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.

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

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).

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Stephanie Jean Tsang, whose focus is on media use in China. She contrasts this with news coverage in western nations, where news stories about particular incidents usually results in questions over which side (official statements or citizen stories) to believe.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 panel is Suncem Koçer, whose focus is on the Turkish news and online media environment. User engagement with online information here is especially polarised – how do users evaluate the information and misinformation they encounter here, and how do they choose what to circulate to their own networks?

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Scott Wright, who begins with a brief history of the ‘fake news’. There are actually false news stories, news stories that are described as ‘fake’ by politicians such as Donald Trump for political reasons, and false information that is deliberately disseminated by politicians for such reasons.

The next speaker in this entertaining IAMCR 2019 session is Adeyanju Apejoye, whose focus is on ‘fake news’ in the 2019 Nigerian presidential election. ‘Fake news’ has become a critical issue in Nigerian politics, given the highly contested nature of the campaign, the shortcomings of Nigerian mainstream media, and the increasing role of online and social media in the country.