News Stories Research Articles

ANALYZING MEDIA PERSPECTIVES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF WESTERN AND MIDDLE EASTERN FRAMING OF HAMAS

After the 9/11 attacks, Western society, especially the United States, began to consider Islam as a religion that gave birth to terrorist organizations. Many media also brand organizations related to the Islamic religion as terrorists, including Hamas. In order to emphasize the intricate relationships between media, geopolitics, and the formation of public opinion, this research seeks to analyze potential biases and contrasting narratives between Western and Middle Eastern opinions on Hamas. In order to examine depictions of Hamas as a "hero," "terrorist," "cruel," and exhibiting "humane" treatment towards civilians and hostages, this study used NVivo 12 Plus to analyze 150 news stories, 75 of which came from Middle Eastern (Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, Asharq Al-Awsat) and 75 from Western (BBC, CNN, The Guardian) media sources. The findings indicate that Western media typically adopts a more solemn narratives, emphasizing Hamas-related conflict and violence. However, the narrative from Middle Eastern media emphasizing Hamas-related themes of resistance and heroism. This research can assist journalists and media organizations in recognizing potential biases and differing narratives in their coverage of Hamas and related subjects.

Was there a Better Time to be Mother? Past and Present of the Socio-Cultural Fear of Crime

Fear of crime refers to the fear of being a victim of crime, and it is nurtured by folklore and the media. Folklore fosters fear of crime by using oral tradition transferred throughout generations by updating old contexts into modern times. On the other hand, the media visualizes the possibility of being a victim by introducing the real-life experiences of victims. Contrary to folklore, victims presented in the media seem more accessible, and the victimization of individuals can be proven. Folklore and the media have cooperated to keep the fear of crime alive to warn society that individual lives are on the verge of becoming victims of criminals. In this paper, I aim to describe the fear of crime through two particular crimes: Child abductions and organ thefts. Data for this research comes from two sets of materials: Newspaper news stories and semi-structured interviews conducted in face-to-face settings with mothers from two different generations. My research reveals that mothers of the eighties were scared of their children being victims of beggar gangs and organ trade criminals, while generation Y mothers suffer from the possibility of their children being victims of online grooming and sextortion. Keywords: Folklore, media, fear of crime, urban legends, organ theft narratives.

The In-House Balance: Negotiating Professional Identity, Boundaries, and Ethical Quandaries as an In-House Sports Reporter

ABSTRACT The sports media landscape has shifted to favor outlets with inside access to sports organizations, teams, and athletes. This study interviews 21 NFL in-house reporters working at 19 official team websites to determine how they view their roles as sports journalists, including ethical standards and shifts in media boundaries. Qualitative interviews uncovered that cultivating a positive team image and protecting the interests of stakeholders supersede the production of objective news stories, even from those who started their careers as external sports reporters. Internal reporters are often conflicted with their roles in the sports media ecosystem. Additionally, interviews reveal their efforts to maintain a balancing act between the established ideals of journalism with the positive spin that accompanies public relations. The present study illuminates how such positions both mirror and diverge from the expectations typically placed within sports journalism, while offering fruitful avenues for subsequent scholarly investigation.

The Quality of COVID-19 Coverage: Investigating Relevance and Viewpoint Diversity in German Mainstream and Alternative Media

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic was a major challenge for journalism. In the case of Germany, critics very early on voiced concerns over the quality of mainstream media coverage. Mainstream media were attacked for the intensity of their coverage, for reporting too much and unnecessarily frightening audiences, for not presenting a diversity of viewpoints on the pandemic and the measures taken to mitigate it, and for being one-sided and too close to the government. Against this background, this paper examines the intensity and viewpoint diversity of the coverage of 13 mainstream and two alternative media in Germany in 2020 and 2021. Based on a comprehensive manual content analysis of almost 9000 news stories, we conclude that the mainstream media did not cover the pandemic in a fundamentally exaggerated or one-sided way. However, they did not always report intensively when the pandemic was particularly severe, and they tended to warn against the pandemic rather than criticize the measures taken. In contrast, alternative media coverage tended to be more one-sided and generally biased against government measures.

THE PARALLELISM OF ENGLISH AND URDU PRESS IN PAKISTAN: CHALLENGES AND OUTCOMES

This paper examines Urdu and English press in Pakistan to identify the differences between the two. Linguistically, both Urdu and English mass media function as the leading media of Pakistan; however, the differences of news and views in presentation, style, and focus refer to an information chasm that we call ‘information segregation.’ In our study, that spans over the period of one-year, i.e., January 1, 2023, to December 31, 2023, we essentially engage in a critical discourse analysis of front-page news stories and op-ed articles (mostly editorials) of four national broadsheet newspapers, especially for two important incidents in 2023, i.e., (i) the May 9 riots, and (ii) the Jaranwala incident. Our analysis demonstrates that there is a difference of focus and presentation style especially in issues related to disputing the status quo and having a bold/critical stance on religiously controversial and sensitive issues such as blasphemy law. In this difference, English media appears to have an audacious approach as compared to Urdu media. With Walter Lipmann, we argue that news and views in media are subject to journalistic and editorial choices. Although studying the reasons of these choices is beyond the scope of this study, we contend that a linguistically different mass media in Pakistan creates (and perpetuates) different worldview for its audience, which is unaligned with inclusive and egalitarian norms of a democratic society.

Journalism and Translation: Practices, Strategies, and Values in News Agencies

Information transmitted between cultures through news agencies, are not only translated in meaning between languages, but are also reconfigured, edited, synthes ized and transformed for the consumption of a new group of readers. In the world of global media, the definition of translation is being challenged and the boundaries of what we might call translation have been reformulated. By investigating mechanisms of news translation, we seek through our research paper to collect a number of foundations proposed by many greatest thinkers in this field. Today, the so-called global communication strategies, does exist. Studies of globalization, media studies, sociology and translation have vast areas of common interest. The question of global information flows is related to the ways in which the media build news stories, and the transmission of these laters often involves moving, not only across space, but also across linguistic and cultural boundaries, which makes the collision between international media and translation, occurs.

A STUDY AND DEVELOPMENT OF APPLICATION ON SENTIMENT ANALYSIS

A subfield of natural language processing called sentiment analysis is concerned with locating and obtaining subjective data from text. Analysing and categorising the emotional tone or polarity indicated in text—such as reviews, social media postings, news stories, and consumer feedback—is its primary goal. A subfield of natural language processing called sentiment analysis is concerned with locating and obtaining subjective data from text. Analysing and categorising the emotional tone or polarity indicated in text—such as reviews, social media postings, news stories, and consumer feedback—is its primary goal. Conversely, machine learning-based techniques employ algorithms to learn from a labelled dataset and categorise fresh data according to patterns seen in the training data. Hybrid methods combine both approaches to achieve better accuracy and coverage. Machine learning models, particularly Support Vector Machines (SVM), were utilized for sentiment analysis, involving the conversion of text data into numerical feature vectors and learning a hyperplane to classify sentiments accurately. Keywords: Sentiment Analysis, Machine Learning, HTML, Support Vector Machines, Bootstrap, Visual Studio Code.

News Media Representations of Protesting Farmers and the Kidapawan Massacre in Central Mindanao, the Philippines

This study explored the media representations of farmer-victims in Kidapawan City, the Philippines. By employing critical discourse analysis, it examined 27 tabloid news stories and exposed how Metropolis-based news media represented the farmers who were reportedly involved in socio-political issues with the government that paved the way to the Kidapawan Massacre dated April 1, 2016. The analysis of media representation of farmers identified four themes: the villains-victims, conflict and politics, media as faultfinders and terminology crisis. It included concurring, dissenting and nondiscriminatory arguments, but were not helpful in resolving conflicts. Rather than skewed representations, the media needs to play a better role in upholding the interest of farmers.

THE PROCESS OF ESTABLISHING CANONICAL STRUCTURES IN THE ARMENIAN APOSTOLIC CHURCH IN RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH IN ARMENIA (1991-2023)

The paper analyzes how over the past thirty years the canonical structures (dioceses) of the Armenian Apostolic Church were established in the Russian Federation, on the one hand, and how the corresponding structures of the Russian Orthodox Church were established in the Republic of Armenia, on the other. Methodologically, the paper is based on the systematization, classification and analysis of documents, historiographic sources on the topic under consideration, and materials of news stories. The paper offers a new approach where the author considers the process as one of the directions in the context of the recent history of Russian-Armenian inter-church interaction.

The Limits of ‘Opportunity’: Is There a Clear Labour or Conservative View of Social Mobility?

AbstractThis article considers the relationship between views of social mobility in British politics, identifying four competing views in government statements, political news stories and opinion pieces. The two established views are the Blairite liberal view, which seeks to widen entry into the ‘playing field’ of educational ‘opportunity’, and its companion bourgeois view, protecting the acclaim given to elite educational experiences. Against these established views are two insurgent views: a (politically ignored) socialist view and a ‘postliberal’ view introduced into the Social Mobility Commission under the chairship of the loosely Conservative‐aligned Katharine Birbalsingh. On the right, the postliberal and bourgeois views explicitly clash. On the left, with the socialist view dormant, the postliberal view is assimilated by Labour almost as a socialism substitute, appearing in turn with the Blairite liberal view in Labour rhetoric. The result is, respectively on right and left, disharmony and incoherence in the meaning of social mobility.

Promoting prevention to fake news through an educational software

This paper discusses the development of an educational system that aims to train individuals to recognize false information. The application includes a news analysis module, which highlights information that can help the user read a news story. To do this, the users simply needs to enter the link to the news they wish to analyze. In addition, the system also contains a training module, in which real examples of news stories to be analyzed by users are shown. For each news example, the user must state whether they believe the information to be true or false. The design of the product is theoretically anchored in lateral reading and inoculation theory. The tool was validated in two phases. The first involved 26 participants from different age groups and showed positive acceptance of the software, especially in terms of efficiency and attractiveness. The second phase of validation was aimed specifically at the elderly and had 16 responses, which indicated a deterioration in the user experience for this type of audience, prompting the need to enhance the application with more instructional and accessibility elements.

Representation of Women in Sexual Violence News on Kompas.com : Sara Mills' Perspective

The aim of this research is to describe the subject-object position of women in the sexual violence news kompas.com using Sara Mills' perspective. The subjects of this research are journalists and the objects of this research are women. Women who experience sexual violence are positioned as victims without resistance. This research data was taken from kompas.com using Sara Mills' critical discourse analysis. The research results in news text 1 show that the woman or victim is in the object position. The victim experienced an act of rape by her stepfather. The second news story shows the victim in the position of the object. The victim was still in elementary school and was molested by an old man. Victims not only experience harassment but are also threatened to keep quiet and given money to cover up the perpetrator's behavior. The third news shows women in the position of objects and as victims.

Us versus them: The role of national identity in the formation of false memories for fake news.

People are prone to forming false memories for fictitious events described in fake news stories. In this preregistered study, we hypothesized that the formation of false memories may be promoted when the fake news includes stereotypes that reflect positively on one's own nationality or negatively on another nationality. We exposed German and Irish participants (N = 1,184) to fabricated news stories that were consistent with positive or negative stereotypes about Germany and Ireland. The predicted three-way interaction was not observed. Exploratory follow-up analyses revealed the expected pattern of results for German participants but not for Irish participants, who were more likely to remember positive stories and stories about Ireland. Individual differences in patriotism did not significantly affect false memory rates; however, higher levels of cognitive ability and analytical reasoning decreased false memories and increased participants' ability to distinguish between true and false news stories. These results demonstrate that stereotypical information pertaining to national identity can influence the formation of false memories for fake news, but variations in cultural context may affect how misinformation is received and processed. We conclude by urging researchers to consider the sociopolitical and media landscape when predicting the consequences of fake news exposure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Textual Analysis of Media Propaganda in Local News Surrounding Post-Election Threats in Nigeria

Media propaganda has been a common tool for political actors to influence public perception and opinion. In the aftermath of the 2023 general elections exercise held in Nigeria, the issue of post-election threats dominated local news coverage. This study has made use of textual analysis approach to analyse the media propaganda in local news surrounding post-election threats in Nigeria and the implications of such propaganda on the receiving audience. The study was anchored on the Media Framing Theory and is supported by the Agenda Setting Theory. A textual analysis of selected local news stories was conducted to identify dominant themes and the framing of the post-election threats from four online newspapers. The research showed that media propaganda played a significant role in shaping the public discourse and framing the post-election threats in Nigeria. From textual analytical submissions, the study concluded that when unchecked, media agenda and framing unnecessarily heat up the polity, deepen misunderstanding and inspire anarchy.

The distorting effects of producer strategies: Why engagement does not reveal consumer preferences for misinformation

A great deal of empirical research has examined who falls for misinformation and why. Here, we introduce a formal game-theoretic model of engagement with news stories that captures the strategic interplay between (mis)information consumers and producers. A key insight from the model is that observed patterns of engagement do not necessarily reflect the preferences of consumers. This is because producers seeking to promote misinformation can use strategies that lead moderately inattentive readers to engage more with false stories than true ones-even when readers prefer more accurate over less accurate information. We then empirically test people's preferences for accuracy in the news. In three studies, we find that people strongly prefer to click and share news they perceive as more accurate-both in a general population sample, and in a sample of users recruited through Twitter who had actually shared links to misinformation sites online. Despite this preference for accurate news-and consistent with the predictions of our model-we find markedly different engagement patterns for articles from misinformation versus mainstream news sites. Using 1,000 headlines from 20 misinformation and 20 mainstream news sites, we compare Facebook engagement data with 20,000 accuracy ratings collected in a survey experiment. Engagement with a headline is negatively correlated with perceived accuracy for misinformation sites, but positively correlated with perceived accuracy for mainstream sites. Taken together, these theoretical and empirical results suggest that consumer preferences cannot be straightforwardly inferred from empirical patterns of engagement.

Can AI Become Walter Cronkite? Testing the Machine Heuristic, the Hostile Media Effect, and Political News Written by Artificial Intelligence

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) in news writing are ushering in significant changes in journalism. This study examined how the nature of a story’s author (human or news bot journalist) affects how audiences assess a news story and its writer. Applying a Relative Hostile Media perspective, an experiment examined the effect of the ideological distance between news outlets and audiences. Results reveal that people express more positive attitudes—and trust—toward human journalists than toward AI journalists, but they perceive the latter as less biased. Also, story and outlet credibility have a negative relationship with ideological distance from outlets.

A Novel Approach to Text Summarization Using Machine Learning

Text summarization is a key strategy in the domains of information retrieval and natural language processing (NLP). Its objective is to reduce a lengthy written document into a clearer, more succinct summary of the information it contains. When a text document is too lengthy or intricate to analyse completely, as in news stories, academic papers, or legal documents, this approach is extremely helpful. The major challenge of text summarising is to take the most important and relevant information from the original text and convey it in an understandable and concise way. In this study, extractive and abstractive summarising techniques are the two primary categories of text summary methods. The paper also presents several algorithms that have been proposed for text summarization, including TextRank, Seq2Seq, and BART. TextRank is a simple and fast algorithm that works well for short documents, Seq2Seq is a deep learning-based approach that generates high-quality summaries, and BART is a transformer-based algorithm that provides the best results on benchmark datasets. The obtained ROUGE Score after passing TextRank, BART, and Seq2SEq algorithm significant also.

Are private placements associated with more active media management than public offerings? Evidence from Taiwan

PurposeThis study investigates the media activities of firms issuing private equity placements and seasoned equity offerings in Taiwan, as firms have incentives to manage media coverage to influence their stock prices during private equity placement.Design/methodology/approachWe collect a corpus of news stories and transform the news into term sets based on the part of speech. Then, we refer to Cecchini et al. (2010) to classify the news terms into positive, negative, and usual categories. Next, we employ the SVM algorithm to perform the classification tasks and the term frequency method to perform the text mining task. In last, we use a multiple regression model to verify the hypotheses.FindingsWe determine that issuing firms in a private placement have substantially more positive news stories and fewer negative news stories than those in public offerings. Furthermore, we evidence that the media management effects of postequity issues are more active than those of preequity issues. Finally, our results demonstrate that the timing and content of financial media coverage among different equity issuance methods may be biased by firm management. According to previous studies, they may attempt to manipulate stock prices to increase the number of highly profitable insider stakeholders.Originality/valueTo our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate that if private placement will associate with more active media management than the public offerings. According to our results of the difference-in-means test, the public offerings market may control news coverage; however, this result is inconsistent with that of the regression results. The private placements market may also exercise media management in the “before announcement day” and “after announcement day” periods by increasing positive news and reducing negative news.

News bias perceptions as impacted by source cues, content cues, and media bias ratings

ABSTRACT Using three experimental studies, this research considers whether exposure to source cues, content cues, and media bias ratings impacts perceptions of ideological bias in news stories. As a possible news media literacy intervention strategy, viewing a media bias ratings chart after reading a news story had limited influence on assessments of bias. Source cues consistently influenced bias perceptions. Study 1 and Study 2 revealed evidence of the relative hostile media perception, where Republicans and Democrats perceived the news stories as biased in the same direction but to a significantly different degree. This finding did not replicate in Study 3, where content cues were held constant. Thus, content cues, alongside source cues, appear necessary in facilitating the relative hostile media perception.

Genre-structural analysis of Arabic accident news reporting

Abstract This paper is concerned with an exploration of the structural arrangement of Arabic hard news reporting with reference to a corpus of twenty accident news stories drawn from two leading Middle Eastern news organizations, Aljazeera and Alarabiya. A range of journalistic traditions has been examined with respect to organizational structures used in their hard news reporting texts. Within journalism discourse analysis, the nucleus-satellite structure developed by scholars of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is commonly found in news reporting in English and across various languages. However, news media texts in some cultures, such as Arabic, have not undergone any close scrutiny from a generic perspective. Accordingly, this study attempts to fill such a gap by investigating the genre-related features of the Arabic accident reports, drawing on the insights provided by SFL literature on the news story as a genre. It employs various lines of analysis such as textual deconstruction, timeline, radical editability, and lexical chaining. The findings of these analyses suggest that the Arabic accident news reports are non-chronologically organized operating with the lead-dominated orbital model, and thus generically bearing a close resemblance to the English news reports.