Politics

Third in this AoIR 2023 session is Reed van Schenck, whose interest is in the decline and reconstitution of the US alt-right after 2017 – from the ‘tiki torch’ marches to the 6 January 2021 coup attempt. A particular focus here is on Telegram, but much of the research so far has examined only the public Telegram channels, and not its private and secret channels where potentially even more problematic activities may be taking place.

Telegram is an in encrypted instant messaging platform launched by the Russian Durov brothers and now operated from Dubai, with strong take-up especially in Eastern …

The second paper in this AoIR 2023 session is by Marco Bastos and Raquel Recuero, whose focus is on the 8 January 2022 insurrection in Brazil, after the election loss of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. They describe this insurrection as a form of connective action: a framework that has largely been applied to pro-social actions like Occupy or the Indignados, but can also be used to analyse anti-democratic actions. The present paper examines the framing devices used by populist politicians to inflame their grassroots activists by distributing disinformation and conspiracy narratives, to be backed up by the insurrectionist leadership.

This …

It’s unreasonably early in Philadelphia, and we’re at the start of the AoIR 2023 conference proper. I’m in a panel on extremism, and we start with Shawn Walker, Michael Someone, and Ben Gansky, whose focus is on the 6 January 2021 insurrection in the United States. This focusses especially on the role of Gab, Parler, and Rumble, and other alt-tech Websites; it builds on an influencer dataset containing Trumpist influencers; an NYU dataset of Parler posts; and a Twitter dataset of tweets by 13 people who objected to the certification of the 2020 election results, which includes the deleted tweets …

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Jasmin Surm, whose interest is in recent changes to global television news. The transnational TV news landscape has changed profoundly in recent times – with more highly ideological content and more overt alignment with political agendas.

Networks have transcended traditional national boundaries and are now delivering content to global audiences; this gives audiences immediate access to global events worldwide. More recent networks such as RT or CGTN are engaged in an intense struggle for ideological supremacy, pursuing explicit public diplomacy objectives, while domestic networks like Fox News are …

The next speakers in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session are María Luengo and Teresa Gil-López, whose interest is in the BBC’s breaches of its impartiality rules. Examples for such breaches were a presenter’s criticism of PM advisor Dominic Cummings for his breaches of lockdown rules; a presenter’s glee over the news roundup; and the well-publicised case of sports presenter Gary Lineker’s criticism of the UK’s inhumane treatment of refugees.

This presentation explores the analytical distinction between regulative and constitutive news rules, and uses social network theory to explain actors’ opportunities and constraints; together, they mean that some news …

The next speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Tim Vos, whose focus is on the relationship between press and police in four liberal democracies. Journalism should usually maintain a critical distance from power, yet also have to have a transactional relationship with police in order to be able to do their work that sometimes gets rather too cozy; how are journalists now rethinking that relationship, especially in the wake of a wave of citizen-generated coverage of police violence and oppression? How does the rise in populism and animosity towards journalism affect the relationship – and how …

The next session at Future of Journalism 2023 conference starts with my own presentation on behalf of our larger team, so here are the slides: