The fourth presenter in this IAMCR 2019 session is Lemi Baruh, who shifts our focus to election press coverage in Turkey. Turkey has undergone a gradual process of political transformation, with growing government influence on the media, but media in Turkey have often been researched using convenience samples, and short-term studies; the present study addresses this by covering four national election campaigns from 2002 to 2015, and by using newspaper readership data and content analysis for 15 newspapers in the country.

Press-party parallelism theory suggests that commercial media structures often parallel political structures; media partisanship is also a positioning strategy …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 is Anastasia Kazun, who follows on from the previous presentation by focussing specifically on the countries that Russian media cover. Media influence public opinion about countries and their leaders, of course, because ordinary people will not have any direct experience of geopolitics – this is especially important in Russia, in fact, because most Russians have never travelled abroad.

The present study focusses on Russian press, TV, and online media, which tend to have different thematic interests and reporting styles. It studies the mentions of some 193 countries in Russian media, focussing on the …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Anton Kazun, whose interest is in the global news flow around the G20 group of countries. International news are important to our perceptions of other countries and their leaders, but state politics, ideology, and news frames will affect this; further, news attention to different countries is never equal. Factors that increase attention to different countries include GDP, population size, and links through common borders, trade, tourism, and migration.

The personalisation of politics in each country also means that attention may be directed especially to a country’s leader, and this is also …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Andrea Cancino-Borbón, whose focus is on satirical ‘fake news’ in Colombia.

At present, Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of Bogotá is highly unpopular with citizens, and an independent media outlet has been set up to publish satire and parody news about him – but articles from this site have been picked up at times by mainstream news outlets and misunderstood as real reporting. This moves such obviously ‘fake’ stories from a harmless and humorous context to a much more problematic place.

So, how is the personal and political profile of the mayor …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Chen-Ling Hung, who presents a case study on typhoon Jebi’s impact on Japan in September 2018, which forced the closure of Kansai airport and led to substantial disruptions especially for the city of Osaka. Many travellers, including especially Chinese tourists, were affected, and there was a subsequent political storm in Taiwan, especially also in online media, when it emerged that Taiwanese citizens may also have received assistance from Chinese consular authorities if they identified themselves as Chinese (rather than Taiwanese).

This event, and the information and misinformation that circulated around it …