Consuming Terrorism

This article discusses a process that linked giving and spending to patriotism, domestic control, and a major foreign policy shift following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Analysis of news reports and advertisements suggests that popular culture and mass media depictions of fear, patriotism, consumption, and victimization contributed to the emergence of a national identity and collective action that transformed the meaning of terrorism from a strategy to a condition: terrorism world. Initial declarations about recovery and retaliation to promote patriotism became a “war on terrorism” with no end in sight. In this process, global policing that would justify a “first strike” against sovereign governments was socially constructed as commensurate with personal caring and national identity. These findings are organized around three points: (1) fear supported consumption as a meaningful way for audiences to sustain an identity of substance and character; (2) consumption and giving were joined symbolically as government and business propaganda emphasized common themes of spending and buying to “help the country get back on track”; (3) the absence of a clear target for reprisals contributed to the construction of broad symbolic enemies and goals.     

Blogs and China correspondence: lessons about global information flows

Recent research points to the evolution of a symbiotic relationship between bloggers and the professional news media, in which blogs influence and supplement the work of journalists but do not appear to be replacing it entirely. Such relationships are developing not only on a country‐by‐country basis but also on a global scale, assisted by the phenomenon of “bridge blogs”. Will this lead to a more democratic global information order? This paper examines the China case, and the emerging relationship between blogs, bridge blogs, and foreign correspondents who cover China. It concludes that if blogs and citizen media are contributing to a more democratic global information order, it is more of a “representative” form of democracy – not a pure “many to many” global discourse that many Internet idealists had hoped.     

The Chinese writer as empty signifier: a corpus-based analysis of the English-language reporting of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature

This study examines the English-language reporting of the award in 2012 of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Chinese author, Mo Yan. Through the corpus-based analysis of news reporting in four countries, the study found that Mo was discursively produced as an “empty signifier” through which significant cultural-political work was done in an attempt to make sense of and manage a resurgent China. Specifically, the global cultural event of the Nobel Prize in Literature was used in the USA, Australian, and French news media largely to reproduce the dominant human rights discourse in which China's dissidents were highly prominent and highly valued. In the news media of the more culturally proximate India, the literary achievement was given greater prominence. The study's keyword and concordance analyses found a high degree of commonality in the linguistic strategies through which China was represented. The findings revealed that the English-language reporting of the Nobel Prize was characterized by narrow cosmopolitanism, in which “they” were invited to become part of “our” free world.     

DETERRENCE,PREEMPTION, AND PANIC: A COMMON‐ENEMY PROBLEM OF TERRORISM

A game‐theoretic analysis of terrorism examines interactions between a terrorist organization and multiple target countries. It considers both preemption and deterrence as counter‐terrorist policies. Damage from terror includes material costs and resultant fear. Fear effects lead to different equilibria and implications for counter‐terrorism policies. The model identifies conditions under which greater preemption may be the rational response to an increase in terrorism, that is, it analyzes the merit of the dictum “offense is the best defense.” It also examines the characteristics of cooperative behavior among target countries in dealing with the threat of terrorism. (JEL C72, D74, F52, F53, H41)     

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.     

Public relations and globalization: Building a case for cultural competency in public relations education

Numerous studies of American news coverage of September 11, 2001, reported unsettling jingoistic and stereotyping tendencies in the stories. These findings are not surprising. Media critics have argued that news reflects “the interests of established political and economic elites” and is biased toward a “consensus of national values and ideology.”This paper explores how public relations educators in the U.S. and U.A.E. could take the lead in developing courses that explore the evolution of American and Middle Eastern cultures. It will analyze how adding cultural competency to the list of skills and competencies required in our educational programs presents an opportunity to educate a generation that will accept difference and value a global culture separate from national identity.     

COMMON DRIVERS OF TRANSNATIONAL TERRORISM: PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS

This article applies principal component analysis to decompose transnational terrorism during 1970–2007 into common (worldwide) and idiosyncratic (country‐specific) factors. Regardless of alternative thresholds and filtering procedures, a single common factor is related to individual countries' transnational terrorist events. Based on a conventional criterion, Lebanon's transnational terrorism is the key common driver of global transnational terrorist incidents. With a more conservative criterion, four additional countries—United States, Germany, Iraq, and the United Kingdom—are core countries in explaining cross‐sectional correlation across 106 countries' transnational terrorism. The analysis shows that there is a marked cross‐sectional dependence among transnational terrorist incidents worldwide. (JEL C38, H56)     

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.     

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.     

Time and Television News Work*

Combining theoretical and ethnographic material, this paper outlines why time is an important vehicle for analyzing the social organization of television news work and the social construction of television news. The paper investigates major events with problematic features—unscheduled “hard news”—as a means of understanding basic beliefs and organizational practices of news assemblers in a local television news station. Based on participant observation and interviews with photographers and reporters, the evidence shows that time is a key independent variable in the selection and assembly of hard news. Time is often more than a variable, it is a constituent feature of television news work—a contingency which must be attended to if the work is to produce what news workers consider to be “good television news.” The problematic elements of news work are magnified under the pressures of perishable hard news stories where adjustments to unfolding work demands cannot be predetermined or programmed. Some implications of the analysis are discussed in terms of the content of local news, the biases of news coverage, and the importance of considering time as a dynamic process in the study of work.     

Normative Bridges and Barriers in the Framing of Emerging Sports Movements

Abstract

Why have some small, emerging sports communities grown faster than others? To begin answering this question, the analysis presented here considers the case of disc golf, a flying disc sport that has grown rapidly since the early twenty-first century. This research conceptualizes the disc golf community as a new social movement and examines how the news media has influenced its development. Drawing on a large, diverse sample of local and national news materials, this study finds that the volume of disc golf news coverage is correlated with reliable measures of the sport’s growth. In addition, a content analysis of 2920 newspaper articles is used to identify the news frames that may promote, or attenuate disc golf’s “grow the sport movement.” The theoretical and methodological contributions of this study shed further light on the complex relationship between the news media and the evolution of small, non-normative sports movements.     

Conspiracies beyond Fake News. Produsing Reinformation on Presidential Elections in the Transnational Hybrid Media System

As presidential elections carry the promise of distilling the contested and elusive “will of the people,” the protracted media event intensifies the public demand for exposing the transgressions of the aspiring political elite. This expectation provides fertile ground for investigative journalism, ultrapartisan smear campaigns, fake news, and full-fledged conspiracy theories that are sometimes difficult to differentiate from one another in a hybridized media space. We compare three unique conspiracy stories—Macronleaks, Pizzagate, and Voter fraud—emerging during the previous French and American elections. We assess the divergent strategies of social action that contribute to the stories’ dissimilar patterns for intervening the political news cycle with the “reinformative toolkit” and deconstruct the common conspiratorial “masterplot” for “reinforming” the public. Focusing on online “produsers”—media users functioning as (dis)information producers—we analyze how the grassroots level participated in shaping the conspiracy stories’ synopses and channeling news-framed, conspiratory content between mainstream and “countermedia” outlets.     

Partisan audience polarization: Beyond selective exposure

The proliferation of available media outlets provides unprecedented access to specialized content. This dynamic media environment facilitates the emergence of partisan selective exposure at the individual level. When aggregated, these selective choices can materialize as partisan audience polarization, defined by the use/nonuse of so-called “Red” and “Blue” news media. The present study extends this line of inquiry beyond selective exposure. The author uses metered exposure data to explore patterns of loyalty and avoidance using single-source, cross-platform data from Nielsen’s TV/Internet Convergence Panel. The results are mixed, suggesting that audiences of partisan news outlets exhibit high levels of loyalty, but also that they do not avoid news of a different slant.     

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.     

Defending White Scientific Masculinity

While many feminist and postcolonial scholars have analyzed the post-9/11 politic in the United States, few have focused on the anthrax “attacks” that followed the 11 September 2001 World Trade Center disaster. The FBI search for the perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax mailings was an important node in US national security discourse making – it culminated in the fingering of a white male government biodefense scientist and cast doubt on the role of scientific expertise in provisioning national security. This article argues that while “white scientific masculinity” was put into question, it was simultaneously shored up as a nationalist symbol of protection against bioterrorism. This article traces shifts across the three FBI-led profiles of the anthrax perpetrator, along with concomitant news media coverage: the white male “loner” nonscientist, the white male “loner” amateur scientist and finally the white male biodefense scientist. Using a cultural studies approach, this article details how at each successive investigatory stage profilers mobilized hegemonic discourses to re-instantiate the authoritative status of white scientific masculinity in US national security. This analysis offers an important dimension to feminist and postcolonial critiques of the symbolic and institutional investment in white masculinity during the War on Terror.     

Media use and political learning: Comparing Trump supporters to celebrity candidate voters

This study examines whether political media use behaviors of voters who supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election align with those of “celebrity candidate voters” portrayed in the literature. The study used a national online survey (N = 1,608) conducted during the 2016 primary, and findings reveal that Trump supporters, more than other voters, are driven by entertainment motivations and follow campaign news using entertainment media: specifically, the video-sharing site YouTube. Although Trump voters are interested in the campaign, their level of political knowledge is lower than other voters, and no one media outlet made a significant contribution to their learning. A comparison group of other voters showed significant knowledge gains from news websites and Twitter. Results for Trump voters are consistent with scholars’ characterization of the celebrity candidate audience, particularly in studies suggesting that celebrity politicians may increase citizens’ engagement through entertainment gratifications rather than by a desire to become informed.     

Facts Of The Moment: The Study Of News*

Reviewing past research on news and mass media, this article charges it is “administrative” research which accepts the presuppositions of the media being studied, particularly their emphasis on “facts” as discrete and objective phenomena. It also suggests that there are epistemological problems implicit in such concepts as “bias” and “refraction” used in gate-keeping studies. The article offers an alternative paradigm, described as “serious work on the sociology of knowledge as a junction with the sociologies of organizations and occupations and professions.” Some studies using that paradigm are described.     

Framing and immigration through the trump era

For the last decade, undocumented or illegal immigration has been one of the most contested policy issues in the United States, with significant news attention on policies affecting the undocumented population, ranging from deportations to comprehensive immigration reform, the DREAM Act, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Despite these prominent and multifaceted policy debates, scholarship on media framing and public opinion remain more focused on the portrayal of immigrants rather than policies affecting them. In general, scholars find that policy frames are far more consequential to public opinion than equivalency frames (variations in how news media describe unauthorized immigrants, either as “illegal” or “undocumented”) or episodic frames (whether news articles are heavy on human‐interest stories rather than policy facts and statistics). Also, negative frames generally have stronger effects than positive frames, and these effects sometimes vary by partisanship and family migration history. Finally, the relative infrequency of powerful frames in news stories, like a life spent in the United States, provides opportunities for advocates to move public opinion on immigration policy. These findings have important implications for future battles over immigration policy in the United States, which show no signs of abating.