How states tighten control: a field theory perspective on journalism in contemporary Crimea

This article contributes to denationalizing Bourdieu’s field theory by analysing the relationship between a regional news media field, the state and transnational influences. The article seeks to answer the question of how a state can impose limits on the autonomy of the news media field during political transition. Field theory is applied to changes that have taken place in Crimean news media since Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in 2014. Drawing on narrative interviews with journalists who worked in Crimea in 2012–17, expert interviews, and secondary sources, I demonstrate how Crimea’s news media field went from being dominated by varied Ukrainian private news media owners to becoming dominated by the Russian state. I show that states can employ direct measures such as anti‐press violence and ownership appropriation of news media outlets in order to increase concentration of state media ownership. In addition, states can reallocate capital in the news media field, disenfranchising some journalists and outlets while favouring others. The adaptive strategies of individual journalists, who, upon losing capital, can sometimes relocate or leave their jobs, also changes the composition of news media fields. Departing from a common view of social spaces as bounded within nation‐states, I examine how the news media field of Crimea has been shaped by both transnational influences, and by the direct imposition of Russian state power through a reconstitution of national borders.     

Can World System Theory predict news flow on twitter? The case of government-sponsored broadcasting

Social media platforms provide world governments with the opportunity to distribute news content from their broadcast channels directly to foreign publics [Wallerstein, I. (1974). The modern world system. New York: Academic Press] World System Theory, which has successfully explained and predicted the structure of international news flow, is now being challenged. Specifically, these social platforms undermined assumptions regarding the one-way flow of information toward audiences and the exclusive institutional nature of the players in the international system. This study examines the unique case of government-sponsored news media and its international news flow. It finds that while the structure of the international news flow on Twitter exhibits a hierarchical core–periphery structure, non-institutional actors (e.g. bloggers) conformed less than institutional players (e.g. governments and news media) to that structure. This study also found that non-institutional actors assumed the role of bridging news sources and audiences, a role traditionally reserved for a small minority of elite news media. The growing and diversified pool of information mediators resulted in a more fragmented network of news flow, siloed, rather than interconnected. Research findings are synthesized and analyzed in the context of international broadcasting and social media scholarship.     

The Othering of Muslims: Discourses of Radicalization in the New York Times, 1969–2014

In this article, I engage with Edward Said's Orientalism and various perspectives within the othering paradigm to analyze the emergence and transformation of radicalization discourses in the news media. Employing discourse analysis of 607 New York Times articles from 1969 to 2014, this article demonstrates that radicalization discourses are not new but are the result of complex sociolinguistic and historical developments that cannot be reduced to dominant contemporary understandings of the concept or to singular events or crises. The news articles were then compared to 850 government documents, speeches, and other official communications. The analysis of the data indicates that media conceptualizations of radicalization, which once denoted political and economic differences, have now shifted to overwhelmingly focus on Islam. As such, radicalization discourse now evokes the construct radicalization as symbolic marker of conflict between the West and the East. I also advanced the established notion that the news media employ strategic discursive strategies that contribute to conceptual distinctions that are used to construct Muslims as an “alien other” to the West.     

The representation of women and girls of color in United States crime news

There is a large body of literature examining the media portrayals of white females as both victims and offenders in crime news, but very little is known about how minority females—including Black, Latina, Middle Eastern, Native American, and Asian women and girls—are portrayed in these roles. In this literature review, I discuss general stereotypes surrounding women of color and their depictions within crime news stories as both victims and offenders. An examination of crime news media portrayals of minority females reveals that outdated and harmful stereotypes provide media personnel frames with which to write their stories. The negative portrayals of minority women and girls—as both victims and offenders—serve to reinforce racist beliefs and affect how consumers view political issues.     

The pivotal role of news agencies in the context of globalization: a historical approach

The global media play a fundamental role in contemporary globalization, making possible instant communication and promoting an experience of global connectedness. The globalization of media communications has deeply shaped the modern journalistic field in the last 150 years and, at the same time, global news organizations have been instrumental in creating the very conditions that have made globalization possible. In this article I explore the relationship between globalization and the media and trace the historical development of the field of global news, examining in detail the role and trajectories of its most important players, the global news agencies, and highlighting significant parallels between nineteenth‐century globalization and the processes that have led to increased global connectedness in the past decades. I also devote some attention to the more recent developments in the field of global news and the appearance of new types of media organizations.     

Coverage of Marikana: war and conflict and the case for Peace Journalism

Different narratives around the Marikana massacre of August 16, 2012 have emerged in the South African news media with regard to what actually happened, what the underlying causes of the strikes were, and who is to blame. Criticism has been levelled against the mainstream news media with regard to embedded journalism, sensationalised coverage and polarisation of views and stakeholders. For this article, an analysis of news articles on Marikana published in the mainstream South African news media has been conducted. This analysis confirms many of the findings of earlier research and I argue that the form of reporting evident in these findings conforms to what has been labelled “war journalism.” I argue that the coverage of Marikana could have been improved by adopting “Peace Journalism” as a model for reporting.     

News‐Media and Terrorism: Changing Relationship,Changing Definitions

This article discusses two aspects that are important for understanding the relationship between Western news media and terrorism: the changing representation of terrorists and terrorist attacks in the media and, with it, the changing definition of terrorism. By calling attention to evolving news media practices in times of terrorism, I argue that advanced communication technologies and the emergence of global media ecology since the 1990s has made terrorism more visible in both national and international media landscapes. One result is that the more the news media expose terrorism to global audiences via the “front door,” the more controversial the use of the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” become in social, political, and scholarly discourses. The paper addresses the evolving journalistic practices and their consequences as documented in previous studies on media reporting of terrorism in several national contexts, mostly the UK, the United States, and Israel.     

Bringing the Media in: Newspaper Readership and Human Rights*

Cross‐national studies examining human rights outcomes have seldom considered the role of the news media. This is unfortunate, as a large body of work in media studies suggests that the news industry effectively educates citizens, shapes public attitudes, and stimulates political action. I juxtapose these two literatures in a cross‐national context to examine the print media’s impact on a state’s human rights performance. First, examining micro‐level evidence from the World Values Survey, I show that an individual’s level of media consumption, including newspaper readership, is positively associated with participation in human rights organizations. Next, I present macro‐level evidence regarding the aggregate effect of a society’s newspaper readership on its human rights record. Analyzing an unbalanced dataset with a maximum of 459 observations across 138 countries covering four waves during the 1980–2000 period, I use ordered probit regression to examine the relationship between a state’s newspaper readership and its Amnesty International rating. I find that newspaper readership exerts strong, positive effects on a state’s human rights practices net of other standard predictors and temporal/regional controls. Moreover, the effect of readership is robust to a number of alternative specifications that address concerns with ceiling effects, measurement bias, influential observations, sample composition, mediation, endogeneity, and the impact of alternative forms of media consumption (i.e., the Internet and television).     

WHEN A WAR IS NOT A WAR:

In this article I juxtapose American media coverage of the Gulf war and the war on abortion in 1991 to trace the meanings and possibilities for identity and activism mobilized by both. While the two wars seem unrelated, I examine the techniques through which the news coverage of both marginalized social protest and women's place within the national imaginary. In the news, protesters and women were positioned outside the sphere of normal politics and reasonable opinion. In this way, the news created a mythic community of "people like us" in opposition to women and activists. Through this marginalization of protest, broadcast news contained the threat of activism to the national imaginary of the United States in both conflicts.     

Fat in the Fire? Science,the News Media,and the “Obesity Epidemic”2

In recent years, the “obesity epidemic” has emerged as a putative public health crisis. This article examines the interconnected role of medical science and news reporting in shaping the way obesity is framed as a social problem. Drawing on a sample of scientific publications on weight and health, and press releases and news reporting on these publications, we compare and contrast social problem frames in medical science and news reporting. We find substantial overlap in science and news reporting, but the news media do dramatize more than the studies on which they are reporting and are more likely than the original science to highlight individual blame for weight. This is partly due to the news media’s tendency to report more heavily on the most alarmist and individual‐blaming scientific studies. We find some evidence that press releases also shape which articles receive media coverage and how they are framed.     

Notes on Contributors

Despite being caught between political censorship and market pressure, investigative journalism in China has exhibited persistent vibrancy over the last three decades. This report seeks to understand the driving force behind this phenomenon by exploring the demographic composition and the ways in which Chinese investigative reporters perceive their jobs. About 259 reporters from 73 media institutions in 18 provinces participated in this study. Compared to beat reporters, investigative reporters cherish the interpretive and populist mobilizing functions of the news media and belittle the entertainment and propaganda functions. The type and location of news organizations, rather than individual background factors, play dominant roles in shaping investigative reporters' professional values.     

Is journalism a transnational field? Asymmetrical relations and symbolic domination in online news

Are all transnational exchanges ‘fielded’? This article explores the limits of the concept of transnational field by focusing on the case of journalism. At first glance, journalism might seem to be the perfect example of a transnational field. The frequency, speed and extent of international exchanges between media outlets has increased dramatically with the development of online news, leading media scholars to develop the concept of ‘global news’. Yet I argue that such international exchanges do not necessarily constitute a field. Using ethnographic methods, I analyse the circulation of online news between the United States and France, two countries with strikingly different journalistic traditions. Specifically, I compare two editorial partnerships between US and French websites, one linking prestigious online magazines across the Atlantic and the other connecting tabloid-oriented news sites. I find that editorial content does not circulate seamlessly between the two countries. Based on this study, the article proposes three criteria that must be met for transnational fields to exist: competition over the legitimate definition of the field, reciprocal field effects, and the existence of common stakes. More broadly, the article contributes to defining the limits of the concept of ‘transnational field’ for the study of international exchanges.     

Understanding Influence on Corporate Reputation: An Examination of Public Relations Efforts,Media Coverage,Public Opinion,and Financial Performance From an Agenda-Building and Agenda-Setting Perspective

Seeking to extend research on public relations evaluation, this study investigates the influence of public relations efforts and media coverage on corporate reputation and financial performance through the theoretical grounding of first- and second-level agenda-building and agenda-setting. A triangulation of research methods compared public relations content, news media coverage, public opinion, and corporate financial performance for 28 U.S. companies from the annual Harris Interactive (2005) Reputation Quotient. Evidence for agenda-building and agenda-setting propositions was found, which work to inform strategies of public relations practitioners. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

Preferring negative or positive news? A closer examination of journalistic negativity in a health crisis

Negativity of news coverage is widely documented. We examined whether the news media’s preference for reporting negative events was salient in news coverage of the outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in South Korea, which was characterized by intensification or mitigation of viral spread. The daily number of news stories on the outbreak was compared with several viral spread indices to determine if the media responded to negative changes more than positive changes. At the aggregate level, the amount of MERS news coverage was associated with positive changes. When the number of newly confirmed patients decreased, the MERS news increased. However, a separate investigation of breakout and abatement stages showed that the media covered more negative changes during the breakout stage and shifted to more positive occurrences during abatement. These findings are discussed in light of the dynamics of journalistic attention to health crisis.     

The Politics of Representation: Wire Agencies and Local News Organizations in the Coverage of Darfur

Sociologists are not at the forefront of studying African news organizations’ coverage of atrocity despite having the tools to do so. This article works to remedy that. I investigate how a media field in Africa frames and represents an atrocity unfolding in Darfur. The article relies on content analysis of news reports published in Kenya between 2003 and 2008. To provide more nuanced analysis, I also rely my own interviews with journalists who had covered and traveled to Darfur. The content analysis delineates the article through the use of by‐line accreditation to allow for an analysis between different journalists working for either local news organizations or wire agencies with offices in Nairobi. I find that Kenyan journalists are not central actors in the process of “meaning making” when it comes to the atrocities in Darfur for the Kenyan audience. They are, effectively, silenced from the knowledge‐construction process in Kenya. Consequently, being Kenyan conspires to produce a condition of invisibility and erasure of Kenyan journalists in the global narrative construction.     

Advancing a qualitative turn in news media trust research

The contemporary media environment represents the greatest challenge ever to journalism's legitimacy. Surveys conducted in different parts of the world highlight a decline in trust in news media. Due to the numerous changes in the news media environment, different investigative tools are required to grasp the mechanisms underlying news media trust from those adopted so far. This article provides a review of existing media trust research and argues that it is necessary to investigate news media trust (also) from a qualitative perspective because today understanding media trust is as crucial as measuring it.     

Hybrid social and news media protest events: from #MarchinMarch to #BusttheBudget in Australia

Public protest events are now both social media and news media events. They are deeply entangled, with news media actors – such as journalists or news organisations – directly participating in the protest by tweeting about the event using the protest hashtag; and social media actors sharing news items published online by professional news agencies. Protesters have always deployed tactics to engage the media and use news media agencies’ resources to amplify their reach, with the dual aim of mobilising new supporters and adding their voice to public, mediatised debate. When protest moves between a physical space and a virtual space, the interactions between protesters and media stop being asynchronous or post hoc and turn instantaneous. In this new media-protest ecosystem, traditional media are still relevant sources of information and legitimacy, yet this dynamic is increasingly underpinned by a hybrid interdependency between traditional news and social media sources. In this paper we focus on an anti-austerity government movement that arose in Australia in early 2014 and was mobilised as a series of social media driven, connective action protest events. We show that there is a complex symbiotic interdependency between the movement and the traditional media for recognition and amplification of initial protest events, but that over time as media interest wanes, the movements’ network becomes disconnected and momentum is lost. This suggests that the active role traditional media play in protest events is being underestimated in the current research agenda on connective action.     

Journalists’ and Educators’ Perspectives on News Media Reporting of Islam and Muslim Communities in Australia and New Zealand

We know much about how the news media report on the topic of Muslims and Islam, but we know very little about the journalistic practices and processes that contribute to the way these issues are framed and reported. Whereas research has until now largely focused on the ways in which Islam and Muslims are represented in various news media, there is relatively little research that explores the issue from the perspective of key people working in the news media. In order to address what we perceive as a significant gap in the research, we draw on data from interviews with 29 journalists, editors, media trainers, and journalism educators located in Australia and New Zealand to explore their understandings of the ways stories about Islam and Muslims are reported and why. The article also investigates the interviewees’ perceptions of the effects of news media coverage of Muslims and Islam. Our findings present a starting point to improving practice for those reporting on Islam and Muslim and inform the development of training modules in the reporting of Islam for journalists and journalism students.     

The press and Alitalia's 2008 crisis: Issues, tones, and frames

Given that public opinion about a company's performance during a crisis is highly influenced by the way news media cover crisis events, studies that look at news media's choice of crisis issues, tones and frames are extremely valuable. This paper presents the main findings of a study on how the Italian and international press framed the Italian national airline Alitalia and its crisis in 2008 before its privatization. This study is based on content analysis of news articles published in 2008 in two Italian and two international newspapers. Comparisons of crisis issues, tones and frames between the Italian and international press are made. Implications and recommendations for crisis managers are discussed as well as directions for further research.     

The Kids Are All White: Examining Race and Representation in News Media Coverage of Opioid Overdose Deaths in Canada

Problematic opioid use in Canada is on the rise, and opioid overdose deaths now number in the thousands each year. While opioids have long been responsible for overdoses among certain demographics of Canadians, such as drug users on Vancouver's notoriously impoverished downtown Eastside, it is only recently that fatal overdoses have also claimed the lives of White, middle-class young people. This critical discourse analysis of Canadian news media examines the differences in racial representation in recent coverage of opioid deaths. I pay particular attention to the ways in which White opioid users are portrayed as innocent victims while other users, such as those from Indigenous communities, are often ignored or stigmatized as “addicts.” I draw on the work of Hall (1978; 2000) and Reinarman and Levine (1989; 2004) on the role of media in representing race and constructing drug scares, to frame the media narratives. I then discuss the Canadian government's current harm-reduction approach to the opioid crisis, as well as calls from Indigenous leaders for “culture as treatment.”