Mainstream Print Media Research Articles

Media Representations and Refugees Crises: Framing of Afghan Refugees in Mainstream Print Media of Pakistan

Media Representations and Refugees Crises: Framing of Afghan Refugees in Mainstream Print Media of Pakistan

‘Straightening’ space and time? Peripheral moral panics in print media representations of Canadian LGBTQ2S suburbanites, 1985–2005

ABSTRACT This paper adopts a spatial-temporal lens to examine mainstream print media representations of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer and Two-Spirit (LGBTQ2S) suburbanites in Canada’s largest metropolitan areas in the 1990s. Due to major changes in Canadian gay rights legislation, the 1990s were a decade when the spatial and temporal reproduction of heteronormativity was contested, including in suburban areas. Through a focus on the metropolitan periphery, this paper argues that LGBTQ2S people and their politics were discursively positioned in print media coverage as spatially unexpected and temporally disruptive of heteronormativity. Drawing upon a suburban LGBTQ2S print-media database from 1985 to 2005 (n = 1300), an analysis of aggregate patterns is provided and three exemplary case studies of suburban ‘moral panics’ detailed from within case-study metropolitan areas of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The paper concludes that the greatest public debate in the print media was generated when queers intruded upon institutions that were central to the reproduction of heteronormative futures, that is, the institutions that are the very foundation of suburbia such as recreational spaces, religious institutions and schools.

Portrayals in Print: Media Depictions of the Informal Sector’s Involvement in Managing E-Waste in India

For over a decade, media stories have exposed health and environmental harm caused by informal electronics recycling in less industrialized countries. Greater awareness of these risks helped inform regulations across the globe and the development of recycling standards. Yet, media depictions also shape public perceptions of informal workers and their role in handling electronic waste, or e-waste. This paper examines how mainstream print media describes the informal sector’s involvement in handling e-waste in India, especially as policymakers and other stakeholders currently grapple with how to integrate informal workers into formal, more transparent e-waste management schemes. This study evaluates depictions of the informal sector in print articles from both non-Indian and Indian news media outlets, employing controversy mapping principles and digital research tools. Findings may help inform stakeholder agendas seeking to influence public awareness on how to integrate informal workers into viable e-waste management solutions. Subsequent research based on these results could also help stakeholders understand the actors and networks that shape such media depictions. Results from the dataset show that most news articles describe informal workers negatively or problematically due to activities causing health risks and environmental damage, but usually do not discern which activities in the value chain (e.g., collection, dismantling, metals extraction) represent the greatest risks. Comparatively fewer articles portray informal workers positively or as contributing to e-waste solutions. Most articles also do not explain challenges that arise when working with informal workers. As such, media depictions today often lag behind policy debates and obscure multiple facets—good and bad—of the informal sector’s involvement in managing e-waste. Thus, an opportunity exists for policymakers, manufacturers, and advocacy groups to bridge the gap between current media representations of informal workers’ involvement in e-waste management and policy recommendations surrounding their role.

‘Sexual misery’ or ‘happy British Muslims’?: Contemporary depictions of Muslim sexuality

We begin this article with a close look at some contemporary pictures of sexual life in the Muslim world that have been painted in certain sections of the Western media, asking how and why these pictures matter. Across a range of mainstream print media from the New York Times to the Daily Mail, and across reported events from several countries, can be found pictures of ‘sexual misery’. These ‘frame’ Muslim men as tyrannical, Muslim women as downtrodden or exploited, and the wider world of Islam as culpable. Crucially, this is not the whole story. We then consider how these negative representations are being challenged and how they can be challenged further. In doing so, we will not simply set pictures of sexual misery against their binary opposites, namely pictures abounding in the promise of sexual happiness. Instead, we search for a more complex picture, one that unsettles stereotypes about the sexual lives of Muslims without simply idealising its subjects. This takes us to the journalism, life writing and creative non-fiction of Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and the fiction of Ayisha Malik and Amjeed Kabil. We read this long-form work critically, attending to manifest advances in depictions of the relationships of Muslim-identified individuals over the last decade or so, while also remaining alert to lacunae and limitations in the individual representations. More broadly, we hope to signal our intention to avoid both Islamophobia and Islamophilia in scrutinising literary texts.

Depoliticising addiction: Who gets to speak in European press reporting, 1991-2011?

Aims:The article presents an analysis of sources of information employed in mainstream print media reporting on addiction problems in Finland, Italy and Poland in the 1990s and 2000s.Method:A quantitative content analysis of frequency of different sources employed in articles in daily newspapers from Finland (N = 258), Italy (N = 296), and Poland (N = 212) from the years 1991, 1998 and 2011. Semantic units were coded in Atlas.ti. The societal spheres represented were identified using a common coding scheme broadly inspired by Boltanski and Thévenot’s typology of polities of worth. Transformations were identified in line with van Leeuwen’s framework for trends in discourse salience over time.Results:The study highlights different patterns of coverage of addictions in the three countries. Over time, increased salience is given to the individuals affected by addictions and experts who represent biomedical sciences. This process occurred with varying intensity and expressiveness in all countries under study.Conclusions:Social and political sources were employed to less extent over time. The media focus seemed to shift to the affected individuals and scientific expertise. This confirms results from previous studies on a general move towards individualisation and an increased focus on more personal and technical aspects of addiction problems in the mass media.

Mainstream print media representations of childhood obesity in the United Kingdom and Sweden

Background Childhood obesity is associated with a range of chronic diseases and economic costs. The UK is among the European countries with the highest obesity prevalence, while Sweden is among those with the lowest. In each country, obesity is socioeconomically patterned, and tackling childhood obesity has been identified as a policy priority. Mass media framing of the drivers of, and potential solutions to health issues can influence public and political opinion on necessary policy responses. Methods We analysed and compared UK and Swedish national newspaper representations of childhood obesity to identify how the issue has been framed to inform policy advocacy. Research comprised quantitative content analysis of 1483 articles about childhood obesity (757 UK, 726 Swedish) published between 1996 and 2014. Results Representations of the causes of childhood obesity shifted from an individual focus to a societal focus in each country between 1996 and 2014. UK and Swedish media presented similar representations of childhood obesity’s growth, its link to health risks, and the extent to which it is driven by diet, physical inactivity and parental practices. Food and drink industry marketing was mentioned relatively infrequently in each country. However, the two countries differed in terms of: whether they associated childhood obesity with males or females; coverage of the socioeconomically and geographically patterned nature of the problem; and the role played by the food environment. Conclusions The observed shift towards a socially-driven framing of childhood obesity may foster acceptance of population-level solutions, and the similarity of trends in the UK and Sweden might be indicative of wider supranational trends. Conversely, differences between each country’s framing of the problem highlight the need for public health advocacy for environmental, population-level interventions to be tailored to specific national policy debates.

Framing Privatisation: The Dominance of Neoliberal Discourse and the Death of the Public Good

This paper looks at the privatisation Bórd Gáis Éireann (BGÉ) in 2014 and the treatment of this issue by the mainstream print media in Ireland. From a contextual perspective, this came in the wake of the global economic recession and its longer term implications for Ireland. The media’s coverage of the sale could not be found to be impartial: both the volume and thrust of the articles were inclined to portray privatisation in a favourable, non-critical light. The majority of content was presented within Neo-Liberal frames, with a competitive frame being dominant; in other words the topic was treated from a market or business perspective rather than the perspective of the public good or wider society. A consistent source bias was also found favouring business or market interests with almost no representation of workers or civil society. Theoretically the paper argues that the framing of privatisation as a business and consumer issue, rather than a political one or that of the public good, acts to detract from the political aspects of the appropriation of public assets by international capital, including the implications for infrastructure, economic development and accountability to democratic structures, none of which receive sufficient journalistic attention.

‘As parents congregated at parties’: Responsibility and blame in media representations of violence and school closure in an Indigenous community

This article considers the discourses of responsibility and blame emerging from newspaper reportage of a crisis in the remote Indigenous community of Aurukun in Northern Queensland, Australia. In doing so, it aims to contribute to the sociology of racism and add to the existing body of scholarship on the ways in which deracialised media discourse can nevertheless be racist. The month of May 2016 saw violence perpetrated by young people against the teachers and principal of the community’s only school. Teachers were evacuated to the regional city of Cairns on 10 May due to violence in the community and fears for their safety. They returned on 18 May, only to be evacuated again on 25 May. These events form the focus of the reportage analysed in this article. The way in which three primary groups of players – parents, teachers and police – are portrayed in mainstream print media is analysed in order to ascertain how responsibility and blame are apportioned in relation to these events.

Reading the Visible: Else Lasker-Schüler's Early Prose Texts and the Small Form

Reading the Visible:Else Lasker-Schüler's Early Prose Texts and the Small Form Patrizia McBride (bio) When Kurt Hiller said of Else Lasker-Schüler that her work lacked "das Mentale," that is, a level of reflexivity that exceeds merely sensual and sentimental expression, he was trying to set the record straight after a disastrous encounter with Wieland Herzfelde, who had slapped him in the face at the Café des Westens in 1915 for making disparaging remarks about his revered poet-friend.1 Hiller's sour comment about Lasker-Schüler's lack of reflexivity struck at an aspect of her public persona that invited both praise and controversy from contemporaries, who marveled at her fearless self-presentation as a radical performance artist whose biographical self was all but indistinguishable from the characters she developed. Lasker-Schüler played this role in a literal-minded way that foreclosed conventional forms of mediation, whether identificatory or allegorical. Her apparent disinterest in reflecting on or gaining distance to this performance, if only to be able to describe her poetics to others, would seem to support Hiller's assertion that Lasker-Schüler was generally unconcerned with metapoetic reflection. In this essay I take Hiller's concern seriously but reframe it by assuming that Hiller missed the reflexivity in Lasker-Schüler's work because it did not look like anything he would recognize as such. This poetological moment unfolds via Lasker-Schüler's engagement with the protean non-genre of the "kleine Prosa" propelled by the proliferation [End Page 625] of feuilletonistic forms of writing in both mainstream print media and the rapidly differentiating niche market of little magazines. Within this frame I will focus on the poetological reflection that unfolds in short prose texts from one of Lasker-Schüler's early collections, Gesichte (1920): specifically, three essays that lend themselves to reconstructing the role of vision and the visual in her poetics. Let me preface my analysis by briefly outlining the status these texts enjoy within Lasker-Schüler's oeuvre. The 1920 Gesichte collection encompasses prose texts that had previously appeared as stand-alone pieces in newspapers, periodicals, and little magazines. The book was part of Lasker-Schüler's twenty-volume edition of collected works that was published by Paul Cassirer and included a companion prose volume titled Essays. The texts in this latter collection have been termed "portrait essays" to reflect the collection's driving conceit, which labels each text for the individual it features and thus turns the short pieces into a portrait gallery of sorts, lending the volume a fairly unified character and a high degree of predictability. By contrast, the texts in Gesichte are marked by far greater heterogeneity in terms of both the generic conventions that frame them and the themes and occasions that prompt the writing.2 They include autobiographical vignettes, anecdotes, street scenes, personal reflections, sketches, and reviews of various kinds of performances, including stage drama, circus, and variété. Such textual heterogeneity shines a light on the modular arrangement that informs both collections and ultimately drives all of Lasker-Schüler's works from the years 1900–1920, including her early poetry collections and especially the prose works (Das Peter Hille Buch, 1906; Die Nächte Tino von Bagdads, 1907; Mein Herz, 1912; and Der Prinz von Theben, 1914). Yet these works retain a recognizable overall structure and a pronounced narrative and thematic continuity that override or at least disguise their piecemeal construction. By contrast, the 1920 Gesichte volume stands out for its heterogeneity and generic fluidity; one can clearly recognize the various units as having been conceived as stand-alone contributions. In sum, the strong heteronomous character of the texts ties them directly to the journalistic environment for which they were conceived: in particular to the literary experimentation that falls under the heading of the small prose form at the time. [End Page 626] Although the term kleine Prosa was reportedly first used by Alfred Polgar in 1926, debates about the reach and value of short prose forms date back to the rise of modern aesthetics in the course of the eighteenth century and flare up...

Whither Objective Journalism in Digital Age: Malaysia's Mainstream versus Alternative Media

In this digital age of online news, objective journalism is increasingly treated as unnecessary, if not obsolete. In the liberal West, news portals can offer different views to counter the political economic status quo proffered by traditional hyper-commercial corporate media. In more authoritarian Asian countries like Malaysia, alternative news portals are assumed to provide opposition political parties with favourable coverage to balance whatever bias the traditional, print and electronic media might have displayed towards the ruling political party. As a result, Malaysia's ruling political party, including many from the critical mass, has claimed that Malaysia's mainstream and alternative media, collectively, have attained the democratic principle of offering diverse, balanced and fair news coverage. This has strengthened the view that there is no need for objective journalism-as in providing fair and balanced news coverage. To what extent then are Malaysia's mainstream print media biased towards the ruling political party and to what extent Malaysia's alternative news portals biased towards the opposition party? Has the digital age finally rendered objective journalism obsolete, at least in Malaysia? These are key questions examined in a study that content analysed the coverage of Malaysia's general elections in 2013 performed by three mainstream newspapers and three alternative news portals based in Malaysia. The results show that even though partisan journalism continues to dominate, especially the mainstream newspapers, objective journalism is far from being abandoned. It is rendered unnecessary only by being politicized by the ruling political regime.

EP 49. Transfer of knowledge from the scientific community to the broad public concerning deep brain stimulation

Question Mainstream media influence general public perception of DBS as a therapy and as a research field. The image formed by the media eventually impacts health policies and resource allocations. This paper aims at defining which factors play a part in shaping the public image of DBS and how the transfer of knowledge operates. Method Discourse analysis of German mainstream print media and qualitative interviews with DBS researchers and communication professionals. Results Journalistic texts end up far from the experts’ propositions. The transformation of research contents into a journalistic story corresponds to the formal and cultural needs of mainstream journalistic publication, but also make a transfer of knowledge possible altogether. This transfer of knowledge is more often than not accompanied by an emotional background that relies on cultural codes and history. In the case of DBS, this involves amongst other things a complex entanglement of pop-cultural elements, going from lobotomy and ECT to a miraculous notion of a mechanical cure “at the push of a button”. Both misconceptions, due to extreme suspicion or exaggerated hope, eventually harm the image of DBS. Conclusion Medical research needs communication professionals to tend to its image, especially in a field involving neuromodulation and neurosurgery. An appropriate chain of work, with medical researchers, press offices and science journalists operating hand in hand, necessitates trust in each professional’s competence in his or her own field of expertise. The processes behind a successful transfer of knowledge need time and attention, which are scarce resources. Nevertheless, if the public and political impact of communication is judged to be of sufficient importance, costs and efforts must be assumed.

Honor Killing of Women: A comparative study of the Pakistani Print Media

This research examines news coverage on honor killing. This study is the comparative study of the two mainstream print media outlets Jang and Khabrain. The time period has been chosen from January 2013 to March 2013.Content analysis was used to examine how honor killing news is presented in these two newspapers. this exploration about the honor killing news especially violence news about the women further advance the dynamics of the crime news reporting by gathering the useful information that how the reporters and the media agenda setters are treating this issue. Six main categories and five hypotheses were developed and tested. This research focused on how much print media of Pakistan gave importance to the news of honor killing. The social evils are highlighted in the press, dealing various issues about women, including honor killing, like arranged marriage, Love marriage, victim statement, Mal-practice, victims of the Sexual assault, Karo-Kari. Murder is another evil against women. The stone hearted people kill the innocent women when they feel they are shame for them.

The Ancient-Turned-New Concept of "Spiritual Hygiene": An Investigation of Media Coverage of Meditation from 1979 to 2014.

A spiritual-yet not religious-practice, meditation has been touted as beneficial to boosting the immune system, lowering blood pressure, alleviating migraines, and increasing gray matter in parts of the brain. While scientific research on meditation is beginning to quantify its benefits, there is increasing concern among the scientific community that news outlets glorify the potential benefits of meditation. This paper considers coverage of meditation in mainstream print media by analyzing 764 articles printed in English from worldwide media outlets from 1979 to 2014. Frame theory analysis is employed to better understand how meditation is presented in print media and how the perception of the practice is interpreted by readers. Results indicate that articles reflect the health and wellness challenges present in contemporary culture, together with a desire for personal relief from such issues. The paper suggests that the practice of meditation as "spiritual hygiene" is indicative of a sociocultural shift in which meditative techniques are becoming increasingly recognized, encouraged, and practiced.

Gay men as parents: Analysing resistant talk in South African mainstream media accounts of queer families

There is increasing visibility of dissident sexualities and genders in media debates about families, including resistant discourses that challenge delegitimising claims about queer families. There remains, however, a lack of research that assesses the ways in which discourses seeking to defend queer parenthood function to challenge or, at times, reinforce hetero-gendered norms. Families formed by gay men have generally received less attention, both in the media as well as academic scholarship. In this paper, we explore resistant discourses deployed in mainstream print media, attending particularly to news reports about queer fathers and their children. Through a critical thematic analysis of South African newspapers, informed by feminist discursive psychology, we identify four themes in resistant ways of talking: de-gendering parenthood, normalising queer parents, valorising queer parenting, and challenging the heteronormative gold standard. We conclude with the political implications of such resistant talk, as part of a project of transforming restrictive hetero-gendered norms.

Who Prevails in the Visual Framing Contest about the United Nations Climate Change Conferences?

The annual Climate Change Conferences (Conferences of the Parties, COPs) held under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are global staged political media events that regularly provide occasions for contesting the framing of global warming in media coverage around the globe. This study assesses which professional group involved in communicating the COPs—journalists, government spokespeople, and representatives from non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—is most successful in seeing their visual framing conceptions represented in mainstream print media coverage. Our analysis combines data from 44 semi-structured interviews with actors from these groups conducted on-site at the COPs in Doha, Qatar (2012) and Warsaw, Poland (2013) with a content analysis of climate change news published in newspapers from five democratic countries around the world. Results show a relative prevalence of NGO-preferred visual framing in COP coverage. Through providing powerful pictures of symbolic actions, civil society actors can prevail in the visual framing contest under certain conditions, but it is much harder for them to circumvent the usually strong statist orientation of mainstream news media in sourcing textual messages.

‘If we had more like her we would no longer be the unheard majority’: Germaine Greer’s reception in the United States

ABSTRACTThis article examines Germaine Greer’s reception in the United States in 1971, the year that The Female Eunuch was first published there. Using hundreds of previously unexamined letters sent by television viewers after she hosted The Dick Cavett Show, the article explores the impact of Greer’s media engagement and the overwhelmingly positive reception she received from this particular audience. The letters detail Greer’s strength, intelligence, wit, and keen ability to communicate. They demonstrate that she educated many audience members about feminist issues including abortion and rape, and inspired pride in her female audience. The sympathetic portrait of Greer in these letters contrasts with the more polarised view of Greer in the print media responses to her: the mainstream print media portrayed and embraced Greer as its ideal non-threatening, attractive and heterosexual feminist, and American feminists dismissed her as an opportunist. Taken together, the unpublished audience letters and the print media sources provide a more complex portrait of Greer’s reception and effectiveness. The letters speak for Greer and – now that they are available in Greer’s carefully preserved personal archive – restore the voices of the ordinary people who helped to shape the history of feminism.

First Nations Experience of the 2013 Alberta Floods: Media Representations and First Hand Experiences

Background: In June 2013, a severe flood affected Southern Alberta. According to the Government of the scale and impact of the flooding [were] in Alberta, causing significant damage to homes and infrastructure. Many of the affected residents were from the First Nations reservations of Siksika and Stoney, outside the Calgary city limits. Objective: To explore how non-Aboriginal Canadians frame First Nations' experience of the floods in print media, and how individuals involved in flood relief coordination respond to these frames. Methods: We combined the results of a media analysis of mainstream print media with semi-structured interviews to achieve our objective. Articles from four Canadian newspapers and one international newspaper were included in the media analysis. Three individuals involved in flood relief coordination on reserve were interviewed. Results: Four frames emerged from the media analysis; the sympathetic, unprecedented support, unappreciative (or whining), and property damage or loss frames. The interview data revealed a perception of bias in print media and that the media coverage of First Nations' experience of the floods was inadequate and inequitable. Participants felt the bias in the media reflected larger social issues surrounding First Nations in Canada. Participants perceived the media as a tool and as a double-edged sword. Discussion: We found evidence of what has been characterized as passive racism in the media. We also found evidence of a dichotomy between First Nation and non-First Nation communities, reflecting a larger social divide. The interview data confirm that.

Moral Steaks? Ethical Discourses of In Vitro Meat in Academia and Australia

The profile and possibilities of in vitro meat are rapidly expanding, creating new ethical conundrums about how to approach this nascent biotechnology. The outcomes of these ethical debates will shape the future viability of this technology and its acceptability for potential consumers. In this paper we focus on how in vitro meat is being ethically constructed in academic literatures and contrast this with discourses evident in the mainstream print media. The academic literature is analysed to identify a typology of ethical discourses, ordered from the most common to least expressed. We then apply this typology to investigate the frames present in Australian print media reportage on the topic. In the academic literature, discourses relating to in vitro meat’s promised environmental, animal welfare and food security benefits are most prominent. In contrast, ontological struggles over its ‘nature’ have emerged as the dominant feature in the Australian print media. Although these spaces of engagement evidence decidedly different discursive trends, ethical discourses critical of in vitro meat’s wider socio-cultural ramifications are currently under-represented in both. This paper therefore calls for critical scholars to move beyond the narrow, presumptive framings of in vitro meat as a technological remedy for our consumptive ills, to more seriously engage with the ethical consequences of this new form of food.

Post-politics, crisis, and Ireland's ‘ghost estates’

This paper argues that the global economic recession provides an instructive point to reconsider recent theorisations of post-politics for two reasons. First, theories of the post-political can help us to understand the current neoliberal impasse, and second, current transformations provide us with an empirical basis to test the limits of these explanatory frameworks. While the resurgence of neoliberal policies, evidenced through the state-sponsored rescue of the financial sector and the introduction of harsh austerity measures in many countries, appear to confirm post-politics, various protest movements have testified to a concurrent re-politicisation of the economy. Furthermore, crises constitute periods of disruption to the discursive and symbolic order, which open a space for hegemonic struggle, however fleeting. We focus our analysis on Ireland's ‘ghost estates’ – residential developments left abandoned or unfinished after the property crash – and their treatment within mainstream print media. We argue that in the context of crash, the ‘ghost estate’ functioned as an ‘empty signifier’ through which hegemonic struggles over how to narrate, and thus re-inscribe, the event of the crisis were staged. We explore the double role played by ‘ghost estates’: firstly, as an opening for politics, and secondly, as a vehicle used to discursively contain the crisis through a neoliberal narrative of ‘excess’. We argue that our analysis offers an instructive example of how post-politicisation occurs as a process that is always contingent, contextual, and partial, and reliant on the cooption and coproduction of existing cultural signifiers with emergent narrations of crisis.

Creating, Sustaining, or Dispelling Misconceptions: Discourse Analysis of Mainstream Print Media's Coverage of Obama's Religious Identity

This study considered the role the mainstream print media has played in creating, sustaining, or dispelling the confusion among some Americans regarding President Barack Obama's religious identity. Employing a qualitative discourse analysis of coverage of Obama's religious identity, the study noted several distinct themes, including current faith practices, connections to history, blame game, otherness, politicization, and Muslim connections. A number of articles failed to capture the social, political, and historical contexts of the issue. This failure resulted in coverage that implicitly accepted the questions' legitimacy surrounding the President's religion and delegitimized his beliefs. Other coverage legitimated the confusion over his religious identity by focusing on Obama's “nontraditional” path to Christianity. Such coverage accentuated Obama's otherness, and created the potential for distrust and doubt. The study concluded that the coverage Obama received from the mainstream print media played an important but inconsistent role in dispelling the confusion over his religious identity.