This article takes two events in the ongoing story of a predicted UK avian flu epidemic—“the dead parrot” (October 2005) and “the dying swan” (April 2006)—and examines the role and use of three interconnected metaphor scenarios (related to the notions of “journey,” “war,” and “house”) in the UK press coverage about avian influenza in 2005 and 2006. These represent fundamental descriptive and explanatory structures that derive from culturally or phenomenologically salient objects or experiences, and which allow journalists, scientists, (...) and policymakers to reduce the complexity of the threat posed by a disease and to promote risk-management strategies for the disease that appear to make instinctive or intuitive sense to experts and the public. Although similar metaphor scenarios may be used over time, the kinds of reporting they are associated with and the policy scenarios that result from these framings differ depending on the perceived proximity of the disease threat. (shrink)

War and peace in the Bible -- Theoretical aspects of war in rabbinic thought -- War and peace in modern Jewish thought and practice -- Israel, war, ethics and the media.

War and peace in the Bible -- Theoretical aspects of war in rabbinic thought -- War and peace in modern Jewish thought and practice -- Israel, war, ethics and the media.

The paper examines the representations of Ukrainian refugees in Polish press at the beginning of the 2022 Russian invasion. Using corpus linguistics methods (namely, collocation analysis) it shows that the displaced Ukrainians were mostly referred to as (war) refugees and discussed with respect to their movement and reception in Poland. The study contrasts the construal of Ukrainian refugees in media outlets with different ideological and business aims. The findings are also discussed with respect to how European media tend to (...) cover immigration from other regions, notably the Middle East and North Africa, and how these two types of migration become linked in the analysed news reports. Altogether, while pointing to a potential of the media to shape positive attitudes towards refugees, as attested by their coverage of Ukrainians, the study also highlights the extent to which racism is likely to determine the construal of different groups of migrants. (shrink)

The 1991 war against Iraq was one of the first televised events of the global village in which the entire world watched a military spectacle unfold via global TV satellite networks.1 In retrospect, the Bush administration and the Pentagon carried out one of the most successful public relations campaigns in the history of modern politics in its use of the media to mobilize support for the war. The mainstream media in the United States and elsewhere tended to be a compliant (...) vehicle for the government strategy to manipulate the public, imperiling democracy which requires informed citizens, checks and balances against excessive government power, and a free and vigorous critical media (see Kellner 1990 and 1992). Indeed, if the media do not adequately inform citizens, provide a check against excessive government power and corruption, and adequately debate the key issues of the day, democracy is undermined. M oreover, the U.S. media, especially CNN, completely dominated global coverage of the event. CNN had cameras and reporters in Baghdad throughout the war, a large crew in Israel, and live coverage of all U.S. military and government press conferences. Thus its images, discourses, and material tended to shape global coverage of the event. This meant that the Bush administration and Pentagon was able to control the flow of images and discourses and thus to manage the TV spectacle of the Gulf War.2 In this chapter, I first discuss the production of the text of the "crisis in the Gulf" and then "the Gulf war." This will involve analysis of disinformation and propaganda campaigns by the Bush administration, the Pentagon, and their allies, as well as dissection of the constraints produced by the so-called pool system. I also indicate how the political economy of the media in the United States facilitated the manufacturing of consent for U.S. government policies. Then I analyze the meanings embedded in the text of the war against Iraq and the reception of the text/event by the audience.. (shrink)

This article examines the discourses that are used by the British press to represent obesity in its coverage of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Obesity is understood to be a risk factor for COVID-19, with people with obesity being more likely to die from the virus. This study adopts a corpus-based approach to Critical Discourse Studies and utilises a novel approach to keyword analysis, based on comparing analysis corpora against two reference corpora in order to yield keywords that are, (...) in this case, characteristic compared to general coverage of both COVID-19 and obesity. It is argued that the context of the pandemic has produced a range of discourses around obesity that are more stigmatising than usual in both the tabloids and the broadsheets, with people with obesity being construed, for example, in especially fatalistic terms and as being responsible for the problems facing the country’s healthcare system. At the same time, the pandemic context also seems to have given rise to some more positive changes to press coverage of obesity, with race-related health disparities receiving more focus than usual and the right-leaning press being more likely to critique the Conservative Government than it usually is, resulting in an arguably more balanced style of reporting. (shrink)

Due to the lack of a standard definition for the concept of corporate social responsibility, various discourse communities have assigned different meanings to it. Based on the intermedia agenda setting theory, this study examines the extent to which CSR-related news releases published by the two electricity providers in Hong Kong have influenced press coverage over a 6-year period between 2006 and 2011. A total of 202 news releases and 1,045 news articles were content-analyzed based on the following mutually (...) exclusive categories of CSR-related news events: operations, education, community, products and services, recognition, environment, and donations and sponsorships. This study found that operations-related and products and services-related news releases were more likely to be reported in the press. Recognition-related news releases were the least likely to be reported. Based on the findings, this study posits that two criteria would determine whether a CSR-related news release is likely to be covered in the press: the extent to which the news events are relevant to the core operations of the corporations and the extent to which the news events make an impact on society. (shrink)

In this article, we carry out a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of a sample from a larger corpus of Romanian news articles that covered the controversial camp evictions and repatriation of Romanian Roma migrants from France that began in 2010 and continue to the time of writing in 2017. These French government policies have been highly criticized both within France and by international political and aid organizations. However, the analysis shows how these brutal, anti-humanitarian events became recontextualized in the Romanian (...) Press to represent the French government’s actions as peaceful and consensual. In addition, the demonization of the Roma in the press serves as a strategy to continuously disassociate them from their Romanian counterparts. While there is a long history of discrimination against the Roma in Romania, these particular recontextualizations can be understood in the context of the Romanian government’s need to gloss over its failure to comply with the Schengen accession requirements and acquire full European Union membership. (shrink)

In times of crisis and social turbulence, the mass media play a crucial role. This becomes particularly evident in economic crises within the European Union. The (biased) way the crisis is reported shapes people’s understanding of the crisis and the parties involved. In this study, the coverage of the Greek sovereign debt crisis in the German newspapersBILD,Die Welt,Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,Süddeutsche Zeitung,tageszeitungandDer Spiegel (online)is examined for the quality criteria relevance, neutrality, balance, and analytical quality. The results show that the reporting (...) is appropriate to the relevance of the topic, but shows deficits in the criteria of balance, neutrality, and analytical quality. During the study period, coverage focuses on a small number of topics, journalists include their value judgments in news and reports. Overall, there is an obvious media bias against the Greek government’s position. (shrink)

This study examines the extent to which the highly diverse and volatile Dutch electorate received a diverse offer of political newspaper coverage during the 2006 general election campaign. We measured the level of diversity of five subscription based national newspapers with a partisan history and two free dailies. Two forms of diversity were examined: party diversity and issue diversity. The diversity of party coverage in the free dailies was greater than the diversity across all newspapers. Whereas free dailies (...) paid a relatively large amount of attention to new and opposition parties, traditional newspapers paid a relatively large amount of attention to the parties with whom they were aligned during the period of “pillarization”. Conversely, we only found small differences in the distribution of attention to issues. The diversity of issue coverage across newspapers was larger than the diversity within newspapers. (shrink)

Research on the media representations of nanotechnology have flourished during the last decennium. However, most of the projects were focused on Western Europe and North America, especially the English speaking countries. This paper aims to move the focus towards Poland - a Central European country that has not been studied in this context before. This study looks at the frames, themes and tone used in the Polish coverage of nanotechnology between 2004 and 2009. Other issues, such as main actors (...) in the debate or articles’ geographical focus have also been considered. (shrink)

Respondents in a southern state telephone survey agreed that media coverage of public leaders' private lives is an important news media responsibility, with agreement greater for legacy media than for online media, and differing depending on hypothetical scenario. The data also suggest increasing tolerance for such coverage and growing belief in responsibility of media to report on private indiscretions relative to previous studies.

ABSTRACTFollowing the terrorist attacks against the US in 2001, the Bush administration reaffirmed the Dover ban, the policy that prohibited press coverage of military coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base from conflicts abroad. Conventional wisdom holds that the Bush administration enforced the ban in the hope of maintaining public support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This understanding, though, is incomplete. If the Dover ban were enforced only in response to eroding public opinion, then other coalition (...) states would have responded likewise to this shared incentive. I argue instead that maintaining public support is only one factor among many that led the US to uphold this policy. In addition to considering the influence of factors such as perceived media bias and casualty aversion, I focus on necropolitics and the related impetus for governments to regulate the observation of death. Through this interpretation, part of the American response to the involuntary loss of sovereignty on 9/11 was... (shrink)

This compelling and stimulating book explores the gendered social history of students in modern Britain. From the privileged youth of _Brideshead Revisited_, to the scruffs at 'Scumbag University' in _The Young Ones_, representations of the university undergraduate have been decidedly male. But since the 1970s the proportion of women students in universities in the UK has continued to rise so that female undergraduates now outnumber their male counterparts. Drawing upon wide-ranging original research including documentary and archival sources, newsfilm, press (...) coverage of student life and life histories of men and women who graduated before the Second World War, this text provides rich insights into changes in student identity and experience over the past century. The book examines : men's and women's differing expectations of higher education the sacrifices that families made to send young people to college the effect of equality legislation demography changing patterns of marriage and the impact of the 'sexual revolution' on female students the cultural life of students and the role that gender has played in shaping them. For students of gender studies, cultural studies and history, this book will have meaningful impact on their degree course studies. (shrink)

The cyclical nature of presidential elections provides regular opportunities for journalists to reflect on patterns in election coverage. This study presents a textual analysis of press criticism o...

Purpose This study investigates the incidence of ethical violations in the Ghanaian press which has become topical in the wake of misinformation in a charged political atmosphere. Public interest institutions have questioned the unprofessional conduct of journalists covering election campaigns in recent years. This study content analysed political stories from two leading Ghanaian newspapers (Daily Graphic and Daily Guide) to determine the nature and extent of ethical violations, and to examine the level of prominence accorded to political news stories (...) by the two dailies. Design/methodology/approach This paper relied on qualitative content analysis for data gathering and analysis. A total of 387 political news items published between 1 October and 30 November 2020, were analysed. Findings This study found infractions of various nature to Article 1 of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) codes of ethics, chief among which is the deliberate publications of news stories without cross-checking facts. Other infractions to Articles 17, 11, 6 and 5 of the GJA codes of ethics were observed. Political news coverage favours the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) than any other parties, with the two parties (NPP-NDC) given greater prominence and salience by the Ghanaian press. Originality/value The research makes a modest contribution to the growing concern of journalism ethics in an increasing ecology of fake news. (shrink)

Religious beliefs influence the making of war and war-making influences religious belief, but religion is not a cause of war. That would be the general conclusion one can take from this work by Arn...

We report on the first stage of a project on the representations of gender in the coverage of the Arab Spring by Western media. We focus on designing comparable corpora to examine Arab women’s depiction in English and German news during the uprisings. The English corpus is composed of reports published by _The Guardian and The New York Times_. The German corpus consists of articles collected from _Der Spiegel, Die Welt_, _Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,_ and _Süddeutsche Zeitung_. The (...) datasets were processed through Sketch Engine to identify the terms collocating with _women_ in the English corpus and _Frau_ in the German one. Then, the themes reflected by these expressions in the two corpora were compared. The results show that both news media feature two types of topical frames linked to Arab women; one is associated with the uprisings while the other is related to their recurrent stereotypes in Western news discourse. Yet, there are discrepancies between their focus on related issues to each type. Other differences between the two sets of news outlets include intensity of reporting on Arab women and stressing their nationalities. These findings suggest that although Arab women’s negative stereotypes continued to feature in western news discourse during the Arab Spring, new positive images emerged and contributed to changing their depictions in global media. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 7-8, November - December 2020, Page 861-863.

Volume 25, Issue 3, May 2020, Page 365-367.

The animal rights movement is a serious challenge to current agricultural practices. Agriculture's response, in part, depends on how successfully it can mobilize its natural constituency, farmers. However, theories of the mainstream press suggest that the mainstream press generally covers events, rarely reports or adopts the perspective of alternative movements, rarely includes mobilizing information, and suggests that routine social structures can, should, and will contain the movement. Hence, current theory indicates that the mainstream press does not act (...) to mobilize the general public. However, very little research has examined how specialized presses, such as the farm press, respond to movements. The study reported here was based on an analysis of 406 articles from ten farm magazines. The findings suggest that the farm press acted more as an advocacy press than does the mainstream press. Collectively, the farm press articles included as many positions pieces and stories explaining animal rights as an issue as they did event stories. The articles reported, and countered, the positions of the animal rights movement; suggested that routine social structures might not contain the animal rights movement; called for agriculture to mobilize; and included specific recommendations concerning how agriculture should mobilize. (shrink)

A philosophical review of Beatrice Heuser's monography, War: A Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices.