International Television Research Articles

A study of intermedia and interorganizational agenda-setting in the news coverage of the Ebola virus on Twitter

The Ebola virus is a rare but often severe and fatal illness in humans. It spreads from animals to humans and then transgresses through human-to-human transmission. The 2014 Ebola virus disease outbreak captured substantial media attention around the world, which is the cornerstone of our study since it can inform us about the current news coverage on the COVID-19 pandemic. This article investigates the media coverage of Ebola in five pairs of English and Arabic international television media outlets (BBC, CNN, SkyNews, RT and France24) by examining the headlines of 298,559 news stories that the respective organizations posted on their official Twitter accounts. Methodologically, we extracted headlines from news outlets that addressed the news on the Ebola virus in two languages: English and Arabic. The media outlets include the following: CNN (English and Arabic), BBC (English and Arabic), SkyNews (English and Arabic), RT (formerly known as Russia Today) (English and Arabic) and France24 (English and Arabic) from late 2013 to early 2015 during which time the Ebola epidemic intensified. We then used descriptive statistics to understand the volume of news coverage and calculate the frequencies, percentages, mean, median and standard deviations for these channels. Further, we continued to model time series regression between the five pairs of news outlets using Granger causality tests. The findings show that over the course of approximately one year’s worth of coverage on these networks, Ebola was mentioned in the headlines of 4138 stories, which constitutes 1.38 per cent of the total news coverage of all media outlets. Building on the theory of intermedia agenda-setting that outlines the ways in which major news organizations influence the agendas of other news outlets, the findings reported here indicate strong, time-ordered patterns where English-language coverage consistently precedes and helps to significantly explain the distribution of Arabic media coverage. In addition to providing evidence of intermedia agenda-setting from a comparative perspective in this context, this article expands on this theory and suggests that it can be applied to multilingual outlets from the same news organizations.

Bridging Differences and Promoting Coordination The Narrative Strategy of External Communication in "Chinese Epidemic Chronicles"

The English documentary "China's War Against the Epidemic" produced by China International Television showcases China's most authentic anti epidemic journey, conveys China's anti epidemic spirit, and shapes a positive national image to the world through storytelling expression. As a successful paradigm for external communication, exploring the narrative strategy of "China's Epidemic Chronicles" has important complementary value for domestic documentaries to "go global" and accelerate the construction of Chinese discourse and narrative system.

From Bron to The Tunnel: localising international television formats

ABSTRACT This article analyses the Franco-British series The Tunnel (Canal+, 2013–2017), co-produced by Sky Atlantic and StudioCanal, as an iteration of the Swedish-Danish series Bron/Broen/The Bridge (Danmarks Radio, 2011–2018). The author situates Bron within the global television format trade and argues that The Tunnel is best understood as a localised version rather than a remake or an adaptation. With six versions of the original series now available around the world, the author argues that Bron has become such a reproducible global television format because it offers a readymade co-production template in industrial, linguistic and narrative terms through its focus on crimes on and around national borders. The article then explores the specific localisation strategies used in the Franco-British version that employ social problems such as terrorism, human trafficking and immigration to position audiences within national and regional frames. Finally, the article discusses the complexities of situating The Tunnel within a nation-centred approach to French television.

Representation of Afghan Peace and War News on National and International Television from the Audience s Perspective: TOLO News and Voice of America – Persian Televisions

Representation of Afghan Peace and War News on National and International Television from the Audience s Perspective: TOLO News and Voice of America – Persian Televisions

Ontarians' Perceptions of Public Health Communications and Misinformation During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Survey Study.

Clear, accurate, and transparent risk communication is critical to providing policy makers and the public with directions to effectively implement public health strategies during a health emergency. We aimed to explore the public's preferred sources of obtaining COVID-19 information, perceptions on the prevalence and drivers of misinformation during the pandemic, and suggestions to optimize health communications during future public health emergencies. We administered a web-based survey that included Likert scale, multiple choice and open-ended response questions to residents of Ontario, Canada. We aimed to recruit a sample that reflected population diversity with respect to age and gender. Data were collected between June 10, 2020, and December 31, 2020, and were analyzed using descriptive statistics; open-ended data were analyzed using content analysis. Subgroup analyses to explore perceptions by age and gender were conducted using ordinal regression. A total of 1823 individuals participated in the survey (n=990, 54% women; n=703, 39% men; n=982, 54% aged 18-40 years; n=518, 28% aged 41-60 years; and n=215, 12% aged ≥61 years). Participants most commonly obtained COVID-19 information from local television news (n=1118, 61%) followed by social media (n=938, 51%), national or international television news (n=888, 49%), and friends and family (n=835, 46%). Approximately 55% (n=1010) of the participants believed they had encountered COVID-19-related misinformation; 70% (n=1284) of the participants reported high levels of trust in health authority websites and health care providers; 66% (n=1211) reported high levels of trust in health ministers or public health organizations. Sources perceived to be less trustworthy included friends and family, talk radio, social media, as well as blogs and opinion websites. Men were more likely to report encountering misinformation and to trust friends or family (odds ratio [OR] 1.49, 95% CI 1.24-1.79) and blogs or opinion websites (OR 1.24, 95% CI 1.03-1.50), compared to women. Compared to those aged 18-40 years, participants aged ≥41years were more likely to trust all assessed information sources, with the exception of web-based media sources, and less likely to report encountering misinformation. Of those surveyed, 58% (n=1053) had challenges identifying or appraising COVID-19 information. Over half of our participants perceived that they had encountered COVID-19 misinformation, and 58% had challenges identifying or appraising COVID-19 information. Gender and age differences in perceptions of misinformation and trust in information sources were observed. Future research to confirm the validity of these perceptions and to explore information-seeking patterns by population subgroups may provide useful insights on how to optimize health communication during public health emergencies.

Multimodal-ish: prosodic and kinesic aspects of bounded and free uses of ish

AbstractThe article explores the prosodic and kinesic aspects of three different ish constructions using corpus data from the multimodal NewsScape Library of International Television News. The results reveal that bound -ish with ‘approximate’ meaning is longer in duration, higher in pitch, and shows more pitch variability than bound -ish with ‘properties’ meaning. Free Ish is also longer in duration and shows more pitch variability but is also prosodically set apart from its linguistic environment. Furthermore, the different ish constructions prove to be associated with different sets of kinesic features, although none of these reaches a significant level in the statistical model. It will be argued that the prosodic aspects mirror the constructional status of ish, whereas the kinesic aspects may be used to support their different functions.

Women in media: ‘Planting and watering the seeds for change’: A conversation with Domizia De Rosa

Domizia De Rosa joined the Warner Bros. group in 1995 and was promoted to executive director at Warner Bros. International Television Italia Srl. in 2014. The president of Women in Film, Television and Media Italy (WIFTMI) since 2021, De Rosa is committed to promoting gender equality in the Italian audio-visual and media sectors. In this interview, she talks about her career as a woman in a position of authority in the media industry and how she gradually rose through the ranks to become an executive director of the Warner Bros. Entertainment Italia group. She also explains the reasons for the asymmetrical presence of women in television, illustrates the goals of the Code of Ethical Conduct for the Audio-Visual Sector that was established in 2021 and discusses the value of ‘creative intimacy’ as the synthesis of personal experiences precious to building a community of creative professionals.

Research on the Entertainment Marketing Challenge of HBO

With the development of the global entertainment industry, film and television productions are increasingly branded as commodities in today’s cultural consumption market. Viewing film and television have become an important part of people’s daily and cultural lives, it is particularly urgent to explore the development status and future trends of streaming brands. As a producer of mainstream film and television culture, HBO has grown across media and expanded its brand across the U.S. and international television landscape, where it is now a full-service content provider of original and iconic programming with a unique brand. Although it is generally believed that the birth of HBO changed the world, cable television has also changed how the network continues to shape popular culture and television industry, leading the way in reforming audiovisual consumption patterns, HBO is now facing increasingly serious challenges. This paper focuses on how HBO successfully promotes its programming, the problems that have arisen while expanding its brand in the U.S. and international television landscape and attempts to explore the optimization possibilities of its improvement policy and make recommendations.

Transmission interrupted: Australia’s international television broadcasting

ABSTRACT Australia’s efforts to pursue public diplomacy through a government-funded international television service have been sporadic and ineffectual. The reasons for failure lie in the way such efforts have been pawns in other political conflicts and relationships – conflicts between Coalition governments and the ABC; conflicts between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard that dominated the Labor government from 2010 onwards; and the wish of key players in both major parties to please Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. The Abbott Government’s 2014 axing of the ten-year contract with Australian Television slashed Australia’s international broadcasting capacity. Domestic agendas have repeatedly trumped what should be a tool of international policy.

The shudder-image: psyche-soma, sex and knowledge in Hannibal

Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (NBC, 2013–15) – an adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels, and their filmic interpretations – is one of the more formally experimental (and startlingly psychosexual) programmes to appear on US network television since the original two-season run of Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–91).1 While critics have aligned Hannibal with the contemporary era of ‘Quality Television’ – which has provided examples of visually ambitious and thematically challenging programming such as Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001–05) or Mindhunter (Netflix, 2017–19) – the majority of these series appear on premium cable or streaming services such as HBO, AMC and Netflix.2Hannibal, by contrast, was commissioned by commercial broadcast network NBC, meaning that it faced significant limitations in terms of budget and censorship in comparison to many of its alleged ‘Quality’ peers. Nonetheless, with the support of Gaumont International Television, Fuller was able to present a distinct vision of Harris’s world as a three-season phantasmagoria of vividly designed and perversely executed violence, mutilation and horror – far beyond what viewers may have been accustomed to on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000–15) or Criminal Minds (CBS, 2005–20). It is a vision in which the conventions of the police procedural eventually give way to an elaborately staged queer romance between the lead characters, FBI agent Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and his psychotherapist Dr Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen).

New perspective on UGC, PGC, and OGC: motivating factors of Chinese co-creators’ engagement with international television series

This paper locates audience engagement in the act of content creation and considers the levels of engagement that content creation could engender. It explicates the different types of content creators defined in the literature and examines motivating factors for the production of content in a Chinese context. It argues that while some content creators seek to draw attention to the series they support, in other cases the engagement with the international television series is not fully motivated by a desire to interact with the international content and direct audiences to it. Rather, content creators are motivated by a desire to gain exposure for their own craft or to develop transferable skills that help them move between the different categories of content creators. In doing so, we argue that international series can tap into these ‘cultural intermediaries’ (Hutchinson 2017).

Longitudinal videoconferencing and confidence development: The impact of perceived interlocutor cultural depth, richness, and self-involvement

Now more than ever before, language learners can autonomously engage with the target culture beyond the classroom through international television shows, online forums, video clips, and study abroad. Still, much of the literature has deemed the target-language dominant speaker (TLDS) as a key source of cultural knowledge, and, thus, the principal aim here is to ascertain how paid TLDSs and student peers are perceived in terms of their cultural expertise and whether these perceptions affect learners’ confidence development over time. This research is guided by the functional model of second language confidence (FML2C), which integrates the contact space dimensions of richness and self-involvement, and novel to this study is cultural depth. In terms of procedure, 32 second language learners of Spanish carried out eight 30-minute videoconferences over 12 weeks, four with a peer and four with a TLDS on Talk Abroad. In terms of the FML2C, the results revealed that the TLDSs were considered to afford significantly more richness and cultural depth than peers. In spite of this, longitudinal gains in learner confidence were indistinguishable by interlocutor type, suggesting that videoconferencing over time is beneficial, no matter the interlocutor with whom it is realized.

Conservation Environmental Sustainability in The Perspective of Islamic Legal Philosophy

This paper is motivated by the existence of central issues regarding environmental damage that are increasingly concerning, both those reported through the mass media and those circulating on national and international television broadcasts. Therefore, it is necessary to have a solution for handling and to bridge environmental issues studied across various disciplines of knowledge, in this case, using an Islamic legal philosophy approach. This research method is a normative legal study using the perspective of Islamic legal philosophy. This study indicates that religion has tended to focus more on matters of ritual aspects without looking further at the meanings of the symbols of religious teachings themselves, particularly if they are associated with awareness to conserve the environment adequately because it involves the benefit of many people. This paper aims to reveal the sides of religious teachings, especially Islamic teachings that raise awareness of the environment. Because in Islamic doctrine, it is taught about how to behave by values or norms concerning human relations with the universe (hablu minal 'alam). The philosophical view of Islamic law is that humans are essentially entrusted with managing the planet and its contents as caliphs on earth, particularly in maintaining and managing the natural resources in a trustworthy manner to avoid mafsadah (damage) that threatens all human life. The findings of this study indicate that the Islamic legal philosophy provides a living guide for how to treat the environment in both peaceful and emergency situations. This can be accomplished by not destroying plants (trees), not throwing dirt anywhere, managing the land to be productive, removing obstacles in the flow of people's movement, and sharing responsibility for sustainably managing forests, water, and energy.

A critical Evaluation of Zakariyau Oseni’s (play in Arabic) Al-‘Amid Al-Mubajjal

The emergence of Arabic play in Nigeria cannot be easily traced. However, the first published one is the Oseni’s al ’Amid al-Mubajjal (The Honorable Dean) in 1994.Thereafter, more than forty of the Nigerian Arabic plays have emerged. The aim of this study is to give a summarized translation of the play and critically examine its literary elements such as the themes, setting, characterization and plots as portrayed in the Arabic play. The research is also significant as it exposes the moral value of the play. The researcher used the descriptive method of research. The play is a reflection of what goes on in some Nigerian Universities where some students and staff are being oppressed by some wicked staff. Having examined the literary styles, it is found that literary elements are used by the author to a large extent to pilot the organic unity of the play. It is recommended, therefore, that the play should be staged on international television stations for the benefit of humanity.

Fictional politainment: Exposure to international television drama and attitude toward female politicians

We examine the relationship between media use motivations and attitudes toward female politicians by proposing a conceptual model explaining the role of key mediating variables such as identification, narrative transportation, enjoyment, and political self-efficacy in influencing the attitude of the viewers of international TV drama towards female role models (politicians). We investigated the direct and indirect effects between media use motivations and attitudes toward female politicians by recruiting 359 students from two large public universities in the Southeastern United States. The hypothesized model supported the evidence presented in extant scholarship, suggesting that a meaningful entertainment experience could foster an appreciation of the fictional televisual entertainment and positively change attitudes toward female lead characters playing the role of a viable and competent politician. This study resonates with politicians, academics, and activists’ concerns that a positive media portrayal could promote the acceptability of female leaders in powerful positions. Our study clarifies the direct and indirect effects between media use motivations and attitudes toward female politicians and the role of crucial mediating variables such as identification, narrative transportation, enjoyment, and political self-efficacy in influencing the attitude of the viewers of international TV drama towards female politicians.

YENİ MEDYADA TELEVİZYON TEKNİĞİ

Today, local, regional, national and international television media broadcasting around the world take advantage of the emotional impact of broadcasting and use the new environment offered by the new media to market global brands and connect with their consumers. Today terrestrial, cable or satellite systems, which were used to transmit broadcast content until the 1990s, have left their place to multimedia platforms such as Internet-based online, offline, uploaded, downloaded, narrow broadcasting or podcasts, with the digitalization. While these platforms offer publishers the ability to select audiences and digital measurement, they also provide the consumer with flexibility in terms of which media content they can access, when, how long and on which device.On the other hand, digital technologies facilitate the production, distribution, sharing and storage capabilities of digital content. In this process, the integration of new stakeholders is accelerating and new digital ecosystems are emerging in the publishing industry.In the study, traditional television broadcasting technologies and broadcasting systems transformed by new media were compared, and the technologies used in both systems were tried to be introduced by scanning the literature. The study reveals that television broadcasting technologies that have changed with the new media are faster, more economical and easily accessible, offer high image and sound quality, and provide significant gains to the audience with their interactive and asynchronous structure.

Telecasting an “Effective Weapon for Peace”

AbstractThis article investigates the history of the International Television Federation, or Intertel. A collaboration between telecasters from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, Intertel throughout the 1960s produced and distributed public affairs documentaries for an international audience. Intertel’s members positioned public affairs programming in the 1960s as an “effective weapon for peace.” By making the nations of the world legible to one another, Intertel programs sought to deploy the international circulation of television texts as a means to diminish tensions in a world defined by uneven economic growth, Cold War ideological battles, and the specter of nuclear warfare. Drawing on archival materials, press reports, and the programs themselves, this essay offers an institutional history of the program’s development, expansion, and demise, as well as an analysis of its politics and ideological premises.

The Olympic World Feed Project: Searching, acquiring and preserving the international television signal of the Olympic Games from 1956 to 1988

This paper describes the project carried out by the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage (OFCH) to locate, acquire and preserve all official televised coverage (ie the international television signal) of the Olympic Games broadcast between 1956 and 1988. After providing a general overview of the audiovisual archives of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which are managed and overseen by the OFCH, and outlining the OFCH’s mission and challenges in this respect, the paper discusses how the television broadcasting of the Olympic Games has evolved and the impact of these developments on the race to repatriate and preserve this content. The paper goes on to discuss the Olympic World Feed Project, describing the planning that went into recovering more than 3,000 hours of content missing from the IOC’s archives, as well as the various steps involved and the numerous challenges faced along the way. In particular, the paper provides a case study of the acquisition of the international television signal produced during the XIV Olympic Winter Games — Sarajevo 1984.

Companion interview

Greyhound racing may not have the high public profile that it enjoyed in Britain years ago but, as a vehicle for off-course gambling, it still attracts a large international television audience. Olivia Cook is one of the vets working to assure punters that the races are fair and the dogs are well cared for.

Innovation and conformity in music reproduction: A network analytics approach to contestants’ song covering in reality shows in Mainland China and the U.S.

Contestants in music reality television shows usually cover songs by other singers; however, excessive song covering is seen as a sign of lacking innovation. Informed by frameworks of innovation, conformity, and cultural capital, this study examines the patterns of song covering practice with a network analytics approach by examining the networks formed by the contestants’ song co-covering practices—an edge is created between two contestants if they cover songs from the same original singer—and how contestants’ positions in those networks are related to their performance outcomes. Examining contestants’ co-covering networks on the U.S.’s and mainland China’s versions of The Voice (an international music reality television show), the social network analysis largely supported the conformity hypothesis: contestants were connected to a certain extent, meaning that most contestants covered songs from similar original singers. Contestants’ betweenness centrality was positively associated with performance outcomes.