Journalism

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Christian Schwarzenegger, whose focus is on the use of alternative information sources by people who no longer trust the mainstream media. Historically, the latter have been key pillars of society, providing citizens with a shared and reliable set of news – but ‘the’ public sphere is now multiple, and there is no longer a guarantee that everyone will encounter the same set of news stories.

With this increasing diversity and fragmentation, the role of journalism as a social institution is increasingly contested; this also manifests in significant distrust in their ability to provide …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 panel is Suncem Koçer, whose focus is on the Turkish news and online media environment. User engagement with online information here is especially polarised – how do users evaluate the information and misinformation they encounter here, and how do they choose what to circulate to their own networks?

The project focussed on the recent Turkish local elections (before the re-runs of some of the contested polls), using focus groups, media diaries, and semi-structured interviews. News users generally had very low trust in the news media, yet still accepted the news narratives being constructed …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Mariella Bastian, who points out the impact of the digital turn in journalistic conflict coverage; journalists themselves are now more mobile, but citizen content has also become easier to incorporate into the coverage. Further, digital media also intensify the dissemination of content coverage, and this could both increase or decrease hostility between the conflict parties.

Polarisation may also matter here, as it may aggravate the polarising effects of conflict-related news, open avenues for the manipulation of what content different users encounter, and undermine user trust in the quality of the content …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Scott Wright, who begins with a brief history of the ‘fake news’. There are actually false news stories, news stories that are described as ‘fake’ by politicians such as Donald Trump for political reasons, and false information that is deliberately disseminated by politicians for such reasons.

In Australia, for instance, there was substantial coverage of the ‘fake news’ debate in the U.S., sensitising voters to the issue; the use of ‘fake news’ as a label for news coverage particular politicians did not like; and outright lies about a ‘death tax’ purportedly …

The next speaker in this entertaining IAMCR 2019 session is Adeyanju Apejoye, whose focus is on ‘fake news’ in the 2019 Nigerian presidential election. ‘Fake news’ has become a critical issue in Nigerian politics, given the highly contested nature of the campaign, the shortcomings of Nigerian mainstream media, and the increasing role of online and social media in the country.

The project examined such issues through surveys and qualitative content analysis of news stories and comments, focussing on some eleven news stories with a particular focus on a province seeking to secede from the country. Some such stories used highly …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Imke Henkel, whose focus is on how British news coverage of EU affairs has influenced the outcome of the Brexit referendum in the longer term. She points to the Leave campaigns infamous lie that Britain was sending £350m to the EU every week, which is understood to have played an important role in campaigning, and notes that this is only the latest of a very long history of bizarre stories about purported EU regulations disadvantaging British citizens and businesses.

These stories are what can be understood as Euromyths, representing a second-order semiological system …

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Edson Tandoc Jr., who begins by pointing out the continuing shift to online and social media as a critical source of news – in Singapore, some 47% of users now access news via Facebook, for instance. This also enables audiences as well as news organisations to engage in promotion, distribution, data collection, and engagement around the news.

Sharing links to the news on social media is now also a form of cultural currency, therefore. Compared to other forms of news transmission, sharing news links increases the speed and reach of the news …

The next speakers at IAMCR 2019 are Thomas Eckerl and Oliver Hahn, whose interest is in the role of Instagram in political communication in Germany. The adoption of such platforms for political communication is an example of growing mediatisation in society as such, and in politics in particular, as well as a sign of the continuing shift towards more participatory media forms and from top-down to bottom-up communication over the past two decades or so.

What is the role of Instagram in Germany in this context, then, especially in the context of the 2017 federal and state elections? How do …

The second paper in this IAMCR 2019 session is presented by Klaus Zilles, whose focus is on the distribution of disinformation on WhatsApp. The messaging platform has been embroiled in disinformation events in a number of countries in recent times, and has now begun to fund several research projects into the phenomenon, including the present study in Spain.

Spanish users are relatively active on the platform, spending more than one hour per day on average on WhatsApp. They are also increasingly using it to share the news, shifting away from more open platforms like Facebook and Twitter to …