Journalism

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.

Much of the research on ‘fake news’ points out that it damages democracy – but it can also have significant negative or positive impacts on personal relationships. The sharing of such content fits into existing sharing behaviours; sharing the news with others is now a widespread social practice, and news is usually shared especially because stories are useful, emotions, bizarre, positive, entertaining, or exaggerated.

’Fake news’ …

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 first government press office was created in 1917 in response to the creation of a similar office in France, and continued after the transition to the Weimar Republic; the explicit aim was to combat propaganda. The press office’s leader was a very high-ranking government official. The aim of the office …

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 present project is interested in reconstructing the professional sphere of League journalism as well as the institutional sphere of League diplomacy itself, building on document analysis and biographical materials.

What emerges from this is an archetype of ‘Geneva correspondent’, specialist across all types of international politics …

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.

Robben Island had long been a prison camp and a dumping ground for political prisoners; Mandela’s incarceration there only added to Mandela’s almost mythical status. This also created pressures for his gaolers, however, and as a result he was not entirely cut …

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.

Meyer was demonised by the more liberal press, and the present paper draws on his personal archives. He came from Boer heritage, and was highly educated; he was suspected of ideological allegiances to German Nazi ideology, but it may be more appropriate to see his major influences as a quasi-theological commitment to self-determination for white South Africans.

Meyer …

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.

This was the case for 19th-century Jewish community: ‘fake news’ in Hebrew journalism is as old as journalism itself. This is in spite of religious commandments prohibiting lies, in …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Irene Neverla, who introduces the concept of communicative sustainability. This may be a research perspective as well as an analytical tool for the study of mediatised societies.

Society is currently undergoing substantial transformative processes, driven by technological factors (digitalisation and artificial intelligence); economic factors (globalisation, turbo-capitalism, and neo-liberalism); political factors (the return of authoritarianism); sociological factors (especially the acceleration of change); and ecological factors (the overexploitation of naturals resources).

This might be understood as humanity reaching its limits, which generates a substantial amount of dystopia narratives to explain the present moment …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Yoav Halperin, who shifts our attention to the issue of ‘fake news’. This is a problem especially in social media: there is plenty of evidence for mis- and disinformation campaigns taking place across a wide range of countries, with the aim to influence public opinion and disrupt political processes.

The aim here is to shape users’ views about particular issues, but also to shape their perceptions of broader political opinion, especially to create the impression that specific views are at more popular or unpopular than they actually are. How do social …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Mistura Salaudeen, whose focus is on the influence of media exposure on perceptions of media credibility. Media credibility has been questioned for a long time, well before the present ’fake news’ moment – many of the citizen journalists of the 1990s and 2000s were also very critical. But what influences people’s perceptions of media credibility?

The literature suggests that the is influenced by their exposure to the media: media preferences, use frequency, political attitudes, and others may influence this. Another stream of research suggests that media use itself creates political knowledge …

The second presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is presented by Nadine Strauß, whose focus is on the approaches by news readers to exposing themselves to a diversity of viewpoints. To do so is important for democracy, but it seems that polarisation in society is increasing, and there remain concerns about the role of ‘filter bubbles’ on people’s information diets.

But political beliefs, attitudes, and even voting behaviours still remain strongly influenced by people’s personal and familial networks rather than just by their online and social media activities; here, network heterogeneity plays a critical role in ensuring the diversity of …