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In this article, I develop a theoretical framework to explain rivalry for narrative control between members of the media and transgressing organizations. I do so by integrating and advancing key in...

This study reviews how Thai and Chinese journalists talk about power and truth in relationship to their Fourth Estate role through examining twenty qualitative interviews. Adding to a previous study similarly looking at US and UK journalists it finds that, like their western counterparts, truth is heavily fetishized, being an ideal that journalists admittedly can never reach. However power relations are discussed quite differently, showing how the divergent power structures of the four countries create very different discourses of the power of journalists which are not fetishized to the same extent. This article thus finds that there are limitations to the universality of Žižek’s concept of ideology as fetishistic disavowal (that is, being able to actively admit the limitations of one’s profession as long as one still performs it) in the realm of comparative journalism.

This chapter investigates to what extent leading news media advocate investigative journalism and perform appropriately their watchdog function, assuming that in various media markets these core journalistic practices are currently adapting to an austere (compared with the past) media ecosystem, as well as to a differentiated newsroom role against a background of digital revolution in the media field. By means of digital tools, journalistic investigation has been facilitated to a great extent. However, the acute crises afflicting the media industries have operated as a severe deterrent to costly investigative journalism. Given the prevalent financial constraints in media markets, testified to by journalists in most countries participating in the 2021 Media for Democracy Monitor (MDM), investigative reporting seems to have become a luxury process, despite it being a journalistic bulwark against fake news narratives and unethical standards in media organisations. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the existence of investigative reporting being proportional to the financial strength that characterises the media organisations at the national level, and that targeted public subsidies, where applicable, seem to have proved effective during times of economic recession.

Stripped of Myanmarese citizenship in 1982 and persecuted for three decades, stateless Rohingya have long found precarious refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh. This study explores the framing of the Rohingya in Bangladesh’s largest circulating English language newspaper The Daily Star, to examine how one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers of record framed refugee migration into the country. Analysing two distinct random samples of news stories published on The Daily Star website between 1 December 2011– 31 November 2012 and 1 August 2017–31 October 2017, this article argues that The Daily Star’s press identity, defined though a nationalist frame, failed to successfully deliver human rights-based journalism though a globalist Fourth Estate imperative.

Investigative journalism across national borders is well known for the large projects, initiated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), with hundreds of reporters in many countries who collaborate to produce coverage such as the Panama Papers. However, there are also many examples in the field of global investigative journalism that are microcosms of their larger counterparts. These smaller or ‘microcosm’ cross-border collaborations are instigated and carried out by a small group of reporters, possibly including freelance reporters. Like their larger counterparts, ‘microcosm investigations’ can also lead to sociopolitical change and thus are deservedly classified as investigative journalism. Microcosm investigations can therefore be viewed as part of a suggested global fourth estate that is calling power to account. The purpose of the article is to examine the characteristics of ‘microcosm’-oriented global investigative journalism and to demonstrate the similarities and differences compared with its larger and more visible counterpart. The empirical material consists of interviews with Australian journalists who were shortlisted as finalists and who won national journalism awards, sponsored by the Walkley Foundation. The findings indicate that new technologies that enable cross-border collaboration are enabling the emergence of a global fourth estate. In the concluding discussion it is argued that for the expansion and mainstreaming of global investigative journalism, the multiple small-scale projects undertaken should collectively be viewed as equally important, if not more important, than the fewer but larger and better-known collaborations. Microcosm collaborations offer opportunities for the proliferation of cross-border media coverage that can be accomplished even by relatively small media outlets.

We know of the key cases of media corruption and generally of corruption referred to in this book, because they were first exposed and reported through the media, and specifically investigative journalists working in conjunction with whistleblowers and citizen journalists. Using the metaphorical analogy of Socrates as the first investigative journalist, the chapter will demonstrate the crucial importance that investigative journalism still plays in exposing and reporting worldwide corruption as illustrated by the Panama Papers case and the Cambridge Analytica controversy, analyzed in this chapter. The chapter will also examine how the symbiotic relationship between the fourth and fifth Estates working together in conjunction, help expose and report on global corruption. This is a welcome and major development and paradigm shift on how this symbiotic relationship between the corporate investigative journalists of the fourth Estate and the citizen journalists of the fifth Estate, as well as whistleblowers, such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, and before them many others such as Daniel Ellsberg, Frank Serpico and Katharine Dunn, and the collective voices of social media in their role of bearing witness, valiantly expose major and worldwide instances of corruption, including media corruption.

Dataset of relevant newspaper articles that are the primary data underlying the doctoral research project of Marie Garnier. This dataset includes the following files: (1) Metadata file (text file, information to understand the dataset) (2) Bilbiographic information file (markup language text file, bibliographic information of newspaper articles retrieved and included) (3) Coding handbook (text file) (4) Raw dataset (qualitative data analysis file, newspaper articles included in content analysis) (5) Processed dataset (qualitative data analysis file, coded newspaper articles included in content analysis)

The deliberate publication of fake news by any media organisation or online network is an aberration in journalism practice. And such sophist intentions and dissemination of falsehood to the people through the virtual media, social media and old media is a depravity against humanity to spread mischief, acrimony, crises, disease, corruption, and squalor. It is total negation of journalism values and news values. Thus, this chapter seeks to examine the concept of newsworthiness in the wake of resurrection of the ghost of fake news in this digital age, which was the practice in the age of ignorance when unlettered men abound as journalists. It investigates the ideological constructs of news because it is a violation of journalism practice for any organisation to base its ideology on the publication of fake news. This study highlights news production process in tandem with the socio-cultural interests, political philosophy, and economic interests of the sponsors, financiers, and owners of the media. The chapter critically examines factors of news or factors of newsworthiness in relation to the concept of fake news. If the twelve factors of news are frequency, threshold, unambiguity, meaningfulness, consonance, unexpectedness, continuity, composition, reference to elite nations, reference to elite people, reference to elite persons, and reference to something negative, should there be anything fake called News? In narrative and argumentative form, the study concludes that anything fake or any information that is based on falsehood cannot be regarded as News. If it is news, it must be based on Truth and Facts. If it is news, it must be new. If it is news, it must be based on actualities. If it is news, it must be based on evidences. If it is news, it must be fair. If it is news, it must be based on realities. If it is news, it must not be based on vendetta. If it is news, it must not be hoax. If it is news, it must not be fallacy. If it is news, it must not be innuendoes.

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...

The main narratives of prevailing ideas of the Fourth Estate were articulated in the era of traditional mass media, and these traditional narratives are challenged by the changing media landscapes. This raises the question whether traditional narratives of the Fourth Estate should be maintained. We will argue – through a close reading of Derrida’s reflections on the relationship between communicative significance and silence, combined with a deliberative ideal for democracy – that the new structures of communication call for a Fourth Estate that focuses on creating spaces for flexible structures of silence in the public sphere. The Fourth Estate has an obvious assignment of counteracting problematic structures of silence (if certain important voices are not being heard). In this article, we will, however, bring out assignments of creating spaces of silence in the public sphere: by (a) silencing certain dominant voices, (b) making room for an increased lack of answers and (c) creating an awareness of the insufficiencies of the public spheres.

The article analyzes the newspapers endorsements in the US in the 2016 presidential election and, in particular, the massive rejection of the Republican nominee Donald Trump. It is argued that it was due to Trump’s non-belonging to mainstream politics and the press tendency to centrism.

This article offers a comparative study of three media scandals arising from two types of leaks: official ones (the Monedero Case and the Pujol Case) and those originating from citizens (the Falciani List). Official leaks are carried out by elites and respond to private/partisan interests. Citizens’ leaks come from anonymous individuals who deliver huge databases to the media for journalistic treatment. Our objective is to analyse the coverage received by both types of leaks in the Spanish press. The results show the use of official leaks as a political weapon in Polarized Pluralism media systems. Scandals based on citizens’ leaks, which refer to transnational problems with greater ramifications, receive less attention. We discuss the extent to which the polarization of conventional political communication has increased and the future of new formats of information based on citizens’ digital participation in an emerging Networked Fourth Estate.

This article addresses power, ideology and media context generally. .In democratic countries, the free media is regarded as the “fourth estate” besides the legislative, executive and judiciary branches. It can be said that political power has a significant role in shaping media discourse. The newspapers as the most efficient print media elements have an effective role in media discourse. Besides determining political agenda, the newspapers function as the instrument of hegemony of the political authority. The objective of this article is two-fold. The first is to analyze the role of the media discourse in the (re)production of ideologies. Within this framework, the role of the media in democratic countries will also be under scrutiny. Second,a historical overview of Turkish print media in general and the Hürriyet newspaper in particular will be provided. Bourdieu argues that, the power of the words lies not in their intrinsic qualities but in the belief that they are uttered by authorized spokespersons (Bourdieu, 1991: p.170). In this context, one of the main arguments of this article is that the Hurriyet newspaper as one of the leading voices of the mainstream media is efficient in determining the political and social agenda. The qualitative research method is used in the article.

The processes by which news is selected—the values that determine the selection of one story over another—have long attracted scholarly interest. In the broader context of exploring journalism’s ‘fourth estate’ function and its claim to hold power to account academics have sought to understand the ideological and financial influences that shape news content. These lines of enquiry have tended to focus almost exclusively on the ‘hard’ news of political reporting, with little consideration being given to the underlying ‘news’ values of other forms of journalism. Whilst other forms of journalism might not be judged and ascribed values based on its political significance in the way that ‘hard’ news is, it is nonetheless the case that other forms of journalism cannot be valueless. This chapter seeks to explore the ‘news’ values of travel journalism produced in British tabloid newspapers. It examines the points of divergence and different in the values that underpin tabloid and broadsheet forms of travel journalism. It considers whether tabloid based travel journalism appears to be constituted by specifically ‘tabloid’ values. In so doing it finds that in some forms of tabloid based travel content use visual images as primary drivers of narrative in ways that are very much in keeping with the fast developing interface between the stylistics of tabloidization and technological possibilities of social media inspired and derived content. Identifying and examining the news values of tabloid travel journalism facilitates further understanding of the cultural influence of this form of journalism as well as its economic power and associations.

In the fake news era, a combination of politics, big technology, and fear and animosity are blamed for the media mistrust and filter bubbles that are entrenching fragmentation in the public sphere. A partisan divide in the media and extreme political disagreements are nothing new, but new technology, such as social media and mobile push notifications, influences these years-old phenomena and plays an important role in current concerns. This paper explores how stories are represented differently by topic and across platforms, examining representation, polarization, and objectivity. Specifically, this paper looks at those issues from a novel perspective: through sentiment analysis of push notifications generated and archived from the Breaking News App on disasters, gun violence, and terrorism. Results indicate that partisan news organizations (1) emphasize different stories; (2) label the same events as categorically different; (3) hyperbolize and emotionalize different types of stories; and, (4) represent different categories of breaking news stories to different degrees of subjectivity.

Mediatization has become more relevant in exploring relations between media and politics in post-Suharto Indonesia. However, the media's roles as the fourth estate of democracy has been hijacked by wealthy politicians and political parties. As a result, most mainstream media have failed to enhance public dabates democratically. Based on existing mediatization literature, politico-economy analysis, and data collected through extensive in-depth interviews and relevant documents in the 2013-2015 period, this article theoretically aims to develop the mediatization concept and explore the degree of mediatization of politics in contemporary Indonesia.

"Whoever controls the media controls the mind." Said Jim Morrison, the famous singer, songwriter, and poet. Media, the fourth estate of democracy affects in various manners on the other three pillars of the democracy. Various Media theories reflect the importance of an informed society where media plays a pivotal role in agenda setting and public opinion creating process. Indian constitution provides the freedom of expressions to its citizen under which all media falls. It creates an informed society by sharing the information, educating the masses. As the largest democracy country in the world, India has hundreds of Mainstream media, established or dominant media now witnessing the rise of alternative media. Since the adoption of Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization policies and later on FDI in economics, the Indian media industry has shifted its ownership pattern under the big corporate and private organizations.

Received 28 July 2019. Accepted 13 September 2019. Published online 5 October 2019. Since 2014, there has been a very concerted campaign launched by the neo-liberal Western mainstream mass media against Russia. The format and content suggest that this is an attempt to induce a moral panic among the Western publics. It seems to be intended to create a sense of fear and to switch the logic to a series of emotionallybased reactions to assertion propaganda. Russia has been variously blamed for many different events and trends around the world, such as the “destroying” of Western “democracy”, and democratic values. In many regards, Russia is projected as being an existential threat in both the physical and intangible realms. This paper traces the strategic messages and narratives of the “Russia threat” as it is presented in Western mainstream media. Russia is connoted as a scapegoat for the failings of the neo-liberal democratic political order to maintain its global hegemony; therefore, Russia is viewed as the “menacing” other and a desperate measure to halt this gradual decline and loss of power and influence. This ultimately means that this type of journalism fails in its supposed fourth estate role, by directly aiding the hegemonic political power.

This paper presents the results of a research project which analyzed the commitments made by prime minister of Poland - Donald Tusk and his government in 2007 and 2008, and compares them with the content of articles published in “Rzeczpospolita” and “Gazeta Wyborcza” (the most opinion-forming newspapers in Poland) during the first 100 days as well as the first year of government. The author confronts two perspectives - classical, Schmittian sense of politics and the new one - post-politics (according to Z. Bauman, S. Žižek and J. Baudrillard). He proposes an aspectual definition of political communication which harmonizes with the idea of the Fourth Estate. Finally author assumes that the key term in the present era of post-politics is an image. What counts are the visions, hopes, dreams, desires, just the image (picture perfect, masking defects, emphazing the benefits), rather than facts, figures, statements and an electoral programmes. This seems to be one of the most important communication barriers in politics - in the present era of post-politics.

This chapter explores resurgent oceanic epistemologies, the rules, beliefs, and protocols dictated by Fa'a Samoa (the Samoan Way of doing things) in their liquid modern context to examine their impact on journalistic practice in Samoa. Using data collected during interviews with Samoan journalists, this chapter demonstrates that the respondents' perceptions of journalism and of what defines and affects journalism practice in Samoa sometimes differ from common Western views of journalistic practices. These journalists often find themselves navigating between Western standards and/or traditional beliefs and protocols deeply grounded in contemporary Samoan culture, indicating that it should not be assumed that journalistic practice in Samoa is a mere reflection of journalism as we define, understand, and practice it in the West.

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. …

The chapter sets the context for the research and argues that there is a need for the introduction of an intranational framework for comparative media research in Africa, using the reporting of corruption scandals. It provides a detailed discussion about the definition of corruption from different disciplines and defines what a scandal is and how media exposure to stories of wrongdoing constitute what is known as scandal. Other issues discussed in the chapter include the fourth estate role of the media, the need for investigative journalism and its various definitions and how it should be applied. The chapter then concluded by reviewing seminal works on comparative media research, such as the Four Theories of the Press by Siebert, Peterson and Schramm (University of Illinois Press, Urbana/Chicago, 1956), The Crisis of Public Communication by Blumler and Gurevitch (Routledge, London/New York, 1995), and discusses how Hallin and Mancini (Comparing media systems: three models of media and politics. Cambridge University Press, 2004) reviewed their frameworks, and then suggests a new paradigm for comparative media research. The chapter argues that the Hallin and Mancini models have a more Western background; therefore, they need to be modified before they can be applied in an African context. The chapter therefore proposes a modification of the framework suggested by Hallin and Mancini from political parallelism to regional parallelism. The book will test the application of this framework within the Nigerian press, and by extension in Kenya and South Africa.

In this chapter the results of the interviews conducted with journalists in Nigeria will be presented. A total of twenty-four interviews were conducted with journalists for this book. The journalists cut across the northern and southern newspapers, and others from South Africa and Kenya (see Chaps. 4 and 5) because this book is comparing how newspapers from the two regions of Nigeria cover the cases of corruption scandal. The discussion is grouped into five themes, corruption/scandal, journalism and political culture, fourth estate role of the media, investigative journalism and suggestions and recommendations. The analysis has shown the complexity of the media in Nigeria. The respondents provided different views that sometimes converge, and sometimes disagree with each other. But what is clear is that the press in Nigeria is alive and the journalists have realised this, but there are challenges that must be addressed in order to strengthen the media and the journalists in their political communication role. Evidence of regional and ethnic bias in reporting was provided by the journalists in order to explain the character of the Nigerian media.

Numerous fi lms of late have been made about the whistleblower organization Wiki Leaks and its founder, Julian Assange, but perhaps the one which has the most applicability to the media studies or ESL/ESL class is The Fifth Estate (2013), an American biopic thriller that attempts to portray the impact Assange’s organization has had on Washington, in particular the incumbent administration, as well as on Fourth Estate media agencies.The Fifth Estate is form of media that is most commonly associated with blogging, microblogging, and other types of media that operate beyondthe realm of Fourth Estate, or mainstream news media. The Fifth Estate often fi nds itself at odds with the Fourth Estate, creating tension not only in global news media, but in global politics as well. It is my hope that this dichotomy can be felt and understood in the classroom as well. This paper serves two main functions: one is to offer a critical review of The Fifth Estate,the Wiki Leaks fi lm. The second is to off er selected salient points, written to initiate exploration and discussion in the media studies class, either in L1 or L2 contexts, on the topic of the Fifth Estate. Under scrutiny is the subject of transparency and Internet privacy and how the fi lm treats these subjects, and how they can be explored by the reader and in the classroom.

A succinct and accessible book, with many chapters that can stand alone asreadings for undergraduate or graduate classes, Media Framing of the MuslimWorld: Conflicts, Crises, and Contexts is a welcome addition to the literatureon Muslims and the media. The authors build on three key concepts: the ideathat the media should function, but often does not, as the fourth estate (an independentand critical press); Edward Said’s Orientalism(the West as the perpetuallysuperior Other who must represent the Orient, which is incapable ofdoing so itself), and in its modern form, Islamophobia; and the importance ofhistory and context in understanding key events in the Muslim world (as distinctfrom religious determinism).The book is divided into eight chapters with an introduction and a conclusion:“Islam and the Muslim world,” “Media-Generated Muslims and Islamophobia,”“Image and Reality of Reporting War and Conflict in the Muslim World,” “Asylum Seekers,” “Covering Terrorism Suspects.” “The ArabSpring,” “A Clash of Civilizations?” and “Moving on from 9/11?” The chaptersare not an extended study of a singular type of media representation of Muslims,but rather a bringing together separate elements into a whole so that wecan look at the issues from several viewpoints. I will mention three of thosethat cover topics not often found in academic studies of Muslims and the media.Chapter 3 relates the personal experiences of John Martinkus, a professionaljournalist trying to cover the Iraq war over the last decade for a bookand later on SBS (Special Broadcasting Service), an Australian broadcast company.His story highlights how the increasingly dangerous on-the-ground situationeventually interfered with proper reporting. Not only did it become veryexpensive to hire security, but western journalists were largely confined to reportingfrom safe hotels and subcontracting to local Iraqis or being embeddedwith the military. Martinkus notes that the only Iraqis they could interviewwere those employed by the US military/media or who had a US military gunpointing at them. Journalists living in fear tended to support Washington’s viewas to why they were there and the efficacy of the mission itself ...

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...

This chapter establishes a framework on the reporting of human rights issues such as human trafficking, people smuggling and refugee migration by using UN protocols to define key terms. It examines the complexity of constructing journalistic narratives about these issues, given many of these human rights issues often intersect each other. The chapter examines journalism’s Fourth Estate role in reporting these issues and explores the challenges of this reporting in a globalised world.

This chapter positions journalism for social change amid the broader field of journalism. It looks at the notion of journalism as a calling and draws upon the testimonies of journalism for social change practitioners. It examines journalism’s role as a Fourth Estate and explores notions of objectivity in the production of news. It frames journalism for social change by reviewing other journalisms such as advocacy journalism, precision journalism and pragmatic objectivity. It argues that in the changing news media ecology there are many ‘journalisms’ that are part of journalism for social change.

This chapter looks at WikiLeaks and other ‘Interloper Media’ (Eldridge 2013, 2014) to explore the boundaries and identity dimensions of ‘being’ a digital journalist. Media technologies have long been connected with a disruption of journalism’s norms, and this disruption has been pronounced with digital technologies (Eldridge 2015). As much as technological shifts have allowed the form and function of journalistic products to change and develop, the way new actors are embracing these digital technologies have exposed a particular disruption around understandings of what a journalist is and how that too might be changing. In this disruption, the boundaries of journalistic identity have been irritated by outspoken claims of belonging from new actors such as Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Going beyond WikiLeaks, questions of journalism’s normative ideals, the domain of the ‘Fourth Estate’, and journalism’s role as a legitimating authority continue to be the focus of discursive reactions to a range of new media actors and their journalistic claims. As platforms, content, and media spaces where journalism occurs change at a rapid pace, questions of what it means to be a journalist are ever present. This chapter reflects on these debates to discuss whether a more expansive and flexible definition of a digital journalist can be developed. In identifying key elements of journalistic identity, this chapter will draw on the literature of ‘boundaries’ around that identity, steep these within a discussion of journalism’s self-defined profession and maintenance of its identity, and posit a definition of the digital journalist fit for modern media realities.

Amy Reynolds and Gary R. Hicks Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era. Los Angeles, CA: Litwin Books, 2011. 218 pp.Matthew C. Ehrlich Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011.Journalism often disappoints its audience. That was true during the buildup to the Iraq war in 2002-2003. Even when journalists and news organizations have tried to rectify the shortcomings that critics have identified, journalists have failed to sustain those reform efforts.Prophets of the Fourth Estate, by Amy Reynolds and Gary R. Hicks, demonstrates the longevity of many criticisms of the press, and Matthew C. Ehrlich's Radio Utopia examines how one medium tried to provide better journalism and why that effort faded after a few years.Reynolds and Hicks focus on press critics of the early twentieth century, with a special emphasis on Charles Edward Russell, Moorfield Storey, and Oswald Garrison Villard. For the most part, the authors allow these critics to speak for themselves, reprinting in part or in full essays the critics published early in the twentieth century. Many complaints have as much force today as they did one hundred years ago.Russell, who had worked for both Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, complained in a 1914 piece for Pearson's Magazine that the control of the press was not vested in the reporters and editors but in advertisers and financiers. Newspapers were reluctant to publish stories that might offend advertisers, who provided most of their revenue. Financiers controlled access to capital that news organizations needed to acquire modern machinery and pay production costs. Publications that offended financial interests could find themselves starved of capital. Even the Chautauqua movement, the talk radio of the World War I era, was vulnerable to commercial pressures. Speakers favorable to the interests of wealthy businesses were subsidized.For Storey, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its first president and legal director, sensationalism was undermining the value of news media. Instead of enlightening the public about the problems of labor, taxation, foreign policy, and other complexities of the twentieth century, news reporters were pursuing stories about the prurient details of private lives.Villard, who owned the New York Evening Post and The Nation, worried about the growing concentration of media ownership. Some cities, he noted in a 1919 piece published in The Atlantic Monthly, had only one morning newspaper. And the number of companies providing features and editorial material to weekly newspapers was dwindling rapidly.Other essays in Prophets of the Fourth Estate examine threats to the press posed by wartime government censorship, increases in postal fees, and public relations. In every case, contemporary parallels come to mind easily.The authors provide brief but helpful biographical information about Russell, Storey, and Villard, but other writers included in the book have little or no identifying information about them. One excerpt is a piece by Robert L. Duffus about an advertising campaign by a meatpacking company to rebuild its reputation after a Federal Trade Commission investigation, but the authors provide no information about Duffus or about where or when the article was published.Sometimes Reynolds and Hicks introduce an essay with background information. An unsigned editorial from a 1918 edition of The Public, an opinion magazine, on the impact of postal rate reform followed almost seven pages of background information on the history of postal rates for newspapers and magazines and the effects of changes in those rates on the industry.Elsewhere, however, explanation is missing. One Russell piece mentions "General Otis" and "the McNamaras. …

In this paper I examine the position of women as news reporters and editors – as journalistic authors and animators – in relation to their male counterparts, and consider changes in news coverage as their numbers increased in the newsroom over the past 50 years. I compare profession-internal guidelines which encapsulate gender ideologies pervasive in the larger culture – starting with a popular 1959 career guide – alongside journalistic genre forms, using as specific examples ‘women's pages’ and ‘page one’ in the New York Times. The change from a backgrounded position on the ‘women's pages’ to greater visibility in more prestigeful news contexts is indexed through macropragmatic factors such as byline (who is entitled to be recognized by name) and story topic (what counts as salient in the journalist's world), both of which can be viewed in terms of their nonreferential index value within the community of journalists. Profession-internal critiques suggest that despite increased opportunities for women over time, the place of women at the Fourth Estate is still limited – and the discourse-level evidence supports that, affording a potential explanation for more global gender disparities in news media coverage.

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.

Hoover's FBI and the Fourth Estate: The Campaign to Control the Press and the Bureau's Image. Matthew Cecil. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014. 368 pp. $29.95 hbk.In early May 2014, only a few months after the publication of Matthew Cecil's engaging and detailed new book, Hoover's FBI and the Fourth Estate, the actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr. passed away at age 95. This would be entirely unremarkable and certainly not coincidental if Zimbalist's fame and career had suddenly ceased after the cancellation of his private-detective television series, 77 Sunset Strip, in 1964. But the very next year, Zimbalist went on to a starring turn in an even more successful, albeit now highly controversial, skein.As a New York Times obituary observed, Zimbalistpersonified the suave and unflappable leading man . . . as a stalwart agent who always got his man on The F.B.I., which ran for nine seasons and made him a household name. The F.B.I. was unquestioning in its support of the agency it depicted, and both on screen and off, Mr. Zimbalist became its unofficial symbol.Indeed, as Cecil explains, The F.B.I. simply was the last of many winning public relations vehicles and efforts deployed during J. Edgar Hoover's 48-year tenure as head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Cecil, associate professor and director of the Elliott School of Communication at Wichita State University, devotes a fascinating final chapter of his book to the television show, which aired 241 episodes during a nine-year run on ABC that started in 1965. The F.B.I., Cecil explains, "represented the culmination of more than three decades of public relations practiced by the FBI and showcased the ultimate expression of the Bureau's preferred self-image, shaping perceptions of the agency during a time of cultural upheaval in America."Hoover attempted to control everything about the show, from meeting with Zimbalist personally and sending him offto Quantico, Virginia, for a tour of the FBI's vaunted training facilities to putting the kibosh on storylines and commercials that did not suit his or the Bureau's taste. Companies with rejected ads included Pfizer, Allied Van Lines, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, among others. In expressing his disgust after begrudgingly accepting commercials for what he called "toilet products" from Colgate-Palmolive, Hoover lamented that "eventually the sponsors will be for cures of bad breath, B.O., & birth control pills."But Cecil's tome is about far more than just a television series that has been offthe air for forty years. With a title as transparent and obvious about its subject matter as the movie Snakes on a Plane, the book pivots on the FBI's highly fruitful efforts during Hoover's reign to manipulate-sometimes subtly, sometimes not so much-members of the mainstream news media to erase the Bureau's early crisis of legitimacy and its reputation as "the Department of Easy Virtues. …

Interviewing as part of broadcast news includes a wide range of practices that go beyond calling public figures to account in ways that have received so much attention and analysis in the research literature. This article examines a major strand of news interviewing which it identifies as ‘experiential’ and argues, on the basis of close discourse analysis of interviews drawn from coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2005 London bombings, that the focus on personal experience and emotion in them is managed in ways quite distinct from accountability interviewing. Indeed, the apparently formulaic quality of the verbal performance in these interviews gives shape to experience in a fashion close to ritual but demands a quite different kind of alignment from the audience than that implicated by accountability interviewing.

In this article we examine the extent of career cross-over from journalism to politics in Australia using biographical data on the pre-parliamentary careers of federal politicians since 1901. We find that while journalists continue to be over-represented in Australia's national Parliament, there is evidence of a decline in the number making the career switch to politics. We argue that one explanation for this is the growing professionalisation of both vocations, and of journalism especially. Journalism education inculcates in graduates a strong sense of the media's Fourth Estate role, contributing to a professional identity that militates against taking up a political career. We also find that in recent decades, in spite of a small number of celebrated cases of journalists joining the ranks of the ALP, prior careers in journalism have been more prevalent among Coalition MPs. We argue that this reflects an ALP pre-selection system that has become less accommodating of all pre-parliamentary occupations other than trade union official and political staffer.

The closure of The Bulletin magazine was widely reported and commented on by journalists and others in the media who sought to apportion blame for this rupture, to explain it as an aberration and to reassert the norm of the ‘free’ press and the Fourth Estate. In the past, such paradigm repair would have gone unchallenged as those in the media controlled what appeared there. With the advent of accessible digital information and communication technologies, however, members of the public are encouraged to have their say. This study compared the ways in which journalists and their sources and members of the public framed the closure of The Bulletin. In the era of dialogic mediated communications, journalists and others in the media can no longer assume that contrary voices will be silenced.

In this paper, which brings together aging research and media research, we will contribute to the mapping of the complicated cartography of anti-aging by analyzing the press coverage of anti-aging medicine. The mass media decisively shape societal impacts of the expert scientific discourse on anti-aging. While sensitivity towards the heterogeneity of the field of anti-aging is increasing to some degree in the social-gerontological discussion, the role of the media in transmitting the various anti-aging messages to the general public has so far not been systematically scrutinized. Current opinions on the press coverage of anti-aging medicine range from proponents’ complaints of a media witch-hunt against them to opponents’ reproaches about uncritical reporting of this complex topic. This paper discusses whether the media act accordingly to the ideal of the fourth estate, controlling the increased power of science in the 20th century. Our areas of investigation are two Western countries: the USA and Germany. Both countries have experienced an apparent increase in the average age of their populations, which has led to increasingly vigorous public debate since the late 20th century. The subjects of our study are three organizations that represent different approaches to anti-aging medicine: the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, the German Society of Anti-Aging Medicine, and the Methuselah Foundation. The article discusses the programs, goals, and media strategies of these organizations and compares them with the anti-aging messages that actually make their way to the reader in the media “interdiscourse.” The article asks whether transatlantic learning processes within the anti-aging medicine movement as well as in the media can be identified. The paper’s methods and sources are those of contemporary history and ethnography. The three approaches to anti-aging medicine are drawn from publications of spokespersons from the three presented anti-aging medicine organizations and from participant observation of anti-aging medicine conferences in Germany and Europe during the period from 2005 to 2008. The media analysis is based on the study of about 300 articles that appeared between 1990 and 2009 in US and German dailies and weeklies such as Newsweek, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and Die Welt. Our analysis shows that, against the backdrop of pessimistic demographic apprehensions, the leitmotiv of both nations’ medical journalism between 1990 and 2009 was overwhelmingly pro anti-aging medicine. It is criticized that medical journalism on anti-aging medicine refrains from own investigations on potential risks. Scrutinizing activities of the media in terms of a fourth estate require stimulation from science itself. Hence, we argue for sensitization of medical journalism regarding ageism.

Brazilian journalism, at its onset in the 19th century, was an activity mainly associated with the colonial aristocracy, the Catholic Church and the intellectual elite. As a result, this heritage led to an almost complete blurring of the distinction between journalists and intellectuals, especially in the early years of the consolidation of the Brazilian journalistic field. Intense debate — not always polite or moderate — was the basis of the newspapers circulating in the country at that time. This tradition still feeds the perception of journalists as intellectuals to the present time although journalistic activity is becoming increasingly technical. The aim of this article is to dissect the origins of this perception by reviewing the production of two pioneer journalists, Hipólito José da Costa and José da Silva Lisboa, who were instrumental in establishing the argumentative practice of the Brazilian fourth estate.

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.

Comparative research is uniquely able to address theoretical questions about the relationship between journalism and political and cultural contexts. This study takes the reporting of political scandal as the entry-point to an analysis of the practice of investigative reporting in Britain and Spain in the 1990s and its status as a litmus test for a Fourth Estate understanding of the press’ role. Using interview and documentary data, the research explores journalists’ backgrounds, their assumptions about methods, relationships to sources and their perception of the public, political and peer response to their work. Journalists’ views of the rationale for reporting political scandal are also explored. The analysis shows that there are a number of differences between the two groups of journalists but also that they are bound far more by common assumptions about the practices and purposes of reporting political scandal, which, taken together, provide a challenge to certain aspects of the production study research tradition and also evidence for the enduring influence of Fourth Estate understandings of the role of journalism across national contexts.

In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, Paul Rotha made a big and expensive documentary for and about The Times, called The Fourth Estate, which remained unseen for 30 years. This was not just because the outbreak of war rendered a film about a newspaper in peacetime outdated before it had even been shown, and then it was just forgotten. According to Rotha himself (Marris 1982) the paper disapproved of his mildly satirical vision of its establishment role (so mild that it hardly registers nowadays) and withheld the film (until after the paper was taken over by the Thomson Organisation in 1967). Given an outing at the Tate Gallery in 2003 in a double bill with Norman McLaren’s Book Bargain (1937), a short for the GPO Film Unit about the manufacture of the London telephone directory, the contrast between the two films is striking. Rotha was a left wing social democrat, McLaren a member of the Communist Party who had just been to Spain with Ivor Montagu to shoot a film about the defence of Madrid against the Fascists. Rotha tries to beat the system and fails, McLaren doesn’t try and succeeds – that is, he turns out a simple factual film which, in eight minutes, unpretentiously reveals a slice of social and industrial history about the spread of a crucial modern technology of communication. Where the first London telephone directory in 1878 had no more than 200 entries, the 1937 directory listed 850,000 subscribers, ran to 2,500 pages, and its production required a dedicated printing operation as complex as that of a newspaper but with its own specialised machinery. We also learn, in the course of the film, that on one section of the production line the women swap their jobs around in order to try to alleviate their boredom a little, which, nearly 70 years later, prompts the response that such flexible labour practices are difficult to imagine under twenty-first century management. There is nothing about such things in the Rotha

Review of Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media, edited by Robert W. Mc Chesney and John Nichols. Forewards by Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich and Ralph Nader. New York: Seven Stories Press. This book's messge has a salutary lesson for us in Oceania, half a globe away from the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols have argued for an honest debate over a total rethink of policy if the media is to continue to have an effective role in demoracy, if it is to remain a genuine Fourth Estate. They present a persuasive case for building a mass movement that seeks to replace their [coporate] media with a media that serves ordinary citizens—our media.

The New Yorker is saturated with references to, and quotations from, other magazines and newspapers, and with gossip about editors, reporters and press magnates. This is especially noticeable in its earliest years, from 1925 to 1929, when it was establishing itself and negotiating its relationship with the American periodical marketplace. This chapter will explore the way that The New Yorker mediates the whole range of the New York press, thereby constructing and addressing a readership which is both consciously sophisticated and firmly middlebrow - in the sense of knowingly engaged with both elite and popular culture, without being fully aligned with either. One of Ralph Barton's 1925 New Yorker cartoon features included a picture of a powerful newspaper editor, captioned: Colonel Frank Hause — who, as editor of the Daily News, produces a newspaper which (along with its sister luminaries of the Fourth Estate, Graphic and the Mirror) presents the news in the luscious form in which it is discussed over our best dinner tables by the people who read the Times. High-society New Yorkers, Barton suggests, may only ever be seen reading quality papers, yet they know a surprising amount about the contents of the tabloids. In fact, The New Yorker itself offered readers access to daily papers and lowbrow magazines through its surveys of, and quotations from, the popular press. Readers could discover the sensational events and sordid places of the city without having to compromise their reputation as sophisticates by actually buying the Daily News or the Mirror. At the other end of the cultural scale, Janet Flanner and other columnists commented regularly on American coterie magazines such as Poetry and The Little Review, and on those published by expatriates in Paris and circulated in New York (the transatlantic review and transition). The New Yorker's audience could thus become familiar with the new publications and current debates of the modernist elite without being at the trouble of trying to decipher the work of Stein or Joyce. The third element of The New Yorker's response to print culture of the city is its part-admiring, part-mocking commentary on its direct competitors, particularly Vanity Fair and The American Mercury. The New Yorker was influenced by both the other titles, and its references to these magazines and their editors work both to reinforce its place in the sophisticated world of these smart magazines and to differentiate it from its rivals. This essay will draw on regular columns and features including "The Talk of the Town", "Reporter at Large", "Paris Letter" and "Heroes of the Week", in which The New Yorker negotiates its relationship (and its readers' relationships) with other periodicals, journalists and editors. In the course of the discussion, I will tease out the complex relationship between "sophistication" and "middlebrow", concluding with a comment on the broader implications of my argument for the study of the middle range of periodical culture.