Industrial Journalism

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 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 …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Martha Evans, whose focus is on the reporting on Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment on Robben Island. Mandela came to personify the anti-apartheid struggle – also by becoming an absent signifier of the struggle, which enabled him to become the ultimate polysemic persona onto whom all sorts of perspectives were projected.

Robben Island had long been a prison camp and a dumping ground for political prisoners; Mandela’s incarceration there only added to Mandela’s almost mythical status. This also created pressures for his gaolers, however, and as a result he was not entirely cut …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, whose focus is on the South African apartheid propagandist Piet Meyer – a highly power political operator influenced by Calvinist morality, and Chief of Radio for the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

Meyer was demonised by the more liberal press, and the present paper draws on his personal archives. He came from Boer heritage, and was highly educated; he was suspected of ideological allegiances to German Nazi ideology, but it may be more appropriate to see his major influences as a quasi-theological commitment to self-determination for white South Africans.

Meyer …

For the post-lunch session on Day 3 of IAMCR 2019, I’ve made my way to a communication history session on ‘fake news’ (!). We start with Gideon Kouts, who points out that such content has a very long history. It spreads under the condition that it finds in its host society a culture that is susceptible to such content, and is able to translate false information into widely believed legend.

This was the case for 19th-century Jewish community: ‘fake news’ in Hebrew journalism is as old as journalism itself. This is in spite of religious commandments prohibiting lies, in …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Mistura Salaudeen, whose focus is on the influence of media exposure on perceptions of media credibility. Media credibility has been questioned for a long time, well before the present ’fake news’ moment – many of the citizen journalists of the 1990s and 2000s were also very critical. But what influences people’s perceptions of media credibility?

The literature suggests that the is influenced by their exposure to the media: media preferences, use frequency, political attitudes, and others may influence this. Another stream of research suggests that media use itself creates political knowledge …