Tabloid Articles Research Articles

Analysis of Textual Complexity in Danish News Articles on Climate Change

Structural linguistic features are often overlooked yet potentially important aspects of journalistic practice. Especially in news reporting on climate change, these features can play a crucial role as the proper use of language is tied to message credibility, processing fluency and knowledge retention, which can positively influence the reader to take more climate action. This article analyzes language use in Danish news articles on climate change using a sample of around 32,000 articles from four different outlet types (quality news, niche papers, tabloids, and public service broadcasters) published from 1990 to 2021. We create a machine-learning model of text complexity covering this concept’s semantic and syntactic dimensions. Our findings confirm expected differences in complexity between news outlets, highlighting tabloid articles as engaging with higher semantic complexity, while quality papers and niche papers exhibit higher syntactic complexity. We observe a significant decrease in semantic complexity and a slight increase in syntactic complexity over time, a trend towards more generic language, and an increased use of pronouns, verbs, and adverbs. Most of these changes can be attributed to the emergence of articles by public service broadcasters. Articles by public service broadcasters are characterised by high syntactic complexity, which we consider problematic due to their popularity among the general public.

Foreign Bodies: Horror and Intimacy in Singapore's Migrant Labor Regimes

Abstract Singapore depends upon foreign bodies to maintain its hypermodern, sleek exterior. For many Singaporeans, a live-in foreign domestic worker (FDW) marks a milestone in achieving a certain kind of bourgeois lifestyle, but the incorporation of a stranger into the household gives rise to certain fears. Intimate labor evokes unexpected feelings, and anxieties about the boundaries of class, nation, gender. In tabloid articles, message boards, and everyday conversation, employers discuss the problem of witchcraft practiced by FDWs—stories such as the incorporation of bodily fluids into employers’ food, the unwanted generation of affection or warm feelings toward those who according to labor contracts should be employees, the surreptitious switching of FDWs’ facial features with those of the employer's children, or other concerns over boundaries and their violation. This article argues that the horror revealed by such stories is one that challenges Singaporean claims to ethnic and economic supremacy in the region, as it points to a return of a perceived threat from an allochronous rural world. Each presents a particular challenge to a sealed, prosperous, “first world” Singaporean self-imagining, a porosity that calls for magical and magico-bureaucratic interventions to set right.

Newspaper Ownership, Democracy and News Diversity: A Quantitative Content Homogeneity Study

ABSTRACT Scholarship is recognising that news diversity is jeopardised by heightened media ownership consolidation and a lack of appropriate regulatory frameworks. Using an automated quantitative content analysis of 658,493 articles published between 2018 and 2021 by two newspapers of the same recently emerged Belgian corporation that had to comply with stipulations to safeguard diversity for five years, we find that while overall content has actually not grown more homogenous, tabloid articles risk crowding out broadsheet news. We ultimately position and contextualise our study and its findings within news diversity and democratic theory and offer suggestions for additional research.

Public Spheres, Counterpublics’ Fears and Syncopolitics

This article explores the often normative and idealist notion of the public sphere at its possible breaking point by analysing the online reactions to two tabloid articles about a 2016 performance of Dancing with Strangers: From Calais to England by Instant Dissidence. It first looks at how a comment platform could be perceived as a subaltern public sphere and as a substitute for a live audience in order to reconsider the notion of the counterpublic. For this, it examines the dialectical tension between politics and aesthetics within a subaltern online public sphere not immune to all kinds of extremism. This leads to an attempt to consider online hostile lay critics as a potentially legitimate public to address the dilemma faced by contemporary artists when engaging with society in an all-inclusive manner. Finally, this article offers a different reading of Instant Dissidence’s performance and of the possible reasons for the commentators’ rage and alienation and proposes syncopolitics as a way out of both online polarisation echo chambers and the public engagement conundrum.

Del americanismo al nacionalismo: el discurso bélico chileno durante la Guerra del Pacífico (1879-1884)

War is an occasion conducive to the formation and propagation of discursive constructs that generate social unity and identity. This article highlights Chilean war discourse during the nineteenth century, which legitimized the War of the Pacific. The aim is to underscore the principal features of war discourse within the prevailing discursive context. The hypothesis is that there is a nationalist discourse that emphasizes cultural and ethnic elements which justified armed conflict. The source material studied here is essentially comprised of national newspaper and tabloid articles. The conclusion is that nationalist political language during that time was basically constituted inarticulately as a result of the presence of a rather diverse and decentralized public sphere.

Effects of News Stereotypes on the Perception of Facial Threat

The human face is central to social interactions and therefore of primary importance in social perception. Two recent discoveries have contributed to a more thorough understanding of the role of news stereotypes in the perception of facial threat: First, social-cognition research has revealed that automatically activated stereotypes influence the perception of facial threat. Individuals holding hostile stereotypes toward dark-skinned outgroup members perceive ambiguous dark-skinned faces as more hostile than similar light-skinned faces. Second, media-stereotyping research has found that the media can influence individuals’ automatically activated stereotypes. Combining these two findings, it was hypothesized that reading tabloid articles about crimes committed by dark-skinned offenders would increase the perceived facial threat of meeting dark-skinned strangers in a subsequent situation. This hypothesis was tested in a laboratory experiment. Participants read crime articles where cues indicating (dark) skin color were mentioned or not. The results showed that reading about dark-skinned criminals increases the perceived facial threat of dark-skinned strangers compared with light-skinned strangers.

News Stereotypes, Time, and Fading Priming Effects

Although there is evidence that the media priming effect fades with time, we lack empirical evidence from experimental designs. We investigated the media priming effect of reading crime tabloid articles that overrepresented foreigners as criminals on a subsequent real-world reality judgment (i.e., estimated frequency of criminal foreigners). We utilized a factorial experimental design ( N = 465) with the between-subjects factors treatment and temporal delay of the postmeasurement. We found that the media priming effect followed an exponential decay function and that vigilance (i.e., the tendency to intensify the intake and processing of threat-relevant information) moderated the decay.

Representations of Islam in British broadsheet and tabloid newspapers 1999–2005

This paper describes the analysis of an 87 million word corpus of British newspaper articles which refer to the subject of Islam. In order to examine representations of Islam and Muslims, the corpus was subjected to a comparative analysis, by analysing the lexis that was used most significantly in the tabloid articles, when compared to the broadsheets, and vice versa. Concordances were then analysed in order to investigate the data in a more qualitative way. It was found that the tabloids tended to focus more on British interests, writing about Muslims in a highly emotional style, in connection with terrorist attacks and religious extremism, focussing on a small number of high-profile Muslim “villains”. On the other hand, the broadsheets had a more restrained reporting stance, writing about Muslims in a wider range of contexts, although their focus on world news resulted in them covering more stories about Muslims engaged in wars. The paper raises issues regarding the meaning of bias, and the process by which readers internalise lexical associations and the extent to which such associations impact on attitudes

Fit for public consumption? An exploratory study of the reporting of nutrition research in UK tabloids with regard to its accuracy, and a preliminary investigation of public attitudes towards it

To explore the quality (accuracy, balance, practical context) of tabloid articles reporting on nutrition research, and public attitudes towards it. A qualitative multi-method study consisting of a systematic analysis of tabloid articles and a series of focus groups with members of the public. Tabloid newspapers (nationwide). Focus groups were conducted at a UK university. All UK tabloid newspapers were collated for a full calendar month. Members of the local Women's Institute and non-teaching staff within the University College Chester were recruited as focus group participants. Twenty-nine tabloid articles were included. A standardised TAT (Tabloid Analysis Tool) was used a total of thirty-nine times (once for each research study cited). Twenty-six failed to accurately report research results, thirty-six failed to mention significant research limitations, and only five quoted a third-party expert source. Two focus groups, each with eight participants, were conducted. Attitudes expressed were largely negative, highlighting elements of confusion and scepticism. Articles were more likely to be disregarded than acted upon, although some value was attached to newspapers providing nutrition information. Tabloid reporting on nutrition research is not sufficiently accurate, balanced or contextualised, and public attitudes towards the reporting are not wholly favourable. Guidance for journalists via registered dietitians and a strengthening of present links could serve to utilise this form of mass media more effectively.

Media presentation of the mental health bill and representations of mental health problems

AbstractThis paper discusses the findings of a study that examined the way in which the Mental Health Bill of June 2002 was presented in the British national and local media over a 3‐year period. A Lexis Nexis search yielded 256 articles, which were then analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. Overall, and perhaps contrary to what might have been expected given previous studies' conclusions regarding the media's negative portrayal of mental ill health, most articles tended to present a negative view of the Bill as unnecessarily repressive, and consequently were more sympathetic towards mental heath service clients, although this was not the case for tabloid articles. However, this paper then considers the more implicit representations found within the articles. It focuses particularly on the continued linking of mental ill health and violence, and also on the way in which the mental health service user might be portrayed as passive and rather pitiful as an alternative to violent and dangerous. It is suggested that the continued use of such images may stem from the fact that mental health problems have long been constructed as ‘Other’, and are therefore deeply engrained in our society. The implications of this for anti‐stigma campaigns are briefly discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An Index of Fame?

This paper discusses the presentation of fame that can be identified through popular search terms. These terms reveal how the rapidly shifting interest in individual identities of ‘fame’ are cast against a continuous sequence of expected and unexpected events including movie releases, annual holidays, murders and terrorist attacks. The central claim of this paper is that fame is continuously reconstituted across a wide spectrum of cultural experiences and actions. Fame is attached to individuals as a personification of mainstream cultural fascination with specific events – whether manufactured or unexpected – and artefacts.

Representations of far-flung illnesses: the case of Ebola in Britain

In western cultures lay people are faced with a plethora of far-flung illnesses, relayed to them by the mass media. A number of social scientists have called for scrutiny of the link between people's patterns of thinking concerning such events, and the messages to which they are exposed. Using the outbreaks of Ebola in Africa in the mid-1990s as a vehicle, the study examines how British broadsheets and their readers, and British tabloids and their readers, make sense of this far-flung illness. Existing work on early representations of HIV/AIDS in the west is utilised to inform the research questions. In particular, this study investigates whether Ebola is constructed as a threat, how media and lay representations of Ebola interact, and whether there are different pockets of shared thinking, or a more uniform representation, in relation to Ebola in Britain. An analysis of the themes in 48 broadsheet and tabloid articles, and 50 interviews with their readers, reveals a common picture in which Ebola is represented as African, associated with African practices, and seen as posing little threat to Britain. However, group differences exist, and are characterised by a more essentialised vision of Ebola in the tabloids and their readers, in contrast to a focus on structural features linked to Ebola's escalation in the broadsheets and their readers. In terms of the media–mind relationship, beyond the similarities found between media type and their respective readers’ ideas, certain key differences exist: While the newspapers make Ebola ‘real’ by referring to its potential to globalise, as well as to how it can be contained, lay thinkers feel detached from it, and draw an analogy between Ebola and science fiction. This is discussed as a method of symbolic coping on the part of the readers, as well as in terms of the power exerted by media imagery on lay representations of Ebola.