This study examines the media discourse on the 2002 coup d’état against the government of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, with the aim of exploring how ideology in media discourse helps construct democracy in a Latin American political context. Critical discourse analysis is used to examine written pieces from Dagens Nyheter (Sweden), El País (Uruguay), and the New York Times (US). The study finds that the discourse on the overthrow and the events preceding it constructs the coup as a potential victory for democracy and as the definitive end of Chávez. However, after the failure of the coup and the reinstallation of Chávez one can perceive discursive renegotiations, such as the publishing of non-fundamental criticism of the overthrow. The study argues that the media discourse on the coup displays a highly relativistic attitude towards democracy, which serves the interests of the elite classes in Venezuela and of US hegemony in global politics. The article also argues that the flexibility of the discourse at hand shows the need for a detailed analysis of how ideology is (re)formed in media discourse.
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This study explores the dynamic interaction between government and news media in the frame-building process, the process of shaping journalistic news frames, during the financial crisis that erupted in September 2008. The unexpected as well as event-driven character of the financial crisis is expected to create dynamics that challenge journalists' dependence on powerful political actors as the national government by opening up the news gate wider to various voices and perspectives. However, the findings of this study indicate unexpected results as the government dominates the frame-building process. In order to empirically explore the frame-building process, this paper employs framing theory to analyse political actors' messages and news media coverage. The study employs two sets of data, the first a content analysis of news coverage and the second a content analysis of political messages, during a three month period in Sweden following the eruption of the financial crisis. Overall, the results of this study indicate that powerful political actors' ability to influence frame-building follows the predictable pattern of indexing also during an unexpected event thus limiting press independence.
Traditional media effect theories as agenda-setting theory have recently been questioned due to the development of the media environment with media fragmentation and individualized media consumption. Other scholars disagree and suggest that a distinction has to be made between actual media effects and the ease with which they can be measured. Given this scholarly discussion the purpose of this study is to investigate and compare the agenda-setting effects of different media consumption measures on individual issue salience. The study is based on a panel survey that includes different measures of consumption: (1) general news media attention, (2) exposure to different media types such as traditional news media, online news media, and political social media. Overall, the findings suggest that general news media attention might be a more significant measure for consumption in a high-choice media environment. In essence, this study suggests that agenda-setting effects are not becoming non-significant but rather difficult to measure.
Media criticism often evolve â and grow in strength â during times of media change with new forms of journalism, new media formats, new media markets, new ways of addressing media markets and new media technologies. Different stakeholders may pursue their interests by formulating a media critique that protect their positions and promotes status quo. It is not difficult to find critics who in the name of the citizens formulate criticism against journalism and the media. It is more difficult to find and study representative examples of criticism expressed by the citizens themselves. The technological development on the Internet has paved the way for a number of new communicative tools that enable users to interact with each other and publish content in a way that changes the conditions for citizens to act as media critics radically. This is an aspect of the Internetâs democratic and participatory potential â and a key point in the rhetoric surrounding the concept âweb 2.0â. In this paper we analyse and compare media critical debates during two periods of media change in Sweden: A) the debate caused by the launch of the tabloid Expressen in the 1950âs, and B) the critique against the new, commercially driven participatory news- and debate forum called Newsmill, launched in 2008. These historical and contemporary cases are used to enlighten a theoretical discussion about participatory online mediaâs potential for improving the conditions for citizens to act as media critics in a fruitful way. Both Expressen and Newsmill represent examples of journalistic innovations that affect surrounding media considerably. The result of the comparison point to a new dilemma related to the role of citizens as media critics in the digital age. The fact that the citizens themselves are now increasingly involved in the production of content, also puts them in a new role as defenders of the site that publish their content, against critics from traditional mass media.
Hyperlocal media has repeatedly been framed as a potential saviour of local journalism, but the democratic and civic role that often is ascribed to hyperlocals is not obvious or uncomplicated. The hyperlocals’ vulnerable economic situation makes them dependent on free content, for example material produced by local councils or organizations. This paper investigates the role of hyperlocal media entrepreneurs and their interaction with local councils and other stakeholders. We examine how the hyperlocal media entrepreneurs supply their communities with news in places of a media void, and how they perceive their role in their communities. Findings from this qualitative study show that the media entrepreneurs view their news production as an important part of the local community. They provide a forum for debate and information for citizens, local governments and organizations. Their service also includes a channel for local events relevant for the community. The interactions with the local governments vary, as well as the hyperlocal entrepreneurs’ evaluation of how the information provided by the councils can or should be handled. The relation between hyperlocal media entrepreneurs and local governments is a complex process, including both interrelated and contradictory goals.
Although considerable efforts have studied online news, studies so far have not investigated how the actual news topics are affected by digitalization in general, if at all, or compared them to different media constructs. Instead, changes in content are assumed or illustrated anecdotally rather than systematically assessed. This empirical study, covering Swedish and UK news sites within tabloid, quality morning, and local/regional varieties between 2002 and 2012, shows that there is a tabloidization effect in general but that it is stronger in tabloids and in Sweden compared to the UK. Further, this tabloidization can be more precisely described as a shift from political to more lifestyle journalism, as it is in the areas where the prime growth and decline are found. In addition, the study reveals that it is the slower news that increases most suggesting that the immediate character of online news is mediated by production conditions
The Internet has the potential to change how organizations communicate with the public, both by allowing them to bypass news media by having their own websites and by offering interactive features and multimedia on their websites. Simultaneously, major news media remains an important factor, especially online, where more and more people visit them for information. Online news functions differently compared to traditional news with regards to, for instance, the much shorter news cycle, which implies that issues can surface and disappear quickly. This provides an intriguing setting where online media can report quickly on any issue and where organizations indicated as stakeholders in the issue can reply on their own websites. This study uses three cases, encompassing 14 organizations, to investigate if and how organizations reply on their websites when they have been identified as stakeholders in an issue. The results indicate that organizations are far from realizing the full potential of their websites.
Public relations research has recently explored how the digitalization of the media has affected crisis communications, focusing on such phenomena as corporate websites and blogs. This study first argues that digitalization involving user participation also changes traditional news production and that this affects the frame in which issues and crisis are told and understood. It then empirically explores media users’ influence on news frameworks through a case study of how mainstream Swedish online news covered the swine flu outbreak in 2009, finding that such users were an integral part of the media coverage of that crisis, contributing with a variety of voices that primarily criticized the media’s paradigms. It concludes by discussing these findings’ implications for crisis communications, in particular the impact of crisis communications becoming multidirectional and decentralized through participatory journalism.
This article attempts to re-assess the often negative evaluations of the political press, through a detailed analysis of a case study from inter-war Czechoslovakia, the newspaper Národní listy, and its publishing company the Prague Stock Printery (PAT), which were affiliated to the National Democratic Party. The analysis is theoretically framed by a discussion of notions of party-press parallelism and political parallelism, and how these political models are evaluated within the contemporary literature. In the following parts, an extensive (but necessary) contextualization is offered, which first focuses on the political-economic history of inter-war Czechoslovakia, and a description of its media landscape, and then details the workings of PAT and Národní listy. The analytical parts first describe the financial, managerial and editorial situation of PAT and Národní listy, and then evaluates their functioning at the economic, political and journalistic level. This evaluation shows the complexities of the political model from within the actual publishing practice, and demonstrates both the advantages and problems of the political model, compensating for the frequent exclusively negative evaluations of this model.
Since the rise of the Internet, there has been a growing interest in research on its implications for democracy and participation. This article contributes to the research on online citizen political participation with a bottom-up, grassroots perspective that focuses on non-professional and individual actors. Through interviews with 15 young Swedish bloggers and social media debaters involved in feminist, anti-racist and leftist politics, the present article explores the conditions for citizen participation, as well as the benefits and impediments to being a blogger and social media debater. The conclusion is that while engaged citizens focused on feminism and anti-racism have many negative experiences, strategies enabled by social media use give them access to a support system that is fundamental to their endurance. The challenges for feminists and women online seem to be the same as those present at the beginning of the 1990s, but strategies for coping and resisting are now enabled by new tools. The participants in this study depend on their network for collaboration, safety, dissemination of content, support, and a sense of community, which is facilitated by the use of information and communication technologies for collaboration and dissemination.
Questions arising out of the global character of the media include whether or not one can become a kosmou politês (citizen of the world) by consuming and using different media whose “relay function” (Schulz, 2004) potentially draws the world into the sphere of the everyday. This potential has mainly been researched from a reception-of-distant-suffering paradigm where what is at stake is the possibility for news reporting to set in motion an “electronic empathy” (Hannerz, 1996). This study ventures beyond this dominant paradigm and uses ESS (European Social Survey) Round 5 2010 to examine the impact of the empirically neglected variables of ordinary news consumption and media consumption in general to see to what extent they cultivate a cosmopolitan outlook in audiences and users. The results indicate that ‘the media’ display ambivalent and multi-directional effects and thus that the notion of “mediated cosmopolitanism” does not withstand empirical testing
Almost all public broadcasters in Europe nowadays face serious challenges in order to remain as central media actors in dramatically changing media environments. Concepts that have recently come into the audiovisual scenario, such as digitalization, deregulation and convergence of the European media markets help to explain why many public service broadcasting companies have to fight for their survival. The main reasons are the more competitive media environment and the subtle, blurred lines among public and private broadcasting and other media platforms. The core challenge facing public service broadcasting today is the transition to public service media.
Different media policy options are discussed in this paper. Firstly, an expansive strategy may be implemented, aimed at allowing public service to use public funds and license fees for Internet operations and also by accepting additional revenues such as sponsoring or advertising to secure online activities. Secondly, a preserving strategy is possible where public service may use its existing revenues freely on different media, but without receiving any extra money for Internet operations. Thirdly, policy makers may adopt a restricting strategy, accepting public service presence on the Net, but only with special kinds of content. Fourthly, it is possible to imagine a free-market strategy where public service on the Net is allowed as long as all its operations are financed by commercial revenues from the Internet activities.
The four British Prime Ministers giving testimony to the Leveson Inquiry choose not to confront the media on issues of large-scale media abuse. "A missed opportunity", John Major said. "I think you certainly do fear the power being directed at you", Tony Blair declared. "We had no mandate", Gordon Brown asserted. The relationship between the media and politicians "has become too close", David Cameron stated. How did this closeness come about? This article discusses the political actors' decisions and non-decisions with regard to possible media policy strategies in Britain during four different Prime Ministers in the period between 1990 and 2012. The four cases examine media policy goals, values, contexts and alternatives offered for every Prime Minister. Their testimonies to the Leveson Inquiry are used for a comparison of media policy decision strategies during the examined period. Copyright © 2015 (Lars W Nord and Torbjörn Von Krogh).
Television depicts people from different social classes, with middle class characters often dominating. How do television viewers receive this? This article discusses the reception of social class dimensions while watching television, drawing on a reception analysis conducted in Sweden in the early 1990s. The aim was to analyze if and how Swedish television viewers perceive the social class position of characters and persons in different kinds of television fiction and news. Both qualitative reception interviews and a questionnaire were used. One main conclusion was that informants usually can give some classification of social position when asked about it but this was mostly not something that they reflected upon while watching. It is argued that this result can be understood as an outcome of both cognitive processes and class embarrassment. However, attention for social position was somewhat higher when watching fiction and lower when watching news.
Recent discussions and research about the uses of digital social media platforms by social movements and protest organizations have raised questions about threats and challenges represented by these technologies. There is also a debate on whether digital social media platforms can contribute to establish and strengthen long-standing oppositional groups and structural change. In this context, this article analyses how the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) experiences and views the use of digital social media platforms in its communicative processes. Based on interviews and observations, the article shows how MST militants present ambivalent views towards platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and towards the dynamics of digital communication. Conclusions point that the main concern is threat to the organic collective character of the movement posed by individualistic digital social media platforms. Different from contemporary protest organisations, MST sees a clear separation between the movement and its media. The goal is to appropriate of and control media technologies, which brings many difficulties when dealing with digital social media platforms.
This study shows what the online editions of Sweden’s two major daily newspapers put on the agenda with regards to climate change and environment. It also illustrates the ideas, values, ideologies and hegemonic ideas entailed within the presented articles’ and news items’ way of narrating. The result demonstrates how the readers are presented not merely with facts concerning climate change, but moreover with general sets of values holding that, for example, Chinese and Russian people are not entirely trustworthy, that Swedish authorities are utterly dependable and that the climate crises shall be solved by means of technology – not through a change in our way of living or through political economical measures.
The purpose of this article is to show how the battle for the citizens’ opinions and actions regarding climate change has been played out via language, i.e. via written documents or oral statements, in the media in the U.S. and in Sweden. The results show the importance of language and discourse in our understanding of science and of the relations of power between consensus scientist and contrarians. They also show how these groups have a different resonance in the media as a result of the media logic, the journalistic narrative form and the journalists’ professional ideologies as well as of the journalists’ and ordinary peoples’ lack of knowledge when it comes to the conditions and restrictions of science.
In March 2014 Swedish news agencies received an anonymous handwritten letter stating that “Banksy”, probably the world’s most famous street artist, would hold his first “official unofficial exhibit in Sweden”. The validity of this press release was heavily debated throughout the week in Swedish media. Would this mythical street artist whose real name no one knows make an appearance in Stockholm? Could it be a PR stunt and if it were, would it be worth seeing anyway? On Sunday 23 March 8000 people gathered to find out. This article discursively explores the event as an urban moment of artistic and spatial improvisations in relation to ideas on spatial subversion, paradoxical space and aesthetic cosmopolitanism. The paradoxical space becomes as a temporal strategy, which holds the potential of displacing and resisting the hegemonic makings of urban space. Further the exploration of the event points to how a discursive construction of an event attaches and detaches signifiers to and from specific places, performances and symbolisms and how notions of place, performance and subjects are (re)negotiated in that process.
This article considers Mulvey's male gaze in today's postfeminist media culture in the latest remake of Charlie's Angels. Male gaze is analyzed as form, as production ecology, and as narrative. Since the inception of Charlie's Angels in the 1970s, the TV and feature film franchise has tried to balance feminist concerns with notions of femininity, in more and less successful ways. Although the 2000 remake of Charlie's Angels could be considered as an exemplar of objectifying and sexualizing women, the 2019 film barely presents such instances. Instead, it offers a male gaze directed at a female audience and internalized as a measure of success for its female protagonists and the implied female audience. Through practices of othering, and by placing male characters in morally inferior positions, the female audience is presented with hegemonic conceptions of white, middle-class femininity as an ideal that female viewers can and should aspire to be.
Through the advent of social media, news achieves a life of its own online. The media organisations partly lose control over the diffusion process, and simultaneously individuals gain power over the process, and become opinion leaders for others. This study focuses on news sharers and news shared (or rather, interacted), and has three RQ:s: 1) What characterizes the people who share news in social media, 2) Have the characteristics of interacted news changed over time? and 3) Are there differences between news content interacted by ordinary people and news highlighted by media organisations? Two different studies have been conducted: A representative survey and a quantitative content analysis.The main results are that the opinion leaders differ from the majority by being younger, with a greater political interest, single and more digital in their general lifestyle, both concerning news consumption and other aspects. The content analysis shows that the most interacted news on social media follow the traditional news values rather well, with a few exceptions. Most apparent is that interacted news is more positive over time and compared to print front-page news. Accidents and crime dominate print front-pages, while politics is more prominent in interacted news.