Broadsheet Newspapers Research Articles

Scholars as European public intellectuals? Media interventions in the 2014 European Parliament election campaign

ABSTRACTThis paper presents results from a collaborative research project investigating European scholars from the social sciences and humanities (SSH) who acted as public intellectuals during the 2014 European Parliament (EP) election campaign. We analyze op-ed contributions published in 21 broadsheet newspapers and in 9 EU member states, written by 195 authors who contributed 262 articles. The result is a portrait of European SSH scholars acting as public intellectuals. It shows a clear overrepresentation of male authors of advanced age. Academic reputation and public prestige show an east–west divide, with prominent authors prevalently publishing in renowned “West European” newspapers. Disciplinary background offers the most noticeable differentiations. Political scientists are most active, however, predominantly publishing in domestic settings. By contrast, economists reach out to a wider international audience and write explicitly on EU matters, while intervening sociologists and philosophers, as the most senior intellectuals, examine Europe in its wider international and historical context. Correspondence analysis comprising the content of public interventions, and key characteristics of all contributors, suggests that even during the EU electoral campaign, scholars from the SSH do not necessarily contribute to the rise of a European public sphere, as their interventions are more domestic than European in focus.

Trends and patterns in sustainability-related media coverage: A classification of issue-level attention

Sustainability has moved from fringe topic to headline news and key policy discourse in its own right. Yet, the sustainability discourse remains fragmented, with a diverse set of challenges receiving vastly different levels of attention. Nevertheless, the vast majority of previous studies have focused on media attention to climate change, whereas other sustainability challenges have received much less attention in the academic literature. In this paper, we explore trends and patterns in media coverage across a set of ten sustainability challenges. In particular, we are interested in the extent to which the recent trends and patterns in coverage that have been well-documented for climate change are reflected by other sustainability challenges. We utilise a sample of 23 broadsheet newspapers from five different countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, UK, US), covering a 17-year period from 2000 to 2016. Using the agenda-setting literature as a starting-point for our enquiry, we then turn to the toolset provided by financial econometrics to develop a basic typology of media attention focusing on the two dimensions information/noise and seasonality/non-seasonality. We find that media coverage on climate change, poverty and HIV/AIDS can mainly be characterized as information, whereas the remaining seven issues included in our study appear noise-driven. Seasonal patterns in coverage appear most pronounced for socioeconomic issues. Media attention to biodiversity and cleaner technologies has been crowded in by increased coverage on climate change. At the same time, we find clear divergences from overall trends and patterns at the level of different countries and individual newspapers.

Trends & Patterns in Sustainability-related Media Coverage: Classifying Issue-level Attention

Sustainability has moved from fringe topic to headline news and key policy discourse. Yet, the vast majority of previous studies have focused on media attention to climate change, whereas other sustainability challenges have received little attention in the academic literature. Findings that have been generated in the context of climate change may or may not hold for other sustainability-related issues. In this paper, we explore trends and patterns in media coverage across a set of ten sustainability challenges. We are interested in the extent to which the recent trends and patterns in coverage that have been well-documented for climate change are reflected by other sustainability challenges. We utilise a sample of 28 broadsheet newspapers from six different countries, covering the years 2000 to 2011. Using the agenda-setting literature as a starting-point for our enquiry, we then turn to the toolset provided by financial econometrics to develop a basic typology of media attention focusing on the two dimensions information/noise and seasonality/non-seasonality. Our results show markedly different coverage profiles for these challenges. Biodiversity and cleaner technologies reflect the upward trajectory of climate change-related coverage, whereas socioeconomic sustainability challenges show stable or even declining coverage over time with clear seasonal cycles in coverage.

An examination of the photographic coverage of sportswomen in the Irish print media: a study of an Irish broadsheet newspaper

Building on a large body of extant international research, which has consistently found that sportswomen are underrepresented and marginalized in media reporting, this article presents a study examining the coverage of sportswomen over a four-month period in a major Irish broadsheet newspaper, The Irish Times. The findings, which are based on a data-set of 471 pages, reveal that less than 4% of photographs were of sportswomen. These findings indicate that the Irish situation mirrors international research on the topic and reflects a continuation of the status quo in terms of how sportswomen and women’s sports are (under)valued and (under)reported in the media. The implications of these findings are discussed as well as directions for further study. The article makes a useful contribution to the field given the dearth of research conducted on this topic in Ireland to date.

Framing the debate and taking positions on food allergen legislation: The 100 chefs incident on social media

Those suffering with food allergies and intolerances need to consider risk every day, and professional organisations are increasingly enrolled in this risk management venture (e.g. offering support, developing legislation, and enforcing laws). Following the release of new food allergen rules in the UK, the Daily Telegraph, a national broadsheet newspaper, published a letter and an article in March 2015 endorsed by 100 chefs criticising the legislation. The chefs felt that innovation and creativity were being harmed by the requirement to state the presence of 14 allergens in the dishes they cooked. Following the release, many food allergen-concerned consumers utilised social media to share their views. In this article we use qualitative research data, comments posted online and collected between 9 and 16 March 2015, to explore how claimants positioned themselves and others in the ensuing online debate, and how the debate itself was framed. The data included traditional news articles, online forum comments, individual Twitter posts, and Twitter discussions. We identified frames across the debate discourse that emphasised medical concerns around managing risks associated with food allergy/intolerance, the assignment of responsibility, fairness of access, the political nature of the debate, and the financial implications involved. We draw on Positioning Theory to illustrate how user-positions can be defined, redefined, and challenged in the light of new or varying information. Our findings have implications for understanding communication around managing food risks from both a consumer and business perspective, and understanding the progression of debates through both traditional and new media platforms.

Pronouns as Means of Impersonal Presentation in English Quality Press

The current paper presents the analysis of pronouns as means of impersonal presentation in English quality press. The article gives the definition of the pronoun as a grammatical category and describes the use and purpose of impersonalization strategies. The data for the investigation was taken from the international English quality newspapers: The Financial Times (UK) and The Wall Street Journal (US), which are the leading daily broadsheet newspapers in the UK and the USA having millions of both print and online subscribers worldwide. The articles on political, economic, and social issues were chosen on a random basis and scrutinized for pronouns as means of impersonal presentation of fact. The body of 187 cases of impersonalization chosen for the analysis were divided into groups with focus on the grammatical category they belong to. The most and least often used classes of pronouns were identified and compared. The results of the current study may be useful for editors, journalists, writers, as well as for further study of impersonalization strategies in the English language.

Shoot the messenger? The media’s role in framing populist attributions of blame

Attributing blame to elites is central to populist communication. Although empirical research has provided initial insights into the effects of populist blame attribution on citizens’ political opinions, little is known about the contextual factors surrounding its presence in the media. Advancing this knowledge, this article draws on an extensive content analysis ( N = 867) covering non-election and election periods to provide insights into how populist blame attributions are embedded in journalistic reporting styles. Using Latent Class Analysis, we first identified three distinct styles of reporting: neutral, conflict, and interpretative coverage. In line with our predictions, we find that populist blame attributions are present most in conjunction with an interpretative journalistic style and least when a neutral journalistic style is used. Populist blame attributions are more likely to be used by journalists of tabloid newspapers than journalists of broadsheet newspapers. These results provide valuable insights for understanding the intersections between journalism and populist communication.

Media coverage of climate change: An international comparison

We present an international comparison of broadsheet newspaper coverage of climate change. We employ two complementary theoretical lenses, multiple streams theory and institutional theory, to explore why climate change has become headline news in some countries but has received comparatively little coverage in others. The study utilises a worldwide sample across 41 different countries for the year 2008, covering 113 leading national broadsheet newspapers. A cross-sectional regression model is used to identify whether and how a range of contextual factors impact coverage of climate change. To a certain extent, a country’s direct exposure to climate change and the measures that have been taken to combat global warming influence the position of climate change on the media agenda. Crucially, however, we identify a number of contextual factors that impact climate change-related media coverage in different national contexts. In particular, we find a significantly positive relationship between regulatory quality and levels of media coverage. At the same time, unemployment trends are significantly negatively related to media attention to climate change. Gross domestic product per capita does not help to explain levels of climate change-related media coverage. In other words, climate change appears to have moved beyond simply being a ‘rich country issue’.

Fundamental evaluative adjective patterns in british broadsheet and tabloid newspaper discourse

Fundamental evaluative adjective patterns in british broadsheet and tabloid newspaper discourse

The “Buen Vivir” and “Twenty-First Century Socialism”

In this article, I draw from Critical Discourse Analysis and Cultural Political Economy to examine the representation of “post-neoliberal” politics in UK broadsheet newspapers during their reporting of the 2013 and 2014 presidential elections in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela. In doing so, I seek to assess the role this reporting plays in the promotion of the selection and/or retention of different political and economic imaginaries in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. I argue that in right-of-centre newspapers (and, to a lesser extent, The Independent), the de-legitimation of the three countries’ post-neoliberalising projects had the effect of promoting support for the retention of both neoliberal capitalism and liberal democracy in the United Kingdom while, in The Guardian, the simultaneous legitimation and misconstrual of these projects as Europeanised versions of social democracy served to promote the selection of a less radical, broadly Keynesian, social democratic imaginary as an alternative route to economic recovery.

Good News? A Longitudinal Analysis of Newspaper Portrayals of Mental Illness in Canada 2005 to 2015.

The overarching aim of this article is to assess media portrayals of mental illness in Canada. We hypothesise that portrayals have improved over time, related to the various antistigma activities of organisations such as the Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC). Specific objectives are to assess 1) overall tone and content of newspaper articles, 2) change over time, and 3) variables associated with positive or negative content. We collected newspaper articles from print and online editions of over 20 best-selling Canadian newspapers from 2005 to 2015 ( N = 24,570) that mentioned key search terms such as mental illness or schizophrenia. These were read by research assistants, who assessed tone and content for each article using preassigned codes and categories. Data were subjected to chi-squared and trend analysis. Over the study period, 21% of the articles had a positive tone and 28% had stigmatising content. Trend analysis suggested significantly improved coverage over 11 years ( P < 0.001). For example, articles with a positive tone had almost doubled from 2005 (18.9%) to 2015 (34.8%), and articles with stigmatising content had reduced by a third (22.3% vs 32.7%). Analysis also suggested that articles on the front page, as well as articles in broadsheet newspapers, had significantly more positive coverage. The study indicates that news media coverage related to mental illness has improved over the past decade. This may be related to the concerted efforts of the MHCC, which has executed a targeted strategy aimed at reducing stigma and improving media coverage since 2007.

‘Organizational, professional, personal’: An exploratory study of political journalists and their hybrid brand on Twitter

Political journalists rely heavily on their occupational status and reputation. This article addresses how political journalists negotiate their standing and enforce their legitimacy on Twitter amidst the online environment that directly challenges them. So far, practice-oriented studies have only looked at journalists in general. Studies have also tended to investigate the content published to journalists’ Twitter feeds, neglecting other aspects of the Twitter profile that can affect the perceived image of journalists. This exploratory study examines the Twitter profile pages of 20 political journalists who work for the top broadsheet newspapers in the United States. It uses the conceptual framework of personal branding to identify patterns and trends of how and where political journalists actively communicate their presence on the platform. This process is delineated by three complementary and co-existing brand identities – the organizational, the professional, and the personal – as well as a digital media skills-based dimension that political journalists use to position their journalistic brand on Twitter. Findings suggest that it could be most appropriate to think of political journalists’ Twitter profiles as digital business cards or digital portfolios, deliberately crafted to differentiate the journalist and establish competitive superiority.

How News Type Matters

Abstract. Today, citizens have the possibility to use many different types of news media and participate politically in various ways. This study examines how use of different news types (hard and soft TV news as well as printed and online versions of broadsheet and tabloid newspapers) indirectly affects changes in offline and online political participation through current affairs knowledge and internal efficacy during nonelection and election time. We use a four-wave national panel survey from Denmark (N = 2,649) and show that use of hard TV news and broadsheets as well as online tabloids positively affects changes in both offline and online political participation through current affairs knowledge and internal efficacy. Use of soft TV news and printed tabloids has a negative indirect effect. These results are more pronounced for online political participation and during election time. However, use of soft TV news also has a positive direct effect on changes in political participation, which suggests a positive impact via other processes.

Stifling dissent: the Murdoch press and its campaigns against its ‘critics’

ABSTRACTIn 2014, Nick Davies, the investigative journalist responsible for uncovering the News of the World phone-hacking affair, argued that Rupert Murdoch’s global media conglomerate News Corp actively seeks to intimidate its critics into silence. This article provides an Australian case study on News Corp’s representation of scholars and commentators the company seemingly identifies as adversaries. Content analysis of Murdoch’s national broadsheet newspaper The Australian reveals patterns of negative campaigns against several of Australia’s most prominent media and communication researchers. Outside of academia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s television program Media Watch and its host Paul Barry have also received aggressive and ad hominem coverage, so too has the Australian Press Council, the press’s self-regulator and its former Chair, Julian Disney. These negative campaigns by The Australian amount to the mobilisation of ‘flak’ against critical perspectives and perceived enemies and is part of broader ideological contest labelled ‘the culture wars’. This execution of media power risks engendering a ‘chilling effect’ upon academic freedom and media scholarship, where researchers might choose to self-censor their activities rather than risk adverse representations of their character, ethics, and research.

Rebirth, Devastation and Sickness: Analyzing the Role of Metaphor in Media Discourses of Nuclear Power

ABSTRACTNuclear power plays an important but controversial role in policies to ensure domestic energy security, fuel poverty reduction and the mitigation of climate change. Our article construes the problem of nuclear power in terms of social discourse, language and public choice; specifically examining the role that metaphors play in the policy domain. We empirically analyze metaphors as framing devices in nuclear energy policy debates in the UK between April 2009 and March 2013, thereby capturing the impact of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. We employ documentary analysis of major UK national broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, using electronic bibliographic tools to extract the metaphors. We then map these metaphors using a Type Hierarchy Analysis, which examines how elements of the target domain (energy technologies and policies) originate from a different source domain. Type hierarchies identify and categorize metaphors, defining the affectual and emotional responses associated with them, providing us with grounded insight into their role in shaping discourse and as a consequence influence public engagement with energy policy. Our analysis highlights three emergent domains of discourse metaphors and discusses the implications of their deployment. Metaphors were found to be classified into three different categories: Rebirth (Renaissance), Devastation (Apocalypse, Inferno, Genie and Bomb) and Sickness (Addiction and Smoking).

Constructing Immigrants: Portrayals of Migrant Groups in British National Newspapers, 2010–2012

Public opposition to immigration in Britain reflects perceptions of immigrants that focus disproportionately on “illegal” immigration and asylum seekers, rather than more numerous workers, students, and family members. This study examines coverage of immigration in the British national press, to see whether press portrayals of migrants provide a basis for these images of immigration underlying public attitudes. We use corpus linguistic methods to analyze 43 million words of news from 2010 to 2012. Among other findings, we show that press portrayals match public perceptions of migrants, with “illegal immigrants” and “failed asylum seekers” as predominant depictions in broadsheet and tabloid newspapers.

The Sociology of Fancy-Schmancy: The Notion of ‘Farterism’ and Cultural Evaluation Under the Regime of Radical Suspicion

Critical sociology suggests that taste judgments are not independent of the social, as actors use them to claim social value. This article demonstrates that this critical perspective has gained currency among laypersons, transforming everyday struggles over cultural evaluation. I discuss the new discursive category ‘farterism’, which emerged in Israel in the 1990s to denounce vain pretence and became ubiquitous in everyday evaluation. I analyse online user-generated reviews on films and restaurants alongside broadsheet newspaper articles to explore how this category is used in different contexts by different actors, which aesthetic surface characteristics are most associated with it and why, and how farterism critique reshapes the relationship between lay judgments and established market (prices) and field/art-world (status) hierarchies. Farterism critique is often used to fend off symbolic violence, but cultural elites use it too, despite their interest. I discuss the implicit ethic behind farterism critique, and its connections with recent transformations of capitalism.

Male and female murderers in newspapers: Are they portrayed differently?

This research aims to identify any similarities and differences in the reporting of male and female murderers in broadsheet and tabloid newspapers. In order to gain a stronger insight into the issue, two case studies have been selected, one male and one female. Through the method of thematic analysis, this article examines how the female serial murderer Joanna Dennehy was represented compared with the male serial murderer Stephen Griffiths in a selection of articles from national newspapers. During this process, reoccurring themes were discovered that are discussed in the analysis. These themes are ‘labelling’ and ‘blaming others’. ‘Labelling’ is divided into sub-themes of ‘mental illness’ and ‘sexualisation and de-humanisation’. The aforementioned themes are discussed in the analysis. It was found that the gender of a serial murderer does dictate how they are portrayed in tabloid newspapers. This is also true for broadsheet newspapers to a lesser extent. For example, this research shows that Joanna Dennehy is represented as mentally ill, whereas this is not as prominent for Stephen Griffiths, despite him committing similar acts. Furthermore, Dennehy is de-humanised in both types of newspaper, although to a greater degree in tabloid newspapers. It was discovered that Griffiths was not subjected to the same de-humanisation. These findings concur with previous research outlined in the literature review, though the themes mentioned in the discussion do not occur as blatantly as some researchers suggest they do for other female murderers in the media.

Using Self-Categorization Theory to Uncover the Framing of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Two National Newspapers

Research into the framing of the Olympic Games indicates that the media often exhibit bias in their coverage. Through discourse, the media attempt to create a situation where consumers are provided with multiple story lines or foci, to build and maintain audiences for the duration of an event. A content analysis was conducted to uncover and compare how two national broadsheet newspapers, one from Australia and one from Canada, pictorially depicted the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Results of this study found large differences in the use of home-nation content to capture, build, and maintain readers for the duration of the Olympic Games coverage. These findings are beneficial for sports managers and sports-media personnel to understand how two different nations pictorially framed the Olympic Games.

Child abuse in England and Wales 2003–2013: Newspaper reporting versus reality

This study examined how child abuse and neglect were reported in a sample of 459 newspaper articles between 2003 and 2013 in England and Wales. The results were compared with data on child abuse and neglect over the same decade. Sexual abuse was by far the most commonly reported, in both tabloid and broadsheet newspapers. Although neglect and emotional abuse are the most common causes of child protection plans in England and Wales, neglect and emotional abuse are relatively invisible in newspaper articles, as is physical abuse. Possible explanations for this disproportionate focus on sexual abuse, which has also been found in Australia and the United States, include the fact that sexual abuse cases reach the criminal courts more often than other forms of child victimisation. Although broadsheet papers were more likely than tabloid newspapers to comment on causes and solutions beyond the individual perpetrator committing a crime, the majority of articles in broadsheet papers still did not frame either the causes or the solutions in broader terms. It seems possible that the notion of the decontextualised ‘evil’ perpetrator serves to distance journalist and reader alike from the pervasiveness and pain of child abuse. The article concludes with ideas to improve the accuracy and utility of the coverage of child abuse and neglect in newspapers.