Politics

The final day at IAMCR 2023 starts with a paper by Hannah E. Morris, on climate journalism in the United States. There has been what seemed to be a striking shift in coverage in recent times, with the New York Times unusually highlighting the role of capitalism and neoliberalism as driving the climate crisis, for instance.

This is in line with the Biden administration’s desire for a new Washington consensus on contemporary issues, received possibly by the legacy press. This calls for a new industrial policy, led by the US, to address these issues, and builds on nostalgic post-war perspectives …

The final speaker on this third day of IAMCR 2023 is Gabriella Szabó, whose focus is on sympathy towards Ukraine in political rhetoric in Poland and Hungary. While usually there are considerable similarities in political rhetoric across the two countries, this is not true when it comes to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces: the governments of the two countries responded very differently to the invasion.

This divergence can be captured by examining the change in political rhetoric following the invasion. The key aspect to examine here is sympathy, which is itself the foundation for solidarity and moral …

Up next at IAMCR 2023 is Zheyu Shang, whose interest is in online propaganda in the Chinese Internet. This now works and looks quite differently from the historical forms of Chinese party propaganda that western observers may be familiar with; the Website of the Chinese Communist Party’s Youth League (CYL) looks more like a social media Website, for instance, and a Chinese army recruitment account on social media uses cartoonish imagery.

In addition, social media platforms are interactive, and ordinary users can create their own content online; they engage in many-to-many communication, also with state media accounts. State propaganda is …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Vaia Doudaki, who presents a discourse-theoretical analysis of Czech social media content about the construction of Europe. This is a suitable approach for the study of identities, as identity signifiers are objects of political struggle for hegemony. This builds on nineteen dimensions in the construction of the idea of Europe, and the present paper focusses on constructions of the European people and of European institutions.

Institutions are seen as durable, multifaceted social structures that are socially constructed and therefore subject to change; the people are variously constructed by populist or nationalist …

The final IAMCR 2023 session for today starts with Joseph Gotte, whose focus is on the elective affinity between political and religious discourses about the ecological apocalypse. ‘Elective affinity’ here is a concept referring to the relationship between religious beliefs and social formations, lifestyle, and economic behaviours; it is the process by which two cultural forms enter into a relationship of mutual attraction and influence.

This is applied here to the apocalyptic genre, which stems from biblical writings and describes an apocalyptic revelation; in recent times it has also been transformed into catastrophism, describing a cataclysmic, often ecological change or …

And the final speaker in this packed IAMCR 2023 session on populism is Christian Wassner, whose focus is on the spread of conspiracy narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic, not least also through niche, alternative, and ‘dark’ platforms. The present project examines these ‘dark communication repertoires’ as they are employed by conspiracist groups on alternative platforms. These cannot be considered in isolation from one another, but need to be understood across actor groups and platforms within a complex social media environment.

It is possible to distinguish between different actors in this, though: innovators, early adopters, and followers; as well as politicians …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Marko Ribać, whose interest is in the impact of authoritarian-populist politics on journalism. The project focusses on Hungary and Turkey as clearly populist and autocratic regimes, compared to Austria and Slovenia as countries with more intermittently populist governments. The focus is on the past ten years of journalistic experience in each country, and conducted through interviews with some 82 newsworkers across the four countries to identify the external forces impacting on their work.

There are three broad areas of findings here. First, the influence of owners was felt strongly in Hungary …

Up next at IAMCR 2023 is Sabina Mihelj, focussing on populist communication about the COVID-19 pandemic, across the US, Poland, Serbia, and Brazil. Such research is critical given the real potential (and genuine experience) of populists assuming positions of political leadership (as in the US or Brazil) and actively contradicting the health advice of pandemic experts.

Populist divides between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, and promotes the rule of charismatic, usually male, leaders; it promotes illiberalism, not least also through the skilful use of social media; and this produces populist challenges to expert authority that can fall on fertile grounds …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Tiago Lapa, whose focus is on how the Portuguese and Spanish populist parties Chega and Vox construct ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ in their political discourse. Vox’s rise in Spain was party driven by the Catalan independence crisis and the growing European migration crisis; Chega mainly benefitted from internal political turmoil in Portugal.

The present paper examined the Facebook posts from both parties in January to March 2023, drawing on some 240-280 posts from each party. For Vox, these featured (in order of importance) anti-minority (including migrants as well as women …

The next session at IAMCR 2023 is on populism, and starts with Karen Arriaza Ibarra, whose focus is on populist parties’ views on public service media. In general, populism has been defined by the centrality of binary distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – the ‘pure’ people and the ‘corrupt’ elites. In presenting these messages, it can then also be defined by the discursive approaches and tropes its draws on. Embedded into this is also a powerful sense of grievance and nostalgia, harking after a lost golden age that was lost and can be restored again by strengthening certain social in-group …