Mainstream Newspaper Coverage Research Articles

Gender-Sensitive Reporting Principles: A Content Analysis of Violence Against Women and Girls in Indonesian Mainstream Newspaper Coverage

ABSTRACT This article analyses how Indonesian mainstream newspapers represent violence against women and girls (VAWG) in news coverage. By applying a parameter of gender-sensitive reporting principles, it argues that gender-sensitive media reporting of VAWG requires overcoming imbalance, inaccurate, and biased tendencies. A gender-sensitive approach with several principles insists on revealing the negative societal attitudes to VAWG represented in media coverage. Through content analysis of 692 news coverage of VAWG published by Kompas, The Jakarta Post, and Republika in 2002, 2007, and 2016, this study revealed that the neglect of gender-sensitive principles continues to occur. While the overall percentage was small, some areas of concern remain. There are still some insensitive news articles published in the newspapers incorporated with biased dictions and excessive attributes. More than half of the sample also missing to mention the social roots of gender violence and reminding society of responsibility as well as lacking to provide contact information support for survivors and witnesses. In contrast, the relatively high number of news coverage provided relevant background information and represented a number of high-quality thematic articles that explicitly challenged common myths, stereotypes, and misinformation about VAWG.

A framing analysis of mainstream newspaper coverage of the 2013 ‘Coalition of the Willing’ initiative in East Africa

The phrase, ‘Coalition of the Willing’, emerged in East Africa in 2013, when three East African Community (EAC) members (Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda) forged a Tripartite Initiative to fast-track the EAC regional integration, sidelining Tanzania and Burundi, for their apparent ‘aloofness’ to integration. This coalition created tensions among the five countries, exacerbating an already simmering conflict between Tanzania and Rwanda involving the expulsion of ‘illegal’ Rwandan migrants from Tanzania. Informed by contemporary political communication and media framing, this article examines how these events were framed in five leading newspapers in East Africa: theDaily Nation(Kenya), theDaily Monitor(Uganda),The Citizen(Tanzania),The New Times(Rwanda) andThe East African(EAC region). Through a thematic frame analysis, we interrogate the prevalence and implications of five prominent themes found in most political conflicts (attributions of responsibility, conflict, human interest, economic consequences and morality) on the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ media debate. The analysis reveals conflicting frames with a potential to inflame antagonistic media debates to the integration efforts – by the resultant blame-game and opening up of historical wounds and personal differences, among the key players.

Shame, pain and fame: sportswomen losing in Australia’s mainstream media reporting

ABSTRACT This article adds to a growing body of literature that engages with failure as a way of knowing and understanding the social. Through a focus on images of sportswomen’s loss or failure in three Australian newspapers during the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games we analyzed affective-discourses and patterns in images and accompanying headlines, captions and stories to explore the place of loss in the narrative of mainstream sport reporting. Through this focus on loss we hoped to find points of disruption that might generate new conceptions of women in sport. What we found was that stories of loss in mainstream newspaper coverage reproduced transphobic, racist, nationalistic, ageist and sexist discourses. We conclude by calling for research that explores how athletes self-present their losses in digital platforms subjectively rather than being reported ‘on’.

Grievable lives? Death by opioid overdose in Australian newspaper coverage

Opioid overdose deaths are increasing in Australia and around the world. Despite this, measures aimed at reducing these deaths such as safe injecting facilities and take-home naloxone continue to face obstacles to uptake. The reasons for this are manifold, but a key contributor is public discourse on opioid consumption and overdose. In this article we explore this public discourse using Judith Butler’s work on ‘grievable lives’. The article analyses mainstream newspaper coverage of opioid overdose in Australia to map key articulations of overdose and to consider how public understandings of overdose are shaped. It then goes on to consider ways these understandings might be reshaped, looking at what have been called overdose ‘anti-memorials’ and a new website Livesofsubstance.org. In concluding we argue that until the lives of opioid consumers come to be considered grievable, the measures known to reduce overdose deaths may struggle to find public support.

Monica Lewinsky and Shame

This study examines mainstream newspaper coverage of Monica Lewinsky in 1998, the year her relationship with President Bill Clinton came to public light. It highlights how a private citizen became a media phenomenon and object of public shame at beginning of online news distribution. The qualitative content analysis of 175 articles in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times showed that Lewinsky was scrutinized and exploited by news media. The news frames used by the newspapers reflected stereotypical shaming narratives about sexualized women who do not conform to the traditional, passive role prescribed by the dominant patriarchal ideology. Lewinsky was portrayed solely in the context of her association with men and became a caricature based on assumptions made by journalists. The newspapers also portrayed feminists as a homogeneous group that was hypocritical in its responses.

#IfTheyGunnedMeDown

Focusing on the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, this study examined the framing of mainstream newspaper coverage of social media activism in the aftermath of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. People of color primarily used the hashtag to draw attention to what they perceived as negative stereotypes perpetuated by the news media. The study employed a textual analysis of news coverage combined with semistructured interviews with hashtag-protest participants. The analysis found that the mainstream media followed news production rituals by relying primarily on elite, established sources and generally ignoring the social media protestors’ voices. The social media protestors who used the hashtag said they used it to bypass the mainstream media, and this research indicates they may well have done so and possibly reached a younger generation that relies more on social media than legacy media.

Media and neoliberal hegemony: Canadian newspaper coverage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement

This article presents findings from a media analysis of mainstream newspaper coverage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). We conducted a broad search of articles published from January 2010 through to June 2014 in the major English-language Canadian daily newspapers, analyzing a total of 404 articles. We found limited substantive discussions about this comprehensive trade and investment treaty, and explain this lack of attention to the TPP by invoking Gramscian political economy theory and the role of media in the production of neoliberal hegemony.

Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing US Racisms Past and Present by Moon-Kie Jung

Moon-Kie Jung, Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing US Racisms Past and Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 264 pp.The relentless acts of resistance staged by the Movement for Black Lives have made it increasingly impossible for dominant groups to continue ignoring the persistent problems of gendered racial violence and inequality in the US and across the globe. As anti-racist struggles focus our attention on contemporary injustices, it is incumbent upon us to clarify how racism functions on diverse terrains and scales. In his theoretically generative book, Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing US Racisms Past and Present, Moon-Kie Jung offers precisely such clarifications. Jung shows that racisms are neither singular nor shallow in their expressions. He refines and reframes our understanding of racisms by attending to their unconscious, durable, and habituated dimensions. Revisiting sociological concepts and methodologies that are generally taken for granted, the book reveals the damaging blind spots created by epistemologies of ignorance and nationalist frameworks.Beneath the Surface is divided into three parts. In Part I, Jung denaturalizes common sense assumptions about race and racisms. Having outlined his key research questions in Chapter 1, Jung devotes Chapter 2 to a new theory of racism. Building on established sociological theories, Jung theorizes racisms' unconscious, habituated dimensions as well as their structural, relational, and global scales. In Part II, Jung denaturalizes the common assumption that the US is a nation-state. Reframing the US as an empire-state, Jung shows how nationalist investments keep us from reading racisms relationally. Re-reading foundational Supreme Court cases in Chapter 3, he demonstrates how the fates of groups and geographies within and beyond the US are inextricably linked. Jung further examines the pitfalls of nationalist frames in Chapter 4. Highlighting the problematic premises of neoclassical and segmented assimilation theories in sociology, he shows how scholarly frames can unwittingly perpetuate racist and nationalist assumptions. Finally, Jung devotes Part III to denaturalizing structures of ignorance in greater detail, meticulously elaborating on two concepts briefly introduced in Part I. In Chapter 5, Jung examines the ways dominant actors ignore subaltern discourses generated by oppressed people, a process he defines as symbolic coercion. In contrast, Chapter 6 shows how dominant actors ignore their own knowledge of racial oppression, a process Jung defines as symbolic perversity.Jung's core contribution lies in his ability to offer theoretical precision and depth about the unconscious, habituated, and taken-for-granted ways racisms function in familiar situations. He examines racisms' operative logics in divergent domains ranging from incidents of police violence, massacres of Filipinos in Hawai'i, mainstream newspaper coverage, legal cases, and scholarly conventions in sociology. He seeks to move us away from narrow readings of racism as individual acts of consciously motivated bigotry toward a layered and relational comprehension of racisms as deep structuring schemas. For example, he opens the book by describing a tragic yet all-too-common scenario in the US: a white police officer's killing of a young Black man. Officer Daniel Norbits's killing of Kiwane Carrington in Champaign, Illinois was, predictably, rendered justifiable. As usual, the police denied that racism factored into the outcome of the encounter. In contrast, Black community members and antiracist advocates claimed that racism was central in Carrington's tragic death. While agreeing that race and racism factored into the incident, Jung challenges us to explain racism's operative logics in police violence with greater precision. If the police fail to utter racist speech, how do we account for racism's presence? Police officers routinely deny that race affects their perceptions, judgments, or actions. …

Dehumanizing metaphors in UK immigrant debates in press and online media

Some Internet genres, in particular Weblogs and discussion fora, have a dubious reputation for giving voice to strongly polemical discourses or hate-speech. This paper investigates the use of dehumanizing metaphors, specificallyparasitemetaphors, in British debates about immigration. It compares the range of metaphors used in Blogs with that used in online fora and in mainstream newspaper coverage and concludes that despite substantial variation, they can be categorised into four main scenarios, of which one includes dehumanizing metaphors such as depictions of immigrants asparasites, leeches,orbloodsuckers. Whilst this kind of stigmatizing imagery occurs across the three different media genres, the samples also show significant quantitative and qualitative differences: dehumanizing metaphors occur most often and their potential for aggressive argumentation and polemics is exploited in more detail in Blogs than in the fora, and least in the mainstream press. It is then asked what cognitive import this differential usage has in view of a) the discourse histories of such metaphors and b) their most likely present-day semantic motivation. The paper concludes that while it is unlikely that present-day users have detailed knowledge of the etymological and conceptual histories of such metaphors, it is also improbable to assume a wholly “unconscious” or “automatic” use or reception in the respective community of practice, and that instead it is more likely that they are used with a high degree of “deliberateness” and a modicum of discourse-historical awareness.

Mainstream Newspapers Highlight Politics over Substance

This comparison of news frames found mainstream newspaper coverage of the 2010 health care reform was largely politically focused, while a significant part of the Latino online newspaper coverage reflected the reform details and their implications for Latinos.

AIDS in Black and White: The Influence of Newspaper Coverage of HIV/AIDS on HIV/AIDS Testing Among African Americans and White Americans, 1993–2007

This study examined the effect of newspaper coverage of HIV/AIDS on HIV testing behavior in a U.S. population. HIV testing data were taken from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's National Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System from 1993 to 2007 (N = 265,557). The authors content-analyzed news stories from 24 daily newspapers and 1 wire service during the same time period. The authors used distributed lagged regression models to estimate how well HIV/AIDS newspaper coverage predicted later HIV testing behavior. Increases in HIV/AIDS newspaper coverage were associated with declines in population-level HIV testing. Each additional 100 HIV/AIDS-related newspaper stories published each month was associated with a 1.7% decline in HIV testing levels in the subsequent month. This effect differed by race, with African Americans exhibiting greater declines in HIV testing subsequent to increased news coverage than did Whites. These results suggest that mainstream newspaper coverage of HIV/AIDS may have a particularly deleterious effect on African Americans, one of the groups most affected by the disease. The mechanisms driving the negative effect deserve further investigation to improve reporting on HIV/AIDS in the media.

Reaganism and the Dismantling of Civil Rights: Title IX in the 1980s

In the 1980s, Title IX and other civil tights laws faced significant challenges within a political climate of Reaganism and the growing strength of the alliance between the New Right and the Religious Right. In the 1980s two major events impacted all civil rights legislation based on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The first was the Grove City College v. Bell (1984) Supreme Court decision and the second was the 1987 Civil Rights Restoration Act passed over the veto of President Reagan in 1988. This article examines the public discourse of these events through a critical media reading of mainstream newspaper coverage throughout the 1980s, highlighting the central role of Title IX in the debate over civil rights. This examination highlights the importance of dominant discourse in the enforcement of civil rights laws, as well as in the resulting lack of opportunity development over time.

Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization, and the UPS Strike

Students of the news will welcome Deepa Kumar’s analysis of coverage of the 1997 UPS strike. Media coverage of that strike was notable for its departure from standard narratives concerning labor-management disputes. Most often, strikes are framed as disruptive, inconvenient to the public, and harmful to the economy.While news reports about the UPS strike often reflected these pro-business sentiments, they also, at times, represented labor’s point of view. Kumar presents a comprehensive examination of why this coverage was anomalous. Kumar adopts a ‘‘domination/resistance’’ model of media power, following Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. Based on this model, she argues that the news media are contradictory institutions that most often uphold the status quo by an over-reliance on official sources, and by unreflectively reproducing a professional ideology congruent with values and beliefs of the country’s power structures. She takes liberal apologists of the news media to task for their easy acceptance of the marriage of capitalism and democracy, criticizes the Chomsky-Herman model of political economy of the media for its overemphasis on the engineering of consent, and skewers postmodernist versions of cultural studies for their valorization of textual reading as resistance. Kumar maintains that, for the last third of the twentieth century, neoliberal strategies of globalization have given rise to a whole series of working class issues that were not unique to UPS: part-time employment, stagnant wages, subcontracting, speedups, diminished safety and health protection, and the pension grab. The heart of her book resides in her textual/framing analyses of network television in chapter 3, and mainstream newspaper coverage by USA Today, the New York