Participation and deliberation: a case study of readers’ comments to news stories on the Brazilian presidential campaign

The Internet has created new “dialogical spaces”1 where issues of common concern can be discussed, serving to democratize the public sphere. However, some scholars express doubts about the quality of the debates that occur in the online environment, pointing out the fragmentation, the incivility or even the anonymity as major problems that may undermine the expansion of the online public sphere.
 As a potential deliberative section and a civic forum, readers’ comments in newspapers’ websites constitute a locus for public debate and ideas exchange provided by the mainstream media. As a case study, this article intends to assess the quality of audience participation in online news sites, by analysing the readers’ comments in the news about the Brazilian presidential campaign (September-November 2010) in the online versions of two Portuguese newspapers.

The Internet encloses unambiguous possibilities of public communication and debate, by creating new spaces for political expression and participation. As a potential deliberative section, readers’ comments in newspapers’ websites constitute a domain enabling citizens to express their views on a particular issue, reacting specifically to a news piece and discussing it along with other readers as well. From a gender perspective, studying the women’s participation in online debates becomes increasingly relevant to understanding the social aspects of Internet use. Some studies have demonstrated, however, that gender differences in online communication tend to disfavour women: women send fewer messages, receive fewer responses and often aren’t able to control the topic of discussion (Herring, 2000). This paper intends to take the debate around the Brazilian presidential campaign as a case study of the possibility of a “female” public sphere, attempting to analyse the way by which women discuss political issues online. Additionally, given the nature and characteristics of the main presidential candidates, our aim is also to understand whether questions about gender were important to the discussion or if the dichotomy male/female was suppressed in the public debate surrounding the campaign. In order to fulfil these purposes, our research focuses on readers’ on the Brazilian presidential campaign (September-November 2010) in the online versions of two Portuguese newspapers, Publico and Expresso

Stem cells continue to garner attention by the news media and play a role in public and policy discussions of emerging technologies. As new media platforms develop, it is important to understand how different news media represents emerging stem cell technologies and the role these play in public discussions. We conducted a comparative analysis of newspaper and sports websites coverage of one recent high profile case: Gordie Howe's stem cell treatment in Mexico. Using qualitative coding methods, we analyzed news articles and readers' comments from Canadian and US newspapers and sports websites. Results indicate that the efficacy of stem cell treatments is often assumed in news coverage and readers' comments indicate a public with a wide array of beliefs and perspectives on stem cells and their clinical efficacy.Media coverage that presents uncritical perspectives on unproven stem cell therapies may create patient expectations, may have an affect on policy discussions, and help to feed the marketing of unproven therapies. However, news coverage that provides more balanced or critical coverage of unproven stem cell treatments may also inspire more critical discussion, as reflected in readers' comments.

In the past few years, it is observed that social media was the first to respond to some issues that become the talk of the town. Broad and easy access to mobile devices and social media has created immense opportunities for the public to share and publish their works on open forums. The audience as the prosumer (producers and active consumers) generates ‘user-generated content’ that undoubtedly influences the mainstream media’s content production procedure and manner through distributing them to many news or social platforms. This process leads to citizen journalism as a parallel mode of journalism where collection, collaboration and dissemination of the information go through a single channel. This study is based on both primary and secondary data sources to understand the impacts, challenges, and opportunities of citizen journalism needed beside the journalism. The qualitative data are collected from seven in-depth interviews with senior journalists, editors, academics and news managers. And two semi-structured interviews were conducted with citizen journalism project coordinators. Their analysis regarding this citizen journalism practices in mainstream media creates access to information by opening a new door to more significant resources. However, the concern remains whether incorporating citizen journalism into mainstream journalism poses any threat or not. It is observed that the absence of practicing journalistic rules and regulations in social media makes their credibility questionable and generates confusion. Online news sites use mobile technologies to create and disseminate their media products, gradually attracting the audience and readers. As a result, people are often used to accessing news from online sites rather than print media. With this current demand, mainstream news media is focusing on more interactivity on their online platforms and encouraging their audiences to join in the news production process.

This essay tracks the media-led production of a Canadian common sense about residential schools in the decade leading up to the 2005 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. Newspaper commentary on residential schools lawsuits accentuated the already constrained understanding of the agency, duration, and effects of the schools’ harm within private law. Civil litigation was a strategy for seeking the accountability of churches and government; however, arguments in the mainstream media repeatedly asserted that the wrong of residential schooling was limited to specific, individual crimes of sexual and physical assault. These arguments reinforced the parameters imposed by tort law. The newspaper commentaries cultivated a common sense about residential schools that drew on the discourse of trauma and a neo-liberal discourse delegitimizing claims on state resources. Trauma’s biographical scale and focus on the catastrophic event reinforced the emphasis on specific crimes. The neo-liberal taxpayer-citizen could empathize with the individual traumatized by violence, whilst dismissing broader claims about residential schooling. In newspaper commentary, then, residential schools became discursively dis-embedded from the broader framework of colonial policy. The claim of a collective experience of cultural loss was key in the struggle to resituate the schools within this framework; however, the recognition ultimately won may bear the imprint of a common sense that constrained what the recovery of culture could mean.

PurposeThis 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/approachThis 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.FindingsMost 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/valueContrary 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.

HOMOPHOBIA AND ‘UN-AMERICANNESS’ AS RISING FACETS OF ISLAMOPHOBIA: AN ANALYSIS OF ORLANDO SHOOTING MEDIA TRANSCRIPTS

The way governments and policy makers think about climate futures has a wide-ranging impact on how they formulate policy and plan for climate change impacts. In the lead-up to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), the IPCC adopted a new scenarios framework that aimed to provide a fuller picture of the interacting elements and policy choices that affect climate change. However, these scenarios, known as Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), are complex and difficult to communicate. Most audiences, including policy makers, receive much of their information about climate change from mainstream media, and particularly online news sites. We therefore examined the five most popular online news sites in the UK and the USA, five popular English-language news sites in India, English-language news media from a wide range of African countries, and the Reuters News agency. Based on manual content analysis to assess 252 articles, we identify several important findings, amongst them: in all countries, the media provide little detailed explanation of how scenarios are developed, very little mention of SSPs, and virtually no detailed explanations of them; generally, journalists use the words ‘projections’, ‘futures’, and ‘pathways’ when talking about the IPCC scenarios, although some usage of ‘predictions’ or ‘forecasts’ is apparent; contrary to previous research, there were very few doomsday narratives such as ‘only 12 years to act’. We conclude by drawing out some implications for more effective communication of the IPCC scenarios.

Media is the source of information for the people. Since the emergence of the Internet, the role of new media got more important, since it has the ability to disseminate the information faster and wider. In media industry, the number of online news site increases along with the development of internet users. This online news sites cover all of the themes that interesting for the readers. Hoax has been a crucial topic appears in the news, whether in traditional mass media or online media. This study aims to reveal the news about hoax in an online news site, namely www.viva.co.id. It is important, since hoax is an inevitable phenomenon in the internet era, and the online news site belongs to one of the candidates for president of Indonesia when the election happened in 2012. The data gathered using observation toward the online news site in the period of 2016, specifically the news about the hoax. Observation toward the data was also being done to get the right data. Meanwhile, the analysis technique employed in this study is content analysis. The finding shows that there is a small number of news about hoax in 2016. They tend to be neutral for the tone of the news. This finding is interesting since the owner of the media is a politician that was also a president candidate in the former general election. Keywords: Hoax, new media, online news, media ownership, content analysis.

Newspaper reader comments are those short, fragmentary, frequently polemical and mostly anonymous ‘replies’ posted to online newspaper articles. And while online comments have attracted much attention in recent years, the experience of reading them has yet to be explored. Newspaper comments have been examined in detail from two key perspectives in the scholarly literature, but by focusing almost exclusively on the text, both journalism studies and public sphere theorists have overlooked the situated sense-making of the reader herself. This study aims to fill this gap by focussing on the embodied know-how and everyday practices through which readers make comments mean. To do this, it draws on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1970), Martin Heidegger (1962) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) as well as the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975). The research underpinning this thesis was structured around in-depth interviews and digital-observation methods with four reader-participants, two of whom are Irish and two Spanish. Travelling to visit each individual in one of their own everyday settings, I observed and took field notes on their media practices, both print and digital, and interviewed them about their experience of reading a newspaper article and its corresponding comments. The articles we read together were selected from either The Irish Times newspaper or the Spanish El Pais; the participants’ own newspapers of choice. The articles and their comments centred on aspects of the housing crises that were rapidly unfolding in each country at the time of the interviews and this context came to play a central role in understanding how the readers made sense of those texts. For several months after these initial interviews I maintained email and video correspondences with each participant, asking further questions and talking through ongoing media experiences. I also carried out an auto-hermeneutic exercise that involved video recording my own media practices and ‘free writing’ responses to the same media texts used in the interviews. In a thematic analysis designed around the concept of the hermeneutic circle, I developed a phenomenological interpretation of three core themes that emerged from this ‘data’. These themes highlight the significance of the readers’ own referential systems for structuring their daily encounters with the news media; they point to a fundamental contrast between the way the readers engaged with the newspaper article and how they engaged with the comment; and finally, they highlight the role of the white space around the comments in facilitating a ‘conversational’ experience in reading them.

August 7, 2015 Harold Marcuse, Review for Holocaust and Genocide Studies of: Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, edited by John-Paul Himka and Joanna Michlic (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 778 pp., cloth $50. review: 2375 words This anthology collects twenty essays about the reception of the Holocaust in eastern Europe since 1989-90, arranged alphabetically from Albania to Ukraine. The editors of the volume contributed essays on two of the countries in this group, which they see as bracketing the range of post-communist engagement with the Holocaust (9). Michlic, who co-authored the essay on Poland, was then at Brandeis and is now a professor at the University of Bristol. She is perhaps best-known as co-editor of a documentation of the debates triggered by Jan Gross's 2001 book about the July10, 1941 massacre of Jewish Poles in Jedwabne. 1 In fact, she sees that debate as having made Poland the country where the second phase of restored memory has reached the most sophisticated level (9). Himka, now a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, is a specialist in Ukrainian history. His assessment is that in Ukraine the first phase of restored memory still has the upper hand, with the second civic phase trying to establish itself in public discourse only with great difficulty. This two-phase model of Holocaust recollection is implicit throughout the collection, and is discussed in greater detail below. Assembling so many excellent essays is an astonishing achievement. The contributors were asked to follow a similar chapter structure: After an introduction describing the wartime situation with an emphasis on relations between Jews and the majority nation, and a brief overview of memories of the Holocaust under communism, seven post-1989 topics were to be covered: high politics and public debates, education and scholarship, culture (literature, cinema, music, theater), grassroots projects and sites, diaspora narratives, indigenous Jewish communities, and antisemitism and Holocaust negationism (meaning both denial and relativization). As one might expect given the broad range of events during the Holocaust, the various countries display a wide range of Holocaust retrospection (or lack thereof), and various authors draw from a similar diversity of sources to attempt to gauge that activity. These include sites, museums and research institutions, memorials and their inscriptions, conferences, scholarly publications, textbooks and curricular materials, speeches, polls, films, fiction, internet forums, newspaper comments, and more--basically anything that sheds light on public dealings with the past. Common to all essays, however, is the extensive use of primary sources and secondary literature in the native languages, Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

日治時期，台灣人與日本人之間的通婚並非如同今日的國際婚姻關係，而是屬於日本帝國國民之間的異民族通婚，是謂「內台共婚」。 由於當時的日本人與台灣人之間存在著「支配者—被支配者」的殖民統治位階關係，使得日本人與台灣人之間的藩籬更形巨大而難以跨越。然而即便法制層面對於共婚家庭是不友善的，共婚雙方卻仍然努力克服文化上的差異與矛盾，試圖建立一個「內台融合」的典範。 本研究試圖回答以下三個問題： （一）法制層面如何調適？由於台灣並未實施日本的戶籍制度，導致內台人間無法「轉籍」，使得婚姻關係等民法親屬繼承篇中所規定之身分關係全都無法成立。1930年代，統治當局藉由法制層面的改革，使得「內台共婚」家庭得以由原先的「非法」關係，轉變為「合法」婚姻。 （二）共婚者的背景為何？透過官方統計文書，瞭解各地共婚家庭的數量，並分析共婚者的個人背景，以進一步探討其中是否具備特殊階級性格。並由當時報章雜誌的評論，瞭解社會輿論對於共婚家庭的看法，解析其中是否出現階段性之變化。 （三）共婚者如何調適雙方的文化差異？共婚家庭不僅必須面對來自外部的阻礙，例如法制的不友善以及周遭的反對聲浪等，也必須克服雙方在文化上的歧異。筆者將藉由案例分析，具體說明共婚者如何經營其家庭生活。

Legacy media have responded to the introduction of digital-born news sites by instigating their own online platforms, reflecting the extent to which journalism operates within a hybrid media environment. This article aims to test if and how digital journalism makes its hybridity manifest by using various online affordances. We used content analysis to compare the extent to which BBC News, Mail Online, The Guardian, Buzzfeed and Huffington Post exploit video, hyperlinks, and Twitter posts to better inform citizens about politics during the 2017 UK election. We found that online news sites did not use video extensively. Hyperlinks were frequently used. Digital-born news sites linked more widely than their public service and commercial legacy counterparts who, in contrast, used more internal links. Digital-born sites used more embedded tweets than legacy sites. We also found that online news preferred to link to journalistic content and tweets than, say, official government or other expert sources. These findings show the hybridity of online news in the UK because both public service and commercial legacy media adopt some online practices but reject others, just as digital-born sites blend traditional journalism with digital tools to produce new ways of supporting their journalism.

The Technological Gaze

Framing is the way in which the reality constructed by media. This research aimed to investigative and analyze the framing and the siding of the polemic about the legalization of the Flag Qanun and Logogram of Aceh. The research used the qualitative method with the framing analysis approach the text of the online news website were analyzed using Gamson and Modigliani model, which refers to a frame consisting of two supporting elements, namely the framing devices and the reasoning devices. The research objects were two online news websites; Kompas.com and Antaranews.com. The total sample frames comprised 56 pieces of news from the two online news website in three mounthstime from March through May 2013. The research results revealed that the two websites considered the polemic about the Flag Qanun and Logogram of Aceh important because there was a news value in it. The framing substance used by two online news websites was the same, i.e. the Flag Qanun and Logogram of Aceh was inconstitutional and therefore had to be revised. Such a framing had an implication that the media took side with the groups who were against the Flag Qanun and Logogram of Aceh.