Journalism

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Brian Weeks, who explores the ecology of incidental news exposure. The various elements of that ecology determine who is exposed to news content, and to what extent, and what impacts such exposure may generate.

In the ecological model of incidental exposure, a number of individual and environmental factors combine. Such factors may be related, respectively, to contextual states or more fundamental traits of the individual or their environment. They include individual traits like cognitive ability or socioeconomic status, but also traits like cognitive load; self-concept traits like partisan identity or states …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Kjerstin Thorson, who begins by noting that incidental exposure is not simply random, but unevenly distributed across the online userbase. The idea of attraction may be useful here: what is it that attracts specific news content into a social media stream; who attracts incidental exposure? What practices produce attraction, or repel news content?

Who has these happy accidents of incidental exposure, then? In the weeks before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, better levels of education mean that users are more likely to be incidentally exposed. The factors that seem to matter …

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Richard Fletcher, who highlights the shift in news users’ main source of news – away from conventional sources and towards online, digital, app-based, and social media channels. This has been linked by some with a rise in echo chambers and filter bubbles, but the incidental news exposure that such platforms also engender means that it has been very difficult to find any real evidence for filter bubbles beyond isolated extreme cases.

One important aspect in all of this is automated incidental news exposure: do incidentally exposed news users actively curate their …

The next ICA 2018 session is on incidental news exposure, and starts with a paper presented by Pablo Boczkowski. ‘Incidental’ here means that people encounter the news without actively seeking to do so. Such work on this has been predominantly quantitative, but there is some more qualitative work on this topic emerging as well. Most of this work has been focussing on single countries in the developed world, too.

Incidental consumption of news is far from new, but is becoming more important in digital and social media contexts, and with the rise in news consumption via mobile devices. Some groups …

The final speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Nicholas Robinson, who starts by challenging the idea that the relationships between news media and politics operate on a linear basis. Given the increasingly polarised nature of political discourse, and the ‘war on the news media’ now being waged by Donald Trump and other populists, this perception may need to be challenged.

Trump and others are openly hostile towards the media, and this may undermine the political apparatus. One possible reading is that as people perceive greater threats to political performance, their political interest declines; but at a closer look it …

The next speaker at ICA 2018 is Michael Koliska, who highlights the re-emerges of the German term ‘Lügenpresse’ as an attack on the press that is somewhat similar to the term ‘fake news’ in the Anglophone world. In addition to such insults, there has also been an increasing number of physical attacks on members of the press in recent years.

The term has a long pre-history in Germany; it was used by extremist political groups (and especially the Nazis) since the 1920s, and also re-emerged several times during the social struggles of the 1960s and 70s. The term challenges some …

The next speakers in this ICA 2018 session are Dorian Davis and Adam Sinnreich, whose focus is on the concept of ‘fake news’ as it has been operationalised in Donald Trump tweets. How and why is Trump using this term, and what are the concrete implications of this use?

The study downloaded some 1,000 tweets from Trump during the first six months of his presidency, and identified terms such as ‘fake news’ and ‘fraud news’ in his tweets. These were contextualised against contemporary media coverage, and the study also explored the online and offline consequences of this rhetoric.

First, Trump …

The next ICA 2018 session is on journalism under attack, and starts with Arjen van Dalen. He notes that journalists and politicians have traditionally been seen as societal actors who are closely interlinked and indeed mutually dependent, but that the emergence of outsider politicians and journalists has disrupted that relationship.

That relationship is also based on certain normative aspects – seeing journalists as watchdogs on behalf of citizens, for instance. But such norms are themselves founded in mutually accepted values, and the societal consensus that governs those values may be breaking down. Indeed, we may no longer be able to …

The final speaker in this ICA session is Logan Molyneux, who notes that journalists have always attempted to normalise new media forms and apply old models of journalism to those media.

But this seems to have failed with social media for now; instead, there is a trend towards fragmentation that has seen the emergence of mainstream and non-mainstream journalists: those at the largest and most prestigious journalistic organisations and those at alternative, often explicitly anti-mainstream and hyperpartisan outlets. These journalists were identified from the Cision database of newsworkers.

How did these two groups compare in their use of social media …

The next speaker in this ICA session is Jan Kleinnijenhuis, who asks whether journalists are still necessary in promoting the social media messages of politicians. Current research is unclear on this: there are few time-series studies that would be able to show trends in this field; many studies also remain quantitative and fail to examine the specific content of politicians’ social media posts.

Jan’s study is attempting to address this by observing developments in the Netherlands, combining data from Twitter and the mainstream media about the candidates’ own activities, responses to them, and coverage of their activities in the media …