Industrial Journalism

The third speaker in this packed IAMCR 2023 session is Barbie Zelizer, whose interest is in the ways Cold War logic hides propaganda in democracies. Practices of obfuscation are now ever-present, but our discussion changes depending on the type of regime (autocratic, democratic, …) we are talking about. In autocracies, information disorder is equated with propaganda, and linked to a long-term history of government control of information; in democracies, information disorders are seen as a new phenomenon linked to disinformation, and related to current conditions of polarisation, populism, and digital technology.

But during the Cold War, conditions in media and …

For the afternoon session on this first day of IAMCR 2023 I am in a session on propaganda, which starts with Courtney Radsch. Her focus is on the use of artificial intelligence in state-aligned information operations. She notes the rise of populist authoritarianism, the emergence of coordinated inauthentic behaviour, the emergence of reputation management firms, and a number of other problematics we have seen in recent years; some of this directly targets journalists and journalism with state-aligned propaganda and harassment.

But how do such tactics leverage the machine learning and AI systems of online platforms, and use AI in their …

The final AoIR 2022 session for today starts with Christian Ritter, whose interest is in journalistic newsmaking on YouTube during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in late 2021. The global nature of YouTube potentially also enables decolonising discourses about climate change. The present project is interested in exploring the role of professional news organisations in covering COP26 on YouTube, which actors were given the opportunity to drive the meaning of specific terms and debates, and what themes emerged in the comments on the YouTube videos.

The project gathered video posts and comments from YouTube that referred to COP26 over …

The next session at AoIR 2022 is a panel on the social media activities around the recent German and Australian elections that I helped put together, and we start with two papers on the 2021 German election. The first is by Nina Fabiola Schumacher and Christian Nuernbergk, and Nina notes that the 2021 election was significantly dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and that social media played an especially important role during the election, therefore. Twitter, in particular, has come to play an especially important role in political debate and journalistic practice, as part of a wider hybrid media environment. But …

After the excitement of the ECREA 2022 conference proper, my colleagues Sofya Glazunova, Dan Angus and I attended a further post-conference on Digital Media and Information Disorders that was organised by the excellent Anja Bechmann and her team, where we presented a number of papers.

First, Dan presented a paper on behalf of first author Edward Hurcombe on the way that Facebook’s owner Meta shapes the public perception of mis- and disinformation through its statements via the Facebook Newsroom, the platform’s main public relations outlet:

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk, focussing on the relations between professional alternative media as an indication of boundaries in the journalistic field. This connects with a long history of research into field theory and boundary work in journalism.

The present study thus understands journalism as a strategic action field – but even if boundaries are now blurry, they still exist: the actors in governance units (press, industry associations, union, funders) and incumbents (editorial-driven, legacy news media) intersect with each other and together form the field of journalism and produce a collective frame of …

The final speaker in this final Friday session tab ECREA 2022 is Stefanie Walter, whose interest is in discovering inclusive keywords related to ethnicity and race. Minority groups are often framed negatively in the news, and this reinforces negative opinions and beliefs about them; but research into such framing is also difficult because it depends in the first place on the use of keywords and search strings for identifying relevant news articles.

The identification of such terms thus often depends on the researchers’ tacit knowledge, and may miss speciality terms like the UK’s ‘Windrush generation’ of Caribbean immigrants, while it …