Analysis Of News Media Research Articles

The EU’s interactions with formal intergovernmental organizations: a big data analysis of news media

ABSTRACT Interactions between the EU and IGOs ˗ such as joint statements, verbal public disagreements, formal cooperation agreements, and IGO dispute resolution involving the EU ˗ have increased in the past decades. We address the question What determines the EU’s interactions with formal IGOs? by carrying out a big data-based sentiment analysis of all news published online between 1999 and 2017. Using over 30,000 events machine-coded by the Global Data Event Language and Tone (GDELT) database, we construct an annual measure for the dyadic relations between the EU and 36 formal IGOs. We find that when the EU has observer or member status in an IGO, this significantly and positively affects the quantity of interactions, while increasing the level of conflict in these interactions. Policy overlap between the EU and the IGO also increases the level of conflict in their interactions. Surprisingly, IGO authority is not relevant for these interactions.

“Never Battle Alone”: Egirls and the Gender(ed) War on Video Game Live Streaming as “Real” Work

From 2018 to 2021, the “egirl” witnessed a radical shift from her origins as a sexualized slur in online gaming. Through critical discourse analysis of news media of this period, this paper interprets this transformation within two primary phenomena: (1) the growth of women game influencers who reclaimed “egirl” slurs in their self-branding and (2) the launch of “Egirl.gg,” a platform for paid gaming companions. I argue that live streaming platform Twitch.tv, and the expansive ecosystems of labor its demand from streamers, were integral to this re-authorization of who can play as themselves in a patriarchal gaming culture. Here, I extend Ergin Bulut’s framework of “ludic authorship” to delineate how stakeholders in game streaming industries masculinize the cultural labor of “authenticity.” The ambivalent embrace of “egirling” via streaming cultural logics further complicates the work of women gamers who must work harder to realize careers in platformed entertainment.

Socio-economic implications of COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria

After half of a century as a major oil producer, the Nigerian economy is yet to diversify; thus, remains dominated by primary activities. Whereas oil and gas activities directly employ a negligible number of Nigerians, the industry impacts on the overall economy of the country. However, with large resource windfalls, limited technical capacity, and weak check and balances, the scope for inefficiency, corruption, and elite capture of Nigeria‘s oil-driven economy is substantial. Consequently, the arrival of COVID-19 further exposed the fragility of the economy. As a theoretical paper, the researcher relied on data from secondary sources which yielded quantitative and qualitative information. The secondary data were derived mainly from journals, books and empirical case studies on the impact of pandemics on global production of petroleum, the Nigerian economy, and the overall social sector. News media analysis, government bulletins, and relevant data from civil society organizations, State Security Forces, and Corporate organizations on the debilitating consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic were also reviewed. The paper revealed that the socio-economic implications of the pandemic derived from fall in global oil price, policy interventions by the government such as bans on certain types of activities, closure of borders, state lockdowns, school closure and social distancing policies, all of which resulted in disruptions felt in all the sectors of the economy and society. Thus, it is suggested here that efforts must be made to address poverty just as there is an urgent need to improve on the healthcare sector. Unemployment should be tackled positively while government should place greater emphasis on technology and other modern methods of imparting knowledge.

Media framing of emergency departments: a call to action for nurses and other health care providers

BackgroundAs part of a larger study focused on interventions to enhance the capacity of nurses and other health care workers to provide equity-oriented care in emergency departments (EDs), we conducted an analysis of news media related to three EDs. The purpose of the analysis was to examine how media writers frame issues pertaining to nursing, as well as the health and social inequities that drive emergency department contexts, while considering what implications these portrayals hold for nursing practice.MethodsWe conducted a search of media articles specific to three EDs in Canada, published between January 1, 2018 and May 1, 2019. Media items (N = 368) were coded by story and theme attributes. A thematic analysis was completed to understand how writers in public media present issues pertaining to nursing practice within the ED context.ResultsTwo overarching themes were found. First, in ED-related media that portrays health care needs of people experiencing health and social inequities, messaging frequently perpetuates stigmatizing discourses. Second, media writers portray pressures experienced by nurses working in the ED in a way that evades structural determinants of quality of care. Underlying both themes is an absence of perspectives and authorship from practicing nurses themselves.ConclusionsWe recommend that frontline nurses be prioritized as experts in public media communications. Nurses must be supported to gain critical media skills to contribute to media, to destigmatize the health care needs of people experiencing inequity who attend their practice, and to shed light on the structural causes of pressures experienced by nurses working within emergency department settings.

Smart technologies in the Covid-19 crisis: Managing tourism flows and shaping visitors’ behaviour

This paper contributes to the academic debate on tourism destination development in the COVID-19 crisis, by investigating the role of smart technology tools for managing tourism flows and shaping visitors’ behaviours. Considering tourism in the COVID-19 crisis as an emerging stream of research, the paper assumes a continuity with the overtourism research (pre-COVID-19) and builds on the cross-fertilization between the advances in this field and the smart destination literature. Based on an explorative online news media analysis, the paper provides fresh knowledge on the role of smart technologies in destination management, by proposing the Smart Technology Matrix. This frames the smart-tech tools and provides the conceptual background for opening future paths of inquiry on smart tourism destinations in the Covid-19 context.

More than mortality data: a news media analysis of COVID-19 deaths in Aotearoa, New Zealand

ABSTRACT News media have an important social role during times of disruption including national emergencies. This paper bears witness to the 21 New Zealanders who died during the first lockdown due to COVID-19 by critically examining the nature of their portrayal in mainstream newspapers. We searched Knowledgebasket for newspapers published between 28 February 2020 and 13 May 2020 relating to COVID-19 deaths. Of the 147 included articles, 50 were selected for in-depth thematic analysis. Our key finding is that COVID-19 made the death of ordinary older New Zealanders newsworthy, albeit in a way that distinguished individuals by residential status. This is reflected in the themes identified: (1) Unexpected community deaths; (2) Inevitable aged residential care deaths; (3) Justification for lockdown measures. We conclude that New Zealand journalists played an important advocacy role in justifying New Zealand’s ‘go hard go early’ approach through the largely compassionate coverage of older people’s deaths.

Who are the actors and who are the acted-ons? An analysis of news media reporting on mathematics education

While there are several studies analysing how mathematics education is portrayed in news media discourses, there has been little examination of the construction of different stakeholders (e.g. teachers, parents, curricula). In this paper, we report our analysis of a corpus of Canadian newspaper reports on mathematics education, focusing on the underlying construction of different stakeholders. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of regimes of truth, we show how news media construct a “truth” that portrays different stakeholders as either actors or acted-ons working for or against individual or national mathematical performance. We explain these findings with reference to the general media framing of mathematics education in the corpus.

New Zealand Religious Community Responses to COVID-19 While Under Level 4 Lockdown.

Social scientific research into the impact of COVID-19 on religious communities is emergent. This research combines interview data (n = 12) collected, as New Zealand moved into Level 3—Restrict and then Level 4—Lockdown, with Facebook and online news media analysis to understand how religious leaders and their communities responded to COVID-19. Our data found four challenges: (1) The requirement to reassess worship practices, (2) the need to mitigate any potential for community transmission, (3) significant difficulties related to social distancing for communal religious practices, and lastly, (4) welfare and pastoral concerns for congregations and others in need.

Conceptualizing a National Threat: Representations of “Homegrown Terrorism” in the News Media, Academia, and Grey Literature in Canada

This article critically examines how the problem of “homegrown terrorism” is represented in a content analysis of news media, academic scholarship, and grey literature in Canada between 2013 and 2016. Findings centred around five primary themes: (1) homegrown terrorism is new to Canada and is growing in scope; (2) it represents a significant threat to national security; (3) it is a problem that tends to manifest in, and transform, “normal” youth; (4) it lacks any identifiable causes; and (5) it has culminated in a new regime of persistent threat and uncertainty in Canada. Based on the saturation of these themes, I argue that a narrative template has formed and proliferated across media, academic, and grey literatures, acting as a framework for understanding the homegrown terrorism problem’s key features that are legitimated by the repeated presence of a small group of expert and official sources. The second part of this article interrogates this conceptualization, including the criteria used in selecting cases and the underlying operation of racialized, orientalist discourses on Canadian Muslims that work to distinguish homegrown terrorism from other types of political violence in the country and to render it antithetical to Canadian values. This article provides a conceptual snapshot of homegrown terrorism around the time of highly publicized events (e.g., the 2014 Parliament Hill attack) that continue to impact Canadian politics and society. This analysis offers insight as ideas of radicalization and violent extremism gain further prominence in realms of public policy, service and program delivery, and multiple political contexts.

Discursive construction of sexual assault: A qualitative analysis of news media reporting of ‘the Kavanaugh Case’

Media coverage of sexual violence in political contexts has previously been shown to sensationalise the events by focusing on the impact ‘the scandal’ may have on a politician’s reputation and career rather than on the narrative of the victim. In late 2018, another political scandal appeared in newspapers worldwide, covering Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assault on Christine Blasey Ford. This paper aims to explore how Blasey Ford’s allegations and the subsequent hearing which came to be known as ‘the Kavanaugh case’ were discursively constructed in UK national newspapers between 13 September 2018 and 24 October 2018. A feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis of 94 articles from UK’s 10 top-circulating national newspapers was employed to explore how heteropatriarchal power relations are continuously perpetuated within UK newspapers through instances of humanising of the perpetrator and framing allegations of sexual misconduct as (only) political game-playing.

The Image of Ruralism in Korea through a Text Mining for Online News Media analysis

The Image of Ruralism in Korea through a Text Mining for Online News Media analysis

News on Events and Social Media: A Comparative Analysis of Facebook Users’ Reactions

ABSTRACTAiming to shed light on why Facebook users react to certain events and news stories more than to others, this study analyses their reactions to different events and to the media coverage of those events. The case selection includes six events covered by two newspapers from four countries: France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. The research design combines an original content analysis of news media outlets’ posts with an analysis of the reactions that these posts have generated from Facebook users—likes, shares and comments—to assess whether and how the nature of events and the characteristics of the news content contribute to explaining the engagement of Facebook users with the news. The data analysis indicated that the decisions to like, share or comment were not driven by the same factors. Unexpected events showed significance, at different levels, for all kinds of reactions to news. Conversely, the specific features of news content only slightly affected the levels of liking and sharing. Facebook users were more likely to comment on news adhering to known criteria for news values, such as negativity or personalization.

Staging incapacitation: the corporeal politics of hunger striking

This essay examines the ongoing hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Through an analysis of news media compiled by journalists reporting on the timelines of the strikes, and various prisoner testimonials, I contextualize how hunger striking has been historically understood to be grounds for emancipation from, and resistance to, state violence and carceral techniques. I further present an analysis of the 1981 Irish death fast to consider how prisoners’ resistance to corporeal wholeness comes to function as a viable form of political self-expression. Focusing on both the state’s suppression of embodied protest as well as the weaponization of the prisoner’s body, I argue that although geopolitically different, in both the Guantánamo and Irish strikes, forms of corporeal incapacitation function as the mechanisms through which protest and discipline register.

Deep Learning for Assessing Banks’ Distress from News and Numerical Financial Data

In this paper we focus our attention on the exploitation of the information contained in financial news to enhance the performance of a classifier of bank distress. Such information should be analyzed and inserted into the predictive model in the most efficient way and this task deals with the issues related to text analysis and specifically to the analysis of news media. Among the different models proposed for such purpose, we investigate one of the possible deep learning approaches, based on a doc2vec representation of the textual data, a kind of neural network able to map the sequence of words contained within a text onto a reduced latent semantic space. Afterwards, a second supervised neural network is trained combining news data with standard financial figures to classify banks whether in distressed or tranquil states. Indeed, the final aim is not only the improvement of the predictive performance of the classifier but also to assess the importance of news data in the classification process. Does news data really bring more useful information not contained in standard financial variables? Our results seem to confirm such hypothesis.

(De)legitimating extractivism: the shifting politics of social licence

ABSTRACTMost scholarly accounts of social licence define it as a public relations strategy to legitimate resource development. In Canadian pipeline politics, however, it has had the opposite effect, crystallizing widespread concerns about industry capture of regulatory processes and affirming the democratic rights of local communities. This assessment of the concept’s critical, counter-hegemonic potential to challenge the policies, practices and logic of state-sponsored extractivist development situates social licence as a key discursive battleground in the struggle between politicization (which accents agonistic confrontation between competing alternative futures) and de-politicization (which defuses conflict and builds consensus around the perception of common interests). Frame analysis of news media and advocacy group texts is used to investigate how opponents of a pipeline project bridged the idea of social licence with movement frames concerning identity, injustice and democratic agency to transform the concept from a public relations term meant to enable corporate activity into a critical trope used to constrain it.

Robotic Surgery: Transforming Patient Care in the 21st Century?

Inspired by a notion that machines can emulate human touch, the paper first examines the adoption of surgical robots in operating rooms at the global and local levels. The adoption of the technology has occurred almost concurrently in many countries without much time lag, and this near-simultaneous acceptance of the technology invites us to rethink technological supremacy in relation to patient care in the field of surgery. With focus on the da Vinci surgical system, this paper presents social and ethical implications of how (not) to regulate robotic surgery with potential and invisible risks with respect to patient care. Based on documentary analysis of news media in combination with literature review of medical journals, Korean news media, and Korean technology assessment reports on surgical robots, the paper explores how prevalently the idea of social progress is embedded in the promotion of advanced technology at the societal and governmental levels. I contend that the ideology of social enhancement has served to shape regulatory practices (or their absence) at the expense of patient care in emergent technologies such as robotic surgery in South Korea. Thus, social scientists and bioethicists should be involved in articulating ethical dimensions of the technology even from the stage of development in order to remedy the gap between technical advancement in surgery and patient care.

When societies crash: A critical analysis of news media’s social role in the aftermath of national disasters

Abstract Apart from their primary role as news providers in disaster situations, news media can also assume a broader social role. Drawing on a critically informed qualitative content analysis of the Belgian news reporting on a national disaster, the article reveals a twofold articulation of this social role. The first consisted in newspapers highlighting the emotional dimension with potential societal implications of raising compassion and identification. Second, we found a strong articulation of a discourse of (national) unity and community, aimed at restoring the disrupted social order in the disaster’s aftermath. Both aspects were discursively established by a dominant presence of emotional testimonies, strategies of personalization and by the use of inclusive language permeated with references to nation or community. The study highlights the important social role of journalism in disaster situations and events involving human suffering.

Analysing news media coverage of the 2015 Nepal earthquake using a community capitals lens: implications for disaster resilience

South Asia is one of the regions of the world most vulnerable to natural disasters. Although news media analyses of disasters have been conducted frequently in various settings globally, there is little research on populous South Asia. This paper begins to fill this gap by evaluating local and foreign news media coverage of the earthquake in Nepal on 25 April 2015. It broadens the examination of news media coverage of disaster response beyond traditional framing theory, utilising community capitals (built, cultural, financial, human, natural, political, and social) lens to perform a thematic content analysis of 405 news items. Overall, financial and natural capital received the most and the least emphasis respectively. Statistically significant differences between local and foreign news media were detected vis-à-vis built, financial, and political capital. The paper concludes with a discussion of the social utility of news media analysis using the community capitals framework to inform disaster resilience.

Securitization, racial cleansing, and disaster capitalism: Neoliberal disaster governance in the US Gulf Coast and Haiti

Through a critical discourse analysis of news media after the US Gulf Coast hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake disasters, we draw from Soss et al.’s (2011) ideas about US poverty governance – neoliberal paternalism – to identify how a similar phenomenon of ‘neoliberal disaster governance’ (NDG) operates in these contexts. NDG is a set of discourses, policies, and practices, we argue, which endeavors to control disaster survivors in order to further the ends of neoliberal capitalism. Specifically, we find several key story lines that legitimate and perpetuate NDG, namely disaster capitalism, securitization and militarization of disaster settings, discourses of racial cleansing, and displacement.

News Media Analysis of the United States Preventive Services Task Force and American Urological Association Prostate Cancer Screening Guidelines

IntroductionRates of prostate specific antigen screening and prostate cancer diagnoses have declined following controversial changes to prostate cancer screening guidelines by the USPSTF (U.S. Preventive Services Task Force) in 2011 and 2012 advising against all prostate specific antigen screening. To understand whether uneven media coverage of the guidelines may have influenced shifts in clinical decision making, this study analyzes news reports about the USPSTF and AUA (American Urological Association) prostate cancer screening guidelines. MethodsTwo national databases were queried for news articles published within 30 days of the release of each guideline. Media analysis included consequences of screening, accuracy of guideline descriptions, discussion of primary evidence and neutrality of headlines. Thematic changes between the preliminary and final USPSTF guidelines were compared. ResultsOf the 45 news articles in the sample 24 were about the preliminary USPSTF guidelines, 17 about the final USPSTF guidelines and 4 about the revised AUA guidelines. More than 80% of the articles discussed adverse consequences of prostate specific antigen screening while a minority accurately summarized the recommendations or discussed limitations of the evidence. Significantly more articles about the final vs preliminary USPSTF guidelines had headlines opposing screening or suggested urologists’ financial gains from prostate specific antigen tests (p <0.05). Of the articles that mentioned the initial opposition of the AUA to the USPSTF, only 29% described the current AUA guidelines in any form. ConclusionsThe USPSTF guidelines were more extensively reported in the news than the AUA guidelines. Articles frequently emphasized the negative aspects of screening and did not discuss limitations of the evidence. These findings may have influenced patients’ decisions underlying declines in prostate specific antigen screening since 2011.