Government

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 …

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.

In China, the media environment means that this plays out somewhat differently: rumours may circulate on its social media platforms, but official institutions including police departments are often directly engaged in the discussion, and will provide updates on these stories directly on these platforms, and seek to suppress the distribution of further online …

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 project focussed on the recent Turkish local elections (before the re-runs of some of the contested polls), using focus groups, media diaries, and semi-structured interviews. News users generally had very low trust in the news media, yet still accepted the news narratives being constructed …

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.

In Australia, for instance, there was substantial coverage of the ‘fake news’ debate in the U.S., sensitising voters to the issue; the use of ‘fake news’ as a label for news coverage particular politicians did not like; and outright lies about a ‘death tax’ purportedly …

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.

The project examined such issues through surveys and qualitative content analysis of news stories and comments, focussing on some eleven news stories with a particular focus on a province seeking to secede from the country. Some such stories used highly …

The next IAMCR 2019 session is on ‘fake news’, and we start with Julio Juarez Gamiz who focusses on ‘fake news’ directed at the national electoral authority in the 2018 Mexican presidential elections.

There is substantial mistrust of electoral authorities given that, until recently, Mexico had the same party in power for some 70 years; in 1988, the system that provides vote count updates broke down altogether as it showed the opposition in the lead, and by the time it came back online the government was back in the lead. This is still seen as a marker of the worst …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Holger Sievert, whose interest is in the European public sphere. There are now some decades of criticism that suggests that the development of that public sphere is lagging behind other forms of European integration, and such criticism has now also increasingly focussed on online and digital media.

This missing European public sphere has also been blamed as one driver of the U.K.’s recent Brexit vote: without a European public sphere there are few fora available to counteract the negative discussion about the European Union that may be taking place in national …