Political Newspapers Research Articles

An Analysis of Pragmatic Presuppositions in Political Newspaper Articles

This study investigates the underlying presuppositions present in a newspaper article published in The Telegraph, a British daily. The newspaper article is authored by Con Coughlin, the foreign and defense editor of the newspaper. This article critiques the Russian war, characterizing it as an unjust conflict aimed at countering Islamic radicals who are carrying out attacks on Russia. The study seeks to examine the various types and triggers of presuppositions employed in the essay to accurately depict and illustrate Putin's misguided military campaign. An eclectic pragmatic model is utilized to examine the types and triggers of presuppositions in the selected article. Finally, the study concludes that the Telegraph mainly depend on lexical and existential presuppositions, with a minor role of structural presuppositions, to convey thoughts in the process of vilifying Russia.

The Afterlives of Byron’s ‘The Isles of Greece’ in the Victorian Press

In the nineteenth-century British press, ‘The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece’, as the Brighton Gazette put it in 1878, ‘have had their joys and beauties sung in lofty strains by the wisest, the wittiest, and the wickedest of poets’. These mostly unidentified poets remained true to the spirit of the original recitation of Byron’s ‘The Isles of Greece’ from Don Juan , where it is presented as a performance by a poet whom we may or may not trust. The poem’s double reading, its levels of irony, denial of authority, and eventual misreading, makes the persistent reappearance in various forms of the double exclamation ‘The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!’ in the Victorian press a natural extension or afterlife of its dynamic. Political newspapers are a culturally dynamic space for unravelling the myriad of performative aspects of the poem in its various afterlives as we follow how it was transformed based on Britain’s relationship with Greece.

‘Be a gen’l’m’n and a Conserwative Sammy’: Political Remediations of the Pickwick Papers in the Provincial Press (1836–1837)

Abstract Throughout its serial run, Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836–7), was repurposed hundreds of times by the provincial press. From acting as innocuous filler material to making strategic political statements, provincial newspaper editors evoked, excerpted and adapted Pickwick as quickly as Dickens was penning the instalments, showing a keen responsiveness to political topicalities relevant to their reading communities. This article contends that these types of journalistic re-use benefit from being read collectively as a form of remediation, defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin as ‘the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms’. It argues that these remediations are vital to understanding the politics of the provincial press because they became one method through which provincial newspapers articulated a localised response to the national political debates that raged following the 1832 Reform Act. As well as reflecting the political priorities of specific communities, these remediations nuance our understanding of Pickwick’s popularity by drawing attention to aspects of its construction that lent themselves to re-use. While explicit engagement with party politics is conspicuously absent from Pickwick, provincial editors capitalised upon this generality and imbued their re-workings of the serial with a partisanship that Dickens himself avoided, while using his name to substantiate and authorise their own pieces. In this respect, these remediations invite us to place Pickwick at the heart of political debate in the papers, by foregrounding the close relationship between newspaper politics, serial literature, and provincial identity in the 1830s.

Newsroom Ideological Diversity and the Ideological Sorting of Journalists

In efforts to curb ideological bias in the news, citizens, academics, and journalists have highlighted the importance of newsroom ideological diversity. Using a large-scale survey of newspaper political journalists in the United States, we examine the diversity of ideological perspectives of political journalists across newspapers and communities and how ideological misalignments with the newsroom and the local community relate to those journalists’ employment decisions. We find political newspaper reporters regularly work for newspapers and in communities that do not mirror their own ideological perspectives. However, by following newspaper political journalists’ employment decisions over a three-year period, we also find that the ideological differences between those journalists and the newsroom where they work (but not ideological difference with the local community) are related to an increase in journalists’ desire to change jobs and in the likelihood they will actually seek other employment, either within journalism or outside of the profession.

Slovenská literatúra a kultúra v českej publicistike Františka Votrubu (1909–1918)

Czech-Slovak reciprocity was an integral part of the personal life program of František Votruba (1880–1953), which began in his his early youth, when he decided to leave his native Bohemia and move to Slovakia for work. In 1902, he came to Ružomberok to participate in the the publication of the newspaper Slovenské listy, which the publisher Karol Salva published in 1897–1900 to promote Czech-Slovak reciprocity. In the middle of 1903, he accepted Milan Hodža’s offer to contribute to the the publication of the political newspaper Slovenský týždenník, newly founded by Hodža; he moved from Ružomberok to Budapest, where he lived until the beginning of 1911. He later joined of the “group of Pest residents”, which co-created a new form of Slovak politics and culture. Through Hodža, Votruba became acquainted with the Slovak agrarian movement. He identified with the opinion that support for the Slovak national program should be sought among the Slovak farmers; the Agrarian movement should support them by solving their economic and social problems. Votruba added to that principal program his own ideas: the farmers’ need for education and culture through popular and educational texts. From the end of the first decade of the 20th century until the war years, he published in Czech periodicals, informing the Czech public about Slovak political, economic, cultural and literary conditions; furthermore, he reminded Czech readers of the importance of Czech activities for the dynamism of Slovak life, suggesting tasks for Slovakia. His goal was to promote the efforts of the first and second generation of the Hlasist movement and their magazines Hlas, Slovenský obzor and Prúdy. His interpretation of the relationship between Slovaks and Czechs were creating a historical narrative and a myth.

Доктор Сьюз о зверях и людях: опыт карикатуриста и иллюстрированные сказки 1930-х–1950-х годов

The paper deals with the first decades in the work of Dr. Seuss (the pseudonym of Theodor Geisel, 1904–1991), one of the most prominent children’s authors of the 20th century. Seuss was not only the author of children’s tales, but also a talented artist who illustrated his own books and whose manner was deeply influenced by his 15-year experience as a cartoonist. In 1920–1940s he worked for different print media, from humor magazines to a political newspaper, drew cartoons and commercial advertisements. Our aim is to study the mutual influence of Seuss-thecartoonist and Seuss-the-writer and illustrator. Our main focus is the “bestiary” of Dr. Seuss, the animal characters of his cartoons and tales. Seuss created his first eccentric animals in the series of cartoons and anecdotes for a weekly satirical magazine Judge in 1927; he blended the Victorian tradition of nonsense and the features of newspaper cartoons and comic strips of the first decades of the 20th century. The motif of eccentricity is developed in the first children’s tales that Seuss published at the turn of the 1930–40s. The same motif is significantly transformed in his political cartoons for a daily newspaper PM in 1941–1942. Seuss puts the familiar animal images into the context of World War II and gives them different political meaning, from the totalitarian insanity of the Axis leaders to the carelessness and blindness of the “America First” supporters. Interestingly enough, Dr. Seuss used in his political cartoons some plot elements of his tales for children, as well as his old sketches and drawings. In its turn, his post-war tales are peculiar parables that absorb the political issues of the previous historical period. Creating his images of tyrants, Seuss makes use of the techniques of political cartoons. He puts his human and animal characters into the situations of tyranny or isolationism, that can be overcome with the help of common sense.

Turkish Political Advertising: A Content Analysis of Newspaper Political Advertisements Between 1977 and 2007

Although newspaper political advertising dates back to the late 1970s in Turkey, the literature consisting of systematic studies based on empirical data is relatively small. This paper examines political advertising in newspapers during eight general elections between 1977 and 2007 in Turkey by using the qualitative content analysis method. This study aims to explore the main characteristics of newspaper political advertisements to contribute to a deeper understanding of Turkish political culture. The study covers a total of 434 political ads collected from the online archive of Milliyet to classify them according to the categories widely used in the literature. The results of this study indicate that Turkish newspaper political ads are 1-) positive; 2-) issue-oriented though there is an upward trend in the rate of images; 3-) not entirely evidence-based; 4-) generally concerned with the economy-related issues and mostly targeting the youth when it comes to a specific voter segment.

Emotional political advertising

The real possibility exists that the overemphasis of a party’s image in advertisementscould lead to the neglect of important political information for voters. Emotional andnegative advertisements could therefore be detrimental to any young democracy.Against this background this article investigates the use of emotional persuasive appealsand negative messages in political newspaper advertisements in the North-West Provinceduring South Africa's general elections in 1999.The results indicate that although all the parties in the study used emotional appeals,they mostly connected them to a policy issue. However, these policy issues were notelaborated on. The opposition parties mostly used appeals of uncertainty, fear and rage.The ruling party in the province (the ANC) concentrated on appeals of hope andachievement.The ANC virtually abstained from using negative messages, while the DP, the NNP andthe FF "attacked" one another in order to emphasise their differences. They did not harmthe sustainability of the South African democracy as such, but they also did very littleto promote it actively through their media advertisements.

Corruption Debates in the First Portuguese Republic 1910-1926

This paper deals with corruption debates as a political factor in the First Portuguese Republic. Criticism of corruption is a hitherto hardly considered aspect for understanding the instability of the Republic. Criticism of corruption as a critique of parliamentarism existed in almost all European countries in the first third of the 20th century. This essay offers a systematic examination of corruption debates in Portugal and aims to emphasise the international commonalities. Similar to the rest of Europe, these criticisms contributed to the bad image and destabilisation of the parliamentary system. The essay mainly uses political newspapers and pamphlets as sources. After an assessment of the relevant research literature and a very short section on anticorruption in the late monarchy, we will concentrate on three groups of critics: monarchical Catholic voices, radical republican commentaries, and anarchist left-wing contributions. The aim is to reconstruct patterns of argumentation of the aforementioned political directions that were typical throughout the republican period. We will also take up the alleged connection between cultural backwardness and corruption in the Portuguese self-description. In the last section, we will shortly focus on the (almost non-existent) defence strategies of the ruling Republicans.

“A Window to the World”: Newspapers and Soviet Foreign Correspondents in the 1960s

Abstract The expansion of foreign correspondent networks in the late Soviet period reflected the importance that international news and reporting had for readers of the Soviet press. This article traces the development of one such foreign correspondent network, that of the Soviet newspaper Sel’skaia zhizn’ (Rural Life), one of the most popular and widespread newspapers in the Soviet Union. Although historiographically overlooked in favor of major political newspapers like Pravda (Truth) and Izvestiia (News), Sel’skaia zhizn’ was an important source of foreign news for the rural population of the Soviet Union. The article examines the role of the editorial office of Sel’skaia zhizn’ in creating a correspondent network, tracing the geographical reach of the newspaper’s correspondents (sobkors) and analyzing their activities and different types of publications. While some materials were similar to those published in other Soviet newspapers, the specifically rural audience of Sel’skaia zhizn’ influenced the topics chosen for articles as well as the style of the authors. The newspaper became a practical guide for readers because foreign correspondents provided them with unique information about the development of agriculture abroad. The article provides research into how readers perceived international news and information in Sel’skaia zhizn’, finding that readers expected the newspaper to fulfill their needs and to reflect their own interests, even in the international section.

Britain and the repression of Black Power in the 1960s and ‘70s

This article details the extensive security regimes deployed against Black Power in the Caribbean that were operated by regional governments and the (neo)colonial British state. These regimes of securitisation targeted radical Black political groups and actors whose Black Power ideology placed them in an antagonistic relation to independent West Indian states and Britain. The author argues that the British state’s involvement in the suppression of Black Power in the Caribbean is inseparable from the domestic repression of the British Black Power movement. But also, shared opposition to British (neo)imperialism and the personal ties of West Indian migrants to Britain connected Black Power resistance on both sides of the Atlantic. By drawing on British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Ministry of Defence and Cabinet Office files, as well as political newspapers and publications produced at the time, the author traces the British state’s involvement in the transnational repression of Black Power in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The Framing of the National Men’s Basketball Team Defeats in the Eurobasket Championships (2007–2017) by the Greek Press

As the study of the negatively expressed news on sports constitutes a scientific area that has not received proper attention by researchers yet, the purpose of this study was to investigate the framing of the Greek national men’s basketball team defeats by the Greek press. Articles (n = 178) concerning the Eurobasket championships from 2007 to 2017, published in three political newspapers and one sports newspaper, were analyzed through content analysis. Specifically, the research reflected upon (a) the existence of the primary framework of “attribution of responsibility”, (b) the differences in framing among the newspapers, and (c) where/to whom the Media focused on regarding the defeats. The “attribution of responsibility” framing was found in all newspapers under study, both in the content and in the titles of the articles, primarily the day after the games. Regarding the defeats, the media were centralized around 12 factors and 8 subfactors as components of responsibilities, while a significant number of other frames were also identified as well as the four stages of the framing function. In conclusion, the finding that framing is significantly met in sports reporting contradicts the credited characterization of “cheerleaders” to sports journalists.

A Corpus–assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of Exclusion Strategies in Political Newspaper Articles: The March of Return in Gaza

This study examines if there is a favored linguistic exclusion strategy in Arabic and English newspaper articles reporting on the March of Return in Gaza and explores their potential impacts on the readers' minds. Ten newspaper articles were collected; five articles are in Arabic, each is from a different Arab country, while the others are the top-selling five newspapers in the UK. Data were analyzed by observing the linguistic structures and the representations of social actors from the CDA perspective adopted by Theo van Leeuwen and using two built corpora to calculate the frequencies of the exclusion linguistic structures found. The findings showed that Arabic and English newspaper articles used linguistic exclusion strategies differently to serve specific functions, such as: excluding the social actors involved in the case of the March of Return in Gaza, driving the reader's attention to the other social actor to view him as a victim or the party who abuses power, hiding or protecting the excluded social actor or driving the reader's attention to the event rather than the action.

Reconquest 2.0: the Spanish far right and the mobilization of historical memory during the 2019 elections

ABSTRACT This paper brings together the literature on far right parties, medievalism and opinion leadership in order to more closely interrogate the memory politics of the far right. We address two broad questions: what does the mobilization of distant-past events do in far right discourse? And how do these memories circulate online? We unpack one specific case study: the mobilization of the topic ‘La Reconquista’ (The Reconquest) among the computer-mediated networks of one Europe’s newest national-populist parties: Spain’s VOX. First, we show three strategies through which the Reconquest trope reproduced a conservative historiography that creates a transhistorical, exclusionary and Catholic Spanish nation: the creation of memory sites, the glorification of heroes and a specifically antagonistic memory. Second, we show that the one-word nature of the historical narrative, through its Twitter circulation, gave it a crucial ability to mobilize in the context of an election. Finally, drawing from opinion leader theory we show how these Reconquest narratives were put forward by traditional elite actors such as political parties and newspapers, but relied on the role of ordinary citizens to spread and circulate.

Political power of the press in the Weimar Republic

AbstractThis paper examines how changes in newspaper circulation affected voter turnout, party vote shares, and mass polarization in Weimar Berlin. My empirical strategy exploits variation in the development of railway system across historical districts of Berlin, which influenced the circulation of newspapers. I find that an increase in newspaper circulation significantly induced higher turnout in fourteen outer districts and a higher degree of mass polarization. Partisan newspapers benefitted party vote shares, with stronger effects in federal elections than in local elections. The electoral influence of newspapers was driven by tabloids and mass newspapers, and not by elite political newspapers.

A Corpus - based Critical Discourse Analysis of Exclusion Strategies in Political Newspaper Articles : The March of Return in Gaza

A Corpus - based Critical Discourse Analysis of Exclusion Strategies in Political Newspaper Articles : The March of Return in Gaza

Discourse Analysis of Semiotic Resources in Newspaper Political Campaign Advertisements of Select Candidates for the 2019 Elections in Nigeria

This study focused on newspaper political campaign advertisements of select candidates for the 2019 general elections in Nigeria with the aim of analysing the semiotic resources in the newspaper political campaign advertisements of the select candidates. The specific objectives were to: determine how personality profiling served as semiotic resource in the 2019 elections campaign advertisements of the APC candidate of Lagos State, Nigeria as well as examine the use of color as a semiotic resource in the 2019 elections campaign advertisements of the APC gubernatorial candidates of Lagos and Abia States, Nigeria among others. The Social Semiotic Theory was adopted as the theoretical framework for the study. Data for this study were drawn from newspaper advertisements in three national dailies: The Punch, Daily Sun and The Vanguard newspapers. The newspapers were published between December 2018 and February 2019. Three (3) advertisements were purposively selected for this study owing to the several semiotic resources in them. The data were analyzed using the Discourse Analysis approach. The analysis revealed personality profiling of the APC gubernatorial candidate of Lagos State based on his educational qualification, experience and popularity. It also showed that color, image placement, attire and handshakes were also semiotic resources found in the newspaper political campaign advertisements of the select candidates in the 2019 general elections in Nigeria. Green and red were identified to be instrumental in communicating growth, light and love. Based on the findings, it was recommended that further study be carried out to uncover the communicative elements in political campaign advertisements in Nigeria newspapers

Evidential Constructions as Deictic Markers of a Communicative Subject in Newspaper Political Narrative

The article is dedicated to studying communicative and pragmatic evidential constructions in newspaper political narrative. Based on the assumption that a communicative subject is represented as chain cooperation (“orderer” – editor – journalist – source – journalist), markers of evidentiality are matched with reference to the information about the events described on behalf of the source of relevant information. Correlation between an evidential discourse marker and an indication of the source of information in the narrative, as well as the possibility of indirect deictic reference to second-hand information with the help of modal verbs and lexical markers have been identified. Using evidential constructions in newspapers is determined pragmatically and connected with the narrator’s desire to distance him- or herself from unreliable or axiologically negative factors.

The Societal Relevance of the “Rheinischer Merkur”

At present, there is no societally relevant political newspaper in Germany that is based on a Christian worldview. The Rheinischer Merkur, founded in 1946 shortly after the end of the Second World War and shut down by the German Bishops’ Conference in 2010, was a newspaper of this kind. It went beyond the Christian milieu in the fulfilment of its mission in the public arena. The closure of the Rheinischer Merkur obscures even today the decisive role it played in the elaboration of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany and the substantial quality of the paper. This essay sketches the history of the Rheinischer Merkur and its self-understanding, as well as its decline, locating these in the context of the journalistic autonomies and media-ethical tensions to which every journalistic medium is subject.

The Representation of Trianon Trauma as a Chosen Trauma in Political Newspapers (1920–2010) in Hungary

The Treaty of Trianon and its consequences continue to be considered traumatic by both scholars and much of society in general. Trianon’s identification as a social or historical trauma not only spread amongst the public in general, but also penetrated historical discourse and journalism. A rather complex and controversial concept has been transposed from psychology to historiography. Hungarian historians generally use trauma in the classical social-psychological meaning: trauma is a social construct based on actual experience (Kovács 2015). In social psychology, the concept of trauma is based on the threat from the outside world to the individual and their identity. However, social trauma has much in common with individual trauma (László 2005). Inevitably, the question arises as to why the concept of psychic trauma seems to be an appropriate scientific description of the effects of Trianon. In my research, I undertook longitudinal content analysis of articles about Trianon and its consequences published in newspapers of various political orientation, divided into five-year periods between 1920 and 2010. The study uses the theoretical construction of social psychology, which involves examining the chosen trauma as a narrative structure. In this study, I present how the concept of the chosen trauma can be applied to describe Trianon trauma through the corpus that includes texts from these ninety years. To illustrate this, I use narrative psychological content analysis.