Press Coverage Research Articles

‘China doll snatched away my husband’: The intersectional othering of Chinese migrant women in a Malaysian newspaper

This article examines the role of a mainstream newspaper in perpetuating the othering of an under-researched migrant sub-group in Malaysia, Chinese national women who work in low-paid jobs and the illegal sex trade. While issues surrounding these women’s economic and social vulnerability have been largely ignored in media discourse, their involvement in sex work as well as their extramarital relationships with Chinese-Malaysian men have garnered negative press coverage. Using critical discourse analysis and critical stylistics, this study analyses the mediatised representations of these economic migrants, the adulterous husbands and their Chinese-Malaysian wives in a local Chinese-owned news site. Our findings show that the articles position the migrant women as sexual predators, sexual commodities and criminals; the men as prey as well as deserting spouses and fathers; and the local Chinese women as moral wives. We argue that these representations facilitate a co-ethnic racism that intersects with gender, sexuality, nationality, migrant status, occupation and social class. These representational choices are inscribed with patriarchal, neoliberal and xenophobic ideologies that converge in the media coverage to reinforce social fictions that justify and entrench the marginalisation of this highly stigmatised group of migrant women.

“The Jogger and the Wolfpack”: An Analysis of the TRANSITIVITY Patterns in the Global Media Coverage of the 1989 Central Park Five Case

Common causes of wrongful conviction include eyewitness misidentification, improper forensics, or false confessions (Garrett in Convicting the innocent: where criminal prosecutions go wrong, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2011; Innocence Canada, https://www.innocencecanada.com/causes-of-wrongful-convictions/); whilst none of these factors are in question in this paper, the notion put forward is that a more implicit factor is also at play; that is, the newspaper coverage of a criminal case during the lead up to trial. According to Felton Rosulek (Text Talk 28:529–550, 2008), “[…] linguistic choices conspire together […] and create a specific interpretation of reality”. Thus, this paper explores how the accused and the (alleged) criminal events pertaining to a high-profile case of the 1980s in New York are discursively framed in a range of press coverage across the USA and further afield. The corpus comprises newspaper articles reporting on the Central Park Jogger case, which resulted in the wrongful conviction and lost freedom of five innocent young men. Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (CADS) (Partington and Marchi, in: Biber, Reppen (eds) The Cambridge handbook of English corpus linguistics, Cambridge University Press, 2015; Stubbs in Text and corpus analysis. Computer-assisted studies of language and culture. Blackwell, Oxford, 1996), the Transitivity patterns (Halliday and Matthiessen in Halliday’s introduction to functional grammar, Routledge, London, 2014) present in the press coverage are examined to gain insights into whether the portrayal of (1) the accused and (2) the victim at the centre of this case may have contributed to securing a wrongful conviction. Furthermore, this paper strives to (1) draw awareness to wrongful convictions more generally and (2) contribute to studies on Transitivity, which serve to highlight societal injustice and the power of printed news when determining the innocence or guilt of an accused individual. To acquire both quantitative and qualitative results, the UAM Corpus Tool (O’Donnell in UAM Corpus Tool, http://www.corpustool.com/) was also employed here.

Applying Thematic Analysis to Analyse Press Coverage in Cross-Country Comparative Research: A Qualitative Study Protocol

The aim of this exploratory study is to investigate similarities and differences in how the press report on school education and policy in England and Germany. For the purpose of analysing relevant regional and national press coverage, we will create four data sets. Inspired by Bourdieu’s theories of the state and work in relation to news media, and applying thematic analysis, we will investigate which specific contents are reported and how issues are covered. To provide contextual information we will also survey who is given voice in the data and which article types are prevalent. Time frame and sample size for this study are determined by balancing the partly conflicting goals of (a) paying due attention to the exploratory ethos of the investigation, (b) analysing a relatively large number of articles, and (c) working with a manageable size of the data set. On the basis of the empirical findings, we will draw conclusions about the relationship between educational policy and the press, adopting a cross-country comparative perspective.

Postmarket Surveillance for Effective Regulation of Digital Mental Health Treatments.

Postmarket Surveillance for Effective Regulation of Digital Mental Health Treatments.

‘Reconstruction’ of US Cultural Development within the Soviet Press during the ‘Thaw’ Period

The authors reveal the peculiarities of the Soviet press coverage of the issues related to culture and education in the United States during the “Thaw” period. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the domestic press materials of the period under review showed that the rhetoric used in relation to the US cultural development share many similarities with post-war rhetoric. In their opinion, this fact is explained by the ideological confrontation of the two systems, between - the “American dream” and the “Soviet way of life,” which excluded the possibility of peaceful coexistence. The materials on the culture issue were intended, on the one hand, to demonstrate the rapid decline of art and education in the United States, and, on the other hand, the impossibility of cooperation in that area. The authors also demonstrate that the positive aspects of American art were simultaneously sharply criticized. However, despite the continuity, the press of the “thaw” period had a number of unique features. It was distinguished by greater objectivity as well as reasoning, and on reliance of facts. In addition, presented information became more meaningful and was accompanied by photographic materials. The press published statements by American politicians, public figures and ordinary Americans, which made the publications more interesting for the reader.

More Than Just a Strongman: The Strategic Construction of Viktor Orbán’s Charismatic Authority on Facebook

Populist leaders are often described as “strongmen,” receiving a somewhat two-dimensional Western press coverage that cannot explain their local popularity. Based on visual and textual analysis of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Facebook, we argue that he has a more complex social media persona. Orbán’s Facebook shows him as (1) a fighter against a variety of enemies, (2) a symbolic condensation of the nation, (3) a relatable politician with (4) a gentleness toward children and animals, and (5) a strong competence in elite political contexts. Orbán uses his charismatic authority on Facebook to draw the boundaries of the Hungarian nation, presenting himself as the iconic representation of “Hungarian-ness.” The building blocks of his image are constantly being adapted to the current political situation and to shifts in public opinion. The Orbán image is, thus, a fluid and pragmatic material with only a few core principles and its popularity remains steadfast despite the brand’s contradictions. Understanding the appeal of Orbán’s self-representation may help us better grasp populist regimes’ variation and success worldwide.

Mobilidades Turísticas e Saúde Pública Análise Histórica a partir de uma Perspectiva Brasileira

This paper aims at discussing tourism and public health from a mobilities perspective. We analyze tourism not just as corporeal movement, but as a socio-spatial phenomenon that combines material and immaterial elements. For the purposes of this analysis, we take a historical approach on disease outbreaks in Brazil by reviewing press coverage on the poliomyelitis epidemic in the context of political, social, cultural, and economic transformations of the 1950s, with particular interest in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Though this disease did not influence tourism directly – which, in fact, was very incipient in the country at that time – this analysis highlights early travel and tourism imaginaries in relation to public health protocols and concerns. As a main contribution, this study explores different dimensions of (im)mobilities (from pathogens to tourists, from idyllic images to sick bodies), which have the potential to grasp tourism in a more relational way in the so-called post-Covid19 pandemic world.

Ethical Issues of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Healthcare

The idea of integrating ethics into artificial intelligence (AI) increased globally, and it became an important policy objective in many countries. The ethics of AI has seen significant press coverage in recent years, which supports related research, but also may end up undermining it. The issues under discussion were just predictions of what future technology will bring, and we already know what would be most ethical and how to achieve that. This paper is a literature review in nature; it analyzes previous studies related to implementation of ethics in AI. The literature results indicate that between 2010 and 2021, there were 150 AI ethical incidents; including data privacy and security risks, safety concerns, bias diagnosis, the possibility of hostile entities taking control of AI, a lack of interpersonal communication or a humanistic perspective, wealth concentration around an AI business and job losses. The findings obtained from this literature review can help to propose method for AI; it's, indeed, an avenue for researchers to understand ethics needed in AI. Thus, this is crucial to provide suitable suggestions on planning the next course of action on how to integrate ethics in AI in the future.

A star is made, not born: the production and reproduction of Mae West as a screen icon

ABSTRACT Mae West was one of the biggest stars of early Hollywood, and her influence can still be felt in the work of many contemporary performers. While numerous scholarly accounts have examined West and her star persona, few have considered the creative practices and labour that went into the creation of that persona. This essay explores the construction of Mae West’s star persona by examining West’s strategic use of secondary and background characters in her films, along with advertisements, reviews, and other press coverage that accompanied the release of those films. I argue that Mae West, along with the studios that employed her and the press that covered her, shaped her particular star image in part by offering carefully crafted representations of imagined audiences. This example reveals broader institutionalised practices used by those in power in early Hollywood to influence how the public thought about stars during the studio era. My analysis includes films released between 1933 and 1940 with West in a starring role. The analysis also examines discourse surrounding West by way of promotional images, paid advertisements, articles, and reviews in periodicals such as Time, Motion Picture Herald, and The Educational Screen.

Pavement publics in late nineteenth-century Stockholm

This article presents a case study of pavement regulation and usage in nineteenth-century Stockholm, probing how urbanites’ interactions on and access to pavements were contested and negotiated, in the process shaping the publicness of streets. Utilising press coverage, it moves beyond a focus on infrastructure and political discourse, to capture urban dwellers’ perspectives, claims and interactions. The article shows that, in favouring circulation, Stockholm's pavement regulations expelled or made subsistence-driven activities illegitimate. Pavement circulation also secured undisturbed, anonymous walking and the ability to maintain a distanced attitude towards others – to be private while in public. Yet pavements featured as a prominent public space not only because it was ordered and controlled, but because urbanites of all sorts fought for access. Next to allegedly “modern” usages, city pavements remained home to age-old but marginalised street practices, as well as middle-class women who had begun to claim their equal right of use.

Reception of neorealist films in the Polish Film School

In this article, I examine the influence of neorealism on the ideological and artistic establishment of the Polish Film School. In the first part, I discuss theoretical assumptions about the Polish Film School, focusing on its characteristics and the reasons behind its foundation. Then, I analyse neorealism’s contribution to the Polish Film School in the 1950s using examples from Polish literature. In the last part, I present an analysis of the two Polish films most strongly imbued with the spirit of neorealism: Pokolenie (A Generation) () and Godziny nadziei (The Hours of Hope) (). Through a critical analysis of interviews and press coverage from 1953 to 1955 that takes the historical perspective of Italian neorealist films into account, I conclude that the Polish Film School was most fascinated by the Italian observation of reality and curiosity about human affairs.

Speaking Out to Outer Space – An Analysis of the Humanity's Messages to Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life, 1962–2018

Various messages have been sent out to potentially existing intelligent extraterrestrial life since the 1960s. Considering the significance of such messages as a medium of first contact and representation of humankind, it is surprising that they have received no attention from sociology. What is their purpose? Who speaks for earth? What is their content and has it changed over time? This work seeks to answer these questions by analyzing all relevant messages (N = 14) sent to outer space as well as related press coverage and official statements from the period 1962–2018. Analyses find a striking shift in purpose, authorship, and content, from political and scientific elites celebrating nation, science and (high) culture to, more recently, for-profits and science facilitating commercial exploitation but also individual agency and planetary awareness. However, such plurality makes global consensus and oversight on whether and what kind of messages should be sent even more difficult.

Framing women’s indignation: news coverage on women’s mobilization in Mexico, 2019–2021

ABSTRACT Women’s mobilizations in Mexico have caused controversy due to violent protest strategies. Also, the government discredited them as being manipulated by the conservative opposition. This study analyzes press coverage of women's mobilizations from 2019 to 2021 in three Mexican newspapers with different ideological orientations, applying frame analysis. The findings point to the predominant frames in the three newspapers as legitimizing the mobilization. However, although the ideological orientation of a newspaper is relevant, it does not automatically define a preference for specific frames, suggesting that the novelty of a phenomenon translates into a more significant interaction between the creators and receivers of the frames.

Cutting colonial losses: imperial ideology in media coverage of the 1878 transfer of Saint Barthélemy in Sweden and France

ABSTRACT During the last several decades, important new research has been published on the Swedish Caribbean colony of Saint Barthélemy, but this has almost exclusively focused on its early years, during the early modern period. By the time it was returned to France in 1878, its heyday was long past. Nevertheless, this article argues that press coverage of the island’s transfer to France in the 1870s provides a useful window into colonial mentalities during an era that constituted the apex of global imperialism, even as it marked the end of Sweden’s small tropical empire. What did Swedes think about imperialism in the 1870s, and how was Sweden’s role as a colonial power viewed from abroad? Investigating a representative sample of Swedish and French newspapers, this article argues that while the peaceful transfer of Sweden’s last formal colony during the high age of empire could be described as exceptional, this did not reflect exceptional humanitarian or anti-imperial attitudes in Sweden. Rather, Swedes subscribed to the contemporaneous European logic of successful colonialism as a source of national pride, but were eager to divest themselves of Saint Barthélemy since the island’s poverty was understood as a national humiliation within this same colonial discursive framework.

Argumentative pro-vaccination and anti-vaccination narratives in the MMR vaccine-autism controversy

This paper presents a discourse analysis of the public’s response to UK press coverage of the debate surrounding the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and its alleged link to autism from 1998 to 2019. The analysis focuses on published readers’ letters to the editor in a newspaper corpus comprising 12 national British newspapers, and on comments posted by users on the Guardian’s and the Daily Mail’s Facebook pages. These social media pages are dialogic sites of individual participation that allow users to discuss how the latest events and debates affect their daily lives, as well as how they interpret them through their own ideological, cultural, social and personal lenses. The findings show that medico-scientific issues such as vaccination are often personalised by the parents and legal guardians of young children, and that they regard individual experiences with vaccination or with vaccine-preventable diseases as valid evidence on which to base their argumentation. The findings thus highlight the need to devise effective communication to foster the science of vaccines and to counter vaccine hesitancy without belittling a person’s genuine experiences and sincere beliefs.

Great Britain's spatial twitter activity related to ‘fracking’

Fracking has proven to be a contentious issue in Great Britain, receiving wide press coverage from the initial sale of exploration and development licences, to the current moratorium. This research tracks the public activity online related to this ‘fracking’ journey by analysing over 317 million geolocated tweets from 2015 to 2020, mapping their location to compare the spatial distribution against the shale gas exploration sites. To spatially normalise the results for population density a χ-squared expectation surface was generated revealing higher than expected levels of interest near the previously active fracking site of Preston New Road and licenced extraction blocks in Lancashire. The data granularity allows for peaks of activity to be identified and topics analysed at higher temporal and spatial resolution than previously possible with more traditional surveys. The paper demonstrates the use of χ-squared expectation surfaces for normalising geotweets and the value of social media spatial-temporal analysis for monitoring local involvement in environmental issues, and for monitoring the changing level of interest across different regions in reaction to political decisions.

The Influence of Short Selling on Negative Press Coverage of Firms

We hypothesize that after a relaxation of short selling constraints, an escalation in short selling activity will heighten incentives for short sellers to accelerate price discovery by revealing their negative information. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that the overall sentiment of media coverage tilts significantly more negative for pilot relative to control firms following exogenous relief of short sale constraints. We find a more pronounced effect for media-initiated articles relative to firm-initiated press releases. Further, following abnormal increases in short interest, there is a significantly greater increase in negative news flow for pilot relative to nonpilot firms. Finally, we find that stock returns of firms with lower short selling constraints become significantly more sensitive to negative news reports. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting. Funding: The authors acknowledge the financial support of the Kenan-Flagler Business School and the Naveen Jindal School of Management. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4783 .

Newspapers and Primacies in Elections: A Comparative Study of Coverage in Two Mainstream English Dailies

Elections are the mechanism under a democratic system to form a government. Invariably, during elections, the power remains in the hands of the people- being able to demonstrate their grumbles and elect the representatives of their choice. To choose among alternatives, people need to know the candidates and political parties with reference to various public issues. The mass media are the channels through which public could able to know socio-political, and economic issues in their country. In the modern marketing driven media world, news about public interests has diminished due to over-dependence of news media on sensational political stuff. Media has obligation to give adequate coverage to election campaign news. It is largely through media that people are able to know their leaders and manifestoes of different political parties. This paper aimed at analyzing newspaper coverage relevant to election campaigns. For the purpose, two mainstream English Dailies -The Times of India and The Hindu have been chosen for analysis. The Study explores the press coverage devoted to political parties, candidates contesting the elections and major public issues like corruption, crime, economy, defence or foreign policy etc. during the elections. Moreover, this research shows how news media play a significant role in shaping discourse on public issues.

The influence of institutional pressure on target setting

We examine whether the desire to maintain sociopolitical legitimacy with critical stakeholders affects sales targets set by Chinese firms. Drawing from institutional theory, we argue that enterprises owned by local government (local-SOEs) feel greater pressure to maintain their legitimacy with the local government relative to private firms (non-SOEs), leading to a stronger association between the provincial GDP target (a legitimate benchmark) and firm-level targets. Results from manually collected data support this conjecture and are robust to alternate measures and samples. Increases in the demand for legitimacy -- measured using exogenous shocks and sample characteristics -- strengthen the association. Finally, changes in the coverage in the official press and changes in target achievement rates document the real effects of this strategy. Our findings demonstrate the effects of institutional pressures on corporate decisions and enrich our understanding on the socially constructed as well as instrumental rationality role of management accounting.

The Sheffield street tree dispute: a case of “business as usual” urban management?

Press coverage of the Sheffield street tree dispute showed images of protestors and yellow ribbons on trees threatened with felling as part of a highly charged and public argument between the council and some of its citizens. However, a closer analysis of the highways management programme shows that it was not simply a case of two parties in conflict. This paper pulls on a wide range of secondary data sources to explore Sheffield’s street tree dispute by examining the urban management approach taken by the local authority. Using the place-keeping concept as an analytical framework, the paper will demonstrate how the Sheffield case reflects “business as usual” maintenance practices undertaken by local authorities when contracting out management work. The analysis also provides evidence showing how the Sheffield case demonstrates poor contract design, governance processes, evaluation and communication practices that had ramifications for the city that went beyond its street trees.