Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality
... Current affairs texts, for example, develop 'personalization' narratives which represent politics in the abstract through a close-up of the personal and the particular, and so are epistemologically grounded in lifeworld testimony and claims to authenticity embedded in "ordinary voice" (see Chouliaraki, 2010;Higgins, 2021;Kunelius & Renvall, 2010;Turner, 2005). Print news accounts, on the other hand, rely more heavily on perceptual realism or a constructed sense of facticity, and so epistemologically on claims to (and the performance of) objectivity (see Hackett & Zhao, 1998;Tuchman, 1972Tuchman, , 1980. Given that my research questions (RQ1 and AQ1, 2, and 3) are concerned with how a mediated politics of vulnerability serves as the epistemological basis for the symbolic justification of different practices of crime control in and through news storytelling (see Chapter 3), then the richest possible answer to these questions will require inclusive consideration of these different textual epistemologies, and a dialogical analysis of their implications for the mediated construction of security imaginaries and so for mediated criminalization. ...
... However, it can also be proximity that is intersubjectively rendered: proximity through identity, through historical experience, through emotional investment, or, as the analysis here finds, through racialization. Some ordinary voices are thus discursively authorized as "flesh witnesses" (Harari, 2009) to newsworthy events, while others can speak only as "symbol people" (Tuchman, 1980) who represent a category of person deemed relevant, by editors, to the story being told. Such speakers are 'heard' in the official sense, but struggle to access the authenticating force of ordinary voice through lifeworld testimony because they have no lived connection to the specific events being reconstructed. ...
... 2016). Torit here is less a 'symbol person' (Tuchman, 1980) than he is a proxy (Mulvin, 2021), called into the narrative not to represent a particular community or point-of-view (less still to represent himself) but rather a specific person-Elaine's 'attacker' 34 -to whom he is linked editorially (that is, proxified) only on the basis of racialized 'sameness'. 35 (Windle, 2008). ...
This thesis makes an empirically grounded attempt to rethink the problem of ‘criminalization’— what it is, how it works, and the kinds of political work it performs—from the perspective of media culture. Informed by an abolitionist ethic, it explores the role played by news media in building, maintaining, and potentially transforming, the justificatory basis for different forms of security practice. More specifically, it investigates how journalistic representations of crime events work to negotiate, in and through public culture, the imaginative conditions of possibility for policing, incarceration, punitive deportation, and other strategies of so-called ‘crime control’. Its major theoretical contributions are a radically expanded understanding of what it means to culturally ‘criminalize’, as well as the ‘mediated security imaginary’ as a new critical heuristic for understanding the relationship between ways of communicating (in)security, on the one hand, and way of acting upon it, on the other. Together, these two contributions open new horizons (both scholarly and practical) for the cultural resistance of criminalization as an endemic, yet ultimately arbitrary, logic of contemporary social and political life. Empirically, these contributions unfold through a close analysis of one specific case of mediated criminalization: the construction of ‘African gang crime’ in and through the Australian press. Since beginning to arrive in Australia in significant numbers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, members of Australia’s Black African diaspora have been subject to persistent negative media attention, with news narratives focussing on perceived issues of juvenile delinquency and gang activity. The analysis approaches news media representations of ‘African gang crime’ events (both print and televisual) as sites of vulnerability politics, where different and sometimes conflictual accounts of social vulnerability struggle for public recognition. Deploying an ‘analytics of mediation’ (Chouliaraki, 2010) which combines granular multi-modal text analysis with the critical analysis of discourse (CDA), the thesis explicates how criminalization operates as a mediated politics of vulnerability across three key dimensions: first, through the negotiation of vulnerability as a political condition, or its constructed sense of “realness”; second, through the negotiation of vulnerability as a moral condition, or its constructed sense of “wrongness”; and finally, through the positioning of vulnerability as a practical epistemology of justification, or as a justificatory basis for different kinds of social practice. As the practices we have historically called criminal justice experience a moment of radical normative instability, this thesis argues that the mediation of criminality will have a critical role to play in determining its longer political legacy. To the wealth of political economy critiques of policing and prisons, the thesis accentuates ‘imaginability’ as an important critical horizon for our efforts to transform the practices through which we pursue safety and justice, and practices of mediated representation as crucial to how this horizon might be remade. Amid heated debates about the status of ‘the victim’ in contemporary political life, it also deploys a critique of mediated (in)security to consider the wider historical significance of a particular, premediated formation of white victimhood that expresses itself in a subjunctive mood: a victimcould, wherein it is the very possibility of injury (rather than the fact or the likelihood) that subverts the promises of whiteness in contemporary Australian life to position its subjects as ‘wronged’.
... Almost daily, mass media including television, radio, and newspapers feature some organisations and their personnel in crises (Wooten & James 2008). Mass media, including television, radio and, newspapers, allows the geographically dispersed people to know information about other ethnics, neighbourhood countries and groups, and also events in the same group (Tuchman 1978). ...
... The news media create a context that influences the discussion on public issues by the audience and also have a greater influence on politicians and policymakers. The news is interchangeable among news-workers and policymakers, politicians, organisational superiors, and the rest of society are following that ongoing conversation (Tuchman 1978). ...
... then introduced to communication byTuchman (1978) and byEntman (1993) much later. Since then, framing research gained huge popularity in communication and was at the centre of mass media body of knowledge as discussed by (Cacciatore et al. 2016; D'angelo 2002; Garguilo, 2014; Pan & Kosicki 1993). ...
Maintaining a good image of political leaders is significant to ensure their political life. The image of political leaders, including presidents of any country, is threatened when they are facing critical situations. There is a necessity to repair the image of presidents when threatened with crises. This effort of image repair by presidents is mostly covered by local or foreign media, and this coverage might be positive or negative. This study examines the coverage by the Malaysian media, specifically New Straits Times (NST), on the Palestinian Presidents, Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas and their portrayal towards several crises. Both image repair theory and framing perspective were used to guide the study. A total of 2715 news stories have been found about Palestinian issues in the 21 year period covered from 1996-2016. A total of 531 stories were related to Palestinian Presidents, 456 stories were on crises. This study employing content analysis has revealed three main crises faced by the Palestinian Presidents, namely political, social, and economic crisis. The political crises included: peace process, internal conflict, foreign pressure, Israeli attacks, Israeli blockade, Palestinian attacks, Israeli threats, clashes, demonstrations, Israeli spying, kidnapping, and relations breakdown. The social crises included: corruption, information leakage, cheating, false information, Israeli rumours, and Israeli slanders. The economic crises included only financial crisis. Palestinian Presidents have used all the main image repair strategies, namely denial, evasion of responsibility, reducing offensiveness, corrective action, and mortification. These strategies have been included in the 50 news stories. The number of used sub-image repair strategies was 61. The employed sub-strategies were simple denial, shifting the blame, provocation, defeasibility, attack accuser, correct/solve problem, confess/admit, and apology. Neutral slant of news stories was the most prevalent slant by NST, followed by positive, negative, and balanced slants respectively. But President Arafat received more coverage than President Abbas. The contribution of study came through matching the types of crisis with image repair strategies since understanding the crisis and determining its type is important for choosing the most suitable response strategy for it. Observing the framing of crises by certain media provides crisis managers and their organisations the most fitted crisis response through using image repair strategies which reduce the damaged image. Another contribution is by combining image repair as public relations theory with framing as journalism theory in this study.
... In studying journalism, ethnographic methods have long been found useful for researchers asking questions about processes or culture. This method has the advantage of being able to show researchers what is actually happening as they are trying to understand the sociology of journalism in various contexts (Tuchman 1978;Gans 2004;Boczkowski 2010;Ryfe 2012;Anderson 2013;Usher 2016;Konieczna 2018). Ethnographic methods were selected for this research due to their ability to interpret observable relationships between social practices and systems of meaning (Lindlof and Taylor 2017, 174). ...
... Non-journalistic partners, in particular, emphasized the need for journalistic operations to be a part of the community they cover, rather than distanced or separate from it. In the twentieth century, newsroom ethnographers found journalists routinely dismissive of their audiences (Tuchman 1978;Gans 2004). That has changed somewhat in the twenty-first century, especially amid the rise of social media and the heightened attention to metrics that give the audience more influence on the gatekeeping process (Nelson 2021). ...
... Also in this phase, the quality of political communication depends on a person or organization's ability to strategically communicate within and through media (Hjarvard, 2013). Therefore, how well a presidential candidate communicates within and through media to sell political opinions will directly affect the election's outcome because media coverage shapes public opinion (Lang & Lang, 2002;Tuchman, 1978). As shown in Fig. 4, the most obvious surges in political pseudo-event coverage are in the election years: 1996, 2004, and especially in 2016. ...
Using automated content analysis, this research explores the phenomenon of pseudo-events coverage in The New York Times (N = 70,370 articles) from 1980 to 2019. By clarifying the operationalization of pseudo-events, this study introduces pseudo-events as a valuable tool to index how different social subsystems perpetuate media- tization (which is when institutions absorb and abide by media logic). Machine-learning classifiers were con- structed to measure pseudo-events, which provides historicity, specificity, and measurability — three tasks set forth for new mediatization research. We found a significant increase in pseudo-event coverage, expressing a more positive tone than genuine event coverage. Moreover, political pseudo-event coverage shows quadrennial cycles with peaks in each presidential election year. Our findings reveal the expansion of mediatization since 1980 and show how media logic has been internalized in different ways by the social subsystems of politics, culture, and economics. Institutions and their social actors need efficient tools to abide by media logic in seeking publicity and commanding authority, and pseudo-events have matured into one of the most dominant tools, especially for political actors. This study offers an innovative approach to capture complex phenomena and shows promises of broader application of machine learning to empirically quantify and identify patterns using theoretical concepts.
... On one hand, Tuchman (1978), devoted particular attention on possible effects on media logic, asking for structures in media organizations and routines analyzing how journalists construct news. On the other hand, Anderson (1997) focused on economic pressures coming from ads, owners, or time limits. ...
This study interprets Mediatization of politics based on Jesper Stromback (2008) conceptualization, where mediatization should be perceived as a concept possessing many traits and aspects made of four different interconnected dimensions, and where each dimension constitutes a “continuum”. This article examines the manifestation of media logic in the content of Investigative Journalism Programs in Lebanon, as political news interrelated to public interest and political communication. The Mediatization and Media Logic hypotheses presume that journalists are predominantly guided by news values, and their own format requirement in determining their selection, presentation, and personalization notch of political news, as first scholars of media logic Altheide and Snow (1979) argue. In this study, the Four Phases of Mediatization, are empirically exanimated and demonstrated through a mixed methodology, and the available data reveals that the Investigative Journalism Programs broadcasted on NewTV (2013-2016-2020) are an execution of a specific media logic that is causing changes and transformations in the political communication process; at least in the internal political fray.
... Consequently, the ferment most media effects proponents often find time to express unequivocally is that when media contents are treated or embedded with negative or positive frame, there is a suggestion that some critical aspects of the media contents have been excluded, downplayed or silenced. This ferment gives validation to Tuchman (1978) presupposition of the mass media as instruments for setting the frames of reference that members of the audience adopt, adapt to, or utilise to form the bases for interpreting and discussing public events. As the media streamline their contents to reflect certain frame of reference in exclusion of others in order to achieve preconceived objectives or intents, the audience members' appreciation and interpretation of the media content are thereby impacted upon given the preexisting frames of reference set in place by the media. ...
The ferment in this theoretical discourse places the audience members at the heart of media effect process by presupposing that they, often thought to be at the receiving end, are self-willed and socially-deterministic individuals who decide their pattern of usage of media contents. The import is that audience-members decide what media content to consume, when, and how to consume them, and by implication, twist the nature of influence the media exert on them. This view finds explanation in the idea that as there are diverse use of divergent communication media, the audience members are hardly divested of their active participation in shaping and deciding what media/contents to turn to in meeting their individualised needs. It is sustained that based on the variations in audience's demography and psychography, different media contents and media sources would continue to strive in meeting audience members' different specific needs and not the other way round.
Much has been written about the coverage of the global south by journalism fields in the global north. Contemporary research has taken a step further by examining how non-Western journalism fields construct their own images. While these approaches are critical, a holistic framework that explores the realities of journalism fields in Majority World Countries remains inadequate. We illustrate the benefits of employing sociology of knowledge, field, and postcolonial theories to understand how journalists in the global south perceive newsroom roles, select news sources, and frame news content. Utilizing these three theoretical frameworks challenges the established Western norms branded as “global” and articulates sedimented knowledge by organizations working to construct knowledge of events. The proposed approach grapples with colonization by understanding the realities in which postcolonial journalism fields operate.
It is presented and contrasted through a framing analysis how selected environmental NGOs and the German Automotive Industry Association (VDA) engaged in the national German debate on urban air quality governance during the height of the emission scandal between 2015 and mid‐2019. For this, frames of communication applied to communicate organizational priorities and conceptualizations of air quality governance to the public are discussed and their potential impact on public perception of different approaches to air quality governance assessed. It is shown that the presented frames provide opposing and competing conceptualizations of air quality impacts and related governance propositions, including health, environmental, economic, and regulatory issues. They align with the interests of the communicating actor groups and are supported by selected scientific knowledge. This, it is argued, can be linked to an interest group led capturing of public debate as identified for other politically charged topics, and structurally resembles a public negotiation on urban air quality governance. Such an approach to public discourse, it is argued, can have negative impacts on public engagement and openness to embrace sustainability led governance reforms, as it can reinforce existing attitudes and create opposition to governance change.
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