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.     

Fake News Is Real: The Significance and Sources of Disbelief in Mainstream Media in Trump’s America

Are appeals to discredit mainstream media reporting of political news in the guise of “fake news” merely a diversion from more fundamental threats to democratic politics and policymaking? Or is the emerging belief in “fake news” itself a looming threat? Using data from the Voter Study Group’s panel survey, we examine the relationship between disbelief in mainstream media and a wide range of social attitudes and policy preferences. We find that in December 2016, just after Trump’s election, belief in fake news wields an outsized influence, independent of partisanship, ideology, media consumption, and other established foundations of public opinion. The effects of fake news beliefs are especially pronounced on key elements of Trump’s rhetoric as candidate and as president—hostility toward immigrants, racial and religious minorities, gender equality, perceptions of America’s “greatness,” and even support for democratic norms and institutions itself. We also find some evidence that by January 2019, the belief in fake news has become even more focally associated with Trump. These findings portend the possibility of an emerging exclusionary, populist variant of American conservatism, of which disbelief in media institutions is a key component.     

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.     

Online news media in the Web 2.0 era: from boundary dissolution to journalistic transformation

This paper examines how online news media have changed as the Internet has moved from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Based on medium theory and boundary theory, online news media are conceptualized as being regulated by the “participatory open media code”. The code analysis attempts to examine the newly emerged form and structure of online news. In the new interactive media environment, it is found that online news media have changed significantly in the following areas: (1) the inclusion of user-generated content; (2) user participatory interactivity; (3)YouTubization; (4) instant reporting; (5) sharing and community networking; and (6) customization through new communication technologies. The trend of growing reader participation in social dialogue is apparent around the globe. The transformed online media have provided good platforms for citizen participation in news. Yet, there are still constraints against quality participation.     

Pure Gold for Broken Bodies: Discursive Techniques Constructing Milk Banking and Peer Milk Sharing in U.S. News

Technological advances provide increased ability to transfer human tissues—blood, organs, milk—from one body to another. This article analyzes mechanisms of reality construction in U.S. news to construct shared human breast milk. Articles used typifications and human interest stories to convey participants as victims, lay heroes, and villains. Milk banking was portrayed as institutionally integrated through associations, expert testimonies, and formalized procedures, making banked milk “pure gold.” Peer sharing was portrayed as institutionally opposed through institutional warnings, expert testimonies, informal procedures, and hypothetical atrocities, making peer milk “fool's gold.” Findings suggest that “biovalue” of human milk is interconnected with institutional processing.     

Exploring the formation of the “leave-it-to-experts” storyline during the initial outbreak of the 2013 smog hazard in Beijing

Beijing’s smog hazard is one of the most urgent issues on China’s public agenda. Drawing on the recently developed dynamic discourse coalition (DDC) approach, this article examines the ways in which the hazard’s initial outbreak in early 2013 was reported by four news sources: the Xinhua News Agency; China Daily; South China Morning Post; and the Associated Press. The findings suggest that although domestic and overseas media first provided different explanations for the hazard, these were eventually consolidated into the same problem-solving discourse of “leave-it-to-experts.” This discourse included a proposal to address the hazard under the current political economic structure of industrial capitalism. The proposal, however, was constrained by an elitist bias that downplayed China’s existing social and regional inequalities. The article argues that environmental challenges such as the smog hazard call for not only a sustainable model to direct China’s future development, but also the explicit recognition of the country’s existing environmental injustices.     

MAIN STREET ON MAIN STREET:

Whereas sociologists have devoted extensive attention to the development of individual identity, the question of community identity has not received similar treatment. Most examinations of collective identity assume that communities build upon positive events and memories, but what about those communities that are forced to deal with criticism? The case of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the hometown of the Nobel Prize winning novelist Sinclair Lewis, is instructive in this regard. In his first major novel, Main Street, Lewis was highly critical of the fictional town of Gopher Prairie, a thinly disguised Sauk Centre. Yet, within a few years reputational entrepreneurs in Sauk Centre had incorporated Lewis and the image of “Main Street” into the town's cultural identity, using these images to promote the town. We examine five processes by which this transformation occurred: revaluation, incorporating positive commentary, confronting negative commentary, selective omission, and contextualization.     

Who speaks and how? Studies of voicing in the China Daily following a decade of change

This study used critical discourse analysis (CDA) to identify and unpick some of the ideas, beliefs, and attitudes encoded in newspaper texts without being explicitly stated. It uses a quantitative-qualitative approach to content analysis to compare articles published in the Chinese government-owned, English-language newspaper the China Daily in 1998 (n = 50) and 2010 (n = 50). The analysis focused on two things: the people considered by China Daily journalists to be important/interesting enough to be quoted and (through an analysis of Halliday's verbal processes) how these people's words are presented. The aim was to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach advocated and to see whether such an approach can help answer how much the media in China has changed in response to changing times.     

Vernon Smith: economics as a laboratory science

Vernon Smith shared the Nobel Prize in 2002 with Daniel Kahneman. This article surveys Smith’s contributions to economics. His early efforts led to greater understanding of markets and market institutions, which developed into important contributions to the design of new markets. Subsequent research focused on the complexity of behavior in simple games, including recent forays into “neuroeconomics”. The impact of his work on economic thinking and economic theory is substantial.     

What's behind public trust in news media: A comparative study of America and China

The study first examines the media identification logic that the prime evaluating indicator for news media is public trust. Perceptions of trust are not only important from a marketing perspective, but also form a vital component of audiences' aesthetic criticism of news and news sources. Comparing people's attitudes towards media in America and China, this study finds media credibility ratings in China are much higher than those in America. Does this suggest that Chinese media are more credible, or are survey reports of public trust influenced by other factors? This study considers three perspectives for considering differences in reports of public trust – operation dynamics, imaged power, and national identity. We consider to what degree, and under what conditions, could the survey reports of perceived public trust in media be related to media system differences, both among countries and over time. The study also examines the role played by structural dialectics such as profit orientation or propaganda orientation; professionalism orientation or authority orientation; and imagined community or heterogeneity construction. Finally, given the limits of survey methods and wording, the study brings forward an evaluation framework for the availability of transnational comparisons of media credibility, based on five evaluating dimensions of identity mechanism: professionalism identity, antagonism identity, heterogeneity identity, public sphere identity, and the “Other” identity.     

The “creative confrontation” of Herbert Schmertz: Public relations sense making and the corporate persona

Beginning in the early 1970s, Mobil Oil's public relations, under the direction of Herbert Schmertz, attempted to demonstrate to Americans that the company acted like a person who worked to benefit society. With an approach he called “creative confrontation,” Schmertz offered an adversarial stance toward the news media, coupled with inventive methods of supporting the arts. Creative confrontation sought the public's support by revealing that the corporation was an entity that understood the needs of the public and worked to uphold American values like free expression and progress. This work, in examining a distinctive and sustained effort to communicate the corporate personality, offers lingering implications for how public relations, through the conveyance of the corporate persona, can more widely conceptualize and execute its sense-making role in society.     

“Ancient Volscian Border Dispute Flares”

Reception of the 2012 film adaptation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, dealt with two particular themes: the homoerotic relationship between Fiennes' Coriolanus and the rebel leader Aufidius whose forces he eventually joins, and the choice to shoot the film in Serbia and Montenegro. While south-east Europe has become an increasingly popular location for Anglophone filmmaking, the promotion and reception of Coriolanus foregrounded the significance of Belgrade and the Balkans as a site of recent conflict. Moreover, the film constructs the world of Coriolanus and Aufidius through simulating or even re-using images of “Balkan” space with which viewers have already become familiar through news media, and it therefore draws on and contributes to representative practices that constitute the Balkans as a violent and warlike zone. Yet Aufidius' rebel force resembling militias from the Yugoslav wars is opposed to a highly disciplined “Roman” military equipped for urban warfare in 2000s Iraq. This article contends that the film achieves this contrast primarily through evoking different military masculinities associated with each force, which have been widely disseminated through still and filmed war photography, and secondarily through its use of specific ex-Yugoslav landscapes and cityscapes. The complex relationship between images of the Balkans, masculinity and military discipline in Coriolanus shows that images of military masculinities juxtaposed with a post-Yugoslav material environment continue to operate as symbolic resources in a contemporary western imaginary of war.     

The behavioral economics of George Akerloff and Harvey Leibenstein

Behavioral economics is now receiving greater acceptance in the economics profession. One illustration of this acceptance is the Nobel Prize awarded to George Akerloff in 2001.Akerloff’s work included issues of rationality, work norms, and asymmetric information in both more and less developed countries. Leibenstein was one of the first economists in recent decades to explore behavioral economics. This was accomplished through his development of X-efficiency theory, but not exclusively through X-efficiency theory. This paper will show similarities in the work done by Akerloff and Leibenstein, and cite examples of how Akerloff extended some of Leibenstein’s work, leading to Akerloff’s much deserved Nobel Prize.     

“Islam Is Everywhere”: Pre-Arab Spring Coverage of Islam in the English Egyptian Press

This study investigates how Islam is reported by English-language Egyptian media. Much research has examined the orientalism that occurs in the coverage of Islam in the West, but little has occurred on how Islam is covered in a Muslim-majority context. This study conducted interviews with eight journalists who report on Islam as a part of their beat in Egyptian publications and a news framing analysis was performed on articles relating to Islam in English-language Egyptian news sources Al Ahram Weekly, Daily News Egypt, and Al-Masry Al-Youm in the months before Arab Spring radically altered the shape of the country. By applying orientalism, this study hopes to examine coverage of Islam in an environment where one would expect better portrayal of Islam and to examine the ways in which reporting regarding Islam foreshadowed the changes to come.     

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.”     

“Maniacal slaves:” normative misogyny and female resistors of the Mojahedin-e Khalq Iran

Feminist scholars the world over are increasingly aware of the importance of analyzing popular discourse, especially regarding women’s involvement in proscribed violence. Yet few have looked at Middle Eastern organizations, and fewer still at the Mojahedin-e Khalq Iran (MEK), a longstanding resistance group whose all-female leadership and sizeable female membership present a compelling challenge to prevailing gender norms. How do popular media portray female MEK resistors and what might these representations signify for our gendered conceptions of violence? In examining the MEK’s female leadership, this article undertakes a close reading of western and Iranian news coverage in an attempt to analyze the degree to which these women are painted as willful political agents or, as is often assumed, irrational actors incapable of autonomous political participation. Following Sjoberg and Gentry, I develop four cognitive frames to describe female resistors, while also challenging the media’s victimizing and sexualizing gaze. I thus problematize these women’s portrayals as “maniacal slaves,” and explain how such gendered rhetoric operates to preclude the notion that members of the MEK might practice legitimate political resistance worthy of analysis or understanding.     

The Paranoid Style Revisited: Pseudo‐Conservatism in the 21st Century

Fifty years ago, the Pulitzer Prize‐winning historian Richard Hofstadter published the seminal essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” In this and related works he examined the rhetoric animating the extreme right‐wing of the country's electorate. In this article I revisit Hofstadter's claims regarding the marginalization of the paranoid style and its connection to status‐based politics. A review of the most popular “pseudo‐conservative” commentators, survey data, the rise of the Tea Party, and the intransigence of the present day Republican Party suggests that a worldview that was once extreme has now become “mainstreme” within the political culture.     

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.     

Predicting Indonesian Journalists' Use of Public Relations-Generated News Material

Abstract

The news media are the main channel for public relations practitioners to get messages across to their publics. In recent years, little research was conducted on predicting journalists' use of public relations news material. As the largest Southeast Asian and the world's most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia presents a complex media and public relations environment. This study found fundamental tenets in journalism, however, which remain the most important factors in predicting the use and acceptance of public relations-generated news materials. At the same time, however, business interests have highly significant effect on journalists. Informal relations can also influence their use.