Jews in the News – Representations of Judaism and the Jewish Minority in the Norwegian Contemporary Press

This article provides an analysis of how Jewish rituals and Jews as a minority group are represented and debated in the Norwegian press: How is “news about the Jews” framed by the media? Which discourses dominate the debates? Are notions of what it “takes to be Norwegian” put forward in these cases? The article is also an analysis of Jewish voices in the press, and based on the fact that Jewish advocates refer to minority-based legal rights suggests that the Jewish minority benefits from the use of a broader international human rights discussion in the press. I claim that a multicultural discourse provides the Jewish minority with language that makes it possible to argue for cultural rights without referring to Jewishness; offering protection against a general fear of anti-Semitism.     

Discursive opportunity structures in post-handover Hong Kong localism: the China factor and beyond

The discourses of localism have been redefining the political spectrum, cultural practices, and identity politics of Hong Kong. A growing body of literature considers how China’s domination has fueled the rise of localism in Hong Kong. Drawing on the content and textual analyses of news media and other empirical evidence, this article scrutinizes the opportunity structure in post-handover Hong Kong to show that it facilitates the formation of localist discourses. It situates the localism of Hong Kong as the response to the social changes and China’s encroachment on the city in the post-handover years. Specifically, it focuses on the emergence of progressive localism prior to the recent deterioration of the China–Hong Kong relationship, the radicalization of social movements, and the continuing effects of critical post-handover events in Hong Kong. The study re-conceptualizes the localism of Hong Kong from the central–peripheral tension arising from China’s hegemony to the dynamic discursive formation of an evolving post-colonial city.     

"Molympics"? Journalistic Discourse of Mormons in Relation to the 2002 Winter Olympic Games

During the 2002 Winter Olympics, many made the argument that attention on Salt Lake City provided an opportunity to reshape the Mormon image. Using discourse analysis of news magazine and newspaper articles, this article assesses whether media portrayals of Mormons shifted during the Olympics. It argues that a model minority discourse used by journalists in past decades to describe Mormons persisted in most fundamental respects. Some details changed, but larger stereotypical images were not challenged.     

“Racist Propaganda”: discursive Negotiations on YouTube of Perceived Anti-White Racism in South Korea

This article analyzes YouTube comments about a Munhwa Broadcasting Company report that White “expatriates” in South Korea called xenophobic and racist. The research is important because there is a paucity of scholarship on White discourse outside the West and because there is limited work on YouTube as a space to articulate and negotiate discourses about racism. This is despite the increasingly complex flows of people and discourse around the globe. In this article, I argue that YouTube acted as a site of ideological negotiation in which Orientalist discourses were advanced under the cover of color-blind racism. Many of the YouTube comments framed Korea as xenophobic and racist, and even for self-identified White commenters sympathetic to the report, they did not challenge the construction of Korea as racist or the normative belief in postracism.     

Discourse on Shanzhai cultural production in Chinese newspapers: authenticity and legitimacy

Emerging from the early Shanzhaiji, or bandit cell phones, the notion of Shanzhai has developed into a prominent cultural phenomenon in China since 2008. This paper examines the discourse on Shanzhai cultural production in Chinese metropolitan newspapers and those of the Communist Party. The research questions pertain to how a grassroots cultural phenomenon is discursively constructed and how social and media structures manifest themselves in this process of discourse construction. Within the framework of discourse analysis, the dimensions of authenticity and legitimacy cut across all discursive categories regarding Shanzhai cultural production. Depending on the relationships between the two dimensions, a rival discourse and a harmony discourse were found in the archived news reports and editorials. The author argues that authenticity is oriented toward power relationships or content and themes of the cultural productions in the two discourses, respectively. The discourses reflect contesting efforts to construct cultural hegemony in Chinese society.     

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.     

“Classic ageism” or “brutal economy”? Old age and older people in the Polish media

This article explores media discourse of ageing, taking the example of Poland and relating it to a broader discussion of ageing policy. The discourse in news magazines appears both to reflect and create attitudes towards older people, which in turn has implications for ageing policy. To reveal the nature of these attitudes, we use a method of attitudinal positioning. The study analyzes articles that appeared in the four largest Polish weekly opinion news magazines, in the 2004–2007 period. Various domains in the discourse of ageing are identified, yet only the family and market domains seem to be described in exclusively positive terms: the authors discuss the implications of this for ageing policy.     

It's Not as Simple as It Seems: Ambiguous Culpability and Ambivalent Affect In News Representations of Violent Youth

While violence problems are a staple of both the mass media and work by constructionist social problems theorists, most of the latter has focused on violent adults. Constructionist research suggests that the media depict violent persons as evil victimizers, deserving of fear and condemnation, and their victims as deserving of sympathy. This article extends the constructionist literature on violence problems by examining news stories that construct youth violence as a social problem. My findings suggest that these media constructions are considerably more complex than previous work has claimed. Specifically, I find that the media (a) contextualize youth violence by casting extant, familiar social problems as its origins and (b) engender an ambiguous sense of culpability and ambivalent emotional orientations toward violent youth. This complexity is shaped, in part, by the media's appropriation of two seemingly contradictory cultural discourses—the evil, violent predator and the innocent child. I suggest that although aspects of these findings may be specific to the problem of violent youth, the contextualization, ambiguity, and ambivalence may well be found in social constructions of a variety of other problems.     

Feminist Readings on Abu Ghraib: Introduction

This article examines feminist responses to mainstream media coverage of female terrorists in West Germany during 1977. Women in left-wing terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction (RAF) and ‘Movement 2. June’ (‘Bewegung 2. Juni’) inspired a gendered discourse reflecting a cultural unease about women participating in political violence, in which the media propagated notions that posited female terrorists as ‘unnatural’ women. This analysis demonstrates how different ‘Alltagstheorien’ (everyday or common sense theories) on female terrorists we find in West German media publications in the 1970s and 1980s served as a springboard for West German feminist activists to examine arguments about violence as legitimate means in their own political communities. This essay begins by briefly outlining key feminist positions on political violence that have made invisible the complex debates taking place in the 1970s. The second part of the essay uses images of female terrorists circulated by the West German media, such as the newsmagazine Der Spiegel (The Mirror), to contextualize the ‘Alltagstheorien’ the magazine propagated in an article covering RAF actions in 1977. The third and main part of the essay then examines the responses this and other articles elicited from contemporaneous feminist movement publications.     

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.”     

Tolerated,threatening and celebrated: How Canadian news media frames temporary migrant workers

Immigration scholars have long observed that migrant workers are paradoxically both welcomed and deemed threatening within the nation state. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which mainstream media outlets reinforce these perceptions. Using critical discourse analysis, we analysed 561 articles in three mainstream newspapers to ascertain the various discourses used to describe migrant workers and migrant work. Our analysis specifically found that a cluster of ‘hiring scandals’ led to an increase in coverage on migrant work, and affected the types of discourses used in reference to migrant workers. Prior to these scandals, migrant work generated minimal media coverage. Ultimately, we find that migrant workers are deemed tolerable to the nation-state at certain time periods, deemed as threats in other time periods, and, in the current moment of the global health crisis, are deemed absolutely essential. Migrant workers are thus only 'conditionally included' in the state.     

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.     

WAR PROGRAMMING: The Propaganda Project and the Iraq War

The invasion of Iraq was justified to the American people by a sophisticated propaganda campaign that reflected a think tank's vision for a new foreign policy. One objective of this article is to set forth a theoretical argument for analyzing modern propaganda campaigns as a feature of mass-mediated discourse crafted by think tanks and highly organized claims makers. We propose that the current structure of policy and critique is now institutionalized and formatted as War Programming, which connects criticism within a narrative sequence, including critiques and reflections about journalistic failings. The scope of the action is so immense that it precludes and preempts its critique. The second objective is to show how the rationale for the invasion was developed as a "public conspiracy" over a decade by the members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The third aim of this article is to describe and clarify why the PNAC plans for Iraq and an imperialist foreign policy received very little news media coverage. Qualitative content analysis of news materials suggests that the news sources and media shared a logic and perspective about "timely and entertaining news." The PNAC plan was not publicized by the major news media because it fell outside the focus of the Bush administration's propaganda campaign to demonize Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein, who was held to be responsible for attacks on the United States. The implications of such a well-organized propaganda campaign for future news coverage of war are discussed.     

Neoliberal policy,chronic corruption and disablement: biosecurity,biosocial risks and the creation of ‘Ebola survivors’?

In this article, I question where ‘disability’ has been in humanitarian discourses and practices linked to the Ebola epidemic. Policy and practice have generally focused on issues linked to biosecurity in relation to West Africa but not on creation of disability linked to breakdown of health systems. Those same discourses of containment and biosocial risks are now being used in relation to people who have survived Ebola but have disabling symptoms.     

‘Green Tibetans’ in China: Tibetan geopiety and environmental protection in a multilayered Tibetan landscape

This article examines how certain Tibetans and Han Chinese converts to Tibetan Buddhism in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and Beijing are articulating various forms of environmental discourse, both in terms drawn from Tibetan ‘geopiety’, and/or from a Western model of environmental protection. In relation to these trends, I further explore how certain Tibetans are articulating their understanding of Tibetan Buddhism within an apparently localised context, while other Tibetans are more obviously appropriating from discourses originating in the West and/or wider Chinese society to become more ‘modern’, while at the same time retaining a conceptualisation of Tibetan Buddhism that is hybridised between traditional and modernist understandings. I also explore how some Han practitioners may seek to become more ‘Tibetan’ by endorsing localised forms of Tibetan Buddhism and/or ‘performing’ certain Tibetan modes of religiosity, while others, due in part to geographical distance from the Tibetan landscape and cultural context, endorse an understanding of Tibetan Buddhism which is more closely tied to discourses of environmental protection originating in the West. In both Tibetan and Han Chinese cases, informants reflect upon their own beliefs and identity by gazing at the Other (Tibetan, Han, or Westerner), and marking out differences and similarities between Self and Other.     

Between moderation and radicalization: transnational interactions of Jamaat‐e‐Islami of India

Abstract Religious movements have often been studied in the context of nationstates. With scholarly attention now shifting to globalization and other world system processes, there is a growing move to go beyond the particularity of nation‐states and study the general transnational dimensions of religious movements. In this article I describe the processes through which Jamaat‐e‐Islami Hind (JIH), a contemporary Islamist movement in India, developed links with ideologically similar movements, institutions and networks in the Gulf countries, Iran and the West. Taking JIH as a social movement, I argue for a more nuanced conceptualization of transnational social movements, because existing theories are based on the experiences of Western democracies and, as such, are insensitive to collective actions in undemocratic polities such as the Gulf states. While making a case for taking into account the transnational dimensions of understanding JIH, I call into question the alarmist thesis that emphasizes the homogenous radicalization of the entire movement as an inevitable consequence of the transnational connections an Islamic movement develops. On the contrary, I contend that they also lead to conflict within the movement and its moderation.     

Non‐understanding as a heuristic to hypothesizing cultural models: A meta‐oriented sociolinguistic strategy1

This article is concerned with the development of an analytic strategy to construct U.S. cultural models of war and terrorism, which are ‘mediatized’ or significantly shaped by the media. Central to that strategy are repair cues to non‐understanding as heuristics in intercultural encounters. These are applied to an inherently mediatized discursive ‘reality’ of war and terrorism. Theoretically, I synthesize sociolinguistic and anthropological perspectives into a ‘meta‐oriented sociolinguistics’, which analytically focuses on the meta‐dimension of discourse. The strategy is applied to a text on war and terrorism from the New York Times, to demonstrate its utility. Furthermore, I provide implications for enhancing validity in the ethnography of mediatized discourse. Specific to the findings of this article, I suggest that corpus studies of media discourse should be conducted on the metadiscursive keywords kamikaze, surprise attacks, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 in particular temporal frames.     

Representations of autism in Australian print media

The mass media provides a frame for discourse around important health issues, and it has been widely demonstrated that the development and reinforcement of stereotypes of minority groups are strongly influenced by the news and entertainment media. An extensive search of academic databases failed to locate any studies which examined the representation of autism in the news media, although there were a number of articles on the media role in the autism and MMR debate. This paper reports on an examination of the extent, and nature, of coverage of ‘autism spectrum disorders’ in the Australian print media between 1996 and 2005. Key findings include a relatively limited amount of factual information and a dual stereotype of people labeled as having autism as either dangerous and uncontrollable or unloved and poorly treated. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the nature and tone of this coverage of autism and its potential impact on individuals described as ‘autistic’, their families and carers and the community in general.     

Framing Feminism: News Coverage of the Women's Movement in British and American Newspapers, 1968–1982

This article analyses the framing in four British and American newspapers of the second-wave feminist movement during its most politically active period (1968–1982). Using content and critical discourse analysis of 555 news articles, the article investigates how movement members were represented, what problems and solutions to women's oppression/inequality were posed and whose voices were used. This paper identifies: opposition to the movement, support for the movement, conflict and movement defined in terms of its goals. In addition to exploring nuances in coverage across time and space, we use a feminist perspective to make political statements about how gendered hierarchies function through media discourse, and argue that the circulation of patriarchal and capitalist ideologies worked to prevent women's equal partnership with men in both countries.