Anglo-American Media Research Articles

Transatlanticism: A fading paradigm?

AbstractIn 2018, the first full year of the Trump presidency, it became abundantly clear that the transatlantic relationship had entered a period of intense discord, causing a series of pessimistic reports and commentary in the mainstream Anglo-American media. With this as the starting point, the article re-examines the study of the ‘transatlantic’ as a region. It engages with thinking of time (periodisation), space (scale), and discipline (methodology) in order to question standard assumptions and open up new avenues for research, identity-formation, and emancipatory commitment.

A Topic-Modelling-Assisted Discourse Study of DiDi’s Delisting from the New York Stock Exchange in Anglo-American Media Coverage

ABSTRACT The Chinese giant ride-hailing company DiDi announced its delisting from the New York Stock Exchange in 2021. The event gained widespread attention from the Western media, signalling China’s defense in data security by restricting tech giants’ offshore listings. This study aims to make explicit the discursive construction of this event among 300 news reports through topic modelling and critical discourse analysis. The analyses showed that the event is recontextualised through four prominent topics: Government intervention, Law enforcement, Financial market response and Impacts on Chinese tech giants. DiDi’s delisting is discursively constructed as more than a case of failed overseas financial activity, but as a threat to the existing financial world order dominated mainly by Western world. Growing concern has been raised as to whether cybersecurity may become an emerging battleground, particularly in a climate of heightened tensions between the U.S. and China on the economic and political fronts. The findings are interpreted with regard to the deep-embedded ideological divergence between socialism and capitalism and also the practical socio-political concerns between the two competing powers. This study also demonstrates the feasibility of incorporating the topic-modelling approach into discourse studies.

Threat and fear: Pragmatic purposes of emotionalisation in media discourse

The impact of mass media on individuals and society is to a great extent based on emotions. We concentrate on fear as it is one of the basic emotions triggered by risk and threat, which is claimed to play a key role in the twenty-first century consciousness (Furedi 20018). The study focuses on the emotionalisation of fear in contemporary media discourse about Russia, more specifically, on constructions of Russian threat and fear of Russia in Anglo-American media texts to highlight pragmatic effects and to speculate on possible purposes of such discourses. The study aims to explore the functioning of the lexemes threat and fear , in textual contexts with the focus on their pragma-discursive characteristics. It identifies the mechanisms as well as linguistic tools involved in media strategies of scare-mongering. The dataset was derived from quality British and American newspapers in the period 2018-2020, and was analysed drawing on an interdisciplinary approach combining critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, medialinguistics, psycholinguistics and the theory of proximisation. The paper argues that appealing to emotions as well as constructing emotions is aimed at enhancing the persuasive function of media and fulfilling their own agenda. The persistent use of the words threat and fear in relation to Russia as well as the obsessive discussion of this topic in media aim to shape a certain negative public opinion of Russia among readerships. The findings show that to achieve this goal different strategies and linguistic tools are used including: exaggeration, repetition, proximisation, interrogative headlines, presupposition, among others. The results go beyond linguistics, and may find implementation in political studies, since they provide researchers with tools for understanding contemporary social and political processes.

Islamic Rule and Iranian Women in the Films of Hatef Alimardani

This article reconsiders some Western textual and visual (mis)representations of Muslim women as mentally imprisoned by Islamic rules and patriarchy through analyzing three prominent films by the Iranian screenwriter and director, Hatef Alimardani (b. 1976). It begins by a brief discussion of the portrayals of women in Islamic societies promulgated by Anglo-American media. Then, by examining <em>For Pooneh’s Sake</em> (Beh Khāter-e Pooneh, 2013), <em>The Nameless Alley</em> (Kucheh-ye Binām, 2015), and <em>Ābā Jān</em> (2017), box-office hits offering sociocultural critiques through realistic cinematic depictions of contemporary Iranian society, it demonstrates how Alimardani’s films dismantle stereotypical and essentialist portrayals of Muslim women by Western media and scholarly works, and thus, help us better understand the lived experience of women in Islamic countries.

Struggle Between Tradition and Modernity: The Images of Beijing Hutongs in Anglo-American Media

ABSTRACT Marrying the attitude system with attribute agenda-setting theory, this paper investigates the images of Beijing hutongs, ancient alleys lined by courtyard residences, in Anglo-American media. The study focuses on the lexical realisation of substantive and affective attributes of hutongs in a self-built corpus consisting of news from 10 mainstream newspapers in the last decade. The findings suggest that hutongs are represented mainly as “modern tourism and leisure destinations” and “traditional residential areas”. While tourists’ delight and eagerness are highlighted in the news describing hutongs as “modern tourism and leisure destinations”, the anger and anxiety of residents, experts and conservationists caused by the deterioration of courtyard residences and over-commercialisation in hutong neighbourhoods are emphasised when hutongs are portrayed as “traditional residential areas”. In addition, appreciation of hutongs’ historic value and scepticism about the legitimacy of government-led demolitions that have caused damage to such value are salient in all news. Besides, the media’s strategic marginalisation of government sectors is also revealed. The study thus identifies hutongs’ struggle between tradition and modernity as reflected from an Anglo-American perspective. The study contributes to image studies by advocating an interdisciplinary theoretical framework and offers implications to the preservation and development of heritage sites in the global context.

Diversifying Voice, Democratizing the News? A Content Analysis of Citizen News Sources in Spanish-language International Broadcasting

ABSTRACTThis paper explores sourcing practices in three international broadcasters in Spanish: China’s CGTN Español, Iran’s HispanTV and Russia’s RT. Often described as counter-hegemonic, in that the worldview they present is not in alignment with dominant Anglo-American media, these three State-sponsored TV channels have grown their presence globally in recent years, but remain largely understudied. Drawing on literature about non-elite sourcing, source functions and public diplomacy, we examine the degree to which citizen sources are featured in these three channels, and, when that happens, how these sources are used to advance the foreign policy objectives that inform the broadcasters’ raison d’être (i.e., promoting the interest of their home country while challenging the international status quo). To do so, we conducted a quantitative content analysis of news stories broadcast in 2014 and 2017 (N = 1,265). Our results show the use of non-elite sources is not ubiquitous but strategic, and is often linked to critical reporting of countries that are not political allies. We also present evidence that the practice is not equally common across broadcasters.

Posfeminismo / Genealogía, geografía y contornos de un concepto

El término posfeminismo ha tenido usos múltiples y contradictorios en el circuito académico y los medios angloamericanos. A pesar de que el fenómeno que denota se ha expandido más allá de las fronteras del contexto social, cultural, económico, político y geográfico en el cual se origina, los trabajos que se ocupan de él en el mundo hispanoparlante son virtualmente inexistentes. Este artículo busca colmar este vacío. Expongo los contornos del posfeminismo como concepto analítico e intento demostrar que el potencial teórico del término solo se pone de manifiesto si se entiende como un régimen de subjetividad femenina de proyección global intrínsecamente conectado con el capitalismo y el ethos neoliberal, que incorpora feminidad espectacular e hipersexualización, pone “la colonialidad del género” en acción y, en vez de desestabilizarlo, refuerza el patriarcado.

Mediating the Landing of a Commercial Aircraft at Waterkloof Air Force Base

The debate on Africanising media theories has been broadly framed through the bifocal prism of postmodernism and postcolonialism. While the postmodernists argue that there is no single framework for studying the media in a pluralised world, the postcolonialists contend media theories inspired by the lived realities of the Anglo-American sphere are not suited to the African context. This paper contributes to this debate by replicating an Anglo-American media theory in the South African context. The paper tests Entman’s cascading activation thesis through an analysis of inter-elite contestations in the South African media. The paper examines the inter-elite struggle over the framing of the landing of a commercial aircraft at Waterkloof Air Force Base in four South African newspapers and news sites (City Press, Independent Online, Mail & Guardian and TimesLIVE [N = 75]). Using framing analysis, the paper examines the framing challenge mounted by the Gupta family against the ANC-led government over the narrative of the landing of a commercial aircraft at Waterkloof Air Force Base in the four news sources. The paper identifies two dominant framings of the incident, Waterkloofgate and Guptagate, depicting the two narratives promoted by the ANC-led government on the one hand and the Guptas on the other hand.

Geopolitics and the political right: lessons from Germany

In recent years, the Anglo-American media landscape has pondered over an old problem: that of German hegemony in Europe. At the heart of this debate lies the question of geopolitics. Is Germany, deliberately or by accident, a regional hegemon, and do its political elites seek to reorganize Berlin's neighbours into a pan-European architecture that prioritizes Germany's national interest? This question is not as straightforward as it may sound, not least because geopolitical thought was long a taboo in Germany, due to its influence on the formulation of National Socialist ideology in the 1920s. This article thus seeks to answer this question by focusing not on the often sanitized statements of political leaders but on the ideas of think-tankers, journalists, political advisers and public intellectuals, many of whom have had a significant influence on the formulation of German foreign policy. The article argues that, while geopolitical ideas were long confined to the right-wing margins of the political spectrum, they are now much more prevalent in the political mainstream. As Germany's relations with the United States and Russia have gradually soured, this new German geopolitics has once again become preoccupied by the notion of Germany as a central power.

ОСОБЕННОСТИ ПЕРЕДАЧИ КОННОТАЦИИ ПРИ ПЕРЕВОДЕ ЭКСПРЕССИВНО-ОЦЕНОЧНЫХ МЕТАФОР В ПУБЛИЦИСТИЧЕСКИХ ТЕКСТАХ

The article describes the patterns of rendering connotations of expressive-evaluative metaphors, revealed during the comparative semantic analysis of metaphors in the texts of the modern Anglo-American media and their translations into Russian. The authors analyze the ways of translating metaphors and the completeness of rendering connotation components, depending on the chosen translation strategy. The morphological structure of the metaphorical units of the original and the translation is considered.

Science news in a closed and an open media market: A comparative content analysis of print and online science news in Denmark and the United Kingdom

Most content analyses of science news are conducted in large Anglo-American media markets. However, we speculate that the intimacy between sources and journalists in small media markets can influence science coverage. Here, we present a comparative analysis of Danish and British newspaper science news in 2012. We find that in both countries science news amounts to about 4% of the total news flow. We also observe that Danish science news more often than British science news is triggered by political events, gives priority to national stories and includes more coverage of humanities and social sciences. Contrary, British science news is more traditional and favours stories on health and the natural sciences often triggered by a journal article. We attribute these differences to intimacy between the public, media, political and scientific spheres in Denmark partly rooted in a closed corporatist media market compared to an open liberal market in the United Kingdom.

Call me Caitlyn: making and making over the ‘authentic’ transgender body in Anglo-American popular culture

A conception of transgender identity as an ‘authentic’ gendered core ‘trapped’ within a mismatched corporeality, and made tangible through corporeal transformations, has attained unprecedented legibility in contemporary Anglo-American media. Whilst pop-cultural articulations of this discourse have received some scholarly attention, the question of why this ‘wrong body’ paradigm has solidified as the normative explanation for gender transition within the popular media remains underexplored. This paper argues that this discourse has attained cultural pre-eminence through its convergence with a broader media and commercial zeitgeist, in which corporeal alteration and maintenance are perceived as means of accessing one’s ‘authentic’ self. I analyse the media representations of two transgender celebrities: Caitlyn Jenner and Nadia Almada, alongside the reality TV show TRANSform Me, exploring how these women’s gender transitions have been discursively aligned with a cultural imperative for all women, cisgender or trans, to display their authentic femininity through bodily work. This demonstrates how established tropes of authenticity-via-bodily transformation, have enabled transgender to become culturally legible through the wrong body trope. Problematically, I argue, this process has worked to demarcate ideals of ‘acceptable’ transgender subjectivity: self-sufficient, normatively feminine, and eager to embrace the possibilities for happiness and social integration provided by the commercial domain.

A concern for humanity? Anglo-American press coverage of Bosnia and Rwanda, 1992–1995

This article provides findings from a detailed analysis concerning Anglo-American newspaper coverage of the conflicts in Bosnia (1992–1995) and Rwanda (1994). A comparison of the response to both crises evidences three things. First, Rwanda received less attention than Bosnia despite the former witnessing more deaths in a shorter time frame. Second, the violence was only of primary concern in specific instances with other issues, such as Western involvement, often being prioritised. Third, to varying degrees, the victims were often caricatured or otherwise marginalised. The findings therefore ask us to consider factors such as the qualitative nature of the violence, proximity of the violence, and perception of the victims when trying to interpret Anglo-American media responses to mass violence. It seems that genocide in itself is not always deemed important enough to warrant coverage, the implications of which need to be factored into future thinking on the Responsibility to Protect.

Framing of Malala Yousafzai: a comparative analysis of news coverage in Western and Pakistani mainstream English print and alternative media

This study compares Pakistani and the Anglo-American media news framing and how these sources portray similar news events. Specifically, it is a comparative analysis of news regarding the principal time periods in Malala Yousafzai’s life, namely: (1) the shooting of Malala by a Taliban gunman and her subsequent recovery; (2) the intervening period when Malala emerges as a brand and is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize; and, (3) the period surrounding the winning of the Prize before she fades out from the media limelight. The study found that Western media articles framed her as a female education activist, a victim of terrorism, a victim of a society largely hostile to women and a beacon of hope for girls in a highly restrictive society. The Pakistani mainstream English media, at times, preferred to tow the western lead without clarifying its own stance. However, Pakistani alternative English media was largely critical of Malala, post western intervention. The results may have far-reaching implications and raise questions about the framing by audience and the modes of communication people adopt for building their knowledge structure.

Cultural Techniques and Logistical Media: Tuning German and Anglo-American Media Studies

Cultural Techniques and Logistical Media: Tuning German and Anglo-American Media Studies

Black swan, white masks: Contesting cosmopolitanism and double misrecognition in a gay tourist town

This article discusses the effects that constructions of lesbianism – generated and circulated widely throughout Anglo-American media – had on normative discourses of gender and sexuality amongst British migrants, living in the affluent coastal tourist town of Sitges, in Spain. Marketed as a cosmopolitan location par excellence, Sitges’ identity is built largely on its reputation for playing host to an internationally diverse gay community, subsequently understood to evince an atmosphere of openness and tolerance. And yet drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon (1952/1967) and Kelly Oliver (2001), I suggest that the visibility of feminine lesbianism in this context was resignified through those media images, constituting a ‘double misrecognition’, which saw all female homosexuality paradoxically become invisible at the exact moment representation was explicitly deemed to have been achieved. Far from elaborating a cosmopolitan ‘openness towards difference’, I argue that the resulting double misrecognition actually substantiated highly conservative gender norms, even as it masqueraded as the opposite.

The Latin Bias: Regions, the Anglo-American Media, and Human Rights1

Media attention is unevenly allocated across global human rights problems, prompting anger, frustration, and recrimination in the international system. This article demonstrates that from 1981 to 2000, three leading Anglo-American media sources disproportionately covered Latin American abuses, in human rights terms, as compared to other world regions. This �Latin Human Rights Bias� runs counter to broader trends within the Anglo-American general coverage of foreign news, where Latin America�s share of reporting is far smaller. The Bias is partially explained by the region�s proximity to the United States (US), its relevance to US policy debates, and by path dependency. A significant portion of the Latin Bias remains unexplained, however, despite our best attempts to rigorously model explanations offered by leading Western journalists. These findings suggest that geographic regions are an important factor in the media�s perception of global human rights problems and that both human rights policymakers and scholars may be inappropriately drawing general lessons from regionally specific and biased patterns. We conclude with suggestions for future research.

The relativity of decline: a reappraisal of French leadership and influence in a time of global crisis

This article is an attempt, in the context of the Eurozone crisis that has shaken Europe since 2008, to explore and deconstruct two pieces of conventional wisdom on French leadership in Europe and the world. The stereotypical image of a country in decline and denial, out of touch with today’s globalised world, is reproduced so often in the Anglo-American media and even in scholarly discourse, that is has become a self-evident truism. The article examines this truism in two different perspectives: there is, on the one hand, the axiom that France has lost influence in Europe and that the balance of power has shifted inexorably to Germany and, on the other hand, the axiom that Europe does not matter in the global ‘power shift’ and that, as part of Europe, France does not count any more either. In questioning the origins and validity of these axioms, the authors argue that a strong perception bias persists and is constantly perpetuated even though reality has changed. Not only has France rather successfully adapted to globalisation in both political and economic terms, but it has also found new ways and discourses about its role as Germany’s partner in leadership in the European Union. The paper goes on to show that both France and the EU retain and use significant levers for action in three dimensions of power—coercion, agenda-setting and attraction. It concludes that going into 2012, France remains an active and important actor, both in the EU and on the global scene. It is present and influential in major international institutions, effectively builds international coalitions and floats important ideas on reforming laissez-faire capitalism.

The Paradoxes of Journalism History

In order to extricate journalism from broader media history, we need to better develop ways of understanding the generic characteristics of journalism over time and across geo-political space. This paper will aim to address what could be termed certain paradoxes of journalism's history; paradoxes which relate to our definitions of the generic boundaries of journalism and flux across those boundaries. Engaging with the complexities of these historical paradoxes will, we may hope, contribute to our understanding of what makes this set of practices distinct in the present and also what we may want to retain of its range of features in some technologically reconfigured future. Journalism's current crises and opportunities, with their implications for the broader qualities of public communication, need us to consider it in all its historical complexity, not just as a profit-making machine which has broken down. Furthermore, the only way to fully begin to grasp journalism's current potential is to consider how it has formed and mutated over the centuries as a global phenomenon. Propelled by both intellectual and technological developments, journalism history is moving out from its confinement in the margins of other disciplinary areas. Journalism studies worldwide is providing a wealth of opportunities for scholars. This paper argues that we need to embrace more ambitious dialogues to clarify our understanding of journalism in itself as well as in its intersections with other fields, at the same time as becoming involved in methodological conversations about the exploitation of digital resources.

Constructing ideal victims? Violence narratives in Finnish crime-appeal programming

This article utilizes Nils Christie’s classic concept of the ideal victim and examines the ways in which crime-appeal programming contributes to the construction of social narratives of victims of violence. Its special focus is on techniques and victim-specific attributes that are used in the Finnish crime-appeal programme, Poliisi-TV, to define victims. The data comprise 21 violence vignettes, which are textually and visually analysed from the perspective of dramaturgy. These narratives represent victims of violence as either survivors or victims. The survivors are portrayed as heroic characters who have found inner strength to carry on with their lives after their victimization, while the victims are presented as depressed and traumatized, and their future is pictured as gloomy and unhopeful. The narratives mediate a strong picture of the hetero-normative nuclear family and the victims of violence represented in the programme are middle-aged, middle-class, financially well-off parents. Victims of violence who are outside the parameters of family, such as marginalized alcoholic men and particularly vulnerable victims, are completely missing from the footage. Some major differences among Finnish and Anglo-American media portrayals are pointed out, and internationally comparative crime media research is called for.