The politics of flies: mocking news in Chinese cyberspace

Utilizing an illustrative case, this article examines readers' satirical comments on online news in Chinese cyberspace, revealing that using the news as a prop, netizens joke about social inequality and injustice, and parody sham and official stereotyped and hollow messages. Furthermore, by raising questions and exploring possible answers collectively, netizens unveil the absurdity of social policies and the hypocrisy, greed, and corruption of government officials. Hence, netizens' satirical comments focus a spotlight on social problems. This article argues that satirical comments enrich news and expand its content, thereby giving the news an aura, making ordinary news extraordinary, and making possible political and radical readings of seemingly apolitical and neutral news.     

Making the news: environmental NGOs and their media visibility in China

This study was conducted to examine the factors that affect the media visibility of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGO) in China. Specifically, we examine the ways in which environmental advocacy and media use behaviors are related to the level of attention an ENGO receives from news media. Using data derived from a content analysis of 2158 media reports by 171 ENGOs across China and other sources, the results showed that ENGOs that have an official website and use Weibo garner more media attention than those who do not have a website or use Weibo. Most importantly, the results indicate differences between environmental activism and environmental consumerism in facilitating the media visibility of different types of ENGOs. Compared to government-organized ENGOs, grassroots ENGOs benefit more from participating in environmental consumerist advocacy and having an official website. The findings demonstrate the importance of using various strategies to increase organizational visibility in news media and highlighting the differences between using websites, Weibo, and WeChat in facilitating the media visibility of ENGOs in China.     

Gone Fishin': A Framing Analysis of the Fight Over a Small Town's City Seal

This study is a framing analysis of regional and national newspaper, Internet, and Associated Press news coverage of a legal dispute over the inclusion of a fish symbol on the city seal in the small town of Republic, Missouri. Analysis of news articles revealed 4 frames. First, news reports framed the dispute as trivial. Second, news accounts framed the plaintiff in the lawsuit against the city as a religious outsider because of her Wiccan beliefs. Third, news accounts framed the dispute in terms of grassroots support for the fish symbol and outside meddlers who opposed the fish symbol. The fourth frame cast the dispute in terms of a battle or holy war.     

Social problem construction and national context: news reporting on "overweight" and "obesity" in the United States and France

Drawing on analyses of American and French news reports on "overweight" and "obesity," this article examines how national context—including position in a global field of nation states, as well as different national politics and culture—shapes the framing of social problems. As has been shown in previous research, news reports from France—the economically dominated but culturally dominant nation of the two—discuss the United States more often than vice versa, typically in a negative way. Our contribution is to highlight the flexibility of anti-American rhetoric, which provides powerful ammunition for a variety of social problem frames. Specifically, depending on elite interests, French news reports may invoke anti-American rhetoric to reject a given phenomenon as a veritable public problem, or they may use such rhetoric to drum up concern over an issue. We further show how diverse cultural factors shape news reporting. Despite earlier work showing that a group-based discrimination frame is more common in the United States than in France, we find that the U.S. news sample is no more likely to discuss weight-based discrimination than the French news sample. We attribute this to specific barriers to this particular framing, namely the widespread view that body size is a behavior, akin to smoking, rather than an ascribed characteristic, like race. This discussion points, more generally, to some of the mechanisms limiting the diffusion of frames across social problems.     

Gender and social policy: the impact of the public expenditure cuts and reactions to them

In social policy research the gender dimension has been relatively neglected in Britain. The attempt to selectively reduce public spending is examined with reference to its objective impact on men and women using official statistics and specialist reports. In addition, on the basis of a large-scale interview survey the subjective impact of and political reactions to the cuts are analysed by gender. The main findings are that this current social policy negatively affects women as both public sector workers and consumers more than men. Political reactions to the cuts were extensive but unrelated to gender per se. However, when one controls for economic activity and related variables, gender differences in terms of both political attitudes and behaviour were insignificant compared to the contrast between the economically active and inactive. The main social policy implication is that the restructuring of the welfare state hits women first and foremost.     

Children and the Discourse of Fear

The news media, a dominant source of information about social issues, use entertainment formats to organize reports that audiences will understand. Part of this organized effort is the use of a discourse of fear, or the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are central features of everyday life. Reliant on formal agents of social control as news sources about fear, news reports tend to repeat certain words, themes, and perspectives that support more social control. Although associated with crime, the discourse of fear includes other topics and concerns as well. A qualitative content analysis approach, “tracking discourse,” permits a mapping of discourse over time and across various topics. Analysis of the use of fear in three major newspapers during 1987–1996 shows that it has increased; that a large part of the discourse of fear includes children and the spaces they occupy (e.g., schools and neighborhoods); and that it changed from a focus on specific events in the 1980s to a more generalized, pervasive perspective in the 1990s, peaking in about 1994. It is argued that this is important for making claims about “necessary” social action to protect children, as well as protect us from children. Fear is the path to the dark side. —Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace     

The Giffords shootings in Tucson: Exploring citizen-generated versus news media content in crisis management

This study expands on previously published research into the role citizen generated content plays in the coverage of crisis situations and discusses implications for public relations practitioners who must respond to this type of coverage. Using a content analysis of newspapers and the websites of cable and broadcast news networks, the authors explored the use of both official versus non-official sources and the use of citizen generated content during coverage of the January 2011 shootings in Tucson that injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and 12 others, and killed six people. Results revealed reporters were more likely to use non-official sources. Reporters also were more likely to use non-official technology sources, or citizen generated content, than official technology sources such as web-based news releases and statements. This study finds additional support for the concept that crisis managers must learn to deal with reporters’ use of citizen generated content while also leveraging social media to control their organization's message during a crisis.     

Social Networks and Stratification in the Urban Chinese Labor Market: The Case of Laid‐Off Textile Workers and Their Officials in the Tianjin Municipality*

By what mechanisms has China's developing capitalist labor market been producing stratification patterns of reemployment and wage differences among laid‐off workers in the late 1990s? Theoretical perspectives delineating state, market, and societal mechanisms are used to guide exploratory analyses of data from a sample of workers who were laid off from state‐owned textile enterprises in the Tianjin municipality. Three findings are reported. First, men with what Portes defined as downward leveling “negative social capital” are less likely to become reemployed. A second, more tenuous, finding is that workers with a higher level of education are more likely to be reemployed. Third, workers with a social network tie to at least one official from a government administrative agency are more likely to be reemployed and, among those reemployed, more likely to earn higher wages, as compared to workers with a social network tie to at least one official from a state‐owned enterprise or workers lacking a social network tie to any official. This third finding, along with reports of analogous findings culled from a review of published literature, stimulates us to go beyond the data to theoretically speculate about how Chinese officialdom has become somewhat more differentiated and consequent ramifications for understanding newly emerging changes in China's stratification order.     

Crisis managers losing control of the message: A pilot study of the Virginia Tech shooting

This pilot study examined the role citizen generated content plays in the coverage of crisis situations and discusses implications for public relations practitioners who must respond to this type of coverage. A content analysis of newspapers and the websites of cable and broadcast news networks revealed reporters were more likely to use citizen generated content during the first stage of the crisis and were more likely to use non-official technology sources, or citizen generated content, than official technology sources such as web-based news releases and official statements.     

Exploring the Social Construction of Crime by Neighborhood: News Coverage of Crime in Boston

ABSTRACT

Information disseminated by the news shapes the way that the public perceives criminal events, often providing a distorted view of crime. Previous research has largely overlooked neighborhoods in discussions of how the news portrays crime. This study examines the ways that the news media report the neighborhoods in which homicides, robberies, and assaults are committed. Multiple theoretical perspectives rooted in the law of opposites and racial typification provide differing explanations for the reporting of crime. Using Boston as a test site, this study employs a content analysis of The Boston Globe crime articles to identify the neighborhoods in which instances of homicide, robbery, and assault receive coverage. A comparison with official crime data from the Boston Police Department suggests differences in neighborhood reporting trends for robbery and assault but not for homicide. Specifically, the news media tend to disproportionately report more robberies and assaults in neighborhoods with lower levels of neighborhood disadvantage. Implications for the social construction of crime and neighborhoods as well as criminal justice response for disadvantaged neighborhoods are discussed.     

“富二代”媒体形象的呈现与思考

主流大众媒体对于"富二代"的报道呈现以下特征:报道体裁方面,注重新闻报道;报道基调上,负面新闻超过半数,且存在"标题党"现象;报道内容方面,炫富、绯闻、违法事件居多;报道主体特征方面,多为高学历低年龄的男性。作为大众媒体,其所构建的拟态环境对公众对于"富二代"群体形象负面认知的形成具有重要影响。媒体由于受到消费浪潮的影响,而乐于通过塑造"富二代"纨绔子弟的形象来迎合受众、吸引眼球,制造了大量有明显倾向性的报道,但也有许多新闻工作者对这种片面化的报道方式进行了反思。一方面,媒体报道应当实事求是,并平衡正负面报道,做到事实客观与整体客观并存,不做"标题党";另一方面,"富二代"也应当严以自律,增强社会责任感以提升自己的公众形象。     

Public relations practitioners’ management of fake news: Exploring key elements and acts of information authentication

Using a thematic analysis of open-ended questions answered by current public relations practitioners in the United States, this study examined how public relations (PR) practitioners currently understand fake news and the strategies they use to verify information. Fake news is conceptualized as an important organizational issue that requires monitoring and management by PR practitioners. Participants identified manipulative intentions and misleading content intended to harm reputation as key elements of fake news. The current findings suggest that PR practitioners rely on both traditional news media and crowdsourcing to verify information. Finally, to differentiate clients’ content from fake news, participants emphasized the need to maintain control as the official source of information, avoid any controversies in official responses, and adhere to PR professional standards and ethics.     

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.     

Media Constructions of Risk and Safety: Differential Framings of Hazard Events*

The media play an important role in the social construction of risk and safety. In this article, we analyze how reports in a New Orleans newspaper defined the risk and safety associated with a series of four events during the summer of 1988: a drought, low water levels in the Mississippi River, a saltwater intrusion, and toxic pollution in local bodies of water. The newspaper reports defined some of the events as hazards by assessing their negative consequences and, in turn, defined them as specific kinds of hazards by identifying their causes. Specifically, we found that the reports defined the nonlocal consequences of an event as more varied and severe than its local consequences. Further, the reports consistently defined each of the events as natural events rather than attributing their causes to social or technological events or conditions. Our results suggest the importance of news sources, economic and political power, and a preference for monocausal frames in the social construction of news. Our results also suggest the importance of local cultural world views in defining hazards and risks. We use the findings to suggest avenues for future research and theory.     

FEAR IN THE NEWS

Fear pervades popular culture and the news media. Whether used as a noun, verb, adverb, or adjective, an ongoing study finds that the word "fear'pervades news reports across all sections of newspapers, and is shown to move or "travel'from one topic to another. The use of fear and the thematic emphases spawned by entertainment formats are consistent with a "discourse of fear,'or the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of the effective environment. A qualitative content analysis of a decade of news coverage in The Arizona Republic and several other major American news media (e.g., the Los Angeles Times , and ABC News) reveals that the word "fear'appears more often than it did several years ago, particularly in headlines, where its use has more than doubled. Comparative materials obtained through the Lexis/Nexis information base also reveals that certain themes are associated with a shifting focus of fear over the years (e.g., violence, drugs, AIDS), with the most recent increases associated with reports about children. Analysis suggests that this use of fear is consistent with popular culture oriented to pursuing a "problem frame'and entertainment formats, which also have social implications for social policy and reliance on formal agents of social control.     

Breaking bad news with CONSOLE: Toward a framework integrating medical protocols with crisis communication

This paper develops the CONSOLE (Coherence, Orientation, Nuance, Support, Ongoing, Leadership, Emotions) framework to guide practitioners on how to break bad news effectively to stakeholders during crises. Arguably the first study integrating well-established medical protocols such as SPIKES (Baile et al., 2000) and COMFORT (Villagran et al., 2010) with crisis communication literature, the CONSOLE framework is applied on four aviation crises to examine the manner in which organizations communicate bad news on social media platforms, which are increasingly used to communicate with stakeholders (Siah, Bansal & Pang, 2010). Data was obtained during the height of the crises (Vasterman, 2005) from official Twitter and Facebook pages of Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia and Asiana Airlines. Findings showed that the airlines’ communication of bad news to stakeholders suffer from emotional deficit. Practitioners can use the CONSOLE framework to break bad news in a holistic and empathetic manner during crises.     

Family Therapy in France: An Australian Perspective

This article is an exploration of family therapy in France by an Australian social worker and family therapist. It also reports on the 2010 European Family Therapy Conference and includes an interview with Dr Mony Elkaïm that provides an overview of his work. All this is discussed in terms of its relevance for family therapists in Australia. It is followed by a brief response from Dr Elkaïm.     

Framing distance: local vs. non-local news in Hong Kong press

Geographical location as a “natural” attribute of news has always been a source of news manipulation. This research investigates how different community newspapers select, interpret, and package events originating in places of varying distances. Contextualized in Hong Kong, three media frames (authority, conflict, and attribution) are closely examined and theoretically connected to three types of newspapers (mass appeal, elite, and pro-establishment) across four locales (local, mainland China, Asian, and international). To test the hypotheses, a large-scale content analysis of 14 daily newspapers in Hong Kong was conducted. On the whole, findings supported the three hypotheses, showing that local news was systematically differentiated from non-local news in terms of the frequency of political authorities cited, presence of diversified opinions, and the likelihood of either individuals or institutions being blamed for social wrongs. Considerable variations were detected across different types of newspapers as well. Theoretical and social implications of the empirical findings are discussed.