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.     

New media, new movements? The role of the internet in shaping the 'anti-globalization' movement

Collective action and social movement protest has become commonplace in our 'demonstration-democracy' and no longer surprises the media or the public. However, as will be shown, this was not the case with the recent anti-globalization protests that attracted demonstrators from countries all over the world. The battles of Seattle, Washington, Prague and Genoa, with an unforeseen mixture of nationalities and movements, became world news. Interestingly, the new media seemed to play a crucial role in the organization of these global protests. This article maps this movement-in-progress via an analysis of the websites of anti-globalization, or more specifically anti-neo-liberal globalization organizations. It examines the contribution of these sites to three different conditions that establish movement formation; collective identity; actual mobilization and a network of organizations. This ongoing, explorative research indicates signs of an integration of different organizations involved and attributes an important role to the Internet. However, whilst both our methodology and subject are evolving rapidly, conclusions, as our initial results show, must be tempered.     

Two dynamics of globalization in the context of a sports mega-event: the case of UEFA EURO 2012 in Poland

ABSTRACT

The article uses the theoretical framework of Saskia Sassen’s two dynamics of globalization in order to analyse the relations between a nation-state and a non-state global actor when applying and preparing for a sports mega-event, namely UEFA Euro 2012 in Poland. The first dynamic of globalization is created by global institutions, organizations – such as global sport organizations, regimes, and processes. UEFA used the application process, and preparation, to confirm and consolidate its role as a global governor of an increasingly important area of globalization. The way Polish public institutions accommodated the UEFA requirements illustrates the second dynamic of globalization. The context of sports mega-events – ‘organized’ by global sports organizations and ‘hosted’ by nation-states – merges the two dynamics and makes it possible to emphasize the mechanisms involved in forming the new global order, defined by the complex interplay between the nation-state and non-state actors.     

民间外交:未来更具人文性的全球化之选择

维基解密网站泄密事件发生后,美国等西方国家的官方外交一度受挫。本文认为,官方外交遭遇危机或陷入僵局时,民间外交可对各个国家和民族的交往发挥积极作用,通过各类媒体以及依靠与非政府组织的合作寻求各国各民族间的合作点,有助于拓宽民间组织在全球范围内的交流与合作。在信息革命与全球化时代,应最大限度地利用各类民间渠道开展民间外交,参与维护国内稳定和世界和平,致力于克服以美国为首的"野蛮全球化"所建立的官方外交中存在的各种弊端,构建一种更具人文性的全球化蓝图。     

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.     

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.     

International news coverage and the problems of media globalization. In search of a ‘new global‐local nexus’

A variety of counter trends seem to call the idea of a linear process of media globalization into question. Many of the arguments against it have concentrated on the growth on national media markets throughout the world or on the information gap between developed and developing countries. Amazingly, though, the topic of foreign reporting has not attained a very prominent place in the globalization debate, although numerous content analyses of international news show that foreign reporting in all media systems is usually heavily influenced by particularist views. The content level of the media globalizes much slower than technical and economic aspects of media development make us think. The system of foreign reporting is not an integrated part of the international system of political and societal relations but is still closely connected to the nation‐state. Further international and intercullural conflicts and crises might be reinforced by a growing gap between globalization and particularizalion of international mass communication. A new global‐local nexus’ is needed, based on a new culture of international media criticism and a reform of the system of foreign reporting.     

Journalism and Globalization

Like every other social practice, journalism cannot now fully be understood apart from globalization. As part of a larger platform of communication media, journalism contributes to this experience of the world-as-a-single-place and thus represents a key component in these social transformations, both as cause and outcome. These issues at the intersection of journalism and globalization define an important and growing field of research, particularly concerning the public sphere and spaces for political discourse. In this essay, I review this intersection of journalism and globalization by considering the communication field’s approach to ‘media globalization’ within a broader interdisciplinary perspective that mixes the sociology of globalization with aspects of geography and social anthropology. By placing the emphasis on social practices, elites, and specific geographical spaces, I introduce a less media-centric approach to media globalization and how journalism fits into the process. Beyond ‘global village journalism,’ this perspective captures the changes globalization has brought to journalism.     

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).     

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.     

Media,Politics and Climate Change: Towards a New Research Agenda

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and the media have been demonstrated to play a key role in shaping public perceptions and policy agendas. Journalists are faced with multiple challenges in covering this complex field. This article provides an overview of existing research on the media framing of climate change, highlighting major research themes and assessing future potential research developments. It argues that analysis of the reporting of climate science must be placed in the wider context of the growing concentration and globalization of news media ownership, and an increasingly ‘promotional culture’, highlighted by the rapid rise of the public relations industry in recent years and claims‐makers who employ increasingly sophisticated media strategies. Future research will need to examine in‐depth the targeting of media by a range of actors, as well as unravel complex information flows across countries as media increasingly converge.     

Globalization of Culture and the Arts

This article examines the state of the field in the sociological literature on the globalization of culture and focuses on key empirical works in the globalization of the arts. The first part of the article presents the main trends in theorizing about the globalization of culture in its broadest terms, that is, the large-scale changes in worldviews that both facilitate and are made possible by globalization such as modernization, universalism, consumerism, and McDonaldization. The second part of the article examines empirical work on television, music, and the performing arts in light of theorizing about globalization and commodification, audience reception, localization and glocalization, the role of the state, imperialism, global cultural fields, and global norms. In terms of theory, the article explores the tension between globalization's homogenizing and diversifying tendencies. The review of the empirical literature includes research conducted in Cuba, Israel, Italy, Japan, Russia, Singapore, the USA, and Uzbekistan.     

Arab Television in Academic Scholarship

Over the past 10 years, there has been an exponential increase in satellite television in the Arab world, with programming ranging from music videos to news, from reality TV programs to Islamic talk shows. Concurrent with this development has been the growth of academic scholarship on understanding the relationship between Arab television and social and political transformations in the Middle East. This article provides an overview of Arab television growth, especially that of pan‐Arab satellite channels such as Al‐Jazeera, and of scholarship about it. Academic work that focuses on theories of media globalization and the public sphere, and that is in conversation with Western journalism and global media studies, is highlighted.     

Ethnography and News Production: New(s) Developments in the Field*

Ethnographic studies of news production provide invaluable insights into the nature and determinants of news production and a necessary corrective, therefore, to grand speculative claims and theories about the news media. These more grounded studies have variously examined the daily routines, bureaucratic nature, competitive ethos, professional ideologies, source dependencies and cultural practices of the news media. Today, however, the globalising field of news production and journalist practices is fast changing and ethnographies of news production remain as essential as ever for explaining and understanding the complexities involved. This article overviews the field of news production studies and makes the case for why ethnographic studies need to be conducted in the future. It describes past studies and their findings, reflects on the principal strengths and possible blind spots of ethnography as a research method, and finally considers new developments in the field and the challenges that these pose to academic researchers.     

SHIFTING ARRANGEMENTS: INDO-TRINIDADIAN WOMEN,GLOBALIZATION, AND THE RESTRUCTURING OF FAMILY LIFE

This article focuses on the changing relationships between East-Indian daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law in a developing society: Trinidad, West Indies. Changes in how families are structured are seen as active responses to processes of globalization. While these changes have provided younger women with opportunities to resist older arrangements, their responses have in turn created new problems that remain unresolved. I argue that these families' experiences of change are linked to complex relations that include increased access to education, changes in the village economy, and global media penetration, all of which are part of broader processes of modernization and globalization. The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork as well as census data and economic, educational, and demographic changes since World War II.     

Implications of urbanism for the use of local news media: effects of population concentration on types of news acquisition in Japan

The Internet, a global computer network enabling people to send and receive information anywhere in the world, also functions as a local medium of communication. This study focuses on the role of the Internet in transmitting local news and examines the effects of community population concentrations as socio-ecological environments on the use of local news media consumed online and offline. Data from 1367 respondents across 156 Japanese communities were used to analyze the relationships between type of community and type of news source. The findings suggest that people who live in highly populated communities tend more often to use the Internet to access local news, whereas those in less populated communities tend to use more traditional mass media. However, the results of this study did not show a relationship between population concentrations within communities and the acquisition of international news, nor did the social features of residents adequately explain the effects of population concentration on the acquisition of local news. These results are consistent with theoretical predictions based on network externalities, urbanism, and collective action. The findings indicate that local news consumption is embedded in local social contexts in a way that international news is not, reinforcing the importance of urbanism in the information age.     

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.     

Mediated and moderated effects of political communication on civic participation

Australian scholars and politicians have long been concerned about politically uninformed and inactive young Australians. However, few efforts have been made to explain how the use of traditional and online media may affect youth’s participation in politics. Our research utilises the citizen communication mediation model and extends the expected mediation chain by an additional examination of the possible interactions between news media use and political discussions, as suggested by the differential gains model. Using representative data from Australian 10th graders, we examine whether and how news media usage (newspapers, television, radio, and the Internet) affects expected participation in a range of civic and political activities conditional of discussions about political issues (with family, friends, and online). Path models account for additional mediators (civic knowledge and civic efficacy) and control variables to explain future civic and political participation. The results suggest that news media use stimulates political discussions, although different media exert differential effects. Yet, news exposure hardly influences the second mediators (civic knowledge and civic efficacy) in a direct manner. In fact, civic knowledge and efficacy mediate the relationships between political communication and participation, both directly and sequentially. Moderation analyses clarify that despite the mediating role of political discussions, news media exposure also influences (future) civic participation contingent of students’ engagement in (primarily Internet-based) discussions about political and social issues. We emphasise the significance of these results with reference to previous research, discuss potential directions for future research, and draw conclusions for civics and citizenship education.     

The online news cycle and the continuous alteration of crisis frames: A Swedish case study on how the immediacy of online news affected the framing of the swine flu epidemic

Abstract

This explorative case study investigates how the continuous publication cycle and the immediacy of online news affected the Swedish news media framing of the swine flu epidemic between April and May 2009. The findings suggest that media framing changes continuously, several times a day, effectively painting different frames of the crisis. Consequently, an organization involved in this crisis may face stakeholders that have encountered contrasting frames depending on when they accessed the latest news. Furthermore, the results show that the speed of modifications seems to be highest in the initial stages of reporting when the flu was perceived as more dangerous. Because the crisis frames change constantly, this provides both a challenging crisis communication environment and an opportunity to influence and shape the frames by organizations that are aware of them and act swiftly.