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Is the Whole World Watching? Building a Typology of Protest Coverage on Social Media From Around the World
Abstract
Previous research suggests that mainstream media coverage around the world follows a “protest paradigm” that demonizes protesters and marginalizes their causes. Given the recent increase in global protest activity and the growing importance of social media for activism, this paper content analyzes 1,438 protest-related English and Spanish news stories from around the world that were shared on social media, examining framing, sourcing, and marginalizing devices across media outlet type, region, language, and social media platform in order to create a typology of how the protest paradigm operates in an international and social media context. Results showed type of protest, location of protest, and type of media outlet were significantly related to whether news stories adhered to the protest paradigm. Social media shares were predicted by region of media outlet, English-language media, and type of protest.
... When it comes to protest coverage, Harlow et al. (2020) investigated shareability of news content about various global protests, focussing on the effect of outlet characteristics, protest characteristic, and protest-paradigm coverage (including frames) on Facebook and Twitter interactions. The authors found geographic location and language to predict Facebook shares, while language, geographic location, and type of protests predicted Twitter shares. ...
... The authors found geographic location and language to predict Facebook shares, while language, geographic location, and type of protests predicted Twitter shares. This study also used the frames by Hertog and McLeod (2003) we employ here and found that, on the aggregate, only the legitimizing frame led to more engagement (Harlow et al. 2020). ...
... These findings are important because they build on research from the aggregate level (Harlow et al. 2017;Harlow et al. 2020;Brown et al. 2018c), which suggested that audiences tend to share articles with the legitimizing frame more than articles with delegitimizing ones. Here, we found that legitimizing coverage of a BLM protest does not increase the likelihood for social media engagement. ...
This article investigates the relationship between digital news coverage of protests and the audience’s willingness to engage with a story about Black Lives Matter on social media. Using a 3x2 experiment, we evaluate if news frames from the protest paradigm literature (riot, confrontation, and legitimizing) and the presence of an accompanying visual would make people more likely to read, like, share and comment on a news story about a street demonstration on social media. We also tested if news portrayal of protests might influence people’s level of support for the movement, which in turn could lead to different types of social media engagement outcomes. Results show that only the presence of visuals has a direct impact on willingness to share a story, with frames having a limited influence on behaviour if compared to other pre-existing attitudes about the police and protesters. However, we also found that the relationship between frames and social media engagement is mediated by a change in these attitudes and increased support for the movement. These findings suggest that engagement outcomes with digital news coverage are contingent on people’s support for the movement portrayed, although legitimizing coverage can influence those attitudes and shape social media behaviour in return.
... Decades of scholarship have demonstrated how US journalism often portrays marginalized communities' collective activism using negative, criminalizing frames aligned with "the protest paradigm." This coverage tends to ignore (or minimize) the structural causes and demands of collective activism (Boyle et al., 2012;Entman & Rojecki, 1993;Gil-Lopez, 2021;Gitlin, 1980;Harlow et al., 2020;McLeod, 2007). Adherence to the protest paradigm varies depending on factors like issue, location of protest, whether protestors aim to challenge versus protect the status quo, and the ideological orientation of news outlets (Harlow et al., 2020). ...
... This coverage tends to ignore (or minimize) the structural causes and demands of collective activism (Boyle et al., 2012;Entman & Rojecki, 1993;Gil-Lopez, 2021;Gitlin, 1980;Harlow et al., 2020;McLeod, 2007). Adherence to the protest paradigm varies depending on factors like issue, location of protest, whether protestors aim to challenge versus protect the status quo, and the ideological orientation of news outlets (Harlow et al., 2020). News coverage is most likely to align with the protest paradigm when activists use radical tactics (Boyle et al., 2012;Lee, 2014) or seek to advance racial justice (Brown & Harlow, 2019). ...
This study positions social justice activists’ objections to dominant reporting norms as a catalyst for critically reassessing these norms and their connection to diminishing trust in US journalism. Based on a conceptual application of discourse ethics to journalism and qualitative analysis of 28 in-depth interviews with social justice activists, we examine how participants experience and evaluate mainstream coverage of social justice, and why they think journalism could improve its trustworthiness through practices consistent with solidarity reporting norms.
... Possible explanations include increased care disruptions from one or both events, and fear of discrimination backlash among Black/AA patients during the human and civil rights protests. Historically, media coverage of human right protests of persons of color has often been racist, biasing public opinion against persons of color [27,28]. We cannot confirm that Black/AA had increased fear of discrimination in spring/summer 2020, but this explanation would be consistent with the fact that we saw a spring/summer dip in Black/AA in-person and video visits, while phone visitswhere skin color is not readily discernible -went up; as well as consistent with a general rise in hate crimes over the past years, and acts of racism in summer 2020 specifically [29,30]. ...
PurposeTelehealth may remain an integral part of cancer survivorship care after the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. While telehealth may reduce travel/waiting times and costs for many patients, it may also create new barriers that could exacerbate care disparities in historically underserved populations, manifesting as differences in overall care participation, and in differential video versus phone use for telehealth.Methods
We reviewed visits by cancer survivors between January and December 2020 at a designated cancer center in Minnesota. We used descriptive statistics, data visualization, and generalized estimating equation logistic regression models to compare visit modalities and trends over time by age, urban/rural status, and race/ethnicity.ResultsAmong 159,301 visits, including 33,242 telehealth visits, older and rural-dwelling individuals were underrepresented in telehealth compared with in-person care. Non-Hispanic White individuals, those aged 18–69 years, and urban residents used video for > 50% of their telehealth visits. In contrast, those aged ≥ 70 years, rural residents, and most patient groups of color used video for only 33–43% of their telehealth visits. Video use increased with time for everyone, but relative differences in telehealth modalities persisted. Visits of Black/African American patients temporarily fell in spring/summer 2020.Conclusions
Our findings underscore reduced uptake of telehealth, especially video, among potentially vulnerable patient populations. Future research should evaluate reasons for differential telehealth utilization and whether visit modality (in-person versus video versus phone) affects cancer outcomes.Implications for Cancer SurvivorsA long-term cancer care model with integrated telehealth elements needs to account for specific barriers for vulnerable populations.
Drawing from the protest paradigm and the mediation opportunity structure, this study textually analyzes mainstream and alternative media coverage of the 2019 inequality protests in Chile and the 2020 racial justice protests in the United States. In both cases, violence and forceful policing were linked to the protests, allowing this study to explore mediated violence and compare the discursive construction of the demonstrations, protesters, and police as articulated through 1) violence/damage, 2) repression, 3) oppression, and 4) blame. Findings revealed Chilean and U.S. mainstream media emphasized protester violence in juxtaposition with police trying to maintain order, peacefulness was portrayed as a novelty, and violence was disengaged from historical context. In contrast, alternative media treated protester violence as a response to structural violence, and police repression of protesters was criticized. This study shows the continued pervasiveness of the protest paradigm in mainstream news, and the way alternative media can offer discursive opportunities to counterframe police and protester violence and challenge mainstream media’s hostile portrayals of protesters’ use of the logic of damage. Ultimately, we suggest media and discursive opportunity structures are key to understanding mainstream and alternative media portrayals of protests.
The protest paradigm, which describes the unequitable reciprocity of the media-social movement relationship, creates a double-bind for social movements. Mainstream news media in the United States emphasize emotion, drama, and irrationality while excluding the grievances, agendas, and substance behind a protest, contributing to negative narratives that can hinder public support for a movement. This analysis of Facebook news posts of protests by mainstream U.S. news organizations contributes to our understanding of how social media’s engagement affordances work in cohort with journalists’ use of emotional appeals to legitimize some protests and delegitimize others. Results show posts encourage the mobilization of some protests more than others, and media frames and emotional linguistic devices might contribute to a spectrum of delegitimizing framing effects. Legitimizing features significantly decrease emotional reactions from audiences, leading to more neutral but potentially less engaging audience reception and response. Findings advance our understanding protest paradigm framing outcomes.
Until now, discussions of theories of media and society or media and the state in the North American literature have been limited. The four theories of the press advanced by Fred Siebert, Wilbur Schramm, and Theodore Peterson cover the main approaches of Western liberal society, the libertarian and social responsibility models, and some aspects of the Eastern bloc in the “totalitarian” model. Under the heading of “authoritarian,” however, a number of very diverse systems are lumped together. One major variation seen in Brazil is the continued vitality of the corporatist model of state and society, which has distinct implications for the role of mass media. In particular, aspects of corporatism seem to be combining with aspects of democracy and mass mobilization politics in ways that shed light on the role of the media in constructing or undercutting ideological hegemony in the heterogeneous, class-divided societies of Latin America.
From the listicle to the personalized headline, sensational form has become prevalent in online content. Interacting with online news articles through liking, sharing and commenting is one of the most popular social media forms of audience interactions with news organizations in modern times. Using a content analysis of viral Facebook news articles, this study examines the degree to which sensational forms appear in headline writing, including forward referencing, personalization, “soft” news structures and listicles. Findings suggest that while both types of organizations use these strategies, digitally native organizations are more likely to employ sensationalistic tactics in headlines while traditional organizations are more likely to appear in viral news for breaking stories. The discussion suggests that audience preference and expectation from specific news organizations may indicate content success.
This study assesses the scope and applicability of the “protest paradigm” in non-Western contexts by examining the news coverage of Brazilian, Chinese, and Indian protests in their domestic media. Two publications from each nation, one conservative and one progressive, are content analyzed for adherence to a series of marginalization devices that have often been used by the U.S. media to ridicule protest movements and portray them as violent. The Indian media emerge as the least likely to follow the protest paradigm, while Brazilian and Chinese media conform to it in moderate levels. Comparative analysis suggests the historical legitimacy of informal power negotiations in a political culture makes news media more willing to take protesters seriously and limits adherence to the protest paradigm. In contrast, a news organization’s ideological affiliation with the government of the day, rather than any ideology per se, makes it relatively more likely to conform to the protest paradigm. Marginalization devices such as circus, appearance, and eyewitness accounts are rarely used in any of these nations. But disparity of sources, (non)reference to protesters’ causes and violence, and violence blame appear to be abiding features of news coverage of protests everywhere.
Recent studies reported reductions of well-established biases in decision making under risk, such as the framing effect, during foreign language (FL) use. These modulations were attributed to the use of FL itself, which putatively entails an increase in emotional distance. A reduced framing effect in this setting, however, might also result from enhanced cognitive control associated with language-switching in mixed-language contexts, an account that has not been tested yet. Here we assess predictions of the 2 accounts in 2 experiments with over 1,500 participants. In Experiment 1, we tested a central prediction of the emotional distance account, namely that the framing effect would be reduced at low, but not high, FL proficiency levels. We found a strong framing effect in the native language, and surprisingly also in the foreign language, independent of proficiency. In Experiment 2, we orthogonally manipulated foreign language use and language switching to concurrently test the validity of both accounts. As in Experiment 1, foreign language use per se had no effect on framing. Crucially, the framing effect was reduced following a language switch, both when switching into the foreign and the native language. Thus, our results suggest that reduced framing effects are not mediated by increased emotional distance in a foreign language, but by transient enhancement of cognitive control, putting the interplay of bilingualism and decision making in a new light. (PsycINFO Database Record
(c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
Protest is now central to politics in Western democracies, but it is known to citizens mainly through portrayals in the media. Yet the media cover only a small fraction of public protests, raising the possibility of selection bias. We study this problem by comparing police records of demonstrations in Washington, D.C. in 1982 and 1991 with media coverage of the events in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and on three national television networks. We model the consequences of demonstration form, context, and purpose on the likelihood of media coverage. The estimated size of a demonstration and its importance to the current media issue attention cycle are the strongest predictors of its coverage. Additional analyses support our claim that heightened media attention to an issue increases the likelihood that protests related to that issue will be covered. Comparing 1982 to 1991 suggests that television coverage of protests is increasingly subject to the impact of media issue attention cycles.
Changes related to globalization have resulted in the growing separation of individuals in late modern societies from traditional bases of social solidarity such as parties, churches, and other mass organizations. One sign of this growing individualization is the organization of individual action in terms of meanings assigned to lifestyle elements resulting in the personalization of issues such as climate change, labour standards, and the quality of food supplies. Such developments bring individuals' own narratives to the fore in the mobilization process, often requiring organizations to be more flexible in their definitions of issues. This personalization of political action presents organizations with a set of fundamental challenges involving potential trade-offs between flexibility and effectiveness. This paper analyses how different protest networks used digital media to engage individuals in mobilizations targeting the 2009 G20 London Summit during the global financial crisis. The authors examine how these different communication processes affected the political capacity of the respective organizations and networked coalitions. In particular, the authors explore whether the coalition offering looser affiliation options for individuals displays any notable loss of public engagement, policy focus (including mass media impact), or solidarity network coherence. This paper also examines whether the coalition offering more rigid collective action framing and fewer personalized social media affordances displays any evident gain in the same dimensions of mobilization capacity. In this case, the evidence suggests that the more personalized collective action process maintains high levels of engagement, agenda focus, and network strength.
Research shows that news coverage of protest groups that challenge the status quo treats them relatively critically. To develop a more precise understanding of such coverage, this study content analyzes an international set of newspapers (N = 220) to explore the relationships between a protest group’s goals and tactics on resulting news coverage. The findings indicate that a group’s tactics—more than its goals—play a substantial role in affecting coverage. Furthermore, the findings also show that the protest issue and location indirectly affect coverage through their relationship to a group’s tactics. Implications for journalists and protesters alike are discussed.
This study examines how conceptions of `public opinion' are embedded within news-coverage of social protests at two levels: the micro-level in terms of informal characterizations of public opinion and the macro-level in terms of general conceptions of public opinion. At the micro-level, public opinion is brought into news stories in a variety of ways, including: statements about public opinion, depictions of compliance with or violation of social norms and laws, and portrayals of bystanders as symbols for public reaction. At the macro-level, coverage may have an underlying conception of public opinion as (1) aggregated individual opinion, (2) attempts of various groups to affect public policy and (3) a mechanism of social control. This case study of mainstream and alternative media coverage of three anarchist protests reveals differences at both the micro-descriptive and macro-conceptual levels.
Although news coverage of protest is a necessary component to a protest movement's survival or growth, the way protest is covered can legitimate or delegitimate a protest movement. This article's perspective argues that television news coverage of protest is shaped by the degree of dissent from elite or institutional parameters. The data presented here look at protest on U.S. and Canadian national news programs. The data support the idea that the tone of news coverage depends on the protest's relationship to institutional interests. For domestic issues, the degree of debate among elites shapes the extent and tone of news coverage. The tone of coverage of protests in other countries tends to correspond with the government's foreign policy toward both the foreign government and protest movements. Canadian news coverage is more likely to give greater credence to protest and to the issues that protesters raise.
/ This study compared newspaper coverage of anti-war protests in three countries based on the theoretical framework of framing. News stories in The New York Times, The Times and the People's Daily over a period of six months were analyzed in terms of news selection, prominence, sourcing pattern, frames, themes and overall favorability toward the protestors. Results show significant differences not only in coverage between contrasting media systems (US and Britain vs China), but also between comparable media systems (US vs Britain). Reasons for these differences and theoretical implications are explored.
We investigated framing effects of television news coverage of an anarchist protest. Three treatment stories differed in their level of status quo support. Status quo support had significant effects on viewers, leading them to be more critical of, and less likely to identify with, the protesters; less critical of the police; and less likely to support the protesters' expressive rights. Status quo support also produced lower estimates of the protest's effectiveness, public support, and perceptions of newsworthiness. The results substantiate concerns about status quo support by showing that it can influence audience perceptions.
"The modern territoriall state and the capitalist market economy superseded a political-economic order that consisted of a plethora of corporate communities endowed with traditional rights and obligations, such as churches, estates, cities, and guilds. Organized collectivities of all sorts, more or less closely related to the economic division of labour, regulated cooperation and competition among their members and negotiated their relations with each other. While themselves changing under the impact of modernization, they often resisted the rise of territorial bureaucratic rule and the spread of market relations, sometimes well into the twentieth century. But ultimately they proved unable to prevent the victory of the state form of political organization of the self-regulating market as the dominant site of economic exchange. Modern liberalism, both political and economic, in turn aimed at abolishing all forms of intermediary organization that intervene between the individual and the state or the marktet. In the end, however, it failed to eliminate collectivism and had to accomodate itself both political faction and economic cooperation." (excerpt)
In liberal democratic theory demonstrations and protests have long been seen as a bridge helping to overcome possible disconnects between publics, opinion formation and decision-makers and, in more recent social theory, they are thought to perform a role in vitalizing moribund parliamentary democracies, crystallizing collective identities and circulating new cultural codes. In Britain today, as in many other Western democracies, emonstrations and protests have moved from the margins to the mainstream, becoming increasingly profuse and an accepted political tactic for an expanded range of organizations, single-issue campaigns, new social movements and transnational advocacy networks. They depend on the media, and the news media particularly, to get their message across and mobilize wider support. Much has changed however, since earlier studies documented how the news media reported protests and demonstrations through a dominant law and (dis)order frame, labelling protesters as deviant and de-legitimizing their aims and politics by emphasizing drama, spectacle and violence. This discussion considers some of these major changes and, on this basis, proposes a new research agenda for the exploration of the complexities and contingencies that now inform the news media's reporting of dissent.
Objective. We apply economic theories of news to explain differences between English- and Spanish-language newspaper coverage of immigration.
Methods. Using content analysis and contextual data, we examine newspaper coverage of immigration as a function of economic incentives of news organizations and the language of the newspaper outlet.
Results. The results indicate that Spanish-language news outlets generate a larger volume of coverage and more positive coverage of immigration when compared to English-language news outlets.
Conclusions. This specific topic is important and politically relevant because of the potential implications variability in media coverage of this issue hold for public opinion on immigration.
This study uses a media sociology approach to untangle how multiple influences shape the way journalists cover left- and right-leaning protests on social media. Several studies have investigated how reporters portray social movements, finding that news marginalizes protestors by focusing on spectacle and violent tactics to the detriment of their ideas. In this study, we turn to journalists’ Twitter accounts to analyze if these patterns are transferred to social media, as predicted by the literature on normalization of new affordances. Through a mixed methodology matching survey and social media data from 466 Brazilian journalists who tweeted about protests in 2013 and 2015, results revealed individual attitudes predicted coverage, indicating that social media was a space for personal, not professional, expression. Contrary to the literature, findings show that social media portrayals were more legitimizing during the left-leaning demonstrations than during the right-leaning elite-driven one. As a result, marginalizing patterns of protest coverage were challenged, not replicated, on Twitter. These findings suggest a limitation of the theory of normalization to explain how global journalists use social media.
This study advances the protest paradigm as a transnational theory by examining how ideological affiliations within and across national borders influence the framing of a protest movement. Our empirical focus is the coverage of the 2016-17 South Korean “candlelight” protests to oust conservative President Park Gyun-hye in Korean and U.S. newspapers. Content analysis of six months of coverage suggests that liberal publications in both nations (Kyunghyang Shinmun and New York Times) were supportive of the movement, framing the protests as large yet peaceful and relying on protesters for information. In contrast, the conservative press in the U.S. (Wall Street Journal) was closer in its coverage to Korea’s conservative publication (Chosun Ilbo), which was defensive of Park and her supporters. We argue that ideological affinities can operate beyond national boundaries — what we term “ideological parallelism” — to make news organizations sympathetic or hostile toward a social movement. But nationalist sentiments also remain significant to the extent that a foreign (Korean) social movement affects a nation’s (U.S.) foreign policy. We identify a novel framing device — Gaze — under which the coverage of both U.S. newspapers converged and considered the adverse implications of candlelight protests for America’s relations with South Korea and its containment of North Korea and China. We also show how the U.S. media’s Gaze recursively shapes South Korean press coverage, indicating that transnational protest frames impact local perceptions of social movements and can potentially influence their legitimacy and outcome.
News coverage is fundamental to a protest’s viability, but research suggests media negatively portray protests and protesters that challenge the status quo (a pattern known as the protest paradigm). This study questions the validity of those claims within the context of digital newspaper coverage, interrogating how topic and region shape coverage. Using a content analysis of coverage from sixteen newspapers in various U.S. market types and regions, this research examines framing and sourcing features in articles about protests. Results suggest media coverage of protests centered on racial issues (discrimination of Indigenous people and anti-Black racism) follows more of a delegitimizing pattern than stories about protests related to immigrants’ rights, health, and environment. A model to understand news coverage of protest based on a hierarchy of social struggle is proposed.
Following the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, protests around the world—online and offline—grabbed headlines. Considering that previous research suggests that the news media tend to follow a protest paradigm of coverage that delegitimizes protesters, this study examined #Ferguson coverage on social media to re-assess the relevance of the paradigm. Using computer analysis, this study analyzed thousands of tweets posted by news organizations and individual journalists in the U.S., U.K., Spain, and France, as well as the general public’s tweets, to compare how race, police brutality, and the protests were discussed across countries. Findings fill the gap in the literature as to whether delegitimizing, paradigmatic coverage extends to Twitter, pointing to differences not just between countries, but also between media outlets and individual journalists, and between the public and the journalism industry. Implications for future research are discussed.
This study compares U.S. digital news coverage of recent foreign and domestic protests. Differences in coverage’s framing, sourcing, and device emphases were analyzed for two cases: protests that erupted after the death of Michael Brown and protests demanding justice for the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico. Building on protest paradigm literature, content analysis results show news articles that appeared on Facebook and Twitter emphasized legitimizing frames for foreign protests more than domestic protests. Foreign protests were framed with the spectacle frame more than domestic protests which were more often portrayed as confrontational. Digitally native news organizations produced content that deviated from expected paradigmatic norms the most. In addition, this research examines the relationship between content and sharing on Facebook and Twitter. Implications of these findings within the theoretical framework of the protest paradigm are discussed.
In 2014 protests erupted around the world after 43 college students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico, were kidnapped and massacred. This bilingual, cross-national content analysis explores the relationship between multimedia features in stories about the Ayotzinapa protests and how social media users liked, shared, and commented on that coverage. This study furthers our understanding of the protest paradigm in a digital context, and sheds light on differences in mainstream, alternative, and online media outlets' coverage of protesters. Additionally, this study suggests social media users might prefer more legitimizing coverage of protesters than mainstream media typically offer.
Audiences play a fundamental role in disseminating and evaluating news content, and one of the big questions facing news organizations is what elements make content viral in the digital environment. This comparative study of the United States, Brazil and Argentina explores what values and topics present in news shared online predict audience interaction on social media. Findings shed light on what news values and topics trigger more audience responses on Facebook and Twitter. At the same time, a comparison between popular content produced by traditional media versus online-native media reveals that the former lean more toward government-related news and con-flict/controversy news values than online native media. Brazilian stories prompted more social media interactivity than content from the United States or Argentina. Through content analysis, this study contributes to improving our understanding of audiences' news values preferences on social networks. It also helps us to recognize the role of users' online activities (sharing, commenting and liking) in the social construction of news and meaning inside the networked sphere. Finally, it opens an old media debate about whether providing and sharing too much media content with conflict, controversy and oddity could potentially hinder understanding and agreement in society. Articles were collected via media tracking and the data collection company NewsWhip.
People increasingly visit online news sites not directly, but by following links on social network sites. Drawing on news value theory and integrating theories about online identities and self-representation, we develop a concept of shareworthiness, with which we seek to understand how the number of shares an article receives on such sites can be predicted. Findings suggest that traditional criteria of newsworthiness indeed play a role in predicting the number of shares, and that further development of a theory of shareworthiness based on the foundations of newsworthiness can offer fruitful insights in news dissemination processes.
This article seeks to explain variation in news sharing patterns on social media. It finds that news editors have considerable power to shape the social media agenda through the use of “story importance cues” but also shows that there are some areas of news reporting (such as those related to crime and disasters) where this power does not apply. This highlights the existence of a social “news gap” where social media filters out certain types of news, producing a social media news agenda which has important differences from its traditional counterpart. The discussion suggests that this may be consequential for perceptions of crime and engagement with politics; it might even stimulate a partial reversal of the tabloidization of news outlets.
Given the increasing attention China has attracted on a global scale over the last few decades, ample academic research has been conducted into the types of China discourses, spread through the media. Studies have pointed at a mounting Sino-phobic discourse in some US media, which prompts the question whether similar attitudes and frames emerge in non-English media narratives. Hence, this study examines how the Belgian as well as the Dutch elite press engage with the new world player. It combines a content analysis, looking into thematic hierarchies and tone/perspective with a critical discourse analysis, retrieving discursive practices, such as evaluative positioning and framing of the country and its main actors. In addition, the article integrates framing research with a Gramscian notion of media hegemony to investigate whether the particular source selection leaves room for a heteroglossic environment.
Protests at summit meetings have inspired intense debate over the nature and significance of the ‘anti-globalization’ or ‘anti-capitalist movement. However, the European dimension of this movement is still largely unknown. In this insightful book Andy Mathers addresses this deficit by focusing on events that have marked the birth of a European social movement. He relates the development of the movement to key matters such as economic, employment and welfare state restructuring along neoliberal lines. He also challenges ideas about the nature of contemporary collective action and the character of present day social movements. Mathers discusses the significance of the movement and its future development through a critical engagement with the work of major writers in European sociology and of academics influential in the wider global movement such as Pierre Bourdieu. A postscript brings readers fully up-to-date with developments in the type of ‘social Europe’ propagated by the institutions of the EU as well as in the maturation of a social movement to oppose it.
Among the emergent data-centric practices of journalism, none appear to be as potentially disruptive as “automated journalism.” The term denotes algorithmic processes that convert data into narrative news texts with limited to no human intervention beyond the initial programming choices. The growing ability of machine-written news texts portends new possibilities for an expansive terrain of news content far exceeding the production capabilities of human journalists. A case study analysis of the pioneering automated journalism provider Narrative Science and journalists’ published reactions to its services reveals intense competition both to imagine an emergent journalism landscape in which most news content is automated and to define how this situation creates new challenges for journalists. What emerges is a technological drama over the potentials of this emerging news technology concerning issues of the future of journalistic labor, the rigid conformity of news compositional forms, and the normative foundation of journalistic authority. In these ways, this study contends with the emergent practice of automated news content creation both in how it alters the working practices of journalists and how it affects larger understandings of what journalism is and how it ought to operate.
This study examined the relationship between two mechanisms of online participation - clicking and commenting - as well as the characteristics of heavily clicked versus highly commented-upon news items. Based on 15,431 items from a popular Israeli website, correlations between clicking and commenting were calculated for 12 separately analysed months from 2006 to 2011. In addition, overlap rates were determined, showing that 40-59% of the heavily clicked items in any given month were different from the highly commented-upon items. A subsequent content analysis indicated that while sensational topics and curiosity-arousing elements were more prominent among the heavily clicked items than among the highly commented-upon items, political/social topics and controversial elements were more prominent among the highly commented-upon items. The study contributes to deepening our understanding of the role of user comments in constructing social/group identity and offers a new perspective on a prolonged controversy surrounding audiences’ news preferences.
With the advent of Web 2.0 applications, practices of news spreading have changed. Now, not only journalists but also average Internet users are able to spread news. This paper examines criteria that influence the forwarding of information in microblogging systems such as Twitter. To test whether and how two different kinds of criteria (contextual criteria and message inherent-criteria) interact in influencing selection decisions of sharing information with others, a 2 × 2 × 2 laboratory experiment was conducted. Awareness information about one’s audience (guiding vs. non-guiding), news topic (educational vs. non-educational), and informational value of the message (high vs. low) were systematically varied. It was hypothesized that participants who received guiding awareness information would show audience design (i.e., adapting communication behavior towards the audience) while disregarding informational value. In contrast, participants who received non-guiding awareness information would not show audience design, but would forward according to informational value. Results confirmed that participants indeed adapted their communication behavior to their audience’s interests. However, participants still preferred messages with high informational value over messages with low informational value. Results are discussed and implications are drawn.
This article sets out to map the journalistic field as a space of struggle between distinct professional milieus. These milieus crystallize around journalists who share similar views on journalism’s function in society. By means of cluster analysis, four global professional milieus were extracted from the survey responses of 1800 journalists in 18 countries: the populist disseminator, detached watchdog, critical change agent and the opportunist facilitator. The detached watchdog milieu clearly dominates the journalistic field in most western countries, while the milieu of the opportunist facilitator reigns supreme in several developing, transitional and authoritarian contexts. In accordance with the theoretical propositions, relatively little professional autonomy was found in contexts with rather strong corporate and commercial influences. However, a more universal approach would need to go beyond corporate and commercial factors in order to account for the realities of the journalistic field in non-western countries.
This article serves three purposes: (1) An explication of the concept legitimacy. Legitimacy has been measured in a wide number of ways by several researchers. By using factor analysis and correlation validation techniques, the various measures of legitimacy are grouped into four dimensions: evaluation, legality, viability, and stability. (2) an investigation of a critical hypothesis which holds that the U.S. media support the centrist political groups by delegitimizing deviant political groups. Although the deviant groups' activities are reported in the U.S. media, the hypothesis holds that the media cover deviant political groups in such a way as to make them seem ridiculous and eccentric. Two experiments yield some supporting evidence for this hypothesis. (3) A discussion of the applied effects of the findings for working journalists and journalism educators. If news articles which are written in what has traditionally been known as an “objective” style can deligitimize a political group, then the U.S. media may be contributing to the support of centrist parties to the detriment of new or different ideas.
Media discourse and public opinion are treated as two parallel systems of constructing meaning. This paper explores their relationship by analyzing the discourse on nuclear power in four general audience media: television news coverage, newsmagazine accounts, editorial cartoons, and syndicated opinion columns. The analysis traces the careers of different interpretive packages on nuclear power from 1945 to the present. This media discourse, it is argued, is an essential context for understanding the formation of public opinion on nuclear power. More specifically, it helps to account for such survey results as the decline in support for nuclear power before Three Mile Island, a rebound after a burst of media publicity has died out, the gap between general support for nuclear power and support for a plant in one's own community, and the changed relationship of age to support for nuclear power from 1950 to the present.
The existence of a European public sphere is often disputed –not only in communication and media science. A common thesis in research is that a European public sphere can be constituted via the Europeanization of reporting in the national media. On the basis of a qualitatively oriented meta-analysis, this article aims to answer the question whether such Europeanization is taking place in European countries. With reference to 17 studies analysing media content from several European countries, the empirical research carried out in German, English and French since the beginning of the 1990s is systematically evaluated. All of the studies examined compare European topics being reported in the media in different European countries. The meta-analysis shows that in the 15 member states of the European Union prior to the 2004 enlargement, developmental tendencies of differing degrees towards a Europeanization of the national public spheres are discernible. Overall, EU topics account for an extremely small proportion of the reporting in the particular national media. Players at EU level only feature in minor roles. It can be concluded that the public spheres of the EU states continue to exhibit a strong national orientation. Keeping in mind that there has been little empirical research in this field so far, the results of this analysis are a first step towards a systematization of the existing research –at a time when the debate about a European public sphere becomes even more important against the background of the ongoing expansion of the EU.
This research examined the relationship between the nature of newspaper coverage of social protests and the level of deviance and type of protest. A content analysis of 280 protest news stories from the Milwaukee Journal, Wisconsin State Journal, Sauk Prairie Star, Watertown Times, and Park Falls Herald from 1960 to 1999 was conducted to compare indicators of the protest paradigm between protests that either support the status quo, endorse moderate reform, or seek radical reform. Additional analyses looked at the role that the type of protest played in adherence to the protest paradigm. Results of analyses indicate that moderate reform and radical reform protests were more likely to be treated critically in both the headline and main body of the article as well as have greater emphasis placed on specific events rather than themes and goals.
Although a great deal of research has identified ways in which mass media can delegitimize social protest groups, little effort has been given to examining the relative prevalence of each of these mechanisms (labeled marginalization devices in this study) in media coverage of protest movements. By employing an innovative typology, the author examined the prominence of these devices in noneditorial coverage of Iraq War protest in 3 major U.S. newspapers over a 1-year period. In addition to gauging the prevalence of each device, the study also determined which specific devices were associated with either a positive or negative overall story tone toward the protesters. Although coverage in general was not more likely to be either negative or positive toward war-protest groups, stories containing the most commonly implemented devices were more likely to be negative in overall tone. Practical and scholarly implications are discussed in scrutinizing the mass media's role in shaping interpretations of sociopolitical issues.
Research on news coverage of social protest has yielded evidence of a “protest paradigm,” a framework of common news attributes that contribute to the marginalizing of protesters as social deviants. Analysis here investigates whether adherence to the protest paradigm varies by structural characteristics of the communities in which news organizations originate. More specifically, news organizations in less pluralistic communities may exhibit lower tolerance for social conflict than news organizations in more pluralistic communities. This research compares newspaper coverage of social protest from communities with varied levels of pluralism. Results showed that newspapers in less pluralistic communities were more critical of protesters when local government was the target and were less likely to quote protesters in stories. Further, newspapers in less pluralistic communities were more critical of protesters when stories were on the front page than those appearing elsewhere in the newspaper. Implications for understanding the protest paradigm and influences of community structure on news coverage patterns were explored.
In Translation Studies, research on media and translation is dominated by questions of audiovisual translation such as dubbing or subtitling. The larger field of the position of translation in the media in general, the awareness of the use of translation in newsrooms, is much less present in research (with the important exception of the Warwick project on ‘Translation in Global News’). Earlier research has shown that translation as such is hardly problematized in media newsrooms, but conceived as an integral part of the transediting process. This article presents a case study of newspapers in Belgium (both in Dutch and in French), in particular regarding the selection of international news and the role of language and translation in the selection process. It is shown not only that the countries dealt with in the international news differ greatly in the Dutch-language and the French-language daily newspapers (which can be seen as a political statement in Belgium), but also that there are striking correlations between the countries covered and the linguistic origin of the main press agencies used. On the basis of these findings, one can assume that the role of language and (the absence of) translation in the information selection process seem to be important framing and agenda-setting factors in newsrooms.
This article aims, within the constructionist paradigm, at integrating culture into the framing process. Four characteristics are important for this approach: the distinction between the event, the media content, and the frame; the explicit attention to the reconstruction of frame packages; the relationship between frame packages and cultural phenomena; and the interaction between frame sponsors, key events, media content, schemata, and the stock of frames. An elaborated framing model is presented, and, subsequently, the constructionist approach is compared with priming and agenda setting. Finally, the methodological implications are discussed, in order to develop a strategy to reconstruct frame packages.
Despite the increasing popularity of viral marketing, factors critical to such a new communication medium remain largely unknown. This paper examines one of the critical factors, namely Internet users' motivations to pass along online content. Conceptualizing the act of forwarding online content as a special case of a more general communication behavior, we identify four potential motivations: (1) the need to be part of a group, (2) the need to be individualistic, (3) the need to be altruistic, and (4) the need for personal growth. Using a survey of young adults, we examine the relationship between these motivations and the frequency of passing along online content. We also investigate if high trait curiosity can indirectly lead to more forwarding by increasing the amount of online content consumed. Results show that Internet users, who are more individualistic and/or more altruistic, tend to forward more online content than others.
The complexities of global protests. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- T Carothers
- R Youngs
Carothers, T., and R. Youngs. 2015. The complexities of global protests. Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. http://carnegieendowment.org/2015/10/08/complexities-of-global-protestspub-61537.
The Journalistic Paradigm on Civil Protests: A Case Study of Hong Kong
- J M Chan
- C C Lee
Chan, J. M., and C. C. Lee. 1984. "The Journalistic Paradigm on Civil Protests: A Case Study of Hong
Kong." In The News Media in National and International Conflict, edited by A. Arno, and W.
Dissanayake, 183-202. Boulder, CO: Westview.
The Media in Latin America
- J Lugo-Ocando
Lugo-Ocando, J. 2008. The Media in Latin America. McGraw-Hill Education.
News use across social media platforms 2018
- K E Matsa
- E Shearer
Matsa, K. E., and E. Shearer. 2018. "News use across social media platforms 2018." Pew Research
Center. https://www.journalism.org/2018/09/10/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2018/.
News Coverage and Social Protest: How the Media's Protect Paradigm Exacerbates Social Conflict
- D M Mcleod
McLeod, D. M. 2007. "News Coverage and Social Protest: How the Media's Protect Paradigm
Exacerbates Social Conflict." Journal of Dispute Resolution 1: 185-194.