This article explores the temporal organization and manipulation of time in the production and presentation of news reports. Time is often cited as one of the most central organizing concepts of news production; indeed one of the major features of news reporting is the breaking of stories and the reporting of events `as they happen'. However, whilst much emphasis is placed upon time within media production, much of this pertains to the reporting of past and present events (...) rather than the reporting of the future. This article explores the future within news reporting through an examination of sequential events leading up to a main scheduled newsworthy event: the execution of Timothy McVeigh. It analyses how the production of `news' utilizes the future by relying upon prediction and speculation about what will happen and examines: how news can be seen to depend to a large degree on uncertainty for its value; the use of time frames within media reporting; and the way time is manipulated in the service of the recency and immediacy of news reporting. (shrink)

This article deals with frames and schemata in news reporting. It distinguishes frames and schemata in newsroom discourse and news reports. On the individual cognitive level, a frame is defined as a set of schemata for different aspects of reality. They emerge in newsroom discourse and in exchange with other discourses, i. e., they are not idiosyncratic but shared among those working in a newsroom. It is supposed that news report structures correspond to these newsroom frames (...) and schemata. The article discusses these considerations in regard to related explanations of news production, especially attitudinal approaches such as news bias. While the latter assume that journalists prefer information consistent with their own attitudes or that news reporting is ‘synchronized’ with editorial tendencies, the framing approach proposes that information in routine news reports correspond to newsroom frames. In this study I will use xenophobia as an example to identify newsroom frames in a qualitative frame analysis. In the second part of the study, quantitative analysis of news framing examines whether news report information correlates with newsroom frames. Finally, I will present empirical evidence that shows that newsroom frames play a role in news reporting. (shrink)

An a l y s e s of more than 300 textbooksfound that the development of lessons on ethics in news reporting and writing textbooks clearly mirrored the development of scholarship in media ethics. Substantial discussion of ethics did not appear in textbooks until the 1920s and 1930s, and after a 40-year absence, returned in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. However, the author argues, the potentialforfurther advancement of ethics lessons among news reporting and writing textbooks remains n question (...) mark. Text discussions of ethics are still not prominent, and important moral and intellectual questions in journalism are overlooked. (shrink)

News media coverage on education plays a ?uniquely important role in shaping public opinion?, can influence educational policy, and can affect and concern teachers. Yet, research examining how teachers have been represented in the news is scarce. What is particularly scarce are investigations with a historical dimension. The study reported in this paper is offered as a contribution towards rectifying the deficit and pointing the way towards one of a number of avenues of research that other scholars in (...) the field could take for various contexts (including different countries) and time periods. It is part of a much larger study whose aim was to provide a historical analysis of The West Australian newspaper?s representation of teachers in its reporting of five major educational developments in the State of Western Australia that were the subject of sustained coverage at various times between 1987 and 2007. The specific topic which is the focus of the analysis presented in this paper is ?standardized testing? (shrink)

China’s extensive media presence in Africa aims to distinguish itself through the use of constructive journalism in contrast with the perceived dominance of conflict journalism by Western media outlets. However, many scholars have raised questions of consistency surrounding Chinese media’s use of constructive journalism in representing Africa (e.g. Marsh, Citation2016). With perspectives from Galtung’s (Citation1987, p. 1998) conflict and peace journalism, this research applies Critical Discourse Analysis to examine Chinese media’s representation of Africa to an international audience. Using linguistic data (...) from China Radio International’s Today, it challenges the distinctions among peace journalism, solutions journalism and constructive journalism. The findings show that China’s claim of constructive journalism strongly favors the coverage of China, yet is largely absent in the coverage of the African continent. It suggests that while Chinese state-sponsored media utilizes the so-called constructive journalism when presenting information about a specific region to that region, these representations are not consistent across their international coverage. Hence, Africa remains a victim of conflict journalism. (shrink)

In the information era, the instant and diversified broadcasting of the COVID-19 pandemic has played an important role in stabilizing the societal mental state and avoiding inter-group conflicts. The presentation of visual graphics was considered as an innovative information form and broadly utilized in news reports. However, its effects on the audiences' cognition and behaviors have received little empirical attention. The current study applied real-time and retrospective priming paradigms to examine the impacts of information framing (positive vs. negative) and (...) form (plain text vs. pie chart) on individuals' risk perception (cognition), positive emotion (emotion), and willingness to help others (behavioral intention) during the outbreak and post-pandemic period in China. The results indicated the “amplification effect” of the innovative form of information in the real-time priming condition, which increased the effect of the information framing on cognition, emotion, and behavioral intention. However, in the retrospective priming condition, the amplification effect on cognition and emotion were weakened, while its effect on behavioral intention disappeared. In conclusion, the study found the “amplification effect” of innovative information forms. Further, the difference in the results in the real-time and retrospective priming paradigms suggested the constraint of the context of the “amplification effect,” and indicated the possible deviation of the retrospective paradigm in studies about disaster-related news. This study provides empirical support for how subtle changes in information presentation influence public mental and behavioral responses during a pandemic and has important implications for media psychology and social governance. (shrink)

This corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of news reports on air pollution published from 2008 through 2015 by China Daily, China’s largest official English-language newspaper, reveals a significant attitudinal shift around the end of 2011 as regards public awareness of increasing air pollution levels in China and related public criticism. It also constructs a clear image of the increasing determination and resolve of the Chinese central government over the course of this 8-year period to take action to effectively reduce air (...) pollution. This study highlights the submissive role played by the official Chinese press in their reporting on air pollution under the strict censorship system of the Communist Party of China, as well as the socio-political role that international sporting events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games played in raising both public and governmental awareness of environmental issues. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the ways in which journalists engage with different news sources in Chinese and Australian hard news. Based on the analysis of a comparable corpus of Chinese and Australian hard news reporting on risk events, the study investigates the cultural variability of engagement patterns and indicates how text patterns point to distinctions in the ways the power relations are reproduced in news production processes. Corpus findings show that Chinese and Australian journalists mediate (...) news sources of different statuses in different ways. Chinese journalists tend to close down the dialogic space of elite sources but to open up that of ordinary citizens’ sources. Australian journalists tend to contract the dialogic space of elite sources as much as they expand it. It is argued that such different patterns of engaging with news sources are related to the power relations between journalists and news sources in each context. (shrink)

The force of globalization has greatly challenged people’s conceptualization of national identity. The traditional definition of national identity as being distinct, stable and generated by such internal factors as ethnic, religion, citizenship and so on, has been replaced by the understanding that national identity is invested with more dynamic and complex features and is actually constructed differently in different situations. By following Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive perspective in critical discourse analysis and drawing on the 47 news reports collected on the (...) websites of People’s Daily Online and Xinhuanet, this study explores how China’s national identities are negotiated in its news reports of the Sino-US trade war. It is found that China’s news reports have constructed three types of Sino-US relations, namely, antagonistic, negotiatory and cooperative relations. Out of these relations, China has been constructed as victim of the trade war, defender of free trade, driver for negotiations and beneficiary of mutual cooperation. The construction of these identities and relations is realized through constructive, destructive, justification and transformation strategies. It is further found that the diversity of both China’s national identities and Sino-US relations in China’s news reports is the result of the political, social and economic differences between the two countries. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The ongoing Sino-U.S. trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies has since 2018 attracted much attention from the international media. This study used the approach of corpus-assisted discourse studies to compare how leading English-language newspapers from each side—The New York Times and China Daily — discursively constructed this issue. The findings indicated that while NYT tended to profile the trade conflict as a ‘war’ in line with mainstream hard-line ideologies that emphasize China’s presumed threat to national security of (...) the U.S., CD sought to dial down the rhetoric and showed a preference for defining the matter as a ‘friction’, consistent with the tenet of ‘pragmatic nationalism’ endorsed by the Communist Party of China. Accordingly, the two newspapers framed the causes, moral evaluation/consequences, and treatment of the issue in congruence with their respective dominant metaphors by means of various linguistic patterns. These differences are interpreted with regard to each side’s underlying ideologies and national interests. (shrink)

Numerous studies have examined the manner in which minority groups, including refugees, are depicted in the media discourse of the host countries or the dominant majority groups. The results of such studies indicate that media systematically discriminate these minority groups and deem them as a security, economic and hygiene threat to the majority groups. Through the use of Lakoff and Jonson’s conceptual metaphor theory, this study compares and contrasts the representation of Syrian refugees in the online media discourse of not (...) only host countries but also non-host countries, which, in this study, refers to nations that do not host Syrian refugees. The results show that statistical differences between the metaphors used by host and non-host countries only occur when using the metaphors that describe the entry of refugees and the burden they are inflicting on the host countries. This is clearly indicated by the p-values of the log-likelihood test. (shrink)

This paper examines how the slogan of the “Chinese Dream” is represented in two western news reports on the CNN and the BBC websites. They are among the first news reports which introduce the “Chinese Dream” into the US and the UK, respectively. The analysis of both the verbal news texts and the visuals shows that the reporters use different discursive strategies to manipulate the ideological orientation of the social actors and social actions in discourse. Through the (...) analysis, this study shows how different discursive resources conceptualized in Theo van Leeuwen’s work, Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis, are used to stereotype “the other’s” politics and political discourse in BBC and CNN’s news texts, and perpetuate a Eurocentric view on perceiving contemporary Chinese political discourse. (shrink)

To reduce negative emotional responses and to stimulate prosociality, constructive journalism promotes the inclusion of positive emotions and solutions in news. This study experimentally tested whether including those elements indeed increased prosocial intentions and behavior among children, and whether negative emotions and self-efficacy are mediators in this regard. To this end, children were exposed to an emotion-based, solution-based, or non-constructive news video. Results showed that emotion-based and solution-based news reduced children’s negative emotions compared to non-constructive news. (...) No direct effects for prosocial intentions were found, but solution-based news led to less prosocial behavior than emotion-based and non-constructive news. Moreover, negative emotions served as a mediator, self-efficacy did not. The more negative emotions were elicited by a news story, the higher the prosocial intentions and behavior. In conclusion, a constructive style of reporting helps to reduce children’s negative emotional responses but subsequently hinders prosociality. (shrink)

The critical linguistic analysis of authorial stance in English news reporting has long been concerned with uncovering the ideological bias embedded in the seemingly objective and neutral representation of people and events. Interest has recently shifted towards the nature of the authorial voice itself and the extent to which this semblance of objectivity is also typical in non-English reporting. This article explores to what extent the most impersonal ‘reporter voice’, as identified by Martin and White in English hard-news (...) reported in the press, is present in Italian reporting. The ‘appraisal’ categories developed by Martin and White are used, discussed and adapted for this purpose. Attention is thereby also given to significant expressive resources that may not be retrievable from English material alone. Similarities and differences in reporting styles are discussed and reference is made to the social and cultural variables that may underlie them. (shrink)

A NewsFusion System is a logic-based system for merging heterogeneous structured news reports. Structured news reports are XML documents, where the textentries are restricted to individual words or simple phrases, such as names and domain-specific terminology, and numbers and units. We assume structured news reports do not require natural language processing. In previous papers, we have presented aspects of a logic-based framework for merging structured news reports based on fusion rules. Fusion rules are a form of (...) scripting language that define how structured news reports should be merged. The antecedent of a fusion rule is a call to investigate the information in the structured news reports and the background knowledge, and the consequent of a fusion rule is a formula specifying an action to be undertaken to form a merged report. It is expected that a set of fusion rules is defined for any given application. In this paper, we present a framework for aggregation predicates that can be used in fusion rules for context-dependent aggregation of structured news reports. We also present a case study that uses aggregation predicates to merge weather reports that have been obtained from a selection of websites. (shrink)

As a type of public discourse closely related to litigation practices, Chinese legal news reports incorporate the important progress in China’s judicial reform. Meanwhile, due to the competitive pressure and driven by profit, Chinese legal news reports are characteristic of an evident trend of marketization. This article examines how and to what extent sensationalism invades Chinese legal news reports. The research methodology combines the theoretical paradigms of critical discourse analysis and genre analysis, with particular attention paid to (...) the notions of genre and interdiscursivity. The data include 70 legal news reports in Legal Daily. Analytical results show that Chinese legal news reports, although being a highly institutional genre, include a number of sensational strategies which promote the restructuring of legal news reports in China. (shrink)

In this paper, we conduct an in-depth study of Japanese keyword extraction from news reports, train external computer document word sets from text preprocessing into word vectors using the Ship-gram model in the deep learning tool Word2Vec, and calculate the cosine distance between word vectors. In this paper, the sliding window in TextRank is designed to connect internal document information to improve the in-text semantic coherence. The main idea is to use not only the statistical and structural features of (...) words but also the semantic features of words extracted through word-embedding techniques, i.e., multifeature fusion, to obtain the importance weights of words themselves and the attraction weights between words and then iteratively calculate the final weight of each word through the graph model algorithm to determine the extracted keywords. To verify the performance of the algorithm, extensive simulation experimental studies were conducted on three different types of datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed keyword extraction algorithm can improve the performance by a maximum of 6.45% and 20.36% compared with the existing word frequency statistics and graph model methods, respectively; MF-Rank can achieve a maximum performance improvement of 1.76% compared with PW-TF. (shrink)

This article is concerned with ‘how’ newsworthiness is constructed linguistically/discursively in a sample of Iranian crime and misbehaviour reports. This is new as both linguistic analysis of ‘crime reports’ and the context of ‘Iranian journalism’ are among under-researched areas. One-month worth editions of two Iranian/farsi language newspapers were collected, and the data were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively with reference to the analytical framework of Bednarek and Caple. While the quantitative analysis showed the construction of Eliteness as the most frequent (...) news value in both newspapers, there were differences in the construction of news values between the newspapers. Qualitative analysis of the data also showed the construction of news values in line with the sociocultural values prevalent in the society as well as the possible role of state and political authorities. (shrink)

Besides offering opportunities in both clinical and non-clinical domains, the application of novel neuroimaging technologies raises pressing dilemmas. ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ (RRI) aims to stimulate research and innovation activities that take ethical and social considerations into account from the outset. We previously identified that Dutch neuroscientists interpret “responsible innovation” as educating the public on neuroimaging technologies via the popular press. Their aim is to mitigate (neuro)hype, an aim shared with the wider emerging RRI community. Here, we present results of (...) a media-analysis undertaken to establish whether the body of articles in the Dutch popular press presents balanced conversations on neuroimaging research to the public. We found that reporting was mostly positive and framed in terms of (healthcare) progress. There was rarely a balance between technology opportunities and limitations, and even fewer articles addressed societal or ethical aspects of neuroimaging research. Furthermore, neuroimaging metaphors seem to favour oversimplification. Current reporting is therefore more likely to enable hype than to mitigate it. How can neuroscientists, given their self-ascribed social responsibility, address this conundrum? We make a case for a collective and shared responsibility among neuroscientists, journalists and other stakeholders, including funders, committed to responsible reporting on neuroimaging research. (shrink)

Contemporary scholarship examining clinical outcomes in medical travel for cosmetic surgery identifies cases in which patients traveled abroad for medical procedures and subsequently returned home with infections and other surgical complications. Though there are peer‐reviewed articles identifying patient deaths in cases where patients traveled abroad for commercial kidney transplantation or stem cell injections, no scholarly publications document deaths of patients who traveled abroad for cosmetic surgery or bariatric surgery. Drawing upon news media reports extending from 1993 to 2011, this (...) article identifies and describes twenty‐six reported cases of deaths of individuals who traveled abroad for cosmetic surgery or bariatric surgery. Over half of the reported deaths occurred in two countries. Analysis of these news reports cannot be used to make causal claims about why the patients died. In addition, cases identified in news media accounts do not provide a basis for establishing the relative risk of traveling abroad for care instead of seeking elective cosmetic surgery at domestic health care facilities. Acknowledging these limitations, the case reports suggest the possibility that contemporary peer‐reviewed scholarship is underreporting patient mortality in medical travel. The paper makes a strong case for promoting normative analyses and empirical studies of medical travel. In particular, the paper argues that empirically informed ethical analysis of ‘medical tourism’ will benefit from rigorous studies tracking global flows of medical travelers and the clinical outcomes they experience. The paper contains practical recommendations intended to promote debate concerning how to promote patient safety and quality of care in medical travel. (shrink)

Property transaction reports are a hybrid genre that combines the characteristics of news reports and advertisements. However, they are different from the traditional hybridity of advertorials, which carry a full-blown label of ‘advertisement’ or ‘promotional material’ and may repeat the name of a product or service many times. Property transaction reports, as an emerging genre in Hong Kong property magazines, combine the voices of property agencies and journalists in a very subtle and sophisticated manner, which is partly made possible (...) by the ambiguous local citing framework. Although the genre is a more successful mix of voices than advertorials, this is not the result of a conscious attempt to mix two genres. Indeed, it is the result of how two ‘communities of practice’ accommodate their practices to accomplish their tasks. This highlights the importance of ‘practice’ in understanding the complex issue of intertextuality. (shrink)

In corporate social responsibility reporting, companies are expected to fully disclose the negative social and environmental impacts of their activities. This study investigates how Chinese companies respond to this challenge by analyzing the representations of occupational fatalities and injuries in 92 CSR reports from 37 Chinese Fortune 500 companies. A move-step analysis was performed on one part of the CSR report, which is the section providing information on occupational incidents. It was found that the negative information was typically disclosed (...) via four rhetorical moves, which are ‘preparing the reader’, ‘delivering the bad news’, ‘mitigating the bad news’ and ‘reassuring the reader’. Communicating bad news through the four moves helps manage the reader’s perception of the reporting company and its CSR performance. The study calls for greater attention to the impression-managing aspects of companies’ self-disclosure of organizational bad news. (shrink)

This article examines the effects of strategic and substantive news on political cynicism, turnout intention and voter uncertainty, drawing on two experiments. We found that among less politically knowledgeable citizens, all news mobilizes, but strategic news also induces cynicism. For the more knowledgeable citizens, we found that the combination of strategic and substantive news yields slightly less cynicism and that substantive news makes these citizens reconsider their voting choice. Overall, we only found favorable or neutral (...) effects among the more knowledgeable, while we found both favorable and unfavorable effects among the less knowledgeable. The implications for news effects research are discussed. (shrink)

This article analyses the multimodal representations of public space in Chilean broadcast news reports on the figure of the hooded rioter and its alleged connections with the student movement. We seek to identify how space is constructed as a legitimation strategy in relation to the actors involved and the actions taking place across four different news broadcast pieces in the light of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics. Results show that the multimodal representations of space are (...) crucial to identify and functionalize hooded rioters as belonging to the student movement. Actions are dependent on the spaces in which actors operate, restricting the occupation of certain spaces to specific actors. Thus, transgressive protest actions are to be contained to educational spaces and represented as naturalized vandalism, ignoring the students’/demonstrators’ motivations to recuperate/vindicate the public space. (shrink)

This article uses a 36-million word corpus of news reporting on Hurricane Katrina in the United States to explore how computer-based methods can help researchers to investigate the construction of newsworthiness. It makes use of Bednarek and Caple’s discursive approach to the analysis of news values, and is both exploratory and evaluative in nature. One aim is to test and evaluate the integration of corpus techniques in applying discursive news values analysis. We employ and evaluate corpus techniques (...) that have not been tested previously in relation to the large-scale analysis of news values. These techniques include tagged lemma frequencies, collocation, key part-of-speech tags and key semantic tags. A secondary aim is to gain insights into how a specific happening – Hurricane Katrina – was linguistically constructed as newsworthy in major American news media outlets, thus also making a contribution to ecolinguistics. (shrink)

Three experts in media ethics reexamine ethical behaviour in news gathering and reporting. The book combines a wide range of real-life and hypothetical examples of ethical dilemmas in news reporting with a thoughtful critique of the underlying individualistic theories of mainstream media ethics.

The paper examines news agency journalists' stance on Affect, in view of the journalistic ideals of factuality and objectivity. News journalists resort to Affect values quite frequently; in hard news reports, however, journalists' own emotions have to be excluded. Recently, Peter White and other scholars have introduced the term ‘observed’ Affect as opposed to ‘authorial’ Affect, to distinguish between Affect which is attributed to some third party and Affect which is the journalist's. I find that term too (...) broad, and suggest the following, more sophisticated taxonomy: Affect is first divided into two subtypes, attributed and non-attributed. Both attributed and non-attributed Affect have three subcategories: observed, interpreted and constructed. Attributed Affect includes a fourth subcategory: experienced Affect. To demonstrate how these new tools can be applied to the analysis of news discourse, examples from Associated Press and Reuters news agency dispatches are explored. (shrink)

Across two studies, one of which was pre-registered, we find that a simple questionnaire that measures intellectual virtue and vice predicts how many fake news articles and conspiracy theories participants accept. This effect holds even when controlling for multiple demographic predictors, including age, household income, sex, education, ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, and news consumption. These results indicate that self-report is an adequate way to measure intellectual virtue and vice, which suggests that they are not fully immune to (...) introspective awareness or “stealthy” in the sense that Cassam (2015) argues. This is an important methodological result and may pave the way for future research on intellectual virtue and vice. (shrink)

News media have transformed over the last decades, there being increasing numbers of online news suppliers and an increase in online news consumption. We examine how reporting on immigration differs between popular German online and print media over three crucial years of the so-called immigration crisis from 2015 to 2017. This study extends knowledge on the framing of the crisis by examining a period covering the start, peak, and time after the intake of refugees. Moreover, we establish (...) whether online and print reporting differs in terms of both frame occurrence and variability. The period of the crisis provided an ideal test to see whether the focus of media reporting differed between online and print sources. Employing a most- similar- cases design based on online and print versions of three major German news outlets, we extract the dominant frames in almost 18,500 articles using algorithm-based topic modelling. While results indicate that many frames are more visible in either online or print media, these differences often do not follow theoretical expectations. Furthermore, online media are dominated by particular frames and, hence, show less diversity than print media. However, important key events happening during our period of investigation do not affect overall diversity of frames. (shrink)

El Paso Times journalists routinely face ethical dilemmas as they cover difficult stories amid all of the violence in neighboring Ciudad Juarez. This ethnographic study, which utilizes participant-observation and in-depth interviews, examines how journalists deal with tough ethical choices. It reveals how reporters and editors at the El Paso Times consider the needs of the public and the ramifications of their stories. The journalists strive to be accurate and fair while protecting their sources and themselves. They weigh the importance of (...) each story with its potential for risk. (shrink)

Analysing how news media portray A.I. reveals what interpretative frameworks around the technology circulate in public discourses. This allows for critical reflections on the making of meaning in prevalent narratives about A.I. and its impact. While research on the public perception of datafication and automation is growing, only a few studies investigate news framing practices. The present study connects to this nascent research area by charting A.I. news frames in four internationally renowned media outlets: The New York (...) Times, The Guardian, Wired, and Gizmodo. The main goals are to identify dominant emphasis frames in AI news reporting over the past decade, to explore whether certain A.I. frames are associated with specific data risks, and what journalists and experts contribute to the media discourse. An automated content analysis serves for inductive frame detection, identification of risk references, and network analysis of news writers. The results show how A.I.’s ubiquity emerged rapidly in the mid-2010s, and that the news discourse became more critical over time. It is further argued that A.I. news reporting is an important factor in building critical data literacy among lay audiences. (shrink)

Using a purposive sample with an even distribution of 299 non-Hispanic Whites, 294 African Americans, 292 Asian Americans and 295 Hispanics, we test a moderated mediation model that examines the relationship between self-reported news media consumption (e.g., non-conservative and conservative) and environmental behavioural intentions. Our study found evidence supporting the mainstreaming hypothesis (converging attitudes) across key variables within the theory of planned behaviour (TPB). Our results also reveal non-conservative outlets to be associated with more favourable environmental attitudes, subjective norms (...) and perceived behavioural control, while conservative outlets are associated with less favourable levels for two of these three variables. Results also indicate conditional indirect relationships between non-conservative news use on behavioural intentions through our TPB variables, which vary by race/ethnicity. (shrink)

A handbook of best practices for television and broadcast journalists, encouraging practices that the public will see as being fair, thereby helping assure that television news gathering remains free.

This article is a detailed discourse analytic study about the transformation of three social research reports into television news, above all through the reporter–source interview. The focus is on how questions are used to probe responses and explanations and how these are either omitted from or incorporated into the final news stories. By this unique research design the interactional conduct of the reporter–source interview as well as some aspects of question design applied in the interview are described. It (...) is argued that both the interviews as well as the editing of the news stories are guided by ‘narrative relevance’, i.e. the reporter’s preliminary idea of what the emerging story should/could look like, rather than by the actual outcome of the interviews. (shrink)

Some kinds of “fake news” bits on Saturday Night Live (SNL) become more meaningful when linked back to the work of media theorist Neil Postman. Postman's best‐known book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, argues that TV journalism will inevitably reflect the influences and biases of television itself. The result is an entertaining but incoherent stream of “disinformation” in a “peek‐a‐boo world” of unfocused and shallow discussion. Using Postman's arguments for structure and support (...) here, this chapter explores similar concerns reflected in the satirical news reporting of SNL. It shows that “Weekend Update” and other such pieces can ground key lessons that help us navigate our increasingly complex media environment, a point that Postman himself considers in his book's closing pages. As our media environment continues to change, it becomes helpful to see Postman's thesis as a valuable philosophical insight, and one that SNL's comedy can illustrate quite effectively. (shrink)

Mass media ethics and the classical liberal ideal of the autonomous individual are historically linked and professionally dominant--yet the authors of this work feel this is intrinsically flawed. They show how recent research in philosophy and social science--together with a longer tradition in theological inquiry--insist that community, mutuality, and relationship are fundamental to a full concept of personhood. The authors argue that "persons-in-community" provides a more defensible grounding for journalists' professional moral decision-making in crucial areas such as truthtelling, privacy, organizational (...) culture, and balanced coverage. With numerous examples drawn from life as well as from theory, this book will interest journalists, editors, and professionals in media management as well as students and scholars of media ethics, reporting, and media law. (shrink)

The variety of devices and the socialization of consumption have decentralized access to online information which is not retrieved directly from media websites but through social networks. These same factors have driven user interest towards a wider range of both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ topics. The aim of this article is to identify the consumption of news on these topics among digital users in Spain. The methodology used is based on an analysis of the survey conducted as part of the (...) Digital News Report 2017. Following this analysis, a conclusion has been reached that the most popular hard news stories in Spain are those related to the local and regional community itself, and to health and education, while the most popular soft news stories relate to lifestyles and arts and culture. The analysis has revealed that increased interest in news and greater topic specialization result in more diversified use of sources, formats, and complementary routes. (shrink)