Editorial Line Research Articles

Editorial policies and news discourse – how Al Jazeera’s implicit guidelines shape its coverage of middle east conflicts

The article examines Al Jazeera’s internal guidelines. It focuses attention on the broadcaster’s editorial policies and practices, how they are created, the way they shape news content, and whether they are documented or not. It attempts to shed light on the role of external stakeholders and regulatory devices with a say on the editorial line and subsequently the type of internal editorial policies and practices journalists are required to pursue. It presents a comparative study and analysis of the network’s two major and most influential channels, namely Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English, the arguments in support of their editorial policies and practices, and the arguments opposing them. It scrutinizes how different forms of internal guidelines and regulatory frameworks affect the network’s discourse, ties with its financiers, and relations with the outside world. Finally and based on the findings obtained through interviews, and linguistic discourse analysis, the article outlines how internal guidelines come into being in the case of Al Jazeera and how they eventually influence the final product.

Une éthique éditoriale et une intégrité scientifique au service du Sud

Une éthique éditoriale et une intégrité scientifique au service du Sud

Journalism under fire

An analysis of the duress that was brought to bear on the press in northeastern Mexico during the so-called “War on Drugs,” based on the experience of ten journalists displaced between 2010 and 2015. The text reveals warring armed groups’ fight to control media editorial lines, in addition to messengers’ vulnerable position in the line of fire due to a lack of security protocols their employers might develop, as well as existing connections between public officials and organized crime. In a context where journalists’ murders and disappearances are left unpunished, organizational initiatives designed to compensate for this high professional vulnerability are emerging.

Pensar la libertad, hacer la libertad: una aproximación al discurso legitimador del activismo catalanista de Buenos Aires. 1900-1940

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the construction of the discourse that established the imaginary of the Catalans of Latin America in Buenos Aires, between 1910 and 1940. We identify the presence of the theoretical category of freedom in the editorial line taken by its mouthpiece, the magazine Ressorgiment. We examine whether the Argentine democratic experience favored the dialectical construction of the notion of freedom in the group’s discourse, and investigate the way in which the migratory experience determined the theoretical reformulation of their thinking and marked the distinguishing features of their political activity. Based on the Catalanism of Buenos Aires we will reflect, from a cultural perspective, on the relations between national identity and democratic ideals in contemporary Ibero-America.

Predictors of credibility of online media in the Spanish polarized media system

Credibility of online news media is facing important challenges: the levelling effect of the digital environment, the changing habits of consumption, polarization of discourses... This scenario makes it relevant to address what features of news brands and news content shape the credibility of contemporary journalism. This article tests a set of items, including journalistic standards, reputation and citizen participation, in order to build predictors involved in credibility judgments. The authors carried on a quantitative survey (n=416), representative of the Spanish online population. Results identified currency of information, inclusion of analysis and context, citation of sources and inclusion of links to primary sources as the most significant predictors of credibility judgements; it also showed that engaged respondents rely on news brand reputation and individual journalists´ reputation and do not take into account ideological affinity with editorial lines of media. Participation in the media did not prove to be relevant in shaping aggregated judgments of credibility.

The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life

The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life

Del estado de excepción al estado autoritario: el control de los medios de prensa escrita. el caso “diarios chichas” en Perú

Based on the review of the judicial reasoning on the “Diarios Chicha” case, both in the conviction and in the acquittal of former president Alberto Fujimori, the relevance of the context of the State of exception is analyzed, in which they were developed facts of an authoritarian state. It is postulated that the lack of an analysis and assessment of the context of discovery and of the conceptual elements on the State of exception, facilitated the acquittal of the former president of the use of public treasury money for the purchase of editorial lines of the written press in his eagerness for a second reelection.

Identificación política y valores profesionales en tensión en la práctica periodística en dos salas de redacción de la ciudad de Buenos Aires

The goal of this article is to look at the tension between professional identity and political identificationas experienced by journalists in the newsrooms of Pagina/12 and between 2011 and 2015, when the editorial lines of both newspapers were in tune with the national government’s policies. From an ethnographic perspective (Restrepo, 2016), this article addresses the tensions and intersections between journalists’ political identification and that of their media outlets. By analyzing this topic, we can appreciate what values the former identify as part of their professional practice. To do this, we returned to the contributions of labor sociology, specifically to those on symbolic interactionism (Abbott, 1993; Becker, 2006; Becker, 2009; Becker, Geer, Hughes, y Strauss, 1961; Becker y Strauss, 1956; Hughes, 2012 y Geer, 1972) and dramaturgical analysis (Goffman, 2006), in order to study two distinct moments in the process of identification. The first involves the hiring of young journalists and how their expectations, upon entering the world of journalism, are affected by the affinity between their own political identification and the editorial line of the newspaper they now work for. The second moment describes situations, in everyday content production inside the newsroom, in which journalists discuss their newspaper’s stance in relation to certain political events, leading to deviations from the editorial line. After studying these moments, we shall find, for example, that criterias for newsworthiness are not always starting points for journalistic work but are instead frequently called into question. Rather than using predefined parameters to analyze daily newsroom tasks, we shall reconstruct the norms and values of journalistic ethics by looking at the continuous self-reflection undertaken by journalists during their everyday work.

Mudar de nombre

En el presente texto se explica el próximo cambio de nombre de la Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares por el de Disparidades. Revista de Antropología, con el objetivo de adaptarse a la nueva política editorial y, fundamentalmente, a las transformaciones de la disciplina antropológica en las últimas décadas. Aunque el título original atesora un indudable capital científico, el Consejo de Redacción de la revista ha considerado que ha llegado el momento de sustituirlo por uno más actualizado.

The reception of Marx in France: La Revue Socialiste (1885–1914)

The aim of the present article is to provide context to reading, interpreting and using Marx from 1885 to 1914 in La Revue Socialiste, the main journal of socialist movements in France. The article first states some quantitative elements on the absolute and relative importance of the references to Marx and the words “Marxism” and “Marxist” in the journal. The central editorial line of the review – to restore a French descent to socialism and to try to found a socialism not exclusively “Marxist” – is then analysed. This line is maintained over time, with variations, in different national and international contexts. Finally, three key economic themes defining the relation to Marx in the journal are presented. Based on this quantitative and qualitative analysis, a brief conclusion stresses some of the most specific aspects of the socialist reception of Marx in France before WWI.

Los inicios de la literatura infantil en España: José de Viera y Clavijo

Arnaud Berquin (Burdeos, 1747-París, 1791), figura capital en el nacimiento de la literatura infantil, publicó L’ami des enfants (1782-1783), que seguía la propuesta editorial e incluso el título de Der Kinderfreund (1776-1782) de Christian Felix Weisse. Las piezas teatrales y narrativas que allí se recogían eran, casi en su totalidad, traducciones de textos de autores alemanes, holandeses e ingleses, extraídos a menudo de la Kleine Kinderbibliothek (1779-1784) de Campe o de la colección de Weisse. Hacia 1784, el ilustrado José de Viera y Clavijo (Los Realejos, Tenerife, 1731-Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1813) traduce algunos de los textos recogidos en la colección de Berquin, junto a otros de Madame de Genlis y de Gessner, y luego, en 1803, comienza a publicarlos con el título Cuentos de niños que instruyen divirtiendo. La obra, la significación y las fuentes de Berquin son sobradamente conocidas, pero poco se ha dicho acerca de las aportaciones de Viera y Clavijo a la literatura infantil, en la que debe ocupar un lugar relevante en los inicios de la literatura infantil en lengua española.

‘A Bit of News Which You May, or May Not, Care to Use’

As the formal Anglo-Irish union ended, Tim Healy, Irish nationalist politician turned Free State Governor-General, and Lord Beaverbrook, politician and press baron, entered their second decade of friendship. Whereas existing scholarship privileges the place of this Beaverbrook-Healy nexus in pre-independence high politics, this article uses correspondence preserved in the Beaverbrook papers to rectify neglect of the post-1922 era and reintegrate the relationship into Anglo-Irish and British media history. The article demonstrates how this enduring informal connection functioned as a vital forum for the exchange of material relating to British and Irish affairs and examines its influence on news content. Tracing the construction of individual stories and overall editorial lines, this case study also facilitates a broader re-evaluation of the process of content production and, by analysing feedback relayed in the letters, provides fresh insight into the place of the British press in the new Irish Free State.

The Moroccan digital media’s representation of the Moroccan woman: A multimodal analysis to Hespress discourse

Abstract Of the many influences on how Moroccan people perceive the Moroccan woman, Moroccan digital media is presumably the most powerful tool used throughout; in fact, Moroccan digital media direct the public opinion, frame specific images, and perpetuate both realistic and unrealistic speculations about the Moroccan woman, whose voice is carefully selected and whose presence goes sometimes reported and at other times unreported. This article is a deep reflection of the overall images chosen to manufacture consensus about the Moroccan woman in the Moroccan digital media; more specifically, emphasis is going to be laid on how Hespress, as an emerging Moroccan news outlet, advertises different conceptions and representations about the Moroccan woman at home and overseas. The article is predicated on the notion of framing news stories, which propel journalists to decide on what is newsworthy and what is not. The researcher’s pivotal argument is that a process of selection is obviously developed by Hespress in its dealing with and detailing on the question of the Moroccan woman. Put otherwise, a large space is arguably accorded to certain women who have outperformed their peers in many vital sectors of life and led successful stories nationwide. As for those women, whose stories do not correlate with the policy and the editorial line of Hespress, they are devoiced and still marginalized. To address this topic more effectively, the researcher suggests utilizing a multimodal analysis to the discourse of Hespress about the Moroccan woman. A preliminary examination of the literature documenting the media’s discourse about her will be considered. Then, an elaboration of the methodology adopted will be explored. Finally, some pedagogical recommendations will be advanced in this article to enable students promote critical reading and hone not only their analytical but also their interpretative skills as concerns Hespress discourse on the Moroccan woman.

Alignment of comparable documents: Comparison of similarity measures on French–English–Arabic data

AbstractThe objective, in this article, is to address the issue of the comparability of documents, which are extracted from different sources and written in different languages. These documents are not necessarily translations of each other. This material is referred as multilingual comparable corpora. These language resources are useful for multilingual natural language processing applications, especially for low-resourced language pairs. In this paper, we collect different data in Arabic, English, and French. Two corpora are built by using available hyperlinks for Wikipedia and Euronews. Euronews is an aligned multilingual (Arabic, English, and French) corpus of 34k documents collected from Euronews website. A more challenging issue is to build comparable corpus from two different and independent media having two distinct editorial lines, such as British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Al Jazeera (JSC). To build such corpus, we propose to use the Cross-Lingual Latent Semantic approach. For this purpose, documents have been harvested from BBC and JSC websites for each month of the years 2012 and 2013. The comparability is calculated for each Arabic–English couple of documents of each month. This automatic task is then validated by hand. This led to a multilingual (Arabic–English) aligned corpus of 305 pairs of documents (233k English words and 137k Arabic words). In addition, a study is presented in this paper to analyze the performance of three methods of the literature allowing to measure the comparability of documents on the multilingual reference corpora. A recall at rank 1 of 50.16 per cent is achieved with the Cross-lingual LSI approach for BBC–JSC test corpus, while the dictionary-based method reaches a recall of only 35.41 per cent.

Between the Letter and the Spirit: International Statebuilding Subversion Tactics in Burundi

ABSTRACT This article explores the appropriation dynamics of international statebuilding in Burundi, with a focus on the period from 2010 to 2015. If international statebuilding is most commonly presented (and debated) as practices leaning towards the achievement of a liberal democracy, this article argues that it can also be used towards undemocratic ends. The central claim is the following: the (most) recent authoritarian trend observed in Burundi’s main political force in government, the National Council for the Defence of Democracy – Forces for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD-FDD), did not only occur against international statebuilding but also through its appropriation and, more specifically, through self-reinforcing subversion tactics of appropriation. The article conceptualizes these tactics, examines the factors of emergence and conditions of existence, and presents the main expressions along three major editorial lines of international statebuilding: pluralist democracy, vibrant civil society and respect of the rule of law.

Exploring News Frames, Sources and Editorial Lines on Newspaper Coverage of Nuclear Energy in Spain

ABSTRACTFive nuclear power plant operate in Spain, one of the EU countries with less support for nuclear energy. The aims of this investigation are to find out if news on nuclear power are provided from an environmental point of view, who are the sources in the nuclear debate and which are the editorial lines in Spanish newspapers from 2008 to 2012. The results show that the environmental perspective on nuclear power is unusual. Using an eco-efficient frame, it is defined as a clean source of energy. Politicians play the greatest role and party political use is made of the nuclear power issue. Spanish nuclear coverage emphasizes the views of interest groups rather than those of scientists and other experts, ecologists or citizens. Thus, the press doesn't play the substantive role in public deliberation and don't connect with the different interests and sensitivities existing in the public sphere about nuclear energy.

Sobre telejornalismo e entretenimento: uma breve análise da adaptação na linha editorial do Jornal Nacional para cobertura da Copa do Mundo da FIFA 2014

No presente artigo é analisada a cobertura realizada pelo Jornal Nacional da Copa do Mundo da FIFA de 2014 – sediada no Brasil. São apresentados dados empíricos coletados em projeto de pesquisa conduzido pelo autor que permitem observar o que se considera aqui como uma adaptação na linha editorial do telejornal. Como hipótese, considera-se que a variação seria potencialmente motivada tanto pela relevância cultural que a modalidade esportiva tem no país quanto pelo interesse no aumento dos índices de audiência do factual diário da Rede Globo com a cobertura do evento. Apresenta-se que tal adaptação (que pode ser observada quantitativa e qualitativamente em relação às categorias de matérias tipicamente veiculadas no programa) iniciara ainda antes do torneio começar.

A journal's journey across time and space: the importance of Ilha do Desterro within local, national, and transnational contexts

Abstract: Taking, as a point of departure, the fact that the journal Ilha do Desterro is currently celebrating the publication of its 70th volume, this article presents an overview of Ilha’s trajectory since its first issues, almost forty years ago. Besides tracing the major changes in the journal’s editorial line, the article also demonstrates Ilha’s impact as a transnational scholarly publication. Moreover, by presenting a description of Ilha’s journey along time and space, the article shows the journal’s consolidation as a venue for critical discussions on cultural production within the Anglophone world, offering to its readers state-of-the-art bilingual research in English Language, Literatures in English, and Cultural Studies.

ZUM Magazine: excitement in Brazil’s cultural scene

This is a review of ZUM, a semiannual magazine published by the Moreira Sales Institute. Aspects such as production, distribution, editorial line and the importance of the publication in Brazil’s art and culture scene will be addressed under a critical and historical approach.

El golpe de estado de Primo de Rivera a través de la prensa nacional. Un análisis comparativo

The present work analyzes the opinions and positions that the national press manifested about of the coup d´etat of Primo de Rivera in 1923. We study the different editorial lines of regular publications of the capital of Spain and a selection of the same ones of the national geography, establishing a comparative analysis that defines an overview of the public opinion about this fact so singular for the history of the country.