Journalism

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Denise-Adriana Oprea, whose focus is on the representations of the Romanian Prime Minister Viorica Dăncilă in satirical news sites; this is especially interesting as Romania for the first time has a female PM. She has, however, been accused of being a mere puppet of her party, and this has also been a persistent theme in satirical portrayals.

The next speaker at ECREA 2018 is Deniz Neriman Duru, who begins by highlighting the role of the news media as presenting moral guidelines for their audiences, here especially in the context of the edit framing of the European refugee crisis. This can be studied usefully by examining the linkages between mainstream media framing in and social media reactions to news media articles.

The first panel on this final day of ECREA 2018 starts early (!), and begins with Frederic Guerrero-Solé. His work examines the overlaps of retweet networks for the posts of Spanish politicians and media. Frederic considers such retweeters to be active audiences for politicians; more passive audiences would be able to be studied by examining the followers of these accounts, but this is considerably more difficult.

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Sílvia Majó-Vázquez, who notes that the current media ecology may no longer guarantee a common ground of information amongst audiences; the diversity of the issues that people consider to be important may be increasing, and this may mean that people no longer agree on a set of common political issues that are important to be addressed in society.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Ben Toff, whose interest is in news avoidance. Such avoidance is comparatively rare: some 7% of U.K. and U.S. news users acknowledge such practices as their default mode, and often explain them as a result of their news fatigue and exhaustion in the current political context.

The third paper in this ECREA 2018 session is by Carlos Aguilar-Paredes, who shifts our focus on selective exposure in sports reporting. This is an unusual approach as such selective exposure is mainly discussed in political contexts. However, sports articles are amongst the most widely read news content.

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Dina Vozab, who combines the concepts of high-choice media environments in the current media ecology, of the news repertoires that news users develop in such high-choice environments, and of the effects of media use across multiple platforms on political participation. She examines this in the context of Croatia, whose media system is characterised as peripheral in the European context, and remains comparatively underresearched. What types of news repertoires exist here, and what is their effect on political participation?

I’m afraid I missed most of the ECREA 2018 sessions as I was in a team meeting of our Journalism beyond the Crisis ARC Discovery project, but I’m here again for the final session of the day, which starts with Mark Boukes. He starts by introducing the concept of political sophistication, and the difficulty in measuring it empirically. Often, this is done by administering knowledge tests, but knowledge does not necessarily imply understanding – so are there alternative indicators?

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Sjifra de Leeuw, whose interest is in the recent rise of populist parties that also take an explicit stance against the role of mainstream media as supposedly elitist gatekeepers.

The next ECREA 2018 session starts with Christina Peter, who begins by noting the reference to (supposed) popular opinion as a common rhetorical strategy of populist politicians as well as of journalists; this is classified as an explicit public opinion cue. By contrast, implicit public opinion cues simply represent public opinion for instance in the form of vox-pops.