Well, it’s mid-year and I’m back from a series of conferences in Europe and elsewhere, so this seems like a good time to take stock and round up some recent publications that may have slipped through the net.
The very final session at IAMCR 2019 features a keynote by Jeff Jarvis, who begins by describing him self as ‘not as real academic, but just a journalism professor’. His interest here is in looking past mass media, past media, indeed past text, past stories, and past explanations.
We begin, however, with Gutenberg’s (re)invention of the printing press in 1450, and the subsequent invention of the newspaper in 1605 and its gradual industrialisation. But print as a commercial and copyrighted model was perhaps an aberration: Tom Pettitt has written of the Gutenberg parenthesis: a business model which emerged from the …
The fourth presenter in this IAMCR 2019 session is Lemi Baruh, who shifts our focus to election press coverage in Turkey. Turkey has undergone a gradual process of political transformation, with growing government influence on the media, but media in Turkey have often been researched using convenience samples, and short-term studies; the present study addresses this by covering four national election campaigns from 2002 to 2015, and by using newspaper readership data and content analysis for 15 newspapers in the country.
Press-party parallelism theory suggests that commercial media structures often parallel political structures; media partisanship is also a positioning strategy …
The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 is Anastasia Kazun, who follows on from the previous presentation by focussing specifically on the countries that Russian media cover. Media influence public opinion about countries and their leaders, of course, because ordinary people will not have any direct experience of geopolitics – this is especially important in Russia, in fact, because most Russians have never travelled abroad.
The present study focusses on Russian press, TV, and online media, which tend to have different thematic interests and reporting styles. It studies the mentions of some 193 countries in Russian media, focussing on the …
The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Anton Kazun, whose interest is in the global news flow around the G20 group of countries. International news are important to our perceptions of other countries and their leaders, but state politics, ideology, and news frames will affect this; further, news attention to different countries is never equal. Factors that increase attention to different countries include GDP, population size, and links through common borders, trade, tourism, and migration.
The personalisation of politics in each country also means that attention may be directed especially to a country’s leader, and this is also …
The next session at IAMCR 2019 is Cinzia Padovani, who is interested in the intersections between mainstream media and the ultra-right. Mainstream media have at times been accused of being complicit in the rise of the ultra-right, by amplifying their reach and normalising their ideologies and political communication styles; this may be especially pronounced for right-wing mainstream media. But is this perception supported by empirical evidence?
The present study explores the coverage of ultra-right political actors in the mainstream media, and of the topics associated with them, from a cross-country perspective involving the U.K. and Italy. Additionally, it also explores …
The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Brian Goss, whose interest is in flak as a socio-political force. This is influenced by the propaganda model of news media in the contemporary United States at the end of the Cold War. Media at the time were free from formal censorship, but several factors conditioned the performance of news workers, and this led to their allegiance to an overall (then mainly anti-communist) ideological positioning.
One of these factors is flak: a set of disciplinary mechanisms exerted from outside of news organisations. Flak comes into play when internal filters are insufficient …
The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Brigitte Huber; her interest is in the motivations for engaging in politics. Such participation might be explained by demographics, political knowledge, news use and other factors, but also by inherent personality traits.
Of the commonly recognised ‘big five’ personality traits, extraversion might make the participation in interactive events such as demonstrations more likely, while voting may be less important to them; agreeableness might make people avoid political conflicts, but they may still be regular voters; conscientiousness is likely to mean that people are more likely to vote, but they may be …
The next speaker in this v IAMCR 2019 session is Sehrish Mushtaq, whose interest is in the relationship between the political affinities of newspaper readers and their selection of newspapers. Does personal bias align with the ideological bias of the newspaper?
This relies on an assessment of the political positioning of different newspapers, of course, which has been well researched for a number of countries (especially the United States). Newspapers are no longer directly aligned with specific parties, however, but there is a parallelism between the structures of the political system and those of the media system.
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 …
