Political News Research Articles

Pointing Fingers in the Disinformation Era: How Journalists and Politicians Perceive Each Other’s Role in Spreading Disinformation and Its Impact on their Relationship

ABSTRACT In an era of post-truth and disinformation, the crucial relationship between journalists and politicians is under increasing pressure. Some politicians publicly question the media’s role in spreading inaccurate and false information, and journalists have reason to be critical of politicians too, as they can easily disseminate falsehoods online. This study deals with how politicians and journalists perceive each other’s role in spreading disinformation, drawing on surveys with political journalists (N = 148) and local politicians (N = 452) in Belgium. We find that 33 percent of politicians, in particular right-wing politicians, blame journalists for spreading “fake news”. Journalists, in turn, are even more critical of politicians: 58 percent of the journalists blame politicians in general, 75 percent blame radical left politicians, and 90 percent blame radical right politicians for spreading disinformation. Importantly, journalists’ views of politicians’ role in spreading disinformation impact their relationship. Although journalists who believe politicians add to the spread of disinformation are not necessarily less likely to interact with politicians, they are significantly more negative about their interactions with politicians. Such perceptions potentially add to the tense relationship between journalists and politicians we are increasingly observing and could have important ramifications for political news-making.

A Socio-Cognitive Account of Ideological Manipulation in Chinese Translation of Political Opinion Articles

ABSTRACT In the realm of politics and media, particularly in situations of conflict, translation plays a critical role in resisting the discourse of news texts towards the socio-political correctness of the target society. Translation researchers have long focused on ideological manipulation and related techniques, notably in the translation of political news, linking ideologically motivated translation techniques to their macro functions (socio-political factors) via critical discursive approaches, but rarely have they examined what mediates these techniques and the social context. The main aim of the present study is to provide a socio-cognitive account of such ideological manipulations based on van Dijk’s notion of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The corpus of the study consists of opinion articles covering the Ukrainian conflict, originally published by American news institutions, and their corresponding Chinese translations in Chinese newspapers. Documented and supported by several examples, the findings suggest that the manipulations are mainly motivated by the polarization of “US” and “THEM”.

EDITORIAL: Gaza, genocide and media: Will journalism survive?

30th Anniversary Edition of Pacific Journalism Review: When editor Philip Cass and I, as founding editor, started planning for this 30th anniversary edition of Pacific Journalism Review, we wanted a theme that would fit such an important milestone. At the time when we celebrated the second decade of the journal’s critical inquiry at Auckland University of Technology with a conference in 2014, our theme was ‘Political journalism in the Asia Pacific’, and our mood about the mediascape in the region was far more positive than it is today (Duffield, 2015). Three years later, we marked the 10th anniversary of the Pacific Media Centre, with a conference and a rather gloomier ‘Journalism under duress’ slogan. The PJR cover then featured a gruesome corpse at the height of Rodrigo Duterte’s callous and bloodthirsty ‘war on drugs’—and on media—in the Philippines. Three years later again the PMC itself had been closed in spite of its success. EDITORIAL NOTE: After the editorial of Pacific Journalism Review and the lead article in this edition (Vol 30, No 1&2) about the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were printed, the Australian journalist was set free and he arrived back in Australia after a plea bargain. The winner of his country’s Walkley Award for journalism excellence, Assange was freed by a US federal court in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, on 26 June 2024 after a plea bargain to plead guilty to one charge of violating the US Espionage Act and the judge sentenced him to 62 months, jail time already served in the UK on remand. His 14-year struggle for freedom was over, but his lawyers say they will press for a full US presidential pardon.

Politics and Fake News: Experiences in Checking Fake News in the Brazilian Par-liament

Esta pesquisa tem como objetivos analisar os serviços de checagem de informação do Congresso Nacional brasileiro. A proliferação de fake news e seu impacto na sociedade justificaram o objeto de estudo, uma vez que o Poder Legislativo é afetado com a disseminação de informações falsas. O problema de pesquisa consiste na seguinte indagação: como o Congresso brasileiro enfrenta o fenômeno das fake news? Além do levantamento documental e tabulação dos dados sobre as informações checadas, a metodologia compreendeu pesquisa bibliográfica relacionada ao tema; e entrevistas semiestruturadas com gestoras dos serviços. Das conclusões principais depreende-se que a implementação desses serviços pode possibilitar ao Parlamento contribuir para a educação midiática dos cidadãos, uma vez que oferece a possibilidade de acesso a canais confiáveis para eles se informarem ou solucionarem dúvidas sobre conteúdos duvidosos a respeito do Poder Legislativo.

A Study on Attitude in China’s Political News Discourse in ...the Light of Appraisal Theory: The Case of the RussiaUkraine crisis reports By: Heba Awny Abd El- Hamid Ismail A PhD Researcher The Department of English Language and Literature, The Faculty of Arts, Suez University

A Study on Attitude in China’s Political News Discourse in ...the Light of Appraisal Theory: The Case of the RussiaUkraine crisis reports By: Heba Awny Abd El- Hamid Ismail A PhD Researcher The Department of English Language and Literature, The Faculty of Arts, Suez University

The Russia-Ukraine Crisis in American Political News: Van ..Dijk Model of Analysis by: Heba Awny Abd El- Hamid Ismail A PhD Researcher The Department of English Language and Literature, The Faculty of Arts, Suez University

The Russia-Ukraine Crisis in American Political News: Van ..Dijk Model of Analysis by: Heba Awny Abd El- Hamid Ismail A PhD Researcher The Department of English Language and Literature, The Faculty of Arts, Suez University

The Practices of Social Media Utilization in Political News : A Comparison Between Print and Online Articles

The Practices of Social Media Utilization in Political News : A Comparison Between Print and Online Articles

Framing of Political News in Pakistani Newspapers: Comparative Analysis of Vote of No Confidence Campaign Issue 2022

Pakistan has always gone through political instability since its inception.(Zahid, A, et al.,2021).The study investigated the role of leading Pakistani newspapers during the vote on the issue of no-confidence. Two newspapers, Dawn News(English) and The Daily Jang(Urdu) were selected for comparative framing analysis. Content analysis using the Categorization Scheme, with pre-established categories developed with the Framing theory as a basis, is employed. Five different frames determined by Semetko and Volkenburg(2000) are observed in the selected newspapers. The result of this study showed that there was a significant difference between the coverage of Dawn News and The Daily Jang. The conflict frame was dominant in The Daily Jang, whereas the responsibility frame was dominant in Dawn News' coverage. Dawn News presented a more neutral Slant than The Daily Jang. Future studies will be done with a larger sample of newspapers and qualitative interviews with editors to gain insight into political issues.

Social Media Political Communication and Misinformation: A Case Study of the Youth in Kiambu County, Kenya

Social media in recent times has proven to be extremely persuasive in influencing the public’s opinion on political affairs. Since 2007, election campaigns have actively utilized several social media platforms in Kenya for communicating with, mobilizing, and organizing supporters. Politicians and political activists along with their parties make maximum use of it to interact and provide civic education to the public. However, few written materials are available on how Kenyan youth, particularly those who live in Kiambu County, use social media for political engagement. The objective of this research is therefore to explore patterns as well as practices characterizing social media use by young people in Kiambu County and how this affects their political involvement and discourse. This research is guided by Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere, which asserts that public political discourse that is free from government interference is important for creating functional democracies. Social media, which acts as a public sphere, can allow the youth to engage in political discussions and other civic activities. The research employs a descriptive research design, utilizing an online survey as the primary tool for data collection, administered via Survey Monkey. The research’s target population includes young people enrolled in institutions of higher learning in Kiambu County who use social media for communication. The sample size was determined based on the number of university students in Kiambu County. It utilized stratified random sampling on a target population of 115,330 to draw a sample of 380 youths using a Survey Monkey online sample calculator with a 95% confidence level and 5% margin of error. Initially, a pilot study was conducted on 10% of the sample, which is 38 respondents, to ascertain the reliability of the research instruments, eventually, from the 342 surveys sent out, 224 were completed and returned. For data analysis, Microsoft Excel was utilized in coding and organizing the data to create tables and graphs. The findings showed that X was the respondents' most used platform for political discourse. Most respondents were aware of and engaged in political discussions on social media, and believed that social media influenced their political attitudes and beliefs. Although most viewed social media as a source of civic education, they were skeptical about its reliability due to misinformation. The study concludes that many youths in Kiambu County are actively participating in political discussions online and therefore it recommends that better education should be provided to help the youth discern credible information from misinformation. Additionally, interventions should be established to curb digital crimes like cyberbullying and online fraud.

Analisis Framing Pemberitaan Program Makan Gratis Prabowo Subianto Di Media Online

online media is a combination of all components of text, video, audio and photos. Political news becomes a medium for the public or the press itself to convey political messages to political actors, both support and criticism. Prabowo Subianto is the Minister of Defense of the Republic of Indonesia who is running for President in 2024. One of Prabowo's programs if elected President is the Free Meal Program. This program was suddenly widely reported by the media, various reports about the program were in online media such as online media detik.com and VIVA.co.id. This research was conducted to analyze the online media detik.com and VIVA.co.id in framing news about Prabowo Subianto's Free Meal Program using the framing analysis approach model of Zhongdang Pan and Gerald M. Kosicki. This research is descriptive qualitative research. The method used in this research is the framing analysis model of Zhongdang Pan and Gerald M. Kosicki which uses a framing device consisting of four structures, namely, Syntactic Structure, Script Structure, Thematic Structure and Rhetorical Structure. The results of this research, detik.com media, in reporting on Prabowo Subianto's Free Meal Program, supports this program. This can be shown in the headline of the news. In the first news title, detik.com appears to explain Prabowo Subianto's Free Meal Program, which means that detik.com media reports on the positive side of the program. detik.com frames the news by selecting news sources, selecting quotes that support statements and information provided in the news. VIVA.co.id put the parties who gave counter statements and criticized the program, VIVA.co.id wants to show the public that is where the controversy is. Political news regarding the Prabowo Subianto Free Meal Program on the online media detik.com and VIVA.co.id has an impact on the knowledge, attitudes and perspective of the public who see the reality of the news framing of the program.

RAZČLENITEV ZNANSTVENEGA USTVARJANJA V SKLOPU ULIČNE VADBE Z AKROBATSKIMI SESTAVINAMI

In recent years, the number of practitioners of disciplines such as parkour, break dance or calisthenics (freestyle or street workout) has increased. These disciplines share common characteristics, such as an unregulated street origin and a focus on acrobatics. This study aimed to analyze the state of scientific publications related to these acrobatic street sports. A bibliometric analysis was conducted, applying traditional bibliometric laws to scientific documentation found in journals indexed in WoS and Scopus. Data processing and visualization were performed using Bibliometrix and Excel. A total of 199 articles published between 1984 and 2024 were identified, indicating exponential growth. Among these, 139 papers were related to parkour, 48 to breakdance, and 12 to street workout. A review of 158 journals revealed that they contained related publications, although their distribution did not conform to Bradford’s model, showig only two areas. Among 417 authors identified, 22 were deemed prolific and 12 prominent. France emerged as the most prolific country, followed by the USA. The 553 author keywords were categorized into three groups, each associated with one of the sports. The 26 most cited papers were selected as relevant, demonstrating a correlation between the increase in publications and the popularization of these sports, largely due to television exposure. The "International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics” emerged as the most prolific journal. The most relevant authors identified in each sport were Signey Grosprêtre (parkour); Max Daniel Kauther and Christian Wedemeyer (breakdance); and Javier Sanchez-Martinez (street workout).

Political News Framing Approach at Detik.com: Analysis of the 2024 Presidential Election Results Dispute

This research aims to find out the analysis of framing (framing/packaging) political news in online media Detik.com regarding the news of the dispute hearing of the 2024 presidential election results. To answer this problem, the framing method of the Zhongdang Pan and Gerald M Kosicki model was used. This research is included in qualitative. The data analysis used in this study was media text analysis using the framing analysis method using the Zhong Dang Pan and Gerald M. Kosicki model approach. The reserch results show that detik.com, in reporting news uses the inverted pyramid technique. Where the main topic of discussion discussed in the news is stored at the beginning of the news. In addition, there are several data obtained by news writers from the statements of sources to be used as data sources. The news structure uses 5W+1H, and the source does not throw many quotes.

ZOOMETAPHOR AS THE СORE OF EXPRESSIVENESS IN POLITICAL MEDIAAND INTERNET-DISCOURSE

The paper analyzes the use and translation of zoometaphor in political media and Internet discourse. Translation of zoometaphors is discussed based on an English fable about the Donkey, Tiger and Lion. The research has revealed that in British English the word donkey metaphorically objectivizes the semes of ‘pomposity’ and ‘stubbornness’; in American English, like in Russian, the semes of ‘stupidity’ and ‘stubbornness’. However, the Chinese English discourse reveals a new meaning - ‘humbly doing hard work’, which is similar to the Russian derived verb ishachit ‘to drudge’. Meanwhile, a Chinese English context can be either negative and positive when the semes ‘without tiredness’ and ‘perseverance’ are activated. The word lion creates a metaphoric image due to the semes ‘power’ and ‘majesty’. British and Indian Englishes, as well as Chinese English reveal one more meaning - ‘power guard’. The word tiger as a metaphor has traditionally activated the semes of ‘danger’, ‘aggressiveness’, and ‘force’, but nowadays in the Asian context it has the positive seme ‘rapid development’ and the negative ‘high-ranking corruption’. The article compares the participation of these words in making phraseological units used in the political discourse and points to the challenges they present in translating to Russian. The paper concludes that it is a cultural underpinning that causes most problems in translating pluricentric English.

Too cool for school: Participatory shirking and U.S. House passage of proxy voting

AbstractA large portion of the American electorate holds contempt for elected representatives who skip floor votes. As a result, political challengers, and the national political media in the U.S., rarely miss a chance to inform the electorate of the shirking behavior of its representatives. New research suggests that, in 2020, the leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives may have developed protection, albeit temporary, to legislators who engage in shirking behavior. That protection came via passage of House Resolution 965, which authorized “remote voting by proxy” in the U.S. House of Representatives due to the COVID‐19 pandemic. This study extends the literature on proxy voting by empirically examining the factors that influenced the tendency of members of the U.S. House of Representatives to either shirk (i.e., skip) the vote on proxy voting (i.e., HR 965) or to vote in favor of the resolution (i.e., HR 965) allowing for the proxy vote. Econometric results suggest that Representatives' gender, age, legislative tenure, and past penchant for participatory shirking worked to determine parliamentary participation, and the direction of one's vote, on HR 965.

The Dynamics of Political Interest and News Media Avoidance: A Generational and Longitudinal Perspective

ABSTRACT Despite the abundance of political information in today’s media environment, an increasing number of people tune out from the news. Scholars have traced these developments to both individual motivational factors gaining importance in the high-choice media environment and generational differences related to changing news habits and changing norms around news consumption. However, research that integrates these perspectives is scarce, and studies investigating this relationship longitudinally are especially rare. Thus, this paper investigates the conditional effects of (1) political interest and (2) age on the probability of avoiding traditional news media, and (3) whether these conditional effects have changed over time. Using data from 1986 to 2021, this study shows that the number of people tuning out from news media is increasing. The effect of political interest and age on the probability of news media avoidance has also increased over time. Additionally, there were only small age differences in the impact of political interest in earlier periods, but these differences have increased over time. Today, being uninterested in politics is clearly a stronger predictor of news media avoidance among younger people compared to older individuals.

Hallucinating a political future: Global press coverage of human and post-human abilities in ChatGPT applications

In November 2022, the tech company OpenAI launched a groundbreaking chatbot model, ChatGPT. This unprecedented chatbot, characterized by an ease of use for lay internet users, gained immediate popularity and attracted extensive media attention. This article examines global press coverage of ChatGPT in peak reporting dates over the first full year of its existence. Based on a qualitative holistic narrative analysis, our findings point to two narrated scapes of political fear in the coverage of ChatGPT: The fear of the machine and the fear of the human. These attest to the collective imagining of an intensified future, where post-humanist interaction with political information is associated with exploitation, propaganda, and polarization of existing political rifts. We draw on the case study to articulate journalists’ role in signaling instability in the current political media ecosystem, and their construction of a techno-moral framework for society. We discuss an important blind-spot in journalists’ fulfilment of their normative role in fostering technology-informed citizens globally.

Democracy and Kinship in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

This article argues that Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind provides generative openings for young people to imagine egalitarian political relations with non-human animals. At the same time, the film also reproduces the all-too-common image of the young monarch who almost single-handedly saves their people from destruction: an autocratic and authoritarian impulse that runs contrary to what a truly ecological democracy might look like. Nevertheless, I propose that educators might still use Nausicaä to help young people think through the politics of climate-minded media.

Bolivar can’t carry double? The impact of the Israel-Hamas war on media coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war

ABSTRACT The article describes how the first six months of the armed conflict in and around the Gaza Strip impacted political and media discourses about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which started on 24 February 2023, in five countries: the two belligerents, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. It shows that after 7 October 2023, the attention of Western leaders and media was distracted from the situation in Ukraine and redirected to the Gaza Strip. The sampled social media, VKontakte and Telegram, reacted to the military operations in the Gaza Strip mostly in unison with legacy media. Before and after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, sources of political and media discourses formed national clusters. The corpora containing more than 218 million words in four languages, Ukrainian, Russian, English, and French, informed the analysis. In addition to social media, the corpora include speeches from political leaders and news items about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, run by seventeen legacy media outlets (newspapers, online news portals, and T.V. channels).

Deep Learning Multimodal Methods to Detect Fake News

Fake news, characterized by false information disseminated intentionally with malicious intent, has become a critical societal issue. Its impact spans political, economic, and social domains, fueled by the rapid proliferation of digital communication channels, particularly social media. To combat this menace, researchers have turned to automated mechanisms for detection, leveraging machine learning algorithms and curated datasets. In this exploratory research, the landscape of machine learning algorithms is employed in identifying fake news. Notably, the research focus on algorithms such as the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) respectively. However, most of these studies rely on controlled datasets lacking real-time information from social networks—the very platforms where disinformation thrives. The findings underscore the need for research in social network environments, where fake news spreads most prolifically. Additionally, future investigations should extend beyond political news, considering hybrid methods that combine NLP and deep learning techniques. This study serves as a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers seeking insights into the evolving landscape of the ability to combat fake news effectively.

NewsSlant: Analyzing Political News and Its Influence Through a Moral Lens

NewsSlant: Analyzing Political News and Its Influence Through a Moral Lens