News Media Discourse Research Articles

“Girls’ things” make headlines: menstruation in the media coverage of women’s tennis

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyze the news media discourse around menstruation in women’s sport by examining news media coverage of two tennis players, Heather Watson and Qinwen Zheng, who attributed their defeat in 2015 and 2022, respectively, to “girls’ things.” Using thematic analysis, the article analyses four themes: (1) breaking the menstrual taboo in sport, (2) specificity and marginalization of the female body, (3) the risk of a leaking body and (4) the wider context beyond the world of sport. The analyzed discourse is part of the broader changes observed since the mid-2010s regarding the greater presence of menstruation in public discourse. The most significant difference between the 2015 and 2022 corpora lies in the framing of menstruation as taboo. Whereas an open statement about menstruation in 2015 was perceived as something both brave and shocking, such discourse was practically absent in 2022. Despite this change, this discourse illustrates the tension between the public exposure of menstruation alongside efforts aimed at keeping it hidden. It can be read in the framework of neoliberal feminism by emphasizing the privileging of the male body and the current product-focused menstrual activism by highlighting the need to keep menstruation invisible.

Shaping the Narrative: Examining News Coverage of Voter ID Laws in the United States

ABSTRACT This study is the first to examine US news coverage of voter ID laws. Voter ID requirements are central to ongoing political debates about voting procedures. Despite rare cases of voter fraud by impersonation and the strong polarization over voter ID among partisan elites, there is a surprising broad bipartisan support for voter ID among the American public. Using a range of inductive computational content analysis methods, we analyse news coverage of voter ID requirements from 2013 to 2023. We find coverage differs by outlets political leaning and demonstrate a link between news media discourse and elite framing on the issue. Donald Trump’s voter fraud allegations, however, appear to have substantially shaped left-leaning media coverage from 2016, raising concerns around whether this might have helped amplify electoral conspiracies, instead of offering the public alternative ways of thinking about voter ID laws.

What’s in the news? A multiscalar text analysis approach to exploring news media discourses for managing protected areas in Switzerland

Park management is often hampered where discourses – encompassing views, values and interests about parks - differ, emphasising the important role public engagement plays in park planning and management. News media are a promising source of unstructured text material for exploring environmental discourses. Here, we combine computational distant reading and close readings across temporal and thematic scales, with the overall aim of demonstrating how a multiscalar approach can be effectively used to explore discourses related to protected areas. We illustrate our aim through a case study in two Swiss Regional Parks with the objectives of a) computationally identifying emerging topics since the formation of the parks through distant reading and b) performing a detailed close reading exploring the discourses around two dominant topics. This multiscalar approach forms the cornerstone of our findings and allows us to explore different ways in which the two parks are valued and debated.

‘Kindling the fire’ of NHS patient data exploitations: The care.data controversy in news media discourses

This paper explores news media discourse about care.data: an NHS England programme of work for amalgamating and sharing patient data from primary care for planning and research. It was scrapped in 2016 after three years of public outcry, delays and around 1.5 million opt-outs. I examine UK news media coverage of this programme through the ‘fire object’ metaphor, focusing upon the visions of purpose and value it inspired, the abrupt discontinuities, juxtapositions and transformations it performed, and the matters of concern that went unheeded. Findings suggest that, in care.data's pursuit of a societal consensus on NHS patient data exploitations, various visions for new and fluid data flows brought to presence narratives of transforming the NHS, saving lives, and growing the economy. Other realities and concerns that mattered for certain stakeholders, such as data ownership and commercialisation, public engagement and informed consent, commitment and leadership, operational capabilities, and NHS privatisation agendas, remained absent or unsettled. False dichotomies kept the controversy alive, sealing its fate. I conclude by arguing that such failed programmes can turn into phantom-like objects, haunting future patient data schemes of similar aspirations. The paper highlights the role news media can have in understanding such energetic public controversies.

The Problem of Semantic Shift in Modern Russian: Corpus Research on the Example of a News Media Discourse

This study discusses the issue of semantic shifts observed in high-frequency words, such as discourse, paradigm, narrative , in the news media discourse in the Russian language. It is shown that one of the effective methods of research is corpus analysis, for which an author’s corpus was created based on a random sample of texts of news articles published on the portal of the state news agency RIA Novosti over 2020-2023. Dynamic processes in the semantics of the analyzed highfrequency words were studied on the material of the National Corpus of the Russian language for the period 2000-2019. When considering the results obtained by the corpus analysis method, it was found out that, being initially the linguistic term, “narrative” turned into a functional proforma as a result of a semantic shift that occurred due to the diversity of newly acquired meanings, i.e. there was a modification of the original meaning of the word ‘ story, narration’ , which made the world into the universal one. The classical meaning of the word ‘ paradigm’ , characteristic of linguistics, is not represented in journalism, in the news media discourse it has been given other connotations such as scheme, model, idea, situation , which have moved into the core, nuclear area from the position of the near periphery. Some values are unique, so they have a small frequency (ipm). The interdisciplinary term “discourse” has turned into a term with vague semantics, but, unlike “narrative”, it is not a universal professional form, although it denotes processes occurring in various social spheres. It is shown that the semantic shift is not identical to the increase in the meaning of the word and is not determined strictly contextually. It is necessary to distinguish between the concept of semantic shift and the appearance of new meanings of the word, since the former is fixed in non-standard contexts and the demonstrated meaning cannot be clearly defined. In the course of the study, it was possible to establish that not all semantic shifts should be classified as erroneous, since it depends on the sphere in which the shift was detected. The use of the considered words in a different meaning is not profane, since the mobility of the lexical level of the language leads to transformations in speech and media discourse, allowing the appearance of texts stylistically close to the spoken style. Thus, we have identified and confirmed quantitatively the process of transformation of the words selected for analysis into pro-forms used as substitutes for a wide range of concepts.

Anticipating Immunity: Vaccine-induced Immunity and Vaccine Safety in the Finnish News Coverage of COVID-19 Vaccines

In this article I draw on the concept of anticipation to examine Finnish news discourse on the development, licensing and administration of COVID-19 vaccines. I explore the interplay of anticipation of vaccine-induced immunity and vaccine safety concerns, and trace how ideas of protection and risk were invoked in relation to specific vaccine technologies as well as different accounts of biomedical pasts, including cases of narcolepsy associated with one of the 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccines. I demonstrate that anticipation around vaccine development during a public health emergency operates through a series of small shifts and twists that magnify affects around novel vaccines in news media discourse. I argue that even a slight shift in the biomedical knowledge about immunity or in the historical framing of specific vaccine technologies may significantly reshape vaccine-induced immunity as an object of anticipation.

Narratives of pregnancy across 19 Countries: Analysis of a 1.5-billion-word news media database.

Pregnancy is a universal experience shaped by sociocultural contexts. News media presents a unique opportunity to analyze public narratives of pregnancy and how it differs across cultures. Our study aims to (1) identify the most prevalent overall themes in news media narratives of pregnancy across 19 English-speaking countries, and (2) compare pregnancy narratives across geographic regions. We used the largest English news media corpus that included over 30 million news articles from more than 7000 news websites across 19 countries, and extracted a one-year data subset (2019; 1.5 billion words). Of the primary search terms 'pregnant' and 'pregnancy', we collated 240,464 descriptors that met criteria of lexical proximity and semantic bonding. Thereafter, we used topic modelling to identify the five most prevalent pregnancy-related themes: (1) complications and risk, (2) crime, (3) celebration, (4) celebrity births, and (5) contraception. Although there were regional differences, themes of complications and risk were most common, comprising 39.6% of all pregnancy narratives in our big-data corpus. The second-most dominant theme was crime (20.8%). Narratives of contraception were more prevalent in Europe, North America, and Oceania (27.2-31.3%) compared to Africa and Asia (11.9-19.6%). Though the vast majority of pregnancies are healthy, themes of complications and risk dominated the news media discourse; unchecked, this may be an avenue for misinformation, stress, and anxiety. In addition, lower prevalence of contraception narratives in Africa and Asia may reflect a gap that requires the attention of policymakers in building culturally-adapted programs to promote family planning and encourage open discussions about sexual health. Results contribute to the academic repository of societal representations of pregnancy through a big-data lens, providing contextual information for future development, implementation and evaluation of localized pregnancy-related campaigns.

On the generic profile of online news reports: An anthropolinguistic case study of Reuters’ news coverage of the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022

This article offers insight into the generic profile of news media discourse (O’Keeffe 2006:1, Silverstein 2005:7, Van Dijk 2008:94, Kopytowska 2013:379) based on the (Western) online news coverage during the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It is believed that the generic value of news reportings is realised in patterns which underlie discourse order (Foucault 1972:49), generate its cultural representations (Silverstein 1975:157, Sherzer 1983:11, Chilton 2004:48, Bazerman 2020:152), and construct its social reality (Foley 1997:24, Langacker 2008:21). Advancing the concept of collocates as a tool for establishing lexical patterns in online news reports, examined through a referential lens of anthropological pragmatics (Chruszczewski 2011:50), this paper provides an integrated approach which combines the quantitative method of a concordance-informed discourse analysis (Baker 2006:92) and a qualitative approach which presents how text provides for the context of use through the dimension of media framing (Anshori/Pawito/Tri Kartono/Hastjarjo 2022, Goffman 1986:26).

No name in the street: Unknowability, Black women, and missing geographies

Renisha McBride, who was killed by a white homeowner while seeking help after a car crash, made national headlines due to her murderer’s stand your ground defense failing to absolve him of manslaughter charges. This article argues that a key factor in McBride’s justice claims were the unknown characteristics of her encounter with the murderer that allowed family members to advocate on her behalf. Using the Black Feminist concept of unknowability, I look at how news media discourses about McBride’s unknown space and time prior to her encounter made her invisible while facilitating the continuous questioning of the events that night. Through an analysis of McBride’s negative portrayals in news media and court proceedings along with family members’ testimonies, I consider the ways unknowability affords Black women the ability to move from geographies of invisibility to visibility through a constant questioning of Black women’s relationship to space. I argue that unknowability allowed McBride to obtain some form of juridical justice.

Gendered AI: German news media discourse on the future of work

AbstractIn recent years, there has been a growing public discourse regarding the influence AI will have on the future of work. Simultaneously, considerable critical attention has been given to the implications of AI on gender equality. Far from making precise predictions about the future, this discourse demonstrates that new technologies are instances for renegotiating the relation of gender and work. This paper examines how gender is addressed in news media discourse on AI and the future of work, focusing on Germany. We approach this question from a perspective of feminist technology studies and discourse analysis, exploring a corpus of 178 articles from 2015 to 2021 from German newspapers and newsmagazines. The findings indicate that critical AI and gender knowledge circulates in public discourse in the form of specific discursive frames, thematizing algorithmic bias, automatization and enhancement, and gender stereotypes. As a result, we show that, first, the discourse takes up feminist and scholarly discourse on gender and discusses AI in a way that is informed by social constructivism and standpoint theories. Second, gender appears as a—to some extent intersectional—diversity category which is critical to AI, while at the same time omitting important perspectives. Third, it can be shown that there is a renegotiating of the ideal worker norm taking place, and finally, we argue that the gendered frame of the powerful men developer responsible for AI’s risk is a concept to be challenged.

App-Hazard Disruption: An Empirical Investigation of Media Discourses on ChatGPT in Educational Contexts

Our paper traces the dominant social imaginaries of ChatGPT in educational contexts as these present in news media discourses. While media plays a central role in shaping the sociotechnical imaginaries we share on specific topics, media texts have thus far been used as the basis for such analysis only in limited instances. To remedy this gap, we apply a critical discursive psychology approach to a sample (N = 143) of news stories and opinion pieces published about ChatGPT in educational contexts in December 2022 and January 2023. Our analysis shows that socially irresponsible technology release tends to operate with relative impunity and lack of regard for social consequences entailed by such technology introduction. The educational sector reported finding itself struggling to address the implications from ChatGPT, in particular whether the central issue pertains to the ‘product’ of such technologies or the face-the-facts necessity of incorporating ChatGPT into educational processes.

The Johnny Depp and Amber Heard Case in News Media: A Critical Discourse Analysis

This article presents a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard case in news media. The aim of the current research is to allow for an in-depth analysis of how a range of news media outlets used discourse to frame intimate partner violence (IPV) in modern news media. A synthesis of previous literature revealed methodological limitations and a potential research bias in the existing body of research addressing news media discourse regarding IPV. The current study utilized a sample of 12 articles from three news media outlets of distinct political orientations that were analyzed following guidelines on maintaining quality in CDA. Two discursive strategies are presented in this article: (a) predication and argumentation; (b) the construction of ingroups and outgroups. This article argues that these strategies were used to discredit the experience of Depp and create perceived ingroups and outgroups throughout the discourse. It is also noted that this sample of articles only highlighted instances of physical violence. Future research should investigate the effect this representation of IPV may have on consumers of news media, as societal expectations may inform help seeking.

Quoting Chinese Political Discourse through Translation: An Analysis of Xi Jinping’s Climate Change Discourse in English-language News Media

Climate change is a heated topic that attracts media and political attention. Previous research has analyzed political discourse using different approaches from various perspectives. However, few studies have investigated the recontextualization of Chinese political discourses in the mass media via translation. This study analyzes how President Xi Jinping’s discourses on climate change are translated and represented in the Chinese, British and American media. It draws on political discourse analysis and the narrative theory conception of quoting, including direct, indirect and mixed quotations. The study analyzes a selection of Xi’s translated quotations through manual coding and examines Chinese and English news outlets’ speech representation. The quotations are interpreted in their socio-political contexts and in relation to aspects such as journalistic conventions. The findings show that these factors contribute to the narrative shifts observed between institutional translation and news translation. The study provides insights into cross-cultural communication and the role of translation in shaping public opinion on important global issues such as climate change.

Shocktainment Techniques in the Mirror, a British Daily Tabloid: Linguocultural Features of news and semantic-cognitive Analysis of Leading Concepts.

This study analyzed 300 news articles from the online version of the British daily tabloid The Mirror. Quantitative analysis showed that shocktainment elements are present in 150 news articles out of 300. The results showed that some shocktainment categories are either incompletely presented or lose to other categories. At the same time, the techniques of familiarity (800), absurdity (908), outrage (5,105), influence (4,200), and persuasion (1,101) are used much less frequently than others. The study proved that the authors of the articles actively use shocktainment techniques since they allow the authors to explain the linguocultural features of the country to the readers easily and understandably. The analysis also revealed the main topics that are disclosed in news articles with the use of shocktainment and trigger cognitive processes in readers. The study results can help to correct theoretical and empirical gaps in the research on news media discourse.

Challenging the elite-public divide; Representing former Indonesian first lady, Ani Yudhoyono in online news discourse

Women in politics invariably attract heightened levels of attention due to their marked difference to the masculine political norm. With the rise of social media and online news, political women can achieve visibility, but also experience even more intense scrutiny. Former first lady, Ani Yudhoyono became an iconic figure in the lead up to the 2014 Indonesian presidential election, through her association with her husband’s flailing presidency, and as a high-profile political woman involved in social media blunders. Using critical discourse analysis, specifically social actor analysis, this paper examines the discursive strategies engaged by the mainstream Indonesian online news media to malign Ani Yudhoyono, and draw a wedge between her and the Indonesian public, which in turn undermined her husband’s presidency. The analysis highlights the role of online news media discourse in shaping power relations and ideological groupings, as well as the role of first lady as a target of political contestation.

CONSTRUCTING RELATIONAL AND VERIFIABLE PROTEST EVENT DATA: FOUR CHALLENGES AND SOME SOLUTIONS*

We call for a relational approach to constructing protest event data from news sources to provide tools for detecting and correcting errors and for capturing the relations among events and between events and the texts describing them. We address two problems with most protest event datasets: (1) inconsistencies and errors in identifying events and (2) disconnect between data structures and what is known about how protests and media accounts of protests are produced. Relational data structures can capture the theoretically important structuring of events into campaigns and episodes and media attention cascades and cycles. Relational data structures support richer theorizing about the interplay of protests and their representations in news media discourses. We present preliminary illustrative data about Black protests from these new procedures to demonstrate the value of this approach.

Attention to news media coverage of unconventional oil/gas development impacts: Exploring psychological antecedents and effects on issue support

Research has examined media portrayals of unconventional oil and gas development's (UOGD) economic and environmental impacts. We examine how selective attention to media coverage of the impacts impact issue attitudes; the role of political ideology in driving such attention; and how this political divide emerges via selective attention to aforementioned content. We contribute to existing work on media attention antecedents and outcomes but with a hitherto unexplored focus on specific issue dimensions that have garnered media and public attention. We explore these relationships using U.S. national survey data (n = 700). We find that political ideology is not associated with attention to coverage of economic impacts, but such attention is predictive of higher UOGD support. Moreover, political ideology is associated with attention to coverage of environmental impacts (more conservative → less attention), and such attention predicts lower support. This indirect effect was also statistically meaningful. Overall, UOGD news media discourse (and attention thereto) has important energy policy implications.

The Role of the Nonprofit Sector within the Climate Change Discourse: The View Through Russian News Media

Abstract This study attempts to understand the role of the nonprofit sector within the climate change discourse in Russian news media. It explores the news media coverage of climate change and nonprofit sector through the quantitative review of Russian news articles published within the five-year period of 2016–2021. We find that the nonprofit sector generally gains positive media coverage, and the climate change is presented as mostly a national and political issue, while the scientific discussions are very rare. Government and nongovernment news media sources diverge in their coverage on the topic. The state-owned media views the climate change as a national issue relying predominantly on Russian official sources, and praising assistance that the Russian government provides to the nonprofit sector. On the other hand, the nongovernment media highlights the political aspects of the climate change, includes government critique, and often draw on business and foreign sources.

A battle for foreign perceptions: Ukraine’s country image in the 2022 war with Russia

This paper examines the 2022 War in Ukraine through the conceptual lens of country image within a broader framework of public diplomacy, soft power, and nation branding. It applies integrative and longitudinal perspectives to examine Ukraine’s country image and country image cultivation strategies over a period of three decades from its independence in 1991 to the 2022 Russo-Ukraine War. To understand Ukraine’s country image, or perceptions of Ukraine held by international stakeholders, a case study examined a convergence of multiple sources of evidence and methods. One method focuses on sentiment analysis through Leximancer, a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software, to evaluate and compare Ukraine’s country image in international news media discourse across three periods of analysis separated by three major events: Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, and the 2022 Russo-Ukraine War. The findings suggest that Ukraine’s country image has strengthened over time, and has been effective in delegitimizing the 2022 Russian invasion and securing strong support from the international community.

Evaluating criminal justice reform during COVID-19: The need for a novel sentiment analysis package.

The health and safety of incarcerated persons and correctional personnel have been prominent in the U.S. news media discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining changing attitudes toward the health of the incarcerated population is imperative to better assess the extent to which the general public favors criminal justice reform. However, existing natural language processing lexicons that underlie current sentiment analysis (SA) algorithms may not perform adequately on news articles related to criminal justice due to contextual complexities. News discourse during the pandemic has highlighted the need for a novel SA lexicon and algorithm (i.e., an SA package) tailored for examining public health policy in the context of the criminal justice system. We analyzed the performance of existing SA packages on a corpus of news articles at the intersection of COVID-19 and criminal justice collected from state-level outlets between January and May 2020. Our results demonstrated that sentence sentiment scores provided by three popular SA packages can differ considerably from manually-curated ratings. This dissimilarity was especially pronounced when the text was more polarized, whether negatively or positively. A randomly selected set of 1,000 manually scored sentences, and the corresponding binary document term matrices, were used to train two new sentiment prediction algorithms (i.e., linear regression and random forest regression) to verify the performance of the manually-curated ratings. By better accounting for the unique context in which incarceration-related terminologies are used in news media, both of our proposed models outperformed all existing SA packages considered for comparison. Our findings suggest that there is a need to develop a novel lexicon, and potentially an accompanying algorithm, for analysis of text related to public health within the criminal justice system, as well as criminal justice more broadly.