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We present Meteor, a new inventory for European news sources (i.e. EU + UK, CH, NO, IL): https://wp3.opted.eu/. This inventory will facilitate researchers' efforts to select sources across platforms and gather related textual data. It contains the names of print and online news sources, social media accounts, news blogs, and alternative news media sources, as well as rich meta-information for each entry (e.g. language, audience size, topical focus, ownership structures, access to full-text archives, secondary data, related research). Meteor accounts for the fuzziness of hybrid media systems through an interlinked knowledge graph. Entries are submitted by researchers, validated, continuously updated, and openly accessible to the public. Our inventory allows users to find various European news sources based on a wide range of criteria, putting scholars in a better position to navigate the European media landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Mass media has an important role in influencing the suicidal behavior of the general population. However, the quality of news reporting of suicide has not been assessed in Iraq. Aim: We aimed to assess the quality of news reports in Iraq while reporting the suicidal behaviors. Methods: The search was done on Google in November and December 2020 with the search term 'suicide news in Iraq' and accessible news reports distributed in Kurdish, Arabic, and English languages were taken out. We scrutinized the news reports to identify the reporting characteristics and compared them with the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines. Results: A total of 130 news reports were analyzed; among them 23.8% were Kurdish, 63.8% were Arabic, and 12.3% were in the English language. About 31.5% of the reports mentioned the name and 40.8% mentioned the occupation. The name of method was mentioned in 88.5%, mono-causality was found in about 34.6%, the term 'suicide' was mentioned in the headline in 94.6%, and method of suicide was mentioned in the headline of about 27.7% of the reports. Only 5.4% of the reports traced mental illness, 6.9% mentioned expert opinion, and none of the reports mentioned prevention program, and educative information. Conclusion: The study revealed that news reports of suicidal behavior in Iraq are poorly adherent to the WHO reporting guidelines. Further studies are warranted to identify the responsible factors and culture-specific prevention strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This content analysis explored associations between the framing of cancer-related health news stories on Facebook and their corresponding comments. It was found that regardless of story framing the majority of responses involved users engaging in debate and discussion rather than sharing personal experiences. Furthermore, stories framed episodically had a greater proportion of both supportive and unsupportive comments than stories framed thematically. As predicted, episodic stories were associated with more attributions of responsibility directed towards the individual whereas thematic stories lead to more societal-level attributions of blame. Contrary to predictions, responses did not contribute towards the stigmatisation of lung cancer, instead more responses were aimed at reducing stigma for this illness. Within the findings strong beliefs about cancer treatment and management were also identified, which raises concern over the spread of misinformation. Overall, this research provided insight into the framing of cancer news and highlighted potential implications of Facebook comments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Irresponsible media reporting of suicide is a potential risk for copycat suicide. There is a paucity of studies from sub-Saharan Africa on the quality of media reporting of suicide. Objectives: We assessed the compliance of Ghanaian online media outlets with the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines for media reporting of suicide. Methods: We searched 10 local media outlets with strong online presence in Ghana, to identify suicide-related news reports from 2000 through 2019. We applied summative content analysis and chi-square (χ 2) test to the data. Results: We included 288 news reports, of which 261 (90.6%) were completed suicides, 7 (2.4%) were attempted suicides and 20 (6.9%) were homicide suicides. Most of the news reports failed to comply with the WHO guidelines: 92.7% mentioned the specific method of the suicide act, 82.6% included 'suicide' in the headline and 55.6% included photos of the victims. The χ 2 tests indicated that privately owned media outlets were more likely than publicly owned to post a photo of the victim, χ 2 (1) = 17.37, p <.001, and report the incident location in the headline, χ 2 (1) = 15.00, p <.001. However, generally, there were no statistically significant relationships between the quality of reporting and media outlet ownership. Each of the 288 reports failed to mention any of the potentially helpful features recommended by the WHO guidelines. Conclusion: Regardless of the ownership of the media outlet (whether private or publicly owned), mostly, the online reportage of suicidal behaviour in Ghana deviates sharply from the international recommended best practice by the WHO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we trace shifting representations of a US-Mexico border region in national mainstream news media during the rise of Donald Trump. We argue that the border is an American concept-metaphor that circulates and reshapes in media in response to political actors. We compare articles published in 2015, 2016, and 2017 about the Texas borderlands where the majority of Central American asylum seekers arrived. Crucial to Trump's success, the narrow, racialized rendering of the border inadvertently provoked a wider array of representations in national news media but remained rooted in how Americans think about Others, sovereignty, and immigration. Our work contributes to scholarship that connects discursive regimes and statecraft with life in borderlands to lay bare underlying social tensions and potential violence. Analysis of concept-metaphors can open spaces for new articulations of key cultural domains and interrogate hidden assumptions about places, crucial during times of surging populism and nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media offer people ways of understanding mental health and illness, shaping their attitudes and behaviour towards it. Yet, the literature on media representations of depression is limited and fails to illuminate sufficiently the content of representations. In times of financial crisis, the prevalence of depression is increased and the particular meanings associated with depression are widely diffused. To unpack these meanings, we focused on the Greek-Cypriot press during the financial crisis of 2013. Two-hundred and three articles from seven widely circulating newspapers were thematically analysed. Two antithetical themes of representations of depression were identified: Biomedical Depression, which constructed depression as a biologically grounded illness treated through medical/pharmaceutical means, and Everyday Depression, which portrayed depression as something normal, encountered in anyone, attributed to psychosocial factors (e.g. the financial crisis), and treated through self-management. Biomedical Depression reflects a widespread medical and deterministic understanding of depression. Nevertheless, this understanding has not overridden, as the literature suggests, references to individual agency, which are present in the Everyday Depression and the more normalising understanding of depression it expresses. We argue, however, that both themes promote an individualistic understanding of depression, placing individuals in a tense position of being responsible for a condition perceived to be outside their control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How populists engage with media of various types, and are treated by those media, are questions of international interest. In the United States, Donald Trump stands out for both his populism-inflected campaign style and his success at attracting media attention. This article examines how interactions between candidate communications, social media, partisan media, and news media combined to shape attention to Trump, Clinton, Cruz, and Sanders during the 2015–2016 American presidential primary elections. We identify six major components of the American media system and measure candidates' efforts to gain attention from them. Our results demonstrate that social media activity, in the form of retweets of candidate posts, provided a significant boost to news media coverage of Trump, but no comparable boost for other candidates. Furthermore, Trump tweeted more at times when he had recently garnered less of a relative advantage in news attention, suggesting he strategically used Twitter to trigger coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth sexuality is typically constructed as a social problem, and associated with a range of negative consequences for larger society and for young people themselves – especially young women. The media play a role in perpetuating this dominant construction, but may also offer a space for resistance. In this article, mainstream news media reportage on youth sexual and reproductive issues in Aotearoa (New Zealand) is discursively analysed to identify instances of resistance to oppressive discourses. Taking a feminist poststructuralist perspective, the aim is to connect news reporting, as a representational practice, with broader relations of power. The focus of the analysis, therefore, is on whether and how young people are allowed a voice in news reportage, and to what effect their voices are deployed. The analysis demonstrates not only that youth voice is relatively muted in comparison to experts, but also that it is frequently used to reinforce the dominant constructions of youth sexuality (as problematic and risky). Yet, instances of resistance are also evident. These are assessed in relation to their impact on gender power relations, and possibilities for amplifying resistance are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined the association of the combination of direct intergroup contact and mass media news with attitudes toward immigrants and gay people in Italy, hypothesizing that direct intergroup contact would buffer the negative association between media news and attitudes, but only when contact was intimate or positive. Measuring contact variables and attitudes toward immigrants (Study 1, N = 428; Study 2, N = 426) and gay men and women (Study 3, N = 220), we found that intimate and positive direct intergroup contact was associated with more positive attitudes toward outgroup members, whereas exposure to negative news was related to more negative attitudes. Moreover, our results supported the buffering hypothesis, as the negative association between negative news and intergroup attitudes was significantly weaker amongst respondents with higher levels of intimate and positive intergroup contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses how mainstream media are conceptualised as a site for mediated recognition in the city of Sydney, Australia. Utilising the notion of political listening, the analysis investigates how participants position certain media outlets as misrecognising the value of diverse voices. Through in-depth interviews, the article explores how audiences discuss perceived issues of significance to society in their recall of news coverage spanning politics, migration, international conflict and local crime. First, the article clarifies how participants construct specific racialised notions of Otherness by situating their use of mainstream media discourses in the context of their everyday communicative interactions. Second, it examines how racialised frameworks are mobilised by participants to evaluate certain news media as spaces of exclusion. This article posits that the participants' discussions of these media spaces as being integral in fostering inclusion endows the media outlets with a capacity for enhancing everyday mechanisms of mediated recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines recent efforts to bring 'solutions journalism' – an approach to news coverage developed in the United States that encourages journalists to propose potential solutions to social problems – to the French regional press. Drawing on interviews and company documents from news organizations, we show that solutions journalism has found support among both management and journalists, though for different reasons. Whereas management see solutions journalism as a way to bolster shrinking audiences, journalists perceive an opportunity to regain relevance in diversified media companies whose emphasis on news has declined over time. Though solutions journalism changes little in terms of journalist's everyday practices, its presence legitimates and valorizes marketing discourses, as journalists use it to describe efforts to grow audiences, boost sales and monetize content. As a result, we suggest that solutions journalism's primary effect on the French regional press may be its operation as a 'Trojan horse' for marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the construction of the Estonian–Russian border incident of 2014, where an Estonian security officer ended captured by Russian authorities, in Finnish, Estonian and British press. It asks (a) How did the press construct the event and the actors in the reporting of the Kohver case in Finnish, Estonian and British press? What happened? Who did what? Who was responsible? What is the outcome of these constructions? Are there differences in national reporting? (b) Can ‘Finlandisation’ explain the discursive choices in the press constructions? By Finlandisation we refer to a hypothesis about the effects that the proximity of a major power in the context of international tension has on media discourse and culture more broadly. We argue that although the discourse of the Kohver case in Finnish, Estonian and British press could be subsumed under the term ‘Finlandisation’ in the case of the first two countries, a more fruitful approach would be to consider the discursive differences in the framework of the ‘domestication’ of news. This implies that explaining the tone of the news discourse is as much a matter of media logic as it is of underlying and/or implicit ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Trinidad two distinct bodies scar everyday cultural life. One is the Carnivalesque - a naked, commodified, and sexualised body of the popular bikini and beads type of Carnival portrayals called 'pretty mas'. The other body is the grotesque - a dead, maimed, and murdered body appearing frequently in news media and in daily discussions on social media as the murder rate locally reaches one person every day. From the mid 1980s to the present, the numbers and visibility of these bodies in the same everyday spaces has increased. While there is no causal connection, fieldwork suggests cultural conversation between two representations of the body, between laughter and grief, jouissance and mutilation, celebration and fear exists in Trinidad. Through ethnographic fieldnotes, historical data, discourse analysis and the cultural theories of Guy Debord, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lloyd Best and Antonio Benítez-Rojo, this article explores the cultural correlation between everyday images (sexual and violent) of the body in Trinidadian society and their impact on the constitution of subjectivity, nationhood and segregation locally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have documented growth in media coverage and popular discourse focusing on politicians’ personal lives—personalization. Candidates use social media and personalization to circumvent mainstream news media, disrupting conventional processes. This personalization arguably increases voters’ reliance on personal characteristics as voting heuristics. An online experiment exposed more than a thousand US adults to personalized or policy/campaigning tweets from a male or female US Senator running for re-election. Candidates who personalized elicited higher evaluations of social presence and parasocial interaction. For female candidates who shared a supported party with a respondent, personalization leads to feelings of perceived presence and parasocial interaction. Ultimately, the feelings of intimacy created by personalized tweets led respondents to express support for personalizing candidates, but this effect is contingent upon the gender and in-party status of the candidate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children are not considered to be an appropriate audience for news coverage based on their presumed lack of emotional maturity, critical thinking and proper knowledge. This article challenges these views by presenting the opinions of children aged 10–15 who report having watched broadcast news nearly every day. Additionally, the views of adults aged 25–62 are investigated. Children contest to the ways they are being portrayed by the news media and demonstrate their need to be considered as active participants in the public sphere, which is presented by the news media as an exclusive domain for adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the contradictions inherent in new media representations of sexual minorities in two bordering post-Soviet countries, Belarus and Lithuania. These nations are divided by their non/membership of the European Union and, being at the western periphery of the former Russian imperial centre, remain directly affected by the Russian mediascape and its information flows. While both countries' state media closely adhere to the Russian establishment's homophobic discourse, the role of new media remains largely uncharted. This article uses discourse analysis to (a) examine the influence of Russian media on each nation's digital discussions about sexual minorities and (b) explore new media's potential to mediate the intersection of sexual minorities and nation-building in two post-Soviet states. The analysis is centred on a set of online media publications (including their 'comments' sections), generated by the Eurovision Song Contest 2014 being won by Conchita Wurst, a drag performer with a beard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central instruments of social policy include not only social programmes but also how social problems and social inequality are represented in the media. In this article, these representations are analysed, with a particular focus on the meanings attached to actors, events and phenomena in the field of social policy and how they are produced and diffused through society by means of language, symbols and images. The aim of the study is to provide an analysis of the representations of social inequality and social policy in one of modern Russia’s official state-run newspapers. The various means of explaining social inequality in the official print media will also be revealed and explained here. This is achieved through a content analysis of the articles in Rossiiskaya Gazeta [Russian Newspaper] from 2005 to 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media concentration has always been a controversial topic. In any media market, the dominant position of some companies may distort the free flow of information and, as a result, can decrease media pluralism and the quality of democracy. This article analyses 10 media and telecommunications product markets in Spain from 1984 to 2012. With this comprehensive and long-term approach, it concludes that content industries are moderately but increasingly concentrated, while technology industries are highly but decreasingly concentrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the construction of conservative consciousness toward the establishment press, namely the articulation of the idea of the liberal media. Using discursive institutionalism and Nancy Fraser’s critique of Habermas’s conception of the public sphere as a theoretical lens, it is argued that the liberal media bias critique was developed and solidified in what the author calls the ‘conservative counter-sphere’, a sub-public sphere for right-wing activists and thinkers. A content analysis of the conservative publication Human Events empirically demonstrates that right-wing news outlets provided a public space for the emerging modern conservative movement to articulate a hegemonic discourse and mode of thought about the seeming liberal bias of the mainstream media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) group of states as a new geopolitical power bloc has received substantial coverage in the media. South Africa’s inclusion in the group has been particularly controversial, and media attention tended to focus on the country’s relationship with China against the backdrop of the BRICS alignment. The media industry itself has also been a part of global movements of people and capital. This article seeks to establish how this relationship has been represented in the South African media, and to explore the attitudes of senior journalists and editors towards South Africa’s position within the changing global geopolitical landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Nordic countries’ media systems are exemplary of the democratic corporatist model, and newspapers have occupied a very prominent position in the political public sphere supported by wide circulation and a political will to subsidize the press and still keep an arm’s length distance. During past decades, these features have come under pressure due to – among other things – the spread of digital media. In this article, we explore two current structural economic challenges to legacy newspaper organizations in Denmark. The first challenge regards the implementation of subscription on news websites since 2013. The second challenge concerns the revision of the Danish press subsidy law in 2013–2014. The introduction of a ‘platform neutral’ subsidy law could be interpreted as a first step toward rethinking the entire press subsidies system. Taken together, these developments pose serious challenges to the printed press: on the one hand, no viable business model seems ready to replace the old one; on the other hand, a reorientation of the regulatory system, which subsidizes the press, seems under way. Despite the global nature of ongoing transformation (digitalization and commercialization), national particularities continue to influence developments and reflect continued support for the democratic corporatist model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores slump media, with emphasis on news media in North America. It examines how television, radio, the press, the Internet and social media contributed to the development of slump media. It discusses why the concepts used to analyse the media's role at the start of neoliberalism can be applied to the crisis that may end it.

The German media presentation of the so-called Greek financial crisis caused an unexpected uproar in Germany. An anti-Greek sentiment evolved and spread among German citizens and solidarity for crisis-hit Greece was mostly rejected. Public surveys revealed that many Germans even wanted Greece to exit the Eurozone immediately. This article highlights the crucial role of the media in shaping the negative public opinion. In 2010, a period which has lately been referred to as Greek bashing, the German press had discussed the Greek financial crisis heatedly and controversially. Europe’s largest daily newspaper, BILD, published numerous reports that implicitly and explicitly constituted the myth of the corrupt and lazy Greeks in comparison to the hard-working Germans. In 2012, the crisis had spread much further, and not only Greece but other countries too were suffering from high debt, economic stagnation and unemployment. The news coverage became more moderate and conciliating and presented the dramatic social consequences for the respective population. This study highlights not only the development of the German media’s tenor on the Greek crisis through time, but adds an international perspective and widens the view by comparing the media treatment of the different countries involved. Based on 122 online articles, the study methodologically focuses on the analysis of metaphorical language in the news coverage of three comparable international news magazines: SPIEGEL (Germany), The Economist (the UK) and TIME (the USA), and contrasts the representation of Greece with the depiction of larger indebted European countries like Spain and Italy. The analysis shows remarkable differences in the evaluation and presentation of the crisis, which can be linked to the degree of involvement of Germany, the UK and the USA in European policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Greek crisis has attracted more public-political attention than any other sovereign debt crisis within the European Union. This article investigates the argument that this is due to the symbolic-catalytic role that the Greek crisis played in forging a specific approach to state rescue and the reform of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Drawing on assumptions of interpretive-narrative political studies about the discursive construction of crisis and a Critical Discourse Analysis of editorials from the financial press, the study shows how this approach was ‘catalyzed’ by a specific construction of the ‘Greek case’. Reference to the ‘Greek case’, in particular the high level of government debt, rendered austerity a plausible option of crisis management. Reference to the contagion potential of the Greek crisis justified the application of austerity across the Eurozone. The Greek crisis was also seen to reveal the systemic flaws of the EMU and suggest deepened economic integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most heated public debates on the subject of violent computer games in Germany take place following incidents of school shootings. Such reactions are often conceptualized as moral panics and signs of underlying social conflict. Focus is rarely on the violent computer games themselves. Actor-network theory allows for an analysis of how phenomena are sequentially drawn together, contingent upon the material available for the press at specific times, to which violent computer games can be related. Six months of press coverage following the 2006 school shooting in the German town of Emsdetten were not a continuous narrative of violent computer games, but divided into six distinct phases. In these, violent computer games achieved several different identities. Both the way the material was brought together in the press and the contingent events beyond the context of publishing houses were decisive for which identities were generated in the press, and which of these became the most enduring. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What are the conditions for the public understanding of biofuels and how do the media shape these conditions under the influence of a new production of knowledge? This article investigates how the biofuel controversy plays out in the Swedish press and Google search engine results and analyses winners and losers in the tight attention economy of contemporary media. It describes different visibility strategies biofuel stakeholders employ in both media arenas, and identifies a form of technoscientific promotion that hybrid actors use to succeed in the day-to-day struggle for media attention. To conclude, it raises broader societal questions of the contemporary blurring of knowledge boundaries and the emergence of new information hierarchies and their biases. By understanding how contemporary media shape controversies, we can address the democratic potential of both mass media and science. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Three-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared on 3 May 2007 from a holiday apartment in Portugal. Over five years and multiple investigations that failed to solve this abducted child case, Madeleine and her parents were subject to a process of relentless ‘intermediatization’. Across 24–7 news coverage, websites, documentaries, films, YouTube videos, books, magazines, music and artworks, Madeleine was a mediagenic image of innocence and a lucrative story. In contrast to Madeleine’s media sacralization, the representation of her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, fluctuated between periods of vociferous support and prolonged and libellous ‘trial by media’. This article analyses how the global intermediatization of the ‘Maddie Mystery’ fed into and fuelled the ‘trial by media’ of Kate and Gerry McCann in the UK press. Our theorization of ‘trial by media’ is developed and refined through considering its legal limitations in an era of ‘attack journalism’ and unprecedented official UK inquiries into press misconduct and criminality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically revisits the operation of ‘mediated visibility’ in the context of environmental conflict. Challenger groups have long gained access to news media and influenced political decision-makers by staging highly visible protest events that draw public attention to environmental threats and destruction. The advent of the world-wide web and digital media tools has since added to the tactical arsenal available to groups wanting to infiltrate and disrupt government and corporate networks of power. In turn, governments and corporations deploy these same tools to maintain their reputation and check opponents who oppose their activities. These developments have, we argue, produced a significant flow-on effect. The function of invisibility – or the coordinated avoidance of media communication, attention and respresentation in order to achieve political and/or social ends – is an under-examined feature of contemporary environmental politics. The case study and evidence presented here are drawn from fieldwork conducted in the Australian island state of Tasmania, and extensive content analysis of news media, social networking platforms and websites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on a study related to the internet connectedness of adolescents with the use of traditional media including television, radio and newspapers. It examines type of internet connectedness relates to adolescents use of other media. The result of the study showed that the use of the internet together with other media such as television, radio and newspapers. It is focused that the internet connectedness of adolescents in relation to their use of traditional media, including television, radio and newspapers use not only the internet but also other types of media to fulfill specific internet-related goals.

This paper examines the role of levels of threat on the newspaper coverage of public order policing. We distinguished between macro/national and micro/ local types of protest involving the Arab minority in Israel, and tried to illustrate how threat was constructed differently by the media. Following the protest paradigm and the threat hypothesis, we focused on the newspaper construction of the threat of two violent public order events in which police used live ammunition against members of the Israeli Arab minority: the October 2000 events (macro) and the Pki'in 2007 event (micro). Our analysis shows that the newspapers highly emphasised the perceived threat of the October 2000 events -- much more than in the Pki'in 2001 event. Furthermore, in the October 2000 events the coverage was mainly episodic and pro filed the Israeli Arab protesters as 'an enemy within', while in the Pki'in 2007 event, reporting was more thematic and contextualised the protest within the social problems of the Druze minority in Israel society. The fact that the Israeli Arab minority is perceived by the State as a dissident minority ('the enemy within'), whilst the Druze Arabs are not, influenced the way public order events were covered by the media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The empirical analysis of protest events and other expressions of social conflict is one of the core tasks of the discipline of comparative sociology. The numerous international data sets and empirical country comparisons that rely exclusively on reporting in English-language newspapers such as The New York Times in surveying protest events nevertheless suffer from considerable distortions. Using the example of some 1800 protest events in Argentina, Mexico and Paraguay in the year 2006, the present study shows that there are remarkable differences between national and international (English-language) newspapers when it comes to frequency of reporting. On the one hand, a mere 5.3 percent of all protest events that are reported nationally also attract the attention of the international press. On the other hand, the percentage of international reporting depends considerably and to a statistically significant extent on the country in which the protest takes place. Besides, these country differences persist when additional protest characteristics (e.g. the number of participants, the participation of renowned personalities and the escalation of the protest into rioting) are controlled by means of multivariate logistic regressions. The measurement error that results when surveying protest events on the strength of coverage in the English-language international press is therefore not constant across countries. The frequently used data sets like the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators or the Cross-National Time Series Data Archive launched by Arthur Banks are thus proving to be highly questionable sources for international comparisons in protest and conflict research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In order to accomplish more multi-dimensional analyses of media logic one needs to study how journalists grapple with news issues in their expanding development, such as the revolutionary development of the climate issue in the news. The present analysis is based on interviews with 14 Swedish environmental journalists from various news media, who have been part of editorial concentrations on climate news. The results consist of three ways of conceptualizing the climate issue among the journalists: as inside, outside, and beyond media logic. These conceptualizations give rise to three conflicting types of journalistic creativity, more precisely, the ability to effectively insert the climate issue ‘into’ media logic; the ability to go as far ‘outside’ media logic as possible while remaining credible by arraying the climate issue in ‘scientific language’; and finally, the ability to think beyond the media-logic ‘box’ and do something about it (to change journalism). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Frame analysis, based on the hybrid frame concept, has proved difficult to translate into a comparative, replicable and longitudinal research design. This article seeks to place the study of media frames in a wider theoretical framework with special interest for the various methods of empirical research. The article focuses on a further operationalization of the law and order frame and the injustice and defiance frame as introduced by Wolfsfeld. For this purpose, different framing and reasoning devices are ascertained and applied to the study of the coverage of the First and Second Intifada in the Flemish press. While its emphasis lies on the empirical testing of a framing research tool, this article also aims to broaden empirical data on the coverage of the Intifada beyond the American, British and Israeli media context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media-related practices have so long been configured in a particular one-to-many pattern that the mass communication paradigm has seemed automatic as both frame for research and fact of social life. The paradigm is summed up in the English term 'the media'. But what if the very idea of 'the media' is also imploding, as the interfaces we call media are transformed? Does the implosion of 'the media' generate a crisis of appearances for government and other institutions? Three dynamics are considered here - technological, social and political - that are potentially undermining our idea of 'the media' as a privileged site for accessing a common world. The article concludes that, instead of collapsing, the social construction of 'the media' will become a site of intensified struggle for competing forces: market-based fragmentation vs continued pressures of centralization that draw on new media-related myths and rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its earliest conceptualizations, publicity was believed to contribute significantly to the democratic social order; it normatively legitimized the press and other media as constitutive of the public and public opinion. Yet all the 'old' mass media rooted in the property rights of their owners failed to enhance and complement the corporate freedom of the press with technologically-feasible actions towards equalizing citizens' opportunities to participate in public debates. The most recent technological advances in communication do not seem to resolve this age-old controversy. Rather, an attempt is needed to change the media in the way that would allow of publicity in its original three-dimensional design: personal right to communicate in public, surveillance of the public over government (governance), and mediation between the state and civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the character of the coverage of Africa in the UK press by conducting a content analysis of six newspapers over a 15-day period. The results of this investigation suggest that the character of the UK press coverage of Africa is not as marginalized, negative or trivial as it is often accused of being. This investigation also finds that there are significant differences between 'tabloids' and 'broadsheets' in terms of the quantity of articles, the topics covered and the use of negative framing. This article seeks to fill a conspicuous research gap and to draw attention to the important but largely unacknowledged role of the UK press in informing citizens about Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using samples from local newspapers, letters and public speeches, this article argues that English assimilates to and reflects the Botswana culture through borrowing and semantic modification. It discusses those terminologies and expressions that depict the cultural values of Batswana in the usage of English in Botswana. Two types of borrowed items are discussed: those depicting old traditional practices that cannot be translated into English (kgosi and mophato) and those reflecting recent socio-political experiences in Botswana including the HIV/AIDS threat (tebelopele and omang). The people's culture is also expressed by items such as brigade and the lands that have been semantically modified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the case study of the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, this article explores the role of news images in moving collectives through contested and potentially traumatic events. It examines the coverage of the disengagement process in the three major Israeli daily newspapers, and argues that the Israeli press took upon itself the role of healing the potential collective trauma as the events themselves were unfolding. Drawing on a modified version of Judith Herman's model for treating trauma patients, the article identifies a range of discursive strategies employed by the press to move the Israeli collective from trauma to recovery. It suggests that these strategies enabled the press to assert the existence of traumatic elements in the disengagement process, while simultaneously constructing the alleged trauma as curable, liberating in the long run, and demonstrating the strength and morality of Israeli society. Visual elements played a central role in this complicated process by enabling the mourning and the bearing witness act, providing the necessary material environment to establish safety and a healing relationship, connecting the events effectively to certain parts of the cultural mythology, and pushing the future collective memory of the events in specific directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although democratic theorists recognize an independent media as central to the proper functioning of democratic institutions, democratic governments often exploit their citizens' faith in that independence to generate popular support or at least acquiescence for government policies. This article uses the examples of Operation Horseshoe and the fighting at Račak and Rugovo during the Kosovo conflict of 1998 and 1999 to illustrate how democratic governments in the US and Germany attempted to manipulate public perceptions of the Kosovo conflict to justify the 1999 war. The study reviews over 100 newspaper articles, found in the Lexis-Nexis database, and numerous scholarly articles to trace the development of these specific narratives. The article shows the construction of two illusions: the illusion of multiple sources and the illusion of independent confirmation. In the end, these 'truths' and frameworks filter into scholarship, as many scholars begin to base their interpretations on these 'facts'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, the Irish Times, the Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman characterized the Zinedine ZidanefMarco Materazzi head-butt incident, which took place during the 2006 FIFA World Cup final held in Berlin, Germany. In extra time, following a verbal exchange, Zidane head-butted Materazzi in the chest, sending the Italian defender to the ground in dramatic fashion. Zidane, one of the most prominent players in the history of French soccer, received a red card for his aggressive act and Italy went on to win the World Cup. Given the history of soccer in the three countries whose media reports we examine, in addition to broader socio-political factors, we expected to observe differences in how newspapers from the three nations covered the initial story and how they portrayed both Zidane and Materazzi in the aftermath. Consistent with these expectations, English newspapers appeared comparatively harsh toward Zidane, with newspapers in Ireland and Scotland publishing fewer reports and appearing slightly less critical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Commission's press and communication service plays a central role in the EU's dealings with news organizations. However, following the fall of the Santer Commission, even the service's own press officials admitted the organization was failing and constantly on the defensive against an increasingly hostile media. It was in this context that Santer's successor, former Commission president Romano Prodi, pledged radical reform, making the goal of a modern and professional' press service a priority. The Prodi Commission concluded that it needed a much more positive and proactive way of working. At a time when the Barroso Commission is proposing its own programme of change in communication policy, this article assesses the inheritance that the Prodi reforms left behind, with particular reference to their impact as seen by journalists from one of the member states in which traditionally it has been most difficult to communicate a positive image of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Rupert Murdoch announced in April 2004 that he intended to see his company, News Corporation, reincorporated in the United States, two competing representations of the 'media mogul' came to dominate the press's interpretation of this event. The first of these 'Murdoch representations' was the most common, and painted an image of a successful entrepreneur, a 'celebrity CEO'. Yet, the second 'Murdoch representation' painted a different image, a more detailed portrait, with critical attention paid to the modus operandi of the world's most notorious media proprietor. This article deconstructs these representations of Murdoch, a mythic fracturing of image resulting from the political economy of the Australian press. In essence, the article explores issues of media diversity, myth and ideology, and the propensity of the press for critical, impartial, journalism. The empirical data are drawn from an analysis of two of Australia's pre-eminent newspapers: The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the last 10 years, the internet has become the principal platform for the dissemination and mediation of the culture and ideology of jihadism. The exponential growth of jihadist fora, with their increasingly 'high-end' production values, sophisticated critiques of prevailing narratives and ostensive attempts at impartiality, do not occur in a vacuum. To a great extent they are reactive, their raison d'être supplied by the mainstream media's perceived collusion with governmental (mis)information, or at least its uncritical acceptance. The jihadist media are far from alone in these critiques and there has been a growing convergence of interests with other non-mainstream media outlets, which are also challenging conventional modes of mediation. This article seeks to explore the functions of the new jihadist media, the ways in which it is granted legitimacy, and the compelling issue of radicalizing efficacy and recruitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glasgow's year as European City of Culture in 1990 is perceived as an event marking a renaissance in perceptions of the city. This article examines how the contemporary press coverage can be used as a resource to trace the narratives and mythologies surrounding the event. To facilitate this research, a pre-existing archive of press cuttings, totalling over 5000 clippings, was employed. This article describes how the interests of the project, and the nature of the large press archive being examined, led to the uti- lization of a distinct methodology of media analysis. The article describes the attempt to unite both quantitative, statistical analysis with qualitative, pre-informed examina- tion. By tracing aspects of the practical examination of the Glasgow 1990 press cov- erage, the article explores the successes and failures of the approach taken and assesses its potential for development and employment in other contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compares the roles of progressive online news services with those of mainstream newspapers in developing reactions to the deaths of two schoolgirls by a US military vehicle into massive anti-US protests during 2002 in South Korea. Clear differences were found between the online news services and the mainstream conservative newspapers' coverage in terms of the number of articles, the composition of news sources, and the frames used to make sense of the issues. It reveals that the progressive media played an important role in escalating reactions to the deaths of the two schoolgirls into a broader anti-US sentiment. The results of the study suggest the limitations to the inter-media agenda-setting model in explicating the dynamics of issue development. Additionally, the potential of alternative online news media in agenda-building and the relationship between the news media and issue development are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the wealth of ethnic media outlets in Eastern Europe, the Romani media have grown faster than any others despite small audiences and the poverty, illiteracy and absence of social, political and linguistic cohesiveness of their natural constituency in the region. Yet, beyond their potential symbolic value, the growth of the Romani media appears to defy, the customary expectations with regard to functions, roles and effects in a region where the ethnic media aid minority identity, cultural preservation and participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese press, instead of acting purely as a state propaganda instrument, now functions as ‘Party Publicity Inc.’ — that is, a quasi-business that seeks to make huge profits on the one hand and to legitimate the Party mandate by promoting its image on the other. The accelerated pace of media conglomeration following China's accession to the World Trade Organization has sharpened this trend. This study examines the impact of press ecology in Shenzhen, a national trend-setter for ‘Party Publicity Inc.’, before and after conglomeration. We observe that press conglomeration has (a) engendered a more centralized management structure and operation; (b) replaced duopolistic competition with market monopoly and greater price-fixing abilities; (c) continued to rely on state office subscription; (d) dampened journalists' enthusiasm for political reform in favor of economic interest; (e) developed a two-tier Publicity Inc. to serve both the Party and the market; and (f) provided an opportunity for overseas expansion. Marketization does not trigger political reform, but pre-empts pressure for political change. The Party Publicity Inc. in its conglomerate form represents a complicitous accommodation between power and money engineered by a post-Communist bureaucratic-authoritarian regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the media reaction to Brenda Hale's appointment to the appellate committee of the House of Lords in January 2004 as its starting point, this article considers the impact difference might have on understandings of both the judge and judging. It argues that beneath the surface of the somewhat simplistic personality-based alternatives posited in the British press lies a more organic response to the woman judge generally and her perceived difference. Drawing on Hale's potential for difference in relation to familial (dis)connection, unwanted parenthood and indecent assault, the article concludes that, far from being a malevolent threat, the perceived difference of the woman judge offers an opportunity to consider the possibility of alternative adjudicative approaches and new understandings of the judge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses five news articles extracted from three Ethiopian newspapers published in the English language in order to examine the type of knowledge journalists presuppose in news discourse and, in Relevance Theoretic terms, the amount of processing effort that readers are required to invest in accessing and/or activating what has been presupposed. The article also aims to reveal the existence of possible ideological reasons behind journalists' use of ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ presuppositions in their texts. This analysis indicates that some news article writers unfairly presuppose different types of knowledge in news discourses and add an aura of mystification to certain issues which, in turn, might be for political/ideological reasons. It is thus argued that in producing news articles containing unfair presuppositions, journalists obscure certain issues and put their readers in a situation where they have to invest excessive processing efforts to achieve the required cognitive effect of the articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article monitors news coverage on the European Union and EU-related matters in terms of news frames and news discourses adopted in online versions of seven quality newspapers (six European and one American) over a period of four months (December 2001-March 2002). During this period the EU Council Summit was held in Laeken, Belgium, on 14 and 15 December 2001. The selection of the national quality press outlets is carried out on the basis of a general, significant readership and centrality to the current media debate on European issues in the country. The seven countries are interesting cases in terms of their varying role in the history of European integration as well as their current attitude towards the EU. The research literature identifies five recurrent news frames (conflict, human interest, economic consequences, morality and responsibility): this article assesses the relative visibility of each of these news frames in the coverage on the EU and its institutions in the news outlets under study. Furthermore, it asks which discourse is more dominant when it comes to the shaping of European identity as portrayed in the news reporting. Four types of discourse (culture, expansion, in- and exclusion and power) are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]