media reviews. Reference is made to Flew and Swift (2013), who apply six main theories in three overlapping categories in debates on the role of journalism and its relationship to the state: fourth estate/market liberal; social responsibility/critical pluralist and dominant interest/radical. A literature review and a qualitative approach were used to identify and compare key debates in various reports from Australia, Britain and South Africa. While suggestions in Britain and Australia favoured an i...

The fourth estate's power, in many African countries, has been restricted and its role as a catalyst of change in civil society curtailed. The ensuing information gap provided fertile ground for alternative forms of communication, to take centre stage. A parallel market of information has been facilitated by new technologies that circumvent government censorship. On 1 August 2013, heavy rains in the Sudan triggered flash floods that affected more than 530 000 citizens. The government failed to aid those affected and created a media blackout. More than 12 000 Sudanese volunteers created a horizontal network of citizens participating in a community-led initiative. The Nafeer campaign united the fragmented discourse, demonstrating that using ICTs to mobilise citizens is not contingent on the number of people with access, but on how access is channeled.

This essay represents the author's attempt to grapple with a number of tensions inspired and enriched by Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. This author's interest in history and historical context first engendered skepticism regarding Habermas's surprising discovery of the ideal of the bourgeois public sphere (hereafter BPS) within the far less than ideal context of eighteenth-century English politics and political discourse. Habermas critics have long noted that Structural Transformation often ignored many of the dreadful realties of the context of eighteenth-century political discourse (Calhoun, 1992, pp. 33, 239). There can be little doubt that the reality of politics and political discourse, at least in the English BPS, was antithetical to Habermas's ideal. According to Craig Calhoun (1992), for Habermas: The importance of the public sphere lies in its potential as a mode of societal integration. Public discourse ... is a possible mode of coordination of human life, as are state power and market economies. But money and power are non-discursive modes of coordination ... they offer no intrinsic openings to the identification of reason and will, and they suffer from tendencies toward domination and reification. (p. 6) In fact, public discourse of the period associated with the English BPS was thoroughly inundated with the influences of money and power. This period saw the rise and consolidation of modern financial institutions like the Bank of England and stock markets. And this timeframe also saw important developments in the growth of English political institutions--particularly political parties--that also exercised influence over policy outcomes and social coordination. In sum, the Structural Transformation may be said excessively to downplay the extent to which the power of emerging financial and political institutions, rather than the power of the better argument, shaped and guided English political discourse and policy--even during the time at which the BPS was allegedly in its prime. But alongside this longstanding unease with the manner in which Habermas may be said to have neglected historical accuracy in the service of his efforts to recover "a valuable critical ideal" (Calhoun, 1992, p. 29) from the BPS, my current ruminations on Habermas's Structural Transformation are informed not just by history, but by concerns about the hyperpartisan context of early twenty-first century political discourse in the United States. As a corrective both to Habermas's downplaying of party and partisanship in the English BPS, as well as the seemingly unchecked partisanship of current political discourse, this essay uses Habermas's Structural Transformation as a springboard for developing contextually based strategies for argument evaluation that view political parties and partisan discourse, not exclusively as distortions of rationality or culprits in the decay of an idealized BPS, but rather as potential agents of rational deliberation and discourse. Although Habermas (1989) maintained that the rise of modern interest-based political parties was a contributing factor in the decline of the BPS (pp. 203-5), he recognized nevertheless that the rational critical debate of the English BPS was itself somehow structured by a discursive tension between Robert Walpole's government and Bolingbroke's opposition. The English BPS, Habermas contends, resulted largely from the parliamentary opposition's attempt to influence the state by recourse to the umpire of public opinion. Opposition papers achieved the status of a fourth estate; and the public sphere developed in a confrontation between the press and the state: "From 1727 on, under the impact of the Craftsman, a systematic opposition arose which ... until 1742, via literature and press, informed the public at large about the political controversies in Parliament" (Habermas, 1989, pp. 63-64). Habermas (1989) continues, through the critical debate of the public, it [political opposition] took the form of a permanent controversy between the governing party and the opposition . …

New media dramatically increase citizens’ access to information and decrease governments’ ability to control the flow of communication. Although human rights nongovernmental organizations have advocated that access to independent news media will improve government respect for human rights, recent empirical studies have shown this is not always the case. We posit that media independence and the presence or absence of democratic characteristics, in particular political competition, have substantial effects on government repression because these factors determine the degree to which the government is vulnerable to public pressures. The model developed here includes three equations that encompass the impact of interaction between and among the news media, citizens, and government. The first equation specifies the influences on the news media’s decision whether or not to perform a “watchdog” role regarding government repression. The second equation represents public reaction to the news media’s coverage of government repression (i.e., protest). Here access to news media via traditional and new media is an important factor. The third equation represents government repression. Solutions to the system of equations are derived for four scenarios (a) Democracy and media independence are both present, (b) democracy is present but media independence is absent, (c) democracy is absent (autocracy) and media independence is present, and (d) democracy is absent (autocracy) and media independence is absent. We then consider interesting properties of the anticipated behavior from the government, media, and general public through case illustrations for the Netherlands and Myanmar/Burma. [Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher’s online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource: two additional case illustrations (Tanzania and Brazil).]

Studies of the Nigerian civil war have examined the notion of ‘war fronts’ and ‘home fronts’ as reflective of gendered representations of the war. Others have critiqued these representations as informed by the anxieties of the elite – the military, business and politician classes. This article attempts to examine Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2007. London: Fourth Estate) as constructing a composite consciousness of the war. It does this by examining the evolving consciousness of Ugwu, the houseboy in the text. By tracing his evolution, the article aims first to examine the novel as a project of memory, especially trauma memory and how it is played out in the daily lives of the protagonists. Secondly, Ugwu is examined as an embodiment of a composite consciousness in the novel. He embodies a memory that competes with the elite and bourgeoisie one, which has defined the literary historiography of the war. Thirdly, the article examines how he evolves from the state of naivety as a houseboy to become a ‘vern...

The media plays a key role in scrutinising Australia's counter-terrorism laws and holding the executive to account for its actions. This article briefly examines why the role of the media is so signiticant in the counter-terrorism context, before turning to examine three factors which have limited the media's effectiveness in performing this role. First, the limited access of the media to information about ongoing investigations and judicial proceedings, Second, the ‘chilling’ effect of the counter-terrorism laws on the freedom of speech. And, finally, the manipulation of the media by the Commonwealth government for political ends.

Following the 9/11 attacks on the USA, the Howard government introduced extensive amendments to the criminal act within Australia. The Australian mainstream media has been criticized for its ineffective contestation of the controversial legislation, effectively becoming ‘seduced’ by the Howard government's discourses around post-9/11 insecurity. This article examines the representation of the ‘anti-terror laws’ by the Australian government and mainstream newspaper media. I argue that competing editorial practices in mainstream newspapers diluted the possibility of effective contestation of the laws. More broadly this article will illustrate that discourses around the media's traditional role as the ‘fourth estate’ often does not account for the various internal and external influences and constraints placed upon journalistic practice.

Aimed at reinforcing the democratic values of freedom of speech and increased diversity in civic access to the means of communication, this paper examines the concept of democracy within an information and communication technology-mediated context. Discussion proceeds with an analysis of orthodox views adopted by Jefferson and the architects of the American Constitution. Building on the Jeffersonian tradition, a critique is presented of present-day, non-transparent constraints on the democratic values of freedom of speech, information access and the structural constrains mitigating unfettered public access to critical information and debate on fundamental social and political issues of the day. The proposed ‘custodiary’ model for the new Democratic Project is premised on the development of a constitutional framework which encourages information diversity and freedom of access and expression as a way of bringing back ‘discourse’ into democratic praxis.

The relationship between media, security and conflict is perhaps one of the most important topics discussed in the field of communication today. The rapid evolution of communications technologies a...

In recent years, many states have reformed laws,or are considering the reform of laws, that govern whether journalists should be compelled to reveal the names of sources who wish to remain ‘anonymous’ (‘confidential sources’). Such reforms have often come about as a result of journalists being sanctioned for non-disclosure under existing laws, or from a general acceptance that existing laws gave inadequate protection to journalists. In such debates, the media lobby has tended to request that they are given an absolute privilege against the forced disclosure of their confidential sources, and currently absolute protection is recognised in around 20 countries. This article argues against absolute source protection laws. It does so by exploring the three main sets of arguments which are used to support protection of confidential sources: those based upon theories of promises and confidentiality; those justified on grounds of the efficiency of newsgathering or other professional related arguments; and those based upon constitutional arguments such as that the press has special privileges as a result of its watchdog role, because it is the Fourth Estate of government, or because of the importance of free speech. None of these arguments is robust enough to support absolute protection, and the position of absolute privilege advocates is further undermined by the variety of situations in which journalists seek to protect their confidential sources. Such sources have a wide range of motivations for disclosing the information they give to journalists, some of which are altruistic, such as the whistleblower wishing to reveal illegal practices. Others are clearly malevolent, hoping to besmirch the name of another, or to criminally exploit false information they reveal. Journalists protect confidential sources who are criminals, and refuse to reveal them even when it could aid a criminal defendant. It is clear that in a number of these situations there are public interests or private rights adversely affected by the disclosure of information by a confidential source, or the refusal of a journalist to reveal the name of a source, which would not be protected if journalists had an absolute right to protect their confidential sources. Whilst being opposed to absolute source protection, this writer accepts that the protection of confidential sources may have an important value; in the concluding section of the article, a number of different ways in which protection of confidential sources can be balanced against competing interests and values are explored.

Headteacher workloads are often in the news. Long hours, punitive audit regimes and excessive amounts of paperwork take their toll on many, including John Illingworth, former National Union of Teachers (UK) President, and ex primary headteacher. In this paper, I investigate a UK BBC Radio 4 human interest interview conducted with Illingworth by the usually acerbic John Humphrys. Mobilising Bourdieu’s notion of field, I examine the interview and argue that the analysis suggests that the media game of market share and the doxa of the fourth estate might work to delimit the capacity of such interviews to speak truth to policy power.

SUMMARY Buoyed by its brand name, Google News has grown from its beta stage into a popular news site with a significant share of the Internet market for “Current Events and Global News.” The success of Google News raises questions about the nature of news and even the desirability of Google's presenting news. Where does Google News fit into the myriad news resources available on the Internet and in libraries? How does Google News work? Is Google News an effective source for news research? How will Google News stand up to its competition, in particular a new wave of community news sites?

The suggestion that the activities of public relations professionals and news agencies help to shape news content in national and local news media is increasingly commonplace among journalists, academics and public relations professionals. The findings from this study provide substantive empirical evidence to support such claims. The study analyses the domestic news content of UK national'quality'newspapers (2207 items in the Guardian, The Times, Independent, Daily Telegraph and the mid-market Daily Mail) and radio and television news reports (402 items broadcast by BBC Radio 4, BBC News, ITV News and SkyNews), across two week-long sample periods in 2006, to identify the influence of specific public relations materials and news agency copy (especially reports provided by the UK Press Association) in published and broadcast news contents. The findings illustrate that journalists' reliance on these news sources is extensive and raises significant questions concerning claims to journalistic independence in UK news media and journalists' role as a fourth estate. A political economy analysis suggests that the factors which have created this editorial reliance on these 'information subsidies' seems set to continue, if not increase, in the near future.

South Pacific media is generally projected as embracing Western news values with the ideals of “objectivity” and “facticity” being paramount. In fact, while this may well be partially true of the Western-owned mainstream media in the two largest nations, Fiji and Papua New Guinea, the reality is far more complex. In many respects, Pacific media have more in common with other developing nations, such as in India, Indonesia and the Philippines. Some argue that unique forms of media language are evolving in the region, while others assert that a unique style of Pacific journalism is emerging. This paper discusses notions of Fourth Estate in the South Pacific and outlines and applies a “Four Worlds” news values model that contrasts with media in the dominant regional neighbour states, Australia and New Zealand. It also assesses the findings of two rounds of empirical research in the newsrooms of Fiji and Papua New Guinea (1998/9 and 2001). Finally, the paper argues for major changes to alter a mindset...

Martin Curley, Managing Information Technology for Business Value: Practical Strategies for IT and Business Managers, Hillsboro, Oregon: Intel Press (2004), 288pp. Linda Volonino and Stephen R. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Information Security: Protecting Computers from Hackers and Lawyers, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall (2004), 232 pp. Georgina Ferry, A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Teashops and the World's First Office Computer, London: Fourth Estate (2003), 221pp.

(2002). Fourth Estate or Fifth Column? the Media and Politics in New Zealand. Political Science: Vol. 54, No. 2, pp. 69-72.

Journalism faces attack from two areas. From one direction it has to repel the pressures from its new owners, the media conglomerates, that have exacerbated the traditional problems of professional news. From another, new forms of political and government communication with the public are emerging. The Internet is displacing the journalistic role of providing information and interpretation for the citizen. This article assesses the future for journalism within the public sphere and asks whether journalism can perform its normative functions in the digital age.

It's our turn to eat: The story of a Kenyan whistleblower, by Michela Wrong, London, Fourth Estate, 2009, xi + 354 pp., ISBN 978-0-00-724196-5 From 3 to 5 August 2009 the Botswana Federation of Pub...

"I told you so" was part of Tom Kent's reply when asked recently about the state of the newspaper industry in Canada (Cobb 1996b, A1). Kent, Chairperson of the 1980 Royal Commission on Newspapers, might be forgiven his expression of self-satisfaction. Deprecated and dismissed when the Commission's report first appeared, Kent and his report are now being cited for their prescient analysis. Shelved as either dangerous or impracticable, the Commission's recommendations are now being seriously debated. This paper aims to explain this renewed interest in the Kent Commission. Background The Royal Commission on Newspapers, popularly known as the Kent Commission, was created in 1980 in response to allegations of collusion following the same-day closings of the Thomson-owned Ottawa Journal and the Southam-owned Winnipeg Tribune. These closings left each company--Southam in Ottawa and Thomson in Winnipeg--with monopolies in their respective cities. The closings were followed by expressions of public concern over newspaper concentration in Canada and worries that the fourth estate was not fulfilling its democratic function. The Commission's mandate was to explore these concerns and make recommendations for improvement. At the time of the Kent Commission, these two newspaper chains, Thomson and Southam, were dominant. Together, they accounted for 77 percent of the 117 dailies in Canada. Significantly, this proportion was up from 58 percent just ten years previously when the first government inquiry on newspapers had been established under Senator Keith Davey. In 1980 Thomson owned the largest number of Canadian newspapers. As well as publishing the Globe and Mail, Canada's only national newspaper at the time, Thomson owned forty other dailies. The Southam chain, on the other hand, had the largest total daily circulation, capturing 32.8 percent of the English Canadian newspaper-buying public (Canada, Royal Commission 1981, Chapter 1). The Kent Commission was generally critical of Canada's newspaper business, confirming the fears that instigated the Commission. Kent reserved his harshest criticism, however, for the Thomson newspaper chain. While praising Thomson for maintaining the quality of the Globe and Mail, the Commission saw the Thomson-controlled smaller dailies as epitomizing the worst aspects of corporate ownership in the print media. The Kent Commission argued that Thomson was squeezing the quality from most of its newspapers in exchange for higher profits. As well, the Thomson conglomerate owned large assets outside the newspaper business. Kent argued that Thomson ran its newspapers much the way it operated its other businesses--profit was its dominant goal. By contrast, Southam (then owned by the Southam family) was focussed primarily on newspapers, and quality was not necessarily sacrificed to profit. As Kent put it, Southam still had a "newspaper conscience": "They spend, on the contents of their newspapers, many millions of dollars a year that are by the simple criterion of the bottom line, entirely wasted" (Kent 1982). A paper bought out by Thomson, on the other hand, inevitably "becomes a little thinner and the share of advertising increases as a percentage of the newspaper's total space" (Kent 1982). Cost-cutting measures are frequently introduced, especially with regard to editorial and news space. These cost-cutting measures occur in an already highly profitable industry, Kent argued. The Thomson conglomerate was (and is) owned by Ken Thomson. But the philosophy behind Thomson newspapers seems to have come from Roy Thomson, Ken's father and founder of the Thomson empire. Roy Thomson famously said that owning television stations and daily newspapers in Canada is like owning money-making machines--only with newspaper ownership, unlike television, one doesn't need a license (Siegel 1996, 123). Focusing on ownership, the Kent Commission predicted conglomerate ownership would increase in the 1980s and 1990s. …

This article assesses some major democratic norms commonly invoked in relation to means of communication or ‘media’, especially in the context of ‘media policy’. The paper argues that freedom of communication provides the most appropriate normative discourse in which to re-articulate the case for the European policy practice of ‘regulated pluralism’ outside Europe. Recent developments in Australia provide a brief case-study of this thesis.

President Mintimer Shaimiev of Tatarstan is undoubtedly one of the most easily recognized regional political leaders. The Russian press has a great interest in him. The name Shaimiev has "very strong influence" on lobbyists. Journalists issue diverse, at times directly conflicting, reports on the Tatarstan press. Freedom of speech is said to be quite limited, and all the media in the republic are considered to be under the president's control. Shaimiev is also reported to be open and accessible to journalists, whom he respects as the fourth estate, and to rely on them in implementing his policies. In any case, about four hundred mass media organizations are registered today in Tatarstan, and 489 newspapers are sold per 1,000 inhabitants, which puts the republic in second place among the most avidly reading regions of Russia. The president of Tatarstan received a certificate from the Union of Russian Journalists "for the openness of his communication with the press," as well as the "Silver Ray," the Nation...

AUTOPERCEPCION DEL PERIODISMO EN LA ARGENTINA / SELF‐PERCEPTION OF ARGENTINE JOURNALISM edited by Rosendo Fraga (Buenos Aires: Editorial de Belgrano, 1997—ISBN 950–577–202–5, 196 pp., tables, charts) CUARTO PODER: COMO EL PODER ECONOMICO SE INSERTA EN LOS MEDIOS DE COMUNICACION COLOMBIANOS / THE FOURTH ESTATE: THE INFLUENCE OF ECONOMIC POWER IN COLOMBIAN MEDIA by Emilio Juan Ruiz (Bogota, Colombia: Castillo Editorial, 1996—ISBN 958–9499–09–0, 300 pp., tables, reproductions of documents, appendices) LA METAMORFOSIS DE LA TV / THE METAMORPHOSIS OF TV edited by Carmen Gomez Mont (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, “Cuadernos de comunicacion y practicas sociales, 8,”; 1995—ISBN 968–859–213–7, 134 pp., notes) MORIR ES LA NOTICIA / DEATH IS NEWS edited by Ernesto Carmona (Santiago, Chile: Ernesto Carmona, 1997 [2nd ed]—ISBN 956–7495–05‐X, 432 pp., tables, illustrations, index) TELENOVELA/TELENOVELAS: LOS RELATOS DE UNA HISTORIA DE AMOR / SOAP OPERA/SOAP OPERAS: THE NARRATIVE OF A LOVE STORY edited by Mari...

Never in the history of newspapering has our Fourth Estate been so unsure of what its premiere medium should be doing as we approach the 21st century. Because daily newspaper circulation and readership have been declining since 1987, every newspaper consultant in America has an opinion about what papers must do. This exploratory study focuses on what Southwest media managers think newspapers must do—provide analysis and context in local news coverage. Context is defined and eight competing southwestern newspapers in Alburquerque, El Paso, Phoenix, and Tucson are content analyzed for “analysis” by investigating 200 seperate 1994 editions in this non-probability, purposive benchmark sample.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines by Kevin Kelly. London: Fourth Estate, 1994, 666 pages, hb £16.99, pb £8.99.

This paper evaluates media credibility in Malaysia and Singapore through a case study of Radio Television Malaysia’s Channel 2 and Television Corporation of Singapore’s Channel 5 English-language news broadcasts. A qualitative content analysis of the two stations’ news broadcasts over a week-long period indicates that whereas in the developmental journalism framework the two broadcasts appear to be credible, they may not measure up to the watchdog or Fourth Estate journalism criteria of credibility. Implications of new information technology for ‘guided’ media systems are considered. The study was done within the framework of media ideology in the two countries.

This 1993 national survey describes the attitudes of our Fourth Estate's science reporters writing for 103 newspapers with circulations in excess of 100,000. Following a journalism literature review of the past 30 years, the investigator classified the scholarship areas into three typologies: accuracy, scientific attribution and creative writing . Seventeen attitudinal statements were developed to reflect those three scholarship typologies. A principal factor analysis of the 17 attitudinal variables reduced the data into three dimensions the investigator named ‘Beat Pressure,’ ‘Creative Talent’ and ‘Reporter Responsibility.’ Science reporters persist in science writing because it offers a rare brand of news that can be shared with readers about new discoveries and the meaning of it all.

(1993). Children of the fourth estate: Public representations of ‘Children’ and ‘Childhood’. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 17, No. 36, pp. 65-79.

The Washington State University Libraries needed a way to organize its collection of newspapers on microfilm in the humanities/social sciences collection that.would be consistent with the way other microfilms in this collection are filed, which is by call number. Since there currently is no LC classification schedule for newspapers, an LC-like schedule using the undeveloped AN class was designed by one of the serials catalogers as a solution to the problem. For ease of use, it is arranged alphabetically by country within thirteen major geographic regions, with optional expansions for some countries within the schedule and/or in appendices, and includes general usage guidelines.