Political Headlines Research Articles

Analyzing Process Types in Nigerian Newspapers Political Headlines Using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) Transitivity Approach

Purpose: This study aims to examine the use of process types in Nigerian political headlines using the transitivity approach within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The purpose of the research is to understand how language is used to construct political narratives in Nigerian newspapers, focusing on the different process types—material, mental, relational, verbal, behavioral, and existential—that shape public perception of political events and actors. Methodology: The study adopts a qualitative method, analyzing 50 political headlines from five major Nigerian newspapers: Vanguard, Leadership News, Punch, Daily Trust, and The Guardian Nigeria. The headlines, selected from articles published between January 2024 and September 2024, are categorized and analyzed based on Halliday's transitivity framework. Findings: The findings reveal that material processes are the most frequently used, representing 48% of the headlines, followed by mental (32%), verbal (20%), and relational processes (10%). Existential and behavioral processes were minimally represented. These results suggest that political discourse in Nigeria is predominantly action- and belief-oriented, with a focus on tangible actions and the intentions of political figures. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: This study makes a unique contribution to theory by applying the SFL transitivity framework to Nigerian political headlines, expanding the understanding of how process types reflect political actions, intentions, and relationships. The findings have practical implications for media practitioners and politicians in crafting messages that effectively engage the public, emphasizing actions and beliefs to influence perception. From a policy perspective, the study suggests the need for greater media literacy to enable the public to critically assess political communication and its impact on public discourse.

When politics trumps truth: Political concordance versus veracity as a determinant of believing, sharing, and recalling the news.

Resistance to truth and susceptibility to falsehood threaten democracies around the globe. The present research assesses the magnitude, manifestations, and predictors of these phenomena, while addressing methodological concerns in past research. We conducted a preregistered study with a split-sample design (discovery sample N = 630, validation sample N = 1,100) of U.S. Census-matched online adults. Proponents and opponents of 2020 U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump were presented with fake and real political headlines ahead of the election. The political concordance of the headlines determined participants' belief in and intention to share news more than the truth of the headlines. This "concordance-over-truth" bias persisted across education levels, analytic reasoning ability, and partisan groups, with some evidence of a stronger effect among Trump supporters. Resistance to true news was stronger than susceptibility to fake news. The most robust predictors of the bias were participants' belief in the relative objectivity of their political side, extreme views about Trump, and the extent of their one-sided media consumption. Interestingly, participants stronger in analytic reasoning, measured with the Cognitive Reflection Task, were more accurate in discerning real from fake headlines when accurate conclusions aligned with their ideology. Finally, participants remembered fake headlines more than real ones regardless of the political concordance of the news story. Discussion explores why the concordance-over-truth bias observed in our study is more pronounced than previous research suggests, and examines its causes, consequences, and potential remedies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A Rhetorical Stylistic Analysis of English Political Headlines in Selected Newspapers

This study explores the language used in reporting political headlines conducting a rhetorical stylistic analysis. It is based on showing the effect of the rhetorical stylistic relations in news reporting. The aim is to investigate the structure adopted in reporting political news. It argues that the rhetorical stylistic devices are necessary and applicable to non-literary texts, i.e. political headlines to evaluate language use in the representation of non-literary texts. The analysis was carried out on data selected from the British broadsheet The Guardian and the American New York Times newspaper headlines. The data were examined and subjected to a contrastive analysis incorporating rhetorical and stylistic tools to discern how they are united to achieve the main purpose of language use, i.e. to persuade and grasp the reader's attention. It was found that the two newspapers tend to employ sentence structures differently in terms of nucleus and satellite relations demonstrating the significant part in a sentence. Examples of the deviation strategy of foregrounding were primarily established in the New York Times to maintain the reader's attention about the content underlying the different strategy of the two newspapers to report war circumstances. The analysis shows that rhetorical devices and stylistic features are found and closely related in newspaper articles.

Effect of Facebook news use on political attitudes and participation

Politics may be significantly impacted by how often people access Facebook news. Users' understanding and comprehension of political topics may improve as a result of being exposed to political headlines on Facebook, which may have an impact on how they feel and what they believe. Facebook users may be more inclined to have passionate opinions on political topics and engage in political activism if they often read political news on the social media platform. In this study, we examined the effects of Facebook network size, connections with public political actors, use for news, and political expression on political attitudes, protest, and participation. We did this by considering the Orientation Stimulus Reasoning Orientation Response (OSROR) framework for political engagement impacts into consideration. According to data from Hong Kong's (HK) whole population, a city that has one of the highest rates of Facebook adoption globally, structural equation analyses were carried out. Results indicated considering Facebook's size and connections to influential political leaders had an impact on users' engagement in Facebook news, expression, and effectiveness in both direct and indirect ways. Through political speech, Facebook news largely had indirect consequences. A discriminant function analysis also revealed that the most important factors for separating Facebook users from nonusers were age, education, and exposure to online news. This research has consequences for political campaigns and groups trying to enlist members on social media sites like Facebook.

Older Americans are more vulnerable to prior exposure effects in news evaluation

Older news users may be especially vulnerable to prior exposure effects, whereby news comes to be seen as more accurate over multiple viewings. I test this in re-analyses of three two-wave, nationally representative surveys in the United States (N = 8,730) in which respondents rated a series of mainstream, hyperpartisan, and false political headlines (139,082 observations). I find that prior exposure effects increase with age—being strongest for those in the oldest cohort (60+)—especially for false news. I discuss implications for the design of media literacy programs and policies regarding targeted political advertising aimed at this group.

Auditing Google's Search Headlines as a Potential Gateway to Misleading Content

The prevalence and spread of online misinformation during the 2020 US presidential election served to perpetuate a false belief in widespread election fraud. Though much research has focused on how social media platforms connected people to election-related rumors and conspiracy theories, less is known about the search engine pathways that linked users to news content with the potential to undermine trust in elections. In this paper, we present novel data related to the content of political headlines during the 2020 US election period. We scraped over 800,000 headlines from Google's search engine results pages (SERP) in response to 20 election-related keywords—10 general (e.g., "Ballots") and 10 conspiratorial (e.g., "Voter fraud")—when searched from 20 cities across 16 states. We present results from qualitative coding of 5,600 headlines focused on the prevalence of delegitimizing information. Our results reveal that videos (as compared to stories, search results, and advertisements) are the most problematic in terms of exposing users to delegitimizing headlines. We also illustrate how headline content varies when searching from a swing state, adopting a conspiratorial search keyword, or reading from media domains with higher political bias. We conclude with policy recommendations on data transparency that allow researchers to continue to monitor search engines during elections.

WHAT HOPE FOR DIGITAL BUSINESSES DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA?: AN ASSESSMENT OF ONLINE NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF TWITTER’S SUSPENSION

A recent World Bank report reveals that poverty has been decreasing in all regions of the world with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as more than 45% of countries in the sub-region are off-track from achieving the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) extreme poverty target. Asanga, Boateng & Akamavi (2016). Hoofmann (TRT News, 2021) echoed similar view when he said that Nigeria has the largest number of people in poverty in the world, with the unemployment rate among 15-34-year-old around 35 percent in 2020; adding that: “Twitter is a digital platform that has been a crucial link in the operations of millions of small and medium-sized enterprises; it allows the kind of business that gives consumers options which leads to innovation and better products and services. It was estimated that the nation stands to lose a whopping sum of N650 million monthly if Twitter suspension remains in place. This paper thus explores the suspension of Twitter operations and reactions by Nigerians and the international community; using the content analysis and case study research designs; while agenda-setting and innovation theories served as the study theoretical foundation to examine how innovative communication will foster the pace of economic development which Nigerians genuinely crave for. Study found that all online news content analysed were foreign based newspapers/ magazines; 6 representing 66.7% of the entire stories dwelt on abuse of freedom of the press; freedom of expression and human rights issue, while economic and political headlines on the ban were two and one stories representing 22.2% and 11.1% respectively.

Manipulative use of political headlines in western and Russian online sources

The research identifies the amount of headline/article discrepancies in the corpora of western (the USA, the UK) and Russian online articles on sensitive political topics. A quarter of the western headlines and nearly half of the Russian headlines distort the publications they introduce. Language means and manipulative strategies employed by different sides vary considerably. Extensive use of expressive language and style variation are seen as leading causes of distortions in the western corpus. The rich imagery used by the authors (metaphors and metonymy in particular) forms emotional implicatures that affect the reader’s perception of the issue. In contrast, information substitution, subjective modality and selective citations are identified as major causes of distortions in the Russian corpus. Contributors to Russian news outlets rely on general rather than language manipulation strategies, including frequent use of logical fallacies and wrong generalizations. These techniques establish false logical sequences and wrong causative implicatures that compromise objective reporting. The underlying motives of the journalists’ creating false emotional and causative implicatures in the headlines lies beyond the scope of the study; however, it is assumed that intentional change of the information introduced by the headline could be viewed as a covert misinformation attempt.

Believing false political headlines and discrediting truthful political headlines: The interaction between news source trust and news content expectancy

An online survey experiment with 897 US adults demonstrated that the level of believability of news headlines about illegal immigration was for a large part the result of an interaction of perceptions about news source trust and news content expectancy. This study was a second, successful attempt to test a theoretical news content believability model to explain correct and wrongful perceptions of reality. A better understanding of how people assess the believability of news would allow educators to fine-tune media literacy modules. There is certainly a need for enhanced media literacy as the participants of the experiment demonstrated that many of them believed news headlines about illegal immigration that contain misinformation.

The genuine problem of fake news

Intentionally deceptive news has co-opted social media to go viral and influence millions. Science and technology can suggest why and how. But can they offer solutions? In 2010 computer scientist Filippo Menczer heard a conference talk about some phony news reports that had gone viral during a special Senate election in Massachusetts. “I was struck,” says Menczer. He and his team at Indiana University Bloomington had been tracking early forms of spam since 2005, looking mainly at then-new social bookmarking sites such as https://del.icio.us/. “We called it social spam,” he says. “People were creating social sites with junk on them, and getting money from the ads.” But outright fakery was something new. And he remembers thinking to himself, “this can’t be an isolated case.” Fig. 1. Fabricated social media posts have lured millions of users into sharing provocative lies. Image courtesy of Dave Cutler (artist). Of course, it wasn’t. By 2014 Menczer and other social media watchers were seeing not just fake political headlines but phony horror stories about immigrants carrying the Ebola virus. “Some politicians wanted to close the airports,” he says, “and I think a lot of that was motivated by the efforts to sow panic.” By the 2016 US presidential election, the trickle had become a tsunami. Social spam had evolved into “political clickbait”: fabricated money-making posts that lured millions of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube users into sharing provocative lies—among them headlines claiming that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton once sold weapons to the Islamic State, that Pope Francis had endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump, and (from the same source on the same day) that the Pope had endorsed Clinton. Social media users were also being targeted by Russian dysinformatyea : phony stories and advertisements designed to undermine faith in American institutions, the election in particular. And all of …

Gaining Freedoms: Claiming Space in Istanbul and Berlin. By Berna Turam. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+250. $27.95 (paper).

<i>Gaining Freedoms: Claiming Space in Istanbul and Berlin</i>. By Berna Turam. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+250. $27.95 (paper).

A Semantical Interpretation of the Post-Electoral Newspaper Reporting in Gaining the Legitimacy from the Citizens: A Case Study of the Newspaper Articles Headlines during the Post-Electoral Period

This qualitative study focuses on the semantical interpretation of the post-electoral newspaper reporting in gaining the legitimacy from the citizens. The study is being addressed through two research questions: 1) what are the semantical interpretation of the newspaper articles’ headlines in the mainstream and the oppositions’ newspapers? 2) What are the issues highlighted in the newspaper during the post-electoral period of the 13th General Election? The data for the entire research were obtained through the mainstream newspapers which are Utusan Malaysia, Kosmo and Harian Metro and also the opposition’s newspaper represented by Harakah. The data were also collected based on the newspapers that were published after the Election Day has ended. However, the newspapers were not collected daily as the researcher has chosen a few newspapers that contained the traits of having portrayed electoral campaign. The data were analysed using the thematic analysis by deriving themes from the content analysis of the newspapers. The findings were divided into two sections which are semantical interpretations of newspaper articles’ headlines during post-electoral period and issues highlighted in the political campaigns. The researcher has come to a conclusion that both mainstream and opposition based newspapers were portraying improper political headlines during the post-electoral period.

Face Value: The Entwined Histories of Money &amp; Race in America. By Michael O'Malley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012, 260 pp.)

Controversies over banking, credit, and currency might now seem the specialized province of financial journalism, but at least from Hamilton's tenure as Secretary of the Treasury to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, such issues routinely occupied national political headlines. Historians have made sense of these debates in various ways, emphasizing rival material interests, competing political ideologies, or contrasting rhetorical appeals. For Michael O'Malley, a distinguished scholar of American cultural history at George Mason University, a slightly different dynamic animates the nineteenth-century money question. Debates about the nation's money supply pitted Americans disposed to anchor value in natural essences against Americans who accepted (or embraced) the proposition that value is produced through social negotiation. Without precisely defining them, O'Malley implies that these contrasting dispositions were/are not creeds or doctrines, but rather broad worldviews that have shaped attitudes toward (and representations of) issues far afield from currency contraction or bimetallism. Specifically, essentialist and social constructivist approaches to money mirrored and framed the discourse of race in the United States, especially between 1860 and 1896.

The people behind the political headlines

Political journalism plays a central role in all democratic societies. But the way political journalists fulfil this role varies from country to country. To better understand the role of political journalists in different democracies, this article explores which features of political journalism are universal and which characteristics vary cross-nationally. Comprehensive surveys among political journalists in Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain ( N = 425) show that political journalists are more often male and higher educated than the general population of journalists. Their political conviction is however less towards the left. Despite structural homogenization, the role conceptions and feelings of autonomy of political journalists vary between countries with different historical relations between media and political systems and different traditions of journalistic professionalization.

Stem Cells

Regenerative medicine and emerging biotechnologies stand to revolutionize the practice of medicine. Advancements in stem cell biology, including embryonic and postnatal somatic stem cells, have made the prospect of tissue regeneration a potential clinical reality. Short of reproductive cloning, these same technologies, properly used, could allow for the creation of replacement tissue for the deficient host. To provide a concise review for surgeons on the current science and biology of stem cells, we surveyed the scientific literature, MEDLINE, and relevant political headlines that illuminate the stem cell discussion; the issues are summarized in this review. Building on this conceptual framework, the related issues of clinical promise and the political debate enveloping this emerging technology are examined. A basic understanding of stem cell biology is paramount to stay informed of this emerging technology and the national debate.

The Haider Phenomenon in Austria

Austria does not often make political headlines. It has at least twice in recent years: in 1986, when the "Waldheim Affair" was debated worldwide, and in 1999, when the Austrian Freedom Party (FPOe) under Joerg Haider received 27 percent of the vote in national elections. Established by former Nazis for former Nazis, the FPOe entered the mainstream of Austrian politics when it became part of a coalition government. This volume explores whether its rise is a uniquely Austrian phenomenon or corresponds to broader social and political changes in Europe.

Dimensions of Candidate Evaluation

The story of a presidential election year is in many ways the story of the actions and interactions of those considered as possible candidates for their nation's highest office. If this is true in the abstract, it certainly was true in the election of 1968. The political headlines of 1968 were captured by those who ran for the nominations of their parties, those who pondered over whether or not to run, those who chose to pull out of the race or were struck down during the campaign, those who raised a third party banner, and those who resisted suggestions to run outside the two-party structure. While 1968 may have been unusual in the extent to which many prospective candidates dominated the political scene, every presidential election is, in its own way, highlighted by those considered for the office of President.The political scientist has shown scholarly interest in the candidates. His interest, however, has been selective in its focus—mainly concentrating on the two actual party nominees and not the larger set of possible presidential candidates. Research in electoral behavior has detailed the popular image of the nominees in terms of the public's reactions to their record and experience, personal qualities, and party affiliation. Furthermore, attitudes toward the nominees have been shown to constitute a major short-term influence on the vote. Yet attitudes toward other candidates have been surveyed only to ascertain the behavior of those people who favored someone other than the ultimate nominees.