Journalism

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 is Marie Falk Eriksen, whose interest is in the introduction of robotic journalism at the Danish news agency Ritzau. Such technologies are now known under a number of terms, and describe an algorithmic process that converts data into news text with limited or no human intervention. What effects this will have on journalistic practices in the longer term remains to be seen.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

The third speaker in this IAMCR2019 session is Zhieh Lor, whose focus is on coping strategies for dealing with news overload in social media. Such cognitive overload is becoming a problem because of the considerable increase in news dissemination and sharing through a complex multitude of channels. How do users manage this?

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?

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.