Snurb's blog

Hamburg.
The second day of the ECREA 2010 conference is about to begin, and I’m starting the morning with a session on media and democracy in the digital age. We begin with James Curran, who begins by noting that there are three standard views of media and entertainment: a diversion from the serious nature of media coverage; a new category unrelated to politics; and crossover between public affairs coverage and entertainment. Each of these are myopic, for various reasons, and fail to understand the democratic functioning of entertainment.

Rather, entertainment allows us to debate the social and moral values that underpin society; to affirm identity; to examine contrasting interpretations of society; and to debate social norms. James names the 24 series as providing a cue to debating the balance between protecting society from terrorist threats and upholding individual liberties.

Hamburg.
The final speaker in this ECREA 2010 session is Sabine Baumann, whose interest is in online grassroots campaigning especially in the past US presidential election. There, of course, to win a candidate not only needs votes, but campaign funding in the first place, and the Obama campaign was exceptionally successful in attracting campaign contributions (collecting twice as much money as John McCain, mainly from small donations under US$200).

Spending figures are also interesting in this regard – McCain spent some US$4.6m on Internet campaigning, Obama spent a whopping US$24m. The Obama campaign Website also prominently displayed its donation and online merchandise functionality, of course; the online store was hugely successful, in fact (offering campaign clothing and art from notable designers and artists).

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Adam Shehata, whose interest is in the extent to which the news media influence gaps in political participation between socioeconomic groups, and how this can be analysed from a cross-national comparative perspective. The study examines nine European countries, and builds on an institutional framework that examines the joint impact of institutional mechanisms on participation.

There are two dimensions of influence here: institutional strength (the effects of news consumption on political participation, which is a necessary condition for influencing gaps), and the distinctiveness of the population base of the media (the socioeconomic characteristics of news consumers). The hypothesis here is that news media use has a positive effect on political participation, and that news media institutions with a low-education bias (targetting less educated audiences) will narrow gaps in participation between socioeconomic groups, while those with a high-education bias will widen such gaps. Further, news media use is likely to narrow gaps in voting participation than other, less widespread forms of political participation. These hypotheses were tested using European Social Survey data.

Hamburg.
The next speakers at ECREA 2010 is Emiliana de Blasio, whose focus is on Italian politics in the age of Web 2.0. Key themes here are access, interaction, and participation. Participation here means both participation in content production (co-deciding on content), in content producing organisations (co-deciding on production), and in technology producing organisations (co-deciding on technology).

Advantages of these shifts are greater interactivity, connectedness, participatory deliberation; disadvantages include a loss of control, and other negatives. The present research examined the information, fundraising, involvement, and mobilisation functions of Italian political Websites, to determine the interrelationships between social networking and political participation. This was done through questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and participant observation.

Hamburg.
The next session at ECREA 2010 starts with Elisabeth Stúr, whose interest is in the mediated debates in the lead-up to a referendum in a small community in Sweden about the extension of a hydroelectric power scheme. In this case, public opinion was communicated both through old and new media, as well as through public meetings, raising the question to what extent political debates moved to new media platforms.

Hamburg.
We move on to Elisabeth Klaus and Ricarda Drüeke as the next speakers at ECREA 2010; their focus is on media coverage of Austrian migration policy. This is a question of cultural citizenship, concerning cultural belonging and identity formation, and conducted through cultural and media participation. Cultural citizenship entails all those cultural practices that allow or prevent cultural participation.

Media present spaces of identity that offer certain positions to people according to their markers of identity. So, the question arises which identities are presented in the media. In the context of Austrian migration policy, citizenship is based on the citizenship of one’s parents as well as a number of other social and cultural conditions (examined in a citizenship test), but can also be granted to persons with extraordinary achievements in science, economy, arts, or sports without other conditions being met.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Leen van Brussel, who shifts our focus from the world stage to northern Belgium, and the debate about euthanasia and the right to die being played out in newspapers there. The relevant players in that debate are the ‘right to die’ and ‘palliative care’ movements, with their respective, opposing, points of view. This is a struggle for meaning, played out in good part through the mainstream media.

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Lina Dencik, whose focus is on BBC World News and its implications for global civil society. Global civil society has grown out of a cosmopolitan notion that privileges public deliberation and involves non-state actors as key transformative agents, resisting and overcoming the attempt at imposing a state-based international order. In this context, the media have three main functions: providing the basis for global citizenship, global public deliberation, and global public opinion and governance. This follows a globalised liberal narrative of media.

But how does this correspond with actual developments in news narratives. BBC World News provides a useful case study here: it is one of a handful of major global news broadcasters, with a substantial audience reach and a mission to provide a global news perspective to a global audience (and yet, compared to CNN and Al Jazeera it has been underresearched so far).

Hamburg.
The first round of parallel sessions at ECREA 2010 is starting now (and there are some 15 sessions running in parallel, so what I’m covering will be far from representative for the whole conference). In the Communication and Democracy session, we start with Hartmut Wessler, whose interest is in a cross-national comparison of TV news in the US, Germany, and Russia – the focus in this is on how political discourse and debate is organised and orchestrated by the news media. This builds on the arena model of (mass-) mediated public debate.

The three countries were chosen as they represent different systems: parliamentarian multiparty democracy in Germany, presidential bipartisan democracy in the US, and defective, authoritarian democracy in Russia. Additionally, various types of TV channels (public service, commercial, state-owned; general interest or neutral or partisan news-only) were observed.

Hamburg.
The second keynote speaker this opening morning at ECREA 2010 is Paolo Mancini, whose focus is on cross-national comparative research. This builds on two main assumptions: that comparative research is crucial to media studies, but also that such comparative work is often delayed. The latter may apply more to some forms of comparative research than others.

Any observations about specific national systems ultimately build on comparisons with other countries (even if such comparisons are mainly implicit rather than explicit); most scientific statements in social science and related fields are relativistic: researchers who know only one country know none. Media studies have often been only implicitly comparative, however; there is a delay in the move towards cross-national comparative work, as acceptance of the comparative approach has taken some time to take hold.