Television

The next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Tess Arnold, whose focus is on fan responses on social media to the ‘failed finales’ of popular TV shows.

Such failures may be due in part to the creators or showrunners of such shows, who are built up as television auteurs who are featured in entertainment media nearly as much as the cast themselves; to the show’s fans, who engage in textual poaching to create their own fan fiction, fan art, and other derivative content that celebrates and extends the show’s participatory culture; and/or …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Kenton Wilkinson, whose interest is the presence of biracial couples and mixed-race families in US television advertising. Such diversity is becoming a new flashpoint in current culture wars in the country.

There is a long history of such culture wars in the US, but they have ramped up much further in recent years. In Texas, where Kenton is based, this has been especially pronounced, not least also in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic; the current Texas governor Greg Abbott has been at the forefront of implementing a number of especially …

And the afternoon session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with Tamer Farag, whose focus is on the communication strategies of Hizbullah in the polarised Lebanese media system (before the current escalation of violence in the region). Over the past decades, we’ve moved from optimism to pessimism about the role of social media in political communication, with plenty of evidence on the problematic uses of social media by autocratic regimes and anti-democratic groups.

But the understanding of social media communication also requires a perception of the local context: in a region beset with civil and other …

The next speakers in this ANZCA 2023 session are Carlotta Antonelli and Mauro Bomba, whose interest is in the dynamics of the political discourse around the COVID-19 pandemic in the main talkshows on Italian TV, with particular focus on the positioning of women with political roles in such discourse. In such contexts, media serve in a function as representatives of public views and responses to the issues they themselves cover.

The present study took a mixed-methods approach, analysing the content of seven daytime talkshows from seven Italian TV stations. Women represented only about one quarter of the nearly 150 political …

And the final speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Setio Budi H. Hutomo, whose interest is in the digitisation of local television in Indonesia, and its impact on democratic processes. This system was affected by the 2002 broadcasting bill, which introduced private, community, and subscription broadcasting in addition to public service media. This has an impact especially also on local media, including local television.

There is a limited number of major media groups in Indonesia, which also dominate the TV advertising market. Local TV does not capture much of this spending, and the more than 300 local television stations …

It’s that time of the year, and I’m in Philadelphia for the 2023 conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (continuing my 21-year streak of attending AoIR), which starts in earnest with the keynote by Aymar Jèan ‘AJ’ Escoffery. His focus is on reparative media, and he begins by noting that it feels like our collective harms are intensifying. This is exacerbated to some extent by corporate media, who often distribute the equivalent of fast, globally consumable food rather than slow and locally relevant content. This perpetuates injustices which require a particular approach to repair, including grassroots (re)distribution.

Power in …

The final speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Jasmin Surm, whose interest is in recent changes to global television news. The transnational TV news landscape has changed profoundly in recent times – with more highly ideological content and more overt alignment with political agendas.

Networks have transcended traditional national boundaries and are now delivering content to global audiences; this gives audiences immediate access to global events worldwide. More recent networks such as RT or CGTN are engaged in an intense struggle for ideological supremacy, pursuing explicit public diplomacy objectives, while domestic networks like Fox News are …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is David Puertas Graell, who shifts our focus to the use of social media in Spanish sporting journalism. Such journalism is an important part of the contemporary media environment, and has a very large mainstream and social media audience, but remains substantially underresearched.

In Spain, there is a substantial media ecology for sports media, focussed especially on football; many such media outlets are now also present on Twitter. This makes it possible to study transmedia patterns between these mainstream and social media channels, and the present project has investigated a number …