US Media Research Articles

Public art and private wealth: the controversial collaboration between the National Museum in Norway and Fredriksen Family Art Company Ltd

ABSTRACT There has been much discussion in the US and European media about the evolving relationship between wealthy private art collectors and underfunded public art museums. This paper examines the public debate regarding the ten-year loan agreement between the National Museum in Norway and the Fredriksen Family Art Company Limited. The agreement was exposed to harsh criticism from actors within the art world when it became known to the public in June 2019. Based on an analysis of newspaper articles from when this was a hot topic in the public debate, we investigate the dynamics of the debate and seek to understand why it became such a contested issue. This study shows that the Norwegian culture based on egalitarian values and high tax moral, and a long history for the state to subsidize the arts and culture, are important reasons why the collaboration became as controversial as it did.

A Green Wave in Media: A Change of Tack in Stock Markets*

AbstractThis paper examines the impact of environmental news coverage in US newspapers on stock markets. Using textual analysis with a dictionary‐based approach, we obtain several measures of attention, tonality and uncertainty in the coverage of environmental news in major US newspapers. We consider different weighting schemes to account for the visibility and relevance of the text sources, and several sets of newspapers to measure the possible impact of their editorial line. Our results show that greater attention to environmental news in the US media reduced the excess returns of carbon‐intensive stocks and increased their volatility over the last decade, especially when the coverage was uncertain. The opposite result holds for the most virtuous green assets. Restricting the corpus of texts to conservative newspapers mitigates the impact of coverage. Overall, our results illustrate how rising environmental concerns lead investors to change their asset allocation.

The New Pravda: How US Media Is Morphing into One Politically Slanted News Organization

The New Pravda: How US Media Is Morphing into One Politically Slanted News Organization

Framing Brittney Griner: The US Media, Race, Gender, and Geopolitics

Framing Brittney Griner: The US Media, Race, Gender, and Geopolitics

Https://medialing.ru/proekt-povorota-sibirskih-rek-dinamika-prezentacii-v-tekstah-sovetskih-smi/

This article discusses how US and UK liberal media slowly but surely created a skewed representation of 45th US President Donald Trump. Asserting that the media are biase and the images of Donald Trump in print media show political slant of the newspapers, the research analyzes partisan media and image portraying words therein. Usage labels enable identification of the ever-powerful lexical instrument used by the media to create a distorted image of the politician and manipulate the citizens; therefore, the paper aims to analyze evaluative lexical items used in media texts to mould required images of Donald Trump. The research examines the articles on Donald Trump’s key activities in early 2020 in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Independent. The methodological framework includes the data of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which is evenly divided between the five genres of spoken discourse, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. Analyzing words in terms of their usage frequency in each of these genres provides a clear picture of the target audience. The Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners provides the most precise and comprehensive classification of the style labels, including “formal”, “informal”, “literary”, “impolite”, “showing disapproval”, “journalism”, and “phrasal verbs”. This combination of the corpus-based approach and the dictionary-based approach resulted from the need to supplement the research with quantitative and qualitative data to study manifestations of political slant in the media holistically. Analyzing image portraying words in the media enables us to describe the key evaluative vocabulary, study Donald Trump’s profile and interpretations of his activities in the liberal media, identify political bias and distortion of facts in mass communications, and define new trends in journalism, medialinguistics, and political communication.

“New Pearl Harbor” and US Digital Media 2001‑2002

The research topic is aimed at studying the means, methods and techniques of updating the metaphor “New Pearl Harbor” in the US foreign policy discourse. Analysis of the evolution of this metaphor in the US media in the 21st century allows us to talk about the formation of a special phenomenon of the socio-political life of the United States, the reconstruction and explanation of which is not possible within the framework of the traditional methodology of historical research, but requires an interdisciplinary approach based on historical imagology. The importance and significance of this metaphor is shown by the fact that in every foreign policy crisis, in every new threat, in every aggravation of the international situation, the metaphor “Pearl Harbor” was used in the United States. The metaphor “New Pearl Harbor” and its variation “Russian Pearl Harbor” is an important element of US foreign policy discourse and contemporary research. As a result of the research, it was established that the metaphor “New Pearl Harbor” is used both for “internal consumption” (political discourse) and for the external one. Moreover, in the 21st century, this metaphor very often arises in the coverage and analysis of contemporary Russian-American relations. The article shows the evolution of the “New Pearl Harbor” metaphor in the US digital media. Digital media in the United States reacted most quickly to changes in the use of the “New Pearl Harbor” metaphor. The article is intended for political scientists, historians and journalists.

Tracing the Flow of Climate Change Frames: Intermedia Agenda Setting Between Twitter and News Media in the US and the UK

This study integrates agenda setting and framing theory to explore the transmission of climate change frames between newspapers and Twitter in the US and the UK. A set of computational methods was applied to identify five prevailing climate change frames—cause, impact, action, real, and hoax—in 230,000 tweets and 20,000 news articles from 2016 to 2021. At the cross-national level, a symmetrical relationship was found on Twitter between the US and the UK, which indicates their mutual influence on social-media discussions of climate change. Within each country, the US news media had a stronger agenda-setting influence on public climate change discussions on Twitter, whereas news coverage and social-media discussions in the UK were relatively isolated. The use of the cause frame in the US media coverage often led to the presence of the hoax, action, impact, and cause frames in Twitter conversations, whereas the action frame in the UK media coverage led to the presence of the hoax, real, and impact frames in Twitter discussions. The findings have implications for the dynamics of framing processes that shape public attention and the understanding of climate issues cross-nationally.

How news media visually dehumanize victims of humanitarian crises through framing disparities: A quantitative comparative analysis

News images have been powerful agents in chronicling humanitarian crises, shaping public engagement with vulnerability, and inhibiting or supporting societal and political interactions. Research critically indicates that refugees frequently face dehumanizing visuals in news media. However, the humanitarian communication literature has primarily limited itself to surveying the vulnerability of the global South as visualized by Western media. This study addresses this gap by employing an inductive-then-deductive framing approach to compare how the news media in the UK, the US, and China visually depict the humanitarian crises in Afghanistan and Ukraine. The analysis shows that the way humanitarian crises are visualized in the news media is influenced by journalism culture across media systems and the geographical origins of suffering. The UK and US media perpetuate a post-humanitarian routine of cultural assimilation, while Chinese authoritarian media instrumentalize distant humanitarian crises for geopolitical purposes, both reinforcing the visual dehumanization of humanitarian vulnerability.

Debunking Biases: A Critical Analysis of Western Media Reports about Chinas Belt and Road Initiative

This paper will examine and debunk some of the negative claims that many US and Western media outlets made regarding the Belt and Road Initiative (One Belt One Road, or BRI). There are plenty of articles published by news organizations in the US that claim China has used unfair measures to take advantage of the host countries, including the debt-trapping of Sri Lanka. This paper will seek to examine and debunk some of the claims that are prejudiced or factually incorrect. To prove the argument of this paper, articles from US and Western newspapers have been examined. After recording the claims of these articles, these claims will try to be corroborated or debunked by looking at how media from the host countries regard and respond to the issue. After the examination, the claim of the debt-trap of Sri Lanka in the Hambantota Port Deal has been proven as improbable. This is because a large number of their domestic media and studies about Sri Lanka reveal that the project actually benefited Sri Lanka by creating a large number of jobs and funding. In addition, the deal seems to have been initiated by Sri Lankan politicians, removing the fault completely from China. Media in other countries such as Myanmar, Cambodia and Pakistan have also been analyzed, proving a majority positive public opinion towards the BRI.

Police Violence in Health Care Settings in US Media Coverage

Hospitals do not collect or share data tracking their policing and security activities despite their reliance on police and security personnel, including armed officers. Thus, little is known about how hospital security is associated with patient and staff safety. To examine the harms exerted by health care-affiliated police and security personnel. For this qualitative study, data were collected using a systematic Media Cloud search for US news media coverage from January 2011 to May 2022. A total of 18 987 articles on policing and hospitals were screened and a content and thematic analysis of articles that met the search criteria was conducted, which involved incidents that revealed harm to patients, patients' families, and staff. Data were analyzed from October 2022 to April 2023. Incident year, incident location (hospital name, city, state), survivor and victim characteristics (race and ethnicity, presence of mental illness), and a narrative description of the incident focusing on outcomes of harm exerted by police and security personnel in the health care setting. A total of 48 unique stories across 25 US states were included. The median (range) year published was 2017 (2009-2022). Harms reported to have been perpetuated by health care-affiliated police and security personnel were identified within 5 domains from 48 unique incidents: (1) patients shot by police or security personnel (17 patients); (2) patients subject to excessive use of force (17 patients); (3) patients arrested (7 patients); (4) patients subject to sexual assault (2 patients); and (5) hospital personnel or those considered collateral damage shot, injured, or arrested (5 individuals). Most survivors and victims were Black, although the race and/or ethnicity of involved individuals was not routinely reported across the news stories. Mental illness was the most documented medical condition among patients injured or killed by health care-affiliated police and security personnel. This qualitative study of US news media found that police and security personnel in hospitals were reported to have perpetuated harm via excessive force, sexual assaults, injuring patients and health care workers, and fatal shootings. Compounded by a lack of transparency and accountability mechanisms, this may represent an underrecognized manifestation of structural racism at the organizational level. Policy suggestions include introducing accountability measures, deescalation techniques, and removing arms from hospital security personnel to reduce harm and fulfill health care's healing mission.

Still facing the ‘paper ceiling’? Exploring gender differences in political news coverage of the last decade

In the present study, we investigate gender bias against politicians in a large set of news articles ( n = 1,139,571) published in major media outlets in the United States between 2010 and 2020 by tracing changes in reporting about 1,095 US politicians. Using topic modeling with latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), we identify main policy-related topics in media reports. We find gender differences in the coverage of certain policy issues, with major imbalances explained by societal factors. Specifically, we show that women in high-level political positions receive less media coverage than their male counterparts and women in less powerful positions on economic and national security issues. However, women and men in less influential positions do not differ in the amount and type of reporting they garner. Since women are still underrepresented in leadership positions, the US media may inadvertently reflect and reinforce existing gender biases in society by devoting more attention to high-profile politicians, who are overwhelmingly male. Although our longitudinal analysis shows positive changes, the gender gap in reporting continues to exist.

Bullshit Genres: What to Watch for When Studying the New Actant ChatGPT and Its Siblings

Another communication technology has been introduced, ChatGPT, drawing the attention of many pundits, occupying valuable space on every op-ed page, and inspiring a Hollywood writers’ strike and endless small talk, all steaming a bit with the intoxicating fumes of moral panic or outsized utopian enthusiasm. Research on artificial intelligence (AI) has existed for decades, entering many people’s daily lives in dribs and drabs. ChatGPT and its siblings, however, have focused so many people’s attention on the potential changes that AI could bring to work lives, entertainment, and social relationships that it seems worthwhile to take a moment now in 2023 to discuss what light linguistic and media anthropologists can shed on what is to come. I say this as one of a handful of media anthropologists also familiar with linguistic anthropology who happened to study people’s use of Facebook (alongside other media) only a few years after its introduction to the US media ecology (Gershon 2010). For more than a decade, I have been thinking about how media ecologies change with each newly introduced medium. Here, I lay out what I believe ethnographers of AI who engage with large language models (LLMs) might want to pay attention to in the next couple of years.My starting point is that it would be helpful tosuomen antropologi | volume 47, issue 3, 2023explore how people are responding to ChatGPTin terms of genre, that people’s reactions toChatGPT is to treat it at its core as though it isa genre machine—that is, a machine intelligencethat reproduces and tweaks genres in just theright way for human consumption.

Factual basis of Colson Whitehead’s novels

Twice Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead bases the plot of his novels on various facts of American reality found in documents and newspaper publications. By juxtaposing fact and fiction, he transforms them to create a new reality, rooted in the events of real life but acquiring a universal or metaphorical character that could be seen even in his early works. In “John Henry Days” (2001) the writer makes use of the legend of the famous black laborer John Henry, its reflection in the folklore and everyday life of the American South and attempts to up-sell it in today’s USA with the help of social networks. In the novel “The Underground Railroad”, written after Whitehead’s archival research and his study of slave narratives of the mid-19th century, the document is woven into the artistic structure of the text by using authentic announcements about runaway slaves. The novel “The Nickel Boys” was written under the influence of the information about the horrible findings discovered on the grounds of the so-called Arthur Dozier School, established in early 20th century for juvenile delinquents, telling the story of two black boys who got there in the 1960s. The writer incessantly explores the impact of racism on American society and social injustice making use of a historical novel elements, of alternative history, neo-slave narratives and satire in his descriptions of the contemporary US media.

The representation of Asian-Americans amid COVID-19: A case study of The Washington Post and CNN

This paper focuses on the representation of the Asian-American community during the COVID-19 pandemic in the opinion articles of the US media about the growing expressions of violence against the community. These articles were posted in The Washington Post and CNN by an Asian-American journalist and an American journalist, respectively. Quantitatively, this study focuses on the proper nouns “Asian(s)” and “American(s)”. Qualitatively, it focuses on identifying patterns and interpreting the meanings underlying the discourse structures employed by each author. For these purposes, corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis (CDA) were employed. Results show that the Asian-American author uses the proper nouns and rhetorical figures more than their American counterpart, who mostly uses quoting. This, since the former speaks from the community and the latter speaks to the community. It is suggested that the opinion articles discourse should be approached critically since they may influence the readers’ representations around the topic.

Telecommunications localism: the fight for control over local communication networks in the United States

While called the “bedrock” and “cornerstone” of US media policy, the localism principle has been chipped away over 40 years by the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) full throated embrace of market-based practices. Recently, however, localism has emerged as a pivotal battleground in telecommunications. Through case studies of three recent regulatory issues—local cable franchising, municipal broadband, and small cell deployment—this paper examines the role of localism in US-based cable and telecommunications policy. It coins the term “telecommunications localism” to capture the changing technological focus of media regulation, from content to infrastructure. In regulatory actions over the past decade the FCC has simultaneously acknowledged local municipalities’ role in telecommunications deployment and actively worked to curtail this power through deregulation. These deregulatory actions strip municipalities of their autonomy over license negotiations and local rights of way and stymies the development and deployment of local communication systems.

Ten Postulates of a Media Imperialism Framework: For Critical Research on China’s Media Power and Influence in the Global South

This article considers the growing media power and influence of China in the global South through the lens of a critical media imperialism framework derived from the geopolitical economy of communications research tradition. While extensive research exists on US media imperialism and the challenge to it posed by China’s global media rise, the idea of China as a media imperialist in its own right has received limited attention. This article addresses this gap in the field by summarizing ten key postulates of a media imperialism framework for critical research on China’s media power and influence in the global South. This article study does not seek to prove China’s status as a new media imperialist power or provide a detailed case study of China’s media imperialism in a specific country. Instead, it synthesizes the ten postulates of a media imperialism framework, examines China’s corporate and state media organizations in relation to these, and draws from relevant scholarship, evidence, and anecdotes. The article argues that each postulate can serve as a foundation for future case studies of different facets of China’s media power and influence in countries across the global South. These postulates can be refined, disproven, or expanded through further research. By considering China’s media power and influence through the lens of the media imperialism framework, this article aims to stimulate further meta-theory, empirical research, and scholarly debates on this pivotal topic, which while contentious, is significant to the future of the global South, and the wider world system.

Douglas Mastriano Scandal

This case study looks at how a fraudulent PhD thesis from a Canadian university became entangled in US politics, attracting US and Canadian media attention. In 2013, Douglas Mastriano, a US Army colonel, was granted a History PhD from the University of New Brunswick (UNB) under unusual circumstances. A thesis committee member was removed without his consent, then informed by UNB that the thesis had been approved over his strong objections. UNB declared a 17-year-long embargo on public access to Mastriano’s thesis (it later admitted that its rules limit thesis embargoes to 4 years). In 2014, Mastriano published a book based on his thesis. Respected historians found multiple instances of academic fraud in it, including falsification of archival information. Scholars who requested access to Mastriano’s thesis were rebuffed by UNB. There matters might have rested. However, in November 2022 Douglas Mastriano ran for Governor of Pennsylvania. A Donald Trump supporter and participant in the Jan. 6, 2021 US Capitol invasion, he often cited his PhD from UNB during his campaign. Under media pressure, UNB released his thesis in October 2022. So far, 213 cases of serious academic fraud have been found in it. Before November 2022, UNB promised that “two independent investigators” would investigate Mastriano’s 2013 thesis and the 17-year-embargo on access to it. Subsequently, UNB has walked back that promise. Attendees will learn about the practical and ethical issues faced by a Canadian university when an old case of academic fraud unexpectedly becomes a source of controversy in the media.

Deliberative panels as a source of public knowledge: A large-sample test of the Citizens' Initiative Review.

Evolving US media and political systems, coupled with escalating misinformation campaigns, have left the public divided over objective facts featured in policy debates. The public also has lost much of its confidence in the institutions designed to adjudicate those epistemic debates. To counter this threat, civic entrepreneurs have devised institutional reforms to revitalize democratic policymaking. One promising intervention is the Citizens' Initiative Review (CIR), which has been adopted into law in Oregon and tested in several other states, as well as Switzerland and Finland. Each CIR gathers a demographically stratified random sample of registered voters to form a deliberative panel, which hears from pro and con advocates and neutral experts while assessing the merits of a ballot measure. After four-to-five days of deliberation, each CIR writes an issue guide for voters that identifies key factual findings, along with the most important pro and con arguments. This study pools the results of survey experiments conducted on thirteen CIRs held from 2010 to 2018, resulting in a dataset that includes 67,120 knowledge scores collected from 10,872 registered voters exposed to 82 empirical claims. Analysis shows that reading the CIR guide had a positive effect on voters' policy knowledge, with stronger effects for those holding greater faith in deliberation. We found little evidence of directional motivated reasoning but some evidence that reading the CIR statement can spark an accuracy motivation. Overall, the main results show how trust in peer deliberation provides one path out of the maze of misinformation shaping voter decisions during elections.

The watchdog role in the age of Big Tech – how news media in the United States and Germany hold Big Tech corporations accountable

ABSTRACT The unprecedented power of Big Tech corporations and the complexity of regulating them requires considering the role of news media as a corporate accountability mechanism. The aim of this article is to examine news media’s watchdog role through a performative lens, extending it to the corporate context by looking at three manifestations of performance: media visibility, way of coverage, and sourcing patterns. Based on a longitudinal quantitative content analysis of 920 news stories on Big Tech from four media outlets (2000–2021) in the United States and Germany, we explain variances in the watchdog role taking an over-time, cross-country, and cross-political leaning perspective. Our findings suggest that Big Tech corporations receive little but increasing media attention over the years that is driven by events. Similarly, news coverage contains an increasingly strong presence of a detached watchdog role performance. A more interventionist watchdog role is also on the rise – even though marginally – and political actors are increasingly given a voice in news coverage. From a comparative perspective, our results show that Big Tech corporations are more visible in the US and across right leaning news outlets. US journalists exhibit a more detached approach, while German journalists perform a significantly higher interventionist performance. Corporate sources are overall prominent in the media arena yet dominate more in the US. In conclusion, US and German news media are critical but passive observers over Big Tech corporations and can therefore be labeled a tame yet increasingly growling watchdog when it comes to holding Big Tech accountable.

FROM ISLAMOPHOBIA TO NEO-ISLAMOPHOBIA: A NEW STYLE OF GOVERNANCE IN THE WEST

Islamophobia is thought to be a modernized version of Orientalism, which was initially used to justify European political actions against the Ottoman Empire and, later, after its decline, to support their imperialist pursuits in the Muslim world. It is now used as a strategy for governing Western societies, particularly the United States, where people are forced to live with historical prejudices against Islam and Muslims. The nature of this animosity points to a new form of Islamophobia, which, like the old one, appears in discourses and practices alike. This study aims to ascertain how Islamophobia manifests as new Islamophobia in the modern West. It investigates the presence of this phenomenon in US media discourse using the theoretical framework of securitization. The researchers employed an analytical framework adapted from Discourse-Historical-Approach and studied 3153 news and opinion pieces from US newspapers and wire services between November 2016 and January 2017. This study has revealed an Islamophobic society where Muslims were the targets of hate crimes due to their Islamic identity. It has been found that Trump's anti-Islamic rhetoric during his presidential campaign contributed to the emergence of this new societal syndrome. It concludes that "neo-Islamophobia" is a name for a new style of governance adopted by some Western politicians who capitalize on Islamophobia as a political strategy to gain power, thereby shaping the existing social order into an Islamophobic one. The researchers recommend similar inquiries into other contexts too.