IAMCR 2019

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Martha Evans, whose focus is on the reporting on Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment on Robben Island. Mandela came to personify the anti-apartheid struggle – also by becoming an absent signifier of the struggle, which enabled him to become the ultimate polysemic persona onto whom all sorts of perspectives were projected.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, whose focus is on the South African apartheid propagandist Piet Meyer – a highly power political operator influenced by Calvinist morality, and Chief of Radio for the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

For the post-lunch session on Day 3 of IAMCR 2019, I’ve made my way to a communication history session on ‘fake news’ (!). We start with Gideon Kouts, who points out that such content has a very long history. It spreads under the condition that it finds in its host society a culture that is susceptible to such content, and is able to translate false information into widely believed legend.

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Irene Neverla, who introduces the concept of communicative sustainability. This may be a research perspective as well as an analytical tool for the study of mediatised societies.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Yoav Halperin, who shifts our attention to the issue of ‘fake news’. This is a problem especially in social media: there is plenty of evidence for mis- and disinformation campaigns taking place across a wide range of countries, with the aim to influence public opinion and disrupt political processes.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Mistura Salaudeen, whose focus is on the influence of media exposure on perceptions of media credibility. Media credibility has been questioned for a long time, well before the present ’fake news’ moment – many of the citizen journalists of the 1990s and 2000s were also very critical. But what influences people’s perceptions of media credibility?

The second presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is presented by Nadine Strauß, whose focus is on the approaches by news readers to exposing themselves to a diversity of viewpoints. To do so is important for democracy, but it seems that polarisation in society is increasing, and there remain concerns about the role of ‘filter bubbles’ on people’s information diets.

The next session at IAMCR 2019 begins with my own paper, which presents an all-too-brief overview of the argument in my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real? (Spoiler alert: no.) The slides of my presentation are below, and a full paper is also available.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Helena Lima, whose work studies the Spanish online platform P3, founded in 2011 and directed largely at younger, urban, high-brow readers. Incorporating a crowdsourcing approach, audiences have been invited to participate in the platform in a number of ways, too.

The next presentation at IAMCR 2019 is by Pere Masip and Pablo Capilla, but presented by Jaume Suau. It begins with the fundamental question of what is news, and how this is perceived by audiences – do they employ the same newsworthiness criteria as journalists and editors? The project explored the news published by El País, ABC, El Confidencial, and Público in Spain, representing legacy and born-digital outlets from a range of ideological perspectives.