Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010028
Authors: Cristina Fuentes-Lara Santana Lois Poch Butler María Luisa Humanes Lara Jiménez Sánchez
This paper delves into the challenges faced by scientists to effectively communicate regarding photoprotection and skin cancer as a result of the pervasive, harmful effects of disinforming messages. In order to do so, the Spanish population’s understanding of photoprotection and skin cancer is examined. This paper is as an extension of the COMUNICANCER initiative, the ultimate goal of which is to establish protocols for producing and disseminating accurate content that raises the awareness of skin cancer-related dangers, as well as transferring knowledge on health prevention. Therefore, we have monitored the prevalence of misinformation and lack of information regarding sun photoprotection in Spain, aiming to reflect, ultimately, on the added difficulties faced by the scholarly community to disseminate accurate content in today’s communication environment, which has become even more complex due to the distorting influence of disinformation. Employing a quantitative methodology, the research involved a comprehensive analysis of 2498 Spanish-language tweets related to skin cancer and photoprotection collected between August 2021 and August 2022. The study proves that scientists face a social media landscape, particularly on X/Twitter, where there is not only a lack of comprehensive information on the various dimensions of skin cancer, its prevention, and treatment, but which also serves as a breeding ground for the dissemination of inaccurate and misleading information regarding sun-related health risks and preventive measures. This leads to an urgent need to develop strategies aimed at fostering comprehensive and accurate information dissemination, especially regarding health information, due to the critical effect this can have on people and public health systems.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010027
Authors: Benedict Witzenberger Jürgen Pfeffer
Women are underrepresented in many areas of journalistic newsrooms. In this paper, we examine if this established effect persists in the new forms of journalistic communication, namely social media networks. We use mentions, retweets, and hashtags as measures of journalistic amplification and legitimation. Furthermore, we compare two groups of journalists in different stages of development: political and data journalists in Germany in 2021. Our results show that journalists identified as women tend to favor other women journalists in mentions and retweets on Twitter (now called X), compared to men. While both professions are dominated by men, with a high share of tweets authored by men, women mention and retweet other women more than their male colleagues. Female data journalists also leverage different sources than men. In addition, we found data journalists to be more inclusive of non-member sources in their networks compared to political journalists.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010026
Authors: Jake Alexander Lynch Matt Freear
This article presents and discusses results from an exercise in comparative content analysis of news articles about issues of conflict produced by Afghan journalists before and after participating in an internationally sponsored training and mentorship programme in Peace Journalism. The programme was part of a Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) project, intended to create community resources for resilience, in the information sphere, towards conflict issues contributing to recruitment by non-state armed groups such as Islamic State–Khorasan Province (IS–KP). Peace Journalism is familiar as the basis for media development aid in contexts of conflict; however, its use in an intervention aimed specifically at PVE is relatively new. The results showed that the programme was effective, it is argued, in terms of benefits transferred to and applied by participating journalists. A sample of articles after the training showed a markedly higher Peace Journalism quotient than a baseline sample of articles by the same journalists before it. This suggested that the training and mentorship had successfully stimulated and enabled journalistic agency, taking account of constraints imposed by media structures and wider political and social contexts. The latter have become steadily more onerous under the Islamic Emirate (Taliban) government, in power since August 2021, according to international monitoring organisations. Implications are considered, in light of the findings, for future media development aid to Afghanistan.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010025
Authors: Yeshan Qian
This study examines the computer-mediated discussion topics of parents who raise bilingual and multilingual children in four active Facebook and Internet forums, and investigates how the language ideologies embedded in the multiple languages being used in these forums are expressed. In this study, 179 data points, including users’ posts and thread comments, were collected to identify the most frequently discussed topics as part of my description of the database, in order to identify parental ideologies by using values analysis. The five most-discussed topics were selected to make a critical discourse analysis on the narratives to understand the language ideologies regarding the use of multiple languages, and regarding what users of the groups are saying specifically about the languages when analyzing metalinguistic discourses. This study found the most recurrent language ideologies that parents expressed on these online forums were supporting bilingualism/multilingualism, and claim that bilingualism/multilingualism is advantageous. Parents also demonstrate language ideologies supporting keeping languages separate, such as following the one parent one language (OPOL) method, using the minority language at home, and so on. A detailed values analysis with illustrative sample messages from the online posts and comments also more specifically shows the recurrent language ideologies identified, and parents’ views underlying their narratives on their posts and thread comments.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010024
Authors: Willy Stephane Abondo Ndo
This study examines how the issue of ethnic identity is approached in Cameroon within the context of combating Boko Haram terrorism, considering the influence of the rise of social media on journalistic practices. The advent of these platforms has fundamentally altered the landscape of media coverage, challenging the traditional monopoly of journalists in shaping the narrative of news. How does this technological shift affect the discourse, especially in the designation of events and actors in the reporting of Boko Haram terrorism in Cameroon, whether in traditional print media or on online platforms like Facebook? Do these designations in print media and Facebook discussion forums indicate shifts in the dynamics of the Cameroonian media sphere (censorship, government repression, etc.), resulting from the emergence of new voices in digital discursive spaces? This study employs a dual analysis, integrating a critical examination of media discourse with a sociological study of journalistic production. The scrutiny of media discourse is based on the investigation of 497 articles published between 1st January and 30 June 2015, sourced from seven Cameroonian newspapers. The online corpus encompasses 450 written publications from three Facebook forums. We aim to establish a dialectical relationship between newspaper discourse, online content, and the sociological foundations shaping their production. The observed quality of designations in the studied forums unveils a surge in hate speech within the ethno-political landscape of Cameroon. While this phenomenon remained manageable through the intervention of state regulatory bodies in traditional media, the unrestrained nature of online content, coupled with the absence of state control, has facilitated the rise of inter-ethnic discursive hatred in politics. In conclusion, this study underscores the challenges stemming from the evolution of journalistic practices in a technological landscape and emphasizes the urgent need for regulatory frameworks to counteract the upswing in hate speech and inter-ethnic tensions within political discourse.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010023
Authors: Hairuo Wang
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation had been investigating the relationship between Russian agents and members of Trump’s presidential campaign since July 2016 out of suspicions that the President-elect worked with Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which became a major news event in American media. The headlines from news media outlets illustrate the strategic use of language to shape opinions and frames. Conducted with the tools of System Functional Linguistics, in particular, the appraisal and ideation resources, based on the framing theory of Journalism Studies, this research aims to answer the two research questions: (1) What frames did The New York Times and Fox News construct in their coverage of the Mueller investigation? (2) What linguistic strategies did The New York Times and Fox News use respectively to construct their frames? It was found that The New York Times uses fewer evaluative tools than Fox News, but the expression of attitudes draws on the context in which they are presented and evaluation is expressed in a more sophisticated and refined manner. Fox News is more straightforward without hiding its own opinion and biases. This research is important in further understanding of the American media and their linguistic strategies in forming manipulative frames.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010022
Authors: Moisés Costa Pinto Suzana Oliveira Barbosa
This article investigates the historical uses and types of artificial intelligence (AI) systems and resources in Brazilian journalistic products. It is a work anchored in critically analyzing the literature on the subject, mapping and observing cases, seeking to identify uses and innovative processes, and analyzing AI projects for journalism. A search was carried out in web repositories, specifically Google, Google Scholar, and Scopus, using the terms: “inteligência artificial” + “jornalismo”, “bot + jornalismo”, “Geração de linguagem natural [NLG] + jornalismo”, “aprendizado de máquina [machine learning] + jornalismo”, and “algoritmos + jornalismo”. The corpus analysis (N = 45) includes the evaluation of the impacts of AI on the production and distribution of news in the context of Brazilian digital journalism. We try to answer questions about the uses of databases, approximation with platforms, uses of shared codes, connections with other Ais, and sources of funding, and whether they are backend or frontend initiatives. In a parallel investigation, we try to identify if Brazilian newsrooms are officially using ChatGPT, a generative AI. The findings point to advances in using low-cost and low-impact AI, with the predominance of bots. The great availability of this kind of AI in web repositories is believed to facilitate native digital media to incorporate innovative processes in using these technologies.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010021
Authors: Sara Pérez-Seijo Alba Silva-Rodríguez
In the digital scenario, where news media organizations face technological disruption, innovation has been identified as key to the survival of journalism. While legacy media, rooted in a traditional mindset, have reacted more slowly to the changes that have occurred, digital native media have been better able to engage with audiences and adapt to new distribution platforms. Given this scenario, this article examined the perception of experts in the field of communication and journalism—both journalists and scholars—regarding the approach to journalistic innovation in digital media (N = 11). Specifically, this research sought to identify areas where the need for innovation is perceived to be greater and to determine the pending challenges in this process of digital innovation. To address these purposes, a descriptive qualitative methodology was applied, using the focus group technique. The findings revealed that an audience-centered approach to innovation is proposed to escape technological determinism and respond effectively to the needs and demands of audiences. This perspective requires embracing diversity in content, advocating for new formats and narratives, and adapting to consumption patterns on new platforms. There is a perception of incremental innovation in digital media, focusing on the introduction of small improvements and calling for a slowdown in processes for greater effectiveness. However, the experts noted a lack of pedagogy within organizations, of collaboration with key sectors of the industry, of investment in human capital, of qualitative audience measurement methods, and even of innovation in business models.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010020
Authors: Beatriz Martínez Rodríguez
In 2020, the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) marked its silver anniversary by releasing its sixth report on the representation of women in the global media landscape, and in 2021, the NGO Plan International unveiled the tenth edition of its report “State of the World’s Girls: The Truth Gap”. The study focused on how misinformation impacts equal opportunities for girls, adolescents, and young women worldwide, and proposed strategies to combat the “truth gap”. These examples showcase the collective efforts made in recent decades by professionals, academia, institutions, NGOs, and activists to enhance the state of information globally. The aspiration is ambitious, aiming to make information more transparent, accessible, and inclusive, fostering equality, truth-seeking, and the visibility of women, young people, and rural populations. However, the findings from the GMMP reports, as well as the analysis conducted by Plan International and numerous other works, underscore that despite evident social changes worldwide—particularly in the educational, labor, and social realms for women—access to truthful and high-quality information remains elusive. Simultaneously, studies reveal a declining public trust, especially among young people, in traditional media, a shift to alternative information sources, and a deterioration in the quality benchmarks of the journalism profession. Journalism, a pursuit of truth from sources to the public, has historically been and should remain a pillar upholding democracy and freedom. This article employs a qualitative case study methodology to analyze the best practices proposed across various domains to safeguard information quality. Special attention is given to initiatives that aim to involve women and young people in the collective effort against misinformation.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010019
Authors: Ioannis Angelou Vasileios Katsaras Dimitris Kourkouridis Andreas Veglis
The relationship between legacy media and social media has become a crucial topic in the discussions about new media. The debate intensified after Facebook announced a reduction in news posts in user timelines in 2018. In the era of the “Like economy”, social media holds significant economic value, prompting media outlets to adopt a “let’s try and see” approach to reach new audiences and increase their online advertising share. The present study, based on a large-scale survey of 50 publishers’ websites, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts, deepens our understanding of the relationship between legacy and social media as indicators of audience feedback. Through the lens of network gatekeeping and reciprocal journalism theories, it contributes to the development of new evaluation tools that predict publishers’ website traffic based on social media metrics. Results show that Facebook and Twitter metrics can predict publishers’ website traffic indicators at a rate exceeding 60%. This study underscores the importance of social media metrics in evaluating media practices and the need to shift research toward specific indicators to understand the relationship between legacy and social media.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010018
Authors: Felix Olajide Talabi Lydia Oko-Epelle
This paper examined the influence of radio messages on the awareness and adoption of malaria preventive measures among rural dwellers in South-west Nigeria. The study investigated the participants’ frequency of exposure to radio messages on malaria preventive measures, message adoption, and attitudes towards adopting measures. We used a multiple-stage sampling technique to select 48 participants from Aye North, Orile-Oshodi, Ofada, Owobaale/kasumu, Isale Oba II, and Ilepa II. The findings showed that the participants were exposed to messages on malaria preventive measures through radio broadcasts; however, exposure did not necessarily influence message adoption. Instead, a positive attitude towards the message influenced adoption. The study concluded that there is a need for radio stations to engage people’s participation daily in health-related issues to achieve the desired change in health behaviour. The authors recommend that radio stations provide time to create daily health messages that influence people’s engagement to achieve the desired change in health behaviour.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010017
Authors: Ogemdi Uchenna Eze
This study examined the knowledge and use of the 2011 Freedom of Information Act among journalists in Nigeria. The hierarchy of influences model provided the theoretical lens, which guided the study. Through a survey of 313 Nigerian journalists, the study found that there was a high level of knowledge of the Act among Nigerian journalists. Nigerian journalists perceived the Act as a useful journalistic tool, and they often used it for such purposes as confirming facts, writing controversial topics and to gain insight into the inner working of government. The study showed that, in the use of the Act in journalistic duties, Nigerian journalists were confronted with the challenges of non-integration of the provisions of the Act in the operations of government agencies, adversarial disposition of government institutions towards journalists and the pervasive culture of secrecy. The study established that knowledge of the Act positively correlated with its use. The implications of the findings were discussed.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010016
Authors: Aaron Hyzen Hilde Van den Bulck
The Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 ignited propaganda efforts from the U.S. executive branch of government and the U.S. media, as the country tried to position itself towards the war not just in the eyes of its citizens but of the entire world as part of its geopolitical power position. A comparative quantitative and qualitative analysis of official U.S. communications and U.S. partisan media coverage in the first week of the invasion aims to uncover how the U.S. government set the agenda and framed the events, and to what extent the media copied or diverged from this agenda-setting and framing. The results suggest a narrow focus and distinct framing on the part of the U.S. government, partly taken over by partisan media. The latter also touched on other topics that fit media logic and provided some counter-frames in line with their ideological positions, yet overall confirmed the dominant framing of the war as unjust, unprovoked and premeditated, as Putin’s choice, and the position of the U.S. as the leader of the free world and defender of democracy.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010015
Authors: Jude Nwakpoke Ogbodo Emmanuel Chike Onwe Blessing Ewa-Ibe Emem Oshionebo
Satire has gained increased scholarly traction across journalism and related fields. The genre increases the entertainment value of journalism and broadens its appeal. Satirical news also serves as a catalyst to pique the curiosity of ordinarily disinterested audiences in news, particularly political news. However, there are some concerns emerging from the weaponization of satire in this contemporary period, which is characterised by the proliferation of fake news and misinformation. From the Nigerian context, there have been minimal empirical spotlights placed on satirical journalism. We employed semi-structured interviews to explore the views of Nigerian print satirical journalists and cartoonists. Our finding broadens scholarship in the evolving area of satirical journalism. It demonstrates how the mainstreaming and the weaponization of satire have changed the texture of satire in Nigerian journalism. Although ethical concerns are admitted, we argue that cartoonists and satirical journalists have a responsibility to adjust to the dynamic media ecology, where satire continuously provides insightful critique and entertaining commentaries.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010014
Authors: Gregory P. Perreault Daniel Nölleke Monica Crawford Ella Hackett
In recent years, the sports communication landscape has seen changes in terms of who occupies the role of sports reporter. In-house reporters, or sports communicators employed by specific clubs, teams, or leagues, now contribute content to the sports media landscape. This study explores the complicated relationship between in-house reporters’ self-perceived professional identities and in-houses reporters’ perceptions of their audiences through the lens of Bourdieusian field theory. As such, it sees in-house reporters as peripheral actors negotiating the boundaries of the sports journalism field. Through semi-structured interviews with 28 in-house sports reporters from the United States and Austria, our findings suggest that in-house reporters conceive of themselves both in relation to professional journalism and as members of the sports establishment. Furthermore, they note an ambiguous relationship to their audience, which is both reliant upon the reporters’ work, and, at times, highly critical of it.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010013
Authors: Yau Ni Wan
Using a discourse approach, this study examines online news and opinion pieces about calls for the British Museum to return Chinese artefacts. We examine the interpersonal meanings conveyed by the linguistic choices made in these texts. This study uses the appraisal system in the systemic functional linguistic (SFL) framework to examine how news discourse addresses the issue and constructs interpersonal meanings. Graduation resources, as a subcategory of appraisal system, can underpin the degree of meanings and perspectives, allowing writers to adjust the gradability of attitudinal meanings conveyed to readers. This research first examines how the writer’s voice is embedded in graduation resources, and later, how these graduation resources are used in online news articles calling for the return of the artefacts. This study also examines how online newspapers covered a short film by vloggers called “Escape from the British Museum”, which sparked massive social media reactions, offering new perspectives on how social media and traditional news organisations interact to construct meanings through language. The results show that quantification and fulfilment (completion) resources are the two most common subcategories of graduation resources. The findings shed light on the language strategies used in news and social media discourse, as well as the interpersonal meanings behind such requests for cultural heritage repatriation.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010012
Authors: Johannes Scherling Anouschka Foltz
Background: Experts are a favorite source of information in the news media as they have the ability to provide balanced and authoritative comments on important issues. However, two factors cast doubt on the extent to which such experts can actually provide balanced information: conflicts of interest and areas of expertise. In this paper, we analyze the use of expert voices during the COVID pandemic in two Austrian broadsheet papers. Methods: We examine the use of reporting verbs employed to indicate the journalists’ stance towards the expert comments as well as the relationship of those comments to the experts’ fields of expertise and to any potential conflicts of interest. Results: Our analysis shows that the media uncritically reported experts that had considerable conflicts of interest, while others were permitted to comment on topics far outside their particular fields. Conclusions: In the absence of journalistic scrutiny, distance, and context, both of these practices are likely to have led audiences to take the experts’ comments at face value and therefore to have embraced unbalanced information that amplified official narratives, to the exclusion of alternative voices.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010011
Authors: Gema Alcolea-Díaz Noelia Zurro-Antón Luis Cárcamo-Ulloa
This article focuses on the role of information disorders in media coverage of cancer as a growing public health problem on both sides of the Atlantic. Taking the examples of Chile and Spain, we analysed news (n = 5522) published by major digital newspaper outlets in both countries between 2020 and 2022 to explore the elements of contextual information disorders, the over- and/or under-representation of mentions of sources and actors, and major latent topics in both journalistic systems. To achieve these objectives, we employed topic modelling and coherence techniques. The results revealed a high number of references to institutional, administrative, and political sources and actors, followed by mentions of issuers of strategic communication and, less frequently, patients’ associations. The discourses differed in their underlying topics, with risk factors and psycho-social factors being the most frequently addressed in the Spanish press and geo-political and institutional health contexts being the most frequently mentioned in the Chilean press. The topic of advances in research, however, was common in both journalistic systems. This article closes by identifying future challenges in health communication.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010010
Authors: Alexander Godulla Daniel Seibert Tim Klute
Nowadays, virtually all discussions of social relevance involve actors negating the scientific consensus and disrupting the public discourse with so-called alternative facts. So far, this phenomenon, referred to as denialism, has encompassed different meanings and definitions that vary depending on the field of application, thereby making correct usage difficult. This paper therefore aims to develop an understanding of denialism by examining how the existing interdisciplinary literature is defining the term. Using an integrative systematic literature analysis, the interdisciplinary field of research is examined. This allows not only for the derivation of a definition of denialism but also for the identification and categorisation of denialist actors and the discussion of potential coping strategies. Finally, the definition integrated in this paper describes denialism from a communication studies point of view as a phenomenon that is characterised by the use of certain rhetorical tactics, a systematic and targeted approach, and an underlying motivation.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010009
Authors: Matthew Fraser
The special status of satire in France is examined historically from the French Revolution to the Fifth Republic. It is argued that satire in France functions with a normative reference to the secular, universalist Jacobin values (hostile to church, aristocracy, and monarchy) that underpinned the foundation of the French Republic. Since the French Revolution, French journalistic satire has, in different ways, perpetrated what can broadly be categorized as either lèse majesté or blasphemy. Given France’s turbulent history over the past two centuries, satire has frequently been used as an instrument to reaffirm the Republic’s values vis-à-vis authoritarian regimes with different characteristics. The symbolic connection between satire and the French Republic’s founding mythology has conferred upon the idiom a special status that endures today. The Fifth Republic, however, has presented a unique challenge to satire because of its authoritarian institutional character with personal power in the hands of the head-of-state. Three case studies are examined: the newspapers Le Canard Enchaîné and Charlie Hebdo and the satirical television program Les Guignols de l’Info. Today satire has found expression on online social networks in the form of memes, gifs, and videos. This marks a shift from satire produced by journalistic elites to more diffused and socially distributed satirical mockery.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010008
Authors: Geoffrey Craig
This study investigates the profiles, practices, and perspectives of leading climate and environmental journalists from Aotearoa New Zealand. Based upon semi-structured interviews, this study discusses the state of national climate and environmental reportage, as well as possible and desired futures in the round, as responses to the rapidly emerging climate and biodiversity emergency. Within a comparatively small national media ecosystem, the interviews reveal a diversity of backgrounds and degrees of scientific expertise, a collegial relationship amongst the journalists, and a relatively high degree of autonomy in their respective newsrooms. The research notes the journalists believe climate and environmental reportage has increased in Aotearoa New Zealand in recent years although the level of coverage is still insufficient, and there are ongoing struggles to locate climate and environmental journalism within existing news frames. The interview discussion also explores features of reportage such as source relations, workload pressures, and audience engagement. This study explores how journalists negotiate their personal commitments to environmental change within the context of their professional practice. It also discusses the issue of advocacy reportage in climate and environmental journalism and possible critiques of existing journalistic practices and dominant news frames within the contexts of a climate and biodiversity emergency.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010007
Authors: Pablo Medina Aguerrebere Eva Medina Toni Gonzalez Pacanowski
Hospitals resort to different initiatives to build their brands, including media relations, events, and marketing campaigns. However, they face several challenges related to legal frameworks, patients’ new demands, and hospitals’ digital transformation. This paper analyzes how the best hospitals in France manage smart technologies to enhance their relationships with stakeholders and reinforce their brands. We resorted to the World’s Best Hospitals 2023 to identify the 150 best hospitals in this country. Then, we defined 34 branding indicators to evaluate how each hospital managed smart technologies for branding purposes. We adapted these criteria to different platforms and targets: homepage (patients), online newsroom (media companies), About Us section (suppliers, shareholders, and public authorities), and artificial intelligence department (employees). When analyzing these criteria, we resorted to a binary system and only considered hospitals’ official websites. Our results proved that 98% of hospitals had a website, but not all respected the criteria related to the homepage (4.54 of 11), online newsroom (2.52 of 11), or About Us section (1.56 of 6). The best hospitals in France, according to the number of criteria respected, were Institut Curie-Oncology (20), Institut Gustave Roussy–Oncology (19), and Hôpital Paris Saint-Joseph (19). We concluded that French hospitals should implement collective branding processes that include all stakeholders, not just patients: media companies, public authorities, suppliers, shareholders, and employees. Moreover, these organizations should implement an in-house artificial intelligence department that leads a digital transformation from a medical, branding, and communication perspective. Finally, French hospitals’ branding efforts on smart platforms should focus more on content about the brand so that stakeholders understand the uniqueness of these organizations.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010006
Authors: Sei-Hill Kim Zdenek Rusek Kotva Ali Zain Yu Chen
Analyzing data from a survey of U.S. adults (N = 509), our study examines the role of partisan media in (a) shaping people’s perceptions of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, (b) producing an echo-chamber effect, influencing users to believe that other people have an opinion similar to their own, and (c) creating a polarized public opinion environment, where people hold more extreme perspectives on BLM. Left-wing media consumption was positively correlated with favorable perceptions of BLM, while right-wing media consumption had a negative correlation, suggesting that partisan media could influence users’ own perceptions of BLM. Also, left-wing media consumption was positively correlated with the belief that others held favorable views of BLM, while right-wing media consumption was negatively correlated with such a belief, suggesting that partisan media could affect one’s beliefs about others’ perceptions. Supporting its role in producing an echo-chamber effect, frequent right-wing media usage was associated with a smaller difference between one’s own views and their assessment of others’ views regarding BLM. Finally, there was a positive correlation between left-wing media consumption and having extreme perceptions of BLM, suggesting that the use of left-wing media could play a role in creating a polarized public opinion climate.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010005
Authors: Ángeles Fernández-Barrero Rubén Rivas-de-Roca Concha Pérez-Curiel
Regional and local media outlets have much more credibility than news organizations placed at a national level, according to polls. In a context fueled by the spread of disinformation, audiences seem to trust close journalistic sources, while national and international leaders are seen as polarized. However, local journalism has few resources for fact checking. In this context, we explore some of the strategies developed by local news organizations to avoid the proliferation of fake news. This study uses a multiple-case study on four local media outlets from similar media systems (Spain and Portugal) as a qualitative research strategy. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with local journalists and secondary data analysis, we examine how these media outlets deal with fake news, shedding light on internal fact-checking resources and other original strategies applied. From our interviews, their journalists are aware of the problem, asking for more training; whereas their organizations have different approaches to the digital platforms where most of disinformation circulates. These findings contribute to the scant literature on the role of the local field in disinformation, arguing that the social mission of local journalism may be a guarantee against fake news if their journalists are trained.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010004
Authors: Ahmet Buğra Kalender
This study investigates the function of data journalism in a UK newsroom using Bourdieu’s field theory. The collection of study data was conducted through in-depth interviews, utilising a qualitative research methodology. The data obtained revealed that data journalism, a sub-field of journalism, continues to develop in an interdisciplinary structure and creates a new type of habitus (data habitus) within the field of journalism. This study also shows that the data journalism team in the newspaper has moved from being niche to being established as one of the most active and effective main sections of the newsroom, and that data-driven journalism has the potential to influence other teams. Lastly, this study suggested that the newsroom is undergoing a process of datafication by indicating the newspaper’s intention to develop data skills beyond the data journalism team.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010003
Authors: Uriel Oliveira Christophe Soares Miguel R. Trigo
Communications professionals have widely recognized the importance of media coverage measurement. Despite having been discredited in measuring media coverage, either by the scientific community or by industry main organizations, advertising value equivalency (AVE) continues, nevertheless, to be a metric used by many communication professionals to measure digital media coverage. We propose a new metric, the Media Output Score (MOS), to automatically measure the online media coverage of brands in real-time, combining brand objectives with target media, media visibility, media favorability, readership, and social amplification of news by individuals. Using the design science research methodology, this research includes a case study analyzing the media coverage of the three main Portuguese telecommunications brands during one year on ten digital media outlets. The use of MOS with the sample data proved to be a comprehensive and valid metric to measure the output performance of brands’ digital media coverage since it effectively combines all variables, providing a single metric that can be used to evaluate and compare the performance in this context. This article presents the development, the application, and the implications of the MOS, providing a new lens through which to view and assess media coverage.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010002
Authors: Emer Connolly
Journalists are working in an ever-changing environment (where precarity has become commonplace). Reporters are increasingly required to multi-task, as news has become ubiquitous. This includes writing and editing copy, posting content online and on social media, sourcing images, recording and editing audio and recording pieces to camera: the traditional television, radio and print reporter all rolled into one. Yet, additional duties are not matched by increased pay; in some instances resources have been cut, and management cite reduced advertising revenue as the main reason. This research examined the impact of those changes to work practices on journalists, the media industry, and on wider society in Ireland, where multi-tasking has become more prevalent in the past 10 to 15 years and the pressures faced by journalists have intensified in the aftermath of COVID-19. Twelve journalists working in the media in Ireland were interviewed as part of this research. Their perceptions on the main influences on their work practices were explored. The findings of this research argue that due to the relentless drive for profit maximization, the result is that insufficient time and resources are made available to run newsrooms adequately and this is particularly prevalent in the regional press. This means ‘desk’ journalism is prioritized over ‘field’ reporting, while the battle between accuracy and immediacy is placing journalists under immense pressure and this also affects the quality of content produced and disseminated. Also, there is insufficient focus by media organizations on time intensive journalism i.e., investigative journalism—which potentially impacts everyone’s lives—and this influences how ordinary citizens understand the world around them. This research argues that the ability of journalism to hold the powerful to account is diminishing. Journalism, in its current trajectory, does not fulfil its Fourth Estate or ‘watchdog’ function, and critically, this influences people’s understanding of society, as this research outlines.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia5010001
Authors: Simplicious J. Gessa William Tayeebwa Vincent Muwanika Jessica M. Rothman
Newspapers are avenues of the media that can influence public perceptions. Newspapers are especially important to engender support for wildlife protection because they reach populations who do not necessarily encounter wildlife frequently. Our research examined how newspaper media depict wildlife-related information in Uganda, a country which hosts high biodiversity. A content analysis was performed in two widely read daily newspapers, namely, the New Vision (n = 258) and Daily Monitor (n = 267), for news articles published in selected years between 2010 and 2019. The findings show a balance between positive and negative articles published in this period. New Vision had 51.5% of its articles on wildlife negatively framed while Daily Monitor had 50% of its articles positively framed. The articles that focused on the positive benefits from wildlife were the longest with 803 ± 525 words. One of the themes that featured prominently was the impact of developments on wildlife such as successful conservation practices, management interventions to save wildlife, and NGO conservation support to wildlife protection and population growth. Overall, newspaper articles addressed efforts that called for wildlife survival, but conflict still featured prominently. Measures to sensitize journalists, such as media engagement, wildlife tours, and integration with scientists, are needed to better implement conservation media. We also suggest that the media focus on the intrinsic benefits of biodiversity conservation, and that scientists be better integrated into wildlife news stories.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4040078
Authors: Elissavet Georgiadou Maria Matsiola
As the media landscape continuously evolves in response to the increasing dominance of data, it is important to understand how future journalists perceive and respond to the emerging discipline of data journalism. This paper explores the impact of an introductory session on data journalism conducted with second-year journalism students at Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece. The study aims, through a focus group survey, to assess the students’ initial understanding and beliefs about data journalism and explores how an educational activity, structured as a one-time workshop utilizing a resource from the Al Jazeera Media Institute and data journalism project examples from the BBC, can elucidate the notion of data journalism and stimulate interest in the field. This study contributes to the ongoing discourse on the integration of data journalism into journalism curricula and the training of the next generation of journalists. Therefore, the findings could provide valuable insights for educators in understanding journalism students’ perception of data journalism in order to develop effective curricula and teaching methods for data journalism.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4040077
Authors: Simona Bisiani Bahareh Heravi
Local journalism is fundamental for a thriving democracy, yet the UK faces a decline in the number of print and digital local news outlets. Large-scale mappings of the surviving outlets offer invaluable insights to policymakers designing interventions to strengthen the sector. Due to the lack of a comprehensive national directory of UK print and digital local news outlets, researchers have resorted to datasets such as circulation auditors’ databases, which have been noted to be incomplete and outdated. A lack of understanding of the magnitude of these data limitations hinders researchers from selecting optimal datasets. This study evaluates four commonly used local news databases, uncovering significant variations in their currentness and comprehensiveness. Thereafter, statistical analyses demonstrate the significant effect of each dataset’s shortcomings on findings in local news research. To address this issue, triangulation and manual verification are employed to create a more comprehensive and robust dataset. This procedure generates a new national dataset of print and digital local news outlets that can be used in future research, alongside a framework for leveraging public data to build an independent research dataset. This work paves the way for more rigorous research in data-driven local news provision studies. Concluding remarks stress the importance of setting definitions and establishing clear data pipelines in an increasingly diversified and dynamic sector.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4040076
Authors: Lilly Joan Gutzeit Victor Tiberius
The motion picture industry is subject to extensive business and management research conducted on a wide range of topics. Due to high research productivity, it is challenging to keep track of the abundance of publications. Against this background, we employ a bibliographic coupling analysis to gain a comprehensive understanding of current research topics. The following themes were defined: Key factors for success, word of mouth and social media, organizational and pedagogical dimensions, advertising—product placement and online marketing, tourism, the influence of data, the influence of culture, revenue maximization and purchase decisions, and the perception and identification of audiences. Based on the cluster analysis, we suggest the following future research opportunities: Exploring technological innovations, especially the influence of social media and streaming platforms in the film industry; the in-depth analysis of the use of artificial intelligence in film production, both in terms of its creative potential and ethical and legal challenges; the exploration of the representation of wokeness and minorities in films and their cultural and economic significance; and, finally, a detailed examination of the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and other crises on the film industry, especially in terms of changed consumption habits and structural adjustments.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4040075
Authors: Edyta Wolny-Abouelwafa
This article presents the results of research conducted on Egyptian popular songs, categorized as patriotic and showing their writers’ support for ʿAbd Fattāḥ al-Sīsī. He was first a general, Minister of Defense and commander of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. When protests occurred in Egypt in 2013, he remained the main actor on the political stage. Then, he became marshal, resigned from his army positions, became the candidate for presidency and finally became president of the Republic. The author of this article briefly describes what happened in Egypt in this short time (2011–2014), and answers the main research questions which concern the messages of the songs, discussing whether the messages changed from the beginning of these events to the moment when he became president of Egypt. She points out how the songs follow the political events, and presents the results of her own participant observations, including photos from when she was living in Egypt from the middle of June 2013 to October 2014. She introduces this phenomenon, how the country changed in a few months and how the culture (music/popular culture) was an important part of the country’s changes that influenced these song’s messages.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4040074
Authors: Sara Ödmark
Journalistic news satire is a satire subgenre that is gaining legitimacy in academic research as well as in the journalistic field as an opinion news format and arena for public debate. News satirists claim journalistic roles and operate under the mandate of exposing moral wrongs and auditing power. The development of a more substantial news satire coincides with an observed repoliticization of humor and comedy and intensified moral negotiation around comedic content, particularly on social media. Based on the Moral Foundation Theory, this study identifies moral judgments in journalistic news satire, using a content analysis of TV news satire material from Sweden and the U.S. The results show an overwhelming majority of moral judgments related to the individualizing foundations of Harm and Fairness, while the binding foundations of Ingroup, Authority, and Purity were less frequent. In addition, the results show strong similarities between the two countries in the material, indicating moral common ground and displaying how moral judgment is connected to the inherent nature of satire in general and the genre conventions of journalistic news satire in particular.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4040073
Authors: Alexandros Samalis Alexandros Z. Spyropoulos Georgios C. Makris Charalampos Bratsas Andreas Veglis Vassilis Tsiantos Anthoula Baliou Emmanouel Garoufallou Anastasios Ventouris
This study investigates the research questions: “How do political connections within Greece’s governing party evolve, and what underlying patterns and dynamics are revealed through a network analysis of interactions on X (formerly Twitter)?” To address these questions, data were collected from X, focusing on following, retweeting, and mentioning activities among the politicians within the governing party. The interactions were meticulously analysed using tools derived from Network Theory in mathematics, including in and out-strength centrality, hubs and authorities centralities, and in and out-vertex entropy. In line with the emerging field of data journalism, this approach enhances the rigour and depth of analysis, facilitating a more nuanced understanding of complex political landscapes. The findings reveal complex and dynamic structures that may reflect internal relationships, communication strategies, and the influence of recurring events on these connections within the party. This study thus provides novel insights into understanding political communication via social networks and demonstrates the applicative potential of Network Theory and data journalism techniques in social sciences.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4040072
Authors: Ahmed Al-Rawi Chris Tenove Peter Klein
In this study, we have identified a Twitter network of bad actors mostly affiliated with Iraqi militias that are closely connected to the federal Iraqi government. Using disinformation and threats of legal action, these users often target journalists and news organizations that are critical of them. Three datasets were collected totaling about 16,000 tweets by using 6 Arabic hashtags. We found three major themes: public shaming and personal attacks; legal threats and misinformation accusations; and glorifying Shiite heroism and promoting conspiracies. These bad actors also created a coordinated attack against journalists, news organizations, and human rights activists and even the UN representative in Iraq, Jeanine Plasschaert, falsely accusing her of fabricating the 2021 federal election results.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4040071
Authors: Rosanna Planer Daniel Seibert Alexander Godulla Hannah Lea Ötting
As science journalism is growing in importance and reader interest, the social media platform Instagram provides new opportunities for media organizations to distribute scientific content. The growing danger of fake news and misinformation, as well as the ongoing pandemic and trends in media consumption patterns, make it increasingly necessary for science journalists to deliver reliable content in a well-designed manner on digital platforms. This study investigates how German media companies and individual journalists inform lay audiences on new publications, findings, and developments in sciences, using the platform Instagram. A representative quantitative content analysis of Instagram posts (n = 2.605) of nine wide-ranging German accounts related to science journalism shows that the three analyzed groups (public service media outlets, private outlets, and individual journalists) pursue significantly different approaches in how they communicate scientific content on Instagram—ranging from informative to entertaining posts—varying in their text length, the complexity of the media elements used, and the tone of voice. The results shed light on a diversification of journalistic approaches to communicating scientific content on Instagram, as well as which approaches seem fruitful. Thereby, the nature of the media organization influences the complexity, design, and purpose of their science communication on Instagram.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4040070
Authors: Muyun Zhou
The US television program The Daily Show has inspired creative talents worldwide to adapt the American political satire news formats to their own political environments. One example is The Night Night Show, hosted by Brian Tseng between 2018 and 2020 and produced by the STR Network from Taiwan. Instead of approaching the show as the result of the diffusion of the US cultural and political model into the rest of the world, this article contextualizes The Night Night Show’s adaptation of an American satirical news format in the Sinophone political discourse of laughter and satire in the modern history of Taiwan. It argues that while the show’s adaptation of an American satirical news format demonstrates how satire can dismantle linguistic and national boundaries as a transnational bonding force, it also brings this American format to critical scrutiny. In particular, the principal cultural understanding of news media as sensationalistic and propagandist instead of truthful in the local context contests the notions of “truthiness” central to the American satire news formats.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4040069
Authors: Rafael Durán
Society and scholars have debated the representation of both women and either immigrants or Muslims in the media and how this representation might affect possible racist behavior and public policy choices. This study responds to the need for a better understanding of the intersectional media representation of migrant and/or racialized women. Framing analysis was conducted on the 234 clippings in which the six most popular Spanish broadsheet newspapers referred to the women in question throughout 2021. We observed that these women are underrepresented and that the opinion the press tends to shape varies depending on the women’s identity marker (Muslim, immigrant and/or Black) and the ideology of the dailies (leftist or rightist). Finally, it is relevant whether a newspaper is published in a territory with a large foreign and Muslim population.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4040068
Authors: Julia Taylor Martyn Polkinghorne
One of the great business institutions of the modern era is the BBC which is now 100 years old. The authors explored letters and memoranda in the BBC’s Written Archives at Caversham, which revealed much about the business tactics of those in charge of the BBC during the pre-Second World War era, and how they used the power of their monopoly to their own ends. A new market of broadcasting magazines sprang up around the radio broadcasts, creating an inter-dependency between the two media. The BBC soon launched its own magazines, and from then on, the BBC’s interactions with the press media were complex, reflecting an uncomfortable blend of symbiosis and threat. Episodes between the press owners and the BBC have been uncovered, about which there has been little previous investigation, and unexpected patterns of behaviour have emerged. This archival research, using narrative history, is based upon original letters, memoranda and handwritten messages that were archived for posterity, and which report upon the actual thoughts and views of those involved at the time, revealing unexpected intrigue and machinations.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4040067
Authors: Pierluigi Vellucci
This study delved into the realm of conspiratorial thinking and misinformation on Twitter, examining the case of Silvia Romano, an Italian aid worker who faced online conspiratorial attacks before and after her release. With the increasing prevalence of conspiratorial narratives on social media, this research investigated the interplay between conspiratorial thinking and the dissemination of misinformation. Two datasets comprising Italian tweets were analyzed, aiming to uncover primary topics, detect instances of conspiratorial thinking, explore broader emerging topics beyond Silvia Romano’s case, and examine whether authors of conspiratorial narratives also engage in spreading misinformation. Twitter served as a critical platform for this study, reflecting its evolving role in news dissemination and social networking. The research employed topic modeling techniques and coherence scores to achieve these objectives, addressing challenges posed by the inherent ambiguities in defining conspiratorial narratives. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics of conspiratorial thinking and misinformation in the digital age.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4040066
Authors: Jian Wangqu Luiz Peres Neto
This study seeks to decipher the modus operandi of Shanghai’s image portrayal to the audience through social media platforms, particularly Twitter. Leveraging the potency of big data analysis, the study scrutinizes the applicability of the two-step flow communication model in the communication of Shanghai’s image. The findings highlight the cardinal role of opinion leaders in the image communication process, overshadowing the impact of mass media. The age-old phenomenon of two-step flow, wherein information trickles down from mass media to opinion leaders, appears to be fading away. Although mass media’s tweets can potentially reach a broad audience, they do not necessarily captivate the attention of opinion leaders. Thus, the study underscores the importance of both mass media and opinion leaders in shaping Shanghai’s image.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4040065
Authors: Joyce Y. M. Nip Benoit Berthelier
As social media becomes a major channel of news access, emotions have emerged as a significant factor of news distribution. However, the influence of cultural differences on the relationship between emotions and news sharing remains understudied. This paper investigates the impact of cultural disparities on emotional responses to political news in Hong Kong. We introduce the notion of “emotional profile” to capture cultural differences in the level and structure of audiences’ emotional responses to political topics on Facebook news pages. The study was conducted at a highly significant political moment in the former British colony when the National Security Law (NSL) was passed. The study found that readers of China-critical news pages on Facebook express the highest emotional intensity while readers of China’s media in Hong Kong express the lowest emotional intensity, and readers of China-supporting media fall in between. Readers of China-critical Facebook news pages express the most anger, but their political news sharing is correlated the most with “wow” and “sad” reactions. In contrast, readers of Facebook pages of China’s media in Hong Kong are more likely to react with “love”, which is also the emotion most associated with their political news sharing. The notion of “emotional profile” helps discover similarities within and differences across political boundaries of the news ecosystem. We interpret the results with the help of recent scholarly understanding of emotional expression on social media within Hong Kong’s political context.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4040064
Authors: Ahmad Wazzan Yasmin Aldamen
This study aimed to find out if there is a relationship between social media and political polarization in Türkiye from the perspective of Turkish students. To reach this aim, the needed data were collected through qualitative and quantitative approaches. A total of 303 valid questionnaires were analyzed. The sample consisted of university Turkish students across undergraduate, masters, and PhD levels in Türkiye aged between 18 and 50+. As well, an online focus group discussion with six Turkish students from different universities and education levels was conducted to gain a more in-depth understanding of the study’s problem. The results of the study showed that the perspectives of the Turkish students were that social media had a weak-to-moderate effect on political polarization in Türkiye. Furthermore, the results indicated that the studied sample of the Turkish students does not rely on social media platforms to obtain political news, and most of them do not follow political leaders on social media. Moreover, communication platforms did not encourage many Turkish students to express themselves, which is an indication that social media algorithms have contributed to a medium degree in creating filter bubbles through the content they suggest to users. Results have also shown that Turkish students are afraid that their posts and comments are being censored.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030063
Authors: John S. Bak
This review article offers a glimpse into the problems and promises of current research on world literary journalism. It discusses the rise and spread of press cultures via colonialism, the contentious nature and taxonomy of the fact—its subjectivism, accessibility, and veracity—within an inconsistent global press, and how the porous divide between fiction and nonfiction genres is affecting the production and consumption of literary journalism around the world. The article concludes by offering nine areas of research (from canon-building and historiographies to digital news platforms and gendered media) still under-represented in international and transnational literary journalism studies.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030062
Authors: Jan Georg Plavec Barbara Pfetsch
Studies of a communication deficit in the European Union (EU) have hardly taken a systematic look at the site where most of the political communication output is being created: within the elite bubble of EU politicians and correspondents in Brussels. This study builds on the communication culture approach to describe and explain the basic attitudinal patterns of EU politicians and journalists who critically shape the political communication output coming out of Brussels that is being consumed by European citizens. Based on a survey with more than 300 participating politicians and journalists, this study demonstrates that the internationalised communication context in Brussels reduces differences between the attitudes of actors from professional and national groups. We demonstrate that there is a tendency toward common elitist attitudes, complemented by a highly negative view of the public and a cynical mode of political communication. However, we observe predominantly national contact networks in Brussels and partly differing attitudes among some sub-groups of politicians and journalists, reflecting the partly conflicting national configurations of the European political and media system and the principal-agent relationships of EU politicians and journalists with their constituencies and media outlets.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030061
Authors: Steffen Heim Sylvia Chan-Olmsted
AI has become increasingly relevant to the media sector, especially for news media companies considering the integration of this technology into their production processes. While the application of AI promises productivity gains, the impact on consumers’ perceptions of the resulting news and the level of AI integration accepted by the market has not been well studied. Our research focused on the analysis of news consumers’ preferred level of AI integration, AI news trust, and AI news usage intentions linked to the application of the technology in the discovery/information-gathering and writing/editing phases. By connecting a comprehensive set of factors influencing the perception of news and AI, we approached this gap through structural equation modeling, presenting an overview of consumers’ responses to AI integration into news production processes. Our research showed that while participants generally prefer lower levels of AI integration into both phases of production, news trust and usage intention can even increase as AI enters the production process—as long as humans remain in the lead. These findings provide researchers and news media managers with a first overview of consumers’ responses to news production augmentation and its implications for news perception in the market.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030060
Authors: Jonathan Hendrickx Annelien Van Remoortere Michaël Opgenhaffen
As an integral part of their online strategies and business models, news outlets diffuse their online content on social media platforms such as Facebook to increase traffic. They thereby succumb to the contingencies and constraints of third platforms infamous for their sudden changes in algorithms. In this article, we assess engagement patterns of 140,359 Facebook posts of 17 Belgian news brands between March 2020 and 2021. We map out differences in audience engagement of news outlets’ Facebook posts related and unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic and differences between mainstream and alternative news outlets. We find that COVID-19-related posts generate more engagement and more so for mainstream media than for alternative media outlets.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030059
Authors: Lucia Vodanovic Janani Venkateswaran
This article discusses the use of personal narratives in food media and journalism with a particular focus on podcasting. It situates the research amongst the abundance of lived experiences both in food content and in podcasting, two spaces that have been regarded as providers of the intimacy required to challenge impartiality practices in journalism. Given that the growth of podcasting has arguably failedto include enough non-mainstream voices, our primary research is based on four series of the Whetstone Radio Collective, a media organisation that aims to tell the stories of marginalised communities. Using content and thematic analysis, it establishes that the innovative use of first-person narratives of the hosts—who are overwhelming people of colour and embody stories of migration and displacement that mirror the food stories—is accompanied by conventional journalistic sourcing of experts who are already established voices based in the Global North. A recentring agenda is most obvious when it reclaims histories such as that of black farmers in the US, when it situates the consumption of foods as part of the global trade that drove the colonial project, or when it delves into and criticises foodways such as the social architecture of kitchens.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030058
Authors: Tony Harcup
News has long been a contested concept but in the digital era it has become increasingly fractured and multidimensional. This discursive article explores some of the ways in which the news has been disrupted by technological and economic tensions and argues that the social value of news is worth articulating and, where necessary, struggling for. News values have never been universal or unproblematic, and the tension between commercial and social ways of valuing news is intensified today. News values are not fixed and must be open to critique as to how they are meeting citizens’ needs. Societally useful news may be at risk of being marginalized as news organizations struggle to survive, but it is not inevitable that disruption and digitization should undermine journalistic ethics and the social value of news. In arguing that scholars ought to approach news more holistically, to defend it as well as critique it, the article attempts to synthesize what typically appear as discrete approaches to studying news. The article concludes that, if the social value of news is not to suffer further diminution, there is a need to view news through a lens of struggle; a struggle in which journalists, audiences, scholars and, indeed, all citizens have a part to play.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030057
Authors: Shuran Yang
This sentence is meant to explain the result of Video 2 [...]
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030056
Authors: Julian Wangler Michael Jansky
The shortage of general practitioners (GPs) and the fact that country doctors’ practices are vanishing—a situation that is currently taking a turn for the worse in some regions of Germany—are issues that have been dealt with in the media as a topic of specific discussion for some time now. In the process, news coverage is dominated by certain depiction patterns, referred to as frames, which are shaped in terms of textual and visual impact. The present explorative study addresses the questions of which media depiction and interpretation patterns (frames) are encountered on the shortage of general practitioners in news coverage in the Federal Republic of Germany and how general practitioners, the circumstances, and the benefits of their care are presented in this context. In the course of a search via the Lexis Nexis database, a total of 655 news items were found or selected that mainly deal with the shortage of general practitioners (period from 1 January 2017 to 31 December 2022). Furthermore, the media libraries of the two public television broadcasters ARD and ZDF were specifically searched for documentaries on the shortage of general practitioners for the said period. A qualitative content analysis was subsequently performed, in which characteristic reporting patterns on the topic under consideration were identified based on frame-defining categories. Five frames could be identified that outline the shortage of general practitioners in different ways. The first three frames present the dominant image of GPs as highly stressed, aged, or frustrated primary care providers who attempt to keep their practice going for as long as possible despite their increasing stress levels. The other frames portray the phenomenon of the shortage of GPs, in particular, as a side effect of demographic and structural changes, discuss the (diminishing) appeal of the profession of a general practitioner, or discuss the issue of remote areas that no longer have access to a GP practice and now receive ‘alternative solutions’. The frames identified reflect societal views and anxieties regarding the consequences of a progressive shortage of GPs, which have been spurred on by the media. They reflect the significance of the GP as a trustworthy and competent primary care provider who is not readily replaceable, neither in his/her role as a guide in the healthcare system nor with regard to his social function.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030055
Authors: Giacomo Buoncompagni
In the digital age, the concept of news relevance seems to be fraying, and the activity of selecting what is considered most important collides with much more complex problems of defining meaning, caused by less compact and coherent visions of the world. If it becomes increasingly difficult to arrive at a shared understanding of what is relevant, important, and interesting for the public to know, as worldviews and benchmarks proliferate, then the only possible measure seems to be to reward what is popular, what is successful, and what produces market-driven journalism. This is an example of what then led to the definition of so-called public journalism, a form of journalism that is attentive to the demands of the public and willing to give more space to the considerations and perceptions of users. However, by transforming itself into a “product”, journalism also changes the public’s sense of use, which is no longer to use information to acquire what one needs to know, but what one wants to know. The public exposes itself to what is culturally closest and shared, often allowing subjective emotions to prevail over the evaluation of facts. Through an analysis and critical comparison of recent international readings on the subject, this paper attempts to reconstruct, from a socio-mediological point of view, the path taken by journalism in the digital age, focusing on the value of news, the relationship with the audience, up to the crisis of the public sphere and the birth of infocracy following recent global crises.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030054
Authors: Yiben Liu Shuhua Zhou Hongzhong Zhang
TV audiences today are more likely to use an additional media device to further engage with the television content, a phenomenon known as “second screening”. This study takes second screening research into an authoritarian context to investigate what motivates users to search for information, engage in discussions, and post on social media. We apply an O-S-O-R model and demonstrates an integrated procedure of second screening’s political effects among citizens of Beijing. Our findings showed that most of the direct and indirect paths in this model were significantly positive. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are also discussed.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030053
Authors: José Luis Rojas-Torrijos Daniel Nölleke
In current digital media landscapes, sports journalism has lost its status as the undisputed playmaker in delivering sports-related information to audiences [...]
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030052
Authors: Paraskevi El. Skarpa Konstantinos B. Simoglou Emmanouel Garoufallou
The purpose of this study was to assess the Greek public’s perceptions of the reliability of information received about the Russo-Ukrainian war in the spring of 2022. The study was conducted through an online questionnaire survey consisting of closed-ended statements on a five-point Likert scale. Principal components analysis was performed on the collected data. The retained principal components (PCs) were subjected to non-hierarchical k-means cluster analysis to group respondents into clusters based on the similarity of perceived outcomes. A total of 840 responses were obtained. Twenty-eight original variables from the questionnaire were summarised into five PCs, explaining 63.0% of the total variance. The majority of respondents felt that the information they had received about the Russo-Ukrainian war was unreliable. Older, educated, professional people with exposure to fake news were sceptical about the reliability of information related to the war. Young adults who were active on social networks and had no detailed knowledge of the events considered information about the war to be reliable. The study found that the greater an individual’s ability to spot fake news, the lower their trust in social media and their information habits on social networks.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030051
Authors: Vera Katzenberger Jonas Schützeneder Michael Grassl Jana Keil
News podcasts have emerged as a relevant medium, contributing to the collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of information in mass media discourse. This paper presents an analysis of the sociodemographic backgrounds, professional profiles, role perceptions, and values of news podcasters based on an online survey of 195 participants in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. The results reveal that news podcasters are predominantly male, middle-aged, and academically educated with no journalistic socialization or journalistic working experience. In terms of self-images and values, news podcasters emphasize the importance of education, information, and entertainment, while rejecting conventional concepts like criticism and control. Overall, they demonstrate a strong orientation towards the needs of their audiences and strive to be responsive to their preferences. Yet, the monetization of content through financing models such as sponsoring or native advertisement is not established on a broad scale. These findings shed light on the unique characteristics of news podcasters and provide insights into their status in a rapidly changing media environment.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030050
Authors: Huiling Ding Manushri Pandya
This study employed critical rhetorical analysis and corpus-assisted discourse analysis in analyzing the news coverage of India’s transition from Wave I to Wave II Focusing on news coverage from the Times of India, we examined how COVID-19 was constructed in the public and technical spheres and how India’s COVID-19 risk communication was shaped by unique geopolitical, cultural, infrastructural, and material factors. Our analysis highlights the tendency to datify COVID as statistics and case numbers, which both dehumanizes the patients and caretakers while erasing human suffering. It also reveals the critical roles played by the geopolitical, socioeconomic, infrastructural, and material conditions in shaping the national and regional capacities to respond to such far-reaching crises. Last but not least, affect and trust play prominent roles in the public coping with emerging pandemics given the uncertainties on all fronts, and thus should be centrally highlighted and addressed in public policies.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030049
Authors: Daniel Fritz V. Silvallana Misraim Grace Hagling
Government agencies play a critical role in addressing societal issues and rely on effective communication strategies to inform and engage the public. However, research on government communication practices in the Philippines is limited. To bridge this gap, this study aims to explore the Philippine government’s communication practices and the influence of environmental attributes on communication efforts regarding the counterinsurgency program. Drawing on the government public relations model, a qualitative research approach was employed to gain in-depth insights into the experiences and perspectives of local information officers. The study utilized semi-structured interviews as the primary data collection method. By engaging local government communicators in the Philippines, the study identified four major themes: common media strategies, pressure to meet public information needs, lack of financial resources, and the impact of external legal frameworks. The findings revealed that government communicators employ various media strategies and face significant pressure to meet public information needs. Furthermore, the study highlights the intersection of external legal frameworks with other environmental constraints, such as politics and professional development, impacting government communication practices. This paper contributes to the limited scholarship on government communication practices in the Philippines, offering preliminary insights into the complex dynamics of government communication to address societal challenges.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030048
Authors: Senthan Selvarajah Lorenzo Fiorito
This study, using content analysis and frame analysis, examines whether there is any connection between the International Criminal Court’s (ICC’s) announcement on the fifth day of Russia’s war against Ukraine (which began on 24 February 2022) that it would investigate credible allegations of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, and the reporting of the international press in those first five days. This study finds a functional relationship between the ICC’s application of international law and international press reporting, in that the latter pursued an agenda grounded in the sources of international law. This reporting appeared to have made people think about the likelihood of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine (accessibility effect) and that Putin and his regime should be punished under international law (applicability effect). In turn, this was advantageous to the ICC’s announcement that it would investigate allegations of Russian war crimes in Ukraine. The speed of the ICC’s decision to open this investigation opens questions as to what distinguished the situation in Ukraine from similar situations. Media reporting may have contributed to a broader rationale for potential realpolitik objectives concerning Ukraine and Russia, underpinned by laudable humanitarian and legal concerns. This study concludes that if power saturates law, then the media is a diffusing agent of that power—an actor that spreads and amplifies elite narratives into the public sphere, rationalising the actions of institutions like the ICC.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030047
Authors: Leonardo Soares Lopes José Azevedo
Over the past three decades, there has been a significant increase in political and media attention towards climate change. The media has been instrumental in shaping, reproducing, and influencing the political and cultural comprehension of this phenomenon. While previous research has concentrated primarily on the textual content of news articles, this study focuses on the use of images in climate communication. It is based on the belief that images can combine facts and emotions, engaging audiences and adding narrative complexity to verbal claims. With focus on climate imagery, a content analysis was conducted on 1010 images used by a Portuguese newspaper (Público) between January 2000 and May 2022 to visually cover climate change. The purpose of the analysis was to identify the visual frames used by the newspaper to frame the issue. The primary findings indicate that 35.5% of the images analyzed employ a frame that dramatizes the effects of climate change, evoking anxiety and vulnerability. However, there is evidence of a growing body of scientific literature that challenges and refutes the sensationalist and demoralizing narrative, resulting in the development of novel methods of communicating the phenomenon. Compared to the preceding period (2000–2005), the proportion of visual frames depicting potential solutions and adaptation strategies has increased substantially over the past three years (2020–2022) by 16.3%.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030046
Authors: Emmi Verleyen Kathleen Beckers
Asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants are central concepts in news coverage of immigration. However, these three terms refer to distinct groups with different meanings and potentially different frames, which could be negative, victim-based, or positive. Additionally, it is uncertain to what extent these groups are given a voice and how this is linked to the news frames used. To address this, a content analysis of 503 articles about asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants in a Belgian elite newspaper and a popular newspaper was conducted for the period from 2015 until 2020. We focus specifically on differences between the crisis years and the non-crisis period thereafter. Our results indicate that if asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants are given a voice, they are more likely to be framed positively or as victims. However, if they are only mentioned, a negative frame is more common. Asylum seekers are also more likely to be negatively framed than migrants and refugees. Moreover, we find no differences between the elite and popular newspapers in how they frame and give a voice to these three actors.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4030045
Authors: Tawfiq Ola Abdullah Brent J. Hale Mutiu Iyanda Lasisi
In the context of the increasing proliferation of users on social networking sites (SNS) and the ensuing debate on their benefits and drawbacks, this study examines the interconnection between human behaviors and identity formation on Facebook. We leveraged the concept of plural identity, seeking to identify relationships between online social behaviors and plural identity tendencies. We conceptualize plural identity as a construct spanning the personal and social dimensions of identity, and use these as the core starting points for studying plural identity. Accordingly, the relationships between social-communicative and personal-communicative behaviors involving plural identity on Facebook were investigated. A survey administered to Nigerian Facebook users (N = 429) revealed that social-communicative behaviors (i.e., social support and social interaction) exhibited strong relationships with plural identity on Facebook; similarly, personal-communicative variables (i.e., presentation of the extended self and self-expression) were strongly related to plural identity. This study highlights the role of SNS in satisfying peoples’ social and communication needs, which are interwoven with identity formation.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020044
Authors: Lovisa Broms
Increased in-depth knowledge on how sport federations shape their social media affordances to build relationships with their audiences will develop the understanding and ongoing discussion on the effects of social media in organized sports. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate in what way sports federations shape their social media affordances to create an increased understanding of how they interact with their audiences through social media. Three sports federations, the Swedish Basketball Federation, the Swedish Skateboard Association, and the Swedish Equestrian Federation, were investigated through semi-structured interviews as well as digital ethnography. The analytical focus lies on in what way the organizations shape social media affordances as well as in what way they imagine social media uses and users. This study shows that the federations’ imagination of who their users are, what they would like to see and how these users act and react defines their affordances. Further, the results reveal that the federations have differing approaches to in what way they imagine their users (as fans, fellows or followers) as well as what their incentives are for using social media. To learn how ongoing mediations mold long-term changes for sport federations, it is of importance to look beyond mediatization and learn more about their current structure and operations, their history, and traditions, as well as their view of their users.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020043
Authors: Fátima C. Carrilho Santos
The increasing prevalence of disinformation has led to a growing interest in leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) for detecting and combating this phenomenon. This article presents a thematic analysis of the potential benefits of automated disinformation detection from the perspective of information sciences. The analysis covers a range of approaches, including fact checking, linguistic analysis, sentiment analysis, and the utilization of human-in-the-loop systems. Furthermore, the article explores how the combination of blockchain and AI technologies can be used to automate the process of disinformation detection. Ultimately, the article aims to consider the integration of AI into journalism and emphasizes the importance of ongoing collaboration between these fields to effectively combat the spread of disinformation. The article also addresses ethical considerations related to the use of AI in journalism, including concerns about privacy, transparency, and accountability.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020042
Authors: Neil O’Boyle Aaron Gallagher
This article provides empirical evidence of ‘defensive mediatization strategies’ in the field of sport. These are strategies used by actors individually and collectively to control and sometimes avoid media publicity—for example, by refusing requests for media interviews, or in the case of an organization, by making media literacy training available to its staff. In this article, we use the concept of defensive mediatization strategies to identify and illuminate some of the challenges facing professional sports journalists in the postbroadcast era. The article draws on findings from an ongoing study of the relationships between professional sports organizations, athletes, and journalists, but reports only on interviews conducted with experienced sports journalists in Ireland and Britain (n = 16). Our analysis identifies a number of defensive mediatization strategies used by sports organizations, including increased levels of in-house media, differential treatment of journalists, and an increasingly competitive stance towards journalism generally. We also consider a potentially more pernicious strategy: the hiring of professional sports journalists as internal communications advisers—a switching of role positions that might be termed ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’. The article organizes findings according to the three categories of defensive mediatization strategies identified in the extant literature (persistence, shielding, and immunization) and proposes a fourth category, which we label steering.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020041
Authors: Márton Iványi
Arguably, social media provides a new playground for the ever-expanding processes of neoliberal subjectivation in accordance with social or ethical standards such as the principles of performance and pleasure, competitiveness and consumerism vis à vis the general population. According to relevant data analyzed in the context of this research, any corresponding model anticipating such tendencies may seem to have limited validity in the context of Hungary, applying to certain segments of the population (aged 18–35) using social networking sites, but not necessarily a general experience. Thus, the present paper offers a theoretical and a Hungarian youth-focused empirical framework based on contemporary experiences for understanding the domestic nuances of real or perceived processes of neoliberal subjectivation.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020040
Authors: Jessica Kunert Peer Kuni
This article examines the tension between journalistic and entertainment values in live soccer TV commentary from the perspective of German commentators. We situate journalistic and entertainment values within the commentators’ wider understanding of their roles as sports journalists and commentators, looking at a specific type of sports journalist who has different responsibilities from the general sports reporter. We asked how soccer commentators assess the role of journalistic and entertainment values in their work, and what constraints they face, such as how the perceived expectations of their employer affect this assessment. We interviewed 28 TV commentators, one radio commentator, and one expert working for relevant German TV channels and streaming platforms, such as ZDF, Sky, and DAZN. While all interviewees see themselves as companions telling the story of the match, most commentators in the sample value journalistic values over entertainment values, a surprising finding in the hyper-commercialized world of sports television. Well-founded journalistic expertise and soccer knowledge are considered most important. However, this assessment depends on factors such as the broadcaster’s guidelines and the nature of the match. In summary, the role of the commentator is either an ‘objective mediator’ or an ‘emotional entertainer’, but this is a balancing act.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020039
Authors: Katherine M. Engelke
Audience participation is a contested issue in newsrooms and can challenge journalistic authority. By conducting a mixed-method analysis of a decade (2009–2018) of metajournalistic discourse (N = 135) on participatory journalism in two leading trade magazines in the US and Germany (Columbia Journalism Review and Journalist), this study aims to contribute to the field’s understanding of how and in which contexts audience participation is covered in public discourse and of reasons for positive and negative public evaluations of participatory journalism. The results show that while metajournalistic discourse covered participatory journalism in all stages of the news production process, notable differences in the coverage emerged depending on the specific context factors of participation dealt with. It is therefore depicted as a pervasive and multi-faceted phenomenon. 93 articles featured an evaluation: 53% depicted participatory journalism positively, 16% negatively and 31% left a mixed impression. Several themes emerged in the reasons for these evaluations, some of which are exact opposites, indicating that the presented evaluation depends on the specific circumstances of audience participation, namely the contexts of participatory journalism, the degree of involvement and character of audience participation and the resources available to the journalists.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020038
Authors: Christof Seeger Thomas Horky Jörg-Uwe Nieland Peter English
Newspaper sports departments in Germany are reacting to changes in social media by expanding their offerings and employing a variety of publishing and engagement strategies. In this constantly evolving media environment, it is important to understand how newsrooms utilize social media to inform their audiences. This study examines the approaches German newspapers apply to publishing sports content on social media, and outlines how users interact with these posts. In analyzing these aspects, this paper applies theoretical elements of agenda setting and audience engagement, gender in media, and quality and diversity of published content. Social media posts were examined across eight German publications, totaling 3633 posts from Twitter and Facebook. Results in the study, which is part of the global 2021 Social Media International Sports Press Survey, highlighted how most of the content published by German newspapers on social media aimed to redirect users to the publications’ websites. The findings also reflect how social media is used less as an editorial space and more as part of a campaign to increase the audience. These results demonstrate challenges for the quality of sports coverage distributed via social networks in Germany.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020037
Authors: Armando Espinoza Carlos A. Piña-García
Thanks to digital media communication, customers can receive targeted communications. Political actors increasingly engage in political marketing on social media in order to strengthen and propagate propaganda. There is enough evidence of a coordinated effort to spread official propaganda and imitate digital support with the aim of influencing and manipulating social media users, as well as the public opinion, primarily through official Twitter accounts and influencers on TikTok, using the Salario Rosa (Pink Salary) social program as cover. Through data mining and visualization tools, we gathered information about Tweets and TikTok videos containing the hashtag #SalarioRosa, and a variety of correlated hashtags, which is the main goal of this analysis. Our research indicates that traditional “brute force” astroturfing campaigns and a novel “mimicking conversation” tactic were employed to promote and raise awareness about political figures as well as to improve their reputation by manipulating the public opinion on social media platforms, without taking into account the negative impact on the current reality of women living in the State of Mexico, as stated in the Pink Salary for Vulnerability program.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020036
Authors: Klaus Meier Jonas Schützeneder José Alberto García Avilés José María Valero-Pastor Andy Kaltenbrunner Renée Lugschitz Colin Porlezza Giulia Ferri Vinzenz Wyss Mirco Saner
In the original publication [...]
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020035
Authors: Aline Grupillo Reis
The purpose of this article is to discuss to what extent the coverage of urban violence by local television news in Brazil has been impacted by journalists’ fear and their distancing from regions of armed conflict, leading to the development of new professional routines and, in particular, the use of WhatsApp. Our methodology included in-depth interviews with 13 journalists occupying different positions in the hierarchy of the newsrooms of the 4 main TV stations in the country. The testimonies suggest that aggression and hostility against journalists drove professionals away from certain territories and turned them toward new technologies and citizen co-production as ways out for local crime coverage. On the other hand, this dynamic creates challenges for journalism itself. One of the main concerns is the verification of content.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020034
Authors: Fashina Aladé Tracy H. Donohue
School districts are quickly adopting one-to-one mobile device programs for children as early as kindergarten, but evidence of successful device integration is mixed. One important area to consider is the home-school connection, i.e., the role of parents and the home environment in supporting or hindering children’s school-based technology use. Previous research has looked extensively at teacher-related barriers and facilitators of classroom technology use, as well as parent-related barriers and facilitators of home technology use. However, the home and school spheres are highly interconnected, especially for young children. Therefore, this survey-based case study explored the relationships between children’s at-home technology use, their parents’ attitudes towards technology, and their in-school tablet use utilizing a sample of 258 parents of kindergartners in a racially and socioeconomically diverse district that had recently adopted a one-to-one tablet program. Results highlight the ubiquity of kindergartners’ home device use and parents’ general optimism towards both home- and school-based digital devices.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020033
Authors: Johannes Scherling Anouschka Foltz
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, in many parts of the Global North, the public has looked to the media as an important source of information about new developments and measures to combat the spread of the virus. The main measure propagated by governments in this respect was the mass vaccination program. In this context, two important concepts in the media coverage were herd immunity and vaccine efficacy, both of which had to be reevaluated over time. In this study, we looked at the discursive construction of “the science” in the discourse on herd immunity and vaccine efficacy in two Austrian broadsheet newspapers. Our corpus-based analysis showed a tendency to overuse linguistic items implying certainty in the face of a very fast-changing, and thus uncertain, situation. We also found evidence that these two Austrian media outlets no longer function as corrective of power, but have taken on the role of mediators of sanctioned government narratives. We argue that the uncritical reporting of government narratives in such a fluid situation has led to unresolved and unreflected inconsistencies in the reporting, arguably decreasing the public’s trust in the accuracy of the COVID-19 information presented in the media.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020032
Authors: Gloria Anyango Ooko
Kenya has a history of media censorship and citizen surveillance. The advent of social media is laudable for contributing to freedom of speech and accountability in Kenya. Studies show that WhatsApp, through its group formation affordance, has largely contributed to political participation in Kenya and beyond. Kenyans see it as a ”safe” place away from government surveillance, a carry-over of authoritarian rule. This is especially so since WhatsApp is considered as private media compared to other social media platforms. For instance, many political bloggers on Twitter and Facebook perceived to be anti-establishment have been arrested and charged, but only accountable arrests have been made in connection to WhatsApp activities despite government threats. This article argues that although actors, both human and non-human, act to construct a safe community for political participation on WhatsApp, modes of exclusion and inclusion arise from the socio-technological interaction which could pose a threat to the newly founded ”safe space”. Though the study site is in Kenya, this article grapples with issues other scholars of social media and politics grapple with globally, that is, safety, security, surveillance, and political participation, among others.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020031
Authors: Sarah Stonbely
This research addresses current gaps in knowledge about local news provision: it considers the method for best understanding the robustness of a local news ecosystem, and it identifies the structural features of a community that are correlated with its level of local news provision. Most local news assessments to date have used the geographic location of the news provider as a proxy for coverage; here, I use (self-reported) coverage area as the marker of local news provision, allowing a more accurate representation of the communities being served. I find that median household income, population density, and the percentage of the population that is Hispanic are positively correlated with the number of outlets that cover a municipality, and are therefore significant indicators of local news provision. I further identify certain local news providers as “local news originators,” and map the number of LNOs for the 565 municipalities that make up the state of New Jersey, making this the first study to map local news provision at this level of detail for an entire state.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020030
Authors: Javier J. Amores David Blanco-Herrero Carlos Arcila-Calderón
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted societies all over the world. In an interconnected and digital global society, social media was the platform not only to convey information and recommendations but also to discuss the pandemic and its consequences. Focusing on the phase of stabilization during the first wave of the pandemic in Western countries, this work analyses the conversation around it through tweets in English. For that purpose, the authors have studied who the most active and influential accounts were, identified the most frequent words in the sample, conducted topic modelling, and researched the predominant sentiments. It was observed that the conversation followed two main lines: a more political and controversial one, which can be exemplified by the relevant presence of former US President Donald Trump, and a more informational one, mostly concerning recommendations to fight the virus, represented by the World Health Organization. In general, sentiments were predominantly neutral due to the abundance of information.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020029
Authors: Mamunor Rashid Md. Ripul Kabir Malik Mahdir Ibne Zaman
This study aims to determine how the global media covered the Padma Bridge inauguration news and its contribution to achieving the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) of Bangladesh. After overcoming several obstacles, Bengalis’ desire to use their own money is set to become a reality. In this study, both qualitative and quantitative methods were used. The first stage was using convenience the sampling method to gather information on the Padma Multipurpose Bridge’s opening, from 25 June to 25 July 2022, from the usual worldwide media and TV networks. The information coverage of several news sources from various countries was subsequently investigated utilizing the content analysis approach. In one way, newspaper stories, expert comments, research papers on the Padma Bridge, government reports, the Bangladesh Planning commission, and finance ministry records have all been analysed to collect the Padma Bridge’s role in fulfilling SDGs. The data show that the Padma Bridge, which showcases Bangladesh’s financial potential, is given significant weight in the international media. The Padma Bridge will contribute to a 29% increase in Bangladesh’s development industry, a 9.5% increase in agricultural output, an 8% increase in the industrial and transportation sectors, and a 0.84% annual decrease in poverty. By the year 2041, Bangladesh hopes to be a prosperous, ecologically friendly, and socially inclusive monarchy. The Padma Bridge will facilitate the development of new rail networks, improve connectivity, and expand global trade. Through this bridge, the enhancement of people’s lifestyles and subsistence abilities is made possible in a significant way.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020028
Authors: Simon McEnnis
Fabrizio Romano’s sizeable social media followings and role as influencer–sports journalist warrant attention. Romano, known for his catchphrase ‘Here We Go’, specialises in football transfers and produces multi-platform content. This study investigates how Romano’s Twitter practice informs professional understandings of sports journalism. A content and textual analysis (n = 494) was conducted of one month of Romano’s tweets and replies. Tweets were categorised according to markers of sports journalism practice. Results show Romano is professionalising sports journalism on social media and subverting understandings of personal branding through favouring objective news over subjective opinion and focusing on the professional rather than the personal. Romano’s transfer news prioritises major European football clubs, which is consistent with the trajectory of sports journalism on digital platforms. Play-by-play commentary is a minor aspect of Romano’s Twitter output, which contributes to the debate on the significance of game coverage to contemporary sports journalism. Tweets did not mention the human rights issues surrounding the World Cup starting in Qatar, even though this was a key talking point. This finding suggests that the normative assumption that sports journalists should scrutinise power and/or highlight social injustice does not always apply to all practitioners in all contexts, particularly where ultra-specialist settings are concerned.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4020027
Authors: Jijian Fan Runquan Guan
We exploit internet censorship intensity changes due to political events to study the impact of internet censorship on online laboor work in China. With a unique dataset from the Ingress (video game) community platform, a difference-in-differences design shows that an increase in China’s internet censorship intensity during politically sensitive dates, while not affecting the amount of volunteer working time, reduces online labour work efficiency by eight percent for volunteers from mainland China relative to those elsewhere. This efficiency loss due to internet censorship can be a proxy for the labour productivity loss for Chinese oversea e-commercers, freelancers and other related online workers.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010026
Authors: Temple Uwalaka
This study investigates the impact of mobile social networking applications in the organisation of protest movements by examining how protesters documented their participation during the 2020 #EndSARS protests as well as evaluating the themes that emerged from online activists’ tweets during the 2022 #EndSARSMemorial2 protests in Nigeria. Data for this study was obtained from a survey conducted in 2020 during the protests in Lagos and Port Harcourt, Nigeria (N = 391), and a qualitative content analysis of tweets and replies (N = 67,691) from the 2022 #EndSARSMemorial2 protest in Nigeria. Results show that there is a substantial relationship between how protesters document their participation and their day of joining the protest. Findings also demonstrate that protesters used social media platforms accessed via mobile phones to display their anger and anguish, imprecate the authorities, and rouse solidarity contagion, which ignited a memorial march for fallen activists in Nigeria. Finally, data illustrate that activists in Nigeria use these successive memorial protests to sustain the #EndSARS protest movements and their demands.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010025
Authors: Zhou Nie Mingzhu Li Moniza Waheed Diyana Kasimon Wan Anita Binti Wan Abas
WeChat has become the most popular type of social media among youngsters in China. They use it for various reasons including communicating in intimate relationships. This study aims to investigate the impact of the density of individuals’ social networks on WeChat Usage in Intimate Relationships among Chinese youngsters, guided by the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). An online questionnaire was constructed and disseminated to respondents online. In total, 923 undergraduate students from Chinese universities completed the questionnaires. Utilizing Structural Equation Modelling, findings show that the density of individuals’ social networks has a limited impact on WeChat usage. On the other hand, TPB factors such as subjective norms and perceived control bring a substantial impact on WeChat usage, while attitude has a less significant impact. These results indicate that Chinese youngsters exhibit strong attributes of the collective culture. This study also suggests that future social media research should place more emphasis on cultural and social factors.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010024
Authors: Moa Eriksson Krutrök
Obtaining accurate information from social media during a crisis can be difficult, but should all information really be disseminated? Social media platforms actively filter out terrorist and violent extremist content (TVEC), but how are users themselves counteracting its spread? This paper aims to connect the research on media events with studies currently being conducted in information science and digital media research through a case study of tweets during the Vienna terror attack in late 2020. These tweets were manually coded in accordance with Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis. This study shows that during the 2020 Vienna attack, GIFs shared on Twitter served three functions: amplification, personalisation and ethical practice. The paper ends with a discussion on the ways cats may function as a countermeasure against the prevalence of TVEC on social media during terrorist attacks and the implications of such countermeasures.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010023
Authors: Fabíola Ortiz dos Santos
How are narratives around peace and conflict constructed in radio? This paper offers a detailed discussion of a framework of analysis of media narratives. It examines how perceptions of peacebuilding are constructed and aired in radiophonic debates. It deals with methodological questions and carries out an interpretative analysis of narratives in ‘media talk’, here defined as a broadcast output in the form of ‘talking’. The narrative analysis is composed of four dimensions: thematic, structural, actor and agency levels. What started as an effort to study a political debate in the Central African Republic from a radio station named Ndeke Luka, evolved into an in-depth reflection of how competing, clashing and counter peacebuilding narratives can take form. One particular transcript of a radio programme is hereby used to exemplify and illustrate how this analytical framework is operationalised. It is not intended, though, to offer any generalisation claim as this study is a work in progress. While interrogating the ways peacebuilding narratives in ‘media talk’ can be detected, this paper goes beyond the sharing of a particular case. This model makes it possible to apprehend the nuances of ‘media talk’ as a contesting and disputing space for diverse narratives. As a point of departure, it claims that the ideas of peacebuildings (in plural) relate to experiential practices. Research in ‘media talk’ constitutes a relevant arena for mapping emerging narratives of conflict and peace.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010022
Authors: Annika Sehl Maximilian Eder
By shining a light on the previously neglected combination of public service media (PSM) and the audience perspective, this paper adds to the debate on (algorithmic) news personalization. While news personalization may offer new opportunities, it can clearly also conflict with the PSM mission of universality of access, reach, and content. This empirical study compares the audience perspective on the news personalization of users and non-users of public service news in Germany, France, and the UK. Overall, the findings of the online survey show that users of public service news in Germany and the UK—in comparison to non-users of these services—perceive more risks such as missing out on certain topics or viewpoints, place greater value on a shared public sphere, and more strongly prefer a news selection primarily made by professional news editors. In France, however, the differences between users and non-users of public service news are rarely significant, which is interpreted against the background of the different media systems and the role of PSM. The findings add to the understanding of what public service news audiences expect PSM organizations to provide while keeping the difficult balance between personalization and universality.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010021
Authors: Paola Condemayta Soto Joke Bauwens Kevin Smets
In this study, both performance and polymedia serve as important conceptual lenses to examine how university students in the Global South handle the social media landscape in enacting cultural identity. Based on 17 focus groups with 105 students from Bolivian universities, we argue that in performing their multiplex identities, this group of Bolivian young people navigate social media as polymedia environments, taking advantage of its possibilities and testing its constraints. The research generated three key findings: (1) students mainly reported examples of cosmopolitan and national identity performances; (2) performances of national belonging showed an ambiguous mixture of self-glorification and self-reflexivity; (3) indigenous identities were rarely performed on the platforms used.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010020
Authors: Xavier Ramon José Luis Rojas-Torrijos
In the current cross-media ecosystem, which is characterized by technological disruption, the prominent relationship between public service media (PSM), sport and cultural citizenship is undergoing a profound transformation. Currently, PSM can utilize its myriad platforms, channels and services to transcend the constraints of linear broadcasting, find new ways of advancing diversity and overcome the perception of disability sport as a media ‘blind spot’. Through content analysis, the objective of this research has been to examine the agenda diversity on Twitter offered during the timeframe of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games by 15 PSM corporations in Europe. This comparative analysis of 6072 tweets demonstrated the uneven attention devoted by European PSM to the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics. In the aggregate, 39.42% (n = 2398) of the messages focused on the event, although significant imbalances can be observed among the different media organizations, both in terms of the volume of coverage and the attention given to the various Paralympic disciplines and protagonists. From a theoretical perspective, the article adds to the existing literature on the nexus between media, sport and cultural citizenship, signaling the need for PSM to reimagine its social media strategies to counteract the limited visibility of different societal groups and to adequately contribute to enhancing cultural citizenship in the digital age. The results can also inform media practitioners. Despite that the conditioning factors and trade-offs linked to the commercial nature of social networking sites cannot be overlooked, PSM should take into account the importance of promoting inclusion and observe audiences’ increasing interest in disability sport.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010019
Authors: Gitte Stald
The article focuses on mobile democracy in connection to the conditional foundations for young Danes’ democratic agency in a digital society. It investigates questions of democratic transformation through a conceptual and empirical triangulation of mobile democracy as a framework for analyzing these conditions. Conceptually, the article draws on research on youth and mobile technologies and on theories of mobility, deliberative democracy, and democratic conversation. Empirically, the article draws on 16 in-depth interviews with 16–24-year-old Danes conducted in 2021. This dataset is supported by findings from a representative survey (2017) and publicly available statistics and surveys. The article analyses three intersecting conditions that frame the concept of mobile democracy through an analysis of young citizens’ democratic participation: 1. Mobile technologies—democratic mobility occurs across the availability of technological mobile platforms and online services. The ‘always on’ status is defining for young citizens’ democratic agency. 2. Mobile information and social media—fragmented publics are increasingly missing societal reference points and ideological coherence, and young people are challenged in their attempt to establish coherent meaningfulness from the fluctuating information stream. 3. Mobile engagement and participation—information mobility affects perceptions of what information, citizenship and democracy are, and how this translates into actualizations of democratic participation.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010018
Authors: Ian Hawkins Scott W. Campbell Andrew Gelderman
Mobile media are fundamental to social life in a growing number of ways. Beyond the mundane, the technology has come to play a meaningful role in protests and emergent demonstrations worldwide, including recent cases of political violence among far-right groups in the U.S. Drawing from the folk theory tradition, this study samples Alt-Right supporters to investigate how perceived essence of mobile media, particularly as a tool for collective action, is associated with willingness to engage in racially motivated and extreme political action in offline and online contexts. Findings reveal that perceptions of the mobile phone as a tool for collective action are associated with greater intentions to participate in online and offline activity explicitly in support of White people. Additionally, we find cases where links between essence and intentions are strengthened among those reporting higher levels of micro-coordination, or use of mobile media for coordinating with others in daily life. The findings indicate how everyday life perceptions and practices function and interact in ways that help explain willingness to join racially motivated calls to action among this group. The discussion offers implications for studying mobile media and collective action more broadly, especially in the context of under-researched political groups.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010017
Authors: Rita Basílio Simões Agda Dias Baeta Bruno Frutuoso Costa
In recent decades, marked by the supposedly universal access to different types of social media, we have seen the emergence of forms of popular feminism embedded in complex dynamics. Often cohabiting in these dynamics are ambivalent ideas and imaginaries that both reject and express feminist issues. Particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of digital technologies increased exponentially to overcome mobility constraints, popularizing connective action around feminism and, at the same time, reinforcing normative views of society. This article explores these ambivalences by focusing on TikTok discourses, whose popularity grew intensely during the pandemic. Departing from a feminist constructionist perspective and using content analysis, we examine the 100 most prominent videos on the Portuguese hashtags #feminismo (#feminism) and #antifeminismo (#antifeminism) in the period corresponding to general containment measures in the second phase of the public health crisis. The results are less than encouraging. Over half of the analysed videos contain discursive dynamics conforming to social hierarchization (53%), often reaffirming gender stereotypes. By allowing forms of popular feminism and antifeminism to permeate the shared discourses, the results suggest that the platform gives rise to ideas and discourses that reify unbalanced power relations.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010016
Authors: Mercy Ette
At a time of renewed power struggles among nations, especially with the rise of China and Russia, the UK’s loss of leverage as a key player in the European Union following Brexit makes its relationship with the United States more crucial than ever before. That relationship, which is traditionally conceptualised as being ‘special’, undergirds international relations discourses in media spaces and political and academic communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Drawing on news coverage by the New York Times and The Guardian (UK) newspapers, this article explores how the media frame the UK–US relationship against the backdrop of Brexit. The discussion is predicated on the understanding that important sources of information can influence not only people’s perceptions but also how they think about an issue. The study concludes that while a special relationship is still a contested notion, a resilient and abiding alliance between the two countries is alleviating the impact of Brexit.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010015
Authors: Kathleen Bartzen Culver Douglas M. McLeod
The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on 25 May 2020, sparked widespread protests led by the Black Lives Matter movement throughout the summer of 2020. Subsequent news coverage of these protests prominently featured acts of civil disobedience even though almost all protests were peaceful. In turn, protest “violence” was picked up by conservative political elites as evidence to promote legislation to control protests and keep communities safe. Since summer 2020, eight states have passed such legislation with additional bills pending in 21 states, raising concerns that the legislation suppresses political expression. This paper brings together literature on free expression, the protest paradigm, and news framing to provide the basis for a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 379 news stories and editorials covering Florida’s HB1 protest legislation. Results reveal that the most frequent news frame was fighting crime, with relatively less attention to free expression, political strategy, and race frames. In addition, very little attention was paid to the legislation’s potential chilling effects suppressing constitutionally protected speech and assembly. These results indicate news media were deficient in providing the public with a sufficient assessment of the implications of protest legislation.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010014
Authors: Marina Fernández Maestre
The present article examines journalism specialized in art and architecture in the print editions of the cultural supplements of three Spanish newspapers with the highest circulation in the country: Babelia (El País), ABC Cultural (ABC), and El Cultural (previously El Mundo, and currently, El Español) covering a twenty-five-year period. All three supplements consolidate visual arts and architecture into a unified section called Art. The main objective of this research is to analyze the Art sections, using the year 2018 as a case study and the twenty-five-year period (1993 to 2018) to investigate the evolution of cultural supplements. To undertake this study, I used the content analysis method. The results show a noticeable reduction in the length of the cultural supplements during the study period. This decline also entails a significant decrease in art content, with architecture severely affected. The conclusions of this study highlight the current precarious state of cultural supplements, the fundamental role of criticism, and the marginalization of architecture in these publications.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010013
Authors: Sadia Jamil Gifty Appiah-Adjei
In conflict-ridden countries, the news media has a pivotal role to perform as an active advocate of human rights and societal peace, as well as a facilitator of conflict mitigation and resolution through the gathering and dissemination of non-partisan information. While today the world witness armed conflicts in more forms than ever before, some countries are more sensitive to conflict and violence—such as Pakistan. The country is recognized as one of the riskiest places for working journalists by virtue of recurrent political, ethnic, and religious conflicts. The Pakistani journalists work in a climate of fear and risks and with opposing groups seeking to influence the news media, which creates more difficulties for them to report unbiased and accurate news to the public. The practice of ethics has become more challenging for the Pakistani journalists because the country lacks an effective and standardized code of conduct to report on conflict. Therefore, drawing on the theory of the conflict triangle by Galtung, this study seeks the Pakistani journalists’ perspectives about the ethics of conflict sensitive reporting. In doing so, this study uses the quantitative method of survey and the qualitative method of in-depth interviews. The study uses descriptive analysis to present the survey findings in the form of percentage and thematic analysis to present the findings of interview data.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010012
Authors: Miguel Midões Joana Martins
The local press finds its vocation in the community it addresses and in its territory of deployment, taking proximity as the main news value in the choice of events. The war in Ukraine, as an international theme, has imposed itself on the national media agenda, and, as such, we have proposed to evaluate its presence in the regional media agenda. For this case study, we have selected the local daily newspapers Diário As Beiras and Diário de Viseu (located in the center region of Portugal) and analyzed twelve consecutive editions of each newspaper, starting on the first day of the conflict, 24 February 2022. The results point to an appreciation of the event, either from an international perspective or through a regional lens, essentially evident in the coverage of solidarity actions and tributes. The sources used by the newspapers are mostly institutional, which leads us to a “seated journalism” in line with previous studies specific to the local press. This analysis also highlights the emphasis on the information obtained from the prism of sources on the Ukrainian side of the conflict, which, in the case of Diário de Viseu, is underlined by biased discourse and some marks of subjectivity.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010011
Authors: Morgan Quinn Ross Jarod Crum Shengkai Wang Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick
Concerns about online news consumption have proliferated, with some evidence suggesting a heightened impact of the confirmation bias and social cues online. This paper argues that mobile media may further shape selective exposure to political content. We conducted two online selective exposure experiments to investigate whether browsing political content on smartphones (vs. computers) facilitates selective exposure to attitude-consistent vs. attitude-discrepant articles (confirmation bias) with high vs. low views (impact of social cues). Notably, these studies leveraged novel random assignment techniques and a custom-designed, mobile-compatible news website. Using a student sample, Study 1 (N = 157) revealed weak evidence that the confirmation bias is stronger on smartphones than computers, and the impact of social cues was similar across devices. Study 2 (N = 156) attempted to replicate these findings in a general population sample. The impact of social cues remained similar across devices, but the confirmation bias was not stronger on smartphones than computers. Overall, the confirmation bias (but not the impact of social cues) manifested on smartphones, and neither outcome was consistently stronger on smartphones than computers.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010010
Authors: Abeer Abdullah Alaql Fahad AlQurashi Rashid Mehmood
We live in the information age and, ironically, meeting the core function of journalism—i.e., to provide people with access to unbiased information—has never been more difficult. This paper explores deep journalism, our data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) based journalism approach to study how the LinkedIn media could be useful for journalism. Specifically, we apply our deep journalism approach to LinkedIn to automatically extract and analyse big data to provide the public with information about labour markets; people’s skills and education; and businesses and industries from multi-generational perspectives. The Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting phenomena coupled with rapidly changing generational attitudes are bringing unprecedented and uncertain changes to labour markets and our economies and societies, and hence the need for journalistic investigations into these topics is highly significant. We combine big data and machine learning to create a whole machine learning pipeline and a software tool for journalism that allows discovering parameters for age dynamics in labour markets using LinkedIn data. We collect a total of 57,000 posts from LinkedIn and use it to discover 15 parameters by Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm (LDA) and group them into 5 macro-parameters, namely Generations-Specific Issues, Skills and Qualifications, Employment Sectors, Consumer Industries, and Employment Issues. The journalism approach used in this paper can automatically discover and make objective, cross-sectional, and multi-perspective information available to all. It can bring rigour to journalism by making it easy to generate information using machine learning, and can make tools and information available so that anyone can uncover information about matters of public importance. This work is novel since no earlier work has reported such an approach and tool and leveraged it to use LinkedIn media for journalism and to discover multigenerational perspectives (parameters) for age dynamics in labour markets. The approach could be extended with additional AI tools and other media.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010009
Authors: Journalism and Media Editorial Office Journalism and Media Editorial Office
High-quality academic publishing is built on rigorous peer review [...]
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010008
Authors: Ana Jorge Bibiana Garcez Bárbara Janiques de Carvalho Ana Margarida Coelho
This study consisted of a content analysis of parenting portrayals in the 40 most popular Portuguese male and female content producers on YouTube and Instagram, on a sample of content published in 2019. Female creators give disproportionately greater attention to parenting and are the ones depicting everyday labor related to it, whereas male creators show themselves as fathers in happy and fun moments. By way of their popularity and visibility on social media platforms, and as supported by the social media platforms and advertising realms, celebrities and influencers are amplifying the traditional division of parenting labor through the mechanisms of a postfeminist, hyper-individualistic discourse emphasized by female influencers and celebrities, and of humoristic content that confirms gender stereotypes without social punishment, deployed by entertainment personalities, both male and female.
]]>Journalism and Media doi: 10.3390/journalmedia4010007
Authors: Yasmin Aldamen
Negative, tragic, traumatic and suffering representations continue to dominate the discussions and content on social media in the stories and content related to Syrian refugees. The public, while browsing social media, finds that this representation is the dominant one that dominates the image of refugees. Thus, there is a potential risk that the public’s compassion will be negatively affected after repeated exposure to the dominant representation in light of the inability to put an end to that situation. This study discusses the perspectives of Syrian refugees living in Jordan and Turkey on whether they feel such repeated negative and tragic content about their stories and news on social media could affect the empathy of the audience in hosting communities with them, especially since social media is an open-source platform that all people at any time and from any place can post, re-share, comment and create content by adding texts, photos and videos, not like traditional media, which are controlled more than social media platforms for open participatory content. This study aims to explore how a vulnerable population, such as Syrian refugees in Istanbul and Amman, sees the effect of negative representation on themselves and their image in the hosting communities and does not aim to examine or offer any conclusion as to whether the public in Jordan and Turkey have experienced compassion fatigue. This study provides and extracts some useful insights, but proves no hypotheses or conclusive evidence regarding the occurrence of compassion fatigue in the public; thus, the study opens the door for the debate on the role that social media plays as a source of compassion fatigue among citizens towards refugees, mainly when they are repeatedly exposed to such negative stories and content, as well as calls for an in-depth and extensive study on the topic from the point of view of the public and citizens in the hosting countries, after examining, understanding and analyzing the opinions and their dimensions of the sample of refugees in this study.
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