Political News Research Articles

Disinformation Unveiled: Tracking Media Hoaxes to Build Public Literacy for Indonesia’s 2024 Elections

This research aims to describe the phenomenon of information disruption through hoax news related to the 2019 Election in the media, and to use this understanding as a foundation for enhancing media literacy among the public for the 2024 Election. The emergence of various hoax news content across both digital and conventional media has disturbed the public and has the potential to trigger national divisions. This study employs a descriptive qualitative textual analysis method with item analysis units. Data were collected from political hoax content related to the 2019 Election, and analysis was conducted using a coding sheet for units of analysis. The research findings reveal: firstly, the phenomenon of information disruption is reinforced by the spread of hoax content related to political news about the 2019 Election, as evidenced by the analysis of the top 10 news items; secondly, the forms and types of hoax content concerning political news about the 2019 Election are predominantly classified into 7 categories of hoaxes according to the First Draft; thirdly, there is a need for media-savvy strategies ahead of the 2024 Election, which includes mastering digital literacy.

The Nexus between Political Awareness and Social Media Political Participation as Mediated by the Political Efficacy Among Youth in Region XI Philippines

The central aim of this study is to examine the role of political efficacy in mediating the connection between political awareness and social media political participation among youths in Region XI, Philippines. This study used a quantitative method, more especially, a non-experimental correlational approach. Data was collected online through Google Forms using modified questions, and respondents were chosen using stratified random sampling. Validity and reliability tests were per-formed on the measurement model, while descriptive statistics were utilized to depict the constructs in the study. The proposed mediation model was assessed using the standard algorithm-bootstrapping of SmartPLS 4.0 for mediation analysis. The findings revealed that the measurement model is valid and reliable based on the AVE, HTMT, Cronbach’s Alpha values. The results indicated that youth in Region XI demonstrated high levels of political awareness, and moderate levels of political efficacy and social media political participation. Furthermore, the mediation analysis suggests that political efficacy significantly mediates the relationship between political awareness and social media political participation. These results underscore the critical role of political efficacy as a key mechanism through which political awareness translates into active political engagement on social media among the youth. The study provides valuable insights for educators, policymakers, and researchers interested in enhancing political participation through increased political awareness and efficacy.

Understanding public perceptions of revolutionary technology: the role of political ideology, knowledge, and news consumption

This study investigates public perceptions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Taiwan, focusing on the roles of political ideology, science news consumption, and knowledge. Analyzing responses from 502 participants, the research reveals that political ideology has a limited impact on AI benefit perceptions but likely becomes more significant with increased AI application. The study suggests that, for narrow AI, science news consumption and content knowledge are more influential than political ideology. It emphasizes the need for tailored communication strategies and highlights the positive association between respect for science authority and favorable AI perceptions. The findings provide essential insights for policymakers navigating AI adoption.

Looking for the International in international relations and political science: Evidence from author locations in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 1999-2023

Political science and international relations have undergone substantive internationalisation over the last 25 years. This short article uses a dataset covering all papers published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations to investigate how authorship in the journal has changed over time in light of this. It finds that while, overall, BJPIR has been dominated by authors based at institutions in the United Kingdom, the journal has clearly internationalised over the past 10 to 15 years. This internationalisation has mostly been driven by increasing numbers of authors based at European institutions whereas work by authors from outside Europe, North America, and Oceania remains relatively rare. These results provide insights into the journal’s development over the past 25 years, but also the extent and the limitations of the internationalisation of political science and international relations more generally.

‘We cracked a hole in this very white structure’: Indigenous journalism practices in mainstream Australian news organisations

A new wave of anti-racist politics is challenging the racialised dynamics of news media reporting. This paper explores the experiences of Indigenous journalists working in mainstream news media organisations in Australia in this changing context, and their strategies to navigate the racial political economy and news values of the industry. While many have observed the growing number of Indigenous journalists working in mainstream news, Indigenous journalists’ experiences and practices in these contexts have rarely been canvassed. I analyse 11 in-depth interviews with practicing journalists in Australia to explore how they have their mediated their positions. I suggest that Indigenous journalists engage in a specifically Indigenous journalistic practice, informed by connections to place, community and culture. This can be understood as a contested practice of Indigenous sovereignty. It also highlights the racialised presumptions of news values, including notions of objectivity, authority and balance.

“Get Woke, Go Broke”: sport media’s monetization of white male grievance in the age of Trump

ABSTRACT Following the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, a new wave of progressive athlete activism emerged. While a section of sport media members supported these athletes and their causes, a subset of anti-progressive pundits and critics emerged resisting the new wave of politically active Black athletes. I argue that sport media pundits like Clay Travis at Fox Sports represent sport media monetizing white male backlash to “woke” Black athletes. By promoting these voices, these outlets committed to amplifying white male grievance politics and emboldened anti-Black racism in sport media, all while increasing polarization and partisanship, paralleling conservative political news pundits during the Trump era. This essay critically and closely reads and contextualizes the increasingly rightward rhetoric of Travis, explaining how he connects Trumpian rhetoric to sports punditry more broadly and allows major sport media an opportunity to advance overtly conservative, racist, and sexist dialogues.

When the Right Riots: How Ideology, Protest Tolerance, Authoritarianism and News Consumption Affect Perceptions of the US Capitol Insurrection

ABSTRACT After the 2020 presidential election, sustained efforts to overturn outcomes culminated in the invasion of the United States Capitol. While scholars have long investigated the impact of news on support for left-leaning protests, it is critical to understand how political predispositions and news consumption relate to support for anti-democratic movements. Through a survey fielded one week after the invasion, we analyzed how ideology, attitudes about protesting in general, authoritarianism, and media habits relate to people’s support for the movement, perceptions of its disruptiveness, and opinions about police response. Results show that conservative media have a strong unidirectional relationship, increasing support for the movement, while left-leaning or mainstream media impact is moderated by partisanship, which is related to increased support for liberals and decreased support for conservatives. We found authoritarianism related to support for Stop the Steal and perceptions of the police as too severe to suppress it. Evidence suggests elite cues and consumption of conservative media can legitimize insurrectionist movements, even among those who strongly oppose the right to protest overall.

Paradoxes in the US Political News Media Supply Chain

Paradoxes in the US Political News Media Supply Chain

Interaction between political pr and political agenda-setting from the perspective of the presidential elections in the Republic of Moldova, 2024 (case study)

The interaction between political PR and the political media agenda-setting process can play a crucial role in creating a climate of opinion in an electoral context. The presidential initiative to organize a republican referendum on the subject of Moldova's accession to the European Union has become a widely publicized event in the local media. Our working hypothesis is that this initiative, which is an element of political PR, has a strong impact on public opinion, and through the media it manages to superimpose the agenda of an electoral candidate with the public agenda of citizens. We are thus talking about the interaction of the three types of agenda - political agenda, media agenda, public agenda (citizens' agenda).

Demokrasi, Governance, dan Oligarki: Konglomerasi Media MNC Group Keterlibatannya Melancarkan Capres Ganjar Pranowo Pada Pemilu 2024

This article discusses the issue of the MNC group as oligarchic media and the news it displays only appears to be based on political interests. The media oligarchy influences political contestation, the latest political reality shows that the Perindo Party supports presidential candidate Ganjar Pranowo in the 2024 presidential election and also utilizes television media as a political capital and political campaign infrastructure in the 2024 presidential election. This research aims to explore the phenomenon of the MNC Group media conglomeration which siding with the coalition of presidential candidate Ganjar Pranowo to form an oligarchy that can influence the governance system. This research adopted a qualitative research design and data collection was carried out through literature reviews from various journals and online publications of articles related to this issue. Research findings show that the MNC Group as the media broadcaster broadcasts broadcasts on television only for political purposes, this has resulted in a democratic crisis because the media no longer has independence, and this phenomenon states that there is a media oligarchy in Indonesia which makes Indonesia bad governance. The research results contribute to a better understanding of democracy, media oligarchy, and cultural hegemony in political media.

Improving fake news detection on social networks through a novel machine learning approach

Recent years have seen an increase in societal information, such as commercial advertisements, celebrity information, political news, etc., due to the growth of online social networks. Some social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, were impacted by Fake News (FN) spread by their users. Nevertheless, some individuals propagate false information using words, images, and videos to increase their connections and reputation. The most current information is unreliable and misleads other members on an online social network. Because FN is circulated to encourage users to trust disinformation, it’s hard for detection algorithms to recognize false information according to uploaded material. In this research, we will provide an autonomous false news detection strategy called Grey Wolf optimized Adaptive Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (GWO+ABi-GRU) that can identify FN on Twitter. The TF-IDF method translates textual material into a mathematical representation that accurately captures the value of terms and their context in the dataset. We improve the overall efficiency of the BiGRU by applying this GWO, which leads to increased accuracy when spotting false news. The experimental examination of real-world data shows that the proposed FN detection strategy GWO+ABi-GRU outperforms traditional approaches regarding recall, accuracy, F1 score, and precision. This enhanced performance proves essential in preventing the circulation of false news on social media, protecting the integrity of information sources, and mitigating the potential damage caused by false information.

Critique du récit pur: gleam of time in Maurice Blanchot’s narratives

ABSTRACT Maurice Blanchot’s itinerary as a critic and writer is marked by a transformation occurring around the beginning of WW2, when Blanchot abandoned right-wing political journalism to focus on literature. His criticism and narrative fictions from the 1940s elaborate the notion of a ‘pure novel’, inspired partly by Mallarmé, in response to historical conditions of the Occupation, in an assertion of literary sovereignty after bitter political defeat. Blanchot casts this pure form of writing through figures of light and luminosity that would transcend, even destroy, empirical experience – moving toward the disaster he will later invoke – thus affording a certain evasion from historical realities, while also betraying an intimate relation to their specific concrete historical conjuncture. The argument is not that Blanchot sublimates / allegorises political disappointment through literary narrative (see Jeffrey Mehlman in the 1980s), but that his literary texts enact a relation to factual political and historical responsibility that ‘pure’ literature fails to liquidate, but rather continually evokes. Tracing out constitutive evasions in Thomas the Obscure, Aminadab, The Madness of the Day, and The Instant of my Death, reveals how Blanchot’s fiction betrays a necessary accounting of the author’s factual history, a historical responsibility called up in the strange vacuous light of literature itself.

No watchdogs on Twitter: Topics and frames in political journalists’ tweets about the coronavirus pandemic

Social media channels, particularly Twitter/X, played a significant role as information platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic. As journalists are crucial actors on that platform, an analysis of the content and tone of their tweets during the pandemic can reveal the role they played in shaping public understanding of this public health crisis. Our analysis focuses on Germany where the government enforced relatively strict anti-COVID-19 measures and where strong opposition to these measures emerged outside the mainstream media. We analyzed almost 10.000 tweets of 247 journalists of mainstream media during a 14-month-period. To shed light on journalists’ watchdog versus collaborative role orientation, computational methods were used to extract themes and tone in their pandemic-related tweets. Furthermore, network analysis was utilized to identify influential actors in journalists’ interactions with experts and other users on Twitter. The findings revealed that journalists tweeted most about topics like the economy, protests, and Chancellor Merkel’s ability to implement a restrictive containment policy. As demonstrated by the network analysis, journalists frequently interacted with cabinet members and pro-government experts on Twitter during the pandemic. The analysis also revealed that some tweets were characterized by an anti-protest and anti-lockdown tone, but these came from different groups of journalists.

Peculiarities of children’s comments on French-language political media texts with the “Diamond” structure

Peculiarities of children’s comments on French-language political media texts with the “Diamond” structure

The Trump Effect? Right-Wing Populism and Distrust in Voting by Mail in Canada.

Do Donald Trump's attacks on voting by mail influence how some Canadians view mail-in ballots? The Trump effect on views and behaviors surrounding voting by mail has been well documented in the United States. North of the border, more Canadians than ever voted by mail in the last general election. In this study, we consider how right-wing populism is associated with trust in voting by mail among Canadians. Specifically, we seek to test two main hypotheses. First, we consider whether Canadians holding populist views-and, in particular, those holding right-wing populist views (would-be Trump supporters)-are less trusting of voting by mail. Second, we consider whether political media exposure amplifies this association. We analyze data from both the 2021 Canadian Election Study and Democracy Checkup Survey. We find that those who hold populist views clearly have less trust in voting by mail. This is especially true among right-leaning individuals. Furthermore, as in the United States, this effect is moderated by one's level of political media exposure, with higher levels of political media exposure amplifying the effect of populist views on trust in voting by mail. Our findings, therefore, suggest that the politicization of mail-in voting by President Trump has important implications for the legitimacy of the electoral system not only in the United States, but also in Canada and potentially in other parts of the world.

Still a Boy’s Club: Women Journalists & Political News Coverage

ABSTRACT We investigate the level of gender parity in political news reporting at the New York Times. We apply a media sociology approach to examine how gender stereotypes, women in media leadership, and women in political leadership interact to affect the extent to which women journalists appear in bylines about domestic and foreign affairs news. We leverage an original data collection of nearly 3,000 news articles published from 2007–2020. We find several key results. First, women are more likely to appear in bylines about domestic political news than foreign affairs news. Second, we find that during Jill Abramson’s tenure as executive editor the number of women writing about politics increased. Third, as the proportion of women in the U.S. Congress rises, more women appear in story bylines about political news. Fourth, while more women write about political news now compared to the past, most political news stories still have men as authors. Our findings show slow but steady improvement in the gender diversity of political news journalists.

From news websites to social media: Unpacking the influence of online channels on presumed influence and responses to misinformation

This study employs the theoretical model of the influence of presumed influence to examine the mechanisms that drive online users to engage in information authentication and social correction, which are critical for countering misinformation. In particular, this study examines how the perceived prevalence and presumed influence of misinformation affect the intention to verify and correct misinformation, and how the use of different online platforms (i.e., social networking sites, video platforms, instant messaging applications, and news websites) for political news shapes these perceptions. This research draws on survey data from 2,589 respondents in Taiwan. The findings indicate that perceived prevalence has a positive relationship with presumed influence, which in turn, leads to authentications and corrections. Moreover, using social networking sites and video platforms for political news is positively related to perceived prevalence, whereas instant messaging applications have a negative association.

(Mis)measurement of Political Content Exposure within the Smartphone Ecosystem

The affordances of the smartphone are shifting individuals toward ever smaller and more fragmented units of political experience. In this piece, we make use of a novel approach to granular assessment of political exposure on smartphones, revealing an incredible level of complexity in modern political content diets, somewhat at odds with simplifying assumptions commonly made by political communication research. Based on five million screen-recording frames taken from 119 smartphones over two weeks, we find clear challenges to three common assumptions in the literature, with clear impacts on new theories about fragmented political media use: Assumption (1) unique encounters with political content can be aggregated by tabulation as though they are equivalent experiences; (2) durations of exposure to political content can be aggregated (e.g., at a monthly or daily level) without regard for how those time units are clustered at smaller timescales; and (3) singular political formats or sources (particularly the news formats and sources) are sufficient proxies for measuring and manipulating overall political content exposure. Regarding the first and second assumptions, our findings suggest that the majority of political content exposure occurs in bursts of only a few potentially-forgettable seconds, and that the remainder follow a power-law curve that reemerges across apps and individuals, with extreme variability within and across individuals. Regarding the third assumption, we find the vast majority of political content is encountered from formats and sources other than news and social media. We articulate how these results fit within and augment literature focused on political content exposure.

The exposure level media teachers for the news (eight o'clock PM) of Kurdish television channels

The aim of this research is to understand the idea and direction of the media instructors for the news at 8:00PM in the Kurdish Satellite Channels. The majority of the viewers of the satellite channels pay more attention to the news at 8:00 PM, as the habit of the international channels. The Kurdish satellite channels solicitude to the news of 8:00 PM. The Kurdish channels are preparing special news covering and the companies that are working in the economic fields are emphasizing on showing their advertisements at 8:00 PM news as it is considered as Golden Time by some of the Media Analysts. This research is considered as descriptive research and depends on media theory (Media Tools) and relies on questionnaire forms as a used tool in the research. In the end, the researchers concluded some outcomes such as; decrease the percentage of the News and TV viewers in general as there are alternatives for the Satellite channels. There are some kinds of debate during watching the news at 8:00 PM among family members and, friends and on the other side with the sample of the research, the mass majority of this research samples come first to follow the Political news, then Miscellaneous news, Economy news and then the social news. Most of the research samples show that the Kurdish channels are not alternative for the other news resources

Moralization of Rationality Can Stimulate Sharing of Hostile and False News on Social Media, but Intellectual Humility Inhibits it

ABSTRACT Many assume that if citizens were more inclined to moralize the values of evidence-based and logical thinking, they would be less likely to share politically hostile, conspiratorial, and false claims on social media. In contrast, on the basis of theories of status seeking and persuasion, we argue that moralization of rationality may actually stimulate the spread of hostile partisan news online, including fabricated claims. Across three large surveys (N = 4800) run on U.S. respondents (one exploratory and two pre-registered), we provide empirical evidence for this prediction and demonstrate that the moralization of rationality can be a form of moral grandstanding by status seekers inclined to spread hostile (mis)information to reach partisan goals. In contrast to such grandstanding with respect to rationality, our studies find robust evidence that intellectual humility – that is, the awareness that intuitions are fallible and that trusting others is often desirable – may protect people from both sharing and believing hostile and false political news online.