Journalism

The final speaker in this final Friday session tab ECREA 2022 is Stefanie Walter, whose interest is in discovering inclusive keywords related to ethnicity and race. Minority groups are often framed negatively in the news, and this reinforces negative opinions and beliefs about them; but research into such framing is also difficult because it depends in the first place on the use of keywords and search strings for identifying relevant news articles.

The identification of such terms thus often depends on the researchers’ tacit knowledge, and may miss speciality terms like the UK’s ‘Windrush generation’ of Caribbean immigrants, while it …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Hendrik Meyer, whose focus is on debates on Twitter relating to climate change. Future scenarios are essential for climate change research, and the journalistic framing of such futures is critical for the public understanding of climate change threats. For Germany, the US, South Africa, and India, the project examined some 56,000 articles on climate change from 2017 to 2020, covering a broad range of media outlets.

But not all such articles were covering climate change in depth or discussing future scenarios; there was a need to extract articles covering climate change …

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session was my own, with Felix Münch, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden. Here are the slides:

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Carlos Ballesteros, whose focus is on news games as a vehicle for digital journalism. Such news games have been around for some time, but they exist in many different forms, and there’s still a lack of conceptual clarity with respect to this term. The general hope is that such games might increase the amount of time people spend with the news media.

But how are such games used to convey journalistic messages? Carlos examined some 84 news games from 48 mass media outlets in 17 countries, classifying these across a number …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Maria Kyriakidou, whose focus is on journalistic understandings of disinformation. This is as part of the Countering Disinformation research project.

The project drew on nine semi-structured interviews with UK-based journalists, editors, and fact-checkers in January 2020 to explore how they understood disinformation, and how saw their role in tackling it. Such perspectives may well have evolved further in the face of the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic, of course.

Much of the focus in the journalists’ responses was on political lies at this stage, therefore, and they noted that politicians now appear far …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is another one of my temporary University of Zürich colleagues, Anna Staender. Her study sought to develop a typology of the spreaders of misinformation across multiple countries. These may include state actors, politicians and celebrities, or alternative media outlets, for instance, but not enough is known yet about their impact; the specific focus here is therefore on alternative or hyperpartisan media actors.

Previous research has seen such alternative media as a corrective to mainstream media, but such alternative media outlets may now also simply attack opposing political views at the expense of …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is David Nicolas Hopmann, presenting on a multinational study of Europeans’ attitudes towards their news media diets as part of the curiously named ThreatPie project. The present paper explores people’s ideas about what a ‘healthy’ diet is; what diets they actually consume; and what perceptions they have of the media their peers consumed. This was done for Germany, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the UK, with younger (18-25) and older (55+) adults. A larger survey of 18 countries will follow.

Younger adults had a clear idea of a healthy media diet: a balance …

Up next in this ECREA 2022 session is my temporary University of Zürich colleague Sina Blassnig, whose focus is on news recommender systems. Such systems are algorithms that provide users with personalised recommendations for news content based on past interactions by them or similar users, overall popularity metrics, and other features.

Such systems are increasingly employed by news organisations internationally, and therefore now also need to be investigated from a political communication perspective. They have implications for political news demand, consumption patterns, and citizens’ information practices. Such systems thus connect both sides of the political information environment, but the research …

The next ECREA 2022 session is on media exposure, and begins with Ole Kelm. He notes the expansion of political participation through the use of online and social media; we now have institutional participation, protests, civic engagement, political consumerism, online activities, and other forms of participation both on- and offline. Political consumerism in particular includes elements such as boycotts, buycotts, discursive political consumerism, and lifestyle political consumerism.

News consumption underpins those activities, and the role of news consumption in boycotts and buycotts has already been investigated; social media activities and political discussions further inform and influence such forms of action …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Marius Gerads, whose focus is on integrating hostile media perception into Spiral of Silence theory. People with such perception see the media tenor as dissonant with their own opinion; this leads them to perceive themselves as being in the minority, and Spiral of Silence theory thus suggests that these people would fall silent. But this isn’t what we can now observe; rather, many people with such perceptions are highly vocal in their media critiques.

Spiral of Silence theory focusses on the climate of opinion, and Noelle-Neumann originally suggested that this can …