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Election Journalism: Investigating Media Bias on Telegram during the 2017 Presidential Election in Iran
Digital Journalism
Abstract
While past studies have predominantly focused on bias in traditional mainstream media in the Western context, this article seeks to explore bias on the Telegram App during the 2017 presidential election in Iran. In doing so, the most visited Telegram news channel titled AkhbareFori (literally meaning breaking news) was selected. Three types of bias (i.e. gatekeeping, coverage and statement) were examined through quantitative content analysis. The results of the study regarding gatekeeping bias show the rate of mainstream sources affiliated to the Reformists was higher than the rate of Conservative sources. In addition, the study indicates that the rate of news coverage from the Reformists was higher than the rate of news coverage from the Conservatives. Moreover, the results indicate that the channel showed higher positive orientation towards the Reformists. Accordingly, AkhbareFori had all three types of bias in favor of the Reformists. Other characteristics of the AkhbareFori channel such as use of news values and tone of news items are also discussed in the article.
... Under such a scenario, their contents are retrievable neither from Telegram servers nor from users' devices [9,22]. Members of a Telegram group can participate in content creation and sharing [7,49]. Telegram groups may include up to 200,000 members. ...
... A Telegram channel, public or private, can have unlimited subscribers. For instance, the Iranian AkhbareFori Telegram channel had 1.8 million subscribers in 2016, and the Belorussian Nexta-Live had 1.6 million subscribers in 2020 [6,7,15]. Feedback on channels is enabled via bots or private messages sent to administrators; these are not public. ...
... Telegram's privacy focus and scarce content moderation made this messenger popular among users in authoritarian states and political fringe groups. As to the former group of users, Iran, Russia, and Belarus have been leaders in the share of Telegram users worldwide, especially during mass protests in those countries [6,7]. The Hong Kong protests of 2019 are considered one of the most significant Telegram-aided pro-democratic movements [61]. ...
Telegram channels are essential in covering Russia’s war in Ukraine. The article compares the war coverage by voenkory, military bloggers in Ukraine and Russia, with war-related news items disseminated by legacy media, both print and electronic (TV, online news portals). A corpus of political and media discourses about the war during its first year was content analyzed using a custom-built Ukrainian-Russian-English-French “dictionary of war.” The corpus contains sources from five countries: Ukraine, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom and France, including the twenty most popular Telegram channels about the war in Ukraine and Russia (119 million words). The study demonstrates the potential of semi-supervised methods of content analysis for studying highly heterogeneous multi-language corpora. It shows how digital propaganda works in the case of war reporting. Military bloggers, actors of white propaganda, appear to outperform bots and throlls. The article also adds a comparative dimension to studies of social media. On the one hand, digital war reporting is compared with war reporting in legacy media. Russian voenkory discussed the invasion in greater technical detail than in national legacy media, whereas Ukrainian voenkory emphasized its ideological dimension more. On the other hand, the comparison extends to include several countries and periods. As the war unfolded, Ukrainian military bloggers’ coverage became less ideological and more technical, too.
... To date, there have been only sporadic studies of Telegram's role in protest contexts, with the geography of protests limited to Hong Kong and Belarus (Urman, Ho, and Katz 2021;Esiev 2021). For the most part, Telegram has been seen as an arena of collision between public and private (in the context of a Telegram ban in Russia), news consumption, and rumors, rather than as a platform capable of influencing citizens through coverage (Wiljermars 2022;Lou et al. 2021;Ameli and Molaei 2020). The authors suggest that in the context of digitalization and constant information consumption, the issue of event coverage plays as much of a role as the events themselves. ...
Contemporary sociopolitical processes do not take place in a vacuum: they are interpreted and covered by various social media, from the internet-based applications to platforms. These include social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, microblogging platforms such as Twitter, photo- and video-sharing services such as Instagram and YouTube, messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, and community-based forums such as Reddit. As such, there is a big difference between what is happening de facto and how the event is interpreted by individual agents. The research aims to analyze the trends and features of media content coverage by government and nongovernment channels during the period of social and political protest escalation in Kazakhstan, based on the materials of Telegram platform publications. To achieve the research objectives, the following methods were used: quantitative analysis of arrays using time series, content analysis of publications, and thematic modeling. The research determined that the protests that took place in Kazakhstan in January 2022 are of interest specifically in terms of how they were shaped in the environment of Telegram, an anonymous messenger known as a means of communication in the protests. Telegram is one of the platforms in which both authorial and state actors are closely intertwined; the research studied how protests were structured in the two “camps,” as well as the specifics of informing the audience using the Python programming language. The data demonstrates a significant difference in the frequency of coverage in favor of nonstate channels, despite a qualitative difference in the vocabulary used and the main “stories.”
... group of war bloggers who administer Telegram channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, voenkory, started to compete in influence with other media. Administrators of Telegram channels post information viewable by all subscribers(Ameli & Molaei, 2020;Urman et al, 2021). The 20 most popular Telegram channels covering the invasion were selected in Ukraine and Russia (10 in each country), along with one English-language channel. ...
This article proposes an approach to assessing propaganda effectiveness inspired by the concepts of forward and backward propagation. The propaganda process has several stages: the formulation of a message by an actor vested in power, its transmission by a propagandist, its reception by a member of the target group, and the latter's reaction to the message. Through content analysis using a quadrilingual dictionary and binary logistic regression, war-related messages of the political leaders of Ukraine, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France were tracked through these stages in the first 15 months of Russia's large-scale invasion. Corpora of political, media, and mass discourses about the war inform this study (140.5 million words). It has been shown that the effectiveness of Russian propaganda has been growing since February 2022, while the effectiveness of the Ukrainian counterpropaganda has been declining. However, the relative ineffectiveness of Ukrainian propaganda is matched by the country population's growing national consciousness.
... So far, few studies have examined TG's role in news dissemination and political communication, and they have mostly focused on countries other than Russia (Ameli and Molaei 2020;Negreira-Rey et al. 2017). In their recent study, Wijermars and Lokot (2022) explored how a platform's image might influence protesters' use of its features. ...
The paper explores the phenomenon of anonymous news channels on Russian Telegram, which have become increasingly popular in recent years. Drawing on 25 self-confrontation interviews, we answer the following questions: Do users trust anonymous news? If not, why do they keep using this information source? How does a restrictive socio-political context influence users’ trust in alternative news sources? Our results show that, in Russia, the concept of trust is linked to the normative democratic understanding of journalistic functions. At the same time, many users believe that trust in media is not at all necessary and develop individual strategies to navigate a “chaos of narratives”. The paper discusses Telegram’s role in shaping trust or distrust in news.
... As in Twitter, researchers have found Telegram as the ideal tool to read the pulse of the population-to assess their political sentiment (salmon, light blue, and bright red clusters). For example, the 2017 presidential campaign in Iran alone accounts for three studies [22][23][24]. By then, Spain had already experimented with an innovative news bot, which came to light in the disputed 2016 elections, termed Politibot. ...
Telegram, an Industry 4.0 style communication service, is one of the world’s most widespread communication platforms. The availability of channels and bots has opened as a broadcast channel for any media outlet. We asked the following questions: Do media outlets from Spain use Telegram channels? Which media outlets? Are they verified? What is their volume of subscribers? Can this information be used to rank media outlets? We identified many media channels and data were collected from each one. We present the results in a ranking. Forty-two media based in Spain have Telegram channels, 26 of which are ranked in the directory. Less than half of these channels are verified by the platform, and only three are linked to their website. This lack of verification could lead to the proliferation of fake channels. The article ends with a series of recommendations for channel managers to make it easier for the end user to identify and verify each media outlet.
In recent years, there has been a growing trend of news sharing through private messaging apps. This shift presents significant challenges for journalism, particularly in terms of media trust and news dissemination. Despite the importance of studying the role of private messaging apps in shaping public opinion, there is a lack of systematic approaches. After a scientific literature review including terms such as “WhatsApp”, “Telegram”, and “mesospaces”, content and thematic analyses were carried out to identify research methods and topics. A total of 61 documents was retrieved in late 2022, 53 of which are articles in WoS journals. Results shed light onthe most common practices, and while WhatsApp remains the most studied platform, paradoxically, it is still in the experimental stage. While the use of private messaging apps for news reception may be considered a private activity, the findings suggest that this private reception does not necessarily equate to individual or isolated consumption. The results have implications for stages such as news gathering and production, while also revealing subtopics in research on these platforms, such as the need for new digital literacies, trust as a primary casualty of disinformation, and some community practices. This approach underlines the need for transnationalstudies to identify common practices in the use of these technologies that are not solely driven by the particular context of a country. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ En los últimos años, ha habido una creciente tendencia de compartir noticias a través de aplicaciones de mensajería privada. Este cambio presenta desafíos significativos para el periodismo en términos de confianza en los medios y difusión de noticias. A pesar de la importancia de la investigación sobre mensajería privada y periodismo en la construcción de la opinión pública, faltan enfoques sistemáticos. Tras una revisión de literatura científica que incluyó términos como “WhatsApp”, “Telegram” y “mesoespacios”, se realizaron análisis de contenido y temáticos para identificar métodos y temas de investigación. Se recuperaron 61 documentos en 2022, de los cuales 53 son artículos en revistas WoS. Los resultados arrojan luz sobre las prácticas más comunes y, aunque WhatsApp sigue siendo la plataforma más estudiada, paradójicamente aún se usa de modo experimental. Si bien el uso de aplicaciones de mensajería privada para la recepción de noticias puede considerarse una actividad privada, los hallazgos sugieren que esta recepción privada no necesariamente equivale a un consumo individual o aislado. Las implicaciones de los resultados se relacionan con la recopilación y producción de noticias, pero también surgen subtemas como la necesidad de nuevas alfabetizaciones digitales, la confianza como primera víctima de la desinformación y algunas prácticas comunitarias. Este enfoque subraya la necesidad de estudios transnacionales para identificar prácticas comunes con estas tecnologías que no estén únicamente impulsadas por el contexto particular de un país.
Connected financial journalists—those with working relationships, common school ties, or social media connections to company management—introduce a marked media slant into their news coverage. Using a comprehensive set of newspaper articles covering mergers and acquisition (M&A) transactions from 1997 to 2016, I find that connected journalists use significantly fewer negative words in their coverage of connected acquirers. These journalists are also more likely to quote connected executives and include less accurate language in their reporting. Moreover, they tend to portray other firms in the same network in a less negative light. Journalists’ favoritism bias has implications for both capital market outcomes and their careers. I find that acquirers whose M&As are covered by connected journalists receive significantly higher stock returns on the news article publication date. However, these acquirers’ stock prices reverse in the long term, suggesting market overreaction to news covered by connected journalists. Around M&A transactions, connected articles are correlated with increased bid competition and deal premiums. In terms of future career development, connected journalists are more likely to leave journalism and join their associated industries in the long run. Taken together, the evidence suggests that financial journalists’ personal networks promote news bias that potentially hinders the efficient dissemination of information.
В статье рассматривается изменение популярности информационных источников среди разных возрастных групп. Делается вывод о необходимости рассмотрения телевидения, социальных сетей и мессенджеров как ресурсов, направленных на охват различных возрастных групп. Анализируются отличия между этими средствами, а также обобщаются основные тенденции в вопросе их влияния на журналистику.
The article examines the changing popularity of information sources among different age groups. It is concluded that it is necessary to consider television, social networks and messengers as resources aimed at reaching different age groups. The differences between these media are analyzed, and the main trends in their influence on journalism are summarized.
The article describes how the first six months of the armed conflict in and around the Gaza Strip impacted political and media discourses about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which started on 24 February 2023, in five countries: the two belligerents, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. It shows that after 7 October 2023, the attention of Western leaders and media was distracted from the situation in Ukraine and redirected to the Gaza Strip. The sampled social media, VKontakte and Telegram, reacted to the military operations in the Gaza Strip mostly in unison with legacy media. Before and after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, sources of political and media discourses formed national clusters. The corpora containing more than 218 million words in four languages, Ukrainian, Russian, English, and French, informed the analysis. In addition to social media, the corpora include speeches from political leaders and news items about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, run by seventeen legacy media outlets (newspapers, online news portals, and T.V. channels).
The article discusses political and media discourses on Russia’s all-out war in Ukraine. It assesses how convergent or divergent discourses are and determines whether the assumption of globalization of information flows holds at the time of war. Political and media discourses are considered here in conjunction. A method for visualizing and measuring the divergence or convergence of political and media discourses is developed and applied. In addition to illuminating the concept of war propaganda, it can be used to test a range of theories about relationships between governments and mass media in a comparative perspective. The geographical scope of the study includes five countries: Russia, Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The coverage of the first twelve weeks of the war by eleven mass media is considered, as well as speeches devoted to the war delivered by presidents of the five countries during the same period.
The chapter ‘Power Triad of Propaganda’ sets a conceptual framework for the subsequent discussion. Propaganda is viewed in a broader context of power relationships, as a particular technique of power. The broadening of perspective on propaganda allows more clearly distinguishing propaganda from the related concept, persuasion. This chapter also introduces a novel interpretation of propaganda using concepts borrowed from computer science, back and forward propagation. Back propagation implies tracking the response of a neural network to an object (a fact, in the circumstances). An error signal in a neural network is produced by comparing the network output with a desired response. Conversely, forward propagation allows tracking an original signal down to the object in a neural network (fact). Three key actors are involved in propaganda: the Principal (a member of the power elite), the Propagandist and the Propagandee. The propagandist plays the role of a gatekeeper in relations between people vested in power and their target audience.
Social networks emerged as the most important source of information about the war in Ukraine and the second most important source in Russia, after the TV. Telegram offers a space where national borders are either absent or permeable. Neither Ukraine nor Russia blocks access to Telegram, which makes its case considered in the chapter ‘Propaganda in Social Media’ particularly interesting. A group of influencers called ‘voenkory’ in Russia rose to prominence after the start of the all-out war in both belligerent countries. As in the case of the national media, the groups of Ukrainian and Russian war bloggers form separate clusters. This study suggests that the growing popularity of the term ‘Rashism’ in Ukraine and some other countries can be attributed to the activities of Ukrainian war bloggers during the initial stage of the all-out war. They devoted significantly more attention to interpreting and promoting this concept than any other political leader or mass medium in the sample.
Los servicios móviles de mensajería instantánea se han consolidado en la comunicación política porque favorecen la conexión continua y generan mayor confianza que otras redes sociales. Por eso, la mayoría de partidos recurre a este tipo de aplicaciones. El objetivo de este trabajo es identificar las estrategias comunicativas de Vox en Telegram en contextos electorales. Con las técnicas del análisis de contenido, se estudian todos los mensajes que este partido de extrema derecha difundió en su canal de Telegram durante dos campañas electorales, en las elecciones generales de 2019 y las catalanas de 2021. Concretamente, se examinan cinco variables: funciones de los mensajes; agenda temática; papel de la crítica; personalización en el líder; y nivel de hibridación con medios de comunicación tradicionales. Los resultados indican una incipiente evolución hacia funciones más innovadoras, aunque todavía con margen de mejora. Además de promocionar su agenda de campaña, Vox usa Telegram para movilizar el voto y construir ataques apelando a las emociones sobre cuestiones ideológicas; personalizar su discurso en un líder revestido de atributos igualmente emocionales; y sustituir a los medios de comunicación convencionales. Todas estas estrategias se ajustan al estilo populista de otros partidos de extrema derecha internacionales.
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Mobile instant messaging services have been consolidated in political communication because they favor continuous connection and generate more trust than other social media. For this reason, most political parties use this type of apps. The aim of this work is to identify the communication strategies of Vox on Telegram in electoral contexts. Using content analysis techniques, all the messages that this far-right party published on its Telegram channel during two electoral campaigns, in the 2019 general elections and the 2021 Catalan elections, are studied. Specifically, five variables are examined: functions of the messages; thematic agenda; role of criticism; personalization in the leader; and level of hybridization with mainstream media. The results indicate an incipient evolution towards more innovative functions, although there is still room for improvement. In addition to promoting his campaign agenda, Vox uses Telegram to mobilize the vote and attack other parties by appealing to emotions on ideological issues; personalize its speech in a leader characterized by his emotional attributes; and replace conventional media. All of these strategies fit the populist style of other far-right international parties.
Mobile instant messaging services have become a standard tool for political actors in communicating with citizens, especially during electoral campaigns. Telegram predominates in this context of disintermediated communication with the electorate. This platform enables parties to issue electoral information while taking advantage of this private space to criticize their adversaries. They do it with messages linked to negative emotions that generate a deeper impact on the audience, although they imply risks such as political polarization. This research analyzes the use of criticism to the adversary by political parties on Telegram during the electoral campaign. For this purpose, a descriptive study with an exploratory purpose was chosen, and a quantitative content analysis was carried out on 710 messages published on Telegram by the main political parties that stood for the elections to the Community of Madrid held in 2021. These parties are the PP, Ciudadanos, Podemos, Más Madrid, and Vox. The PSOE has been excluded as they did not make any publication during the analyzed period. The results show that criticizing the adversary is an emerging communication strategy in political parties on Telegram. Unlike other social media such as Facebook, the attacks on rivals are used on this platform mainly by the parties in the government, who focus their criticism on the president of the Spanish state. The attacks are mainly directed at the professional trajectory of their rivals and question the credibility of any action carried out by them.
Este artículo analiza el uso de Telegram como herramienta de comunicación electoral en España, centrándose en los mensajes enviados por los cinco partidos mayoritarios del país (PSOE, PP, Vox, Unidas Podemos y Ciudadanos) durante las campañas correspondientes a los comicios generales del 28 de abril y del 10 de noviembre de 2019. Una singularidad de este estudio recae en la triangulación metodológica, con la combinación de dos técnicas de investigación empleadas: un tradicional análisis de contenido y, a su vez, un proceso de minería de datos mediante el lenguaje de programación Python. De esta manera, los resultados iniciales, que apuntan a un mayoritario uso de Telegram como herramienta de movilización y de acercamiento del candidato al votante, se refuerzan y contextualizan gracias a la implementación de técnicas de análisis Big Data que permiten profundizar de forma ágil y precisa en las deducciones del estudio.
News sharing across different social media platforms is increasingly impacting on our news habits. However, we know very little about what makes news popular in these settings. The current paper details what types of news stories are are shared the most on two social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter. By conducting a qualitative content analysis and comparing data from four Norwegian media outlets we find that editorial comment pieces about 'softer' news topics are more frequently shared than 'harder' news topics from all media outlets-except for TV2. For this latter broadcaster, the results suggest that sensational news and news regarding celebrities allows for viral effects to take place.
Bias in political news coverage may have a profound influence on voter opinions and preferences. However, the concept of media bias actually encompasses different sub-types: Visibility bias is the salience of political actors, tonality bias the evaluation of these actors, and agenda bias the extent to which parties address preferred issues in media coverage. The present study is the first to explore how each type of bias influences party preferences. Using data from the Austrian parliamentary election campaign of 2013, we combine an online panel survey (n = 1,285) with measures of media bias from content analyses of party press releases (n = 1,922) and media coverage in eight newspapers (n = 6,970). We find substantial effects on party preferences for tonality bias and agenda bias, while visibility bias has no clear impact. Voters who are less politically sophisticated and lack a party identification are more susceptible to bias, and media bias can also reinforce existing partisan identities.
The Iranian elections of June 2009 and the ensuing protests were hailed as the 'Twitter revolution' in the media in the United Kingdom. However, this study of the use of sources by journalists covering the events shows that despite their rhetoric of the importance of social media in alerting the global community to events in Iran, journalists themselves did not turn to that social media for their own information, but relied most on traditional sourcing practices: political statements, expert opinion and a handful of 'man on the street' quotes for colour.
This study shows that although the mythology of the Internet as a place where all voices are equal, and have equal access to the public discourse continues – a kind of idealized 'public sphere' – the sourcing practices of journalists and the traditions of coverage continue to ensure that traditional voices and sources are heard above the crowd.
This report explores the variables related to partisan selective media exposure, a process by which people select media outlets and content consistent with their political predispositions. This study employs national survey data (N = 876) during the month of October 2012 immediately prior to the U.S. presidential election. Political orientation (i.e., liberal, moderate, or conservative) served as the dependent variable. The analysis revealed that political orientation was related to gender, race, and religion. The civic engagement variables of participation in a church project and participation in volunteer work within one's community were also related. Finally, the results suggest that conservatives were most prone to use conservative talk radio, Christian radio and TV, and Fox News. Liberals were more prone to use PBS and Facebook. As such, the data indicate that audience members appear to seek out partisan media and messages consistent with their political leanings. The implications of partisan selective media exposure concerning the development of political knowledge are discussed.
We examine biases in online news sources and social media communities around them. To that end, we introduce unsupervised methods considering three types of biases: selection or ``gatekeeping'' bias, coverage bias, and statement bias, characterizing each one through a series of metrics. Our results, obtained by analyzing 80 international news sources during a two-week period, show that biases are subtle but observable, and follow geographical boundaries more closely than political ones. We also demonstrate how these biases are to some extent amplified by social media.
Although many scholars dismiss allegations of bias in the mainstream US media, careful research on bias can illuminate media effects on political power and public policy. This article refines framing theory to provide a theoretical foundation for systematic studies of bias. It suggests that scholars distinguish framing from other communication by its diachronic nature and its cultural resonance. Despite journalists’ best efforts, framing often favors one side over another in political disputes. Slanted framing results from the interaction of real world developments, cultural norms, and journalistic decision rules with the sometimes proficient and other times maladroit efforts of competing elites to manage the news. A case study of 2008 presidential campaign coverage focusing on Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin illustrates how slanted framing can shift over time with changes in these interactions. The findings imply that, contrary to many critics’ contentions, unbalanced news does not arise from the presumably stable personal ideologies of journalists.
The kappa statistic is frequently used to test interrater reliability. The importance of rater reliability lies in the fact that it represents the extent to which the data collected in the study are correct representations of the variables measured. Measurement of the extent to which data collectors (raters) assign the same score to the same variable is called interrater reliability. While there have been a variety of methods to measure interrater reliability, traditionally it was measured as percent agreement, calculated as the number of agreement scores divided by the total number of scores. In 1960, Jacob Cohen critiqued use of percent agreement due to its inability to account for chance agreement. He introduced the Cohen's kappa, developed to account for the possibility that raters actually guess on at least some variables due to uncertainty. Like most correlation statistics, the kappa can range from -1 to +1. While the kappa is one of the most commonly used statistics to test interrater reliability, it has limitations. Judgments about what level of kappa should be acceptable for health research are questioned. Cohen's suggested interpretation may be too lenient for health related studies because it implies that a score as low as 0.41 might be acceptable. Kappa and percent agreement are compared, and levels for both kappa and percent agreement that should be demanded in healthcare studies are suggested.
Contemporary web-related technologies facilitate the reporting of news and events over the Web in an unparallel way and to an extent that is unprecedented. Although similarities and pattern models can be established as to make comparisons with offline world –the case of brochures or even wall-newspapers come first–, the size of the phenomenon requires special deliberation due to the technological factor which reformulates the production conditions. The cardinal virtues of this new medium usage are detected not only in its novelty, but also –and more importantly– in its potential to reach a wider body of users and the easiness of realization.
Especially in the cross-section of technology and journalism some of the intrinsic and thoroughly examined problems related to web publishing, the most prominent among them being the issue of trust, reach critical levels of importance. The special weight of each factor in such cases has yet to be examined; nevertheless, there are strong indicators that the business model and the economic factor play a crucial, yet unrevealed, role. The constitutive interrelations of the parties involved in this relatively novel communication medium are so closely and intricately interwoven that their exhaustive exploration is considered essential.
Among the conflict-convergence issues arising, credibility is the one that imperatively needs elaboration. Undoubtedly, technology imposes certain constraints on the successful intervention of gatekeepers, i.e. those responsible for keeping the posts impeachable and trustworthy in traditional communication models. Interestingly, it is again through technology that these constraints can be removed, and research on relative solutions is currently thriving.
The theoretical discussion of the issue in question includes some enlightening approaches in view of elucidation. However, it is the real world examples that provide useful inputs in order to model the interrelation of technology and journalism and determine the parameters which lead to conflict, as well as the ones providing ground for convergence. Furthermore, cultural factors, such as the language and the level of media-literacy in each society, make the phenomenon even more diverse; hence, appropriate for inductive studies – viz. generalizing from inferences based on concrete data to macroscopic conclusions for civic journalism.
As a real case example which contributes to the discussion with experience gained in production level, we examine the paradigm of the news video-enhanced portal Television without Frontiers as an indicative, yet appropriate, case in which the aforementioned factors co-exist along with the cultural parameters posed by modern Greek societal aspects. The appropriateness of the case is ensured by the hybrid nature of this type of medium, which combines traditional media reporting schemes and user contribution; it is further underlined by the success of the portal with regard to users (in quantitative terms) and impact (in qualitative ones).
The analysis of the empirical data gathered from the real case scenario, and the discussion and conclusions are done in a collaborative manner: both the developers of the portal, expressing the technological limitations or decisions, and the inspirer of the project, being the owner and director of the portal, thus expressing the journalistic and at the same time the business-case of the project, collaborated in order to identify and bring to forth from the pool of content and statistical data the conditions and subtle interrelations of technology and journalism in everyday life, and production conditions of a contemporary, participatory Greek news portal.
Television without Frontiers started as a project in autumn 2008 and was launched in early November 2008. During December 2008 there was a major social upheaval in Greece triggered by the shooting to death of a 15-year old youngster by a policeman. This was a milestone for the recently launched new medium and its relation to the user basis. A year later, during December 2009, the medium entered its version 2.0 period, based upon the experience gained throughout the previous year and one major breakthrough: the business-model departed from the previous phase in which it was solely based upon advertising revenue and introduced the model of subscription paying premium members. Therefore the timing is ideal for an estimation and analysis of the experience gained during the most crucial beta-launching year. This being the case, the fact that the major conclusion of this analysis pinpoints the economic factor as the single most outstanding one as far as technology and journalism conflict or converge in production level is concerned is far from being a mere coincidence.
The bias in the news media is an inherent flaw of the news production process. The resulting bias often causes a sharp increase in political polarization and in the cost of conflict on social issues such as Iraq war. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for readers to have penetrating views on realities against such bias. This paper presents NewsCube, a novel Internet news service aiming at mitigating the effect of media bias. NewsCube automatically creates and promptly provides readers with multiple classified viewpoints on a news event of interest. As such, it effectively helps readers understand a fact from a plural of viewpoints and formulate their own, more balanced viewpoints. While media bias problem has been studied extensively in communications and social sciences, our work is the first to develop a news service as a solution and study its effect. We discuss the effect of the service through various user studies.
Social media platforms such as Twitter pose new challenges for decision-makers in an international crisis. We examine Twitter's role during Iran's 2009 election crisis using a comparative analysis of Twitter investors, US State Department diplomats, citizen activists and Iranian protesters and paramilitary forces. We code for key events during the election's aftermath from 12 June to 5 August 2009, and evaluate Twitter. Foreign policy, international political economy and historical sociology frameworks provide a deeper context of how Twitter was used by different users for defensive information operations and public diplomacy. Those who believe Twitter and other social network technologies will enable ordinary people to seize power from repressive regimes should consider the fate of Iran's protesters, some of whom paid for their enthusiastic adoption of Twitter with their lives.
Does media bias affect voting? We analyze the entry of Fox News in cable markets and its impact on voting. Between October
1996 and November 2000, the conservative Fox News Channel was introduced in the cable programming of 20 percent of U. S. towns.
Fox News availability in 2000 appears to be largely idiosyncratic, conditional on a set of controls. Using a data set of voting
data for 9,256 towns, we investigate if Republicans gained vote share in towns where Fox News entered the cable market by
the year 2000. We find a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between
1996 and 2000. Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News. Fox News also affected
voter turnout and the Republican vote share in the Senate. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of
its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure. The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect
for rational voters, or a permanent effect for nonrational voters subject to persuasion.
The Handbook to Global Online Journalism features a collection of readings from international practitioners and scholars that represent a comprehensive and state-of-the-art overview of the relationship between the internet and journalism around the world. • Provides a state-of-the-art overview of current research and future directions of online journalism • Traces the evolution of journalistic practices, business models, and shifting patterns of journalistic cultures that have emerged around the world with the migration of news online • Written and edited by top international researchers and practitioners in the area of online journalism • Features an extensive breadth of coverage, including economics, organizational practices, contents and experiences • Discusses developments in online news in a wide range of countries, from the USA to Brazil, and from Germany to China • Contains original theory, new research data, and reviews of existing studies in the field.
The recent increase in partisan media has generated interest in whether such outlets polarize viewers. I draw on theories of motivated reasoning to explain why partisan media polarize viewers, why these programs affect some viewers much more strongly than others, and how long these effects endure. Using a series of original experiments, I find strong support for my theoretical expectations, including the argument that these effects can still be detected several days postexposure. My results demonstrate that partisan media polarize the electorate by taking relatively extreme citizens and making them even more extreme. Though only a narrow segment of the public watches partisan media programs, partisan media's effects extend much more broadly throughout the political arena.
Data obtained from a Survey Research Center post-election study shows a newspaper's perceived support of a candidate was associated with about a 6% edge in the vote for that candidate.
Scholars of political communication have long examined newsworthiness by focusing on the news choices of media organizations (Lewin, 194734.
Lewin , K. 1947. Frontiers and group dynamics. Human Relations, 1: 143–153. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references; White, 195056.
White , D. M. 1950. The “gate keeper”: A case study in the selection of news. Journalism Quarterly, 27: 383–390. View all references; Sigal, 197347.
Sigal , L. V. 1973. Reporters and officials, Lexington, MA: Heath. View all references; Gans, 197919.
Gans , H. J. 1979. Deciding what's news, New York: Vintage Books. View all references). However, in recent years these traditional arbiters of the news have increasingly been joined or even supplanted in affecting the public agenda by “new media” competitors, including cable news, talk radio, and even amateur bloggers. The standards by which this new class of decision makers evaluates news are at best only partially explained by prior studies focused on professional journalists and organizations. In this study, we seek to correct this oversight by content analyzing five online news sources—including wire services, cable news, and political blog sites—in order to compare their news judgments in the months prior to, and immediately following, the 2006 midterm election. We collected all stories from Reuters' and AP's “top political news” sections. We then investigated whether a given story was also chosen to appear on each wire's top news page (indicating greater perceived newsworthiness than those that were not chosen) and compared the wires' editorial choices to those of more partisan blogs (from the left: DailyKos.com; from the right: FreeRepublic.com) and cable outlets (FoxNews.com). We find evidence of greater partisan filtering for the latter three Web sources, and relatively greater reliance on traditional newsworthiness criteria for the news wires.
Electoral research acknowledges the growing significance of the mass media in contemporary campaigns, but scholars are divided on the nature of this influence. Using a unique database that includes both media content and public opinion, we examine the flow of partisan information from newspapers to the voters and assess the press's role in electoral politics and citizen learning. We find that the American press does not present clear and singular messages about presidential elections but, rather multiple messages about the candidates and the campaign. In addition, perception of the information is shaped as much by an individual's political views as by the objective content. Despite the mixed messages, we find that a newspaper's editorial content is significantly related to candidate preferences in 1992. These results challenge the minimal effects interpretation of the media, because local newspapers can play a significant role in providing cues that influence voters' electoral calculus.
The aim of this study is to give some systematic insights into how Irish media tend to report an election campaign. The main focus will be on their attitudes toward and treatment of the competing parties and candidates. Content analysis data from television newscasts and campaign stories in four of the largest newspapers is used to investigate three different forms of media bias: coverage bias, agenda bias, and statement bias. We find that Irish media tend to grant disproportionate amounts of coverage to the government parties, Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats; the more prominent the coverage, the less proportionate it becomes. The extent to which media take the freedom to ‘distort’ party agendas in their reporting appears to depend on party size, campaign strategy and the acquired status and acceptance of a party amongst the political and media establishment. Most notable, however, is the predominantly negative attitude of all Irish print media towards political actors. Instead of a polarised partisan press, as for example in the UK, in Ireland we seem to be faced with a rather homogenous anti‐politics bias.
Among the unpleasant surprises that awaited Barack Obama's administration during the post-election turmoil in Iran, the unexpected role of the Internet must have been most rankling. A few government wonks might have expected Iranians to rebel, but who could predict they would do so using Silicon Valley's favorite toys? Team Obama, never shy to tout its mastery of all things digital, was caught off guard and, at least for a moment or two, appeared ill-informed about the heady developments in Iranian cyberspace. Speaking a few days after the protests began, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confessed that she wouldn't know "a Twitter from a tweeter, but apparently, it's very important"—referring to Twitter, a popular mix between a blogging service and a social network that enables its users to exchange brief messages of up to 140 characters in length.
This article investigates the current state of press partisanship in the UK. Utilizing content analysis data from the 2005 General Election campaign, recent hypotheses about press dealignment are tested with quantitative methods. Partisan tendencies in reporting are measured in terms of coverage bias, statement bias, and agenda bias. As the governing party, Labour benefits from coverage bias in all papers, while the Liberal Democrats remain marginalized. It can be shown that increasingly ambiguous endorsements in broadsheet and tabloid press alike translate into a general absence of open support for political parties. At best, endorsed parties receive neutral treatment, with their opponents being harshly criticized. Partisan tendencies do, however, manifest themselves in other patterns of campaign coverage. Even weakly partisan papers engage in strategic behaviour, most notably by reinforcing the issue agendas of endorsed parties. With both the Independent and the Guardian lending strategic support to the Liberal Democrats, and the Murdoch press being largely non‐committal, the analysis hints at an erosion of support for New Labour.
A meta-analysis considered 59 quantitative studies containing data concerned with partisan media bias in presidential election campaigns since 1948. Types of bias considered were gatekeeping bias, which is the preference for selecting stories from one party or the other; coverage bias, which considers the relative amounts of coverage each party receives; and statement bias, which focuses on the favorability of coverage toward one party or the other. On the whole, no significant biases were found for the newspaper industry. Biases in newsmagazines were virtually zero as well. However, meta-analysis of studies of television network news showed small, measurable, but probably insubstantial coverage and statement biases.
We investigate how editorial slant—defined as the quantity and tone of a newspaper's candidate coverage as influenced by its editorial position—shapes candidate evaluations and vote choice. We avoid various methodological pitfalls by focusing on a single Senate campaign in a single market with two competing, editorially distinct newspapers. Combining comprehensive content analyses of the papers with an Election Day exit poll, we assess the slant of campaign coverage and its effects on voters. We find compelling evidence that editorial slant influences voters’ decisions. Our results raise serious questions about the media's place in democratic processes.
BACKGROUND: Evaluations of interrater agreement and interrater reliability can be applied to a number of different contexts and are frequently encountered in social and administrative pharmacy research. OBJECTIVES: To highlight key differences between interrater agreement and interrater reliability; describe the key concepts and approaches to evaluating interrater agreement and interrater reliability; and provide examples of their applications to research in the field of social and administrative pharmacy. METHODS: This is a descriptive review of interrater agreement and interrater reliability indices. It outlines the practical applications and interpretation of these indices in social and administrative pharmacy research. RESULTS: Interrater agreement indices assess the extent to which the responses of 2 or more independent raters are concordant. Interrater reliability indices assess the extent to which raters consistently distinguish between different responses. A number of indices exist, and some common examples include Kappa, the Kendall coefficient of concordance, Bland-Altman plots, and the intraclass correlation coefficient. Guidance on the selection of an appropriate index is provided. CONCLUSIONS: Selection of an appropriate index to evaluate interrater agreement or interrater reliability is dependent on a number of factors including the context in which the study is being undertaken, the type of variable under consideration, and the number of raters making assessments.
Content analysis is a research method that was traditionally utilized by communication scholars, but as the study of media messages has grown, scholars in other fields have increasingly relied on the methodology. This paper reports on a systematic review of studies using quantitative content analysis methods to examine health messages in the mass media, excluding the Internet, from 1985 to 2005. We searched for health-related content analysis studies published in peer-reviewed journals, identifying 441 articles meeting inclusion criteria. We examined article attributes including theories used, topics, media type, and intercoder reliability measures, and looked at differences over time. Our findings show that studies focusing on health-related messages increased from 1985 to 2005. During this time, studies primarily examined magazines, television, and newspapers, with an emphasis on topics related to substance use, violence, sex, and obesity and body image. Results suggest that studies published in communication journals are significantly more likely to include intercoder reliability data and theory discussion. We recommend that all publications, regardless of discipline or impact factor, request the inclusion of intercoder reliability data reported for individual variables, and suggest that authors address theoretical concepts when appropriate. We also encourage authors to include the term "content analysis," as well as media type and health topic studied, as keywords to make it easier to locate articles of interest when conducting literature searches.
Objectives. This research explores the consequences of a fragmented television news audience. The recent proliferation of a wide array of television news sources has influenced the manner in which a large number of Americans get their information about politics and government. The political consequences of media fragmentation and the polarization of the U.S. television news audience are explored.
Methods. I analyze data on television news-gathering habits and political attitudes collected from several surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center during the 2004 presidential election campaign.
Results. The Fox News Channel has been the main beneficiary of television news fragmentation by appealing to those individuals who have become disillusioned with what they perceive as a liberally-biased mainstream media. The findings show that the Fox News audience has a distinct set of political attitudes regarding President Bush and his opposition. Evidence also indicates that the Fox News audience has distinct voting behavior patterns, even when controlling for party identification. Finally, the results illustrate that Fox News watchers have perceptions of political reality that differ from the rest of the television news audience.
Conclusions. The television news audience is divided along political lines. This division could contribute toward further political polarization among the U.S. mass public as the content of television news coverage of politics becomes less and less homogenized.
August 11. becomes the world’s largest Telegram channel
- Tasnim News Agency
Internet Penetration Rate Reaches 82%/Mobile Internet is at the Top of the Connections
- Mehr News Agency
- Siapera Eugenia
The Role of “Telegram” as a Social Network in Advertising about the 12th Presidential Election Iran. Enslish Translation of [Naqshe Narm Afzāre Ejtemāei Telegram Dar Davāzhahomin Doreh Entekhābāte Riyasat Jomhoori az Manzare Ray Dahandegan
- Mahdizadeh Taleshi
- Seyed Mohamad
- Eghbal Khaledian
- Mehrav Ferdosi
Social Journalism: Exploring How Social Media is Shaping Journalism
- Hermida
Intercoder Reliability
- Young Cho
- Ik
Interrater Agreement and Interrater Reliability: Key Concepts, Approaches, and Applications
- B Gisev
- J Natasabell
- Timothy F Simon
- Chen