Piece Of News Research Articles

MADE IN BRAZIL: CONSPIRACY THEORY AND THE FLOW OF INFORMATION IN ONE-TO-ONE WHATSAPP CONVERSATIONS

This essay aims to shed light on the multiple and complex ways that information flows among individuals in times of intense use of digital platforms. Based on actor-network theory, it unveils largely unknown communication processes about the controversial death of the Brazilian Supreme Court Justice, Teori Zavascki in 2017 that occurred in closed conversations in which the author was part. Analyzing primary data, the essay discusses the signs of authority that allow for non-verified or fiction pieces to circulate as if they were news pieces, enabling conspiracy theories to take form. The essay defends that mutual responsibility in building the narrative with peers within a likeminded groups, and “translation” processes in which sender and information merge their characteristics to create trust are important factors to understand this phenomenon. Furthermore, in discussing news as cultural artifacts, the essay also raises reflections of the limits of framing this phenomenon as fake news, which artificially oppose what is “real” and “fake” disregarding cultural dynamics at stake.

Football Misinformation Matrix: A Comparative Study of 2020 Winter Transfer News in Four European Sports Media Outlets

Mainstream sports media generate a football information overload that sometimes makes it difficult to separate rumours from real news. Accordingly, this paper analyses the level of misinformation in the coverage of the 2020 winter football transfer window in four leading European digital sports media outlets: Marca (Spain), A Bola (Portugal), La Gazzetta (Italy) and The Guardian Sport (Britain). The methodology used was based on the content analysis of hundreds of news pieces and tweets posted on these outlets’ football homepages and Twitter handles over a month. To examine to what extent this coverage may have been speculative, misleading or false, the misinformation matrix developed by the fact-checking organisation First Draft News was employed to classify five different types of inaccuracies in sports reporting. A system was also created to determine how many reported rumours finally turned out to be true, which sources were more reliable and what outlets resulted more accurate. The findings reveal that the four digital media published a larger amount of non-factual content about likely football deals rather than sealed transfers. Speculative reporting prevailed in the coverage of the top teams in each league, on which the media outlets placed the accent, whereas reporting about minor clubs was based more on factual news.

“A Possibly Sick Bird that Could Inform Broader Public Policy”: Discourse Analysis of Humor and News Discourse in “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”

Comedy news has become a relevant and influential referent of news media diet for people in the U.S. One of the major exponents of this kind of outlets in the U.S. is the show Last Week Tonight. This paper analyzes the objective value of comedy discourse and news discourse from this show and aims at investigating its persuasive effect on people. Van Dijk’s (1983) model of news discourse analysis, and Attardo’s (2010), and Attardo and Raskin (1991) sequences of joke organization and General Theory of Verbal Humor joke-forming resources were used to apply a conceptual framework for the jokes and the news piece structure of this paper. Results showed that humor is used in pieces of information as de-escalation to the seriousness of news discourse, and that this show has a robust news discourse structure similar to serious news programs.

Visions of Europe in Crisis: Strategic narratives and their alternatives in Russian state and independent media coverage of the 2015-16 ‘Refugee Crisis’

What stories do states tell about themselves and their neighbours, and how are these narratives challenged? This study takes the case of the European ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015-2016, a period of hostile relations between Russia and the European Union, to examine the vision of Europe disseminated by Russian state-controlled media, and the alternative offered by independent media. It analyses 609 news reports on the ‘refugee crisis’ from state-controlled broadcaster Channel One and 181 news pieces from the independent web-based outlet TV Rain. Adopting the strategic narrative framework proposed by Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle (2013), this study both provides new detail on the narratives found on Russian state-controlled media, and asks the previously unresearched question: how do independent media outlets react to the dominant narratives seen on state broadcasters? It uses a grounded theory approach to elaborate new findings on the behaviour of independent media. The importance of independent media has traditionally been understood in terms of its ability to hold government to account, but the findings of this study suggest independent media can also act as a watchdog and corrective to state-controlled media. This study thus contributes to the literature on both strategic narratives, and media theory.

The portrayal of sex in online media as conflictive, feminized behavior far from hedonic pleasure

Sex is news. Sex is widely present in the media, from news pieces on abuse, pornography, and scandals to reports on hedonic practices and erotic tendencies. To investigate its portrayal in the media, we carried out a quantitative content analysis (n = 950) of the journalistic pieces in which sex appears, published in the Spanish online media eldiario.es, elpais.com, and abc.es during 2019. In addition, a distinction is made between three dimensions of sex: sex as a condition (“sex that one is”), sex as behavior (“sex that is done”), and sex as an attribute (“sex that one has”). The results of this study indicate that more than two-thirds of the analyzed news pieces address sex as a behavior with potential negative consequences. Likewise, the terminological analysis reveals the feminization of news about sex, especially with regard to sex as a condition. Consequently, the online press does not advance beyond the hegemonic image but is rather limited to disseminating stereotypes established in society and thereby contributes to maintaining and propagating sexophobic and erotophobic attitudes. This scenario suggests a lack of communication strategies to report on sex, with the exception of those incorporating the gender perspective. However, when understood based on a prism of power relations, this approach only intensifies the discourse against it. These findings underscore the need to rethink media narratives about sex and adopt other propositional approaches for framing sex as a value.

An Unknown Work about Boris Godunov from the Post-Petrine Era

This article examines a new early manuscript containing two works by an unknown compiler in the 1730s: the story of the “tyrant Ivan the Terrible” and Boris Godunov “greedy” for autocratic power. The manuscript is kept in the State Archives of Ryazan Region as part of the collection of the Ryazan Provincial Scientific Archival Commission. The study demonstrates that its brief archaeographic description was given in 1892 by Aleksey Vasilyevich Selivanov, one of the founders of the archival commission in Ryazan. Relying on watermarks, he dates the collection to about 1727; in 2001, the manuscript was described anew in a review of the manuscript collection of the State Archives of Ryazan Region. The authors analyse the part of the manuscript collection containing an essay about Boris Godunov; this essay has not been introduced into scholarly circulation previously. The article reveals the compiler’s sources, which turn out to be translations of notes taken by foreigners about Russia between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, more particularly the works of Jerome Horsey, Jacob Ulfeldt, Adam Olearius, and some others. Also, the authors single out a whole series of parallel pieces of news from Jerome Horsey’s notes in a little-known version of the publication in Old German about Tsar Boris’ character. The authors focus on which notes would have been available to the alleged compiler of the collection in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The article contains data revealing the provenance of the work. Additionally, an assumption is made about the possible author of the published source, who was probably related to the circle of victims in the case of Artemy Volynsky. Finally, the appendix to the article contains the previously unpublished text of the manuscript about Boris Godunov.

A model of indirect contagion based on a news similarity network

AbstractOur objective is to model indirect contagion among companies. We use pieces of news about companies to measure the similarities between them. We assume that two companies are similar if we may associate a story about one company with the story about another company and vice-versa. First, after statistically eliminating arbitrary similarities between companies, we introduce a network based on the news similarities. Second, we evaluate a vector of stationary probabilities associated with the process of contagion that takes place in the network and we use these pieces of information to define the notion of centrality. Third, we use this vector of stationary probabilities to build an associated graph that reveals the most important paths of information contagion. Finally, we build a model of indirect contagion and evaluate the size of the information avalanches that take place in the similarity network.

Le voleur d’enfants (1906) : trompe-l’oeil médiatique et fausse nouvelle romanesque

Le voleur d’enfants est un roman de Louis Forest paru dans en feuilleton dans Le matin en 1906. Le texte se démarque par sa forme inusitée, mimant la couverture d’une grande affaire criminelle par la presse. Fausse nouvelle, le roman ne vise pas tant à tromper qu’à divertir en jouant avec un certain imaginaire du crime et en utilisant les formes poétiques propres au journal de l’époque. À cet égard, le texte peut être analysé comme l’équivalent fictionnel d’un genre pictural visant à produire des effets similaires : le trompe-l’oeil.

SIMILAR BUT NOT ALIKE: THE FRAMING OF COVID-19 IN INDONESIAN AND MALAYSIAN NEWSPAPERS

The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly caused havoc all over the world. Governments, healthcare personnel, and the general public are all struggling to survive the health crisis. In such calamity, the media plays an important role as it is able to impact public attitude and response towards the pandemic. Malaysia and Indonesia are two neighbouring countries that are equally affected by the pandemic. These countries share the same language and geographic location, but they have distinct populations, government systems, and ethnic identities. This study compares the news framing of Covid-19 in Malaysian and Indonesian newspapers to understand how socio-political and cultural similarities and differences affect how the health crisis is framed and presented. The Star (Malaysia) and Detik (Indonesia) were chosen to be studied in this paper, with a total of 369 news pieces obtained between 60 days after the first local COVID-19 case was discovered in the respective country. The findings suggest that the framing of Malaysian online newspapers was action-oriented, whereas the framing of Indonesian online newspapers was uncertainty-oriented. In addition, Malaysian and Indonesian internet newspapers were quick to report on the Covid-19 news. Both cited the government as their primary source and addressed risk bearers as their primary focus. This shows that despite their geographical proximities, the two countries had distinct ways of covering the pandemic.

Media crisis and disinformation: the participation of digital newspapers in the dissemination of a denialist hoax

Disinformation is a communicative phenomenon that frequently feeds on political or electoral topics, as well as other aspects of our reality. This research takes as a case study the coverage given by the Spanish digital media to a hoax broadcast during the Filomena storm in 2021 that insisted that the snow was plastic. The purpose of this work is to analyze the instrumentalization of fake information as an expression of the information media crisis in the current context of disinformation. We set out four specific objectives: (SO1) to study the spread of the hoax through the media, (SO2) to analyze the construction of headlines in the news pieces, (SO3) to investigate the treatment of the hoax in the content of the pieces, and (SO4) to analyze the sources used in the pieces. To reflect on this phenomenon, we propose a three-dimensional model (structural, economic, and pragmatic) aimed at clarifying the relationship between the logic of the spread of hoaxes on the Internet and the role played by traditional media in their diffusion. The methodology used combines workflow techniques of digital methods with quantitative and content analyses. The results reveal the appropriation of certain communication strategies by digital newspapers aimed at obtaining visits. We conclude that the Spanish media, by adapting to the dynamics of disinformation irresponsibly encouraged by the attention economy, subscribe to and reinforce the crisis of credibility faced by the media ecosystem.

Detecting Comments on News Articles in Microblogs

A reader of a news article would often be interested in the comments of other readers on an article, because comments give insight into popular opinions or feelings toward a given piece of news. In recent years, social media platforms, such as Twitter, have become a social hub for users to communicate and express their thoughts. This includes sharing news articles and commenting on them. In this paper, we propose an approach for identifying “comment-tweets” that comment on news articles. We discuss the nature of comment-tweets and compare them to subjective tweets. We utilize a machine learning-based classification approach for distinguishing between comment-tweets and others that only report the news. Our approach is evaluated on the TREC-2011 Microblog track data after applying additional annotations to tweets containing comments. Results show the effectiveness of our classification approach. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on live news articles.

Today Is My Day: Analysis of the Awareness Campaigns' Impact on Functional Diversity in the Press, on Google, and on Twitter.

(1) Every day, people with functional diversity face different kinds of difficulties that pose a barrier to their social inclusion. These difficulties often go unnoticed by most citizens. Social networks are a powerful tool to sensitize the population. With this objective, different organizations such as associations, federations, foundations, and other institutions have promoted campaigns through the celebration of world days for different types of functional diversity. This research aims to monitor and analyze the impact of these social campaigns in Spain, including Asperger’s syndrome, rare diseases, Down syndrome, autism, hearing and visual impairment, cerebral palsy, dyslexia, ADHD, spina bifida, disability, and dyscalculia world days, between 2015 and 2020. (2) The impact of each campaign on the press, Google, and Twitter has been analyzed using: MyNews, Google Trends, and Trendinalia. (3) The results suggest a close relationship between the impact on the number of pieces of news generated in the press, the searches on Google, and the hashtags in high positions on Twitter. (4) The campaigns with the greatest levels of success are those whose diagnoses involve greater difficulties in adaptive behavior. These results can provide some practical implications for future campaigns.

A Signal Detection Approach to Understanding the Identification of Fake News

Researchers across many disciplines seek to understand how misinformation spreads with a view toward limiting its impact. One important question in this research is how people determine whether a given piece of news is real or fake. In the current article, we discuss the value of signal detection theory (SDT) in disentangling two distinct aspects in the identification of fake news: (a) ability to accurately distinguish between real news and fake news and (b) response biases to judge news as real or fake regardless of news veracity. The value of SDT for understanding the determinants of fake-news beliefs is illustrated with reanalyses of existing data sets, providing more nuanced insights into how partisan bias, cognitive reflection, and prior exposure influence the identification of fake news. Implications of SDT for the use of source-related information in the identification of fake news, interventions to improve people’s skills in detecting fake news, and the debunking of misinformation are discussed.

“Flatten the Curve”: Data-Driven Projections and the Journalistic Brokering of Knowledge during the COVID-19 Crisis

The Coronavirus has prompted an urgent need for guidance and practical intervention. Newsmakers responded to this demand by providing outlooks that plotted the contagion’s contours against a host of parameters. The article looks back at this acute area of sensemaking where journalistic forecasts, epidemiological modelling, and policy measures intertwined. It examines how possible courses of the pandemic were displayed and discussed in the multimodal infographics and reports of data journalistic news products. The estimations predominantly choose to take the form of bell-shaped curves which conceived of the disease as a kind of wave that should, after reaching its peak, flatten out again. Confronted with an immense degree of uncertainty around the illness and an ambiguous environment of conflicting meanings and explanations, we argue that this predictive newswork fulfilled some of the journalistic functions of brokering knowledge. By giving cogent visual form to the incoherent prognoses, it raised awareness of the available models and rendered COVID-19’s potential developments accessible to policy makers and the public. By comparing sources, the data-driven forecasts fostered engagement with the spectrum of outlooks and the uncertainty they entailed. Furthermore, the news pieces connected consonant sources from science and public health institutions.

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Angel of the Odd, an Extravaganza

Publicado pela primeira vez em 1844, The Angel of The Odd, an Extravaganza, é um conto burlesco-parodístico que revela a veia cômica de Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), o mestre norte-americano das histórias de terror e mistério, autor de um dos poemas mais conhecidos do mundo, The Raven (O corvo), e também considerado um dos criadores do gênero investigativo-policial. Após ler num jornal uma notícia que considera insólita e externar dúvidas quanto a sua veracidade, o narrador tem um encontro inesperado com uma figura muito estranha que se autodenomina Anjo do Estranho. A partir desse encontro, o narrador se vê envolvido em diversas situações que parecem casuais, obras do acaso, mas que nos levam a suspeitar serem provocadas pelo misterioso anjo – que em nada lembra os anjos convencionais –, todas com o objetivo de provar que os “estranhos acidentes”, de cuja existência o narrador duvidava, acontecem, sim, não sendo meras invenções de jornalistas. Esta nova tradução, precedida de uma breve apresentação, procura recriar os elementos estilísticos que marcam esse conto de Allan Poe – em especial o modo de falar do Anjo com seu forte sotaque alemão –, bem como resgatar, em notas de rodapé, referências talvez desconhecidas para o leitor brasileiro contemporâneo. Por se tratar de um conto redigido originalmente há quase 180 anos, procurou-se também manter uma certa “pátina de antiguidade”, como diria Paulo Rónai, com o emprego de recursos vocabulares e sintáticos capazes de remeter o leitor atual à paisagem do período narrado.

Information about Human Evolution: An Analysis of News Published in Communication Media in Spanish between 2015 and 2017

The present study examines a sample of 220 pieces of news related to human evolution, written in Spanish and published over a period of two years, both in digital and print media. The aim of this study is to assess the rigor and coherence of the information in the news in our sample with scientific knowledge on the theory of evolution. To this end, errors and the incorrect use of concepts related to biological evolution are identified, classified according to criteria resulting from the review of previous studies, and finally, the frequency of errors identified in news published in print media is compared with that identified in digital media. The results presented allow us to highlight the significantly high frequency of errors in the news analyzed and the most frequent error categories. Results are discussed within the frame of the important role that scientific journalism plays in the processes of knowledge dissemination, in this case, related to human evolution.

“If This account is True, It is Most Enormously Wonderful”: Interestingness-If-True and the Sharing of True and False News

Why would people share news they think might not be accurate? We identify a factor that, alongside accuracy, drives the sharing of true and fake news: the ‘interestingness-if-true’ of a piece of news. In three pre-registered experiments (N = 904), participants were presented with a series of true and fake news, and asked to rate the accuracy of the news, how interesting the news would be if it were true, and how likely they would be to share it. Participants were more willing to share news they found more interesting-if-true, as well as news they deemed more accurate. They deemed fake news less accurate but more interesting-if-true than true news, and were more likely to share true news than fake news. As expected, interestingness-if-true differed from interestingness and accuracy, and had good face validity. Higher trust in mass media was associated with a greater ability to discern true from fake news, and participants rated as more accurate news that they had already been exposed to (especially for true news). We argue that people may not share news of questionable accuracy by mistake, but instead because the news has qualities that compensate for its potential inaccuracy, such as being interesting-if-true.

News Text: Genre Transformation

The article considers a news text as a secondary type of text where news content undergoes modifications as a result of humorous interpretation. New trends in media coverage, which lead to a change in its format and linguistic content, are analyzed. The creation of a secondary news text / genre is shown as performed through transforming the main (primary) news text. The secondary media text belongs to the comic picture of the world, the modeling of which becomes possible due to various means of the comic which fulfill social-critical, aesthetic and entertainment functions. The empirical material of the study comprises 530 news texts telecast at the beginning of the program "Evening Urgant" on Channel One in 2017–2020. The identified mechanism of news transformation includes the use of irony, sarcasm, comic exaggeration and understatement, references to precedent phenomena, the techniques of allegory, comic dissonance and comic surprise, comic exposure, etc. The analysis of the news transformation mechanism revealed a reduction in the primary news component with a simultaneous "build-up" of a pragmatic component through the use of various means and techniques of the comic. This leads to the construction of a secondary news text, which, in turn, is characterized by a recombined semantic content and subjective interpretation of the primary news piece.

Novel technologies and Geopolitical Strategies: Disinformation Narratives in the Countries of the Visegrád Group

Abstract In the current media environment of growing information disorder and social media platforms emerging as primary news sources, the creation and spread of disinformation is becoming increasingly easy and cost-effective. The projection of strategic narratives through disinformation campaigns is an important geopolitical tool in the global competition for power and status. We have analysed close to 1,000 individual news pieces from more than 60 different online sources containing disinformation, which originally appeared in one of the V4 languages, using a natural language processing algorithm. We have assessed the frequency of recurring themes within the articles and their relationship structure, to see whether consistent disinformation narratives were to be found among them. Through frequency analysis and relationship charting, we have been able to uncover individual storylines connected to more than ten overarching disinformation narratives. We have also exposed five key meta-narratives present in all Visegrád Countries, which fed into a coherent system of beliefs, such as the envisioned collapse of the European Union or the establishment of a system of Neo-Atlantism, which would permanently divide the continent.

China in the eyes of news media: a case study under COVID-19 epidemic

As one of the early COVID-19 epidemic outbreak areas, China attracted the global news media’s attention at the beginning of 2020. During the epidemic period, Chinese people united and actively fought against the epidemic. However, in the eyes of the international public, the situation reported about China is not optimistic. To better understand how the international public portrays China, especially during the epidemic, we present a case study with big data technology. We aim to answer three questions: (1) What has the international media focused on during the COVID-19 epidemic period? (2) What is the media’s tone when they report China? (3) What is the media’s attitude when talking about China? In detail, we crawled more than 280 000 pieces of news from 57 mainstream media agencies in 22 countries and made some interesting observations. For example, international media paid more attention to Chinese livelihood during the COVID-19 epidemic period. In March and April, “progress of Chinese vaccines,” “specific drugs and treatments,” and “virus outbreak in U.S.” became the media’s most common topics. In terms of news attitude, Cuba, Malaysia, and Venezuela had a positive attitude toward China, while France, Canada, and the United Kingdom had a negative attitude. Our study can help understand China’s image in the eyes of the international media and provide a sound basis for image analysis.