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Multiperspectival Normative Assessment: The Case of Mediated Reactions to Terrorism
Abstract
This article provides a model for how communication phenomena can be normativelyassessed using multiple normative perspectives simultaneously. We exemplify the proce-dure of multiperspectival normative assessment (MNA) using mediated reactions to ter-rorism as our case in point. We first identify the normative challenges related to thespeed and substance of terrorism communication and the ways in which relations ofsolidarity are communicatively constructed in reacting to terrorism. We link these chal-lenges to four distinct normative theories that prioritize competing values for public dis-course (freedom, community values, empowerment of the marginalized or constructivedebate). The resulting set of competing normative expectations, which help assess theperformance of terrorism communication, are eventually translated into recommenda-tions for professional and non-professional communicators. In conclusion, we showhow MNA can help ground empirical scholarship in firmer theoretical foundationswhile simultaneously demonstrating the usefulness of normative theory in analyzing awide range of issues.
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This study looks into how the combination of Islam, refugees, and terrorism topics leads to text-internal changes in the emotional tone of news articles and how these vary across countries and media outlets. Using a multilingual human-validated sentiment analysis, we compare fear and pity in more than 560,000 articles from the most important online news sources in six countries (U.S., Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, and Lebanon). We observe that fear and pity work antagonistically—that is, the more articles in a particular topical category contain fear, the less pity they will feature. The coverage of refugees without mentioning terrorists and Muslims/Islam featured the lowest fear and highest pity levels of all topical categories studied here. However, when refugees were covered in combination with terrorism and/or Islam, fear increased and pity decreased in Christian-majority countries, whereas no such pattern appeared in Muslim-majority countries (Lebanon, Turkey). Variations in emotions are generally driven more by country-level differences than by the political alignment of individual outlets.
A healthy democracy needs citizens to make reflective political judgements. Sceptics argue that reflective opinions are either nonexistent or rare. Proponents of deliberative democracy suggest that democratic deliberation is capable of prompting reflective political reasoning among people. Yet, little is known about the mechanisms underlying this relationship. This article offers a bridge between psychology and political theory and proposes a theory of perspective-taking in deliberation. It argues that under the right conditions, deliberation induces more reflective judgements by eliciting the process of perspective-taking – actively imagining others’ experiences, perspectives and feelings – in citizen deliberators. Two institutional features of deliberative forums are emphasized: the presence of a diversity of viewpoints and the interplay of fact-based rational argumentation and storytelling. I test the plausibility of this theory using a case study – the Irish Citizens’ Assembly – thereby, relying on qualitative in-depth interview data and quantitative survey data. I further substantiate my findings with a laboratory experiment.
Whether Muslim immigrants can adapt to Western values is a recurring theme in European contestation over diversity. Yet, a review of literature that engages with ‘values’ in studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism reveals a dominant and narrow conceptualisation: values as core trait of groups. This conceptualisation reinforces an idea that values mark strict boundaries between homogenous and dichotomous ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘Values’ figure particularly prominently in post-terror public debates. An analysis of value-talk after the 2011 terror attacks in Norway shows a prevailing narrative of value-based unity: an enlarged ‘we’ that supersedes ethnic and religious divisions. Simultaneously, the post-terror setting shows an ‘us’ articulated in contrast to the extremist Other who attacks ‘our values’, the immigrant Other that threatens those ‘values’, and the multiculturalist Other who fails to protect them. Drawing on well-known insights on the complex dynamics of racial, ethnic, and national relations, this article untangles the variability in ‘us’ and ‘them’ articulated through value-talk. It thus challenges widely accepted approaches to values as core traits that divide cultural or political groups. Instead, it brings attention to how value-talk works as expressions of multiple and changing constellations of ‘we’, ‘us’, and ‘them’ in contestation over diversity.
Social media, and Twitter in particular, have become important sources for journalists in times of crises. User-generated content (UGC) can provide journalists with on-site information and material they otherwise would not have access to. But how they source and verify UGC has not yet been systematically analyzed. This study analyzes sourcing and verification practices on Twitter during the Brussels attacks in March 2016. Based on quantitative content analysis, we identified (1) the journalists and news organizations sourcing during the attacks, (2) classified different forms of sourcing and verification requests, and (3) analyzed the sourced UGC. Results show that sourcing on Twitter has become a global phenomenon. During the first hours of the attack, journalists rely on UGC. Their sourcing and verification practices vary widely and often lack basic verification procedures, which leads to a discussion about the ethical implications of sourcing practices.
Previous research shows that news about Islamist terrorism can seriously affect citizens’ fear reactions and influence non-Muslims’ out-group perceptions of Muslims. We argue that news coverage that explicitly links Islam to terrorism or terrorists of the Islamic State (IS) may trigger fears in non-Muslim individuals. In contrast, news differentiation (i.e., explicitly distinguishing between Muslims and Muslim terrorists) may dampen particular fear reactions in citizens. To test the specific effects of news differentiation, a controlled laboratory experiment was conducted. Results showed that undifferentiated news about IS terrorism increased participants’ fear of terrorism and resulted in hostile perceptions toward Muslims in general. However, fear of terrorism only enhanced hostile attitudes toward Muslims for individuals with negative and moderately positive prior experiences with Muslims. For those with very positive experiences, no such relationship was found. Implications of these findings for journalism practice and intergroup relations in multicultural societies are discussed.
Journalistic news coverage plays an essential role for providing an audience with a diverse, multifaceted perspective upon public affairs. However, in the scholarly debate, most measures of viewpoint diversity do not distinguish between statements raising commensurable interpretations, and contributions that construct different meaning in a consequential sense. We provide an operationalization of viewpoint diversity that builds upon a tradition of identifying distinct interpretations through framing analysis. Going beyond frame diversity, we then distinguish between equivalent, complementary and competing, diverse interpretations: we consider as commensurable those frames that derive from the same ‘interpretative repertoire’, a notion borrowed from discourse studies. We propose a strategy for operationalization and the measurement of viewpoint diversity. Our focus on meaningfully different interpretations contributes to advancing research into journalism, political opinion formation, audience elaboration, and other important fields of study.
Tables and figures Foreword Friedhelm Neidhardt Preface Glossary Part I. Introduction: 1. Two related stories 2. Historical context 3. Methods Part II. Major Outcomes: 4. The discursive opportunity structure 5. Standing 6. Framing Part III. Representing Different Constituencies: 7. Representing women's claims 8. Representing religious claims 9. Representing the tradition of the left Part IV. The Quality of Abortion Discourse: 10. Normative criteria for the public sphere 11. Measuring the quality of discourse 12. Metatalk 13. Lessons for democracy and the public sphere Methodological appendix References Index.
News frames are patterns of news construction journalists rely on to present information to their audiences. While much of the research on news frames has focused on their identification and effects, less work has investigated the specific contributions these different frames make to democratic life. Value judgments about distinct news frames are often not generated in a systematic fashion, not grounded in democratic theory, and/or not supported by empirical evidence. In this article, we address these problems by arguing for and extending normative assessment as a standard operating procedure to determine the democratic value of political communication phenomena. We demonstrate the usefulness of normative assessment by showing how two important generic news frames (politics as a strategic game and as a substantive contestation) contribute to a deliberative public discourse prior to a general election. Using data on television news coverage of the German federal election campaign in 2009, we investigate how these frames are related to the inclusiveness and civility of public discourse and the extent to which it features exchanges of substantive reasons for political positions. Results show that mediated democratic deliberation suffers consistently from strategic game framing, while contestation frames make ambivalent contributions. Implications for political communication scholarship as well as journalistic practice are discussed.
This paper aims to clarify current knowledge on the contribution of communication to crisis management in the case of terrorism incidents. This is done by means of a systematic review of the scientific literature on terrorism communication over the last 10 years to identify the many challenges facing communication in such crises, and represents the first attempt of its kind. To date, within the literature on terrorism communication, much attention has been paid to chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear hazards. Terrorism crises are complex and challenging. Preparedness for such diverse low‐probability high‐impact crises can best be included in a wider educative approach. Terrorism crises call for fast information updates that, using a multi‐channel approach, can be tailored to fit different needs and (social) media habits. Full text free available on http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-5973.12065/full
In this study the authors investigate the ways in which a television interview with a Palestinian female terrorist was received by Jewish-Israeli youth with hawkish political views, focusing on their emotional reactions. The ethical implications of the interpretive acts performed by viewers are discussed. The authors' analysis of viewers' responses to a media portrayal of a female terrorist contributes to the understanding of the role played by gender in the construction of enemy images in violent conflicts.
There is currently a diversity of understandings of digital democracy being deployed within popular commentary, research, policy making, and practical initiative. However, there is a lack of resources clearly outlining this diversity; this article undertakes such an outline. It provides a reconstruction of four digital democracy positions. These four positions are referred to here as liberal-individualist, deliberative, counter-publics, and autonomist Marxist. The delineation of each position draws from critical-interpretative research and has been developed with respect to three elements: the democratic subject assumed, the related conception of democracy promoted, and the associated democratic affordances of digital media technology. The aim is to draw attention to different understandings of what extending democracy through digital media means, and to provide a framework for further examination and evaluation of digital democracy rhetoric and practice.
This article develops a normative model of public deliberation and proposes ways to apply it in the comparative empirical analysis of political media content. In the first part of the article, a set of normative claims connected to deliberativeness is explicated that revises some of the familiar claims found in the literature. Deliberative media content, it is argued, can provide a repository of diverging justifications for political positions as well as model deliberative behavior in audiences. In conjunction with an attentive, deliberating public, deliberative media content can also serve to procure and withdraw legitimation with respect to political decisions and the polity as a whole. In the second part of the article, a new research design is proposed that operationalizes deliberativeness in print media by taking into account apparent differences in the cultures of journalism. The proposal involves measuring deliberativeness on four different levels of analysis—the idea, the utterance, the article, and the page/edition—as well as in three different political/cultural contexts—the liberal, democratic corporatist, and polarized pluralist models of media and politics as distinguished by Hallin and Mancini.
In recent years, there has been an explosion of ambitious sociological research thatattempts to map and explain the dynamics of media understood not as technologiesor individual organizations but rather as systems interacting with other systems. Thisapproach has multiple roots, but in this essay, I argue that its reach and influencehave been amplified by the work of Jurgen Habermas, especially through his conceptof the “public sphere.” Habermas has been especially helpful in clarifying normativedebates about democracy, and he is right to suggest that normative criteria canusefully guide empirical research. Yet his own empirical model, despite some recentimprovements, remains underdeveloped and moreover, embodies debatable assump-tions about the social origins of democratic and intellectual renewal. Habermas, andmany sociologists of social movements influenced by or implicitly allied to hisproject, make the mistake of taking the “media system” as a given and then orientingtheir analysis toward effective strategies to exert influence in the face of thissupposedly invariant media “logic.” A new generation of researchers, influenced byBourdieu and state-oriented new institutionalism, is fortunately moving to fill in thisgap just at the moment when journalists and activists are searching for guidance inrebuilding a media system devastated by commercial pressures and the inadequatelyremunerated shift to online platforms. This opportunity for sociology to describe andexplain variations in media logics and to actively engage in shaping these logics fordemocratic ends must not be missed.In the remainder of this essay, I thus attempt to address the following questions:First: What has Habermas contributed to the sociology of media and communica-tion? And to what extent and in what ways has his conceptual apparatus—chiefly the
Jürgen Habermas is arguably the most influential social theorist and philosopher of the twentieth century, and his imprint on media and communication studies extends well into the twenty-first. This book lucidly unpacks Habermas’s sophisticated contributions to the study of media, centering on the three core concepts for which his work is best known: the public sphere, communicative action, and deliberative democracy.
Habermas and the Media offers an accessible introduction, as well as a critical investigation of how Habermas’s thinking can help us to understand and assess our contemporary communication environment – and where his framework needs revision and extension.
Full of original and sometimes surprising insights, this book is essential reading for scholars and students of media, political communication, and democracy, as well as anyone seeking guidance through Habermas’s rich world of thought.
It has become widely accepted that there is an almost symbiotic relationship between terrorism and the news media as terrorism provides for exciting and violent stories which help sell the news product and the media provides terrorist groups with a means of spreading their message and creating fear among the general public. This chapter will address two interrelated questions: (1) What role does western news media play in carrying the terrorist message? (2) Can governments limit the news media’s reporting on terrorism?
The deadly attacks on a public meeting and on a Jewish citizen in Copenhagen in February 2015 have given rise to a vast amount of public discussion and interpretation of the events themselves, their background, their causes, their significance, and their repercussions. During these discussions, various conceptions of publicness and public space have been articulated. Indeed, one may view the killings as a ‘critical discourse moment’ in which a range of discourses have been employed to help interpret, understand, and deal with what happened. In several of these discourses, conceptions of publicness play a central part. This article sets out to investigate the conceptions of publicness that were articulated in the Danish public spheres following the attacks. The article maps out some of the key different and partly contradictory notions of publicness that the reactions to the killings brought to the fore. The investigation thus focuses on the articulation of normative expectations and ideals of public spheres, on the limitations and restrictions that were acknowledged, and on the main societal problems and (inter)national contexts to which publicness was viewed as related. The analysis will cover national newspapers and center on the discursive resources of the media elite in early responses to the attacks, for example in editorials, or comments by writers, academics, debaters, and intellectuals.
This project argues that multidisciplinary methods and work to reconsider key concepts are critical if media ethics scholarship is to continue to mature. It identifies 3 dimensions of a reoriented framework for media ethics theory: one that conceptualizes moral motivation as the focus of inquiry at the individual level; another that focuses on promising assessments of autonomy and organizational influences for a transformed media landscape; and a third that applies formalist virtue ethics as the best framework for normative claims arising from the first 2.
Packaging Terrorism investigates how American media have identified and covered international terrorism and violence since September 11, 2001. Compares US coverage with that of British and Arab media Discusses the priorities, assumptions, political debates, deadline pressures and bottom-line considerations that will continue to influence coverage in the future Suggests how terrorism could be better covered by the media going forwards.
This article offers a formal normative assessment of political satire. It summarizes social scientific research on the influence of political satire and findings on the normative implications of political satire within a democratic framework. Two cogent lines of empirical research, persuasion and understanding, receive special attention. Political satire's potential to generate normatively positive democratic effects is examined according to three competing theories of democracy: republicanism, pluralism, and elitism. Reports of its relatively small effect prevent clear normative judgments on satire as good or bad for democracy. However, its relationship to internal political self-efficacy merits further investigation. At the system level, political satire might generate significant normatively positive effects in the republican and elitist democratic frameworks. Examples of U.S. traditional political satire reveal the boundaries within which satire functions and their impact on the normative roles of this potentially important form of political discourse.
The SAGE Handbook of Political Communication is an authoritative and comprehensive survey of political communication drawing together a team of the world’s leading scholars to provide a state-of-the-art review that sets the agenda for future study. © Holli A. Semetko and Margaret Scammell Introduction and Editorial Arrangement 2012.
Studies of political discussions online have been dominated by approaches that focus exclusively on deliberation, ignoring other equally relevant communication norms. This study conducts a normative assessment of discussion spaces in two prominent web platforms—Twitter hashtags and newspaper comment sections devoted to particular political issues—applying the norms of communitarianism, liberal individualism, and deliberation. The platforms’ distinct design features and users’ left/right issue stances emerge as significant predictors of normative differences.
Transforming Media Coverage of Violent Conflicts offers a fresh view of contemporary violent conflicts, suggesting an explanation to the dramatic changes in the ways in which war and terror are covered by Western media. It argues that viewers around the globe follow violent events, literally and metaphorically, on "wide" and "flat" screens, in "high-definition". The "wide-screen" means that at present the screen is wide enough to include new actors - terrorists, 'enemy' leaders, ordinary people in a range of roles, and journalists in the field - who have gained status of the kind that in the past was exclusive to editors, army generals and governmental actors. The "high-definition" metaphor means that the eye of the camera closes in on both traditional and new actors, probing their emotions, experiences and beliefs in ways that were irrelevant in past conflicts. The "flat-screen" metaphor stands for the consequences of the two former phenomena, leading to a loss of the hierarchy of the meanings of war. Paradoxically, the better the quality of viewing, the less the understanding of what we see. Through these metaphors, Kampf and Liebes systematically analyse changes in the practices, technologies, infrastructures and external institutional relationships of journalism.
This exploratory study attempts to explain how journalistic routines for covering violent conflict lead to the construction of ethnocentric news. A distinction is made between two sets of routines. One set is permanent and ensures ethnocentric control over the flow of information, while a second set varies as journalists construct coherent narratives for particular events. This latter set of routines is further broken down into what are labeled the 'Victims Mode' and 'Defensive Mode' of reporting. The Victims Mode is used when one's own citizens have suffered an especially tragic loss of life, while the Defensive Mode is employed when one's forces have carried out an attack that has inflicted a similar loss on the enemy. It is argued that each of these modes of reporting parallels psychological reactions that have been found in individuals. The ideas raised in the theoretical discussion are investigated by comparing cov- erage of two events by Israeli and Palestinian television. Two events were chosen for analysis: a Palestinian suicide bombing that killed 19 Israelis, and the killing of Hamas leader Sheik Salach Shehadeh in which 16 Palestinians were killed. An in-depth reading of the six news broadcasts provides important insights into how journalists' routines ensure a steady flow of culturally acceptable news stories that reinforce hatred between enemies.
The goal of this article is to try to resolve two key problems in the duty-based approach of W. D. Ross: the source of principles and a process for moving from prima facie to actual duty. I use a naturalistic explanation for the former and a nine-step method for making concrete ethical decisions as they could be applied to journalism. Consistent with Ross's position, the process is complicated, particularly in tougher problems, and it cannot guarantee correct choices. Again consistent with Ross, such complexity and uncertainty speak in the method's favor, given the difficulty—factual, motivational, and organizational—of ethics problems and decision making.
The ‘war on terror’ has emerged as the principal conflict of our time, where ‘Islamic fanaticism’ is identified as the greatest
threat to Western liberal democracies. Within the United Kingdom, and beyond, this political discourse has designated Muslims
as the new ‘enemy within’—justifying the introduction of counter-terrorist legislation and facilitating the construction of
Muslims as a ‘suspect community’. In this paper, we develop Hillyard's (1993) notion of the ‘suspect community’ and evidence how Muslims have replaced the Irish as the main focus of the government's
security agenda whilst also recognizing that some groups have been specifically targeted for state surveillance. We conclude
that the categorization of Muslims as suspect may be serving to undermine national security rather than enhance it.
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