Politics

It’s the last day at IAMCR 2019, and I’m in a session on media effects that begins with a paper by Evelia Mani. Her focus is on the situation in Mexico, where there is acute mistrust in the political system. Such mistrust is now not uncommon world-wide, and may be explained by the poor performance of state and political institutional as well as by changing cultural attitudes – but the more immediate explanation is probably the former.

The mediatisation of political reality also has consequences for all this, of course. But the role of online and social media has …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Andrea Cancino-Borbón, whose focus is on satirical ‘fake news’ in Colombia.

At present, Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of Bogotá is highly unpopular with citizens, and an independent media outlet has been set up to publish satire and parody news about him – but articles from this site have been picked up at times by mainstream news outlets and misunderstood as real reporting. This moves such obviously ‘fake’ stories from a harmless and humorous context to a much more problematic place.

So, how is the personal and political profile of the mayor …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Vanessa Cortez, whose focus is on hate speech in the recent presidential election in Brazil. This election was marked by increasing polarisation and hate speech, and to study this the project gathered content around the election itself.

Hate speech attacks others for specific individual or group characteristics. This is now quite prominent on social media in Brazil. The present project gathered data from comments around 16 leading news outlets in Brazil, and used a dictionary of some 260 hate speech terms in Brazilian Portuguese to identify hateful comments.

Some 175 of …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 is Nicolas Hube, who presents a comparison of the public press offices of German governments through the 20th century. The government spokesperson service was institutionalised very soon after the 1918 revolution, and the Federal Republic’s service built in part on these origins.

The first government press office was created in 1917 in response to the creation of a similar office in France, and continued after the transition to the Weimar Republic; the explicit aim was to combat propaganda. The press office’s leader was a very high-ranking government official. The aim of the office …

The next paper in this IAMCR 2019 session is presented by Arne Gellrich, who focusses on reporting about the League of Nations in the 1920s. The League changed the reporting of international affairs by shifting interest from national politics to international relations, and the role of journalists in this evolution has remained underresearched.

The present project is interested in reconstructing the professional sphere of League journalism as well as the institutional sphere of League diplomacy itself, building on document analysis and biographical materials.

What emerges from this is an archetype of ‘Geneva correspondent’, specialist across all types of international politics …

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.

Robben Island had long been a prison camp and a dumping ground for political prisoners; Mandela’s incarceration there only added to Mandela’s almost mythical status. This also created pressures for his gaolers, however, and as a result he was not entirely cut …

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.

Meyer was demonised by the more liberal press, and the present paper draws on his personal archives. He came from Boer heritage, and was highly educated; he was suspected of ideological allegiances to German Nazi ideology, but it may be more appropriate to see his major influences as a quasi-theological commitment to self-determination for white South Africans.

Meyer …

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 aim here is to shape users’ views about particular issues, but also to shape their perceptions of broader political opinion, especially to create the impression that specific views are at more popular or unpopular than they actually are. How do social …

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 literature suggests that the is influenced by their exposure to the media: media preferences, use frequency, political attitudes, and others may influence this. Another stream of research suggests that media use itself creates political knowledge …

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.

But political beliefs, attitudes, and even voting behaviours still remain strongly influenced by people’s personal and familial networks rather than just by their online and social media activities; here, network heterogeneity plays a critical role in ensuring the diversity of …