Newspaper Outlets Research Articles

Newsprint representation of the alcohol sales bans during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa: A mixed methods analysis

Aims: Content analysis of newspapers covering the alcohol sales bans during Covid-19 in South Africa.
 Methods: Mixed method content analysis of the highest circulated, paid for, English language newspapers published by four newspaper outlets in South Africa, between 26 February to 26 September 2020 (seven months).
 Setting: South African Bibliographic Information Network (Sabinet) and Arena Holdings Media databases were used.
 Participants: 317 newspaper articles were identified for analysis from four newspapers: Sunday Times (Arena Holdings), Daily Sun (Naspers), The Star (Independent Media) and the Mail and Guardian (Media Development Investment Fund).
 Measures: Qualitative data: a structured coding frame was used to identify themes. Quantitative data: date, agency, placement/page number in the newspaper, number of graphics, words in heading and in article and whether the article was based on opinion or fact. The media vectors: framing, responsibility and newspaper media exposure were calculated.
 Findings: Articles were predominantly unfavourable toward the alcohol sales bans, indicated that government should take responsibility for prevention of harmful alcohol use, and focused mainly on the negative economic impact of the alcohol sales bans.
 Conclusions: News agencies should make a concerted effort to ensure balanced reporting on matters of health and put measures in place to prevent undue influence on journalists by large corporations, such as the alcohol industry.

Reported corporate misconducts: The impact on the financial markets.

This study empirically examines how reported corporate misconducts affect the stock returns of US firms. As the reported misconducts are broadcasted in the newspaper outlets, the cumulative abnormal return (CAR) is -4.1%. Involvement in a reported corporate misconduct gets punished by market participants especially when the act of reported misconduct is blamed on the level of the corporation rather than in involvement of a specific individual, when reported misconducts take place in the home market, and when the linguistic tone used in the newspaper article is negative. Financial penalties imposed, firm size, leverage, revenue growth, and the level of firm foreign exposure are found to have significant impact on the returns during the period of observation. The results suggest that investors recognize the importance to penalize firms in the financial markets when firms act unethically.

COVID-19 telephone contact tracing in Flanders as a “contested” new genre of conversation: Discrepancies between interactional practice and media image

During the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium, most COVID-19-related information was communicated to the public through mainstream media such as newspaper outlets, television, and radio. These media had substantial influence over which information was (widely) distributed and how this information was framed, subsequently shaping citizens' interpretations of matters concerning the pandemic. This chapter considers one of the government's endeavors to contain the pandemic: COVID-19 telephone contact tracing. Specifically, we compare the image of such telephone contact tracing generated by the media with the de facto interactional practice. We report on analyses made as part of a 1 year applied conversation analytic and pragmatic study conducted at Ghent University and the University of Antwerp in collaboration with the Flemish Agency of Health and Care. Methodologically, we use thematic content analysis to examine the portrayal of COVID-19 telephone contact tracing in widespread Flemish newspapers and its evolution throughout the pandemic. We then compare this media analysis to our analysis of a corpus of 170 recorded, transcribed, and interactionally analyzed contact tracing calls. Our results demonstrate how the mainstream media's image of contact tracing does not align with the various (interactional) functions of COVID-19 contact tracing calls identified in the study. We argue that this one-sided, distorted image produced by the media may have had considerable consequences for the efficacy of contact tracing, especially because the contact tracing call was a new genre of conversation. It was introduced to the public almost exclusively through mainstream media and, at the same time, its success relied for the most part on citizens' voluntary participation, trust, and willingness to share private information.

Newspaper media framing of maternal obesity in the UK: a review and framework synthesis

BackgroundNews media is powerful at framing health, shaping public perceptions and demand for policy. The effects of news media include perpetuating obesity discrimination, which threatens public health. Two-thirds of pregnant women report experiencing bodyweight-related stigma. The aim of this review was to explore the portrayal of maternal obesity in UK newspaper outlets. MethodsNexisUni was searched for newspaper articles published between Jan 1, 2010, and May 31, 2021, reporting content on obesity during pregnancy. Articles were screened against inclusion criteria. Integrated quantitative and qualitative analytics supported a novel framework synthesis to characterise the content of the articles. Findings442 articles were included: 261 (59%) published in tabloids and 181 (41%) in broadsheets. We identified three overarching themes: blame; responsibility; and burden of women with obesity. Subthemes were health outcomes (primarily of the infants); impact on the UK National Health Service (NHS); causes of and solutions for obesity; and calls for action. Women were blamed for their bodyweight, pregnancy risks, and NHS care requirements. Solutions were framed as the woman's responsibility to reduce her own and future generations' bodyweight, prevent adverse pregnancy outcomes, and alleviate the burden on the NHS. The burden of maternal obesity was consistently placed on women, as a burden on individuals (ie, themselves, their children, and health professionals), society, and the NHS. Patterns in language framed the so-called problem and scale of maternal obesity, emphasised risk and danger, and were alarmist, aggressive, and violent. Articles platformed purported experts' voices, such as professional organisations representatives, rather than women's lived experiences. The article narratives were underpinned by oversimplifications of obesity development, weight management, and causal pathways to health outcomes. InterpretationUK newspapers negatively frame and oversimplify maternal obesity. Exposure to blaming and alarmist messaging could increase women's guilt and internalised weight bias, which can harm maternal and child physical and mental health during this life phase. The newspaper media should instead be harnessed to destigmatise maternal obesity, promote maternal wellbeing, and improve public health. The interdisciplinary, multinational research team and novel, rigorous methods are strengths of this review. A limitation is the focus on article texts but not on accompanying images. FundingNone.

Gulf Security through the Lens of the ROK-US Alliance

ABSTRACT An analysis of South Korea’s independent deployment of the Cheonghae Unit to the Strait of Hormuz sheds light on the fragmentation of media and political discourses in the country. Empirical evidence from five major South Korean newspaper outlets reveals that the South Korean government’s pre-emptive securitisation presents a wide gap in manifest and latent security interests between the state and society. Securitisation is debated with regard to the two interconnected questions of South Korea’s military deployment to the Middle East and the future of the Korean Peninsula – both of which are ultimately tied to the question of Seoul’s commitment to the US alliance.

The Ramapough Mountain Indians’ Unsuccessful Bid for Federal Acknowledgement

This exploratory study used content analysis to examine socio-cultural factors associated with the unsuccessful bid of the Ramapough Mountain Indians (RMI) for federal acknowledgment. It applied the McCulloch & Wilkins 4-factor framework for explaining success in the Federal Acknowledgement Process (FAP): (1) meeting the social construction of the image of an Indian, (2) cohesiveness of the self-identity of the tribe’s members, (3) perceived legitimacy of benefits or burdens directed toward the group, and (4) tribe’s resources to assist acknowledgement effort. The study hypothesized that if the framework is applicable, then newspaper articles will reflect weakness or negativity with regard to the four factors. With a sample of 50 newspaper articles from 21 newspaper outlets, thematic and quantitative analyses revealed that application of the framework offered socio-cultural insights about RMI’s unsuccessful bid. The analyses coded for the presence and prevalence over time of each factor with inter-rater reliability 80-100%. Results indicated varied depictions of the RMI in the newspaper media during the FAP, with some articles centering indigenous experiences and leadership and other articles focusing on negative stereotypes of indigenous communities. The study illuminated the powerful role over time of economic and political opponents in shaping negative media narratives particularly in relation to Indian gaming. Given critiques of bias in the FAP, this study supports the argument for reforming this process with input from indigenous communities. Limitations of this study include the exploratory nature of the research, manualized data analysis of a complex data source, and the impact of researcher bias.

Beyond Caster as object? Examining media constructions of Caster Semenya through decolonial thinking

ABSTRACT The popular media coverage of South African track and field star Caster Semenya showcases how colonialist discourses shaped the sexed, gendered, and racialised meaning of her public biography. Yet, when researchers study Semenya as their research ‘object’, does this act of inquiry reproduce the knowledge constructs of Western coloniality as well? In this article, we consider both issues by conducting and reflecting on our poststructuralist analysis of popular media coverages of Semenya’s athletic career, with specific attention to her dealings with gender-verification testing. We examine the discursive construction of Semenya’s public biography by popular newspaper outlets in the United States and South Africa from 2009 to 2019, arguing that both geopolitical locales maintained Western social binaries and scientific discourses concerning Semenya’s sexual identity in similar, yet distinct ways. Drawing from the poststructuralist methodology of intertextuality, we reflect on its capacity to deconstruct the colonial discourses shaping the cultural meaning of a non-Western athlete of colour such as Semenya, as well as its relation, as a method of knowledge production, to the epistemological legacies of Western coloniality. We also contend that by approaching Semenya as the ‘object’ of our poststructuralist framework, our analysis implicitly reproduced, rather than challenged, the Eurocentric subject/object framework of modern (Western) epistemology. Thus, our purposes are empirical, methodological, and reflexive as we seek to contribute to critical analyses of the constructed cultural meaning of celebrity athletes while subjecting our own research assumptions and frameworks to poststructuralist and decolonial deconstruction.

Media frames and the sex offender: A qualitative content analysis from six major metropolitan areas

ABSTRACT Media portrayals of sex offenders are often negative, suggesting that public attitudes share a one-dimensional portrait. But past scholarship has regularly relied on a single newspaper or combined national-regional newspapers when investigating the media framing of sex offenders, which has possibly masked the disparate discourse of sex crimes across geographies and outlets. Our qualitative content analysis of sex crime depictions in articles published between 2012–2016 from six daily newspaper outlets of major metropolitan areas demonstrates that the media framing of sex offenders is varied and multidimensional. Our analysis indicates four salient sex offender frames: the monstrous sex offender, the psychotic sex offender, the sex offender versus the victim, and the humanized sex offender. Each frame is constructed by distinctive scripts, or a sequence of events and actions to describe sex offenders and their offenses. As parts of the interpretative repertoire, sex offender frames and scripts are connected to specific policy initiatives from a conservative to a progressive orientation.

International Investment Disputes, Media Coverage, and Backlash Against International Law

This paper puts forth a theory explaining domestic backlash against international investment law by connecting media coverage—specifically the bias in the news media’s selection of international disputes—to public opinion formation towards international agreements. To test our theory, we examine both the content and effects of the media’s reporting on international disputes, focusing on the increasingly controversial form known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). We find that newspaper outlets in both the United States and Canada have a bias in favor of covering disputes filed against their home country as opposed to those filed by home country firms. Using two national survey experiments fielded in the United States and Canada, we further find that the bias in news story selection has a strong negative effect on attitudes towards ISDS and related agreements, especially among highly nationalistic individuals.

Quantifying the effect of Wakefield et al. (1998) on skepticism about MMR vaccine safety in the U.S.

Efforts to trace the rise of childhood vaccine safety concerns in the US often suggest Andrew Wakefield and colleagues' retracted 1998 Lancet study (AW98)-which alleged that the MMR vaccine can cause children to develop autism-as a primary cause of US vaccine skepticism. However, a lack of public opinion data on MMR safety collected before/after AW98's publication obscures whether anecdotal accounts are indicative of a potentially-causal effect. We address this problem using a regression discontinuity framework to study change in monthly MMR injury claims (N = 74,850; from 1990-2019) from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) to proxy concern about vaccine safety. Additionally, we suggest a potential mechanism for the effect of AW98 on vaccine skepticism, via automated sentiment analyses of MMR-related news stories (N = 674; from 1996-2000) in major television and newspaper outlets. AW98 led to an immediate increase of about 70 MMR injury claims cases per month, averaging across six estimation strategies (meta-analytic effect = 70.44 [52.19, 88.75], p < 0.01). Preliminary evidence suggests that the volume of negative media attention to MMR increased in the weeks following AW98's publication, across four estimation strategies (meta-analytic effect = 9.59% [3.66, 15.51], p < 0.01). Vaccine skepticism increased following the publication of AW98, which was potentially made possible by increased negative media coverage of MMR. Childhood vaccine skepticism presents an important challenge to widespread vaccine uptake, and undermines support for pro-vaccine health policies. In addition to advancing our understanding of the previously-obscured origins of US vaccine skepticism, our work cautions that high-profile media attention to inaccurate scientific studies can undermine public confidence in vaccines. We conclude by offering several recommendations that researchers and health communicators might consider to detect and address future threats to vaccine confidence.

Proposed Model for Context Topic Identification of English and Hindi News Article Through LDA Approach with NLP Technique

According to the survey, India has the world's second-largest newspaper market, with more than 100 K newspaper outlets, approx 240 million circulation, and 1300 million subscribers or readers. The topic modeling work is increasing day by day, and researchers have published multiple topic modeling papers and have implemented them in different areas like software engineering, political science and medical, etc. LDA topic modeling is used in this research because it has been introduced successfully for topic modeling and classification and it measures the probability of a text-dependent on the bag-of-words scheme without considering the word series. LDA is a common topic modeling algorithm with excellent implementation in the Gensim Python package. However, the challenge is how to extract good quality topics that are simple, separated, and meaningful. The purpose of this research deals with finding the main topics of the same category news articles which are in two different languages (Hindi and English) and then classifying these different language news topics with similarity measurement. In this research, the corpus is constructed with bigram. To achieve the research goal, we have to first build a headline and link extractor that scrap the top news from Google News feeds for both English and Hindi languages (Google News collects news stories that have appeared on different news website which is already accessible in 35 languages over the last 30 days) and then analyses which two news headlines are similar.

Heritage-based tribalism in Big Data ecologies: Deploying origin myths for antagonistic othering

This article presents a conceptual and methodological framework to study heritage-based tribalism in Big Data ecologies by combining approaches from the humanities, social and computing sciences. We use such a framework to examine how ideas of human origin and ancestry are deployed on Twitter for purposes of antagonistic ‘othering’. Our goal is to equip researchers with theory and analytical tools for investigating divisive online uses of the past in today’s networked societies. In particular, we apply notions of heritage, othering and neo-tribalism, and both data-intensive and qualitative methods to the case of people’s engagements with the news of Cheddar Man’s DNA on Twitter. We show that heritage-based tribalism in Big Data ecologies is uniquely shaped as an assemblage by the coalescing of different forms of antagonistic othering. Those that co-occur most frequently are the ones that draw on ‘Views on Race’, ‘Trust in Experts’ and ‘Political Leaning’. The framings of the news that were most influential in triggering heritage-based tribalism were introduced by both right- and left-leaning newspaper outlets and by activist websites. We conclude that heritage-themed communications that rely on provocative narratives on social media tend to be labelled as political and not to be conducive to positive change in people’s attitudes towards issues such as racism.

Crisis, reputation, and the politics of expertise: fictional performativity at the Bank of Italy

ABSTRACT Since the early twentieth century, scholarly interest in the intersection between knowledge and political rationality in advanced liberal democracies has drawn attention to two general and contradictory processes: first, the rise of technocracy, and of the institutions, and experts, who use technical knowledge as a lever of power; second, the democratization of expertise – the emergence of lay audiences as stake-holders and competent participants in technical and scientific decisions and debates. In this paper, I analyze the annual reports on the Italian economy written by the Bank of Italy between 1960 and 1984, and trace the debate they spurred in three national newspaper outlets. I detail the emergence of public expertise on the economy, as well as the emergence of crisis and reputation management as techniques for the Bank to bolster its authority. I argue that the Bank of Italy, by framing the present as an exception, achieved a form of performativity that I call fictional.

An Examination of the Relationship Between Media Exposure and Fear of Victimization: Implications of the Superpredator Narrative on Juvenile Justice Policies

AbstractThe media allow crime to infiltrate the public’s consciousness in every conceivable way, thereby playing a major role in shaping the public’s opinion and attitude toward crime and crime issues (Barak, 1995; Fields &amp; Jerin, 1996; Kappeler &amp; Potter, 2005). Reporters constantly talk about crime, and crime related stories dominate the headlines of local and national newspaper outlets (Dowler, 2003; Pizarro et al, 2007). Some of the most highly rated television programs are based on crime plots and people across social, political, and racial demographics are constantly engaged in crime dialogue generated from local or national news stories. When the focus of these mediums is on youth they become even more profound and contentious. The images portrayed conjure up stereotypes that lead to fear and inflammatory remarks that become entrenched into the national lexicon. The current study uses data from the National Opinion Survey of Crime and Justice to test the relationship between crime‐related media viewership and fear of victimization within a nationally representative adult sample. Approximately 42.67% of respondents reported regularly watching crime shows and about the same proportion (42.83%) believed their local media paid too much attention to violent crime. In addition to regular crime‐show viewership, confidence in the police, gender, and recent contact with the police were associated with fear of victimization. This article adds to an existing body of research through a largely unexplored area in the administration of justice. It does so within the context of the U.S. juvenile justice system.

Alignment between Disaster Policies and Practice: Characteristics of Interorganizational Response Coordination Following 2016 Hurricane Matthew in Florida

This study examines the alignments between disaster policies and frameworks to disaster response practice by exploring characteristics of interorganizational coordination operated in Florida during Hurricane Matthew in 2016. To measure the alignment between policy and practice, a set of network data was constructed from a systematic content analysis of newspaper outlets resulting in 612 articles from 32 sources. Social network analyses were conducted to identify characteristics of interorganizational coordination and evaluate the alignment between disaster policies and practice. Findings highlight how actual disaster response coordination reflects the corresponding disaster policies in terms of resource sharing, information planning, and communication functions during response operations. Based on the findings, we suggest some policy and practical implications to enhance alignment between disaster policies, frameworks, and practices.

REMEMBER TO NOT FORGET

In 2019, Serbia marked the 20th anniversary of the end of the Kosovo War through numerous commemorations that received significant media coverage. Through qualitative, ideographical research, this article explores how the Serbian media constructs the collective memory of the 1999 NATO intervention. By using thematic analysis and coding, the article analyses a total of ten newspaper articles from two newspaper outlets. Three themes emerged from the analysis: 1. “Unjustified and premeditated bombing campaign”; 2. “Do not forget Milica!”; and 3. “No justice?”. The thread that unites all three themes is the element of victimhood that the media frames and positions at the centre of collective memory. The article concludes that this view of victimhood is not an anomaly in history, but is aligned with the existing collective memory through the continuous emphasis on the suffering of Serbs.

The Newspaper Industry in a Changing Landscape The Shift in News Content of Various Newspapers as a Response to the Rise of Social Media

This paper examines the association between the rise of social media and the types of news content produced by newspaper outlets. Over the past two decades, the rise of social media has precipitated a decline in the role of traditional newspaper outlets. I present two hypotheses and their ensuing rationale &amp;ndash; hypothesis one describes how newspapers may increase hard news content to further consolidate their reader base, while hypothesis two postulates that hard news content will decrease as papers try to regain the readers they lost to social media. Data was collected from two reputable and two less-reputable newspaper outlets to see how they reacted to increases in social media usage and whether their responses varied. For each newspaper outlet, the author identified the number of articles that included keywords drawn from hard news and soft news word banks. Using a ratio of hard to soft news, regression analysis was then performed. After running regression analysis with trend data from the Pew Research Center on the number of US adults with social media accounts, results indicate a moderate negative correlation amongst the two more reputable newspapers and no correlation amongst less reputable newspapers, meaning that the more reputable newspapers tended to decrease hard news content as social media became more popular.

“God Bless Texas. God Bless the NRA”

The shooting at Sandy Hook elementary and other past and more recent acts of school violence involving guns in the United States have created considerable national dialogue about how we can prevent such horrific acts from happening in the future. In Texas, public conversation has ensued about the possibility of arming teachers, school staff, and administrators to “protect” and “defend” schools from similar attacks. Media discourses produced by the general public, right-wing political leaders, and organizations like the National Rifle Association (NRA) have been instrumental in advocating for teachers and other school personnel to become armed protectors. As such, in this article, I describe the context of the debate to arm Texas teachers as portrayed by newspaper outlets across the state while problematizing the dominant discourses they produce.

Does Google Distort Your Clickk? Search Engines and the Emergence of Internet Monopolies

This study seeks to determine whether search engines contribute to the emergence of Internet monopolies. We do this by empirically examining search engines’ role in the competition for online traffic via a case study of the U.S. newspaper industry. We demonstrate that newspaper market shares are more concentrated online than offline; indeed, a small number of “top” newspaper outlets drive the high concentration of online readership. The dominance of these sites is observed in the distribution of online traffic routed through search engines but not that resulting from clicks that are not mediated by other websites. Overall, this study presents suggestive but compelling evidence that search engines may contribute, at least to some extent, to the creation of Internet monopolies.

Newspaper Review Show in the Broadcast Media Space in Ghana

Ghana’s public sphere has witnessed a growing media presence which has enhanced the relay of information to the citizenry. By this, society is given a full spectrum of alternatives to access media. Amid this atmosphere is a platform labeled the “Newspaper Review Show” which appears to have generated some sort of contention since its inception among newspaper publishers on one hand and broadcast stations on the other. Using an exploratory qualitative approach, this study has shown that review of newspaper content is pervasive in the landscape and the selective style of review of major agenda has affected readership, revenue of newspaper outlets, and reading culture, among others. However, the article also contended that falling readership is attributed to some factors other than only review of newspaper content.