Journalism

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

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.

The next speakers in this IAMCR 2019 session are Changfeng Chen and Wen Shi, whose focus is on the ethical dimensions of AI-driven ‘fake news’ detection – as part of many ethical issues related to artificial intelligence more generally.

The final IAMCR 2019 panel I’m attending today is on ‘fake news’ and hate speech, and we start with Andrew Duffy. His focus is on why people share ‘fake news’ stories via social media.

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 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 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.

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.

For the post-lunch session on Day 3 of IAMCR 2019, I’ve made my way to a communication history session on ‘fake news’ (!). We start with Gideon Kouts, who points out that such content has a very long history. It spreads under the condition that it finds in its host society a culture that is susceptible to such content, and is able to translate false information into widely believed legend.