Blogs

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Donald Matheson, whose focus is on the journalistic reporting on invasive species in the US and Aotearoa New Zealand, as a case study of reporting on the biodiversity crisis more generally. Globally, some half a million non-native species have been introduced to new ecosystems; this demonstrates the impact of human factors such as colonialism, globalisation, tourism, and climate change. This in turn impacts on agriculture, health, and Indigenous cultures, and drives accelerating biodiversity loss.

The second presenter in this climate change-themed session at IAMCR 2023 is Henri-Count Evans, whose interest is in South African press coverage of climate change negotiations. Climate change is a global threat, of course, but disproportionately affects poor and marginalised countries; there have been global efforts, facilitated by the UN, to address the crisis since at least 1995 and the start of the COP summits.

The final day at IAMCR 2023 starts with a paper by Hannah E. Morris, on climate journalism in the United States. There has been what seemed to be a striking shift in coverage in recent times, with the New York Times unusually highlighting the role of capitalism and neoliberalism as driving the climate crisis, for instance.

The final speaker on this third day of IAMCR 2023 is Gabriella Szabó, whose focus is on sympathy towards Ukraine in political rhetoric in Poland and Hungary. While usually there are considerable similarities in political rhetoric across the two countries, this is not true when it comes to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces: the governments of the two countries responded very differently to the invasion.

Up next at IAMCR 2023 is Zheyu Shang, whose interest is in online propaganda in the Chinese Internet. This now works and looks quite differently from the historical forms of Chinese party propaganda that western observers may be familiar with; the Website of the Chinese Communist Party’s Youth League (CYL) looks more like a social media Website, for instance, and a Chinese army recruitment account on social media uses cartoonish imagery.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Vaia Doudaki, who presents a discourse-theoretical analysis of Czech social media content about the construction of Europe. This is a suitable approach for the study of identities, as identity signifiers are objects of political struggle for hegemony. This builds on nineteen dimensions in the construction of the idea of Europe, and the present paper focusses on constructions of the European people and of European institutions.

The final IAMCR 2023 session for today starts with Joseph Gotte, whose focus is on the elective affinity between political and religious discourses about the ecological apocalypse. ‘Elective affinity’ here is a concept referring to the relationship between religious beliefs and social formations, lifestyle, and economic behaviours; it is the process by which two cultural forms enter into a relationship of mutual attraction and influence.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Sisanda Nkoala, whose interest is in science journalism on social media in South Africa.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Khayrat Ayyad, whose interest is in how media institutions in the UAE engage with their audiences via social media. The UAE is a global leader in the adoption of digital technologies, and there are a number of state-sponsored or -subsidised media outlets across the UAE’s emirates, alongside for-profit media organisations.

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2023 starts with Julian Maitra, whose focus is on news on Instagram. He begins by noting several media trends that affect digital journalism and news: increasing news consumption via social media; platformisation and atomisation of the news; personalisation of news; incidental or serendipitous encounters with the news; the social dissemination of news; the fragmentation of audiences; algorithmic gatekeeping; and the weakening of conventional news gatekeeping.