Journalism

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Maria Kyriakidou, whose focus is on journalistic understandings of disinformation. This is as part of the Countering Disinformation research project.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is another one of my temporary University of Zürich colleagues, Anna Staender. Her study sought to develop a typology of the spreaders of misinformation across multiple countries. These may include state actors, politicians and celebrities, or alternative media outlets, for instance, but not enough is known yet about their impact; the specific focus here is therefore on alternative or hyperpartisan media actors.

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is David Nicolas Hopmann, presenting on a multinational study of Europeans’ attitudes towards their news media diets as part of the curiously named ThreatPie project. The present paper explores people’s ideas about what a ‘healthy’ diet is; what diets they actually consume; and what perceptions they have of the media their peers consumed. This was done for Germany, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the UK, with younger (18-25) and older (55+) adults. A larger survey of 18 countries will follow.

Up next in this ECREA 2022 session is my temporary University of Zürich colleague Sina Blassnig, whose focus is on news recommender systems. Such systems are algorithms that provide users with personalised recommendations for news content based on past interactions by them or similar users, overall popularity metrics, and other features.

The next ECREA 2022 session is on media exposure, and begins with Ole Kelm. He notes the expansion of political participation through the use of online and social media; we now have institutional participation, protests, civic engagement, political consumerism, online activities, and other forms of participation both on- and offline. Political consumerism in particular includes elements such as boycotts, buycotts, discursive political consumerism, and lifestyle political consumerism.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Marius Gerads, whose focus is on integrating hostile media perception into Spiral of Silence theory. People with such perception see the media tenor as dissonant with their own opinion; this leads them to perceive themselves as being in the minority, and Spiral of Silence theory thus suggests that these people would fall silent. But this isn’t what we can now observe; rather, many people with such perceptions are highly vocal in their media critiques.