Journalism

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.

Of the commonly recognised ‘big five’ personality traits, extraversion might make the participation in interactive events such as demonstrations more likely, while voting may be less important to them; agreeableness might make people avoid political conflicts, but they may still be regular voters; conscientiousness is likely to mean that people are more likely to vote, but they may be …

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 limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing suggests that this volume of content encountered triggers symptoms of cognitive overload, and the hypothesis here is that the size of a user’s news repertoire will be positively associated with their level of news overload. Strategies for avoiding such …

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?

This relies on an assessment of the political positioning of different newspapers, of course, which has been well researched for a number of countries (especially the United States). Newspapers are no longer directly aligned with specific parties, however, but there is a parallelism between the structures of the political system and those of the media system.

The present project …

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 mediatisation of political reality also has consequences for all this, of course. But the role of online and social media has …

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

At present, Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of Bogotá is highly unpopular with citizens, and an independent media outlet has been set up to publish satire and parody news about him – but articles from this site have been picked up at times by mainstream news outlets and misunderstood as real reporting. This moves such obviously ‘fake’ stories from a harmless and humorous context to a much more problematic place.

So, how is the personal and political profile of the mayor …

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.

Hate speech attacks others for specific individual or group characteristics. This is now quite prominent on social media in Brazil. The present project gathered data from comments around 16 leading news outlets in Brazil, and used a dictionary of some 260 hate speech terms in Brazilian Portuguese to identify hateful comments.

Some 175 of …

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.

Detection mechanisms fall into two broad categories: context model-based and social context-based algorithms. The former of these applies deception detection approaches to news texts: it searches for linguistic clues about lies and truth in the articles. This can detect rumours and misinformation from the rich linguistic clues present in such articles.

Such models build on corpora of ‘fake’ and ‘true’ news …

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 …