Politics

The final session on this first day of the Future of Journalism 2023 conference begins with Jaume Suau, whose interest is in the role of news organisations in the spread of mis- and disinformation. What is the impact of disinformation, and how might we study it? Jaume is focussing here first on foreign-sponsored disinformation, whose main objective is to diminish societal trust and increase polarisation; Howe can we assess whether these campaigns have been successful? But in addition, there are also various top actors within society who create and spread disinformation content, and their dissemination strategies and goals might be …

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Karen Assmann, who begins with Nieman Lab’s prediction that ‘democracy beats’ (journalism in defence of democracy) were soon coming to US journalism – a prediction made in 2021 and then again in 2022, yet still barely realised. Journalism has of course long been seen as a pillar of democracy, yet what this means is hardly ever fully explained – this is a folkloristic view, for the most part.

Instead, what political journalism (in the US) means is often simply horse-race reporting, and there have been long-standing calls (going …

The second keynote at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference today is by the wonderful Jane B. Singer, who will be reflecting on the past and future of journalism studies as a field. We can mark somewhere around 100 years as journalism studies now, as the first issue of Journalism Quarterly (now Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly) was published in 1924 – and much of the research published since then has attempted to define journalism as an object of study, and sometimes also explored the prospective future of journalism. Editors of this and other major journals in the field …

The second presenter in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Svenja Boberg. She begins by noting that crisis reporting seems to be the new normal in journalistic reporting of the current permacrisis, from COVID-19 to the Ukraine war and beyond. But journalism is not necessarily prepared for this, and the quality of its reporting especially on war crimes and other critical matters is sometimes problematic and insufficiently thought-through.

Journalistic crisis reporting depends on the time available for preparations, and the routines in reporting that journalists can build on. From the initial breaking news situation, more context becomes available, and …

The next session I’m attending here at Future of Journalism 2023 conference is on the Russian war on Ukraine, and starts with James Rodgers, who begins by noting the long history of censorship of foreign journalists in the Soviet Union, and links this to questions about the Russian war on Ukraine as a potential rekindling of Russia’s imperial ambitions. Such censorship increased in the Cold War period, with some brief periods of thawing relations and thus fewer restrictions towards foreign journalists at times; in the Putin era, conditions for foreign journalists have severely declined again.

Today, Russian state media are …

The next speaker in this fast-paced final ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Iuliana Calin, whose interest is in the susceptibility to disinformation. What is new about this today, given the long history of mis- and disinformation throughout history? Iuliana particularly notes the impact of AI and algorithms, of emotions, and of cognitive biases, and aims to build a psycho-social profile of the people most susceptible to disinformation, in order to develop communication strategies to address them.

Her study builds on a survey of 150 Romanian respondents, and tested participants’ susceptibility to disinformation, as well as several other personal traits …

The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Karolína Bieliková, whose interest is in the resilience to disinformation on social networking sites amongst active users. How can such resilience be improved? Karolína’s research takes an individual-centric view, exploring users’ strategies for building their resilience.

Users who provide corrections to mis- and disinformation might be crucial here – what motivates them, how do they choose their strategies for engaging with mis- and disinformation, and how can they and their actions be supported and empowered? The present study explored this in the Czech Republic, through 60 interviews with active …

The next speakers in this final ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session are Elizaveta Kusnetsova and Martha Stolze, whose focus is on computational propaganda and the broader relationship between algorithmic systems and mis- and disinformation. This has been highlighted especially by the use of algorithmic tools by the Russian propaganda machine, particularly in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine. This continues a long-standing tradition of Soviet and Russian propaganda by using new technologies.

The present study focusses on the ‘US biolabs in Ukraine’ disinformation story, and is interested in what information sources search engines provide in response to this …

The final panel of this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference is on mis- and disinformation, and starts with Václav Štětka; his focus is especially on countries with populist governments (the US, Brazil, Poland, and Serbia). What has been the impact from such populism on the COVID-19 crisis?

The present study is informed by the Receive-Accept-Sample model of public opinion formation, where the media diet online and offline determines the extent to which people are exposed to (i.e. receive) mis- and disinformation. How is this affected by uses of social and legacy media? Second, preexisting values and beliefs will affect how ready …

The final speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Alena Kluknavská, whose interest is in truth contestation on Facebook during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic; it approaches this through a country-comparative study involving several European nations (Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland). Truth contestation is especially prominent during crises, but we know very little about the dynamics between contestants in this process.

This can be approached through discourse network approaches, exploring how actors shape discourses of truthfulness and create binary divisions between the liars and the truthful. Such divisions often also map onto anti-elite antagonisms …