Politics

The next speaker in our ECREA 2018 panel is Folker Hanusch, who shifts our focus to how journalists construct and uphold their professional boundaries through discursive means. Such boundary work remains prominent because of the entry of a range of new journalistic or para-journalistic outlets and amateur or semi-amateur practitioners into the field of news coverage, and rather than developing normative theoretical definitions of journalism it is important to examine how journalists themselves draw the line between themselves and other professional and non-professional news workers, and how they themselves reflect on the ideologies of journalism.

We’re in the final panel at ECREA 2018, and it’s the panel presenting the work of our ARC Discovery project Journalism beyond the Crisis, which triangulated between the self-perceptions of journalists in Australia, Germany, and the U.K., their observable social media engagement, and the existing and emerging landscape of news outlets in these countries. The first paper in the panel is presented by Julia Conrad and also involves Christoph Neuberger, and explores emerging news content providers at the periphery of conventional journalism in Germany.

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Denise-Adriana Oprea, whose focus is on the representations of the Romanian Prime Minister Viorica Dăncilă in satirical news sites; this is especially interesting as Romania for the first time has a female PM. She has, however, been accused of being a mere puppet of her party, and this has also been a persistent theme in satirical portrayals.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Holger Sievert, whose interest is in the European public sphere. There are now some decades of criticism that suggests that the development of that public sphere is lagging behind other forms of European integration, and such criticism has now also increasingly focussed on online and digital media.

The next session I’m attending at ECREA 2018 is on ‘fake news’ in the European context, and it starts with Flavia Durach, whose focus is on the role of emotions in the dissemination of ‘fake news’. The term itself has become a buzzword, and is now used in a variety of ways; its use spiked in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but it has a considerably longer history.

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Pablo Jost, who begins by discussing the limitations of surveys (expensive, reactive, increasingly unable to reach representative panels of participants) and raises the question of whether digital trace data may be able to be used as an alternative. Twitter might be a poor substitute, as it remains an elite medium in many countries; Facebook use, however, is far more widespread, and could therefore be seen as considerably less inherently biased.

The next speaker at ECREA 2018 is Deniz Neriman Duru, who begins by highlighting the role of the news media as presenting moral guidelines for their audiences, here especially in the context of the edit framing of the European refugee crisis. This can be studied usefully by examining the linkages between mainstream media framing in and social media reactions to news media articles.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Javier Ruiz Soler, whose interest is in locating a transnational public sphere on Twitter, in the context of the EU. Many scholars are sceptical of the idea of a European public sphere, due to language and national differences, while others point to the emergence of a growing overlap between national communities and discussions.

The second speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Judith Möller, who shifts our attention to the Habermasian concept of the public sphere, or Öffentlichkeit. In its original conception, this appears only in enlightened discussion – for instance in the coffeehouses of the 19th century –, and it is highly disputable whether this translates to an online and social media environment.

The first panel on this final day of ECREA 2018 starts early (!), and begins with Frederic Guerrero-Solé. His work examines the overlaps of retweet networks for the posts of Spanish politicians and media. Frederic considers such retweeters to be active audiences for politicians; more passive audiences would be able to be studied by examining the followers of these accounts, but this is considerably more difficult.