Pointing Fingers at the Media?

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-124
Author(s):  
Alexander Beyer ◽  
Steven Weldon
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Online Data ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
German Politics ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Media ◽  
Alternative For Germany ◽  
Key Questions

The 2017 Bundestag election and the breakthrough of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) will likely long be remembered as a pivotal moment in German politics. One of the key questions in the aftermath of this breakthrough is what role the mainstream media played in this party’s success. Drawing on online data from the four largest German news outlets, Google-trend searches, and Twitter, we examine the media coverage landscape over the course of the election campaign, focusing on the coverage of the AfD relative to other parties and its key issues of immigration and Euroskepticism. Our results indicate that the AfD did indeed face a favorable media environment, especially in the final month of the campaign. Further analysis, however, suggests that the media was in many ways simply responding to public interest and demand—immigration, especially, was a highly salient issue throughout the campaign, something that was a significant departure from recent elections.

A Knight in Sheep’s Clothing: Media Framing of the Alt-Right Can Alter the Image of Racist Groups

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Burton Speakman
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Media Framing ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
Framing Analysis ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Media ◽  
Racist Ideology ◽  
National Profile

The Alt-Right increased its national profile during the 2016 presidential election based on its support of Donald Trump. This research becomes more salient with the media continuing to face similar challenges in framing far-right groups. The Alt-Right, like other Far Right groups worldwide, has moderated their framing to hide racist ideology. Therefore, the challenge of this article is to learn if the media allow newer far-right conservative groups to self-frame even against the advice from the Associated Press. This study uses qualitative framing analysis through grounded theory to review the coverage of the Alt-Right as a manner of examining if the group was successful in advancing its desired frames into mainstream media coverage. The results of this study suggest overall the Alt-Right was successful in reducing a direct discussion about the racist beliefs of the group within press coverage. This study continues in the tradition of framing studies of the past yet moves the genre forward as journalists negotiate increasing polarised and fragmented political communication.

From Ni putes ni soumises to #metoo in the French press: Between the hegemony of Whiteness and the Otherness of Muslims

2021 ◽  
pp. 095715582110217
Author(s):  
Marion Dalibert
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
White Women ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Media ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
Majority Groups ◽  
Feminist Movements

By questioning the media coverage of the seven feminist movements that have received most publicity in the French mainstream media since the 2000s, this article shows that the media narrative regarding feminism perpetuates the national metanarrative produced in generalist newspapers. This metanarrative reinforces the power of majority groups by portraying them as inherently egalitarian, while those with the least economic, social, political and cultural power, such as Muslim men, are portrayed as the most sexist. It also highlights that racialised collectives are still socially invisible or limited to a visibility that is framed by representations rooted in a (post) colonial imaginary. Non-white women are in fact presented as fundamentally submissive, while (upper)-middle-class white women are the only ones associated with emancipation, which is significant of white and bourgeois hegemony at work in the French news media.

scholarly journals Image, krop og maskulinitet. Mediediskurser om skihoppere

2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gertrud Pfister ◽  
Rikke Schou Jeppesen
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Teenage Girls ◽  
Ski Jumping ◽  
Fan Communities ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Discourses ◽  
The 19Th Century

Artiklen beskriver og forklarer de forandringer, som sporten har gennemgået, og den indflydelse, som disse forandringer har haft på udøvere og på deres kroppe og images. Der er særlig fokus på mediernes rolle i forhandlingen om konstruktion af ambivalente maskulinitetsformer. Gertrud Pfister & Rikke Schou Jeppesen: Images, Bodies and Masculinities. Media discourses about Ski JumpersToday ski jumping can be considered a typical media sport: it has very few participants and no basis to become a »sport for all« movement. Nevertheless, the few specialists and their main events attract masses of spectators and great media attention. The high demands of skill and strength as well as the danger involved have made ski jumping a typical male sport. Since its beginnings in the 19th century a ski jumper was looked upon as the epitome of »true manhood«. Today ski jumpers are celebrities with fragile egos, skinny bodies, boyish looks, ambivalent masculinities and fan communities of teenage girls. With a constructivist theoretical approach, we will describe and explain the changes that have taken place in ski jumping and the effects of these changes on the athletes, their bodies, their images and their masculinities. The focus will be on the media representation of two German ski jumpers, Martin Schmitt and Sven Hannawald who dominated this sport between 2000 and 2003. Sources are the articles about these athletes in 6 German print media. With a qualitative content analysis, we explore the media coverage of ski jumping and the way the athletes are presented. The correlations between the images and the »doing gender« of the athletes and their presentations in the media along with the role of the media in constructing new and ambivalent masculinities will be the key issues of this article.

Young adults know that their issues are not represented in the news: Israeli young adults and mainstream news media

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Benny Nuriely ◽  
Moti Gigi ◽  
Yuval Gozansky
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Online News ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Media

Purpose This paper aims to analyze the ways socio-economic issues are represented in mainstream news media and how it is consumed, understood and interpreted by Israeli young adults (YAs). It examines how mainstream media uses neo-liberal discourse, and the ways YAs internalize this ethic, while simultaneously finding ways to overcome its limitations. Design/methodology/approach This was a mixed methods study. First, it undertook content analysis of the most popular Israeli mainstream news media among YAs: the online news site Ynet and the TV Channel 2 news. Second, the authors undertook semi-structured in-depth interviews with 29 Israeli YAs. The analysis is based on an online survey of 600 young Israelis, aged 18–35 years. Findings Most YAs did not perceive mainstream media as enabling a reliable understanding of the issues important to them. The content analysis revealed that self-representation of YAs is rare, and that their issues were explained, and even resolved, by older adults. Furthermore, most of YAs' problems in mainstream news media were presented using a neo-liberal perspective. Finally, from the interviews, the authors learned that YAs did not find information that could help them deal with their most pressing economic and social issue, in the content offered by mainstream media. For most of them, social media overcomes these shortcomings. Originality/value Contrary to research that has explored YAs’ consumerism of new media outlets, this article explores how YAs in Israel are constructed in the media, as well as the way in which YAs understand mainstream and new social media coverage of the issues most important to them. Using media content analysis and interviews, the authors found that Young Adults tend to be ambivalent toward media coverage. They understand the lack of media information: most of them know that they do not learn enough from the media. This acknowledgment accompanies their tendency to internalize the neo-liberal logic and conservative Israeli national culture, in which class and economic redistribution are largely overlooked. Mainstream news media uses neo-liberal discourse, and young adults internalize this logic, while simultaneously finding ways to overcome the limitations this discourse offers. They do so by turning to social media, mainly Facebook. Consequently, their behavior maintains the logic of the market, while also developing new social relations, enabled by social media.

Representation and Government

2020 ◽  
pp. 204-233
Author(s):  
Catherine E. De Vries ◽  
Sara B. Hobolt
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Government Formation ◽  
German Politics ◽  
Responsible Government ◽  
Government Stability ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Alternative For Germany

This chapter highlights the impact of the rise of challenger parties on both representation and responsible government. It begins by examining whether voters are more mobilized and feel more represented in systems with greater choice and more challenger parties. The chapter also looks at how the rise of a new challenger, the Alternative for Germany, on the far right in German politics has had a mobilizing effect on citizens. It then turns to the effect on government stability. The chapter shows that it is more difficult to form a government as the share of challenger parties rises and, importantly, the governments that are formed are less stable. Finally, it discusses the specific examples of government formation in Belgium and government instability in the Netherlands.

scholarly journals Using the president’s tweets to understand political diversion in the age of social media

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Lewandowsky ◽  
Michael Jetter ◽  
Ullrich K. H. Ecker
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Media ◽  
Increased Activity

Abstract Social media has arguably shifted political agenda-setting power away from mainstream media onto politicians. Current U.S. President Trump’s reliance on Twitter is unprecedented, but the underlying implications for agenda setting are poorly understood. Using the president as a case study, we present evidence suggesting that President Trump’s use of Twitter diverts crucial media (The New York Times and ABC News) from topics that are potentially harmful to him. We find that increased media coverage of the Mueller investigation is immediately followed by Trump tweeting increasingly about unrelated issues. This increased activity, in turn, is followed by a reduction in coverage of the Mueller investigation—a finding that is consistent with the hypothesis that President Trump’s tweets may also successfully divert the media from topics that he considers threatening. The pattern is absent in placebo analyses involving Brexit coverage and several other topics that do not present a political risk to the president. Our results are robust to the inclusion of numerous control variables and examination of several alternative explanations, although the generality of the successful diversion must be established by further investigation.

scholarly journals One issue, different stories: The construction of GMO issues on Chinese, American and British mainstream media portals

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 255-275
Author(s):  
Yiqin Ruan ◽  
Jing Yang ◽  
Jianbin Jin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Genetically Modified Organisms ◽  
Scientific Information ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The Public ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Uk

Biotechnology, as an emerging technology, has drawn much attention from the public and elicited hot debates in countries around the world and among various stakeholders. Due to the public's limited access to front-line scientific information and scientists, as well as the difficulty of processing complex scientific knowledge, the media have become one of the most important channels for the public to get news about scientific issues such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs). According to framing theory, how the media portray GMO issues may influence audiences’ perceptions of those issues. Moreover, different countries and societies have various GMO regulations, policies and public opinion, which also affect the way media cover GMO issues. Thus, it is necessary to investigate how GMO issues are covered in different media outlets across different countries. We conducted a comparative content analysis of media coverage of GMO issues in China, the US and the UK. One mainstream news portal in each of the three countries was chosen ( People's Daily for China, The New York Times for the US, and The Guardian for the UK). We collected coverage over eight years, from 2008 to 2015, which yielded 749 pieces of news in total. We examined the sentiments expressed and the generic frames used in coverage of GMO issues. We found that the factual, human interest, conflict and regulation frames were the most common frames used on the three portals, while the sentiments expressed under those frames varied across the media outlets, indicating differences in the state of GMO development, promotion and regulation among the three countries.

Lost at Woomera: Rereading Mainstream and Alternative Media

2003 ◽  
Vol 109 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Bishop
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Alternative Media ◽  
Detention Centre ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Online Activism ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Public Demonstration

This paper focuses on aspects of the media engagement with demonstrations at the Woomera Detention Centre during Easter 2002. A broad range of interests and affiliations were represented within the 1000–2000 protestors, several hundred of whom attacked the fences, allowing a number of detainees to escape. In an era of online activism, the Easter 2002 demonstration at Woomera showed the continuing significance of the embodied occupation of public space by protestors. It echoed an upsurge in public demonstration, from Seattle to more recent worldwide marches against war in Iraq. In addition to receiving extensive mainstream media coverage both in Australia and overseas, a whole series of ‘alternative’ forms of media were mobilised around the demonstration. Through a study of some mainstream and alternative media, this paper suggests that casting them as oppositional — one as reactionary towards asylum seekers from Islamic cultures and the other as emancipatory — is too simplistic. While mainstream media are the subject of searching critiques of their representational and agenda-setting power, similar critical evaluations are few for alternative media. It suggests that such a dichotomy has serious consequences for the understanding and operation both of emancipatory struggles and of the media. Giroux (2002) has called for a politics of educated hope, and this paper suggests that critique should be accompanied by an active search for moments of contradiction and possibility.

scholarly journals Media Coverage of Valentine’s Day: Is Media Biased in Covering the Festival?

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 171-187
Author(s):  
Taha Siddiqui
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Qualitative Methods ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
The Media ◽  
Valentine's Day ◽  
Quantitative And Qualitative Methods

Valentine’s Day celebration in India has been much debated and covered by the media in the last couple of years. In the year 2009, far right Hindu activist from Sri Ram Sena to Bajrang Dal were involved in beating up unmarried couples and blackening their faces, as mark of shame for celebrating Valentine’s Day. They claimed that the festival was a “western practice” and promotes “lust not love”. Following this other Anti- Valentine’s Day groups also expressed their views and this led to public debate about moral policing and Indian culture. However what is interesting to note is the fact how media covered. At one side media has played a big role in promoting it (for many reasons) and on the other hand it has also criticized it for cultural and religious concerns.This research tries to explore in depth how media covers the festival with commercialization, culture, religion and politics in the backdrop. The research studies 9 newspapers of in 3 different languages, namely English, Hindi and Urdu.  The study tries to find out whether media is biased in covering the festival or is it propagating an idea to its readers. The idea of taking 3 different languages is to draw a sharp comparison and contrast among the national and vernacular newspapers.In order to find it, both quantitative and qualitative methods have been applied to the articles. Content analysis and Textual analysis are the important methods used to find out the statistics and underlying meanings behind these articles.Int. J. Soc. Sc. Manage. Vol. 3, Issue-3: 171-187

Germany’s CDU looks set for modest shift to the right

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Euro Area ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Political Fragmentation ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Christian Democratic Union ◽  
German Politics ◽  
Regional Branch ◽  
Good For ◽  
The Right ◽  
Alternative For Germany

Subject CDU leadership race. Significance On February 8, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer announced she would resign as leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) after the party’s regional branch in Thuringia defied party rules to vote with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Her resignation reopens the question as to whether the CDU continues with Chancellor Angela Merkel's pragmatic course after she steps down, or whether it will take a more conservative direction; it also raises the possibility of a snap election. Impacts Deepening political fragmentation will make it increasingly difficult for the CDU to maintain its policy of not cooperating with the AfD. German politics will become more domestically focused in 2020, thereby slowing progress on issues such as euro-area reform and EU defence. Kramp-Karrenbauer’s leadership was underwhelming, so her resignation may be good for the CDU if a more authoritative leader replaces her.

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