Martin Scott

University of East Anglia | UEA · School of International Development

This paper presents the results of a comprehensive scoping review of empirical research into US and UK media representations of Africa published between 1990 and 2014. The results show that existing research has a remarkably narrow focus on a specific number of countries, events, media and texts. Research into representations of North Africa, Franc...

The internet is often celebrated for the abundant opportunities it appears to offer citizens to become more informed about and inspired to act on issues related to international development and distant suffering. But to what extent do users actually make use of such opportunities? And what social processes are such decisions governed by? This artic...

How does donor funding affect the independence, role perceptions, and ideology of the journalism it supports? We begin to answer this increasingly important but underresearched question with a year-long case study of the humanitarian news organistion IRIN as it transitioned from being funded by the United Nations to a private foundation, run by a M...

This article analyses how international advocacy campaigns approach and define media freedom, and what influences this process. It does this through a two-year case study of the Media Freedom Coalition—an intergovernmental partnership of over 50 countries—that included 55 interviews with key stakeholders, observations, and document analysis. This r...

We examine if and how news coverage influences governments’ humanitarian aid allocations, from the perspective of the senior bureaucrats involved in such decision-making. Using rare in-depth interviews with 30 directors and senior policymakers in 16 of the world’s largest donor countries, we found that the majority of these bureaucrats believed tha...

In this chapter, we examine what we know, and do not know, about humanitarian news and identify the major challenges such journalism currently faces. In doing so, we hope to help producers, researchers and audiences of humanitarian news to reflect critically on the increasingly complex ethical and political dilemmas inherent in this field. We argue...

How do journalists working for different state-funded international news organizations legitimize their relationship to the governments which support them? In what circumstances might such journalists resist the diplomatic strategies of their funding states? We address these questions through a comparative study of journalists working for internati...

Humanitarian journalism can be defined, very broadly, as the production of factual accounts about crises and issues that affect human welfare. This can be broken down into two broad approaches: “traditional” reporting about humanitarian crises and issues, and advocacy journalism that aims to improve humanitarian outcomes. In practice, there is over...

Private foundations are an important source of funding for many news outlets. It has even been suggested that they may offer a partial solution to journalism’s economic crisis. Yet we do not know how foundation funding shapes journalistic practice. In this article, we show that foundation funding has a significant effect on the “boundaries of journ...

Latest industry report from the global AHRC-funded research project into humanitarian journalism

Latest industry report from global AHRC-funded project on humanitarian journalism

This chapter investigates if and how a private donor’s apparent motivation to ‘look good’ – or to generate symbolic capital – interacts with a news organization’s ability to ‘do good’ by producing public service content. We address this issue by reporting on the findings of a year-long study of the online humanitarian news organisation – IRIN – as...

Not-for-profit news organisations are increasingly funded by private foundations, supported by wealthy entrepreneurs. This raises a range of ethical dilemmas for journalists, which are particularly serious when their donors are alleged to have been involved in unethical or illegal activities. Although this is a relatively common occurrence in the n...

Virtual newsrooms have enormous potential: enabling journalists around the world to pool their knowledge, skills and perspectives within joint projects, such as the Panama Papers. These virtual newsrooms are supported by Online Collaborative Software (OCS), the most popular of which is Slack. But although many of the world's top news organisations...

Virtual newsrooms have enormous potential: enabling journalists around the world to pool their knowledge, skills and perspectives within joint projects, such as the Panama Papers. These virtual newsrooms are supported by Online Collaborative Software (OCS), the most popular of which is Slack. But although many of the world’s top news organisations...

How effective are celebrities, not just in helping to draw attention to distant suffering, but in actually regulating spectators’ mediated experiences of the lives of distant strangers? What function does the perceived authenticity of a celebrity play in their role as mediator? This article seeks to address such questions by analysing the results o...

This article draws on the results of a large-scale audience study to examine how audiences respond to mediated encounters with distant suffering on UK television. The research involved two phases of focus groups separated by a two-month diary study. Research participants’ mediated experiences of distant suffering were generally characterised by ind...

Based on focus groups and interviews with first-time voters in the UK, this study reflects critically on the role of popular culture as a resource of political engagement. Unlike previous studies, it looks at a wide range of popular culture and suggests that entertainment television, video games and popular music provide young citizens with some of...

This chapter traces the history of academic study of the relationship between politics and popular culture. This history has a variety of sources. These include Plato’s warnings about the ill effects of music to their more modern equivalent in the work of the Frankfurt School. It also traces the counter tradition that derives from the work of FR Le...

This chapter examines the different ways in which popular culture is understood to engage with politics. We refer to these as ‘points of engagement’. These begin with the idea that films, soaps and the like ‘inform’ us about, or seek to represent, a ‘real’ world. The second point of engagement is that of creating affinities, which refers to how pop...

This chapter argues that previous empirical work on citizen engagement and popular culture has been dominated by a narrow concept of the political. As a consequence, much of this research focused on factual genres and tended to ignore more subtle expressions of citizen engagement. This chapter makes the case for a wider concept of the political. It...

This chapter explains the methodology for our investigation into the relationship between popular culture and political engagement. In modifying the methodology of David Buckingham we adopt a ‘bottom-up’ approach which attempts to take account of the personal and subjective nature of political engagement and media use. The research involved three s...

Young people in our focus groups and interviews regularly commented on media texts and their representations of the world as being either ‘real’ or ‘unreal’. In this chapter we argue that these judgements about reality can often be read politically because they can reveal young people’s understanding of where power lies in society and how they atte...

Drawing on the results of our interviews and focus groups, we discuss how young people regard celebrities like Bono and Geldof who engage directly with politics. They tend to be suspicious of such involvement, and argue that the music or whatever is what is important. They prize sincerity and authenticity. At the same time, they display quite tradi...

This chapter explores the potential of popular culture to create or represent the social ties that are an important dimension of citizen engagement. It demonstrates that young people use popular culture to explore ideas of national and regional belonging and to articulate the interests of their age group. This chapter shows that identity politics,...

This chapter reflects on the pleasures young people derive from their engagement with popular culture. It recognises that young people often seek out popular culture for the purpose of play, rather than political engagement. Yet it cautions against the idea that play can never lead to connections with issues of public affairs. This chapter argues t...

This chapter reflects on the implications of this research for academic debate, education policy and media production. It stresses the importance of taking seriously young people’s cultural tastes for research that wants to understand the nuanced ways in which citizen engagement can happen. It suggests that media and cultural studies are subjects t...

This article investigates the extent to which young people use different forms of popular culture to express and make sense of their relationship to politics. We look closely at young people's interpretation of popular culture in order to find out whether, and if so how, it plays a political role, using focus groups and interviews with first-time v...

While the importance of news media to politics is widely acknowledged, it is only relatively recently that entertainment media have received similar recognition. There is now a substantial body of research on the impact of popular culture on various aspects of the political process, from political knowledge to political engagement. This article is...

This article examines the character of the coverage of Africa in the UK press by conducting a content analysis of six newspapers over a 15-day period. The results of this investigation suggest that the character of the UK press coverage of Africa is not as marginalized, negative or trivial as it is often accused of being. This investigation also fi...